Propaganda
Supported by
Jamelle Bouié
By Jamelle Bouié
Opinion columnist
It cannot discredit Republican accusations of voter fraud. You can show that they are not true (and they are not), but this has no relation to the trust itself.
“Electoral fraud” is not a matter of factual allegation that is subjected to objective testing and analysis, yet it is a matter of ideology, a confidence in how the world works. In practice, accusing Democrats of voter fraud means that the Democratic electorate are not valid political actors, that their votes do not count as those of the “people” (i. e. , the Republican electorate), and that Democratic officials, elected with those invalid votes, have no valid right to power.
In a sense, allegations of voter fraud will have to be taken seriously, but not literally, as Donald Trump’s apologists once said about the former president. These accusations, the flowery maxims, the best, imply to the public that the speaker is aligned with Trump. and that he supported his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. They also tell the audience that the speaker will do whatever is mandatory to “stop the theft,” that is, anything to prevent a Republican from wasting an election and, failing that, everything to delegitimize the Democrat who won.
In the final days of the California election that ended this week, for example, leading Republican candidate Larry Elder suggested his supporters report fraud on an online page that claimed to have “fraud stumbled” on the results. Statistical research used to stumble on fraud in elections held in third countries of the world (such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran) stumbled upon fraud in California, resulting in the reinstatement of Governor Gavin Newsom as governor,” the site said. “full of mischief. “
“My concern is that they verify this in this election,” he said.
It doesn’t matter if the effects haven’t yet come through the time Elder promoted this website, or if it’s far from starting. The last Republican to win a high-level public workplace in California Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006, when he effectively ran for re-election after winning the 2003 repeal vote opposed to Democrat Gray Davis. Newsom, a Democrat, won his 2018 gdist race by just about 24 points. through massive cheating and fraud – ridiculous. But again, the purpose of the allegations of voter fraud is not to describe reality; the goal is to express a confidence, in this case, confidence that Newsom and his followers are illegitimate.
There are other applicants competing for claims. Adam Laxalt, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in the U. S. Senate race in Nevada, promised to “file lawsuits early” to “harden the election. “Laxalt co-chaired Trump’s 2020 crusade in the “There is no doubt that, sadly, many prosecutions and much of the faithful attention to Election Day operations came too late,” he said in a recent interview.
Trump endorsed Laxalt this summer and praised his commitment to the voter fraud narrative. “He fought bravely against voter fraud, which took a stand in Nevada,” Trump said in a statement. Adam has my full and total approval!».
Nor is it just rhetoric, ideological reliance on voter fraud is a genuine effort to delegitimize the democratic Party’s victories and tilt the electoral game in favor of Republican candidates. In Florida, for example, a member of the state House of Representatives brought a bill that would require an election audit similar to Arizona’s in the state’s largest (and most Democratic) counties.
In Georgia, a Trump-backed secretary of state candidate, Jody Hice, is running for a promise to do what incumbency President Brad Raffensperger would not do: revoke the election in Trump’s favor if the former president made any other offers for the administration. White House. ” If elected, I will instill confidence in our electoral procedure through the defense of the Georgian Constitution, the implementation of meaningful reform, and the aggressive prosecution of those engaged in voter fraud,” Hice said in his march. Congress voted against certifying the 2020 election in January and, the following month, told an organization of conservative activists: “What happened in the last election was only because of a terrible secretary of state and the terrible decisions he made.
There’s also the Republican electorate factor: According to a Monmouth University vote in June, nearly a third of Joe Biden’s victory is the result of fraud, 63% of whom are Republicans. Of voter fraud, it is both because the Republican electorate needs to listen to it and because those politicians themselves are real rs.
If this ideology of voter fraud were just a matter of miscommunication, it would be undeniable (if not very easy) to correct, but as legal scholar Ned Foley has argued, the statement of fraud – the falsification of truth into narrow political goals – is more akin to McCarthyism. You can’t reason him, you can only defeat him.
The challenge is that to break this ideology’s grip on Republican voters, republican politicians are needed to lead the charge, like Margaret Chase Smith, for example. But as long as Trump controls party loyalists, as long as he’s essentially in the midst of a cult of personality, those voices, if they exist at all, would possibly not say in public what they almost actually say behind closed doors.
So it’s up to the Democrats at least our ballot form for some other attempt to “stop the theft. “Senate obstruction is also very important, even as centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin insist there is a undesped commitment to Republicans. Hopefully he’s right because at this point in the game, it’s the only move left to play.
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Propaganda