Kool Aid Luke

And suddenly, there was silence...

Go figure. After spending the last decade and some, beating the drum about bogus endemic voter fraud sweeping the nation, it turns out (surprise!) that all along it was the Republicans who were the biggest perpetrators of actual election fraud.

Quick point of information, voter fraud is carried out by individuals who seek to misrepresent themselves in casting individual ballots. Election fraud is a systematic effort to influence the administration of an election so that the playing field is skewed in favor of one candidate over another. Mark Harris, the Republican candidate for the 9th Congressional district in North Carolina, attempted the latter while the North Carolina GOP accused Democratic voters of perpetrating the former. Oh, the irony.

Funny how that works. Looks like Donald Trump didn't write the fraudster playbook after all, he was just one of its more shameless, adept users. No, in fact, ever since the enactment of landmark voting rights legislation over 50 years ago, the GOP, in pursuing its Southern Strategy, has sought to roll back and neutralize these reforms. Give them credit, though. This is not your grandfather's Jim Crow. Now, they're much more "subtle," using a variety of techniques with the advantage of enjoying a thin veneer of legality:

• gerrymandering electoral districts, either by cracking or stacking them to dilute minority voice; 
• limiting the number of days for early voting to suppress voting by working class folks unable to take time off their jobs to go to a polling station; 
• reducing the number of polling stations, especially in areas populated predominately by poor folks and people of color: and, 
• as was the case in NC, harvesting and bundling absentee ballots from voters who are unaware of that this practice is actually illegal.

To add insult to injury, last year Donald Trump established a bogus commission, led by one of the country's biggest election fraudsters, Kris Kobach, Kansas' now former secretary of state, to investigate voter fraud. After several states refused to submit their electoral data to the commission, effectively rendering it toothless, Trump disbanded it. Since then, we haven't heard too much about this false crisis, which, by my estimation, is approximately #17 of a running list of 139 false crises manufactured by Trump and his cronies and enablers.

And now, when there is finally evidence of widespread election fraud, an actual crime, all we hear are...crickets. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. Or maybe I'm wrong, and it's not a guilty silence. Maybe the Republican Party has done nothing illegal at all. Maybe it was just poor messaging and what we really have here is just failure to communicate...