crats Discover New Ways to Play the Race Card for Electoral Advantage //

This excerpt is adapted from Fred Lucas’ book The Myth of Voter Suppression. The Left’s Assault On Clean Elections.

After Georgia Gov. After Brian Kemp, a Republican signed election reforms into legislation, many Democrats made it a talking point for themselves by calling the changes “Jim Crow 2.0.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted about Kemp and his defeated 2018 opponent Stacey Abrams. She never conceded defeat.

The Democrats, the party of Jim Crow, can’t stop talking and discussing Jim Crow. They just found a new way of playing the race card to their electoral advantage.

Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to steal elections, and attack democracy with the exact same dire predictions they made in 2000 when state voter ID laws were popular. None of these predictions came true.

First, it is important to note that the term “voter suppression”, as used in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is very vague. It is against the 1965 Voting Rights act to intimidate or threaten someone trying to vote. Vote denial, which is preventing a legally eligible voter exercising his or her constitutional rights to vote, and vote dilution, an intentional effort in order to dilute the votes from one group of people are also illegal.

“You could search for the United States Code in all the lawbooks, but you will not find voter suppression in any of them,” J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney, is now president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. was written by in 2020. “That’s because voter suppression is a myth. It is a term that is used to denigrate perfectly legal activities, such as voter ID laws, by suggesting that it is illegal.

After the Civil War ended, real vote denial and voter intimidation were common. In 1965, Democrats created Jim Crow to alter voting laws in order to gain an electoral advantage. Today, Democrats use Jim Crow to manipulate voting law to gain an electoral advantage.

Invoking is better than imposing. After Jim Crow laws were made impossible to enact in 1964, Democrats had to shift their strategy while maintaining the tried-and-true identity politics formula.

Democrats are not only the party of Jim Crow, but also the party Tammany Hall, and other machines. To solve the supposed problem of voter suppression, Democrats in Congress are pushing Tammany-style legislation. They have feel-good names like HR 1, the ” For the People Act” to create a legal structure that allows fraud to be made easier and install long-term majorities.

Today, the competing narratives are the Right’s concern over voter fraud and Left’s concern regarding voter suppression. These two evils are actually inseparable. Because of the improperly skewed election results, voter suppression was one type of fraud. Fraud is also a form voter suppression. This happens because fraudulent or ineligible ballots eventually cancel out or dilute eligible voters’ votes.

Tammany Hall and all the other corrupt machines spread across the United States had the same ultimate goal as the bigots who ran the Jim Crow elections in South Carolina: to warp the election law and procedures to ensure Democrat victories.

The machine Democrats are best known for fraud, but the Democratic Party’s Jim Crow policies, which include mass voter denial, violence and intimidation of African Americans, are more well-known.

The savage southern deeds included methods similar to those of the northern Democrat machines. These included ballot theft, burning ballots and illegal arrests on Election Day. Importing voters from outside the jurisdiction and recording votes cast by dead or imaginary people, according U.S. District Judge Lynwood Smith who wrote a report in 2011 about Jim Crow election practices.

Age of the Machines

Before he became the third and most sinister vice-president of the United States, Aaron Burr founded Tammany Hall in 1789. The machine was able to preserve the legendary legacy of the scoundrel well into the 20th century.

Tammany, who might make some Democrats proud, worked to free prisoners to ensure that they voted. Tammany also established a “naturalization machine” to instantly convert immigrants from boats into voters.

The Washington Post explained that Tammany Hall bosses in New York “ushered hundreds upon thousands of Lower East Side residents and others into citizenship” so they could register to vote. The Post continued, “The machine paid court costs and provided witnesses to prove that immigrants had been in the country for the required five-years.” Sometimes, often before crucial elections, immigrants were sworn into citizenship the day they arrived.

Similar Democrat powerhouses include the Pendergast machine, Kansas City; the Daley Machine in Chicago, most famous for its impact on 1960’s presidential election; and The Long machine in Louisiana.

It was the machines who resisted reforms to make elections more transparent. Today, the machines’ spirit lives on through Democrats in Congress, who produce legislation like HR 1 and various nonprofits fighting against voter ID.

Battle for the Secret Ballot

Voting was used to decide elections in the early days of the republic. This was usually done at small-scale gatherings. In the early days of the republic, elections were decided by voice voting. Then political parties distributed color-coded “tickets” to their candidates. These tickets were given to voters to drop into the ballot boxes.

Although it was better than shouting your vote, the brightly colored, preprinted party ballot was always a dead giveaway for election officials as to who the vote was for.

This accepted method was changed in the middle of 19th century, but it was not easy to do so.

The intellectual predecessors of liberal groups like the Brennan Center for Justice or Fair Fight Action were political machines that didn’t want their favorable system changed. Their arguments against a secret vote were very similar to those used by their successors today. They also opposed clean voter rolls, voter ID, and the curbing on ballot harvesting.

It wasn’t until 1856 when some US localities adopted what was then called the Australian ballot system. It’s now known as the secret vote.

It may seem strange to think that anyone would object to a secret vote today. However, such laws were met with much resistance in that era. The reason was, as you guessed it, voter suppression.

In the 1800s, illiteracy rates were high. Voice voting or color-coded votes for a party’s candidate slate arguably made the enfranchisement more extensive than simply entering a private vote booth, closing the curtain and choosing from a list of competing party nominees.

Secret ballot was what we would call today a “restrictive” type of voting. The secret ballot was not available for voters to consult or seek advice, which could have had a significant impact on the poor. It turned out that the secret ballot didn’t produce the horrifying mass voter suppression that entrenched machine politicians predicted.

However, it is possible that the argument may not be as settled as you think.

“Given that some things Donald Trump said during or prior to the campaign was so racist and xenophobic, voters might not want it to be associated with them.” A Washington Post op ed in 2017 stated that the secret ballot allowed them to vote for him anyway. “If a candidate acts illegally–and one must remember that even the GOP leadership refused to defend Trump throughout the campaign–it is the voters who ultimately have to take responsibility for his defense. Many of them were able to get away with it because they didn’t have to do so.

This is not a popular view on the left. It was published by one of the largest newspapers in the country. Some of the congressional proposals in election nationalization bills, such as HR 1, that would give a wrecking ball at the most basic election security standards were unimaginable just a few decades ago.

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The post Democrats Discover New Ways to Play a Race Card for Electoral Advantage originally appeared on The Daily Signal.