By David Amaya
Many deceptive and divisive strategies, notably twisted lies, were used to achieve the premise we are faced with today: Voter fraud is a severe problem in U.S. elections. Voter fraud is a big problem, but not in the way GOP leaders would have you believe –the allegations are a sign of corruption. Dissecting our shared reality will lead us to our shared truth.
Republican elected officials’ vociferous belief that the election is subject to voter fraud is the pot calling the kettle black. In an attempt to admonish Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Ted Cruz asked the founder in November of 2020 whether he had evidence of voter fraud or not. The question came from Twitter’s decision to flag tweets mentioning voter fraud as misleading during the election season. The Texas senator fails to recognize that he, and the other proponents of the Big Lie (the false belief that voter fraud stole the election from Donald Trump), is that they are guilty of the very charges they place on others. Before questioning whether Dorsey has evidence that there is no voter fraud when he tweets of voter fraud as misleading, Cruz ought to ask himself whether his allegations of voter fraud are grounded in truth. If not, would he hold himself accountable to the degree he would Twitter? The Supreme Court of the United States, and every court below it, rejected the pernicious lies spewed by Republican leaders. What we’re seeing is the spearhead of voter suppression.
If Republicans were serious about voter fraud, they would disown the 45th President. How did the former president expect to find 11,780 votes in Georgia but without voter fraud? What Trump requested from Georgia’s Attorney General, Brad Raffensperger, goes far beyond the act of voting out of your precinct or ballot harvesting (purported sources of massive voter fraud). Trump asking Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes is not conjecture like the Republicans' allegations. It is a substantiated severe attempt of voter fraud by Republican leaders against American voters.
We now face more than 250 bills in state legislatures meant to make it harder to vote because of this Big Lie. Most of these “anti-voter fraud” bills would affect non-Republican non-Caucasian voters in urban areas the most. The Republican Party is very close to being considered the cognoscenti of voter suppression. Acting out from lies is a sign of conspiracy. More so, passing off these fraudulent allegations as reality to Republican constituents is a red flag of an abusive relationship (see “gaslighting”).
The Republican’s mascot (if we accept their leaders’ falsities of the safest, most diverse, and highest turnout election) should change from the elephant to a snake eating its tail.
The claims of voter fraud are not only wrong, but they are also deranged. How can someone decry voter fraud and commit to it both at once? The discrepancy is confusing and shows why the Republican party needs leaders with competency dedicated to honesty and transparency to their constituents. Accepting any less will perpetuate our house divided; a dangerous strategy to achieve control of our government has led to our Civil War over state rights. We should know better.
History is sure to look unfavorably upon our recent allegations of widespread voter fraud. The last time we had a large-scale campaign that used conjecture disguised as truth as its primary political change tool was the Red Scare of the mid-20th century. The use of baseless allegations as a catalyst to achieve some political end that goes against truth has a term in America: It’s called McCarthyism.