The votes have been counted fairly as long as Republicans win

State legislatures from around the country have changed voting laws to make it more difficult for some groups — mostly Black and Latinos — to participate in the election process. As of October of last year, 19 states had enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for Americans to vote. These states are led by Republicans.

Let’s consider the plight of a Black family that lives in Georgia, in a county and a congressional district made up of a majority of Black voters. They usually turn out to vote for Democrats. Turnout for almost every political race in that district is high. Let’s say 50 percent; if it’s a presidential election participation is much higher. Traditionally, this being Deep South Georgia, their voting locations have traditionally been outfitted with less and older voting machines making them prone to break more often than in the majority white districts. They are also usually understaffed, by design. This results in a longer waiting period to vote.

And yet, in 2020, Georgians based on the work of persons like Stacey Abrams and others who undertook the heavy lifting of registering voters and making sure that they turned out to vote, this state voted to elect Joe Biden over then President Donald Trump, and went a step further and elected two Democrats to serve as their U.S. senators — one a Black man and the other a Jewish man. Considering the history of the state, the 2020 results were surprising. 

The Georgia legislature, made up of mostly white Republican men, was outraged at the fact that Trump was not president and that their state, one of the first to secede from the Union back in January 1861, had elected a Black man and a Jew to represent them in the U.S. Senate. Something had to be done… 

It is not surprising then that the Georgia legislature, in 2021, rammed through new voting laws they claimed would help rid elections of rampant fraud. 

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, one of the premier and most respected centers in the country that studies and investigates voting, issued a report titled The Truth About Voter Fraud which among its many conclusions reported that it had “reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.” Their conclusion: It is more likely that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

Still, the Georgia legislature persisted and passed laws that make it a crime to offer food and water to voters, for example. 

The Center for Public Integrity, a journalism nonprofit organization, found that voters in the very poorest neighborhoods in the country typically took longer to vote, and they were also modestly more likely to experience voting times of an hour or more. In the district were the Black family from Georgia lives there were reports of people standing in lines for four hours! 

Who do you think can use some water and food when standing in voting lines? 

Other notable restrictions as a result of the new Georgia voting laws include:

• Restrictions on hours of early voting, which will curtail voting access to persons who work daytime hours or have less flexible schedules and who may be unable to return an absentee ballot. 
• Closing of voting locations and often not notifying the voter of his or her change of location making it difficult to find their new voting precinct.
• Limiting the hours of early voting and Sunday voting, which, especially among Black voters, has become a tradition known as Souls to the Polls where Black voters go to early vote in large groups after attending religious services on Sunday.

Whose side are you on?

In a speech given last week, President Joe Biden asked, “Do you want to be on the side of Martin Luther King or George Wallace?” referring to the segregationist former Alabama governor. 

The president and his administration, along with some members of Congress, have been trying to build public support for the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bills would make Election Day a holiday, register new voters and strengthen U.S. Justice Department oversight of local election jurisdictions with a history of discrimination. Most every Republican and even several members of his own Party, the Democrats, have not shown much support for these bills that ultimately try to protect the right of every American to vote.

For months Progreso Weekly, through columnists like Max Castro and Jake Johnson of Common Dreams, has pointed to the fact that many gifted minds from around the country and the world are pointing at the flashing signs that U.S.-style democracy is teetering on a dangerous precipice. Thomas Homer-Dixon in an exhaustive op-ed published in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail warns: “The ‘political and social landscape’ of the U.S.—a profoundly unequal and ideologically polarized nation that also happens to be ‘armed to the teeth’—is ‘flashing with warning signals.’”

The brightest red light flashes loudly when it comes to the right to vote, which, as I have shown, is being, not so slowly, diluted for groups not in sync with the fascist mentality of many Republicans and even some Democrats. 

One last thought, and it deals with our own Cuban Americans in Congress from the South Florida area. We can start with Senator Marco Rubio who did not vote for either of the Freedom to Vote Act and/or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Then there are our members of the House of Representatives — Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Giménez and María Elvíra Salazar…

These are four individuals who constantly complain that Cubans on the island do not have the right to vote while at the same time deny the same to certain groups right here in the United States. And all because there are people who strongly believe that if a Republican, or persons who think like Trump Republicans, do not win an election (any election) then that election is fraudulent. At the same time they feel that Democrats should not be allowed to win — just because, in their eyes, Democrats and their ideas are not good for the country. 

That’s their democracy, as they see fit.