The Republican war on democracy just got even more insane
The Republican Party war on democracy continues in full force. As most readers know by now, Republican Party majorities in various state legislatures have been rushing to pass new laws restricting the voting rights of many, primarily people of color, the elderly, and daytime hourly wage working folk in Democratic Party strongholds.
Draconian anti-voting measures gleefully enacted by the QAnon Party include drastically limiting the location of voting drop-off boxes in large urban areas, greatly reducing the hours of open polls, restricting or virtually eliminating the convenience of mail-in balloting, and cutting down the number of polling places to create long lines of inconvenienced voters.
An evil new follow-up measure passed by the Trump Sadist Party then makes it a crime to be a Good Samaritan by bringing water or other refreshment and aid to an elderly or suffering voter waiting for hours in that long line.
But the Trumpublicans aren’t satisfied by merely making it difficult to cast a vote. They also want to declare war on honest, hard working citizen volunteer poll workers.
In an article just published in the New York Times, various Republican controlled legislatures are proposing laws to make it a serious crime — even a felony subject to imprisonment and a heavy fine — for a poll worker to make a mistake in their work at the polls, no matter how innocent or unintentional.
It does not seem to matter to the Trumpublican legislators that the general public and the state and local government officials in charge of running the elections, even those that are Republicans, are overwhelmingly against such measures.
The 2020 election was a very honest, smoothly run, and relatively mistake-free process throughout the United States. However, the Trumpublicans are claiming that poll workers are as suspect as the voters, and should have a Sword of Damocles of felony jail time and large fines hanging over them to keep them from stuffing the ballot boxes with rice and bamboo paper ballots imported from China.
Many election workers are retired elderly volunteers that heroically and selflessly work long hours during busy elections, keeping order and putting up with a lot of guff from the Trumpublican poll watch bullies. It’s inevitable that these good citizens, many of them registered Republicans, will just plain refuse to put up with the repressive and punitive actions threatened against them, and will quit serving as poll volunteer workers.
The sudden lack of sufficient numbers of trained poll workers will result in a need to close down or reduce polling stations, which in turn will heighten demand for unrestricted mail-in balloting. Maybe we should be thanking the Trumpublicans for another one of their harebrained schemes that will backfire to the advantage of the Democrats.
