>Hi Tamar,
>
>>>The Kavanaugh protesters did _NOT_ invade the Senate buildings. They came in following the rules and they did not have weapons... There is a world of difference between non-violent civil disobedience and a violent insurrection.
>
>I thought long and hard on a response, having several cuts at it before settling on the following:
>
>- my post was in response to Thomas's reference to the Beer Hall Putsch and Machtergreifung.
>
>For those who don't know, the Beer Hall Putsch was a violent attempted seizure of power. When it failed, Hitler was sentenced to 5 years jail of which he served 9 months during which he dictated Mein Kampf and made better plans. The Machtergreifung was the devious non-violent but successful seizure of power that followed.
>
>For this context, the relevance of the Kavanaugh protest and the others I mentioned, is the precedent they set that it's OK to invade the seat of government. By definition they were invasions and while you and others may consider some invasions to be noble, others perceive double standard and can never benefit from your viewpoint if their ears are closed to you, just as yours are closed to them. Attitudes harden and people call each other fascists and high-five angry denouncements of straw men on message boards while the powder keg continues to smoulder.
>

There is a long history of protests in the US Capitol, of exactly the sort my son participated in. This is nothing new and none of those ever turned into insurrections. (The last time anything like an insurrection happened in the US Capitol before January 6 was 1954, where Puerto Ricans nationalists staged an attack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_shooting.)

So to say that the Kavanaugh protesters set a precedent that the insurrectionists followed is ahistorical.

>On the issue of investigating fraud: doctors screen all the time for diseases that otherwise show no evidence until well advanced. Anybody who has an annual check-up or participates in breast, prostate or cervical screening can hardly then turn around and claim there's no need to investigate if there's no evidence. Yet here we are.
>
>IMHO the smartest response from uniparty Congress and presidency would be to mandate integrity screening/audit for all federal elections. Make it bipartisan and invite loudest critics to participate in selection of the cohort for review. Do it as a sign of confidence in election integrity, for unity, to disincentivize those who might be plotting and presumably to comfort millions of fellow citizens that incidence is low and when it does happen, it's caught early. Rather than declaring there's no fraud and demonizing people who believe there is, assemble evidence and invite them to participate.
>

In fact, many of us who are left-leaning have been calling for better follow-up processes to elections that include random audits. The move I mentioned away from voting methods that have no paper trail is part of that.

The point, though, is that this election was scrutinized more closely than any other recent election, and that scrutiny turned up zero signs of systemic fraud.

By comparison, in the 2018 cycle, it was known by early December that in one Congressional district (North Carolina's 9th), the Republican campaign had used "ballot harvesting" methods, where they collected people's uncompleted mail ballots and filled them in themselves.


>>>I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the idea of voter fraud has been exploited by the Republican party for nearly 2 decades as a way of making it harder for people to vote, especially people who are more likely to vote Democratic.
>
>If this refers to Voter ID, maybe check how European democracies manage? Even poverty-stricken Mozambique with annual GDP less than $500 per capita can manage a Bilhete de identidade, so perhaps some sort of inverse American Exceptionalism is at work here.

I am not speaking only on voter ID, but let's start there. If the US government were to propose a required national identify card, the same people who are making and supporting voter ID laws would be utterly opposed, calling it government overreach. (To be fair, so would many on the left.) Yes, this is an example of American exceptionalism. There is a general belief in this country, on both sides of the aisle, that US citizens shouldn't ever be required to "show their papers." (That said, there have been pushes on the right--see, for example, Arizona's SB 10 of some years ago--that it's okay for people who don't look like citizens to random members of law enforcement to be made to show their papers.)

Absent a national identity card that is free and easy to get (that is, you don't have to take time off work or spend money to travel), voter ID laws disadvantage poor people, and many of them have been written specifically to disadvantage those most likely to vote for Democrats. The choice of what items count as voter ID makes a huge difference between whether the law is reasonably fair or voter suppression. In Texas, a gun license counts as voter ID, but a student ID from a state college does not. In Alabama, after they passed the voter ID law, the state closed many DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles, which issue driver's licenses and non-driver's ID cards) offices and cut the hours at many others. Even when the card itself is free to obtain, one typically needs to bring a set of documents, which can be expensive and/or difficult to acquire. (When I needed to get official copies of my birth certificate and marriage license a few years, it cost me $84 total, and I knew exactly what I needed and from where.)

The bottom line is that you can tell that Republicans think voter ID works in their favor because every voter ID law that has passed has been in a Republican-controlled state. Also, thought there were a few such laws beforehand, these laws proliferated after the Supreme Court gutted an essential provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. In fact, at least two states introduced the bills the same week the decision came down.

However, the voter suppression pushes from the GOP have been much bigger than voter ID. Republican-led states have made it harder to vote in many other ways. They have cut down on the number of polling locations; they have cut the number of days of early voting. In some states, the distribution of voting machines tends to favor people more likely to vote Republican; witness the long lines we've seen in some parts of Georgia in the last few years. That's nothing new; it happened in Ohio as far back as 2004, where voters in places strong for Democrats (like cities and college towns) waited in line for hours and hours (or had to leave without voting), while voters in traditionally Republican territory voted in minutes. Some states have passed laws that take people off the voting rolls if they haven't voted in a certain number of years. Some states make it extremely hard to register to vote. In Texas, for example, organizations can't just run voter registration drives. To register voters there, you have to get a special permit from the state; those permits last no more than two years.

In 2018, voters in Florida passed an amendment to the state constitution that restored voting rights to felons who had served their time. The Republican-controlled state legislature wasted no time passing a law that required that all fines and fees related to the sentence must all be paid before the person could vote. However, there is no agency in Florida that tracks those, and most of those people have no way of knowing exactly what they owe. So even if that provision were what the voters wanted, most of the people affected can't fulfill that requirement.

There is a lot of history here, and it's not flattering to the US. I won't bother to write it out, because it's well-known. It's sufficient to say that the Republicans as a party have taken over what was the (southern) Democratic position for much of the century following the Civil War and believe that the votes of Black people should not be allowed to override their votes. If you'd like to learn more about this, I can recommend some reading.

Tamar