The Republican party has not legitimately won the White House since Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.
Even though November's mid-term election results were historic, it does not mean the GOP has forgotten how to cheat to win.
From foreign trolls and bots, Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, right-wing hate radio, dog-whistle (and not-so-dog-whistle) racism, mendacious Facebook ads, and Donald Trump's thousands of lies, the Republican party has its machine's gears well-oiled.
Yet there is one area the Grand Old Party has identified as the country's oft-ignored Achilles' heel--voting.
Eleven years ago the Republican party was licking its wounds after the country elected its first African-American president and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.
So Republicans came up with a strategy: concentrate on 16 states and gerrymander them so badly Democrats have little to no mathematical chance of winning in the 2010 mid-term elections.
But there was another, more insidious strategy.
Republicans knew they couldn't come right out and criminalize voting, so they devised ways to make casting ballots harder, more inconvenient, frustrating, hoping people would stay home rather than go through all the trouble to practice their civic duty.
That's when the term "voter fraud" started circulating around right-wing media. Simply accuse random people (mostly immigrants) of voting illegally, and enough "patriots" would rise up in an altruistic fervor to fortify the most fundamental of democratic institutions against those who seek to denigrate it.
Some (Republican) states began instituting "voter-I.D." laws, requiring birth certificates, drivers' licenses, passports, to "protect election integrity." After all, minorities vote primarily for Democrats. If they are to preserve their hegemony, Republicans must take evasive measures.
Voter fraud, however, is a myth.
Voter suppression is very much alive in America, and Republican states are setting a record for purging voting roles.
A recent study from the Brennan Center for Justice reported earlier this month that, between 2016 and 2018, at least 17 million voters were purged from nationwide voting rolls.
Voting districts with voter discrimination histories have purged 40% beyond the national average.
This is due almost entirely to the 2013 Supreme Court Shelby County vs. Holder decision that rolled back section five of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring states to receive Justice Department "pre-clearance" before initiating changes to voting laws that may impact minority voters.
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