From a NYT Newsletter I get every week:
My weekend trips to the playgrounds of North London are starting to feel like Groundhog Day: In recent weeks I’ve had almost precisely the same conversation with everyone I’ve met.
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“I saw this weird story about the U.S. election,” they say, and I know what’s coming. They’re about to ask me about electoral shenanigans that would be unheard of in Britain, like the purging of electoral rolls, or felons in Florida needing Michael Bloomberg to pay their fines so that they can vote. Or President Trump saying that he blocked funding for the U.S. Postal Service because he didn’t want universal mail-in voting to be possible. And that he wants to confirm a new Supreme Court justice before the election because he expects the result to end up before the court and wants its overwhelming support.
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Why, people want to know, are Americans willing to tolerate this? They’re so proud of their democracy — don’t they want people to vote?
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So I explain, in words that sound weirder to me every time they come out of my mouth, that in the United States it has been considered all too acceptable to manipulate election results by preventing people from voting. Yes, disenfranchisement has been a major political and legal issue for decades. But those fights have tended to be couched as a matter of individual rights, rather than the integrity of the system as a whole.
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Consider the 1960 presidential election. After John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon by a slim margin, rumors swirled that the Illinois Democratic Party had stolen the election by either casting fake ballots for Democrats or undercounted real ones cast by Republicans. (Which they probably did, although there’s some doubt about whether it actually made a difference in the presidential race.) That was bad. Don’t steal elections, kids!
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But it was 1960. In the south, a combination of racist laws, poll taxes, literacy tests and violent intimidation excluded Black citizens from voting almost entirely. In many places, the southern Democratic Party operated as a de facto one-party regime, creating authoritarian enclaves that restricted the rights of white as well as Black people. So while there was some evidence that the Illinois Democrats’ interfered with the election, there was absolutely no doubt that Jim Crow laws did.
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Yet there was no national controversy over the southern election winners’ right to take office, or the allocation of those states’ electoral votes. Votes that were cast in Illinois gave rise to disputes over legitimacy. Votes that weren’t cast in the south did not.
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And while the question of whether the Supreme Court “stole” the 2000 presidential election by halting Florida’s ballot recount remains a live controversy, it’s rare to hear anyone suggest that Florida’s practice of disenfranchising felons was enough to render the election inherently illegitimate no matter what the court did — even though the number of people kicked off the voter rolls was considerably larger than George W. Bush’s margin of victory there.
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One of the main things to understand about elections in America, in other words, is that winning them by keeping people from voting is a relatively low-risk, high-reward strategy. And it is one that Republicans have heavily pursued in recent years, purging voter rolls and supporting I.D. requirements and other rules that suppress voting within groups that are likely to lean Democratic.
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Now, however, President Trump may be testing the limits of public tolerance for that strategy. His casual admissions that he hopes cuts to the post office budget will block mail-in voting have violated the unspoken rule that disenfranchisement should primarily burden people of color, the poor, and other underprivileged groups. In past elections, the people most likely to vote by mail were those over 65, a powerful demographic that skews whiter and more conservative.
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In Florida’s election in 2018, when Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Rick Scott, both Republicans, saw their election-night leads narrow as mail-in votes were counted over the week that followed, President Trump tweeted that the election should be called in favor of the Republican candidates because the later ballots had “shown up out of nowhere.” But he dropped the complaint after both men won, making his objection seem partisan rather than substantive — a track record that could come back to haunt him if he tries to challenge this year’s election results on similar grounds.
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