August 16, 2017
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Page 17
O PINION
Stealing Our Vote If They Get the Chance
Voting rights have
been lost before
d iallo b rooks
One October morning in Rich-
mond, Va., 32-year old
Joseph Cox watched
his friends and neigh-
bors go to the polls for
the first time.
The fight to get to
that moment had been
long, bloody, and vi-
cious. But as a black man newly
eligible to vote after a lifetime of
discrimination, Cox did some-
thing that would’ve seemed in-
comprehensible only a decade
before: He won an election.
Cox was one of 24 black repre-
sentatives elected across Virginia
that year — 1867.
But the response to that prog-
ress was vicious.
Racist white politicians worked
to find new justifications for strip-
ping the voting rights of African
American men (women could not
yet vote), alleging voter fraud and
implementing heinous tactics like
literacy tests, poll taxes, and vot-
ing roll purges.
The fact that thousands of Af-
rican Americans voted and held
elected office during Reconstruc-
by
tion only to face a brutal Jim Crow
backlash underscores an import-
ant theme in our country’s history:
Voting rights have been won, then
weakened, and then lost before.
Today, too many people take for
granted that the advances
achieved during the civil
rights movement are still
firmly in place. But prog-
ress is neither promised
nor irreversible.
The latest incarnation
of the long right-wing
campaign to weaken voting rights
is Donald Trump’s “Election
Integrity” Commission, which
Trump convened after absurd-
ly claiming that he only lost the
popular vote because millions of
people voted illegally. But there’s
not one shred of evidence of wide-
spread in-person voter fraud in the
United States.
The same sham justifications
used to prop up voter suppression
tactics during the Jim Crow era
— claims that such measures pre-
serve the integrity, efficiency, and
sustainability of elections — are
being unapologetically recycled
today.
Trump’s new voter suppression
commission, which met for the
first time in July, is led by some
of the most strident opponents of
voting rights alive today — peo-
ple who’ve built careers on strip-
ping the voting rights of thousands
upon thousands of eligible voters
of color.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris
Kobach, who co-chairs the com-
mission, is among the worst.
After requiring Kansans to
time “— putting voters at risk of
losing their most essential right.
Another member is Hans von
Spakovsky, a former Justice De-
partment lawyer described by
former colleagues as “the point
person for undermining the Civil
Rights Division’s mandate to pro-
tect voting rights.”
progress and regression.
When I think of Joseph Cox
winning his right to vote in
Richmond in 1867, and when I
think of my grandparents having
to fight for that same right in that
same place all over again a cen-
tury later, I wonder how so many
Americans have forgotten the
The same sham justifications used to
prop up voter suppression tactics during
the Jim Crow era — claims that such
measures preserve the integrity, efficiency,
and sustainability of elections — are being
unapologetically recycled today.
show a passport or birth certifi-
cate in order to register to vote —a
move that blocked nearly 20,000
eligible voters — a federal court
said Kobach had carried out “mass
denial of a fundamental right.”
Kobach also promotes the “In-
terstate Crosscheck” program that
claims to identify in-person voter
fraud. But in reality, the Washing-
ton Post reports, the system “gets
it wrong over 99 percent of the
Of course, no one should be
allowed to vote twice in an elec-
tion. But voter impersonation
is basically non-existent. While
the commission might claim to
be about promoting the integrity
of our elections, their true task is
to find justifications for laws that
make it harder for members of
certain communities to vote.
The history of voting rights in
America is a one filled with both
fragility of this precious right.
I wonder how so many are
blind and indifferent to the as-
sault on the right to vote — a
right people fought and died for
— happening right before our
eyes today. We’ve seen these at-
tacks before. And not all of us
have forgotten.
Diallo Brooks is the director of
outreach and public engagement
at People for the American Way.
Threats Move World Closer to Catastrophe
Trump’s
adolescent
bellicosity
M el g urtov
The problem with
Donald Trump’s “fire
and fury” statement
on North Korea isn’t
merely that it intensifies an al-
ready tense situation. Nor is it
just another example of Trump’s
inappropriate, childish language
when faced with a complex is-
sue.
Most worrisome is that he
seems to have no grasp of how
his remarks might play out in
real-world international politics.
Trying to one-up the North Kore-
ans with threats may give Trump
the false sense that he is besting
them, since he believes—as al-
ways, from his business experi-
ence—threats work.
But he has no awareness
of how threats are received in
by
Pyongyang, not to mention in
Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and other
capitals. Trump’s language does
nothing to move the
nuclear issue toward
dialogue, but does
much to further en-
venom relations with
North Korea and to
support the wide-
spread view else-
where that the president of the
US is unstable and prone to vi-
olent actions.
In the past Trump has said
of North Korea that attacking
it sooner rather than later is the
best way to resolve the nuclear
issue. Bill Clinton disproved
that in 1994 by rejecting an at-
tack on North Korea’s nuclear
facility at Yongbyon and instead
entering into an Agreed Frame-
work with Pyongyang that pre-
vented war. Does Trump still
hold to that view?
Numerous specialists, and
Trump’s own defense depart-
ment leadership, have concluded
that war would be catastroph-
ic, with immediate one million
deaths and economic costs of
around $1 trillion. Needless to
say, Koreans north and south,
Japanese, and Chinese would
pay the heaviest price for such
madness.
But Trump, with his well-
known ignorance about nuclear
weapons, seems blissfully un-
aware of such matters. He would
rather talk about “fake news,” at-
tack critics, lie about his accom-
plishments, and keep pushing a
domestic agenda that has gotten
nowhere. Nuclear weapons, Ko-
rean history, North Korean moti-
vations, and the art of diplomacy
are outside his area of interest,
and to say he is not a fast study
is to be overly polite.
Secretary of State Rex Til-
lerson responded to questions
about Trump’s latest threat by
saying “Americans should sleep
well at night,” dismissing the
threat as “rhetoric.” Given the
drumbeat of war that the media
has engaged in over North Ko-
rea’s missiles, I doubt that many
informed Americans are sleep-
ing well. I doubt that US military
leaders in particular are sleeping
well; they have an inexperi-
enced, unpredictable command-
er-in-chief who just might issue
an order to attack North Korea.
And most assuredly South Kore-
ans and Japanese are not sleep-
ing well.
Warlike rhetoric from the
US president can never be dis-
missed. In a word, President
Trump is loose cannon, a serious
threat to national and interna-
tional security.
Mel Gurtov, syndicated by
PeaceVoice, is professor emeri-
tus of political science at Port-
land State University.