Ever since the 2000 election recount, the issue of voter suppression and voter purges has been a concern for the Democratic Party – but only when it is convenient. The Democrats have had 17 years to deal with issue or to make some kind of progress on it and they have failed. And now we’re facing one of the largest potential voter purges of our lifetimes because the Democrats sat on the sidelines and ignored all the warning signs. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript:
By now, I’m sure everybody is familiar with the fact that Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission is in full effect. They’ve been met with a ton of resistance from state election officials who have refused to turn over voter rolls as that would be a massive violation of privacy for every single registered voter in the United States. A couple of states have said, “Yeah, sure. You can have our stuff. We don’t care about our citizens.” But, that’s basically what’s happened so far with Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission.
Now, earlier this week, they decided to hold a meeting during which Donald Trump once again said that millions of illegal voters voted for Hillary Clinton. That’s why I lost the popular vote and that’s why we’re doing this whole commission. First of all, there has been no widespread reporting of voter fraud from any state in this country whatsoever. A couple of people have been arrested for voter fraud. Most of them, if not all of them, were Donald Trump supporters who actually committed voter fraud in a couple of cases based on Donald Trump’s own advice for them to go vote again, specifically he said that in Colorado.
Nonetheless, here’s the problem. We do have an issue with vote security, vote hacking in the United States. Now, this commission is going to do nothing to prevent that. That’s not what they’re looking into. They’re trying to kick honest registered Democrats off the voting rolls to make sure that Donald Trump can sail to victory in 2020. The real problems with our voting system here in the United States are the ones that today Democrats are screaming about. Our system is easily hackable. We had voting systems in the United States that, on election day, the penetration attempts numbered in the hundreds. People from outside the United States did try to hack into our voting machines, and we do not know necessarily if they were successful. Furthermore, the voter purges, the voter ID laws, all of the other things that have added up basically since the year 2000 with that election debacle where tens of thousands of people were kicked off the Florida voting rolls and then George W. Bush finally ended up winning the state by a few hundred votes.
Democrats have known the dirty tricks of the Republicans for years. We have had people, specifically two that come to mind, Brad Friedman and Greg Palast who for more than a decade have devoted their careers to warning the public, warning Democrats in Washington, D.C. and all over this country that we had significant flaws with our voting systems in the United States and the Democrats did nothing. In the last few years, Ari Berman has also stepped up and joined that fight for secure voting systems in the United States. But, before that, again, Brad Friedman of Brad Blog and Greg Palast, about the only two people in this country consistently warning us about these problems.
Again, what did the Democrats do? We’ve known about it but they did nothing. You know why? They got complacent. They saw that Democrats took back the House of Representatives in 2006 so they thought, “Okay. Well, I guess the issue of the voting problems are over because we finally won.” 2008, they won the presidency and said, “Okay. I guess we don’t have to worry about these voting issues again because we won so what’s the point?” That was the mentality of Democrats at the time, but now that they’re in the minority, now that they finally said, “Oh, god. We were wrong. Things were hacked,” or people attempted to hack them. “People were kicked off voting rolls and it could have been just enough to flip the election. Now, we should do something about it.” Bullshit. You had 17 years. 17 years these journalists, this election protection agency groups were out there telling you this was a problem and you did nothing. Now, you’re pissy because you lost.
But, you know what else you lost other than an election? You lost the ability to do anything about this. We’re too far down that rabbit hole to pull ourselves back out at this point. You can make it slightly better, but you’ll never take it back to what it was because you let the cancer spread too far. We were warned and that’s what pisses me off so much about this story. We covered it on Ring of Fire, had Friedman and Palast on countless times and nobody listened. Nobody did anything and that is why this happened. I have no faith that the Democratic party will take this issue seriously today because for the last 17 years, they acted like they could not care less.
