ELECTION DAY -- November 6,2018 PART ii

The only way the GOP knows how to win:

CHEAT, LIE, SUPPRESS THE VOTE:

"Look at what’s happening in Georgia, where Brian Kemp — the Republican secretary of state, who oversees elections — is running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams. In any other democracy, letting a man supervise his own election would be inconceivable. But that’s how it is in Georgia, and Kemp is abusing his power to the max. In recent years Kemp has purged millions of names from Georgia’s voting rolls, on dubious grounds. Finding himself in a close race despite these efforts, he tried to purge even more based on criteria so spurious that the courts have — for now — blocked his efforts. So over the weekend Kemp’s office issued a warning, with no evidence or specifics, that Democrats may have tried to hack the voter registration site. 

 A political party with any kind of commitment to democracy and fair play would treat Kemp as a pariah. Instead, he has the full support of the national G.O.P. And Georgia is far from unique. There have been similar if less spectacular attempts to rig the vote in Kansas and North Dakota, where would-be absentee voters were told that they had to use the right color ink — and were given conflicting information about what color was acceptable. 

 What about matters at the federal level? The executive branch doesn’t directly control the electoral process, but Trump has nonetheless engaged in an extraordinary abuse of power in the run-up to the vote: He has deployed large military forces to the Mexican border, at a likely cost to taxpayers in the hundreds of millions of dollars, in an obvious attempt to hype the supposed threat from a small, bedraggled caravan of refugees still more than 700 miles away. This deployment clearly serves no national interest; it’s a blatant misuse of the power of the presidency for partisan political advantage.  

The lesson we learn from all these abuses of power is that today’s Republicans are just like their fellow white nationalists in Hungary and Poland, who have maintained a democratic facade but have in reality established one-party authoritarian regimes. Everything we’ve seen says that Republicans will do anything they can to take and hold power, and Tuesday’s elections may be the last chance to stop them from locking in permanent rule. 

 Oh, and in case you’re tempted to bothsides this: No, both sides don’t do it. Voting restrictions are almost entirely a Republican thing. As always, Democrats aren’t saints, but they appear to believe in democracy, while their opponents don’t."