Voting rights

If you ask me (and I know you didn't, but here goes anyway), the right to vote is the most sacred of our American freedoms.

It's the lubricant of our democracy. In a world full of despots, parliaments, oligarchies, theocracies, anarchists and communists, our 250 years of free and fair elections are, I believe, what most clearly defines us as Americans.

So why is there an assault on our right to vote? Why is the Voting Rights Act being decimated by the Supreme Court? When the American vision should be welcoming all of its citizens to vote, why are limitations being imposed on who and where we can vote?

Why, for crying out loud, did officials in Tarrant County, TX – the third largest county in the state, which includes Fort Worth – approve a plan on Tuesday to reduce the number of polling locations by 92 for the rapidly approaching midterm elections?

It might be an easy guess. The Tarrant County Commissioners, in a party-line 3-2 vote decided by three Republicans, reduced the number of polling locations from 316 to 224.  Fewer polling stations is expected to cut down the number of potential voters – and thus the number of Democrats who show up in steadily growing purple Tarrant County.

Most appallingly, the polling stations at the University of Texas-Arlington and Tarrant County College have been dropped, denying students an easy opportunity to vote. That's what this is really about – access to the ballot. Fewer voting locations usually means it's more difficult for older voters, rural voters or students – to arrive and exercise their franchise.

For a Republican Party that is in (desperate) fear of losing majorities in both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in the midterms, restricting voting locations and attempting to explain that there are still plenty of places to vote is absurd. It's all about control.

The excessively corrupt Trump Administration has been whining about rigged elections for more than a decade now without any evidence, even though he has won two presidential elections. This whining is nothing more than pre-planned fear-mongering (think Project 2025) and red meat for the MAGA base, even though numerous studies and investigations have shown that elections have been overwhelmingly free and fair.

The Brennan Center think tank published a report years ago, "The Truth About Voter Fraud", and found that most incidents of fraud are traceable to other sources, like clerical errors or poor data matching processes. Consequently, the Brennan Center concluded that incident rates of fraud measure between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.

The Brennan Center wrote than an American more likely "will be struck by lightning than he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

In another study by the bi-partisan Brookings Institute, election data from the conservative Heritage Foundation found that voter fraud measures less than 1 percent over the last 38 years. In other words, no election was altered by voter fraud over those years. Imagine that.

When Trump complained about the "rigged" 2020 election, Trump's then-Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security, Christoper Krebs, declared the elections were the most secure in American history. He was fired by Trump days after the election.  

Early voting begins in North Carolina on Oct. 15 and the midterm election will be held nationally on Nov. 3, only 57 days from now.

To this point, the only attempted tampering with our elections seems to have come from Trump himself.

Our right to vote is under attack. It's being assaulted by gerrymandered districts. It's being assaulted by Supreme Court decisions that have dismantled Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It's being placed in doubt by the repeated unsubstantiated lies of an astoundingly failed president.

Exercise your franchise to vote. Get to the polls the best way you know how. And vote.