It’s weird how Republicans keep trying to end our democracy

We have voting integrity. We have fair elections. But even if we didn’t, we have something that ensures our elections are fair: Auditing.

Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden. He lost the Electoral College. He lost the popular vote. He lost every legal challenge, in every court — state or federal. He fucking lost, man.

As David Dill famously put it, and I’ll just paraphrase here: ‘The Devil himself could run an election here in the United States, and even he couldn’t cheat, because we can audit every single vote.’

We voted in person, and we voted by mail. We voted from overseas military bases, and we voted from the comfort of our homes. We voted in long lines on Election Day, and we voted in short lines during early voting. We voted on electronic voting machines, and we voted on paper ballots. The point here is that we all voted, and every single state is allowed to make their own rules about how voting works.

Mail in voting isn’t new, and before 2020, five states were doing all their voting by mail. It’s not inherently less secure, and it’s still a safe way to vote. Donald Trump and various Republicans have raised spurious claims about voting, inventing lies from whole cloth, because they lost. There are armies of reporters fact checking this election, and every claim of fraud, wrongdoing, “dead people” voting, ballot harvesting, fake ballots, inteference, etc — has been thoroughly debunked.

Even if you truly believe that there was a wide-ranging conspiracy across multiple states, involving voting machine software engineers, hackers, ballot printing companies, and “secret” agents who planted votes, there’s an easy way to resolve this: Audits. Recounts. Signature matches. It’s not like there’s some secret to how this works. It’s just counting upwards. You start at zero, and you go until there are no more ballots to count. If you want to start over, you can. Those are called “recounts” and they’re easy to perform.

Notably, in states that did recounts like Georgia and Wisconsin… nothing changed. The ballots were all legitimate. There were no faked ballots. There were no “pallets” anyone unloaded with fake votes to change the election. It simply didn’t happen.

The vote happened. Joe Biden won. Anyone looking at the evidence and asserting otherwise is tacitly advocating to end democracy in America, and begin a dictatorship.

Yet that hasn’t stopped vast swaths of the GOP from attempting to completely overthrow our democracy.

I chose those words intentionally. That’s what this means, and I feel like the media is covering this like it’s just a series of legal challenges. When you have a free and fair election, and the losing party tries to overturn an election to remain in power, that means you’re ending democracy. Anyone supporting this effort is trying to push a dictatorship into power. If you support baseless claims of voter fraud, and even suggest that perhaps Donald Trump should remain President, you are advocating for the end of our democracy, and the start of a dictatorship.

Full stop.

The 120 Republicans who signed on to the insane Texas lawsuit to overturn legal elections in four states… like, holy fuck man… I cannot put into words how crazy these people have become. It’s not just political posturing for their base anymore. Their base believes election fraud happened, because the GOP, Trump, his lawyers, and talking heads on Fox News, One America, Newsmax, and other “right wing personalities” have lied to them.

Elections aren’t like ideas. You can I can disagree on abortion rights. We can disagree on military spending or intervention. We can disagree on school vouchers, private prisons, healthcare, or how Social Security should work. Those are political ideas, and within the realm of reason, you can make arguments that work on paper. I’m willing to hear those arguments.

Elections are a score. Hard numbers. The total counts mean something, and the people who wish to undermine the integrity of free and fair elections have their stories told in history books. These are the same people who supported the rise of every dictatorship in history. Every single Republican who went along with this wasn’t just posturing or pandering to their base Their careers should forever be stained by the decision to support putting our democracy in front of a firing squad.

I’m thankful the Supreme Court did the right thing, followed the Constitution, and decided on what was right, over what was politically convenient. I can disagree with Gorsuch, Coney-Barrett, and Kavanaugh on things like a woman’s right to choose, and that’s a fair argument. What we can never disagree on is voting, and the integrity of votes meaning something.

Every single person who has stood up and supported the disenfranchisement of their fellow Americans should hang their head in shame at the farce they have perpetuated, and the damage they have done. This isn’t the type of idea that goes away overnight. Donald Trump, the GOP, and every single person who has supported this parade of lies — they all took part in a process that was designed to make people believe that democracy was dead, and our elections were rigged.

This isn’t like the rest of Donald Trump’s lies. This one mattered for the integrity of our entire country. This one had stakes that even the GOP should have recognized as dangerous. But the GOP has ceased being part of our democracy, and their voters clearly don’t wish to live in a democracy. All they had to do was accept the outcome of the voters, and they couldn’t even do that.

The media failed at reporting on this correctly, because they made it sound like, “Well, here goes that crazy Donald Trump again with another one of his lawsuits.”

No. 120 Republicans, like 17 Attorneys General, and a fuckton of voters wanted to overthrow our Democracy. They actually fucking tried it. It was a longshot, sure — but they tried. That’s the story. That’s the way it deserves to be reported.

My only real fear is that even with all they’re doing now, it’s not over. Congress still has yet to certify the Electoral College, which happens one day after the Georgia runoffs. In the rare event that Democrats win Georgia, Republicans will have nothing left to lose. They’re going to let it happen, because they’ll soon be the minority anyway. They’re going tot burn it all the way to the ground. I’d be willing to bet Donald Trump tells his merry band of fuckheads to start a war if he doesn’t get his way.

That’s how this ends. No one has stood up against Trump. They’re enabling him to the end. This is how people get hurt. This is how people die. This is how you end a democracy.