GOP clings to minority rule

 

Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 has been officially affirmed by the votes of the electors in states around the nation. His 7 million popular vote landslide turned into a whopping Electoral College win of 306 to 232. But because there’s always the next election, and the next ... the outdated and undemocratic Electoral College must be replaced by a system acknowledging and ratifying the majority vote of the people.

It’s past time for letter writer Earl Beal and the Republican Party (”Electoral College must be preserved,” Tribune-Star, Dec. 10, 2020), to admit that the Electoral College is a decrepit and dangerous Rube Goldberg device. What the Electoral College does is endow rocks and trees in sparsely populated states with voting clout. In doing so, it diminishes and denigrates voters living in cities and populous states.

Think about Wyoming. A state with beautiful scenery but not many people. One electoral vote is bestowed on Wyoming for every 193,000 people who live there. In the states of Texas and California, it’s one vote for every 700,000. This places Wyoming cowboys very tall in the Presidential election saddle.

Conservatives, Republicans, Wyoming cowboys and Earl Beal want us to believe the citizens living in states of small-town rural America are paragons of intelligence, honesty and virtue. If you live and vote in these states, you are a bulwark against what Mr. Beal reasons is a defense against “Socialist Democrats,” “Marxist Democrat unhinged-types,” and for good measure, a blow against “ignorance, stupidity and arrogance.”

And Republicans know where these defective voters live. Cities are key targets in Republican voter suppression tactics. Urban centers are dangerous, foreign, corrupt places. Is it necessary to note that cities are home to communities including large numbers of Black voters?

The Texas lawsuit thrown out by the Supreme Court cited illegal voting in Detroit eight times and in Milwaukee and Philadelphia seven times each. Seventeen Republican state attorneys general and 126 Republicans in the U. S. House of Representatives supported this attempted anti-democratic coup.

Republicans are afraid of democracy. Party leaders work diligently to suppress democracy in ways going beyond clinging to the Electoral College — voter-ID laws, gerrymandering, registration time limits, unreasonable poll opening and closing hours, reduced number of polling stations, questionable purges of voting rolls, making false accusations in regard to mail-in voting — all working toward an end purpose of reducing votes cast in any and all elections.

These backward looking Republicans fear majority rule. Is minority rule what American elections or America stands for?

— Gary Daily, Terre Haute

Terre Haute Tribune Star, Dec. 24, 2020