Letter to the Editor: Elections Have Consequences
If you vote Republican, you are voting support for a Republican Party leadership which has embraced voter suppression and given a platform to White Supremacists and Christian Nationalists. Both of these groups advocate taking power by any means possible, and their racist and antisemitic rhetoric has emboldened acts of violence across this nation. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified 488 antigovernment groups and 733 Hate groups. The FBI has reported that in 2020 there were 8,263 hate crime incidents involving 11,219 offenses.
In last week’s Congressional candidate debate between Dr. Kermit Jones and Kevin Kiley, Kiley refused to answer the question, “Do you support neo-Nazi’s”. He referred to the question as “crazy” even though he has been seen in association with neo-Nazi’s and has supported the fraudulent claims of insurrectionists that the 2020 election was stolen. Another Republican has run ads in which she likened Democrats to destructive feral pigs that range free and destroy the American countryside. She shows herself hunting down feral pigs in a helicopter and shooting them dead, posing over the body, and inviting supporters to accompany her on her next hog-killing expedition. These are the type of the elected officials who erode and destroy Democracy.
Republican majority state legislators have already gerrymandered some states to the point that vote integrity no longer exists. North Carolina is nearly evenly divided between registered Republicans and Democrats. Extreme gerrymandering has given Republicans control over 10 of the 14 districts. This is not Democracy!
Republicans are poised to elect Secretaries of State who are willing to throw out the votes of their states’ citizens if the result of the election is not the desired outcome. Secretaries of State determine which votes can be counted and what voting infrastructure will be used. They can enact voter suppression measures such as reducing the time period to vote, reducing the number of polling stations available in a district, determining whether mail-in ballots and drop-off boxes will be allowed, where polling stations are to be located, and numerous other practices that make it harder for minorities and people of limited means to vote.
Clearly, who we elect as legislators will determine the fate of Democracy and the integrity of our votes. I, for one, hope Democracy prevails!
Faith Strailey
Quincy