December 27, 2021 11:20 am
For the January 2022 issue, one year after the assault on congress launched by Donald Trump’s supporters, The Atlantic monthly published an article, signed by Barton Gellman, entitled: “Trump’s next coup is already started “. The journalist claims that the assault of January 6, 2021 served as a kind of training, and that in recent months the former president and his allies have created the conditions to subvert the outcome of the upcoming elections.
“For more than a year, with the tacit and explicit support of the party’s national leaders, Republican politicians in many states have built an apparatus to distort the vote. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and other states have studied Trump’s attempts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 vote. They noted the weaknesses and took concrete steps to prevent it next time. the effort fails. In some cases they have rewritten the statutes to take control of the commissions that decide which ballots to accept and which to discard, and also which results to discard and which to accept. They are stripping powers from elected officials who refused to participate in the plan to subvert the elections in November, trying to replace them with those faithful to Trump’s ‘big lie’. They are preparing legal arguments that will give state parliamentarians the power to overturn the choices of voters ”.
The article is long and very detailed, but it starts from a simple premise: the Republicans’ undemocratic and unconstitutional strategy is working because in recent years – even before Trump entered politics – they have managed to convince an important part of public opinion that electoral violations in the United States are very common and that it is mainly black and Hispanic voters (who tend to vote for the Democratic Party) commit them. In reality, the data show that the violations are very few, that when they occur they are mostly the result of errors in good faith (for example voters who go to vote at the polling station forgetting that they have already voted by mail weeks before), and that in any case they do not affect the final result at any level.
If Republicans have been able to convince so many people otherwise it is because they have taken some of those few violations and turned them into paradigmatic cases. In particular, that of Crystal Mason, a 47-year-old African American woman, mother of three, who lives in Rendon, Texas. In 2012, Mason, who ran an accountancy firm with her husband, was sentenced to five years in prison for tax fraud. After four years in prison, a judge allowed her to serve the final part of the sentence at home. It was 2016, the presidential elections were approaching and Donald Trump was telling everyone that the Democrats would steal the elections by making millions of people who did not have the right to vote. At his mother’s insistence, Mason had turned up for the poll on November 8. Not finding her name on the lists, the teller advised her to cast a provisional vote, that is, on a ballot that would be accepted or canceled based on a later check.
His vote was not admitted, because Texas law stipulates that anyone who has been convicted must serve their entire sentence before they can return to vote. The story could have ended there, as Mason technically didn’t vote. But a local Republican politician informed the district attorney that she had tried to vote despite not qualifying, and on February 16, 2017 Mason was arrested for election fraud. At the trial the woman said she had not been informed that she would not be able to vote, and that hers was a good faith mistake; the prosecutor argued that he had tried to cheat the system to subvert democracy, and that his conviction would “send a message” against all potential electoral fraud. In 2018 Mason was sentenced to another five years in prison. Now he’s out on bail pending appeal.
The Mason story (told very well here) has been used to justify dozens of laws designed by Republicans to discourage people from voting, and which generally affect mostly black and Hispanic voters. In the first nine months of 2021, 33 were approved in 19 states in the country.
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