Stop the steal – Memphis Flyer

If, in the aftermath of a decisive (if narrow) victory for Donald Trump in the just concluded presidential election, anybody expected Republican-minded folks to put aside their “stop-the-steal” concerns from 2020, that was a premature hope.

It turns out that numerous believers in a stolen 2020 election still believe in it, and a fairly significant controversy regarding the matter continues to fester on social media.

One local believer is former Shelby County Republican chairman Lee Mills, who has carried on a brisk online conversation about it on Facebook.

“Now that it’s officially over,” Mills wrote on his page last week, “can we revisit 2020 for a moment?”

Whereupon he reproduced a dubiously sourced bar graph that’s been making the rounds in MAGA circles.

Crude and simplistic, employing blue and red bars, respectively, to indicate Democratic and Republican vote totals, it purports to compare the results for both parties in the presidential elections of 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. Strikingly, it seems to show the Democratic vote holding to virtually identical levels in 2012, 2016, and 2024, while the Republican vote is represented graphically as steadily rising through the respective campaign years, finally out-distancing the Democratic vote total this year.

The year 2020 is seen as an anomaly, with the blue bar representing the Democratic vote vaulting high above the red bar representing the GOP presidential total. Both bars show an increase over previous years.

The blue bar is depicted as coming back to “normal” for 2024. The red bar is somewhat lower as well.

Mills feels emboldened to comment: “This is a rhetorical question, but who can explain this anomaly?”

And he supplies some numbers, after a fashion. “So l’m not misconstrued by the Trump haters: The 2020 election saw a huge turnout spike — 159 million people voted, with Democrats getting nearly 80 million votes, which is a massive 23% jump from previous years. Statistically, that’s a total outlier.

“A big factor was the sudden expansion of mail-in voting, which went from 21 percent in 2016 to 46 percent in 2020.

“Here’s the issue: A lot of these changes were made by unelected officials, bypassing the state legislatures. When you change the rules to allow massive non-in-person voting [sic], it opens the door for fraud to run rampant.

“While this doesn’t flat-out prove fraud, it definitely raises red flags about how secure the process was with all these last-minute changes.”

Response on Facebook was forthcoming. William Albert Mannecke agreed: “They learned to cheat on an industrial level.”

As did Ellen Ferrara. “They stole 2020, 100 percent.”

Randy Higdon probed a little further: “We will find out he [presumably Trump] won all 50 states. Only states she [Kamala Harris] won were ones that didn’t require voter ID. Then this goes back to 2020. Many, many heads are gonna roll.”

But a demurrer would come from Cole Perry, a local statistician with both solidly Republican bona fides and a well-earned reputation for accurate analyses of election results: “Harris is going to end up with somewhere near 76.5 million votes, and Trump will end up [with] close to 78.5 million. That’s almost exactly the same total turnout as 2020. If they really did cheat in 2020, why did they suddenly forget how to do it?”

A telling point. Another one is this, apropos the effects, such as it was, of write-in votes, which were disparaged by a suspicious Trump in 2020, the Covid year, but actively encouraged by him for his supporters in 2024.

That might be as good an explanation as any for the supposed “anomaly” of the 2020 electoral outcome.

In a democracy — or, if you prefer, a republic — the government’s actions are supposed to reflect the will of the majority. That’s why we vote: to discover who the majority of the citizenry wants to hold office and what policies they want to have put in place by those they have elected. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But the sad reality is that the United States has for years been ruled by a backward-thinking, repressive, xenophobic minority.

There are many reasons for this, starting with the fact that the nation’s most powerful legislative body — the U.S. Senate — is absurdly undemocratic. Republican senators haven’t represented a real majority of the country’s population since 1996, yet the GOP has managed to delay and obstruct the will of the majority for 25 years.

Currently, the 50 GOP senators represent 43.5 percent of the country’s population, mostly due to the absurdity of states such as Wyoming, which has 578,000 citizens (about half the number of people living in Shelby County) having the same representation in the U.S. Senate as California’s 40 million citizens. California has 80 times the number of people as Wyoming and both states have equal representation in the Senate. It’s ludicrous.

More than 56 percent of the country’s population is represented by 50 Democratic senators, but they can’t pass gun-control measures, election reform, healthcare reform, tax reform, or any number of mildly progressive laws, because Senator Turd Ferguson of South Dakota doesn’t like it.

There’s little likelihood real change will take place in the structure of the Senate, and the GOP knows the only chance of retaining power is to continue to thwart the will of the majority by making it harder for people to vote, especially people of color and people with limited resources, who tend to vote for Democrats.

All across the country in states controlled by the GOP, restrictive voting laws are being proposed and enacted, including reducing the number of polling places and early voting days, restricting voting by mail, purging voter rolls, limiting voter-registration periods, restricting absentee ballots, eliminating Sunday voting, and even banning anyone from providing water to people in long voting lines. It’s Jim Crow all over again. And it’s out in the open.

From last November through January 6th, the former president defamed the American electoral process. But those who went along with Trump’s Big Lie weren’t trying to “stop the steal,” they were trying to stop democracy. And they still are.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed (on a party line vote, naturally) a bill known as H.R. 1 — the For the People Act. It would eliminate the voter suppression tactics that Georgia just enacted, for example, and would codify the voting process to make it equal for all U.S. citizens, no matter what state they live in. The bill requires states to maintain a voter database with universal automatic registration. In other words, if you’re a citizen and can prove it, you’re registered to vote. No more jumping through hoops at the local level. H.R. 1 mandates at least a 15-day early voting period, and institutes independent commissions to set Congressional district boundaries to eliminate gerrymandering.

It’s a big deal, but it has no chance whatsoever to pass the Senate, since it would need at least 10 GOP votes. Which brings Senate Democrats to a crossroads decision: Should they attempt to eliminate the filibuster so that the bill could pass with 50 votes, plus one from the vice-president, or just let the GOP do what it’s done for the last 25 years: undermine the will of the majority?

Eliminating the filibuster means if the GOP gets control of the Senate back at some future date, they could ram through all kinds of racist and corporatist policies (kind of like they’ve done for the last four years). But this is no time to be timid. Democracy is in the balance. It’s time to take back the reins of power and respect the will of the people. It’s time to stop the steal.