In an oxymoronic moment of infuriated amusement, I caught perhaps two minutes of former RNC chair Michael Steele yesterday on MSNBC cheerfully explaining that no matter how many voting barriers Republican state legislatures throw up, voters are going to vote. In droves. The host and another guest smiled in comfortable reassurance.
Yet just seconds before that prediction, Steele had briefly touched on the grotesque reality that said legislatures are rigging the electoral process itself — that is, they'll soon determine in key battleground states which votes are counted and which are "fraudulent." Neither host nor second guest paused to note the throbbing contradiction of Steele's mass-voting triumphalism paired with Stalinesque vote counting.
Of no liberating consequence is the number of voters voting if Republican goons can simply throw out any number of pesky Democratic votes.
Also largely inconsequential are the growing number of states passing restrictive voting laws and the number of laws themselves. Only one law is needed to kill American democracy — that of election subversion, cited above. And merely one or two states with such a law are enough to swing a presidential election and determine Congress' partisan composition.
For the love of God, the left, center-left and center need to abandon their worry over voter IDs or whether a voter in line can be handed a bottle of water. The looming monster to be singularly confronted is any state law that hands the counting of votes to partisans. That alone is destined to kill American democracy.