By A. Bruce Crawley
(An oped by A. Bruce Crawley for use by Al DIA, SCOOP USA MEDIA
and THE PHILADELPHIA SUNDAY SUN)
Like many of you, perhaps, I sat transfixed in front of my TV set on Election Night, after local and national polling sites closed on the evening of November 5.
I had fully anticipated that the growing Kamala Harris campaign momentum and her consistently improving favorability ratings, which we had all been witnessing up to Election Day, would finally lead us to the transformative election of the country’s first female president.
That candidate, Kamala Harris, also happened to be Black and, by most accounts, the single most qualified and experienced candidate for the nation’s highest office in U.S. history.
That being the case, we “true American believers” — Black, brown, white, red, and yellow — were also confident that U.S. voters, regardless of their background, find it extremely difficult to ignore the stark differences between what the two campaigns were offering, and that they would, in the majority, make the right choices.
On the one hand, the Harris/Walz ticket offered the commitment to fight for improved economic, housing, and healthcare access for American families for a similar commitment to control the runaway increases in prices charged for their families’ food purchases; in addition, as a candidate, Harris made emphatic commitments to conclusive efforts to protect women’s reproductive rights comprehensively, to defend the critical need for the uninterrupted availability to Social Security and Medicare benefits for deserving seniors, and for the passage of fair and appropriate legal immigration policies for the United States.
Importantly, Harris also pledged to fight the egregious, RNC-inspired “mass deportation” plans designed to be targeted at immigrants “of color.”
By sharp contrast, on the other hand, the Trump/Vance ticket offered voters a darker, diametrically opposed vision for the country’s future.
That future, they promised, would be one filled with vengeful threats against opposing individuals and organizations, and one that would put the families of all working- and middle-class voters at even deeper social, health-related, and economic risk.
As the TV reporters and chart makers, throughout the evening, continued to announce the right-leaning, state-by-state voting results, most of us became increasingly disappointed, deeply confused, and then highly suspicious about what we were being told.
We were finding it hard to believe what seemed to be a surprisingly strong pattern of Republican victories, that was being reported to us, hour by hour.
At the same time, we were finding it difficult to understand how America’s voters could decide to cast their precious ballots so “overwhelmingly” against the interests of their own communities, their children, and their increasingly needy seniors.
How could they, in good conscience, we wondered, even the die-hard Republicans among them, join in supporting the Donald Trump campaign platform, which so clearly prioritized the needs of the very wealthy, the private equity funds, and their investors, their ROI-seeking campaign donors and price-gouging large corporate interests, over the justifiable needs of the average American family?
The more I thought, personally, about that incongruity, the more I began to believe that those “pro-RNC votes” for president and for contested senatorial and House seats, state by state may not have actually been cast at all, especially in such “decisive numbers,” as broadcast media pundits had so breathlessly been informing us throughout the evening.
In fact, driven by that question, I began to reflect, once again, upon the Associated Press disclosures over recent months, describing an ongoing RNC corruption of our country’s longstanding electoral protocols which had created a set of circumstances that now have been systematically, and insidiously, designed to make it extremely difficult for any non-RNC-endorsed candidate to win legitimately in the honest pursuit of any future national elected office.
In that regard, in the following excerpts from April 22, 2024 AP online disclosures, drawn from its solid, investigative journalism research, that reveal, among other key findings, that since 2020, Donald J.Trump and the RNC have expanded their nefarious political activities substantially, moving from a simple “election interference focus” to one designed to enable a comprehensive, “systematic subversion” of the entire vote-counting process, state-by-state.
Prominently included in the details of the AP’s report on how the U.S. electoral system had been undermined were the following observations: The RNC “filed election-related lawsuits in nearly half the states. Recent lawsuits over voter roll maintenance in Michigan and Nevada are part of a larger strategy targeting various aspects of voting and election administration.”
Among the most salient quotes from the AP’s findings, also included the following:
“…the (RNC’s) legal maneuvering is expected to play an increasingly significant role for the party as Election Day in November approaches. The lawsuits are useful for campaign messaging (and for fundraising…”
“…The RNC is actively deploying an army of lawyers to make it harder for Americans’ ballots to be counted.”
“Voter ID rules, mail ballots, and voter roll maintenance are among the RNC’s litigation targets…the latest is a lawsuit this month alleging that Michigan has failed to keep its voter rolls up to date.”
“…opponents of the lawsuit have said it relies on unsubstantiated data and runs the risk of purging legitimate voters.”
“…just days after the Michigan lawsuit was filed, the RNC filed a similar one in Nevada.
The RNC has also “filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania questioning whether officials should count improperly dated absentee ballots…a Wisconsin lawsuit is targeting absentee voting procedures and ballot drop boxes… another in Mississippi seeks to prevent mail ballots from being counted” for various reasons.”
“…the GOP and affiliated groups are involved in… more than 80 lawsuits in 23 states.”
“On Friday, the RNC announced plans to train poll watchers, poll workers and lawyers and send out more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers to monitor vote-counting across Battleground States, in November.”
In addition, the RNC has also made other mean-spirited changes since (Michael) Whatley and Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, took control and reshaped the organization with a renewed focus on what they brazenly and deceptively have called “election integrity” and recruited scores of newly designated RNC “election integrity directors,” who were subsequently dispatched to “oversee” the ballot administration processes across the country, including in each one of the so-called “Battleground States.”
Indeed, in its April disclosures, the AP also noted that “the RNC now has ‘election integrity directors’ in 13 states.”
The target of the Trump/RNC activities, these disclosures made clear, was the laws and procedures that U.S. leaders and citizens have relied upon since 1788 to ensure fair and honest selection of U.S. presidents, senators, congresspersons, and other elected officials.
Trump and his RNC colleagues had effectively conspired to create a new and different political environment, wherein states had been routinely intimidated in their efforts to oversee the conduct of fair, honest, and open elections.
Such a new environment has provided to the RNC the unilateral ability to decide whether the votes of unsuspecting U.S. citizens would actually matter…or whether they would not.
The existence of such an environment has also emphatically diminished the prospects of competing parties, their candidates, or their voters to ever achieve successful outcomes in what has become no longer a fair and just electoral process.
(Part 2 will be available in next week’s edition of the SUN, and at: www.m3mpr.com.)
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the article belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, The Philadelphia Sunday SUN, the author’s organization, committee or other group or individual.
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