There are many ways to take away your right to Vote. If you live in a state run by Republicans, they're looking for every conceivable way to deny Americans their right to vote by inventing solutions for problems that have never existed. If you live everywhere else, your vote is being taken way as well because the goal here is to make the Electoral College a Republican stronghold and a firewall against actual democracy.
There are many sophisticated ways to make this happen. Then there's mob rule and violent intimidation.
Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide – from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers. The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims. The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.
In an exclusive interview, Tricia Raffensperger spoke publicly for the first time about the threats of violence to her family and shared the menacing text messages with Reuters.
The Raffenspergers – Tricia, 65, and Brad, 66 – began receiving death threats almost immediately after Trump’s surprise loss in Georgia, long a Republican bastion. Tricia Raffensperger started taking precautions. She canceled regular weekly visits in her home with two grandchildren, ages 3 and 5 – the children of her eldest son, Brenton, who died from a drug overdose in 2018.
“I couldn’t have them come to my house anymore,” she said. “You don’t know if these people are actually going to act on this stuff.”
The end result is that nobody is going to work at the polls anymore. No one is going to risk being threatened or attacked because of their civic responsibilities. We are rapidly heading towards a reality where the American way of practicing democracy is suddenly incompatible with a Republican determination to harass and intimidate their fellow citizens.
There's one political party trying to save democracy and one trying to destroy it. I would love to say that the media gets it, but we know how that has played out since January 6. We need to address the ugly turn that this has taken and stop the normalization of intimidating Election workers.
