Toon: Icing the Vote

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was asked on Face the Nation over the weekend whether he had plans to send ICE thugs to polling places in Democratic-leaning areas, where they were likely to deter some citizens from voting. 

He hedged on what his department's plans are, and offered talking points about making sure non-citizens weren't voting (an infinitessimal problem) so that only approved citizens get to exercise their constitutional rights.

As we have seen over and over again under the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™, ICE frequently abducts citizens and legal residents as well as undocumented aliens, quickly spiriting them far away from family and legal representation, making no attempt to notify their loved ones what has happened to them. Even having proof of citizenship is of no avail if one's skin happens to be the wrong color.

The deterrent effect of ICE thugs at the polls, especially on people targeted by the present regime's ethnic cleansing policy, cannot be discounted.

Add to that the Republican playbook of shouting unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud any time an election doesn't go the way Republicans like, plus the Trumpsters' unconstitutional demands to states to turn over their voter rolls and equipment, and I worry that as soon as polls close, ICE agents will be seizing voting machines and ballots before anyone has a chance to stop them. 

From razing the East Wing to renaming the Kennedy Center to countless examples of graft and fraud to stealing box upon box upon box of classified papers off to Mar-a-lago, it's the way the Trump regime works.

Q Toon: Is Fox News Evil?

I'm exaggerating any antigay animus on Fox News's part because this is a cartoon drawn for the LGBTQ+ press. That animus exists — especially against transgender people as the whipping boy/girl/children du jour — even if Fox News hasn't been up in alarms about marriage equality or Gays In The Military lately.

What I'm not exaggerating is Fox News's reliance upon stirring up its audience's phobias and resentment against The Other, and promoting The Big Lie. As a Republican media outlet, Fox News is acutely aware that majority rule is a potential threat to their party; so it is eager to cast doubt upon the legitimacy of free and open elections.

Absent any real evidence of massive voter fraud by Democrats, Fox News can't state it as fact. (Indeed, nearly all of the instances of voter fraud that have come to light, rare as they are, have been individuals casting a second vote for Republican candidates.) Instead, Fox News puts democracy in jeopardy by casting its aspersions in the form of a question.

Fox News isn't accusing Democrats of busing dead illegal immigrant voters to the polls. It's just asking whether they might be doing it. Journalists are supposed to ask questions, aren't we?.

Hence the title of today's post.

The Republican Response

In statehouses across the nation, Republicans respond to Senator Joe Manchin's insistence that federal voting rights legislation be bipartisan.

Toon: Taking the Seat Back, Revisited

It's possible that only we editorial cartooning nerds will get the reference made in my cartoon today.

Most of you are aware of the full-bore assault on voting rights underway in Republican state legislatures all across the country. Iowa has shortened in-person voting hours by a full hour in the evening because, I don't know, voting fraud between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m.

Republicans said the rules are needed to guard against voting fraud, though they noted Iowa has no history of election irregularities and that November’s election saw record turnout with no hint of problems in the state.

In Georgia, Republicans are making it a criminal offense to offer water to voters forced to stand in line for hours on end in order to exercise their constitutional rights. They are well aware that rural and suburban voters never have to wait anywhere near that long at their polling places; this measure has nothing to do with making sure voters aren't being bribed with bottles of Evian.

Just about everywhere the Republicans are making it tough for city folk to vote, by cutting the availability of early voting, absentee voting, and voting by mail. This on top of earlier voting restrictions such as requiring photo ID but not allowing student or municipal IDs. (Oh, sure, if you don't have a car, you can get a state-approved ID; but you still have to schlep way the fork out to the exurbs to the DMV office for it.)

Even Republican election officials readily admit that the 2020 general election was the most secure and fraud-free election in history. Republican elected officials, however, say that their voting restrictions are necessary to address allegations of voting irregularities — allegations which they themselves have fabricated.

Now, for some of you, I may need to explain that this cartoon references one by the great Bill Mauldin upon the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1963. 

"I've Decided I Want My Seat Back" by Bill Mauldin in Chicago Sun-Times, September 6, 1963

It's not as famous as the Weeping Lincoln he would draw less than three months later. Still, I think it found its way into enough high school and college textbooks that you don't necessarily have to be an editorial cartoonist yourself to recognize it.

Q Toon: Truth Will Out

A peculiar little detail in the case of Jared and Ivanka Kushner using private e-mail for government business (gosh, where have I heard about that before, I wonder) is the revelation that Jared Kushner was somehow registered as a female voter in the state of New York.

It has since been revealed that the mistake was due to a clerical error rather than some subconscious desire on the part Kushner himself. It does lead one to wonder, however, whether any other such clerical errors will be cited by the Kris Kobach Kommission as proof of widespread voter fraud.

Q Toon: Voter ID-OC

Yeah, yeah, I know the argument. You need a photo ID to board an airplane, open a bank account, buy a house or join a country club -- all sorts of things that some of the poor, elderly, students, blind, minorities and whatnot try to get along without. The fact is that these laws have been crafted to include Republican-leaning groups (gun licenses are okay) and inconvenience Democratic-leaning groups (student IDs are not).

But it's only a photo ID, they say. And if cataracts keep your great-grandmother from schlepping out to spend a day at wherever the heck they moved the DMV these days, that's a small cost to prevent the .0000003% of voters who have no business exercising their civic responsibility.

Wisconsin voters have just been through a nasty series of recall elections, and with Democrats having eked out a narrow victory in just one election in my own State Senate District (enough to cost Republicans their senate majority), local Republicans have been literally digging through garbage dumpsters in a desperate effort to rustle up something to allege voter fraud. Our Republican dumpster diver found -- stop the presses! -- "some ripped up voter registration forms which he [placed] in a garbage bag along with a prescription bottle, a couple of bills and - get this - a MacDonald's food bag," which he duly turned over to sheriff's deputies.

After a thorough investigation, the Racine County Sheriff's report concluded:

"In summary, none of the items brought to the Sheriff's Office removed from the dumpster by Ottelien prove or even suggest voter fraud had occurred at the Cesar Chavez Center. The items discarded in the trash are just that, trash."

Aside from that, some poll workers around the state -- those nice ladies who sit in that voting room all day from before the polls open until the last vote is counted -- made occasional mistakes about which parts of the Voter ID law had and had not been stopped by judicial injunction. Republican provocateurs have highlighted a few isolated cases in which a voter did not sign a registration sheet (the only part of the law currently in effect in Wisconsin). Yet elsewhere, voters were turned away for not having the photo ID the injunction expressly said they wouldn't need.

Clearly, Republicans have their work cut out for them as they seek to level the playing field between their multimillionaire campaign contributors and the hoi polloi whose free speech under Citizens United is barely audible, but make up the other 99.99999% of voters.

There are other groups whose influence in elections Republicans would like to cut down. In the future, we can look forward to Republicans whittling down workers' ability to vote by shortening voting time to between the hours of 10:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. and require that you fill out and seal absentee ballots at the state capitol in the presence of your Congressman and FedEx them to your local elections office. In a hermetically sealed box the size of a grand piano.

Wisconsin toon: Voter fraud & the GOP

After state Attorney General (and chair of John McCain's Wisconsin campaign in 2008) J.B. van Hollen searched tirelessly for examples of the voter fraud his fellow Republicans keep assuring us is running rampant in Wisconsin, he managed to unearth scores of cases. Well, not scores, exactly. More like exactly one score.

From Rick Ungar's The Policy Page for Forbes.com:

"A study of the 2008 election conducted by the Wisconsin Justice Department has turned up just two instances of people 'double' voting, six people who engaged in voter registration shenanigans and 11 ex-cons who violated the prohibition on felons voting.

"In fact, there has been a sum total of 20 people charged with some form of voter fraud out of the millions of Wisconsin residents who voted in the 2008 election. And over half of them are already on voter denial lists as they are convicted felons."

Since the 2010 election produced a Republican monopoly on power in all branches of state government, Republicans had no problem cranking out a Voter ID bill this year requiring voters to produce a photo ID: a driver's license, a passport, a military ID, a tribal identification or a student ID, provided that the student ID shows an expiration date -- meaning that the University of Wisconsin (for one large example) would have to redo all their student IDs, at a cost of $1.1 million. And if Grandma doesn't have any of the above, she can schlep on down to the Department of Motor Vehicles to spend the day getting a $28 voter ID card.

And you thought that Poll Taxes were a thing of the past.

As Rep. Kelda Helen Roys (D-Madison) pointed out,

"Republicans know that their days of complete control over Wisconsin’s government are numbered, so they are rushing frantically to game the system to keep power,” Roys said. “They know that according to a 2005 study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, about 180,000 Wisconsinites (23 percent) aged 65 and older do not have a state-issued ID, and about half of African-Americans and Latinos/Latinas lack a valid driver’s license – compared with 17 percent of white Wisconsinites."

The voter suppression law was originally set to go into effect in time for the 2012 elections, but with six Republican state senators threatened with recall elections this summer, the timetable was moved up to Right Away. Meanwhile, since those same Republicans were busy trying to jam the Republican agenda down our throats, they couldn't devote their full attention to defending themselves in the recall elections.

So the party recruited Republican volunteers to run against the Democratic challengers in Democratic primaries.

"Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state party, issued a statement justifying the practice because Republican senators have been too busy in Madison to prepare for the recall elections. 'The Republican Party of Wisconsin has advocated that protest candidates run in Democratic primaries to ensure that Republican legislators have ample time to communicate with voters throughout their districts after the state budget is approved.'"

Naturally, since those Democratic primaries will be the only races on the July 12 ballot, nobody seriously expects that only Democratic voters will be deciding who the Democratic nominees will be. And since the Republican party has disenfranchised so many members of the Democratic base, it shouldn't require quite as many Republican crossover voters to make the recall elections moot before they happen.

If only there were some Republican party primary which Democrats could cross over and mess up next year...