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[–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

Or votes being thrown out due to “fraud”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Eye_(United_States)

or the election being cancelled

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot

or certain voters being rounded up by cops so they can’t cast ballots

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/texas-woman-sentenced-five-years-trying-vote-gets-new-appeal-n1262691

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/11/politics/hervis-rogers-texas-voting-charge/index.html

or any other number of ways elections can be meddled with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_caging

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States#False_information

All common in US politics and heavily influential in shaping the outcomes of states like Ohio, Texas, and Florida. These are features baked into our election system and designed to shape the outcomes. They've been going on since the colonial era. This is not a bug of liberal democracy but a feature. To pretend Trump is changing the game, you need to ignore how its historically been played.

And don’t be too triumphalist just because the election goes off without any problems and Democrats win

Of course not. What could that possibly prove, except Democrats aren't nearly as far removed from the Project 2025 goon squad as they like to advertise.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago*

    To pretend Trump is changing the game, you need to ignore how its historically been played.

    Right, he's just reviving older parts of the playbook. Very few of the things he's done are actually new, they're just things the US isn't used to anymore or things that haven't been done on a massive scale.

    But it wasn't voting that made those older practices fall out of favor, it was more direct actions: labor militancy, mass protests, and radical organizing. What your examples demonstrate is that Trump is defeatable even if he revives every authoritarian trick in the US playbook, but none of that proves voting specifically still matters.

    I'll be watching the 2026 elections to see if we can still vote our way out of this, or if we simply need to do something else.

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