Ugly election rigging in America

In Congress, traditions of ‘’filibuster’’ speech-making and assigning chairmen of committees on seniority basis, ensured that racist Congressmen like Wilber Mills, Huey Long, Barry Goldwater chaired key committees and blocked federal contracts and funds from benefiting African-American communities. Consequently, the richest economy in the world has the most wretched primary, secondary and colleges for black […]

In Congress, traditions of ‘’filibuster’’ speech-making and assigning chairmen of committees on seniority basis, ensured that racist Congressmen like Wilber Mills, Huey Long, Barry Goldwater chaired key committees and blocked federal contracts and funds from benefiting African-American communities. Consequently, the richest economy in the world has the most wretched primary, secondary and colleges for black children under democracy. African-Americans lacked opportunities to vote out racist Congressmen who dutifully represented wishes of their racist constituencies.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act wrestled into law by Lyndon Banes Johnson, remained a moment of gross betrayal to southern racists. Johnson was a long-serving Congressman from Texas who became President after the assassination of John F, Kennedy in 1963.  In 2005, the State of Georgia started a creeping war of dismantling the right to vote which the law had guaranteed to African-Americans. By 2015, 34 states have legislated Laws which block voting by low-income African-Americans; immigrants from South America (the “Hispanics’’), “Indigenous Nations’’, Asians and youths. Elizabeth Drew reports a case in North Carolina where ‘’the number of people prevented from voting exceeded the margin between the loser and the winner’’.
 Measures being used include: ending people registering to vote on voting day;  demanding a driver’s licence or a passport as an identity card; election officials packing “as many blacks as they can into a constituency so they can reduce the total number of blacks elected to office’’. In 2014 Texas denied 608,470 African-Americans the right to vote because they lacked one of the seven identity cards specified by the state’s legislature. By the 2014 mid-term elections won by the Republican Party candidates, 21 States ‘’had enacted new restrictions on voting rights’’.
Brad Friedman claims that in the 2014 elections in Georgia forty thousand people who registered to vote were removed from the voters’ list, and “hundreds more were not assigned voting places’’. In Florida and Mississippi States, some voting locations ran out of ballot papers. Howard Koplowitz notes that most poor people do not have drivers licences because they cannot afford cars, and do not own passports because they “can’t afford to travel out of the country’’.  The most affected are poor African-American and Hispanic voters.
 “Direct Recording Electronic (DRE)’’ computers which rely on “touch screen voting machines’’ – used in one-third of the country – ‘’are 100 per cent impossible to verify for accuracy after polls have closed’’. The use of hand-marked paper ballots if read by the use of “omputerized optical scan systems’’ can “either report results accurately or not’’. Friedman reports a scandalous case in the State of Wisconsin where a computer recorded only 16 (sixteen) voters out of a total of 5,350 voters. He notes that it is a severe restriction of rights of voters if election monitors and voters ‘’are unable to see inside a computer as to whether a vote is tabulated accurately’’.
Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the only African-American on the Supreme Court, voted in a 5-4 majority decision to repeal a law which required prior approval of new election laws passed by states to be approved by the Federal Department of Justice, as a measure to prevent a return to politics of slave-aristocracy dictatorships.
A study by Harvard and Sydney universities showed that while in 2012 the United States was ranked 26th ‘’on a global index of election integrity’’, in 2014 she had fallen to 45th place. The 2014 study considered 107 countries in which 127parliamentary and presidential elections had been held between 1st July and December 31st, 2014. The surge in electoral racism is almost certainly due to the result of a Stanford University study which showed a major population shift which put African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians in a majority. These groups tend to vote for Democrats. If Hillary Clinton is to be beaten by a Republican candidate, Republicans must re-entrench a pandemic of election-rigging in America’s democracy.
The African Union is committed to promoting the welfare of the “frican Diaspora’. As American diplomats strut across Africa preaching the doctrine of “free and fair elections’’, it provides excellent opportunities for vigorous African demands on President Obama to give primacy to fighting the political ‘Election Ebola’ warfare by Republicans against African-Americans.