Donald vs. democracy: Trump's "rigging" talk is dangerous indeed, and completely distorts the true threat on Election Day

New York Daily News

October 17, 2016

With the election three weeks away and Hillary Clinton far ahead in every legitimate poll, Donald Trump is setting out to poison America’s most precious civic resource: trust in the democratic process itself.

If his disgusting and cynical attack succeeds, designed as it is to undercut the legitimacy of the next President and foment racial animus, there will be casualties.

In the United States, national elections are run by thousands of local districts, overseen by 50 state leaders. In crucial swing states, including Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Nevada and Iowa, Republicans now happen to rule the roost.

The process of casting and counting ballots may not be perfect, but it’s almost entirely tamper-proof — and resistant to nefarious coordinated plots.

Never mind. Stating not only that the media is against him but that “there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day,” as he put it in a tweet, Trump rages against an imaginary machine.

At rallies, he works his supporters into a frenzy, saying it is “so important that you watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us.”

The candidate and his increasingly debased minions leave no doubt at whom they are pointing the finger: black people. You know, the citizens who are planning to vote 9-to-1, according to just about every poll, for Hillary Clinton.

“I just hear such reports about Philadelphia,” Trump told white Pennsylvanians last week. And so, he would have roving bands of angry, untrained, partisan observers set up shop at urban polling sites on Nov. 8 looking for anything untoward.

Newt Gingrich — stooping, if possible, lower — called the election a “coup d’etat.” Shell of a man Rudy Giuliani said “dead people generally vote for Democrats” because Democrats “control the inner cities.”

This is a calculated effort, plotted by Trump and former Breitbart News CEO Steve Bannon, to reduce the world’s most advanced democracy into a mobocracy. It is consistent with the ever-widening fever dream Trump is conjuring of a vast conspiracy involving corporations, the media, big banks and pollsters.

It’s apparently working: Swallowing Trump slanders, a disgusting 41% of voters now tell pollsters the election could be stolen.

But ballot-box shenanigans are a fictional threat to the sanctity of elections. A comprehensive investigation of in-person election fraud found just 31 credible incidents out of 1 billion votes cast from 2000 through 2014.

What is a real, live danger is the disenfranchisement of voters, and especially black voters.

In recent years, 14 states have imposed new registration and balloting restrictions, from strict photo ID requirements to cutbacks in early voting, that disproportionately, and deliberately, burden black voters. In a half-dozen states, courts have ruled such rules improper — but state or local election officials are dragging their feet.

A federal judge ordered Wisconsin to provide ID to voters who lack it in time for the election — but local officials are telling voters they may not get them in time to vote. To date, the state’s DMV has rejected almost a fifth of applicants for the paperwork — 85% of whom are people of color.

In North Carolina, a federal court eviscerated a law, declaring: “The new provisions” — including one that cut back on early voting — “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

But the state’s GOP chair went so far, in a memo to local election boards, as to urge them to “feel empowered to make legal changes to early voting plans, that are supported by Republicans.”

Trump, of course, is too busy stoking fear and chaos to speak out about real threats to democratic participation.

Which makes the choice in this election clearer than ever: Burn it all down — or defeat Donald Trump, and defeat him decisively.