VOTERS: Democracy about to be lost

There are those who’ll continue to rationalize and explain it away, but the fact remains: In the year 2000, our politicized U.S. Supreme Court, with utter contempt for the voters and the Constitution, rolled out the carpet for George W. Bush. Ten years later, the Court conjured up Citizens United, a decision so harmful to our democracy and so hated that it would be repealed tomorrow if it were up to the people. Shortly after the Citizens United decision, the Shelby County v. Holder decision lifted constraints from 15 states that had flagrantly practiced voter suppression during the Jim Crow era. Welcome back, Jim Crow.

Thanks largely to the Supreme Court, we, as voters now, can be made road kill in so many different and interesting ways. Take, for example, Kris Kobach’s method. As Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach cooked up a scheme called Crosscheck. Trotted out as a remedy to the hallucination known as voter fraud, it was instrumental in getting many tens of thousands of legal voters’ names in more that two dozen states taken off voter rolls. Registered one day; persona non grata, the next.

Crosscheck was in full operation in time for the 2016 presidential election and, judging by the states and relevant numbers involved, it was at the very least, a factor in the election’s outcome.

But now the good news. Out of all this, we, as Americans, have something in common, something very important, a cause. And that is our democracy. If it’s not lost already — flat out stolen, it appears it’s about to be. Plain and simple.

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