“If voting did anything they would outlaw it.” Is such an insane take to me, because literally all of human politics for recorded history has centered around Outlawing the Vote.
Big tiem agreed. The problem is due to loss of ciritical thinking skills, people don’t understand that “outlawing voting” doesn’t come with a big announcement of “voting is now illegal” delivered by a mustache twirling villain on tv and now nobody at all can vote.
Outlawing voting looks like th SAVE act requiring the name on your ID to match your birth certificate making it illegal for millions of married people (primarily women, but this would have affected my former husband) and trans people to vote.
Outlawing voting looks like increasing restrictions on mail-in ballots, making it illegal for millions of disabled people and people without access to voting locations to vote. It looks like voting locations being hosted in buildings that don’t have to comply with ADA. It looks like closing polling places so that high population areas don’t have the capacity to get everyone through in a timely manner. It looks like requiring state ID and then restricting the number of available places to get that ID and making it expensive, because that technically isn’t a poll tax.
It looks like absurd redistricting. It looks like “accidentally” purging active voters from the voting rolls a few days before the election. It looks like piling as many restrictions onto voter registration as they can.
Outlawing voting looks like voter suppression. But it really is the same damned thing.
The big “voting is now illegal” announcement only comes when it has already been made impossible, when it is already de facto illegal
Also they never say “voting is illegal”, they say something like “you no longer need to vote, you don’t have to vote” etc, they frame voting as a chore or inconvenience
They also might never announce “voting is now illegal”, but make it so that the legal vote is functionality meaningless.
My family lived in the Soviet Union. They all went to vote, dutifully playing their part in the charade of The Ideal Nation. And when their turn came, they, like all other Soviet citizens, were faced with two choices: The Communist Society Party, or Abstaining. Which is functionality no different to not having elections at all.
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