The real election fraud

It is true that there is election fraud in Texas. But the cheating to alter election results is not happening at the polls. Instead, it was designed by the state Legislature to keep the Republicans in power.

As a result, election identification laws that benefit certain types of voters and are detrimental to others have been approved. For example, hunting permits are accepted as IDs for voting, but student identification cards are not.

Redistricting approved by the Legislature is another weapon used to defraud democracy by reducing the voting power of Latinos and African Americans. The case of Dallas-Fort Worth is an example of how to split up the community into four Anglo-majority districts and group minorities into several districts. This happened in such a shameless way that a federal judge found that the redistricting plans were “enacted with discriminatory purpose.”

Therefore, the Justice Department did the right thing when it decided last week to turn to the courts and demand for Texas to once again obtain preclearance for election changes, under the new legal framework established by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In our days, election fraud is called vote suppression, and it is being carried out by legislatures like North Carolina’s, which imposed restrictions and eliminated several measures that facilitated access to the polls for voters.

A series of Republican-majority state Legislatures are driving these reforms, with the excuse of preventing supposed election fraud at the polls—which in reality is insignificant. If these lawmakers wish to identify the culprits of real election fraud, all they need to do is look in the mirror.