For Republicans, All Black Vote Is 'Fraud'

Don't dismiss Roy Moore's ineffectual election challenge as harmless.

Let her save you.

I’m supposed to dismiss Roy Moore’s election lawsuit as an ineffectual last gasp from a disgraced pedophile. Because it is. Moore filed a lawsuit yesterday to prevent Alabama from certifying its senatorial election results. But the results are supposed to be certified today and the Alabama Secretary of State, John H. Merrill, has given every indication that he will proceed as planned.

Moore has no play here. Even if Merrill does decide to delay the certification, Moore has no hope. He can bitch and moan and refuse to concede, but Doug Jones is going to be the next Senator from Alabama and Roy Moore can choke on that for all any board of elections or judge is going to ultimately care. As I’m sure you’ve had to explain to your non-lawyer family members: anybody can sue anybody for anything, simply filing a lawsuit doesn’t mean there’s a chance in hell it’s going to succeed. Moore is throwing a Hail Mary with no time left on the clock, looking for a pass interference call. But he’s down by 9. It’s easy and practical to ignore Moore’s last-ditch lunacy, grab some leftovers, and watch football.

But it’s important that Moore is refusing to concede and it’s important that he’s using the old Republican canard of “voter fraud” as the foundation for his baseless lawsuit. What Moore is trying to do is nothing less than undermine an American election. And his efforts are just as dangerous as whatever the Russians did in the national election, even if Moore isn’t as effective as the Russians. Moore is telling his supporters — which still include a majority of white women and a super-majority of white men in Alabama — that they didn’t really “lose,” they were “cheated.” And you don’t have to be Superman to hear that Moore wants his supporters to know that black people did the cheating:

Mr. Moore’s court filing ran for dozens of pages, and it argued that returns in Jefferson County, the state’s most populous county, “confirmed election fraud.” It also said that turnout in the county was suspiciously high; it suggested that Mr. Jones had benefited from voter intimidation; and it argued that Mr. Moore’s opponents had spread “lies and fraudulent misrepresentations.”

For Moore and his supporters, the black vote just seems fraudulent. Not fraudulent in a way that can be supported by any evidentiary standard, but these people look at the black vote as a prima facie indication of voter fraud. If you pan the camera back from Alabama, you’ll find millions and millions of white people who simply can’t understand the black vote. Those white people think “massive, systemic voter fraud” is a likely explanation. Those white people also think Occam’s Razor is made by Gillette.

And, from a certain point of view I guess, the black vote is ridiculous. Black people went with Jones over Moore by 96-4. Black women went with Jones over Moore by 98-2. Folks, in a mature democracy you shouldn’t be able to get 96% of ANY group of people to vote the same way about anything. It’s not like 96% of black people agree on anything else. Over here at Black Christmas, 96% of us can’t even agree on whether it’s okay to have a white Santa as an ornament (for the record, there are no white people on my Christmas tree, and my most prominent Santa is playing a saxophone — Megyn Kelly can kiss my black ass).

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When other countries report 96% or 98% of people voting the same way, we send in Jimmy Carter. We call the U.N. We laugh at their obviously fraudulent elections.

Yet black people in this country regularly vote en masse for the Democrat at levels that would make warlords sheepish. There are lots of white people who look at that and assume something is fishy. All the voter fraud commissions you read about are organized around the twin conceits that black people can’t possibly hate the Republican party this much, and if they do there can’t possibly be enough of us to swing an election.

Of course, up here in “evidence based” land, the black vote is the result of the Republican party’s ongoing strategy of ignoring black people and, latterly, being expressly racist towards black people in hopes of energizing racist white voters. Black people only make up 13%-15% of the population (results in your town may vary), and the Republican party has decided that it can essentially do without those people and still get elected. The Democrats, spineless suits that they are, literally care more about THE NAZI VOTE than Republicans care about the black vote. Democrats don’t think they can win elections without appealing to at least some racist white people, while Republicans are confident they can win elections while actively spurning black voters. The black vote is what it is because black people know when they’re not wanted or respected.

Republicans have no desire to actually encourage black people to vote for them — they don’t want black people in their party beyond mere tokenism (hi Tim Scott, you keep shining those shoes and I’m sure bossman McConnell will have your committee chairmanship just as soon as he can). There is no outreach, there is no even basic understanding of the issues that face black America. I promise you there isn’t a Republican strategist who could even EXPLAIN what’s going on between Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates, much less devise a strategy to position Republican candidates on one side or the other.

The problem with the Republican strategy is that the numbers don’t really add up anymore. You can’t spot the other team 15 points every election. They can’t close the gap and so we get… VOTER FRAUD. The GOP will do everything it can to question and suppress the black vote: commissions, lawsuits, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, whatever it takes. It’s life or death for them: if black people VOTE then Republicans LOSE, end of story.

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There are some black people who criticize the black community for voting as a block for Democrats, and those black people get a disproportionate amount of coverage because they’re shucking and jiving to a song white Republicans are desperate to listen to. But the reality is that black people did not “decide” to all vote for Democrats. The Republicans decided that instead of competing for the black vote, they’d try to disenfranchise it. They’re too invested in that strategy to turn back now, especially when the last two Republican presidents proved that you don’t even need to get the most votes to “win” the election.

So if you want black America to be able to save white people from themselves, as we did in Alabama, I suggest you do what you can to beat back these voter “fraud” commissions. Maybe you didn’t hear the dog-whistle before, but now that Roy Moore is playing the tune, maybe you can understand the stakes?

Roy Moore Sues to Block Certification of Alabama Senate Election Results [New York Times]


Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.