Republicans are growing so perverse in disenfranchising non-white voters that progressive Americans may be left with either accepting their perverse, even criminal, methods or use some form of force to assure the fairness of the 2020 presidential election.

Republican electoral victories are dependent on gaming the election system, with a wide range of unethical, even criminal practices to win absent any real majority of votes. It is beginning to look more and more like a Vladimir Putin election enterprise.

Now with Trump’s criminal enterprise still in office, largely with the help of Republicans, Trump is free and unrestrained to cheat, and lie to defraud the election results, seeing it is increasingly difficult to win lawfully.

Less than ninety days before the presidential election, Republicans are plotting and scheming multiple paths to cheat the system, especially in states they control. Compared to other liberal democracies, the US is embarrassingly ranked second to last in electoral integrity.

There are at least six or seven categories of fraud, dirty tricks and cheating, many strengthened by a SCOTUS ruling in 2013.

While many states strive to make it easier to vote, but only states controlled by Democrats, 18 Republican states, mostly in the South, have strict photo ID requirements, something designed to limit voter registration for those most likely to vote Democrat. They include Arizona, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Photo ID requirements are mainly targeted against non-white voters with phony pretexts of cheating. This practice alone most likely accounted for Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. He won by 22,000 votes in Wisconsin, where in Milwaukee alone 41,000 fewer votes were cast than four years before due to a restrictive photo voter ID law. It was estimated in Texas that 600,000 people lacked the IDs to vote under the state’s strict guidelines. Overall, voter suppression worked, giving them a victory with 3 million fewer popular votes overall.

Add voter purges to the stricter voter ID laws and the closure of polling booths. Christine Jordan, Martin Luther King’s cousin, had been registered to vote for years with no change in residence or name, but was wiped from the rolls. It happened to her and 17 million other people in Republican states between 2016 and 2018, according to the Brennan Center.

In states controlled by Republicans, voting booths closures are calculated to affect Democratic voters in non-white areas. The Leadership Conference Education Fund revealed that 1,688 polling places have been shut since 2012. Ten percent of Georgia’s counties were left with single precincts for all voters; Texas had 760 poll closures and Arizona had 320.

A ballot initiative passed in Florida to restore voting rights to 1.4 million felons who served their sentences was passed in 2018. Twenty percent of all African American adults have been disenfranchised in Florida due to felony convictions, and overwhelming majority vote Democrat.

Calculating how to counter this voting boon for Democrats, the Republican-controlled state legislature added a rider that required those with completed sentences to pay all the court fines, fees, and penalties accrued during the trial and incarcerations before voting rights could be restored, amounting to a poll tax. A federal judge partially stopped it, but Republicans quickly got around it.

In 2018, Brian Kemp, then Secretary of State, presided over suppression of the Georgia vote to become governor by less than 2 percentage point. Georgia had 127,000 missing votes on election day only in black districts. They had hackable voting machines with no paper trail to track votes. To assure that continuing capability, under Kemp as governor, Georgia bought new vulnerable voting machines.

Even during the pandemic and taking precedence over legislation to help American victims of the pandemic, Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell, continued packing federal courts with judges, many deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association, and whose only expertise is hostility to civil rights, including the right to vote.

Increasingly desperate with unfriendly polls, Trump is striving to weaken and slow down PO deliveries. In turn, Republicans are exploiting the pandemic risks by closing down the safe alternative to in-person voting, including mail-in and absentee balloting. One wonders if Putin is coaching Trump about techniques that he, Putin, uses to game Russia’s voting system.

Trump is demonizing the post office. He appointed a corrupt postmaster general who is slowing down mail delivery, getting rid of sorting machines, and declaring election mail as bulk mail rather than first class mail. As bulk mail, they can, according to a PO worker in Michigan, recycle all political mail (AKA, throw it away). He is also suspending the PO-mandated tracking of political mail of any kind so that it can easily be lost.

All Republican-controlled states are a danger to democracy because all adhere to a united disenfranchisement effort. In all, 28 states have Republican majorities in their legislatures. The most worrisome are battleground (swing) states rich in electoral votes like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. In some states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, & Michigan — elections of Democratic governors have blunted disenfranchisement efforts.

Coupled with Trump’s effort to disenfranchise by sabotaging vote by mail, Frank LaRose, the Ohio Secretary of State, is trying to close off the alternative. He is restricting the number of voting drop boxes to one per county, his effort to make it harder to vote. The much riskier alternate, to vote in person, and thus the risk of catching the virus, is much less attractive.

How far will you go to assure a fair election?