Does Trump Know What Voter Suppression Means?

Trump is demanding that CNN retract its recent poll that showed Biden 14 percentage points ahead of the president. In a tweet, he called the results “fake news.” The Trump re-election campaign called for “full, fair, and conspicuous retraction, apology, and clarification to correct its misleading conclusions." The statement goes on to claim that the poll is a “stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression.”

Voter Suppression! Voter suppression is what the Republicans did in Georgia to deprive Stacey Abrams the governorship and instead giving it to Brian Kemp, a veritable redneck who boasts that he hunts down immigrants. Voter suppression is the change of voter requirements pushed by Republicans in states throughout the country requiring unusual IDs for those lacking driver licenses, obviously designed to curb voting by members of the popular sectors, particularly African Americans. Just hop on a bus in any city and you’ll see that there is a disproportionate number of non-drivers who are African American.

Voter suppression is what Trump is now advocating when he opposes the use of absentee ballots in the context of the pandemic, thus favoring the rural population (heavily Republican) at the expense of the urban population (where the Republicans enjoy much less support).

The Republican strategy includes the recruitment of, in the words of the Washington Post, “up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting.”

Indeed, according to an audio recording of a private event. one of Trump’s top re-election advisers told influential Republicans in Wisconsin that the party has “traditionally” relied on voter suppression to compete in battleground states, as reported by the Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/21/trump-adviser-republicans-voter-suppression