My granddaughter is a freshman at the Colorado School of Mines. It is well-known that in the initial year, there is a general effort at Mines to make it hard for students that are not serious about their studies or come to the institution for the wrong reason.
That is a way of maintaining student quality and integrity in the learning process. It is also a way to increase the value of the degree.
I remember even a harsher and more deliberate effort to do this during the Vietnam War. In those days, being successful in college studies could be a way of avoiding the draft.
As a graduate student I taught required basic language classes that were generally over-enrolled and needed to be reduced in size. Because of this, we were told to be up front with our students and tell the males that not doing well in the course could lead to a tour in Vietnam.
Needless to say, that strategy was very effective as classes got much smaller by the end of the first week. This type of “quality control” was controversial as it was questioned by activists in the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Having been a volunteer in the military and a recent veteran at the time, I had mixed feelings about drafting people for war even if I saw value in protecting the integrity of the classes. My assessment at the time contrasts drastically with what election deniers are now doing as they dis- honestly challenge the voting process and then use it to get themselves elected.
I am reminded of the 2016 campaign where Donald Trump proclaimed that the election was rigged unless he won. That kind of dark transparency was accompanied by a somewhat hidden strategy of having Russian intelligence help him win.
The 2020 campaign saw Trump attack the voting system again. This time it was the vote by mail that he targeted as illegitimate unless, of course, he won.
He lost. In doing so, he unleashed the big lie about the election being rigged because he lost.
The election denial movement has gone so far as to become part of the Republican Party platform. The irony is that election deniers, beginning with the former President, are campaigning for offices even though they have expressed the feeling that the system is corrupt. Why would they do this? Apparently, it is all a matter of projection, a practice of accusing other people of something that they themselves are doing.
By the end of 2021, 19 states, mostly controlled by the Republican Party, had enacted voting restrictions. This together with evidence that 2020 election deniers are running for state and local offices that are responsible for coordinating the voting process and vote counting present a danger to our democracy.
This is all being done in the name of rigging outcomes in favor of election deniers. So, the issue here is not the major defects in voting they argue exist, but the notion that if they can scare enough people away from voting booths and boxes they will have the numbers to control the country.
The attack on the voting institution is part of a larger strategy designed to maintain political control even though the ability to have the votes to do so is going away. It is about making democracy work only for them.
Let us confront the challenge and vote to make sure that democracy works for all of us. That is the basic mandate of November 8th.
The views expressed by David Conde are not necessarily the views of la Voz bilingüe. Comments and responses may be directed to news@lavozcolorado.com.
