The United States midterm elections are this upcoming Tuesday, November 4^th. Every single eligible voter in the USA has the opportunity (and, in my opinion, civic obligation) to vote for their Representative in Congress and for other local or state elections and referendums on their ballots. However, there are those who do not believe every American should vote, and that voting should become more difficult, not less. One group that has come out in favor of limiting voting is in fact the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts. The Court has played dumb by pretending that its decisions will not have precisely the impact that critics say the decisions will have, but it is not an accident that gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 last year has resulted in making it harder for Americans to vote.

Last year in another of the contentious 5-4 decisions with the Republican appointed Justices (Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito by George W. Bush, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy by Ronald Reagan, and Clarance Thomas by George H. W. Bush) on one side and the Democratic appointed Justices (Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader-Ginsburg having been appointed by Bill Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan by President Obama) on the other that have become the new normal, Chief Justice Roberts declared that racism in America was over. Roberts declared that there was no longer any need for the title of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that gave the federal government power to police the former segregationist states to keep them from enacting – as they had in the past from the end of the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction in 1877 to the passage of the landmark 1965 law– blatantly racist legislation in order to make it harder for Blacks, Latinos, and other minorities to vote. We have two ways we can look at decisions like this one and like in Citizens United when the Roberts Court approved a new, narrow definition of what constitutes corruption in politics; we can either believe that a majority of Justices on the Supreme Court are utterly oblivious fools who honestly don’t recognize racist and discriminatory voting laws or corruption in politics, OR we can believe that the Justices know precisely what their decisions are doing, who the decisions are harming, and who they are helping.

Surprising no one, once freed of the restraints of the Voting Rights Act, many of the former Confederate states (and some others with Republican legislatures that were not in the Confederacy) began the most aggressive and coordinated assault on voting rights that we have seen in this country since the days of Jim Crow. And we’re supposed to pretend that this was all an unintended consequence of the Roberts Court’s decisions and that the state legislatures enacting these onerous anti-voting laws are really serious about fighting in-person voter fraud and ‘shocked’ that the laws are going to deprive thousands of eligible registered voters from being able to cast their ballots.

Even forgetting the lack of in-person voter fraud, how can any supposedly honest and democracy-loving American justify the actions of states like North Carolina and Ohio and their moves to drastically cut early voting days and eliminate many polling places? These measures can’t possibly be considered necessary to combat voter fraud, so if they’re not to purposefully keep turnout down, what are they being enacted for? Can honest Republicans truly convince themselves that cutting early voting days and eliminating same-day registration is a way to police the almost non-existent threat of in-person voter fraud? Must we pretend that the drive to stop in-person voter fraud – which is the only kind of fraud that voter ID laws can stop – is the real impetus behind states requiring forms of ID that not everyone has, when such fraud is almost non-existent, and lie to ourselves that these new laws are not attempts at keeping certain voters from being able to cast their ballots?

I have seen otherwise intelligent (and in most other things honest) Republicans confronted with the fact that in-person voter fraud is almost non-existent and then reply with the weak argument that “We need IDs to own a gun or drive a car, why SHOULDN’T we mandate IDs to vote?” Even if, “Why not?” was not a lazy argument in favor of voter ID laws, the answer of “because there’s almost none of the voter fraud that voter ID laws are supposed to address, and thousands of eligible voters are being robbed of the sacred right to vote,” is almost irrefutable. Any person who is OK with thousands and thousands of his or her fellow Americans being disenfranchised in order to pursue fraud that he or she will often admit doesn’t exist is lying (maybe even to themselves) if he or she claims to support democracy. In reality the person only likes other people voting if those voters cast their ballots for the ‘right’ candidate. Even if the Republican position of “Why not voter ID?” wasn’t so easily addressed, the position amounts to the prosecution in a major trial saying to the defendant “Prove you DIDN’T commit this crime we’re accusing you of!” The burden of proof is on those who want to pass new laws and change the way we’ve run elections for generations, so once the fig leaf of ‘stopping voter fraud’ is blown away by the sheer weight of facts, the Republicans need to do a LOT better than to merely say, “Why not?” and then walk away before their lazy answer is addressed.

As I write this, Republican-led states are changing election laws all over the United States of America that are statistically guaranteed to keep thousands of eligible American voters from being able to exercise their franchise. The laws are also so specific as to be transparent regarding their real intention, which is blocking the votes of people who are likely to vote Democratic. This is obvious when we consider that states like North Carolina have refused to allow the government-provided IDs of public employees and IDs given to college students whether they attend a state school or not because both groups are likely to vote Democratic. We can’t just assume that all elected officials actually want us to be able to vote anymore, and that all the things that they have done to make voting more difficult are just unintended consequences of an honest attempt to purge elections of voter-fraud. We can’t pretend that Chief Justice Roberts didn’t know exactly what would happen when he gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because “racism (was) over.” This attack on voting rights is not an accident or a side-effect, it was the plan all along.

Therefore every single eligible American must vote on Tuesday, and if you know you’re an eligible voter, make sure you don’t leave your polling place without at the very least writing your vote down on a piece of paper and signing it; if you don’t vote before Tuesday it won’t count, so make sure you leave some record of your intentions so that you can at the very least go to court and defend your right to vote. If you’re cynical and don’t feel like your vote matters for much, I’ll be addressing that too in the next few days, but I am entirely sincere when I say that I don’t care who you vote for as long as you do in fact vote; I may disagree with your choice and try to convince you to vote for a different candidate, but your vote is just as important as mine and I’ll fight for every single one. Mark it down in your calendars and this Tuesday, November 4^th, make sure you go vote – it is arguably the most important thing you’ll do in 2014.