Drama, dance, and violence, as a Bollywoodesque presidential election comes to a theater near you

Representative Image / Pexels

With the Presidential elections just three weeks away and early voting already underway or about to begin in most states battlelines have been drawn and crossed. Threat of Bollywood drama hangs in the air. While some experts are sounding the alarm on threats to election sites and officials and the safety of the ballots, others are working around the clock to ensure communities' access to voting and cheering the voters along, drum beating them to the polls. 

A R Rehman’s Jai Ho goes Kamala! 

The Kamala anthem, Jai Ho, Kamala! hit WhatsAp with a bang. Lyrics were added to the catchy tune to energize votes and voters. Three Bay Area artists, Manjula Gupta, former producer/host of Chai with Manjula, a nonprofit TV show; Ankur Gupta, professional producer/artist name Encore; and Palak Joshi, a well-known singer, dancer recreated the magic of Rehman’s Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire tune.  

Oscar winner AR Rehman, first International artist to come out in support of Kamala Harris, performed a 30 minute virtual concert from the Foo Fighters studio. It was intercast via the AAPI Victory Fund’s YouTube channel. 

As the drama of the election unfolds there are those that warn of dangers to democracy. 
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81fyUnWeh5c

Threat of violence hangs in the air

National and local election experts met at Ethnic Media Services to discuss the dangers that lurk to the vote and ensuring no voices are smothered and participation hindered. 

“As we approach the presidential election next month, our election sites and officials may be in considerable physical danger — and the safety of the ballots and the integrity of the vote count could also be at risk,” said Robert Page, professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Since 2021, the Department of Justice has charged more than a dozen people across the country with threatening election workers. President Biden said on Friday that while he was confident that the election would be “free and fair,” he was not sure that it would be “peaceful”. 

“At the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a research institute that I run at the University of Chicago, we have been conducting quarterly national surveys of Americans’ attitudes toward political violence since the summer of 2021,” said Page. “In our most recent survey, conducted from Sept. 12 through Sept. 16, we found disturbingly high levels of support for political violence.

Notably, this attitude was bipartisan. Nearly 6 percent of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the “use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” A little over 8 percent agreed or strongly agreed that “the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.”

These results reflect a relatively stable pattern over the past year. And in this area, public attitudes can become reality:

Historically, the higher the level of support for political violence, the more likely actual political violence is. To be sure, people often have their own unique psychosocial reasons for acting violently. But public support for violence can nudge people to act by making them believe their violent act would be popular (as seems to have been the case, for example, with the would-be assassins of Mr. Trump),” said Page.

Stolen-election fears were prominent. 40 percent of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump, about 20 percent of Republicans agree or strongly agree that “the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 to stop the certification of the 2020 election results are patriots,” revealed the survey.

“If we had not recently witnessed some of the worst election-related violence in modern American history — the Jan. 6 riot, the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Nancy Pelosi before the 2022 midterms and the two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump — it might make sense to take more modest precautions. But the past four years have shown that we live in a dangerous new world,” he concluded. '

The drama of misinformation and voter rolls

Celina Stewart, CEO, League of Women Voters of the United States raised the alarm on attempts to hinder participation by removing voters from the rolls. “We have seen in not only this election cycle, but election cycles in the past that there are often purges that happen to remove voters from rolls.”

League of Women Voters of Virginia filed a lawsuit in federal court to challenge the state's policy of illegally and systematically removing voters from the rolls only one month before the upcoming election.

Executive Order 35, which was signed by Governor Glenn Youngkin in August requires state and local election officials to remove individuals from the state voter registration list if Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records do not indicate US citizenship. However Virginia driver’s licenses are available to non-citizens and can remain valid for up to eight years, meaning people who obtained driver’s licenses as non-citizens, subsequently became US citizens, and lawfully registered to vote are being unlawfully purged from the voter rolls based on outdated DMV information

“ Everyone wants clean rolls. That's not something that we dispute, but it has to be done in a legal way,” Stewart said. 

“We have also seen misinformation on the rise in the last several election cycles. We saw it on Facebook in 2020. We saw it show up again in the midterms in 2022.And it has not gone away.”

She shared a bilingual guide that will help voters navigate their way to making their vote count. At Vote411.org voters can check their registration, polling place, learn about candidates and more. 

“We're concerned about polling locations changing at the last minute, people not knowing where to go. So we're trying to fill the gaps.”

Changing rules of the game

Andrew Garber, counsel, Voting Rights and Elections Program, Brennan Center for Justice shared state election laws and some big changes that have happened recently. “The Brennan Center puts out a few times a year our voting laws roundup, where we track every voting related bill in all 50 legislatures across the country to get a scope of how voting laws are changing.”

Scripps News the Brennan Center has found that going back to January 2021 at least 30 states have passed at least 78 laws "that make it harder to vote."

The amount of election law changes is almost twice what his organization saw in the prior two election cycles combined, said Garber. states including Georgia, Florida and Texas have passed omnibus laws that make it harder to vote in multiple ways.

Happy ending

The Brennan Center found that at least 41 states have passed around 168 laws that the organization says make it easier to vote, in their findings.

Early voting has begun. 

“We saw in Georgia, there were 300,000 people who showed up on Tuesday within 10 or 15 minutes. They're waiting in line for more than an hour to vote. And it's not because things are slow, it's because there's so many more people turning out during the early voting part of this election cycle,” said Stewart.