The Congressional Black Caucus protests that election integrity laws — which have passed some Republican-controlled state legislatures — discriminate against blacks, yet three of its most influential members called for similar reforms while working on the Democrat-only Congressional Task Force on Election Security.
Three black Democrats—Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, and Val Demings of Florida—endorsed rigorous election-security measures leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, but now slander all means to protect America’s elections as “racist” and “undemocratic.”
Trump “has really been in denial about Russia’s interference in our 2016 election,” Demings said in July 2018 on C-SPAN. “When we talk about cybersecurity, I believe the president removed our cybersecurity czar, who was in charge of looking at not just our election system but all of our…interests systems that are very vital to our nation.”
The Congressional Task Force on Election Security warned about cybersecurity threats in a report that today’s Democrats would instantly label far-right propaganda, because of its consistent concern about voting machine breaches, vote-flipping, and “altered vote totals.”
But as soon as former President Donald Trump raised the same concerns about vote-flipping, unexplained delays in vote counting, and voting machine malfunctions, the once-concerned Democrats changed their tone.
“To throw around baseless claims of fraud, with no evidence, undermines our republic and threatens our most precious freedoms,” Demings tweeted in Nov. 2020.
She wrote on Twitter in January that elected officials “who lied about the election” and “tried to overturn our democracy…must be held accountable.”
Richmond mocked Trump and his supporters for requesting audits to verify the 2020 election’s results, even though the 2018 report that he signed on to suggested election audits.
“Election security experts agree that all states should be routinely conducting these audits to detect any anomalies in election results and to increase the public’s confidence in elections,” the report said, according to the World Tribune.
When Trump’s election security concerns emerged, Richmond in November 2020 called them “certainly un-American” despite himself expressing them two years earlier, The Hill reported.
“It was a fair and square election. Donald Trump lost. And so, at some point, we have to move on,” Richmond said, rejecting calls for election audits.
Thompson — who co-chaired the 2018 Congressional Task Force on Election Security — also supported its far-reaching conclusions about America’s weak and vulnerable election infrastructure.
But as soon as his preferred candidate won the 2020 presidential election, he changed his tone.
“We cannot allow ourselves to be undone by liars and cheaters,” Thompson said in July at a hearing for the Jan. 6th Commission. “While our institutions endured … a peaceful transfer of power didn’t happen this year. It did not happen. Let that sink in.”
Not only did Thompson reject the same concerns that he shared two years earlier, he said in an NAACP lawsuit that Trump partnered with right-wing militia groups to disenfranchise non-whites, CBS News reported.
“They tried to do everything to impede people of color and progressive people from asserting their rights as American citizens,” he said.
“Donald Trump has to go away. If he doesn’t, we will put him out of business,” he continued.
