Luis Montgomery
Staff Writer
Jackson State University students viewed and discussed the documentary “Rigged”, which focuses on voter suppression and fraud, during the annual Constitution Day observance on Sept. 17. Student Affairs and the Department of Political Science sponsored the event.
Many students, like Jayla Patton, a junior political science major from Arcadia, Mich., were very interested in the topic of the event.
“I think that it is important for my generation especially, to be educated on the voting process and be made aware of the illegal doings on both the governmental and citizen sides,” said Patton.
According to a NBC article, the filmmakers say the political movement to uncover “voter fraud” grew out of the backlash against the expansion of voting rights after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Proponents of voter restrictions claimed that there were thousands, maybe millions, of votes that were illegally cast, though no one ever produced any evidence of fraud on this scale.
The documentary claims that millions of people of color, students, women, the old and workers were turned away from the polls on one technicality or another, or just plain intimidated into not voting in 2016.
While filmed primarily during the 2016 presidential election, the documentary lays out a variety of voter suppression tactics with a focus on how the Republican Party has used each one to win elections for its candidates.
The “malevolent” strategy, termed by narrator Jeffrey Wright, described in the film as a 10-point national exercise in political and policy machinations, intended to combat what is seen from a GOP point of view as a losing demographic contest.
1) Operation Redmap: the strategy to take control of state legislatures.
2) Gerrymandering or Pack & Crack: as one political operative says: “Whoever gerrymanders usually wins.”
3) Voter restriction laws: “There are only so many old, white, straight men left and the only way to win is to suppress the vote,” said one Republican staffer in the documentary.
4) Gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965 “Racism is about policy,” said Rev. William Barber II, the leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, said in “Rigged”.
5) Voter fraud: Leverage the Big Lie (fixing a system that wasn’t broke.)
6) Voter poll purges.
7) Voter intimidation.
8) Voter ID déjà vu.
9) The Voter Integrity Commission, which was established by Trump in the aftermath of the 2016 election to root out voter fraud. It has since been disbanded.
10) Change the courts.
“Rigged shows how the right to vote is under attack from every direction, and we need to let people know about it,” said executive producers Mac Heller and Timothy Smith in an interview with MSN. “Unless we act now and seek to protect and, yes, augment the right to vote, we will witness the slow bleed-out of our democracy.”
The film aims to raise the consciousness of communities of poverty and color, who are the main targets of the Voter Suppression Playbook.
“You didn’t have this clamor for voter suppression until African-Americans and Latinos started voting in record numbers, especially in and after 2008,” Rev. Barber II said.
Anthony Higgins, a freshman computer engineering major from Miami, Fla., said the documentary was very informative.
“I feel like this documentary really touched base on a lot of efforts to keep the minority votes down. It is really unsettling to know that even in our current state we are still given the run around to be able to vote or to be given various stipulations that could basically discourage us from voting,” said Higgins.
He continued,” Even in 1915, when African-Americans were allowed to vote, there was still a long list of obstacles such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause.”
At a little over an hour, “Rigged” presented several outlooks for current and future voters.
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