If you’re interested in political history (or just current affairs viewed through the lens of a political historian) haven’t come across Heather Cox Richardson, I highly recommend her daily summaries.

Specific to this one, it’s worth remembering that we still have an election running and, it seems that the Republican Party is intent on using the pandemic as a way of magnifying their power.

In this case, we have primary elections which really should be either postponed, moved to vote by mail or otherwise have significant allowances for the pandemic. Unfortunately, all attempts to do any of these have been subverted and we’re looking at attempts to run elections as in person affairs with a small handful of polling places (because sensibly, the volunteers who would normally staff polling places are mostly staying home).

Unfortunately, that means that there will be extremely low voter turn out and if you’ve paid any attention at all to voter turnout numbers you’ll have noticed that a few groups dominate when there are obstacles. These groups tend to vote Republican (and the hard core anti-democracy Republicans at that), so it’s no wonder that the Republican Party is doing everything it can in order to run an election as a turn up in person affair.

That leaves many of us faced with a choice (and I would not be surprised to find that a similar choice will be presented in November): put your life at risk due to COVID-19 or deal with democracy being subverted and the election of those who would subvert it further.

We can currently see the disastrous lack of leadership from Republican held offices today and it will be magnified heavily if they get to run away with the coming elections.

So, which way are you going to go:

• Option 1: Put your life at risk for democracy and go vote.
• Option 2: Put your life at risk by allowing those who do vote to elect incompetent people whose primary interest is either making the rich richer or gathering power to themselves.
• Option 3: Put your life at risk by protesting in the streets so that those who are trying to do this understand it’s not acceptable (some people still have to chose between 1 and 2 today, even if they take up 3).