Stacey Abrams, a black woman, ran for the governor’s office in Georgia in 2018. She lost by less than 55,000 votes.

However, the man who won was Georgia’s secretary of state. He had purged over 300,000 voters from Georgia’s voting rolls, the majority of whom were black.

In an article in Sojourners (“Unafraid to Hope,” Sept/Oct 2020), Abrams writes: “There are nine states where you can lose your right to vote simply because you didn’t use it. When I don’t go hunting on Saturday, no one tells me that I’ve lost my Second Amendment right, so why is it that I can lose my right to vote simply for not using it?”

The Voting Rights Act of 1969 prohibited racial discrimination in voting in the United States. But those who don’t wish certain classes of people to vote never give up.

Knocking people who are registered to vote off the registration lists simply because they missed a vote is one way.

An additional fault line for this year’s presidential election centers on voting by absentee and voting by mail. Wild claims are made about fraud in both cases. It’s alleged that foreign interests will inundate elections with fraudulent ballots.

Fifty states have charge of voting. In addition, the states include over 3,000 counties and local municipalities. In Washington state, I vote by mail in Island County. Ballots are received and counted in this county.

It would be difficult for an enemy, domestic or foreign, to cause much damage to the process itself, given the large numbers of municipalities they would have to deal with, although voting by machines is not as safe as voting by paper ballots.

Voting by mail and/or absentee also means the ballots are available for recounts and close scrutiny.

Yet, in an age of pandemic, some are trying to use the uncertainties of mingling in public places to attack voting by mail and/or absentee.

We should make it extremely hard to win public office by fraudulent means. That includes unfairly manipulating the vote registration process, as well as the vote itself.