By Shivaji Sengupta
“Nay, do not mock me! For I am a foolish old man!”
— Shakespeare, King Lear.
The news media are reporting that President Trump, and with him some Republicans, are very much against too many votes by mail. In the year of the novel coronavirus, to cast doubt about voting by mail should be the last thing on one’s mind.
My wife and I are senior citizens, residents of Suffolk County for 30 years. We came here when we were still youthful, with our daughters, 3, 7 and 10 years old. We have voted in every election, driving to polling stations early morning en route to work.
Our daughters have grown up with similar civic responsibilities. Now that they are married, have their own families and are all professionals in their own right, we take some pride in having reared them as responsible citizens. If there is anything we’ve achieved as a family, it is instilling into them the pride of being Americans.
Now we are both into our 70s. We both are also in remission from cancer, undergoing regular periodic checkups by our respective oncologists.
The coronavirus shut us down, and we have been homebound for more than three months. Nothing, anymore, can be taken for granted. For a while, we weren’t sure whether we would get food on time; our regular cleaning ladies were trapped indoors.
Then, as the elections drew near, my wife and I began to worry: Will there be elections this year? If not, will Trump continue for four more years without being elected? Will we be able to vote in absentia, or by mail, if we need to?
So much is at stake in this year’s elections. If the coronavirus proved anything, it is how unprepared we were for this pandemic. The outcomes of this election will depend on the public’s response to health care. We senior citizens have a huge stake in it. We need to vote as an interest group.
And now, suddenly, voting by mail becomes an issue in the hands of Donald Trump and the Republicans. Their stated concern is about the jiggery-pokery that may be practiced by dishonest people in the elections commissions. Voting by mail, amid the virus, is bound to increase manifold. Their logic is: The more votes through the mail, more the chances of corruption.
Thus, voting outside the booths has become acutely political. According to “538,” an analytics group that studies voting patterns, over 60 percent of voters by mail are above 65 years old or disabled. Sixty million Americans are senior citizens. Polls indicate that, this year, a vast majority of them intend to vote against Trump. Curtailing their votes by restricting voting by mail will be beneficial to him and the Republicans.
Nor is this merely a personal concern of the elderly. During the three years and more of the Trump regime, we have seen a number of assaults on American democracy: demonizing the media, isolating Muslims as a source of terrorism when the country is awash with gun violence, brandishing the military to control people’s right to demonstrate.
Nationwide, there have been many obstacles to voting, such as intentionally created language barriers, removing the names of legitimate voters in the guise of purging duplicate or deceased ones, and abrupt closures of polling stations, usually affecting minorities.
Hitherto, voting by mail has not been questioned as severely — until this year. If it is interfered with by Mr. Trump and the Republicans. almost 300,000 senior citizens, a fifth of the population of Suffolk County, may be hindered from voting.
I ask the Fourth Estate in Suffolk County to please be extra vigilant during election season this summer and fall. Keeping us senior citizens out of the voting process can render the 2020 elections hollow and debilitate democracy itself.
Shivaji Sengupta is a resident of Medford.
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