WE HAVE always been led to believe that the United States is the leader of the free world. They are, after all, allegedly, the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Of course this has only ever really applied to people who were or are white and Anglo-Saxon.

The indigenous population of the land now known as America or the millions enslaved onto the plantations of North America would find it hard to believe in the freedom and democracy proposition.

Americans born from Japanese heritage imprisoned in concentration camps for the duration of World War Two would also likely find it hard to sign up to the notion that the US was this bastion of freedom and liberty.

One of the hallmarks of a functioning democracy is, I believe, the right to vote without hindrance or interference.

The right to vote has been long fought over. Not least in the Civil Rights movement where we learned of iconic names such as Rosa Parks, and Dr Martin Luther King junior.

The iconic Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, was enacted to guarantee African Americans the right to exercise their right to vote.

It came about through the blood, sweat and tears of many people who will likely never go down in history in the same way as Mrs Parks or Dr King but it was, because of their efforts, one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights laws in US history.

States in the old confederacy routinely put in place punitive laws and rules to ensure blacks were treated as second-class citizens, such as through “whites only” public facilities, but they also made it virtually impossible for black people to vote.

But in 2013 the Voting Rights Act was effectively gutted in a ruling by the US Supreme Court known as Shelby county v Holder.

The ruling cast aside the requirement certain states and localities — basically those from the old confederacy — with a history of discrimination against black voters to get any changes to voting regulations cleared by the federal government before they went into effect.

This meant discriminatory voting rules could be blocked by the federal government before they had the chance to harm black voters.

The burden of proof was previously on the authorities to prove why changes they wanted to make were not discriminatory.

After the act was gutted the burden shifted to voters to prove they are being discriminated against.

This is not just a random delve back in history. These changes to the Voting Rights Act have directly enabled 21 states across the US to introduce more than 40 new pieces of legislation since 2021 to restrict voting rights.

I should say, before I continue, that in my mind the world does not revolve around what happens in the United States.

But as I write this the news wires are consumed with the outcome of the US mid-term elections and the contest to see who will, in the end win either or both of the houses of Congress.

The House of Representatives looks likely to be won by a whisker by the right-wing Republicans.

The Democrats have narrowly, and somewhat against the odds, managed to hold on to the Senate.

If the Democrats win Georgia they will secure an outright majority. But this comes down to a December 6 run-off because neither party candidate managed to win more than 50 per cent of the vote in the election.

Also the Democrat candidate for governor, Stacey Abram, narrowly lost out to incumbent Republican Brian Kemp.

One could look at this and think “wow, that was a close-run thing,” and just assume that everyone who wanted to vote had the chance to do so. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Kemp, as governor, was responsible for signing into law some of the most draconian vote-stealing laws in the country — aimed primarily at the state’s African American community.

It is possible for any voter in Georgia to challenge the right of another to vote.

As a result of this one Republican operative alone was able to block 32,000 ballots from being sent out.

A familiar feature of US elections is the ballot drop box. In 2021 over half a million voters in the city of Atlanta, mainly black voters, used these boxes to cast their votes.

Governor Kemp signed a law to abolish these drop boxes which led to an 83 per cent drop in mail-in ballots.

Remember the US has some of the poorest labour rights on the planet so you can’t just pop out of work to go and stand in line for hours to cast a vote at the increasingly limited number of polling stations. You would lose your job for exercising your democratic right.

Georgia is also the state where it is against the law to offer food or sustenance to anyone who might decide to stand in a line so they can cast a vote.

I don’t even have the space here to talk in detail about the gerrymandering of electoral boundaries to favour Republican voting areas.

Any country that claims to lead the free and democratic world but allows blatant voter-stealing on the extraordinary level that is plain to see in Georgia really needs to get a grip of reality.

This isn’t like the great TV programme the West Wing where there is a great benevolent president who can come to the rescue and where good people will, according to Aaron Sorkin, the writer of the show, win because good prevails.

The will of the people will only be heard in the US when there is a strong socialist movement that creates a clear red gap between the at best so-called progressive liberalism of the Democrats and those, such as the Communist Party USA, who are prepared to organise and campaign for socialism.

Only a radical and fundamental change in society will do, in this time when the working-class voice needs to be amplified and not muted or stolen.

Roger McKenzie is a journalist and anti-racist activist.