Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook

Nonsense movie not backed up with fact. They represent only half of the issue, while demonizing others.

I was intrigued by the premise of the movie and have a soft spot for the narrator, Jeffrey Wright from Hunger Games. Disappointed to see the documentary wasn't a factual, balanced review of a serious subject but rather a politically motivated narrative with predictable tropes. 1 star for content. +1 star for a good narrator.

I wish they would've interviewed Carol Anderson for this project. She wrote an excellent book on the topic titled "One Person, No Vote" which was published in 2016. She wrote about everything mentioned in this documentary and more.

"Rigged" points out the attempts of the Republican Party to suppress the vote of minorities who overwhelmingly vote Democrat. The tactics they use are slick and underhanded, but they all start with, first, exacerbating a problem that doesn't really exist: voter fraud. By pointing to the infinitesimally small amount of cases of voter fraud as a proof of something grander, they effectively garner the support needed to make very restrictive voter laws that disproportionately affect people of color and the poor. By using phrases like "we want to make voting easy and cheating hard," they can paint themselves as genuinely interested in honest and fair elections, but their track record points to anything but.

I think a documentary like this had to be made when you had the POTUS crying foul at every chance he got. The chant of rigged elections became so deafeningly loud that there had to be an equally loud rebuttal. "Rigged" doesn't nearly reach the decibel level, hence the ears, of as many people as Trump and his minions did, but it's at least an honest attempt.

While we were sleeping, our nation has been under attack by a group of citizens stealthily developing goals and strategies as a path to political power. Their long-range vision, meticulous planning and persistence in achieving their goals are frighteningly successful. Hopefully, this film will alert more people to the threat to our democracy, and will encourage those who object.

Rigged is a powerful, information-packed program on how during a ten year period since the election of a black President, Republicans and their allies have deliberately devised a playbook of strategies to suppress or intimidate minority voters.The documentary goes into detail on each of the ten strategies, showing examples of them in action,such as a lady sheriff in a Texas county who has a Latino man arrested on the charge of voter fraud, and a busybody in a rural Carolina county who goes about getting voters who haven't participated in several recent polls purged from the database.The film does give some hope in the sense that at least one of the strategies, the cumbersome Voter ID laws, has been temporarily stopped in some of the states shown, by the courts.But mostly this film will have to serve as a tool for groups who want to make sure that the right of citizens to vote can be protected from these threats.