Republicans don’t like the results of majority voting in the U.S. and have introduced more than 300 bills in more than 45 states to undermine it.
Any who aren’t allergic to facts realize that significant voter fraud is an urban myth. The conservative Hoover Institute reviewed decades worth of records and found very, very little. Before Trump and Trumpists filed scores of lawsuits in 2020 and provided no evidence, former N.M. Secretary of State Dianna Duran sent the State Police 64,000 records to investigate for voter fraud and found none; and the State paid $90,000 for illegally hiding those public records from the ACLU.
So the folks who desperately shout “Voter fraud!” can’t find any.
Logic would tell us the same: individual voter fraud just isn’t worth it. Would a sane person risk serious criminal penalties over a vote that’s extremely unlikely to change anything? Absentee-ballot fraud is also harder than it sounds. Folks registering to vote must show the state identification, then most states require voters request absentee ballots be sent them by mail. Widespread voter fraud would be extremely difficult to coordinate and to hide.
The Republicans are doing this for the obvious reason: as white U.S. citizens move toward minority status, the Republican Party continues having white males, mostly older, in almost every significant party position; the party has lost the popular vote badly in the past several years, and gets by on gerrymandering, U.S. Constitutional provisions on the Senate and Electoral College, and convincing voters that immigrants, black neighbors, and abortions are more urgent national issues than global warming or economic inequality. Then they gave us Mr. Trump, idolized by his “base” but appalling to most everyone else.
Georgia’s 98-page S.B. 202 is the most prominent of the make-voting-harder bills. While some provisions are innocuous or even sensible, the overall effect is so unfair and dangerous that even corporations are objecting. Some provisions limit drop-boxes (and close them in the crucial last few days when voting is heaviest), start absentee voting later, and forbid giving water to voters waiting in line.
One provision changes the composition and powers of the state election board, making it a mere tool of the Republican-controlled Legislature. The Secretary of State, an independently elected official who in 2020 stood up to Donald Trump’s bullying and whining designed to overturn the will of Georgia voters, will no longer chair the five-member board. He’ll be an ex-officio, non-voting member. Republican politicians, not voters, will choose the chair.
The remaining four members will be three more Republican appointees (one each by the state senate and state house of representatives and one by the Republican Party) and one Democratic Party appointee, creating a 4-1 Republican majority, with no real nonpartisan member, although the chair may not have run for office or made campaign contributions during the previous two years.
The Republican-controlled board would also have more power to intervene in county election boards that are deemed underperforming. (e.g., Fulton County.) County election boards certify results and decide challenges to voters’ eligibility; now the Republican-controlled Sate Election Board will be able to replace county boards where results are unsatisfactory to the Republican state legislators. Such a system unquestionably would have said, “Yes, Sir!” when Donald Trump told them to find 11,000 more votes in 2020.
They haven’t revived the “literacy test” whereby dark-skinned voters had to recite the Constitution from memory to qualify. Yet.
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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 3 April2021, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on on the newspaper's website and KRWG’s website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will shortly be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]
[One reader wrote this morning to ask a long series of questions, starting with “I am confused as to your statement, ‘While some provisions are innocuous or even sensible, the overall effect is so unfair and dangerous that even corporations are objecting.’ How can innocuous changes become dangerous? “ Well, what I intended to say, but apparently failed to make clear because of my space limitations or ineptitude, was that in this 98-page bill there were many minor points, including some that were administrative improvements with a neutral effect on voting and some that actually improve voter access; but the bulk of them will tend unnecessarily to suppress voting, by shortening periods of early voting and/or making it harder to relieve the impact of long-lines on voters’ patience in highly-populated (and often the most progressive) counties. Too, one could argue that the changes to the Sate Election Board’s composition and powers are innocuous; but in the context of a defeated president trying to bully the Georgia Secretary of State into illegally changing the vote, and encouraging state legislators to usurp powers to change results in their states, putting those decisions in the hands of the Republican-controlled legislature seems an obvious step toward permitting such a politically-motivated change in some future election. Why else do it? At any rate, a further discussion, perhaps on our radio show, with Republicans included, may be warranted.]
Interestingly, Governor Greg Abbott announced that combatting election fraud is an emergency item in the legislative session, although he admits that there were no known cases of voter fraud in Texas in 2020. What’s the emergency? He doesn’t explain, but insists that “We must pass laws to prevent election officials from jeopardizing the election process.” In this new hyper-partisan world, I guess you don’t even need to come up with a good cover story.]
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