This story just won’t go away. For all its ostensible reverence for constitution and principle, there seems to be no end to the GOP’s efforts to secure antidemocratic rule for itself in violation of both. The GOP’s zeal for restoring confidence in an electoral process it has spent decades undermining requires the sort of contortions customers pay to see in carnival sideshows.
NPR reports this morning:
The Brennan Center, a nonprofit that tracks voting laws, says that 43 states — including key swing states — are considering 253 bills that would raise barriers to voting, for example by reducing early voting days or limiting access to voting by mail. Lawmakers in a different set of 43 states have proposed expanding voter access, but Republicans have prioritized new security requirements and shorter voting periods.
In Georgia, which President Biden won by nearly 12,000 votes, legislators are considering multiple bills to restrict voting. The most significant, House Bill 531, is before a committee chaired by Republican Rep. Barry Fleming. He said Democrat Stacey Abrams campaigned to expand voter access after losing a governor’s race in 2018, and now Republicans want their own changes. The bill is “an attempt to restore the confidence of our public,” he said, because “there has been controversy regarding our election system.”
Again, confidence the GOP worked diligently to undermine by promoting controversy after fake controversy.
That controversy had no basis in fact. Audits and recounts confirmed the accuracy of the vote count in Georgia, and lawsuits there and in other states by the Trump campaign and allies failed to show otherwise. But Trump sought to discredit the vote and even asked Georgia’s secretary of state to change the vote totals. Now Georgia lawmakers are moving to repair a system that was not shown to be broken.
The latest amended version of HB 531 would instruct Georgia counties to hold no more than 17 days of early voting. Populous counties held more days than that in 2020.
Republicans say they want to make voting rules “uniform” across the state’s 159 counties.
“There are some counties that have as many voters as maybe a small neighborhood in Atlanta,” reports Stephen Fowler, who covers elections for Georgia Public Broadcasting. “And this would treat all of them the same, which would tend to make it harder for the bigger, more urban, more Democratic metro counties to account for everyone and get them through the early voting process — especially if vote by mail is restricted by some other measures in the legislature.”
The former president in his CPAC address on Sunday insisted on “an end to no-excuse absentee voting, strong voter ID laws and for the election to take place on one day,” CBS News reports. The Supreme Court, he added, “didn’t have the guts or the courage to make the right decision” on a case brought by his campaign to overturn the election won by Joe Biden.
Republicans including Trump promoted mail-in voting for decades until Democrats turned to it in large numbers in 2020.
Myrna Pérez of the Brennan Center describes “a very discernible and disturbing pattern” to reduce mail-in balloting — for example, by adding requirements to request a ballot or changing the rules for drop boxes. She described the bills as “attacks on methods of participation that had been used by older, white voters for a very, very long time.”
Mail-in balloting is questioned only now, Pérez said, because nonwhite voters have taken advantage of it. “There was very little attempt to hide the racialized nature” of the attacks on mail balloting in 2020, she said, noting that Trump allies constantly claimed corruption in big diverse cities such as Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit.
Like its allegiance to principles, the Constitution, and the United States of America itself, the Trump GOP’s allegiance to a particular voting method is only as old as the last election Republicans won using it. In fact, the only law that would satisfy the party of Trump is one that declares Republicans the winners no matter what a majority of voters say.