Election “integrity” efforts by Republicans in New Jersey (including posting off-duty cops outside minority polling places) led to the recently expired 1982 consent decree. It required a federal court to review any of Republicans’ “proposed ‘ballot security’ programs, including any proposed voter caging.” One would think it in the party’s best interests not to invite another three-plus decades of such oversight. Or something worse.
But one would not be a Texas Republican, would one?
Via the Washington Post:
In a leaked video of a recent presentation, a man who identifies himself as a GOP official in Harris County, Tex., says the party needs 10,000 Republicans for an “election integrity brigade” in Houston.
Then he pulls up a map of the area’s voting precincts and points to Houston’s dense, racially diverse urban core, saying the party specifically needed volunteers with “the confidence and courage to come down here,” adding, “this is where the fraud is occurring.”
The official cites widespread vote fraud, which has not been documented in Texas, as driving the need for an “army” of poll watchers to monitor voters at every precinct in the county.
Fraud and rumors of fraud are by now as gospel among Republicans as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Voter-suppression legislation purportedly drafted to restore confidence in elections the GOP has worked assiduously at undermining for decades is really not in the party’s long-term best interests, argues Ryan Cooper at The Week.
Nor is rationalizing who should and should not be enfranchised, as National Review‘s Kevin D. Williamson argued recently. Voters so “often vote from low motives such as bigotry and spite, and very often are contentedly ignorant.”
Cooper counters:
On the merits, this is a crock. The average citizen is every bit as trustworthy as the average graduate of Harvard, investment banker, elected official or political pundit, if not more so. Moreover, the whole moral foundation of democracy is political equality — a social contract between the people and their elected representatives.
But there is another more cynical case for universal voting. Democracy, which has come to be based on an ever-greater franchise, provides legitimacy to government and an orderly mechanism for resolving political conflict. Undermine those things, and violence and instability could spill out of control.
As it has already this year, death and injuries in its wake. Besides the risk of civil war or autocracy replacing the peaceful democratic transfer of power, Republicans nervous about being replaced put themselves more at risk for that, not less, by undercutting the democratic process:
Anti-democracy conservatives such as Williamson and Georgia Republicans, just like their fire-eater ideological ancestors, do not realize the danger the arguments and tactics they are pushing pose to themselves. If a large enough fraction of the population comes to believe that democracy is illegitimate, then we are right back to raw force as the ultimate arbiter of political conflict. Why accept that somebody is your “real” representative when the system has been rigged so they cannot possibly lose? And in that case why not march on Washington and throw them out? The reason even a minority party should support fair elections based on a universal franchise is that it’s better than civil war — and besides, history shows that today’s minority is most often tomorrow’s majority.
This country doesn’t even have a tradition of monarchy that might theoretically provide a minimal foundation for permanent Republican rule — on the contrary, the entire legitimacy of the American state is based on the consent of “we the people” (which is why conservatives have to come up with such preposterous arguments that “the people” should include fewer people, or convince themselves that Democrats are the ones stealing elections). Republicans would put themselves in basically the same position as King George III in 1776, and we all know how that turned out.