“Republican officials dislike postal voting in 2021 because in 2020 Biden voters were much more likely than Trump voters to use a postal ballot,” writes David Frum at The Atlantic. Thus, new rules proposed in Republican-controlled state after Republican-controlled state aim to limit voting by mail in spite of the potential that the Democratic vote-by-mail surge of 2020 was a “once-in-a-lifetime event” driven by the global pandemic.
Photocopies of your photo ID may be required under some new rules. Maybe two copies. Easy if you work in a Democratic-leaning, suburban Atlanta office park, Frum notes. Tougher for the less tech-savvy or poorer without the know-how for scanning an ID wih a cell phone and the printer for making a hard copy.
As I have argued repeatedly, Republican legislators play the percentages. They weigh the harm such measures might do to Democratic performance against how much they might harm their own voters. If the advantage is on their side, harm to their own voters is acceptable. All their ballot integrity and stolen vote alarmism is bullshit and they know it.
Frum concurs, but he wonders if Republicans have checked their math:
You might assume that Georgia Republicans have absorbed such negative information, balanced it, and coldly calculated that the trade is worth it: They may lose some of their older, poorer, or sicker rural voters, but if they can thwart a larger number of Black or young voters, they will emerge ahead.
But in the Trump and post-Trump era, local Republican power holders have again and again demonstrated that they are not good risk assessors. They refuse to acknowledge awkward truths. They believe their own inflammatory propaganda. The result is that they make self-harming decisions based on inaccurate information.
“Misperceptions and the rage are blinding Republicans,” Frum believes. Their efforts at shrinking the voting pool might do more harm to them than good. He cites four ways in which their legislative election sabotage could backfire. But perhaps the least obvious is failing to make democracy work for them:
Winning votes is better than suppressing them.
In 2020, many of the precincts with the most immigrants moved most strongly to Trump. In Chicago, the precincts with the most people of Mexican descent delivered 45 percent more votes to Trump in 2020 than in 2016. Yet these Republican-leaning new voters figure high among those most negatively affected by Republican-sponsored voter suppression.
State-level Republican officials have sought to reduce the number of early-voting days. They hope that by cramming more voting into Election Day itself, they can lengthen voting queues and discourage minority voters. Almost everywhere in the country, minorities must wait longer to vote than whites; urban and suburban voters must wait longer than rural voters.
So it’s natural to assume that by further extending the lines on Election Day, Republicans can gain an even greater advantage.
Natural, but wrong.
They could try to try to speed minority voters to the polls rather than try to deter them. “Republicans would be smarter to switch off the race-baiters on cable news, read the precinct reports, and do the solid work necessary to earn and secure votes from voters who are ready to vote Republican if only the party will allow them to vote at all,” Frum suggests.
But decades of race-baiting and immigrant-hating have produced a kind of ideological muscle memory that logic and electoral math will not easily overcome. What Republicans may want, deep down, is a return not to the 1950s but the 1850s, to a time when white, male property owners controlled it all and did not have to share power with anyone.