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Democracy optional

As a space pirate once said, we’re not out of this yet (New York Times):

MADISON, Wis. — In three critical battleground states, Democratic governors have blocked efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures to restrict voting rights and undermine the 2020 election.

Now, the 2022 races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states that have long been vital to Democratic presidential victories, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s — are taking on major new significance.

Republicans will be back, leaving Govs. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania facing “a rising Republican tide of voting restrictions and far-reaching election laws.”

Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti write:

Republicans have aggressively pursued partisan reviews of the 2020 election in each state. In Pennsylvania, G.O.P. lawmakers sought the personal information of every voter in the state last month. In Wisconsin, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, who is investigating the 2020 election results on behalf of the State Assembly, issued subpoenas on Friday for voting-related documents from election officials. And in Michigan on Sunday night, Ms. Whitmer vetoed four election bills that she said “would have perpetuated the ‘big lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote.”

Republican candidates for governor in the three states have proposed additional cutbacks to voting access and measures that would give G.O.P. officials more power over how elections are run. And the party is pushing such efforts wherever it has the power to do so. This year, 19 Republican-controlled states have passed 33 laws restricting voting, one of the greatest contractions of access to the ballot since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Democrats in Congress have tried without success to pass federal voting laws to counteract the Republican push.

“I would’ve never guessed that my job as governor when I ran a couple years ago was going to be mainly about making sure that our democracy is still intact in this state,” said Evers, once Wisconsin’s superintendent of schools.

Now Evers worries that if his reelection campaign fails next year, Wisconsin Republican legislators would have a clear path to overturning the state’s 2024 presidential election results. “Governors are required to submit to Congress a certificate of ascertainment of presidential electors,” Epstein and Corasaniti write. What would happen if a Republican governor refused?

“It’s full of hyperbole and exaggeration, which is what the Democrats do best on this election stuff,” Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, said in an interview last week at the State Capitol. “All we’re trying to do is make sure that people who were elected were elected legitimately.”

See, Republicans are all about restoring faith in election systems they have worked decades to undermine with relentless, unsubtantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. Tear down the building and you can rebuild from the ground up. Your way.

In Pennsylvania and Michigan as well, Republican candidates for governor are running on “election integrity,” essentially, on erecting new barriers to voting or else prohibiting making voting easier.

Michigan was also home to one of the most forceful and arcane attempts at reversing the outcome in 2020, when Republican election officials, at Mr. Trump’s behest, tried to refuse to certify the results in Wayne County and stall the certification of the state’s overall results. That memory, combined with new voting bills and Republican attempts to review the state’s election results, makes Michigan’s election next year all the more important, Ms. Whitmer said.

“If they make it harder or impossible for droves of people not to be able to participate in the election,” she said, “that doesn’t just impact Michigan elections, but elections for federal offices as well, like the U.S. Senate and certainly the White House.”

Democracy-optional Republicans have dropped all pretense of allowing voters to decide who represents them.

It’s not as if Republicans have not telegraphed the move. Under Michigan’s Public Act 436, then-Gov. Rick Snyder appointed emergency managers empowered to take control of city governments and school boards, particularly minority-majority cities, elected by voters. Chris Savage (Eclectablog) noted in 2013 that half of Michigan’s black residents were living “in cities where their elected officials have been replaced by a single, state-appointed ruler.”

Chris Lewis wrote in The Atlantic in 2013:

“It totally decimates democracy,” Detroit resident Catherine Phillips says of state takeover. “We have the right by federal law to allow us to go and choose by way of voting who we want to represent us in municipalities and school districts. By implementation of this dictator law, they have taken that right away.”

A study published Sept. 14 in the journal State and Local Government Review finds that the law affected more than drinking water in Michigan:

“Our findings provide evidence that decisions about state takeovers in Michigan are not entirely, or perhaps primarily, driven by objective measures of financial distress. Cities with larger Black populations and a higher reliance on state funding are more likely to be taken over,” said study lead author Sara Hughes, an environmental policy analyst and assistant professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability.

“We also find that cities that have had takeovers are more likely to see changes to their drinking water systems, such as rate increases and privatization. Whether these patterns are the product of racial bias, flawed policy and implementation, or broader political motivations is a question that could be taken up in future research.”

The most notorious recent example of water-system changes during a Michigan municipal takeover occurred in Flint, which was under emergency management when critical decisions about the city’s water supply and water treatment protocols were made, and where emergency managers were resistant to public concerns about the safety of the city’s drinking water. For nearly 18 months, from April 2014 to October 2015, the city of Flint delivered inadequately treated Flint River water to residents, exposing thousands to elevated lead levels and other contaminants.

The 10 other Michigan cities that came under emergency management between 1990 and 2017, and which were analyzed in the study, are Highland Park, Hamtramck, Three Oaks Village, Pontiac, Ecorse, Benton Harbor, Allen Park, Detroit, River Rouge and Lincoln Park.

See link to Savage’s post above about the demography of those towns.

Hughes and her co-authors expected that at least one of the financial indicators used by the state, or a composite financial health score based on all the indicators, would be able to identify all 11 Michigan cities that have experienced takeover.

Surprisingly, that was not the case. The composite financial stress score captured just 45% of those cities. But a city’s level of reliance on state revenue sharing captured 82% of the takeovers, while the percentage of Black residents and median household income correctly predicted 64% and 55% of the takeovers, respectively.

“These findings support previous work challenging the technocratic and rational basis of state municipal takeover laws and pointing to the inherent politics in municipal takeovers, specifically the bias and structural challenges facing Black and poor communities,” the authors wrote.

You have been warned. This erosion predates Donald Trump. Under Republican rule democracy is now optional.

Published inUncategorized