The above quote from Mystery Men supervillain Casonova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) comes to mind time and again in considering Republicans’ treatment of their own supporters. “It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other,” he says. “Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules.”
Republicans pass photo ID laws knowing they could disenfranchise not just Democratic women, but their own.
Republicans hold pandemic relief hostage. prolonging their supporters’ suffering if it will harm Democrats.
Republicans refuse time-tested practices for fighting a global pandemic, and promote Covid denialism and crank cures while hundreds of millions of their own supporters die.
Now in Michigan, Republicans have found a new way to harm their own voters on the prospect that they will harm Democrats more. Having failed to override Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) veto of their proposed voting restrictions, they hope to eliminate 20 percent of voting places statewide.
Igor Derysh writes at Salon:
The head of the Michigan Republican Party is funding the “Secure MI Vote” petition, which includes a ban on in-kind contributions to local election clerks. Organizers have acknowledged that this provision would in fact end the use of donated polling sites, such as churches. Some cities and townships could lose half their polling sites — or in some cases all of them — under the new restrictions, according to a new report from the liberal advocacy group Progress Michigan.
The initiative includes no funding to compensate for the loss of the donated polling sites and would include schools and senior centers in its scope.
“I hope people are able to see the danger and the impact of this proposal,” Mary Clark, president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks and Delta Township clerk, said in a statement. “This is the type of policy that causes me to lay awake at night because it will cause so much confusion amongst voters and put clerks in impossible situations. This would absolutely negatively impact legally registered voters in my jurisdiction and every jurisdiction in this state.”
A provision in the state’s constitution allows the legislature to adopt a citizen initiative petition without sending it to the voters. If the GOP-supported ballot petition receives signatures of just 8% of the voters who cast ballots in the previous gubernatorial election, the Republican-controlled legislature may adopt it. The governor has no veto.
Civil war by other means
The initiative would create the “most restrictive voter ID law in the entire country,” voting rights groups say, even though the state already has a voter ID law on the books. It would also ban election officials from “sending or providing access to” an absentee ballot application unless it is requested and ban election clerks from accepting donated spaces or private donations to help administer the elections.
Local election clerks have sounded the alarm over the proposed initiative, arguing that the stricter voter ID requirement amounts to a “poll tax” and will restrict ballot access while causing confusion among voters. But the ban on donated spaces “would be devastating,” Clark said in a news conference last week.
Churches and religious spaces accounted for 664 of the state’s 3,355 polling places in 2020. Religious spaces accounted for more than 40% of polling places in five counties and more than 20% of polling places in 15 counties. More than 1.5 million voters across Genesee, Kalamazoo, Kent and Ottawa counties could lose about half of their polling locations, according to the Progress Michigan report. Religious sites also made up more than 25% of polling locations in the state’s largest counties, Wayne and Oakland. About 111 cities and townships used churches as 50% or more of their polling sites and 28 cities and townships used churches as 100% of polling locations.
Cutting funding is an effective way to kill any government effort, Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum told Salon. Her county of 285,000 (which includes Lansing) may lose a quarter of its polling places. Delta Township’s 26,000 voters had 16 sites in 2020, 12 located at religious sites.
“I wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘Where am I going to put 26,000 voters?’ There are townships that don’t have a township hall. What are you going to do in a small community?” she said, adding, “It’s alarming, it’s frustrating, and it’s scary. … It’s starting to create panic about how we are going to manage this.”
Elimination of customary voting places, longer lines at new ones, and longer travel distances to get there. It is an attack on democracy itself, civil war by other means.
Since I don’t travel in these circles, this “fraud” rumor was new to me:
The proposal in the Secure MI Vote petition are similar to the voting restrictions introduced by Republicans in the state legislature amid a slew of Republican legislation restricting ballot access nationwide amid baseless allegations of voter fraud from President Donald Trump and his allies. But the ban on private donations appears aimed at Republican suspicions over “Zuck bucks,” or private grants from a nonprofit that received funding from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.
The couple gave $400 million to the Center for Technology and Civic Life, a nonprofit that donated funding to local election officials to help administrators conduct elections amid the pandemic. The funds, including nearly $8 million that it donated to cash-strapped election officials in Michigan, were meant for renting polling places, recruiting poll workers, equipment and PPE, according to the organization.
Though the organization said it donated funds to urban, suburban and rural areas, Republican lawmakers have raised suspicions over “what strings are attached” to the grants and whether third-party group donations may favor liberal areas. Some Trump allies have used the donations to claim that tech “oligarchs” are “buying the administration of the state’s elections.”
Naturally, the effects of long lines and confusion will be most pronounced in urban centers more prone to vote Democrat. But as we have seen again and again, Republicans are not averse to harming their own if their vote-suppression schemes harm Democrats more.