Arizona Republicans have drafted two dozen bills for changing election procedures, including adding more layers to the state’s ID requirement. Arizona state Rep. Walt Blackman wants to limit early voting to by-request only and that non-early voting must “take place in a polling place or a center.” Read: no drop boxes, no easy vote-by-mail, etc.
Elvia Díaz of The Arizona Republic continues:
Blackman also wants to require a new voter ID card, which would require a passport or citizenship certificate and other documents, to vote. On top of that, anyone voting in person would also need either fingerprints or a “unique security code” issued to the voter.
Digby asked on Monday, “Why not require a DNA test?”
I proposed that in my first months here. As a joke:
“Just because we haven’t found the example doesn’t mean they aren’t there.” Hans von Spakovsky, True the Vote, and the Voter Integrity Project believe the same thing, and just as firmly.
Come to think of it, underneath their rubber skin, True the Vote members might be Red Lectroids from Planet 10. You know, there could be thousands of them Lectroids on our planet, in our country, and voting illegally in our elections, and we would ever know, would we? Because WE’RE NOT LOOKING. So, DNA tests for every voter, right? I mean, you wouldn’t want Red Lectroids corrupting the integrity of our elections.
That was 2014. In 2022, we’re up to fingerprints and thought police.
Judd Legum writes at Popular Information. “For years, people on the right have complained about the supposed left-wing assault on free speech,” he begins:
Today, Republican state legislators are proposing legislation to restrict what teachers can say in their classrooms. This trend started in 2021 — ten such bills have already become law — but has dramatically accelerated in the first few weeks of this year. A new report by PEN America found that in the first three weeks of 2022 “71 bills have been introduced or prefiled in state legislatures across the country” to restrict the speech of teachers.
These bills were put together hastily and it shows. In Virginia, a Republican legislator introduced a bill requiring school boards to ensure students understand “the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.” (Lincoln actually debated Stephen Douglas, a very different person.) Other bills contain “contradictory language” or leave “important terms undefined.” Nevertheless, 55% “include some kind of mandatory punishment for violators.”
Over half call for “mandatory punishment for violators.” Reminiscent of Julia betraying Winston Smith to O’Brien, Virginia’s new governor wants parents to rat-out liberal teachers to the Party state:
Legum continues:
A particularly aggressive government effort to limit speech is underway in Florida, led by Governor Ron DeSantis (R). A bill championed by DeSantis prohibits any school or private business from engaging in instruction or training that makes anyone “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.
Critics say the focus on white guilt precludes any candid discussion of American history. “This isn’t even a ban on Critical Race Theory, this is a ban on Black history,” State Senator Shevrin Jones (D) said. “They are talking about not wanting White people to feel uncomfortable? Let’s talk about being uncomfortable. My ancestors were uncomfortable when they were stripped away from their children.”
To wit, the bill explicitly requires teachers to lie to students. It requires teachers to define “American history…as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” At America’s founding, of course, the principles stated in the Declaration of Independence were not universal. Black people, women, and other groups had few rights.
The Florida bill is a radical attack on free speech in schools and the private sector. But that hasn’t stopped it from moving rapidly through the Republican-controlled legislature. Last week, just seven days after the bill was filed, it was approved by the Senate Education Committee.
Dozens of similar bills are on the march in state legislatures across the nation.
It is important to recognize that none of this is new. Only more virulent for having gone untreated. It reflects a deep, pre-rational fear of the Other made more urgent by the election of a Black man to the White House in 2008. This is White Christians’ country, by god, and they want it back. Democracy be damned. The only freedom that counts is theirs. They want their right to dominate guaranteed. By minority rule, if necessary.
“This is about putting the fear of God into teachers and administrators,” Jeffrey Sachs, the political scientist behind the PEN report, told Greg Sargent.
The right hopes ultimately to collapse public schools and redirect tax-dollars mandated by state constitutions for universal public education into private (donors’) pockets. Hundreds of billions of dollars per year. But that is just the surface of it.
“Not only for profit schools but tax funded indoctrination is their goal,” tweeted one reader. Yes, that plus preventing their kids’ exposure to people from different religions and cultures, and to ideas different from what they learned at their parents’ and preachers’ knees. They fear losing control.
Again, this is not new. At a 2012 Board of Elections recount hearing here, the chair read aloud from state statutes on the validity of student’s votes being challenged by Republicans. A gerrymandering error by state Republicans had left half the dorms at Warren Wilson College on the wrong side of the line drawn to sequester students safely in the liberal ghetto drawn to make the eastern side of the county more conservative-friendly. The mistake cost Republicans the election. T-party activists argued for over an hour that the law is not the law when they lose. Somebody must have cheated:
At one point, an attendee in support of [Republican candidate] Merrill looked back at a group of Warren Wilson students in the packed meeting room and flashed a piece of paper on which she had written, “You are a law breaker.”
A year later, the Voter Integrity Project of NC held a “boot camp” for amateur voter fraud sleuths. I wrote then:
The sad part is, such legislation and citizen “boot camps” feel like white-knuckled exercises in protecting a demographic patch of electoral turf that’s shrinking beneath supporters’ feet. State after state erects barricades to voting and retreats behind them as for a siege. Not once did any speaker this weekend suggest opening up the franchise to greater participation, registering new voters and encouraging them to go the polls to exercise their right to vote.
The more the demographic walls close in, the crazier they get.
Part 1 here.
Update: Youngkin’s “snitch line” is backfiring.