They are pushing voting rights out the Overton Window
The GOP candidate for Governor in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano isn’t trying to hide their plans:
Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s Republican candidate for governor, is perhaps the state’s most prominent peddler of former President Donald Trump’s lie that widespread fraud cost him the 2020 election.
A state senator and retired U.S. Army colonel, Mastriano says he wants to make everyone re-register if they want to vote again. The concept flatly violates federal law, legal scholars say, and may conflict with state law, not to mention constitutional protections. It is also a throwback to laws designed by white people in past eras to keep Black people or newer European immigrants from voting.
But Mastriano, who was present at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection and was endorsed by Trump, is undeterred, discussing his plan for re-registration both before and after winning the Republican nomination for governor on May 17.
Pennsylvania is one of the few states where governors appoint a secretary of state who oversees elections. That means a Mastriano victory in November could make Pennsylvania — a premier presidential battleground state — a test case of whether laws meant to protect voter access to the polls can be undermined.
It’s unclear where Mastriano got the idea, and he has not responded to repeated interview requests on this or any other topic. But he has pitched re-registration as a necessary step to scrub the voter rolls of dead voters and ghost voters — voters registered to nonexistent addresses — in time for the 2024 presidential election.
In a gubernatorial primary debate in April, Mastriano said that, if elected, he would require voters to “re-register. We’re going to start all over again.”
In an interview on the conservative broadcaster Newsmax three days after the primary election, Mastriano suggested that it is a step that his appointed secretary of state can take without approval by the Legislature.
“We might have to reset, as far as registration, start that whole process over here,” Mastriano said. “There’s still a lot of dead on the rolls, and what have you, and there’s ghost phantom voters that we found, as well, at various address.”
If he is elected, he said, taking that and other steps is of the utmost urgency: “So we’re going to take that very seriously and move really hard. Basically we have about a year to get that right before the 2024 presidential election.”
It appears that this is illegal under the national Voter Registration Act and Pennsylvania law. However, we know how much weight precedent has with our high court, so who knows? I’m sure there’s some ancient states’ rights argument they can dredge up if they want to legalize this.
This is not a new idea:
Southern states, following Reconstruction, imposed annual re-registration requirements, with some of those laws lasting until at least 1971. The laws were regarded as one of the mechanisms used by those states to try to keep Black people from voting.
“So it definitely does not have a favorable history,” said Michael Morley, a Florida State University law professor who specializes in constitutional and election law.
Northern states did, too, imposing it in the early 20th century on big cities such as Philadelphia and New York City, where there were higher populations of newer immigrants from Europe, researchers say.
Perhaps its most modern comparison is to a law in Texas, enacted in 1966 soon after the 24th Amendment outlawed poll taxes. The Texas law limited voting to people who re-registered annually, setting aside a four-month time frame within which to register.
A three-judge federal court panel struck that down in 1971, calling it a “direct descendant of the poll tax.”
That is where they are headed and is very possibly part of the long term strategy underlying the Supremes’ decision to gut the Voting Rights Act back in 2013.
Mastriano is a nut. But then, so is Trump. Writing these people off isn’t wise. They can win.