Rejecting results they don’t like is how they roll
Jamelle Bouie returns to the “heads, we win, tails, you lose” approach to politics of the Republican Party. After President Joe Biden’s recent statements, we might call them MAGA Republicans. But that would discount prior efforts by Karl Rove, Roger Stone, the Brooks Brothers rioters, Hans von Spakovsky, Ken Blackwell, REDMAP, and North Carolina’s Rep. David Lewis and Thomas B. Hofeller. MAGA Republicans are latecomers to undermining free and fair elections. Bouie nonetheless documents more recent attrocities:
The first is in Michigan, where pro-choice canvassers obtained more than enough signatures to put an abortion-rights amendment to the state Constitution on the November ballot. The goal of such an amendment, beyond establishing the right to an abortion in the state, is to pre-empt a law, originally enacted in the 19th century, that bans abortion with only limited exceptions for the life of the mother.
Canvassers met the requirements, but Republicans on the Board of State Canvassers decided that was not enough. As the law professor Leah Litman explains for Slate magazine, Republicans “mounted a spurious challenge to the Michigan ballot initiative, arguing that the petitions contained less than optimal spacing between the words on the petition. That’s right: There were no missing words in the petition; no misleading words; no inaccurate words. Just some words they felt should have been spaced further apart.”
The word spacing ploy is right up there with time in 2004 when Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell rejected thousands of voter registration forms for being on the wrong weight of paper. So, there’s precedent for what Ohio’s Michigan neighbors did last week. Sort of.
The evenly split board split evenly on partisan lines, killing the effort to place the pro-choice measure on the ballot this fall, pending appeal to the state Supreme Court.
Bouie continues:
The whole debacle is practically farcical in its bad faith and insincerity. Had this been an amendment to ban abortion, there is no question that Republican officials would have allowed it on the ballot; after all, as the Supreme Court said in its opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, each state is now able to decide for itself how it wants to handle abortion rights.
A neutral reader might understand this to mean that the people of each state can choose, democratically, to either protect or restrict abortion rights, but Michigan Republicans seem to see it as a more limited grant of freedom: Voters can either restrict abortion or do nothing at all. They cannot, and will not, be allowed to protect it.
Heads, conservatives win, tails, liberals lose. If it wasn’t for bad faith, etc.
The second example is Republican outrage at seeing Democrat Mary Peltola defeat Sarah Palin to win a special election to fill Alaska’s at-large U.S. House seat last week through 2022. Alaskans narrowly voted (50.5% to 49.5%) in 2020 to use ranked-choice voting. When the new system elected a Democrat, Republicans cried foul:
The process is straightforward, but in the wake of Peltola’s historic victory — she will be the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress as well as the first Democrat to hold the seat in 50 years — Republicans cried fraud. “Ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections,” said Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas on Twitter. Josh Hammer, a conservative commentator, said he was “calling for a complete and total shutdown of ranked-choice voting until we can figure out what the hell is going on.”
[…]
There’s nothing unfair or complicated about ranked-choice voting. The issue for Republicans, in this case, is that they lost. But rather than accept this loss and move on to fight another day, they have gone with what appears to be the now-standard response to defeat: to attack and undermine the system itself.
Republicans have done that for so long now that in the Trump-MAGA era they’ve simply abandoned all pretenses. Rejecting results when Republicans lose is now GOP S.O.P.
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