The only good election is an exclusive one
Lauren Windsor obtained a recording of one of Donald Trump’s coup-plotting lawyers arguing for making it harder for many Americans to vote in 2024.
The Washington Post listened to Windsor’s audio and tells the tale:
A top Republican legal strategist told a roomful of GOP donors over the weekend that conservatives must band together to limit voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters, according to a copy of her presentation reviewed by The Washington Post.
Cleta Mitchell, a longtime GOP lawyer and fundraiser who worked closely with former president Donald Trump to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, gave the presentation at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in Nashville on Saturday.
Mitchell was subpoenaed in November by special counsel Jack Smith in connection with two federal investigations into Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. A Fulton County, Georgia grand jury subpoenaed Mitchell in July as part of District Attorney Fani Willis’ investigation into Trump’s attempts to manipulate Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensper and upend election results there. She was on Trump’s January 2021 call with Raffensperger in which Trump asked him to “find 11,780 votes” for him, enough for him to win Georgia’s electoral votes.
“The Left has manipulated the electoral systems to favor one side … theirs,” she wrote in the presentation. “Our constitutional republic’s survival is at stake.”
Republicans have claimed that lax ID requirements — such as allowing college identification or mail voting where no ID is required — open the door for voter fraud. Butthey have produced no evidence of widespread fraud — and experts say that’s because it doesn’t happen.
At one point in the presentation, Mitchell said she is optimistic that the Virginia Senate will flip to Republican control this year, allowing for the elimination of early voting in the state, according to the audio reviewed by The Post.
“Forty-five days!” she said ina reference to Virginia’s early voting period. “Do you know how hard it is to have observers be able to watch for that long a period?”
Shorter Cleta Mitchell: The only good election is one with so many barriers to particpation that only GOP die-hards can cast ballots.
Marc Elias provides a tweet thread on GOP efforts to make voting harder — in Arizona, in Georgia, and in Missouri, Montana and Texas — and to eliminate polling locations from colleges and from K-12 schools, plus efforts to ban voter registration and education activities on public college campuses and to prohibit the use of college IDs for voting.
Elias tells the Post:
“Imagine if in every place in this presentation where she references campuses, she talked about African Americans,” Elias said. “Or every place she says students, she instead talked about Latinos. There is a subtle but real bigotry that goes on when people target young voters because of their age.”
Conservatives have reason to fear younger voters. They’d have even more reason if Americans under 45 turned out to vote at the rate of us oldsters. That power is there just waiting for the young to close their fingers around it (your state similar).
I’m surprised the GOP hasn’t tried yet to repeal the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-sixth Amendments. You know they want to.
Keep an eye on Windsor’s Twitter feed this morning. She promises more audio.
Update: Here’s that second post from Lauren Windsor.