2024 Laboratories of Autocracy competition
David Pepper, former Ohio Democrats’ state chair, calls GOP-led legislatures such as in Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina laboratories of autocracy. But really, must they be so competitive about which is worst?
Here in N.C., Democrats are trying to organize for 2024 beginning with the March primary. But since rules and the district lines keep moving, how to do it? Voters will need photo IDs this time. Do they know? And which type? Under Covid, use of voting by mail skyrocketed. His Indictedness disapproved. Now N.C. Republicans mean to make voting by mail more unwiedly and mailed ballots less likely to be counted. So Democrats over the next year will advise voters against their use.
State and federal districts will be different in 2024. Again. (I’ve lost count of how many times over the last dozen years.) The N.C. GOP will hold a couple of public hearings about new N.C. districts that are already predetermined. The meetings are meant to be pro forma and unattended. Ask Pepper. This is what his looked like the other day in Ohio:
The Ohio state Supreme Court declared Republicans’ gerrymandered maps illegal too. Seven times. The GOP ignored the court.
If Republicans have their way, confusion will be our epitaph.
Ari Berman at Mother Jones:
In North Carolina, the governor dictates the political makeup of the state and county election boards, which are each composed of five members. Under Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, the boards have three Democrats and two Republicans. The governor appoints the members of the state board and the chair of the county boards. Under the new bill, those bodies would be evenly divided, with legislative leaders choosing the members of the state and local boards.
While that is theoretically more bipartisan, it is a recipe for gridlock that could hand sweeping new powers to Republicans in the legislature, who have a supermajority in both chambers due to the gerrymandered maps they drew in 2021.
If the state election board deadlocks and cannot certify a winner of an election, that power would instead go to the legislature. That means Republicans could determine the state’s presidential electors and potentially subvert the popular vote winner of the state if a Democrat carries North Carolina. “The legislature now gets to decide the outcome of all of our elections,” says Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of North Carolina Voters for Clean Elections, a pro-democracy coalition in the state. “When people vote is the will of the people still going to be accepted in North Carolina?” (State and federal courts could still order that elections be certified, and in presidential elections the legislature would need to comply with the revamped Electoral Count Act passed by Congress in 2021, which makes it harder for rogue legislatures to overturn the will of the voters.)
The bill also makes it easier to overturn elections in another way: only five of eight members of the new state board need to vote in favor of redoing an election, compared to four out of five members under the previous law (the board would grow in size from five members to eight under the new bill).
In addition to subverting fair election outcomes, the bill could lead to a huge decrease in voter access as well. Local election boards currently determine the number of early voting sites in a county, but if those boards deadlock under the new legislation there would only be one early voting location per county. That would dramatically limit the number of early voting sites in large urban counties that favor Democrats, leading to much longer lines at the polls. In 2020, for example, Wake County, home to Raleigh, had 20 early voting sites used by 374,000 voters, according to WRAL News. “There would only be one early voting location in counties with more than a million people,” says Price Kromm. “Can you imagine how long the lines would be?”
More than half of North Carolinians used early voting in 2022 and Democrats were more likely to cast a ballot that way. “In the state’s 2022 Senate race, writes Daniel Walton of Bolts magazine, “in-person early voters favored Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley by five percentage points, even as she lost the election overall by more than three percentage points to Republican Ted Budd.”
That’s not all. The legislation could also lead to the ouster of the current executive director of the state board of elections, Karen Brinson Bell, who is widely respected but has been targeted by election deniers for extending the deadline for returning mail ballots during the pandemic. If the state board cannot come to an agreement on the board’s executive director by July 15, 2024, Republicans in the legislature would get to make the selection, allowing them to put in place someone who is more allied with the GOP just months before the 2024 election.
Wisconsin Republicans are attempting to remove Wisconsin Election Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe for similar reasons. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul declared the state Senate vote to remove her a blatant disregard for state law.
In Texas this spring, Republicans passed a law to strip local control of elections from the state’s largest blue county, Harris, an area greater than Rhode Island.
Berman again:
North Carolina Republicans are pursuing a multi-pronged strategy of election subversion and voter suppression to gain an electoral advantage in the state, which Trump narrowly won and which in recent years has seen close statewide races for governor and US Senate. They also passed another bill in August that undercuts Election Day registration, gives voters less time to cast ballots by mail, and expands voter challenges. That legislation was inspired, at least in part, by conservative activist Cleta Mitchell, one of the architects of Trump’s effort to overturn the election, who consulted with North Carolina Republicans on its drafting.
The fate of all mankind, I see
Is in the hands of fools