By any means necessary
Shamelessness is their superpower. You’ve likely heard that somewhere.
Voters in Louisiana on Saturday by 73 percent passed Amendment 1. It bans state and local governments from using funds, goods, and services donated by foreign governments or nongovernmental (private) sources for the purpose of conducting elections.
Bolts reported back in August that this makes Louisiana the 26th state to adopt such a restriction. As the National Council of State Legislatures (NCSL) described them back in July:
All legislation on this topic has been enacted since the 2020 election when the COVID-19 pandemic led to unexpected expenses related to mailing and processing an increased number of absentee/mail ballots, providing larger in-person voting facilities to accommodate social distancing and sudden demands for more cleaning and hygiene supplies.
Generally, elections are funded by state and local budgets—with occasional federal infusions. To meet the additional needs during the pandemic, philanthropic funding for local election offices was made available by the Center for Tech and Civic Life, with donations from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Grants ranged from $5,000 to $19 million.
Those who support banning or limiting such grants argue that private funds could result in the donor or grant-making organization having undue influence over elections and perhaps favoring some jurisdictions over others. Opponents, however, say that elections are chronically underfunded and that such bans may prohibit election offices from using donated resources they have long relied on, such as cybersecurity tools and the use of polling places.
Currently, over one-third of the states [now with 26 it is over half] have passed laws prohibiting or limiting the use of private funds in elections. Eleven states did so in 2021 (similar bills were vetoed in Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that year), and 13 states followed suit in 2022. The specifics vary, with some states passing outright bans on election officials accepting or using philanthropic funds and others setting new regulations on how and when such funding can be accepted.
Bolts put the conservative hostility to benefactor funding a tad more bluntly in August:
[The bills are] directly inspired by what conservatives have demonized as “Zuckerbucks” spent on elections during the onset of the pandemic. The billionaire’s donations have drawn particular ire from conservatives convinced that CTCL boosted Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts, and the partisan outrage is clearly reflected in state policies: 23 of the 25 states that already adopted such restrictions voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 or have Republican legislative trifectas, or both.
NCSL’s article needs updating. The Republican-controlled state House and Senate in North Carolina overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of SB 747 last week. One of its provisions prohibits “the State Board and county boards of elections … from accepting private monetary donations or in-kind contributions for the purpose of administering elections or employing individuals on a temporary basis.” *
North Carolina’s legislature is underfunding election services here while adding new requirements elections officials must fulfill. Conservatives decades ago railed against unfunded mandates. Not now. But what they really, really dislike is benefactors stepping in to help fund elections operations Republicans mean to monkey-wrench.
If any reader has seen a current set of measures by which GOP legislators have tried to limit who can vote, make voting more difficult and take longer, skew equal representation away from unfriendly populations, and manipulate election outcomes to ensure Republican victories, please send along a link. Their efforts to overturn the 2020 election are now legend and being litigated in multiple courts.
As Josh Marshall observed last week, Republicans’ MAGA wing now reject democratic processes even within the GOP caucus. He wrote regarding the failure of U.S. House Republicans to elect a new speaker after the majority of their caucus voted to approve Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana. Nope. Not if the MAGA faction doesn’t get its way:
Couldn’t happen to a nicer caucus, of course. But we should note that there’s a clear thread connecting this to 2020 rigged electionism and, perhaps more tightly, the dramas of debt ceiling hostage-taking and government shutdowns. The premise of all those dramas is that they’re what you do when you don’t have the votes to do what you want. If you’ve got the votes in the Congress and a President who will sign your bills, you just do it. Threatening to shut down the government is what you do when you don’t. Do what I say even though I don’t have the votes or I start breaking things. That’s the bottom line behind every one of these gambits.
It’s all cut from the same cloth.
Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot, meant to “starve the beast,” to “cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” That was nearly 25 years ago. What has become of the Republican Party in the intervening years is working furiously by all means it can think of to drown democracy itself.
* As we featured on Wednesday, Voto Latino, the Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force, and Down Home North Carolina (with help from Marc Elias) immediately sued to prevent implementation of SB 747’s “Undeliverable Mail Provision.” Plaintiffs contend the section “will arbitrarily disenfranchise North Carolina’s same-day voters, those who register to vote on the same day they cast their ballots during the state’s early voting period.”