MAGA finds it easier to rig elections than win them
Is there a term for an entire political party suffering a case of flop sweat? The GOP’s brows are gleaming. Stuck with their degenerate (and degenerating) candidate for president and faced with an energized Democratic ticket raking in millions by the hundreds and volunteers by the tens of thousands, Republicans are engaged in a frenzied effort not to prop up their own slates but to strip the right of fellow Americans to express their will at the polls.
Republicans have long neglected serious efforts for turning out the vote in favor of suppressing the votes of people they perceive as lower-caste interlopers. Irresponsibles, I’ve called them (ironically). David Frum famously (and belatedly) declared in 2018, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
Frum was years late with that realization. The voter integrity “boot camp” I attended in 2013 was a white-knuckled exercise in “protecting a demographic patch of electoral turf that’s shrinking” beneath Republicans’ feet. Not once in that day-long workshop did any speaker suggest opening up the franchise to greater participation, registering new voters and encouraging them to go the polls to exercise their right to vote. No, the goal was to prevent Them from “stealing” the election from Real Americans™.
The Georgia state election board’s attempt to implement a flurry of last-minute election rule changes has drawn both the ire of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and a lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party of Georgia and county board members. The move by the board’s MAGA majority seems designed to undercut the state law mandating local officials certify election results (NBC News):
At the heart of the civil suit, filed in Fulton County, are two items the election board passed this month: the reasonable inquiry rule and the examination rule.
The suit says that the rules conflict with Georgia’s statutes governing certification and that the election board did not follow procedures for rulemaking as required by state law. It therefore asks the court to pause the two rules to the extent that they conflict with existing law.
The plaintiffs are also asking for a declaration that election results must be certified by Georgia’s statutory deadline of Nov. 12 and that certification is mandatory rather than discretionary.
A conservative party otherwise obsessed with size and strength is putting its weakness on public display. Fair fights are for losers, Donald Trump might say.
“Voters in 28 states will face restrictions that weren’t in place in the last presidential election,” the Brennan Center reported in May. The overwhelming majority were red states in 2020.
“As MAGA Republicans and their plans—especially their assault on reproductive healthcare and the policies outlined in Project 2025—become increasingly unpopular, Republican-dominated states are ramping up their effort to keep the people they assume will oppose them from voting,” Heather Cox Richardson writes, summarizing additional GOP displays of self-doubt:
In Nebraska, Alex Burness reported in Bolts today, two Republican officials—Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Secretary of State Bob Evnen— last month stopped the implementation of a new state law, passed overwhelmingly by a Republican-dominated legislature earlier this year, that granted immediate voting rights to about 7,000 people with past felony convictions. In the process, Hilgers also declared unconstitutional a 2005 law that had allowed those convicted of a felony to vote two years after they completed their sentence. Evnen then told county-level elections offices that they could not register former felons.
The confusion has made people nervous about even trying to register. “People are scared they’re going to get charged with something if they try to vote and can’t vote, so a lot of people will just wash their hands of it,” Pamala Pettes told Burness. “They don’t want to go and vote unless they have a clear idea of what’s going on. They don’t have that.” More than 100,000 people are caught in this confusion. As Burness notes, the election could come down to the city of Omaha, where thousands of potential voters—overwhelmingly Black, Latino, and Native—have been blocked from registering.
As with Georgia’s plans for casting doubt on election results there (to borrow from King Crimson), if MAGA Republicans get their way, confusion will be democracy’s epitaph.
But HCR’s summary is not finished:
Voter intimidation is underway in Texas, too. On August 18, Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo, who was a key figure in promoting the Big Lie, posted a rumor that migrants were illegally registering to vote at a government facility west of Fort Worth. The Republican chair and election administrator there said there was no evidence for her accusation and that it was false, but Texas attorney general Ken Paxton nonetheless launched an investigation.
In addition to feeding the narrative that there is voter fraud at work in Texas, the investigation led Paxton’s team to raid the homes of at least seven Latino Democrats. No one has been charged in the aftermath of the raids. Latino rights advocates call them a “disgraceful and outrageous” attempt to intimidate Latino voters and have filed a formal complaint with the Department of Justice.
Today, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that since 2021, Texas has removed more than one million people from the state’s voter rolls, and said the process will be ongoing. Abbott’s office said those removed are ineligible to vote because they have moved, are dead, or are not citizens. But more than 463,000 of those on the list have been removed because their county of residence is unaware of their current address.
Even when voters do make their wishes known, in Republican-dominated states, those wishes are not always honored. David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo today pointed out an article in which Adam Unikowsky, who clerked for the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, eviscerated a recent decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court that will prevent an abortion rights initiative from appearing on the ballot in November.
The reason? A technical defect in the submission: “They didn’t submit a photocopy that wasn’t required” of a document already submitted a week earlier. (The “defect” was quickly corrected.) If the ballot initiative sponsor had failed to count the number of beans in the jar, the court’s ruling would have been no different. Because keeping the abortion rights initiative off the Arkansas ballot, HCR notes, “will generally help Republicans.”
Just as Jim Crow helped southern segregationists maintain white supremacy for nearly a century. MAGA Republicans’ 21st-century attempts at resurrecting it would be humiliating if they were capable of shame. This makes Donald Trump’s sculpted comb over a fitting symbol of Republicans’ desperate efforts to hide their receding popularity from the world and from themselves. Nobody’s fooled.
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