The Republican Party’s War on Voting Rights

Donald Trump has constantly lied that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that voter fraud was rampant.  Never mind that Trump and his sycophants lost rough 60 lawsuits - a number at the U.S. Supreme Court - pushing this lie and that no evidence of significant fraud was found.  Nonetheless, state Republicans across the country in an effort to prostitute themselves to Trump and more importantly his supporters (particularly evangelicals, among the least educated of any religious group and, in my view the least intelligent and most gullible) have introduced 253 bills in 43 states to restrict voting rights.  While the targets of these bills being pushed by white Republicans are minority voters  -further mobilize  sometimes blatantly so - as a piece in The Atlantic lays out, many of these bills could actually disenfranchise Republican voters, particularly older voters more and more of whom prefer to vote by mail.  The other irony of the effort is that it could well galvanize minority voters and Democrats to increase efforts to guarantee minority turn out.  Here are article excerpts:

In February, Arizona state senators tried to have the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors thrown in jail.

The legislators had demanded that the county officials hand over documents relating to the 2020 presidential election in the state, which Democrat Joe Biden won by fewer than 11,000 votes. Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, had already audited its results and found no evidence of fraud. The board argued that it was not legally allowed to hand over the ballots themselves.

Senators tried to hold the board in contempt, which would have allowed its five members to be arrested. The motion failed, by a single vote, and supporters promptly tried to retaliate against the swing voter, tanking a pet bill of his.

[A]lthough the senators who wanted to lock up the county board are Republicans, so are four of the five members of the board. And the rogue senator who blocked the effort? He’s a Republican too.

Republican legislators insist that they’re merely responding to the righteous indignation of their voters as they pursue a raft of new rules that would make voting more difficult.

In the intramural Maricopa melee, that indignation has pitted the people actually conducting elections, who see the legislature’s interventions as counterproductive and possibly illegal, against superfans of former President Donald Trump who are demanding action to deal with nonexistent fraud. Around the country, indignation has driven Republicans to propose new restrictions on voting rights. Some of these are likely unconstitutional. Some appear to target particular constituencies. But one of the most striking features of these proposals as a whole is their incoherence.

And although they seem unmoved by warnings that these laws will disproportionately affect minority voters, they may well discover that they have actually disenfranchised many of their own supporters, even as their push to pass restrictive rules energizes their opponents.

Some Republicans have been open about their goal of suppressing votes. “Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues,” State Representative John Kavanagh told CNN last week. “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes as well.”

[T]his view fits a long-standing pattern. For decades, Democrats have sought to make voting easier and Republicans have sought to make it harder. Democrats argue that the right to vote is fundamental to American democracy, and that there should therefore be fewer barriers. Kavanagh’s Kinsley gaffe aside, Republicans mostly contend that such barriers are needed to prevent fraudulent voting, because any fraud taints democracy. The problem is that despite years of efforts to find it, there’s still no evidence of widespread voter fraud at levels that would tip elections.

This debate has been supercharged by the bogus claims of fraud that Trump lodged both before and after the election. As of February, the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice has tallied 253 bills in 43 states that seek to restrict voting.

The GOP drive for stricter voting laws, and in particular to make voting by mail more difficult, is rooted in three incorrect assumptions. The first, and most widely debunked, is that the 2020 election was tainted by significant fraud. The second is that the historically large turnout was responsible for Trump’s defeat. As the CNN data analyst Harry Enten recently wrote, “Trump lost because he was an unusually unpopular president, and he likely would have been defeated if turnout looked like it did in 2016.” The third is that mail voting swung the election toward Democrats. A Stanford University report released this month concludes that “no-excuse absentee voting mobilized relatively few voters and had at most a muted partisan effect despite the historic pandemic. Voter interest appears to be far more important in driving turnout.”

But just as Trump’s claims of fraud were not backed by evidence, Republicans don’t seem to have carefully thought through all the ways their bills might affect state’s the entire electorate. Whereas past efforts at voter suppression around the country seemed to target Democratic demographics “with almost surgical precision” (as a federal judge wrote of North Carolina’s 2013 voter-ID law), some of the laws currently under consideration in Arizona and nationwide look like blunt instruments that could end up making it harder for Republicans to vote too.

“You look across the country, the western states have tended to be more progressive in expansion of voting opportunities, ways to register to vote, when and where you can vote,” says Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at Democracy Fund who worked in the Maricopa County Elections Department for more than a decade. “When I left there in 2014, almost 70 percent of Maricopa County voters were getting their ballot by mail. They were electing [mostly] Republicans. There was no question about the security of voting by mail, there was no question around the fraud risks of voting by mail, because the process was tried and true.”

Now that energy in Arizona has shifted away from expanding access, legislators are effectively targeting the methods of voting that got them elected. That could make voting more difficult for their own supporters.

“When you look at the history of mail voting, it has traditionally been used at much higher rates by older voters and more affluent and more white voters—constituencies that tend to lean more Republican in their voting patterns,” Wendy Weiser, a voting expert at the Brennan Center, says.

Snowbirds who spend part of the year outside Arizona could be hit especially hard if the permanent early-voting list goes away, because they’re not accustomed to having to request a ballot. And although the new requirements for ballot security would create barriers for the poor, they might also be a challenge for older voters. Garrett Archer, an election-data analyst at the ABC affiliate in Phoenix, calculated that a shorter deadline for ballot arrival would have invalidated more Republican than Democratic ballots in 2020.

Republicans have pushed voting restrictions despite the danger of backlash, Perez believes, because the imperative to show loyalty to Trump has overshadowed careful deliberation: “They’re responding to one god right now, and his name is former President Donald Trump.” Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, defended the state’s system against attacks from Trump last fall.

Ducey has not indicated how he’d handle any bill the legislature might pass, and his spokesperson told me that the governor does not comment on pending bills. But Chuck Coughlin, a longtime Republican operative in Phoenix, said that many of the most overreaching bills were already stalled. And he said he expects that Ducey would veto anything that passes that the public might see as voter suppression.

“My instinct is that the Democrats will look at it as a turnout mechanism, and whoever’s running for governor will look at it as a branding mechanism for the person that they’re running against,” Coughlin said. As for the legislators, “I don’t even think they’re thinking that hard about it. They’re caught up in their righteous indignation right now.”

That’s the problem with letting righteous indignation guide legislation. It’s a powerful political tool, but it doesn’t always make for good policy.