REPUBLICANS HAVE ILLEGALLY TARGETED DEMOCRATIC VOTERS

 

                                       …The GOP failed to stop drive-thru voters

 

The Republicans have tried, but failed, to stop American democracy

 

Russia and Iran and other foreign adversaries have attempted to interfere in our elections, but they can back-off and take it easy on America’s election day. They needn’t waste their precious resources tampering with vote tallies or degrading the perceived legitimacy of our election results.  That’s because Republican officials have been making this effort, all on their own.

Americans like to think of our country as a place with a shared set of democratic values. We’re a nation in which whoever receives the most votes, according to some predetermined set of rules, wins the election.  But recent developments reveal that the sharing of these values is perhaps a fantasy. In the months leading up to this presidential election, the Republican Party has been singularly focused on preventing eligible voters from reaching the polls and on blocking lawfully cast ballots from being counted.

This one party has abandoned the old-fashioned electoral strategy of appealing to a majority.  Instead, it has fully and openly embraced voter suppression.

In Texas and Ohio, Republican officials reduced the number of ballot drop boxes, particularly affecting densely populated counties more likely to vote Democratic. In South Carolina and Oklahoma, GOP leaders fought to require witness signatures or even notaries for their absentee ballots, despite a pandemic that makes such requirements dangerous.  In Michigan, they supported a suit to allow open carry of firearms at the polls, despite the obvious potential for intimidation. They’ve praised other forms of voter intimidation, too, including an alleged attempt to run a Joe Biden campaign bus off the road. The FBI is investigating that attempted activity.

At the federal level, the Trump administration crippled operations of the US Postal Service. Then, in states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, Trump’s allies have fought to disqualify ballots that might be delayed by the resulting slowdown in deliveries.

In Texas, days before polls closed, Republicans filed lawsuits to invalidate more than 120,000 ballots already cast via drive-through voting.  However, even a Republican nominated judge found the Republican lawsuit had no standing, and he threw it out.

As the longtime Republican election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg summarized in a Washington Post op-ed: “The Trump campaign and Republican entities engaged in more than 40 voting and ballot count cases around the country this year. In exactly none - zero - are they trying to make it easier for citizens to vote.”

Of course, none of their efforts have succeeded. But where they have come close, they’ve been aided by some federal judges appointed by President Trump.  Nearly three out of four opinions issued in voting-related cases by Trump appointees, they favored policies reducing ballot access. As The Post colleagues have tallied, judges appointed by earlier presidents, including Republicans, they do not have nearly the same anti-suffrage record.

In some of their efforts, Republicans have precisely targeted voters likely to cast ballots for Democrats.  In others they appear to be pushing to throw out batches of ballots more or less randomly, without knowing the partisan composition.  But this, too, is a strategy that can help Republicans:  If you expect to lose when all the ballots are counted, as the polls suggest,  the best thing they can do is to stall.  As an example, by cutting off a vote tally short of a full count, they increase their odds of winning.

Republicans will try to thinly veil these voter suppression ploys with their legalese, with ginned-up fears about voter fraud, procedural integrity, that sort of thing.  But every once in a while they slip and give the game away. Such as when Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller told ABC News on Sunday that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election by counting all the votes.  Yes, he was being serious.

At this point, the only way to avoid a protracted legal battle, and any doubts about the perceived legitimacy of the outcome, would be for Biden to win in an-Election-Day-ballot-count landslide. That way the absentee, drive-through and provisional ballots that Republicans are trying to invalidate won’t end up mattering.

But even so, the broader issue still would be, let’s be honest, America can’t continue calling itself a democracy if it throws out tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots cast in good faith.  Just to do this for anti-democratic reasons, simply because a political party asked for it, that is not being democratic.  We can’t continue to pretend our judicial branch is made up of neutral, qualified individuals calling balls and strikes.  Especially, not when the courts have been packed with appointees vetted for their inclination to cement a partisan agenda that Republican politicians openly expect voters to react.

The legitimacy of our government, and respect for the rule of law, depends on voters’ belief that it has been put in place as a result of free and fair elections. That’s the social contract. And for this election, the Republicans have set it on fire.

Copyright G. Ater 2020