The lies, the laws limiting voting in state after state. Project 2025- a user manual for one party rule, Trump himself promising to be a dictator on day one. It is a multi-front attack. I recently talked with Sam Levine, the voting rights reporter for The Guardian U.S. and he helped put some more of the pieces together.
Sam told me,
I think it's a little bit of a different scenario from 2020 when people were concerned about the prospect of a candidate trying to overturn the election results deemed a little far-fetched. There was still sort of skepticism even going into the election that Trump could try and overturn it. I think that there's little doubt that Trump will accept the results of an election he doesn’t win.
This was part of a larger conversation from my radio show The Big Picture on WCPT820. You can hear the whole interview at the link at the top of this page. It got me thinking about the GOP attack on voting. The attack goes to the core of our democracy and has four elements.
Suppress votes
Dilute votes
Nullify elections
Break our faith in the validity of elections
Today’s GOP is strategically engaged in all of these in order to take control of the country. If they succeed, we will never again be a democracy.
Voter suppression is the effort to stop people from voting. Across the country, GOP election officials, claiming they are protecting voters from fraud, are aggressively purging voting rolls, narrowing the time for voting, making it more difficult to vote in certain places, forbidding providing water to anyone waiting in a line to vote, requiring multiple forms ID to vote, and more. His week the Republican majority in the U.S. House voted to require proof of citizenship to vote. (That bill will not make it through the Senate.) Each of these strategies targets voters who tend to support Democrats.
They say they are protecting voters from fraud. But that is a lie. A lie they repeat even after it has been proven to be a lie.
Voter dilution is the effort to make some votes count less than others. This is what partisan gerrymandering accomplishes. In a state like Wisconsin, the practice of cracking and packing means that it democrats are mapped into a few districts where they can easily win while the rest are divided up amongst many districts they can never win. This means every republican voter counts for more than any Democratic voter when it comes to a voice in the legislature.
The United States Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act so there is no protection for voters from partisan gerrymandering. The court went further to say that if a gerrymander can be shown to be partisan then protections against racial gerrymandering are moot- essentially throwing out the voting rights.
Both parties have engaged in voter suppression and gerrymandering to some degree. But today’s GOP has gone further than any previous efforts, and they have made these part of a broader anti-democracy strategy. To see that, let’s turn to the rest of the list.
Election nullification. This is something new. We are seeing cases across the country where county officials simply refuse to certify an election. The three GOP commissioners in Washoe County, Nevada, that’s Reno, are doing that right now. Reporter Sam Levine, who follows these issues for the Guardian told me,
What we've seen in these efforts is that there was some glitch in the election and these kinds of errors happen- voting equipment breaks or there's some problem at the polls or some problem with absentee ballots. But it's not a widespread issue… That becomes sort of the basis for commissioners or people who are unhappy with the election results to doubt. And they say, well, we'll never be able to know what the true effect of this relatively minor error was, and they use that as a basis for not certifying the election. In some cases, people who have refused to certify haven't cited any basis. They’ve just said something in their gut tells them something wasn’t right.
So far these efforts have not led to the overturning of an election. So why go through the trouble? Turns out it was practice. This week the Georgia legislature moved forward with a bill to make it easier for local officials to delay the certification of the vote. And that’s important, because this year that delay could mean the state’s vote is not available in time for the Congressional certification of the Presidential ballots.
Now recall that four years ago, on January 6th, while the insurrectionists were gathering outside the Capitol, inside folks like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley introduced motions to nullify the votes of several states. They did not succeed, but lessons were learned. Now they will be able to rely on local county officials to refuse to certify.
Breaking our faith in the validity of elections, is essential for autocratic takeovers. Today’s GOP is determined to make sure Americans doubt our own ability to hold elections and to count votes. That’s why they tell a lie and repeat it even after their claim is disproved. They don’t care about the claim, they want the doubt. That’s why Congress voted to impose the unnecessary yet burdensome requirement of proving citizenship before voting. They want to be able to say Democrats are getting votes from people who aren’t citizens. They don’t care that there is no evidence of that happening. They want the doubt.
I asked Sam Levine if he has ever seen a democracy where people don’t believe that voting is legit. Here’s what he said,
A lot of the discussion can be outcome focused… is this going to be a successful effort to overturn the election results? And sometimes what gets lost in that is regardless of the outcome, do people have confidence in the election results? One thing we've seen since 2020 is that even though Donald Trump wasn't successful, it offered a playbook for his supporters. It offered a permission structure for his supporters to continue to believe that the election was stolen. And one of the most critical parts of any functioning government and any functioning democracy is that people believe that those who govern them, those who represent them, are legitimately elected. And when people start to lose faith in that, I think it raises really disturbing questions about government and takes us to a very scary place.
What place is that? Project 2025 and the perpetual rule of an empowered minority party. If you do nothing else, google Project 2025 to see what’s coming if we do not move heaven and earth to stop it.
