“The suppression tactics included in this bill would hurt the Republican Party as much or more than its opposition,” Texas state Rep. Lyle Larson, a Republican, said in an opinion column this week. “One can only wonder — are the bill authors trying to make it harder for Republican voters to vote?”
I wondered about this when I heard that one state (Texas? Georgia? I don’t remember) wanted to make it illegal for people to provide a ride to the polling place to a voter who was not a family member. I worked as an election judge in 2018. The polling place I was assigned to had several busloads of voters come in. They were all from a local senior residence complex. Of course, they might have voted Democratic, but the only voter from that facility that I know for whom he voted was a Republican – he asked what he needed to do to vote a straight Republican ballot. He must have been new to my county, since that hasn’t been an option in decades.
Actually, in some cases, voter suppression efforts can indeed backfire, which is why the republicans aren’t just settling for moving a voting station from point A to point B; they want to have the power to disrupt voting and to undermine the entire system. I don’t necessarily believe that every Repub is in concert on these ideas - some are probably okay with voting database purges and moving voting stations out of urban communities, and probably less comfortable with refusing to certify otherwise valid election results. But some Repubs seem to have no problem with illiberal democracy in all and any of its variants.