I’ve had the same thought as the article – particularly the attempts to reign in absentee and early voting seems like a double-edged sword for Republicans. They’re basing it off one very anomalous election where proportionately more Democrats voted using these methods. But the blue collar whites who make up more and more of the Republican vote have as much trouble as others finding time to go vote during the middle of a working day. And plenty of retirees who spend all day watching Fox News vote absentee.
That’s why some of the more insidious aspects of Republican voting “reform” seek to shift responsibility for verifying votes away from local precincts and into (Republican controlled) centralized bodies. That way even if Democrats overcome the hurdles to actually get their votes properly submitted, the new overseers can find just enough “irregularities” to make sure they get the outcome they want.
Red state legislators are simply going to refuse to accept certification of results from heavily blue counties. That’s what they wanted to do last year.
It’s starting to look like Rural right wing voters are going to have full and total control after they simply throw away the votes from anyone living in a city.
Biden needs to seriously prioritize this issue post-haste before it really begins to metastasize. To address it on a more escalated level, I can only think of, offhand, is for him to simply mention it a LOT more, make it apparent - in more announcements - that it’s a bigger threat to democracy than even when Trump was in office; to drum up as much media buzz as humanly freaking possible on this - maybe they can get themselves in a lather over something worthwhile, for once - and with four-alarm-bell urgency, making it apparent that democracy, now, is truly, increasingly, at stake.
Sure, he called it sick and Un-American in his first news conference, but that was almost a month ago. He needs to whip it up again, like, yesterday. And ramp it up.
Like, blitzkreig the fuck out of this.
And as flurb has mentioned, this GOP tacitc could backfire to some degree.
It may, and I hope that it does, but it seems to be the only tactic they have left.
The have identified the problem, and the problem is that people vote against them. Rather than convince them to change their minds through policy or governance, they seek to eliminate dissenting voices at the polls.
It’s not a terrible strategy on their part. The remedy for bad governance is to vote them out. There is no legal remedy for disenfranchisement.
And there is no remedy for trying to align themselves with law enforcement and trying to radicalize them, so that they can be used as their praetorian guard. Wouldn’t surprise me if a new tactic becomes recruiting sheriffs and cowboy LEOs to run for office.
Delving a little deeper than that the problem is that they along with the help of right wing media have engaged in a feedback loop that is preventing any possibility of reform. Originally the GOP pushed fear and loathing because it got ratings and ampped up the base for the general election. All was good. But as they trained their base to expect fear and loathing, they started losing some of the middle ground, which moved the average party member further to the right. Which meant in order to win the primary they had to run further to the right. Which further cost them middle voters concentrating the fear and loathing even further. Until now when no one to the left of a General Ripper, Bull Connor love child can hope to win the nomination, and such a person has no chance in the general. So even if the Republican leadership wanted to deradicalize the party and return to the mainstream there is no way for them to do so.
From their point of view, why take chances, right? Keep in mind, Montana still occasionally flies off the handle and votes in a centrist Democrat, so they gotta be vigilant.
I really think we’re seeing a general normalization of illiberalism in the Republican party. Trump was the accelerant for sure, but the Republican party had been wanting to ‘go there’ for years. Trump’s celebrity and buffoonery just made it a hell of a lot easier for the GOP to say the unspeakable out in the open and now they’re not even hiding their contempt for democratic norms.
Hey, IF every state did this and IF Congressional districts weren’t so gerrymandered, this might not be a bad idea, per se. But if you only do it in blue or swing states and if the Congressional district are blatantly gerrymandered it’s a whole different matter.
They’re using a multiprong approach. One approach is to greatly impede access for voting blocks that vote against them. Another is to control who counts the votes and signs off on an election. The former is disturbing but the latter even more so - it’s like giving the home football team the power to decide whether a win actually counts as a win, or whether the home team’s coaching staff have the power to go through and review scores and ultimately decide which ones count and which ones don’t.
They really are the Party of Stupid. Almost every voter they’re seeking to suppress – the young and the urban poor – will eventually overcome the tactics used against them and, once they’ve jumped through all the hoops to get to the voting booth in the future, will forever be an enemy of the Republican Party.
But yeah, the immediate danger is another close election in '24 where a gerrymandered red Michigan legislature decides not to certify Wayne County results and throw the election to Donald Trump, despite him losing the popular vote by seven million again. A disenfranchised majority isn’t going to take that lying down.
In a purely democratic sense, yes, it’s a stupid strategy. Their opposition have overcome such efforts before, but the strategy has also paid off on other occasions, which is why they will continue to push in this direction.
But more to the point that @LSLguy made, Republicans (conservatives) are mainstreaming a hostile takeover of government at all levels. They are quickly evolving into an overtly illiberal party that will do anything to win power.
And I emphasize that last part: their objective is not necessarily to win every election, it’s to gain increasingly disproportionate amounts of real power, to impose their will through brute force. It’s to control enough of the mechanisms of power so that they don’t necessarily have to worry about competing in the marketplace ideas, which they seemed to have given up on long ago.
There’s already been at least one serious constitutional/political crisis as a result of the GOP’s recent trend, and I think more are inevitable. Even though the GOP has lost elections as a result of their attempts to suppress voting, the takeaway from the Trump years is that you can be illiberal as hell and people will vote for you, in record numbers. They will never forget this. We shouldn’t either.
The whole point of totalitarianism is about bending the law for your own use to stay in power. If it simply becomes the law that Republicans are in power, then fighting against that becomes against the law.
So, the question is, will people actually take up arms against a regime that has lawfully elected itself? That’s the only way to not take it lying down.
People act as if democratic elections are supposed to be a self-evident desirable feature of the US form of government, but that’s not part of the Constitution and never has been. The Constitution only states how elections are to be run and who may vote, if elections are held. It does not dictate that states hold elections.
A popular democracy would be an innovation in American government. I feel it’s an important and vitally needed innovation, but democracy activists need to avoid rhetoric that appeals to tradition. Anti-democracy is the true American tradition, it’s the whole reason for Constitutional originalism, and it needs to end.