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Trump's Voter-Suppression Strategy Is a Crisis (Even If It Backfires)
We will need to fight hard to regain our freedoms long after the current election. It is going to be closer than polls suggest, not because of poor turnout, but because of Republican officials working hard to disenfranchise their constituents. This has created a government that is not accountable.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/historic-voter-turnout-trump-voter-suppression.html
The Republican Party has rationalizations for almost all of these actions. Videotaping voters as they use ballot drop-off boxes — and encouraging far-right militias to patrol polling places while heavily armed — is about “transparency,” not voter intimidation. Pushing for aggressive signature matching is about ensuring election integrity, not exploiting Democrats’ greater propensity for mail-in voting — and the dearth of objective criteria for signature matching — to disenfranchise Biden supporters. Distributing ballot drop-off sites by county instead of population size is intended to enhance election “security,” not to make voting harder in left-leaning urban areas than it is in right-leaning rural ones.
These claims seem absurd on their face. Every attempt to establish the existence of mass voter fraud in the United States has come up empty. And contra Republican talking points, there is no reason to believe that Democratic efforts to make mail voting easier are motivated by a desire to create opportunities for fraud, rather than, you know, opportunities for vulnerable people to safely vote amid a raging pandemic. The president has publicly argued that he believes high turnout will hurt him. And his team’s public statements on the matter brim with bad faith. The Trump campaign’s director of battleground strategy told Politico that it is “the height of hypocrisy that Democrats call our election transparency efforts ‘voter suppression’ — they’re the ones who scared voters away from the polls for months,” apparently referencing the fact that the Democratic Party has encouraged the public to abide by the Trump administration’s own public-health guidelines.
But there is one demonstrably fraudulent excuse the GOP has made for voting restrictions. In Pennsylvania, Republicans have opposed a state Supreme Court ruling that would allow for the counting of mail-in ballots postmarked before Election Day but which arrive up to three days after, as a result of pandemic-induced delays in mail delivery. The GOP has claimed that it opposes counting these ballots because the party believes that it’s vitally important to determine the election’s winner on Election Night — or as soon as possible thereafter — so as to ensure confidence in the vote’s integrity. As Brett Kavanaugh wrote when blocking a similar grace period for mail-in ballots in Wisconsin, “States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.”
Never mind that it is the Republican Party and its affiliated media outlets who have been propagating the suspicions of impropriety that Kavanaugh cites. Never mind that it is a routine occurrence in U.S. politics for absentee ballots counted after Election Night to determine the outcome of a competitive federal race. There’s a larger hole in the GOP’s fig leaf: The Republican Party is actively trying to slow the counting of ballots in Pennsylvania.
These claims seem absurd on their face. Every attempt to establish the existence of mass voter fraud in the United States has come up empty. And contra Republican talking points, there is no reason to believe that Democratic efforts to make mail voting easier are motivated by a desire to create opportunities for fraud, rather than, you know, opportunities for vulnerable people to safely vote amid a raging pandemic. The president has publicly argued that he believes high turnout will hurt him. And his team’s public statements on the matter brim with bad faith. The Trump campaign’s director of battleground strategy told Politico that it is “the height of hypocrisy that Democrats call our election transparency efforts ‘voter suppression’ — they’re the ones who scared voters away from the polls for months,” apparently referencing the fact that the Democratic Party has encouraged the public to abide by the Trump administration’s own public-health guidelines.
But there is one demonstrably fraudulent excuse the GOP has made for voting restrictions. In Pennsylvania, Republicans have opposed a state Supreme Court ruling that would allow for the counting of mail-in ballots postmarked before Election Day but which arrive up to three days after, as a result of pandemic-induced delays in mail delivery. The GOP has claimed that it opposes counting these ballots because the party believes that it’s vitally important to determine the election’s winner on Election Night — or as soon as possible thereafter — so as to ensure confidence in the vote’s integrity. As Brett Kavanaugh wrote when blocking a similar grace period for mail-in ballots in Wisconsin, “States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.”
Never mind that it is the Republican Party and its affiliated media outlets who have been propagating the suspicions of impropriety that Kavanaugh cites. Never mind that it is a routine occurrence in U.S. politics for absentee ballots counted after Election Night to determine the outcome of a competitive federal race. There’s a larger hole in the GOP’s fig leaf: The Republican Party is actively trying to slow the counting of ballots in Pennsylvania.
