Republicans want to break up Maricopa County, Jim Crow-style (AZ) [View all]

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/19/arizona-maricopa-voter-suppression-latinos/

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https://archive.ph/BkA2m

Voters in Arizona’s Maricopa County, about a third of whom are Latino, helped deliver Joe Biden a victory in the November 2020 presidential election. Arizona’s 11 electoral college votes had gone to Donald Trump in 2016; in 2020, they want to Biden. Afterward, Republican proponents of the “big lie” — the false idea that Biden won only through fraud — argued that Democratic counties such as Maricopa are hotbeds of political corruption. Now, Arizona Republicans are pushing a seemingly novel and innocuous political reform: Divide Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest, into four smaller counties.

Counties oversee the administration of presidential elections, and elect their own important officials such as sheriffs, school superintendents and election administrators. That makes them critical units of political organization. As The Washington Post reported, critics of the push to divide Maricopa County see this as an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of elections, which are administered at the county level. The new counties, Republicans must calculate, will either vote for Republicans legitimately, or be more likely to be run by election officials who will support attempts to paint future elections as fraudulent.

In my research, I’ve analyzed the history of county division during the Jim Crow era. There I’ve found that newly created counties, like those proposed in Arizona, were more likely to administer fraudulent elections. I also find that these new counties hurt Black voters and Black officeholders the most.

How I did my research

From 1865 to 1920, the period from the Civil War through the early 20th century, state legislatures created more than 300 counties and significantly adjusted the borders of 1,000 existing ones. This geographic manipulation happened during the same period that the federal government ceased enforcing Reconstruction, enabling the former Confederate states to abandon democratic elections and voting rights for African Americans. During this time, new counties were created to target Black voters and officeholders, helping the then-white-supremacist-aligned Democratic Party solidify control over the South and institute Jim Crow rule.

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