While pixels continue to be spilled over the identity of the anonymous “Trump Administration official” who authored the last-week’s now-famous New York Times op-ed, confirming--apparently for the first time for many--that yes, this White House is in fact a dysfunctional rathole captive to the whims of a dysfunctional rat, the same New York Times this weekend published a Non-Anonymous op-ed of far greater consequence to the future of the American Republic.
In a piece titled “The Republican Approach To Voter Fraud: Lie,” Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies at Emory University, describes the steady march of voter suppression in this country from its original conception in the 2000 election to where it stands today, with Republican-controlled states passing wholly cynical and spurious “Voter ID” laws and enforcing widespread, targeted voter purges with the single-minded goal of preventing people of color in this country from voting.
Deliberately suppressing the right of people to vote is an act so un-American that it ought to disqualify the existence of any political Party that promotes it. In a healthy Democracy people who promoted or hatched such schemes to violate Americans’ most sacred right would have their citizenship stripped and be forcibly expelled from the country to places like Russia or Hungary where they could live out their lives in the dystopian autocracies they seem to crave. Unfortunately what we now have in this country is a Republican Party that now actively and publicly promotes passing laws calculated to suppress the vote. And they do it through a coordinated pattern of lies and talking points about an imaginary phenomenon they invented called “voter fraud.”
That was the point. Demoralize people. Strip away their voting rights. Debase their citizenship. Dilute the diversity of voters until the electorate becomes homogeneous. Lie and say it’s because of voter fraud. But most important, do all of this in the name of saving democracy.
Rampant voter fraud does not exist. There is no epidemic of illegal voting. But the lie is so mesmerizing, it takes off like a wildfire, so that the irrational fear that someone might vote who shouldn’t means that hundreds of thousands who should can’t cast ballots, in part because of the increase in voter ID laws across the country in recent years.
The only reason “Voter ID” statutes exist is because the Republican Party realized that the racism underlying their entire Party’s reason for existence was repelling African Americans and Hispanics, and in all likelihood those voting blocs would never, ever be returning to vote Republican. So as demographics, especially surging among Latinos and Hispanics, increased the urgency of the situation, it became necessary to achieve a counterbalance in order for the GOP to retain its power as long as possible. The way to solve the problem, the Party leaders reasoned, was to keep enough of “those people” from voting at all. Their rights as Americans never entered the Party’s thought process. Passing laws to restrict voting to those with a specific form of photo identification was one proven method of reducing African-American turnout. Purging voter rolls in minority-concentrated areas was another.
Anderson’s article describes how the Republicans’ process of suppressing votes germinated and flowered into the massive propaganda operation it is today.
Consider the brutal clarity of Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which eventually helped write voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer across the country: “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said in a 1980 speech to conservative preachers in Dallas. “Our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” The Republican Party learned that voter suppression, done ruthlessly and relentlessly, could deliver victory.
As Anderson notes, in order to suppress the vote it was necessary to control the actual mechanism of voting. To stop people at the very point where they attempted to lawfully cast their votes. This process got an enormous assist from people like Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris during the Florida debacle of the 2000 Presidential election, in which paper ballots were evaluated not for their obvious “intent,” which had been the standard for recount procedures, but to a higher, artificial standard of “intent” that could be manipulated by those in charge of the process, people who could also, incidentally, determine the necessity and scope of any vote recounts.
The article also raises the lesser-known, but arguably more important, lesson that Republicans learned from the vote in Missouri that same year—in particular the value of purging voter rolls in order to keep people of color --mostly African Americans-- from voting. In St Louis, the Board of Elections (mostly through sloppy record-keeping and bureaucratic malfeasance) stripped 50,000 people of their registrations, without informing them. Thousands showed up to vote and were told they could not. When Democrats filed for injunctions to keep the polls open so these voters could lawfully cast their ballots Republicans responded with charges of “voter fraud.” As it turned out, out of 2.3 million votes cast in Missouri, exactly four were determined to have been “fraudulently” cast. Meanwhile thousands were denied the right to vote at all, thanks to Republican legal maneuvers.
The Missouri fiasco taught Republicans the value of deliberately suppressing the vote. And the rest, thanks to morally bankrupt Republican state legislatures, the GOP’s propaganda campaigns, and ALEC, is history.
The final and perhaps most important lesson from 2000 was to lie. Lie often. Say the lies loud; say them with pride. Lie over and over and over. Lie without shame. Lie until the truth is drowned out, dead. Lie until no amount of evidence could convince anyone otherwise. Lie until there is no other narrative.
The lie of “voter fraud” turned out to be a surprisingly easy sell to an audience of Republican voters trained by Fox News to reflexively distrust the motives of African-Americans, Latinos and Hispanics. The average African-American portrayed on Fox News is either a criminal, a parasite looking for a handout, or an angry radical. These stereotypes made it easy for Fox News audiences to swallow the idea that such people were voting illegally in mass, when nothing of the sort was occurring. The lie has been repeated so many times it is now an article of faith among Republicans, which is exactly what the GOP needed in order to support cookie-cutter legislation suppressing “those” voters.
Anderson’s op-ed ends on a despairing note. But fortunately Democrats have begun to organize and formulate their national message to fight and reverse these efforts. The movement to make access to voting a key part of the Democratic platform started sporadically but it is now coalescing into a unified theme. Groups like Jason Kander’s Let America Vote and the National Democratic Redistrict Committee, spearheaded by former Attorney General Eric Holder, and Tom Steyer’s NextGen America have begun to transform the Democratic Party’s response to the Republican onslaught against voter rights. The NDRC in particular was the spiritual impetus behind President Obama’s speech this week in Illinois, exhorting young people to vote.
The organization is armed with millions of dollars and a four-pronged strategy of pushing reforms, waging litigation, electing Democrats, and organizing educational campaigns. It’s also armed with an important ally: Barack Obama, who jumped back into politics last summer and announced that pushing back on Republican gerrymandering would be his main post-White House focus.
The NRDC’s focus is on redistricting, an unsexy subject that normally doesn’t inspire voters’ emotions. However, as pointed out in Rachel Cohen’s article for Talking Points Memo, (linked above) the issue of increasing peoples’ access to voting polls very well indeed:
In 2016 Gallup found 63 percent of Americans support automatic voter registration, and 80 percent favor early voting. More recent data from Civis Polling as part of the Data for Progress New Progressive Agenda Project found that 48 percent of likely 2018 voters support automatic voter registration, 37 percent oppose, and 15 percent aren’t sure. When so-called Democratic “influencers” (referring to involved party activists) were asked to pick their top political priorities from a list of almost a dozen issues, two of the top three most highly ranked issues were related to strengthening voting rights.
With the “voter fraud” myth now being parroted incessantly by this Administration, it is time for Democrats to embrace the simple fact that people want more than anything to have their voices heard. And people who normally don’t vote—the most significant untapped portion of the population in any election—tend overall to lean progressive.
Sean McElwee, co-founder of Data for Progress, put it this way: “The way to think about voting reforms is that these policies don’t wildly motivate voters — that’s sort of a fantasy — but what is real is that the people who do not vote like progressive stuff.” Progressives should support making it easier to vote, McElwee says, partly “because it will increase turnout in our elections, and will create more space for progressive ideas.” In other words, making it easier to vote will bring in more marginal voters who lean further left than the historically more consistent voter.
Nothing would serve as a more fitting rebuke to Republican voter suppression than to increase the sheer pool of voters who vote liberal. As the aging, white Republican base slowly dies out, that pool of voters could reshape the future of this country.
All Democrats have to do is take the initiative.