As the Georgia runoff elections near, Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger continues to be blamed by conspiracy-peddling Republicans like Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Sen. David Perdue, the state's two insider-trading senators who remain desperate after not getting quite enough votes to dodge a runoff with their Democratic opponents. He has also been targeted by Donald Trump, who similarly claims that the only possible reason he could have lost the state is because something something massive fraud.
Raffensperger has vigorously batted down those theories, presumably because he still wants to maintain a political career and isn't interested in being a fake fall guy for a trio of losers. But he has also continued to actually support Loeffler and Perdue's election bids even as he himself acknowledges that they are damaging America's democracy by undermining faith in free and fair elections, because he is a Republican and, at this point, Literally All Republicans are willing to abide by other people in their party sabotaging democracy, and the dividing line between moderate and extremist consists of whether you're willing to do the sabotage yourself or just support the others doing it on the party's behalf.
Now, though, Raffensperger appears to believe his position in the Republican Party is so precarious that he needs to shore things up a bit. How is that done, if you are a Republican elected official who needs a quick popularity boost? You announce a new plan to keep people from voting.
Raffensperger is shifting from defending the integrity of his office to a new initiative, calling on Georgia lawmakers to end no-excuse absentee voting in the state. The reasons are straightforward. Trump and other conspiracy-minded Republicans blame mail-in votes for their loss; the answer to future Republican success therefore lies in removing those votes from the voting pool.
This, after the state's Republicans themselves championed absentee voting—because absentee voters tend to be older Americans, which tend to be more Republican in their voting trends. The pandemic fouled those assumptions, so now absentee voting has to go.
Now, none of this makes particular sense. Raffensperger's new claims that Georgia must now end fifteen years of no-excuse mail-in voting because all of a sudden he and the party think it's a path to, quote, "illegal voting" is ridiculous and transparent. It is quite obviously a reaction to false conspiracy claims and to Republican chagrin that a method of making voting easier for their own voters is now being used by other voters in unexpected proportions.
By curtailing mail-in voting, it will become easier for Republican officials to tailor in-person voting suppression efforts in the now-standard ways. They can reduce access to in-person polling places in Democratic areas of the state, while boosting it in Republican areas. Mail-in ballots sabotage such plans by allowing voters in any part of the state to dodge long polling lines.
There is no pattern of fraud or illegal voting, not in person or by mail, anywhere in the country. Would-be hero Brad knows this, and has repeatedly said this in no uncertain terms when those conspiracy theories were launched at his office and threatened to undermine his political future. It is a hoax. But it also seems that Raffensperger knows he will not have a future in the party if he goes against those conspiracies, and so is willing to lend his name to them if that is what it takes to keep state conservatives from kneecapping his career whether Loeffler and Perdue eek out a win or not.
