Yesterday’s post was about the nuclear threat. Today, I want to talk about the Republican threat. Republicans are the most serious threat to American democracy. Yesterday, in Commerce, Georgia, located about 70 miles NE of Atlanta with a population of about 8,000, former and defeated president Donald Trump spoke to a dwindling crowd. He was there to bolster the waning campaign of former senator David Perdue. Also in attendance to speak included Herschel Walker, former football player and denier of evolution ’cause apes are still around, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, former window’s saleswoman and America’s leading conspiracy theorist, and others trying to run on Trump’s coattails.

Apoplexy

In 2020, three Democrats won key elections in Georgia. President Biden won the contest against Donald Trump, three times! Then Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff defeated their Republican rivals, Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively. This election gave the Democrats the majority in the US Senate because the 51st vote was made by the sitting Vice President, Kamala Harris. These victories were enough to give the Republicans, not only in Georgia, but around the country apoplexy.

This has led to extreme anger amongst Republicans, and they decided that they will do anything to control elections in the future. To do this they claimed that 2020 elections were insecure. One state legislature after another formed “election integrity committees.” To bring “integrity” to future elections, the Republicans set out to change the rules, since they couldn’t win with the “old rules”. I’m sure you remember when US Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Chris Krebs said “the 2020 US election was the most secure in American history.” He went on to say that across the country, election officials reviewed and double-checked the entire election process prior to finalizing the results.

Krebs analysis of the 2020 election directly contradicted President Donald Trump’s claim that there were wide-spread voting irregularities and fraud. He fired Mr. Krebs a few days later.

Voting Rights

Voting rights are on trial in the United States because of Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” of voter fraud, which never occurred anywhere in the United States. Even though the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” since then, democracy has been under attack. The Big Lie undermined the confidence people have in the voting process. Republican state legislators have launched an attack on voting rights in America. There is a direct attack being made especially against Black voters around the country, not just in the South. And voter repression is not new.

Obama

After Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008 by more than 8 million votes, conservatives launched widespread voter suppression laws in as many states they controlled. In her book White Rage, Carol Anderson explains how conservatives designed a multitude of ways to keep the people they don’t want to vote away from the ballot box.[1] And it didn’t begin when Obama won the election. Voter suppression had been going on for a long time. The goal of suppression has been to “intimidate and harass key populations to keep them away from the polls.”[2]

Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American Studies at Emory University. In White Rage, she exposes the subtle and more sophisticated disfranchisement methods, especially those used by William Rehnquist while he was practicing law in Arizona in the early 1960s. Rehnquist’s sycophants sent “do not forward” mail to residents in Democratic precincts. Returned cards to the state were falsely interpreted to mean the addressee was no longer there and was then removed from the rolls. On election day, the voter removed from the rolls needed to prove they could read and interpret parts of the Constitution.[3] And, yes, this is the same Rehnquist who was appointed to the Supreme Court and became Chief Justice from 1986 to 2005.

The Brennan Center for Justice

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, there were hundreds of bills introduced during the 2021 legislative session in many states that would restrict voting. The intent is to suppress, subvert and disenfranchise voters.  Figure 1 shows how this played out in 2021.  Each map identifies states that enacted bills in state legislatures that will either restrict or expand voting.  Note that a few states enacted restrictive as well as expansive laws. Restricting or expanding the citizens’ right to vote is split among the states. 

As you read ahead, you will find out that the state I live in passed the earliest and one of the most restrictive bills. This bill makes it more difficult for to citizens to vote and also opens the door for the state legislature to suspend county election officials and assume the power to head elections around the state.

Voting Bills

            There were two voting bills in the Congress that failed to pass in the Senate. The first bill was the Freedom to Vote Act,[4] which would expand early voting and require that every state have at least two weeks of early voting, as well as permit no-excuse mail-in voting for every eligible voter.  The bill also called for Election Day to be a public holiday. To protect individual voters, the bill would require that states have a wide range of forms of identification to validate voters.  The bill also restricted states from changing election laws and eliminated partisan gerrymandering in order to work toward neutral standards for creating vote maps. Voter registration would become automatic and include same-day voter registration. 

            The second bill was the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.[5]  It was designed to strengthen the basic voting rights law and restore voting to the core protections that were in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The recent act would put a stop to the voting rights violations that spread across the country in which state legislatures discriminated against many groups of people by lessening their ability to vote.

The Georgia Election Law Case

Georgia is a model case for new voter suppression laws that began in 2021. As a resident of this state, I have made sure that my opinions are known to Republicans. I’ve urged Democrats fight these autocrats. US Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) blasted the Georgia legislature for passing the massive voting bill that would restrict voter access. Warnock said, “I think it’s unfortunate that some politicians have looked at the results and, rather than changing their message, they’re busy trying to change the rules.”[6]

Georgia Republican legislators are perpetuating Trump’s Big Lie. They are using it as the rationale to claim there was widespread voter fraud. There was no fraud in the 2020 election. Rather than competing to earn votes, Georgia Republicans favor changing the rules. They want to make it harder for the people who voted against them to get to the voting booth. Georgia legislators audaciously established a Special Committee on Election Integrity. This underscores their action against a fair and just election system in the state. This committee missed the mark. The integrity of voting in Georgia has been questioned and investigated for decades. The 1965 Voting Rights Act changed the rules of voting not only in Georgia, but throughout the South.  Instead of making voting more accessible to citizens, this committee made it more difficult for Georgians to vote.

I’ve studied this new bill. It would restrict voting by reducing the number of ballot drop boxes and require voter ID for absentee ballots. It’s a disturbing piece of legislation. The bill expands the number of days for early voting. However, the new law requires a personal ID on both in-person and mail-in voting. Some critics claim that this disproportionally affects voters of color.

Drop Boxes

Intervention at Precinct & State Levels

The bill enables the Georgia state election board to intervene in county and precinct level elections. They suspend county or municipal superintendents based on performance or violation of election laws. This is rather ironic because the president of the United States interfered in the 2020 election. This is a violation of Georgia’s election laws.

The law also removes the Secretary of State from the election board. This is a direct attack on Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State. He stood up to Donald Trump in the phone call on January 2, 2021. I believe that this is a powerful weapon that Republicans will use in the next and future elections. They will be able to appoint their own people to direct the work at local precincts. This will make it possible to take over elections.

Theft or Rigging of Future Elections

In a powerful article, Ari Berman writes that Republicans are paving the way to steal future elections.  In his Mother Jones piece, Berman warns us that if we ignore the consequences of Trump’s Big Lie and sit on the sidelines, Republicans across the country will pull off another coup by making it more difficult for people to vote and easier for them to take over the election process.  Here’s how he puts it:

And make no mistake, if Republicans prevail in rigging the 2022 election, they’ll be even more emboldened in 2024, especially if Trump is on the ballot. The lies of a stolen election propagated by Trump—and exploited by Republican lawmakers who know better—are now being used to lay the groundwork to sabotage elections for real. “Their endgame?” President Joe Biden asked rhetorically during a major speech in Atlanta on January 11. “To turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion—something states can respect or ignore.” This isn’t just about the normal ebb and flow of partisan politics; it’s a test of whether a party that is deadly serious about ending American democracy as we know it will regain control of ostensibly democratic institutions.[7]  

Attack on Democracy             

The current effort by Republicans to deny and limit voting is a direct attack on liberal democracy. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act would thwart this attempt. It would eliminate the barriers to voting. [8]

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[1] Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).

[2] Anderson, White Rage, 142.

[3] Anderson, White Rage.

[4] Torres-Spelliscy, C., Weiser, W. R., Weiner, D. I., & Kirschenbaum, J. (2021, December 6). The freedom to vote act. Brennan Center for Justice. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/freedom-vote-act

[5] Weiser, W. R. (2022, January 13). Why the Senate Must Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Brennan Center for Justice. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/why-senate-must-pass-john-lewis-voting-rights-act.

[6] Daniella Diaz, “Warnock Slams GOP-controlled Georgia Legislature for Bill That Would Restrict Voter Access,” CNN, March 21, 2021, retrieved November 21, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/21/politics/raphael-warnock-georgia-voting-rights/index.html.

[7] Berman, A. (2022, January 13). “The Coming Coup: How Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork to Steal Future Elections” Mother Jones, Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/01/how-republicans-are-taking-over-election-system-big-lie/.

[8]. Jack Hassard, The Trump Files: An Account of the Trump Administration’s Effect on American Democracy, Human Rights, Science and Public Health (Marietta: Northington-Hearn Publishing, forthcoming, August 2022.