Republicans are going all-out to limit voting rights. We know why

Jill Filipovic

In 2021 legislative sessions, lawmakers in 28 states have pushed a whopping 106 bills that would restrict voting access

Sat 30 Jan 2021 11.21 GMT

I

t’s been less than a month since rightwing insurrectionists stormed the Capitol building in a deadly riot incited by the former president and his false claims of mass voter fraud. In the riot’s wake, many prominent Republicans have tried to distance themselves from the attackers and those who spurred them on. “The mob was fed lies,” said the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”

Those “other powerful people” were powerful members of the Republican party and leading voices in conservative media, who are now either claiming we simply need to move on for the sake of healing, or saying that actually, the riot was the left’s fault. But while some Republicans are positioning themselves as honest and reasonable by condemning the riot and recognizing that it was sparked by lies about voter fraud, their party’s actions and policy priorities tell a very different story. Because as our nation remains rocked by an attack on the heart of our democracy, Republicans are using the same baseless lies that fueled it to push a staggering number of laws to scale back voting rights.

A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice shows just how effectively Republicans have been talking out of both sides of their mouths, at once decrying the violence over false allegations of election rigging, and at the same time using false allegations of voter fraud to make it harder for people to vote. In 2021 legislative sessions (which six states haven’t even yet begun), lawmakers in 28 states have pushed a whopping 106 bills that would restrict voting access – and we’re not even a month into the year. According to the Brennan Center, that’s three times the number of restrictive voting laws that were introduced by 3 February last year. These laws are clearly responsive to widespread conspiracy theories on the right – conspiracy theories started by the Republican party and the former president.

Each one of these 106 bills aims to make voting harder, either by scaling back vote-by-mail, imposing stricter voter identification laws, limiting policies that successfully registered large numbers of voters, or allowing states to more easily and aggressively purge their voter rolls.

None of these laws actually correct an existing problem – because, as we learned through a great many court cases brought by the Trump administration, there simply was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. And there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in elections before that one, either.

So why, then, would Republicans waste their time and taxpayer dollars so aggressively battling a problem that doesn’t exist? It’s because Republicans do have a voting problem – or rather, a voter problem. Many of their policies aren’t actually that popular, and the more eligible voters turn out for elections, the less Republicans win. Their clearest path to staying in power is limiting the number of people who are able to cast a ballot – and particularly limiting the number of Democrats: people of color (and Black people in particular), people in cities and college students. The sharper members of the Republican party rely on claims of “election security” and voter fraud to justify limiting what is perhaps the most sacred duty of any individual living in a democracy. The duller just flat-out admit that making it easier for people to vote would hurt the Republicans. Former president Donald Trump, for example, told Fox & Friends that Democratic appeals for wider use of absentee ballots and vote-by-mail would cause “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”.

Republicans trying to restrict voting rights is not new – the conservative justices of the US supreme court even sided with them in overturning key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which is why so many new anti-voting laws have flooded the nation in recent years.

But the context after the Capitol riot is different: Republicans now cannot deny the serious, deadly and democracy-threatening costs of exploiting lies about voting fraud to the advantage of Republican politicians. And yet, across the nation, they’re choosing to do it anyway. Until they drop this dangerous farce and quit using the big election fraud lie to strip Americans of our right to vote, no one should believe a word they say about defending democracy, admonishing those who physically attacked it, or aspiring to national healing.

It’s not all bad news on the voting front, though. Appalled by conservative malfeasance, newly emboldened by the success of mail-in voting during Covid, and heartened by hard-won wins in Georgia, more Democrats are latching on to what leaders and organizers like Stacey Abrams have been doing for years: fighting for expanded voting rights. Legislators in 35 states have introduced a total of 406 bills that would make voting easier for more people. The most common new laws seek to expand mail-in and early voting, methods of casting a ballot that enable far more people to participate in the democratic process – people who are ill, elderly or disabled and find it challenging to vote in person; people who work demanding jobs, or several jobs, or jobs without predictable schedules, and don’t get the first Tuesday in November off of work; people who are caring for small children or the elderly or the infirm and can’t easily sneak away to stand in line for what can turn into hours. Other proposed laws would make it easier for citizens to register to vote, allowing same-day, online, or automatic registration so no one shows up on election day only to learn that, despite being a US citizen, they can’t cast a ballot. And still other laws would allow people who have served time and paid their debt to society to regain their right to vote.

It’s easy for anyone to say all the right things about valuing democracy, especially in the aftermath of a stunning attack on it. But words are free. The real question is what both parties are actually doing to strengthen American democracy and ensure that all American citizens have a say in our governance. And while Democrats are pushing for expansion, Republicans are using the same dangerous lies that caused an anti-democratic insurrection on 6 January in the service of their own anti-democratic policies. The visuals aren’t as shocking. But the damage to the nation is just as severe.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/30/republicans-restrict-voting-access-bills