Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger drew fulsome media praise at the end of last year after revealing Donald Trump’s illegal attempts to meddle in Georgia’s 2020 election certification process. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod celebrated Raffensperger’s “courage,” highlighting him as an exception to the GOP’s moral decline. There was even a brief media boomlet about awarding Raffensperger the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But Raffensperger is no hero today. Like other Republicans around the country, he’s focusing his energies on passing severe voter suppression proposals that undermine election integrity without the public visibility of an unhinged Trumpian call. In December, Raffensperger endorsed ending no-excuse absentee ballot requests in Georgia, arguing that it “opens the door to illegal voting.” In reality, the plan is aimed at making it harder for the over 1 million largely Democratic Georgians who cast absentee ballots to ever do so again.
He’s not alone. Republican legislatures across the country are engaged in a full-steam effort to emulate Georgia’s restrictive new proposals. Unlike Trump’s threats to the Georgia secretary of state or his supporters’ half-baked insurrection, Republican voter suppression efforts moving through dozens of state legislatures could actually succeed. We should make no distinction between the failed Capitol insurrection and the GOP doubling down on antidemocratic voter repression schemes, except the latter could be even more far-reaching.
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Voter suppression began as a tool to sustain white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. It is now wielded with cold efficiency by Republican legislatures for much the same reason. What’s new is how overt GOP efforts to strip the franchise have become. Republican state legislators have already introduced over 100 voter suppression bills this year. At least some of those will become law, hurting our electorate and weakening democracy.
That paranoid urgency to restrict the vote is due in large part to the GOP’s electoral collapse in Georgia and its accompanying partywide mental breakdown. Not only did Joe Biden beat Trump in one of the GOP’s “Red Wall” states; voters also ousted its pair of GOP senators in favor of a double helping of Democrats. Adding insult to injury is the fact that Republicans’ defeat came in large part because of Stacey Abrams, an organizer and former candidate for governor whom conservative pundits delighted in lampooning as unserious and out-of-touch until the moment she clobbered them.
The fear that Abrams’ success could be replicated across the 2022 midterm election map has shaken a Republican Party already hobbled by its lack of any governing vision. The party that in 2020 chose simply to republish its 2016 national policy platform with a new cover attached now faces an energized Democratic base with a proven model for state-level organizing. Unwilling and unable to develop a platform voters might support due to its capture by far right Trump loyalists, frantic Republicans are scrambling to disqualify as many Democrat-leaning voters as possible from exercising their right at the ballot box.
In Georgia, state lawmakers introduced at least eight bills to sharply restrict the right to vote. One bill requires anyone seeking an absentee ballot to show a valid photo I.D., even as Georgia shuts down DMV locations in low-income and majority-minority communities. Another would save you the trouble of finding your driver’s license by making it nearly impossible to qualify for an absentee ballot in the first place. One particularly nasty proposal involves scrapping the state’s automatic voter registration system—without requiring the DMV to tell Georgians they’d need to opt-in again to stay enrolled.
And good luck casting your ballot even if you qualify under the new proposals: a bill sponsored by election fraud conspiracy theorist State Sen. Jeff Mullis would ban all absentee vote drop-boxes in the state. If you live or vote in a majority-minority part of Georgia, it may soon be harder than ever to participate in choosing your own government. So much for Raffensperger’s Medal of Freedom.
In Virginia, the by now traditionally loony Republican gubernatorial primary is taking on Stop the Steal vibes. Trump loyalist Glenn Youngkin announced a raft of voter suppression proposals squarely targeting low-income and minority Virginians. Youngkin’s bizarro “Election Integrity Task Force” calls for scrubbing voter rolls monthly to purge mismatched files—a tactic frequently employed by right-wing election officials to strip voting rights from students, people who move frequently, and those facing housing insecurity.
Youngkin’s “task force” conjures an image of Virginia elections crawling with fraud and mismanagement. There’s just one problem: a Virginia Department of Elections report on the commonwealth’s handling of the 2020 election found that Virginia hosted some of the best-run, least error-prone elections in the country.
Nowhere is the GOP’s assault on voting rights as clear and present as in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis is backing a series of draconian and likely illegal voter suppression laws. Now Florida is on the verge of surpassing even the most repressive segregationist anti-voting legislation it birthed during the cultural terrorism of Jim Crow.
In 2018, nearly two-thirds of Floridians—a rare bipartisan supermajority— cast their ballots to restore voting rights for formerly incarcerated felons. That initiative, known as Amendment 4, was a watershed moment in the fight to make our electorate truly representative and truly democratic. Republicans had none of it, first slow-walking implementation and then overruling Florida’s voters by nullifying the entire initiative in the legislature.
The Southern Poverty Law Center responded to Florida’s rising illiberalism by suing DeSantis to stop his war on voting. That’s a necessary step, but court cases could take years to resolve. Meanwhile, DeSantis and Florida Republicans are pushing to immediately gut vote-by-mail in an effort to guarantee only the right Floridians cast ballots.
Republican attacks on our elections are cloaked in the dense legalese of state legislatures and buoyed with RNC campaign funds and a pro-suppression right-wing media machine. If these efforts succeed, the GOP will have achieved a coup against democracy far beyond anything the QAnon Shaman could have imagined.
A mob of far-right nutcases marching on the Capitol demanding the invalidation of a free and fair election was a bridge too far for the GOP, but as their ongoing war against the right to vote shows, the disagreement is only a matter of presentation. If Republicans want to get serious about protecting democracy from the creeping threat of authoritarianism, they can start by addressing their own addiction to democracy-killing voter suppression tactics.
Fortunately, Democrats finally have options for blunting the GOP’s latest assault on voting rights. That starts with congressional Democrats fast-tracking passage of Rep. John Sarbanes’ For the People Act, a bundle of measures that would enact pro-voter policies like automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration for federal elections, and expand vote-by-mail.
Fighting back also means building a state-level bench capable of beating back anti-voter GOP majorities in state houses, where most voter suppression efforts take place. That will take a massive grassroots effort by the DNC, but the costs are clear: without action, Republicans could win their war against the democratic process.
