Republicans plan all-out voter intimidation effort after decades of court-imposed limits

Republicans have such a long history of abusing voting rights—often in specifically racist ways—that from 1982 to 2018, the party’s ability to run operations against “voter fraud” were limited by the courts. But a 2018 decision unleashed the Republican Party to do its racist, vote-suppressingest worst, and Republicans are getting ready to do their worst.

Republicans plan to recruit 50,000 volunteer poll-watchers in 15 key states, with the aim of challenging votes by people they find suspicious, for whatever reason. (Translation: black people, brown people, young people …) They also plan to go to court whenever necessary to crack down on voting rights. Republicans have announced $20 million in funding for this project so far, but more may be coming.

Republicans from Donald Trump on down are running around screaming warnings about rampant voter fraud, despite the fact that “It’s utter nonsense. This has been shown over and over,” as University of Wisconsin-Madison elections expert Kenneth Mayer told The New York Times. “The continued insistence that there are material levels of intentional voter fraud is itself a form of fraud.”

Republicans have even teed up their argument for why all of their poll-place intimidation was necessary when they don’t find fraud. “Just having a presence of some sort is a deterrent for probably 80 percent of the bad behavior,” said Republican consultant Josh Helton. Or, as Fair Fight’s Lauren Groh-Wargo explained, “This is a burn-it-down strategy, a strategy to win at all costs,” and one that Republicans see “as central to victory.” In a close election, they don’t need to scare that many people away from the polls or force that many people to cast provisional ballots—a little bit here and there, combined with the long voting lines Republicans in so many states have created in areas with lots of voters of color, plus the restrictive voting laws they’ve passed in some key states, could tip an election.

Looking back at the decades of court-imposed restrictions on Republican voter intimidation, a Trump campaign adviser summed up the change they see coming: “We were really operating with one hand behind our back,” he said. Now, they plan to come out swinging, with both hands and tens of millions of dollars, against voting access.

from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/2TopM3t