An attack on voting rights
Let’s be clear: What’s going on in Georgia is not about restoring integrity to elections that wasn’t missing in the first place. It’s about the Republican party using its own big lie of election fraud to suppress the rights of Black voters. No amount of gaslighting will alter that reality.
Let’s be clear, too, that this isn’t some “states’ rights” matter that’s purely Georgia’s affair, as if there even is such a thing when it comes to an assault on democracy. What happens in Georgia — and other states trying to rig elections — affects us all.
Georgia Republicans last month passed a raft of rules aimed especially at suppressing Black voters. The rules restrict early voting, impose new ID requirements, limit convenient ballot drop boxes, ban mobile polls, and even criminalize providing food or beverages to people waiting in line to vote.
All this is being done in the name of restoring public trust in elections — trust that Republicans themselves have been eroding with the false narrative of widespread voter fraud, an excuse they’ve used, without evidence, to make voting as difficult as possible for Democratic-leaning constituencies.
The real fraud in Georgia elections is the one former President Donald Trump attempted to perpetrate in his failed effort to cheat his way into a second term by trying to get officials to alter the results of the 2020 presidential race. Mr. Trump, remember, was caught on tape telling Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” just enough votes to make him the winner in Georgia instead of Democrat Joe Biden.
The exposure of that possibly criminal conduct hasn’t stopped Mr. Trump, his propagandists in right-wing media, and many Republicans in Congress from perpetuating this myth of a stolen election — an incendiary lie that helped precipitate the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Plenty of Republican state legislatures have continued to milk this big lie. As of March 24, lawmakers in 47 states had introduced 361 bills aimed at curtailing voting rights to one degree or another, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute at New York University.
On their face, Georgia’s actions would be bad enough. By any measure — racial, democratic, moral — it’s repugnant to deprive people of the right to vote. But as we saw in both the last presidential election and the January runoff for Georgia’s two Senate seats, this has nationwide consequences. When one political party in even one state tries to unfairly seize an advantage, it can affect who occupies the White House and which party controls the House or Senate.
This is high-stakes, down-and-dirty politics that strikes at the heart of civil rights and self-governance of the people — all the people — in America. It’s a raw power grab. It’s a threat to the Constitution. It must be treated with all the seriousness and urgency that the deliberate undermining of our democracy deserves.
Before even more states follow Georgia’s lead, Congress must pass legislation to protect voting rights, and strengthen the Voting Rights Act to bar states preemptively from trying to game the system. If that means tossing the Senate’s filibuster rules, so be it. Democrats — and those Republicans who still put their oaths to defend the Constitution above partisan politics — should not be cowed into some false sense of fair play by those who are trying to dismantle our democratic republic one foul law at a time.