Help the poor vote? Gasp!

Republicans generally oppose voting by mail because they think Democrats would persuade or manipulate poor people who otherwise wouldn’t vote.

Republicans think it’s bad for their interests, and for the state of affairs, if large numbers of poor people vote.

That’s why they purge voter rolls for the often-uncertain addresses of the transient poor. It’s why they impose ID requirements.

And it’s why, in Arkansas last week, Republican legislators voted down state Sen. Joyce Elliott’s proposal to amend a budget bill in the fiscal session to permit voting absentee without any excuse until the end of the year, owing to the virus.

Republicans countered by arguing dubiously that anyone may get an absentee ballot now.

Let’s all try this fall and see how that goes.

President Trump was saying at a White House briefing last week that Republicans would never win another election if we had nationwide voting by mail.

Trump and his believers think Democrats will be filling out pliable people’s ballots and mailing them in.

State Rep. Robin Lundstrum of Springdale, a member of the huffy right, said it was interesting that Elliott was bringing up a version of voting by mail at this time. She seemed to be implying that Elliott was seeking to design a personal advantage in November in her Democratic challenge in the 2nd District to U.S. Rep. French Hill.

But the more certain timing factor was that there might still be a virus in November. And the more fascinating factor is that it seems to be generally assumed by Republicans that more people voting would help Democrats and hurt them.

The Republican attitude toward voting was never better expressed than by then-Gov. Mike Huckabee, who called Arkansas a “banana republic” because African American church congregants had been bused

OPINION

after church to a specially opened early voting location in Jefferson County.

Some people think convenience of voting and encouragement thereof are good things.

That’s not true so much of Republicans, except in the case of evangelical churches in Ohio that Karl Rove, otherwise an accomplished vote suppresser, mobilized intensely in 2004 to lift George W. Bush from defeat in Ohio and into a second term.

In Wisconsin last week, Republicans forced Democrats who wanted to vote in the presidential primary to take their chances with the coronavirus.

They gaveled out of session the Democratic governor’s call for a special session for voting by mail. The Republican-dominated state Supreme Court then overturned the Democratic governor’s executive order to delay the primary until June so that voting by mail could be facilitated.

There was a state Supreme Court justiceship seat on the ballot. The Republican fear was that a heavy Democratic vote in the presidential primary, which absentee voting would better permit, would have the ancillary effect of harming the Republican candidate for the state high court.

But Supreme Court membership is not partisan, as perhaps you have been told.

Alas, you’ve been misinformed. As Wisconsin made clear, the Supreme Court is the partisan backstop in the states and nationwide.

Wisconsin Republican legislators needed to protect a Supreme Court justice so he could protect them.

About 20 or so states allow absentee voting only by a restrictive process of declaring a reason for the absence.

They tend to be the most right-wing and regressive states, like Alabama and West Virginia and … well … Arkansas, where the longstanding practice has been to neglect the poor.

Several states allow no-excuse absentee voting, which is what Elliott was seeking only temporarily.

Three states — Colorado, Oregon and Washington, the western marijuana states, coincidentally—rely entirely on voting by mail, and have done so for the last few years without rancor or complication.

The overlap of race, poverty and historical disenfranchisement seems to make the difference between those democracy states out west and the anti-democracy ones like ours.

Colorado, Oregon and Washington have a different socioeconomic demographic, by which I mean much lower poverty rates, than, say, Arkansas. And the Republican aversion to voting by mail seems to be a fear of accommodating the poor and historically disenfranchised—“fraud” is what they call this accommodation.

In Arkansas, everyone’s current favorite Republican — Gov. Asa Hutchinson — danced his usual soft-shoe on this issue. He said Republican legislators simply were in a mood to do budgets exclusively in the fiscal session and get home without the complication of peripheral issues.

He said the state could address other forms of voting if the virus persists as a problem in the fall.

I’m predicting that, come autumn, the Hogs will be playing, poor people won’t be getting any ballots in the mail, and all will be right for Arkansas as we know it.

It might be that Republicans were right last week that Elliott was mostly making a show.

But what she showed is that Republicans don’t want some of you voting.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.