Disenfranchising voters
Republicans engaged in a systematic effort to make it more difficult to cast a ballot
REPUBLICAN officials have rhetorically brushed aside President Trump’s refusal to say he will accept the results of the election.
They note that presidencies have changed hands peacefully since the start of the Republic. Meanwhile, they are engaged in a systematic effort to make voting more difficult.
These actions are not the work of a confident, expanding party with its appeal widening. Instead, they are an acknowledgement that, unless something changes, they could face a bleak future, one in which winning elections will depend more on holding down the size of an increasingly diverse electorate than on encouraging the widest possible enfranchisement.
This is not a new phenomenon. For some years, Republicans at the state level have instituted barriers to voting. They have done this in the name of ballot integrity, despite the absence of evidence of widespread voting fraud.
Before 2006, no state required voters to produce identification. Today, 36 states have voter ID laws.
The ends to which the GOP has gone are extensive. Two years ago, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative to restore voting rights to most ex- felons who had fully served their time in prison and parole. Florida’s Republican- controlled legislature then crafted a law that said the newly eligible voters would be prohibited from casting ballots until they had paid all outstanding court fines or fees. Critics call it a modern- day poll tax.
The issue has gone back and forth in the courts, but the Florida requirement still stands. Recently, former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg pledged $ 16 million ( about R263m) to help pay the fines. Several prominent athletes and entertainers have also chipped in. People have been scrambling to register and mobilise these newly enfranchised voters, with time running out.
There are other ways in which voters can be discouraged or frustrated, and they are on display as state and local officials deal with what could be a record turnout in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott on October 1 ordered that there can be no more than one dropbox for mail ballots in each of the state’s 254 counties.
Voting rights groups sued, and late on Friday, a federal judge overturned Abbott’s order, though the state has filed an appeal. The state argued that it had expanded options for early voting and therefore Abbott’s order was justified. The judge rejected those arguments, saying the limits on drop boxes hurt older voters and those with disabilities especially hard.
The issue has particular implications for Harris County, which encompasses the city of Houston. Its population is about 4.7 million people, about 40% of whom are non- white and nearly 20% of whom are black.
It is also increasingly a Democratic stronghold.
Some analysts believe Trump could lose the county by an even larger margin in November than he did in 2016. Who in Harris County is able to vote and who isn’t will help decide whether Texas, which the polls show is potentially competitive, goes blue in November.
Because of the pandemic, concerns for safety in voting are paramount.
Election officials across the country have sought ways to provide easier options for citizens who prefer not to stand in long lines on Election Day.
They have done this by making it easier to vote by mail or by expanding early voting. Some officials have sought to extend the deadlines for when mail ballots must arrive. Some have tried to allow election officials to begin counting mail ballots before Election Day in a move to accelerate what is often a slow process.
Recently, the city of Madison, Wisconsin, another Democratic stronghold that could tip the balance in one of the country’s most competitive battleground states, decided to hold Democracy in the Parks, where poll workers would accept absentee ballots.
Republicans protested, with the GOP state House speaker and the majority leader of the state Senate arguing the event violated state law. Republicans have said they might seek to have such ballots invalidated.
Last week, the Supreme Court sided with Republicans in South Carolina and said that mail- in ballots had to be signed by a witness, a requirement that in a time of a pandemic is more burdensome than normal.
The president has called the process of voting by mail “rigged” and rife with fraud. He has called for his supporters to form an army of poll watchers on Election Day to scrutinise the balloting and counting in what could become clear intimidation as citizens come to cast their votes. He also has said that Republicans will not be able to win elections if what he calls Democratic proposals to make voting easier are widely adopted.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who dealt with election laws for decades, wrote this in a recent Washington Post op- ed: “The president’s words make his and the Republican Party’s rhetoric look less like sincere concern – and more like transactional hypocrisy designed to provide an electoral advantage. And they come as Republicans trying to make their cases in courts must deal with the basic truth that four decades of dedicated investigation have produced only isolated incidents of election fraud.”