STOP TELLING THIS STUPID LIE, REPUBLICANS
As the war over voting rights ramps up, Republicans are increasingly falling back on a claim that has grown ubiquitous. Republicans are deeply concerned about voter fraud because their voters believe the 2020 election was stolen from them, we are told, and Republicans merely want to restore their confidence in future elections.
This claim is absolutely central to the massive new wave of GOP voter suppression efforts — and utterly preposterous to its core.
A sharp exchange between a Democratic senator and a Republican attorney general, and a new report on conservative groups lining up behind voter suppression efforts everywhere, provide an opening to dig into this absurdity.
In the exchange, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia unloaded on that very claim. At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita insisted the expansion of vote-by-mail and other practices had “shaken confidence” in the 2020 election.
Rokita then suggested each law countering voter fraud should be judged on the “confidence it brings to the process.”
“I take exception to the comments that you just made,” Ossoff responded, “that public concern regarding the integrity of the recent election is born of anything but a deliberate and sustained misinformation campaign led by a vain former president unwilling to accept his own defeat.”
That misinformation campaign, Ossoff continued, “culminated in a violent assault on the United States Capitol.” Ossoff ripped into the idea that a “law enforcement” official like Rokita would “indulge” such garbage, which itself undermines “confidence.”
“You’re entitled to your opinion, as misinformed as it may be,” Rokita replied soon after. “But I share the opinion of millions of Americans.”
You see, millions of Americans believe the integrity of former president Donald Trump’s loss is in doubt — and that this justifies efforts to restrict voting, ostensibly to bring “confidence” to the “process.”
Similarly, the head of a new Republican National Committee group with the Orwellian title of “election integrity” committee refuses to say President Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate, and justifies this by saying “a lot of people” have a “lot of questions.”
Meanwhile, CNN reports that numerous conservative groups are lining up behind the voter suppression efforts that GOP legislatures have launched in states across the country. And here again, the same justification is offered.
The real way to restore “trust” in the process is to tell these voters the truth.
That means telling GOP voters that the 2020 election came off impressively smoothly amid extremely challenging conditions. The results were certified by state officials, including a few Republicans, and upheld in dozens of court cases.
Yet Trump and Republicans themselves spent months stoking precisely the opposite impression, deliberately fomenting the very lack of confidence in the outcome that they now widely cite as their justification to make access to voting harder in numerous places.
All this points to a deeper contradiction in the legacy of Trumpism. As Jamelle Bouie writes, the 2020 election showed that Republicans can perform well in a high turnout election. Though Trump lost, they won House seats and held some tough Senate seats. Yet as Bouie notes, they continue to act as if high turnout is a threat to their very survival.
Indeed, Republicans themselves regularly say one of Trump’s big successes is that he brought large numbers of low-propensity conservative voters into the GOP coalition, and that the party’s future depends on keeping them in the fold.
Yet they seem to think the way to do this is to continue honoring the Big Lie about the stolen election, using it to justify voter suppression everywhere, and resisting efforts to make it easier to vote, efforts that might actually facilitate participation by those same low propensity voters.
We are not obliged to pretend this widespread justification for voter suppression is a real argument. It’s time to treat it with the contempt that it deserves.