Why Are Republicans So Afraid of Voters?

There is no �both sides do it� when it comes to intentionally keeping
Americans away from the polls.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are
informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values.
It is separate from the newsroom.

Nov. 1, 2020

As of early Sunday morning, more than 92 million Americans had cast a
ballot in the November elections. That�s nearly 67 percent of the total
number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until
Election Day.

This is excellent news. In the middle of a global pandemic that has taken
the lives of nearly a quarter of a million Americans, upended the national
economy and thrown state election procedures into turmoil, there were
reasonable concerns that many people would not vote at all. The numbers to
date suggest that 2020 could see record turnout.

While celebrating this renewed citizen involvement in America�s political
process, don�t lose sight of the bigger, and darker, picture. For decades,
Americans have voted at depressingly low rates for a modern democracy.
Even in a �good� year, more than one-third of all eligible voters don�t
cast a ballot. In a bad year, that number can approach two-thirds.

Why are so many Americans consistently missing in action on Election Day?

For many, it�s a choice. They are disillusioned with government, or they
feel their vote doesn�t matter because politicians don�t listen to them
anyway.

For many more, the main obstacle is bureaucratic inertia. In New York
City, a decrepit, incompetent, self-dealing board of elections has been
making a mockery of democracy for decades. Just in the past four years,
tens of thousands of absentee ballots have been sent to the wrong
addresses, and hundreds of thousands of voters have been wrongly purged
from the rolls. For the past few days, some New Yorkers have been forced
to stand in line for four or five hours to cast their ballots.

But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting
harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican
Party. Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. �I don�t want
everybody to vote,� Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative
movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980. �As a matter of
fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting
populace goes down.�

This strategy has become a central pillar of the G.O.P. platform. It is
behind the party�s relentless push for certain state laws and practices �
like strict voter-identification requirements and targeted voter purges �
that claim to be about preserving electoral integrity but are in fact
about suppressing turnout and voting among groups that lean Democratic.

The strategy also is behind the partisan gerrymandering that Republican
state lawmakers have mastered over the past decade, redrawing district
lines to keep themselves in power even when they lose a majority of the
statewide vote. (Democrats gerrymander when they can, too, but the most
egregious examples of the past decade have been by Republicans.)

And the party is behind the early shutdown of this year�s census, which
the Trump administration insisted on over the objections of longtime
Census Bureau officials, and which it hopes will result in an undercount
of people in Democratic-leaning parts of the country.
Editors� Picks
Sean Connery: From Tentative Secret Agent to Suave Bond
A Nutmegger, a Buckeye and a Sooner Walked Into a Voting Booth...
Watch What Happens When Real Housewives Don�t Wear Masks

The Supreme Court�s conservative majority has greenlit the Republicans�
anti-democratic power grabs. In 2013, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court struck
down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, giving free rein to states with
long histories of racial discrimination in voting. Last year, the court,
again by a 5-to-4 vote, refused to block even the most brazenly partisan
gerrymanders, no matter how much they disenfranchised voters.

This year, in the face of the unprecedented hurdles to voting introduced
by the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans are battling from coast to coast
to ensure that casting a ballot is as hard as it can be. In Texas, Gov.
Greg Abbott mandated a single ballot drop-box per county � including the
increasingly Democratic Harris County, population 4.7 million. Republican
lawmakers there are also suing to throw out more than 100,000 ballots cast
by Harris County voters from their cars, at drive-through sites.

In Nevada, the Trump campaign and the state Republican Party have sued to
stop counting mail-in ballots until observers can more closely monitor the
signature-matching process. In Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin,
Republicans have fought to prevent the counting of all mail-in ballots
that arrive after Election Day, even if they are postmarked on or before
Nov. 3.

This all amounts to �a concerted national Republican effort across the
country in every one of the states that has had a legal battle to make it
harder for citizens to vote,� said Trevor Potter, a Republican lawyer who
formerly led the Federal Election Commission and worked on both of John
McCain�s presidential campaigns.

The effort has been turbocharged by President Trump, who has spent the
past year falsely attacking the integrity of mail-in ballots. Mr. Trump�s
lies have been echoed by the attorney general, William Barr, who has
claimed that mail balloting is associated with �substantial fraud.� Not
remotely true. Mr. Trump�s own handpicked F.B.I. director, Christopher
Wray, has said there is no evidence of any coordinated voter-fraud effort.
Scholars, researchers and judges have said for years that voting fraud of
any kind is vanishingly rare in this country. That hasn�t stopped
Republicans from alleging that it happens all the time. They know that
accusations of fraud can be enough by themselves to confuse voters and
drive down turnout.

When that tactic fails, Republicans turn to another tried-and-true one:
voter intimidation. Frightening people, particularly Black people, away
from the ballot box has a long history in the United States. Modern
Republicans have done it so consistently that in 1982 a federal court
barred the national party from engaging in any so-called anti-voter-fraud
operations. The ban was renewed again and again over the decades, because
Republicans kept violating it. In 2018, however, it expired, meaning that
2020 is the first election in which Republicans can intimidate with
abandon.

All the while, Mr. Trump happily plays the part of intimidator in chief.
He has urged his supporters to enlist in an �Army for Trump,� monitoring
polls. �A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,� Mr. Trump said
during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania. �We�re watching you,
Philadelphia. We�re watching at the highest level.�

Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people
participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when
those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as
possible. Yet today, one of the two major political parties is convinced
it cannot win on a level playing field � and will not even try.

What would a level playing field look like? For starters, it would have
more polling places, more early-voting days and shorter voting lines.
Since the Supreme Court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013,
almost 1,700 polling places have been shut down, most of them in the
states that had been under federal supervision for their past
discriminatory voting practices. It�s no surprise that voters in
predominantly Black neighborhoods wait 29 percent longer to cast ballots
than voters in white neighborhoods.

A fair election would mean giving all states the necessary funds to
implement automatic voter registration and to upgrade old voting machines.
It would mean allowing people with criminal records to vote as soon as
they have completed the terms of their sentences.

Many of these reforms have already been adopted in some states, and they
have enjoyed bipartisan support. In the case of early voting, some
Republican-led states are ahead of their Democratic counterparts. Georgia,
for example, has long offered many weeks of early voting � far better than
New York, which began the practice only last year, and for only 10 days.
(It�s worth noting that Georgia once had even more early-voting days.
Republican lawmakers cut them back by more than half after Black voters
started taking advantage of early voting in 2008.)

To help ensure that voting is easier for everybody, the federal government
needs to take action. Currently, there are two comprehensive voting-rights
bills in Congress, the Voting Rights Amendment Act and H.R. 1, also known
as the For the People Act. The first bill would update the old map the
Supreme Court invalidated in 2013 and would identify the states and
localities that are racially discriminating against their voters today,
requiring them to seek federal court approval before changing any election
laws.