3/30/21
The most outrageous provision of the
Election Integrity Act of 2021, the omnibus election bill signed by Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia last week, is one that makes it illegal for anyone except poll workers to offer food or water directly to voters standing in line. Defenders of the law say that this is meant to stop electioneering at the polls; critics say it is a direct response to volunteers who assisted those Georgians, many of them Black, who waited for hours to cast their ballots in the 2020 presidential election. Less outrageous but more insidious is a provision that removes the secretary of state from his (or her) position as chairman of the State Election Board and replaces him with a new nonpartisan member selected by a majority of the Georgia’s Republican-controlled Legislature. The law also gives the board the power to suspend underperforming county election officials and replace them with a single individual.
This is what it looks like when a political party turns against democracy. It doesn’t just try to restrict the vote; it creates mechanisms to subvert the vote and attempts to purge officials who might stand in the way. Georgia is in the spotlight, for reasons past and present, but it is happening across the country wherever Republicans are in control. Last Wednesday Republicans in Michigan introduced bills to limit use of ballot drop boxes.
Republican lawmakers in Arizona, another swing state, have also introduced bills to limit absentee voting in accordance with the former president’s belief that greater access harmed his campaign. One Arizona Republican, John Kavanagh, a state representative, gave a sense of the party’s intent when he told CNN, “Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues.” In other words, Republicans are using the former president’s failed attempt to overturn the election as a guide to how you would change the system to make it possible. In Georgia, as we’ve seen, that means stripping power from an unreliable partisan and giving it, in effect, to the party itself.
This fact pattern underscores a larger truth: that the Republican Party is driving the nation’s democratic decline. The Republican Party’s turn against democratic participation and political equality is evident in more than just these bills and proposals. You can see it in how Florida Republicans promptly instituted difficult-to-pay fines and fees akin to a poll tax. If Republicans are building the infrastructure to subvert an election — to make it possible to overturn results or keep Democrats from claiming electoral votes — then we have to expect that given a chance, they’ll use it.
