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The Republican Party has been working on voter suppression since the 80s
Forty years ago Paul Weyrich, the influential conservative strategist who founded the Heritage Foundation told evangelical leaders, “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
In 1982, the Republican National Committee came under a court-ordered consent decree prohibiting it from engaging in voter-intimidation tactics aimed at communities of color—tactics designed to deprive Blacks of their right to vote. The decree was updated after further attempts at intimidation in 1987, and again in 1990. Despite more violations in 2004, federal courts let the decree expire in 2017. Freed from the decree, the RNC has plans to recruit up to 15,000 poll watchers in key states to challenge voters they deem suspicious, precisely the tactics that led to the original court order. True, intimidation is not really denying people their right to vote; it merely scares them from doing so.
The 5-4 conservative majority Supreme Court 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder gutted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the pre-clearance requirement for jurisdictions with a history of voter discrimination. That cleared the way for a flurry of laws enacted by Republican-controlled legislatures intended to reduce voter turnout, all in the name of preventing virtually non-existent voter fraud. One of the most egregious was North Carolina’s voter ID law, struck down by a federal appeals court for attempting to deny Blacks their right to vote with “almost surgical precision.”
Returning to the present day, the Trump campaign and the RNC are pouring millions of dollars into blocking Democratic attempts to make it easier to vote. The RNC fought all the way to the Supreme Court, but lost its suit to keep Rhode Island from removing witness requirements on its absentee ballots.
Indeed, the GOP is pursuing its legal strategy with “surgical precision.” Last week the Trump campaign and the RNC filed lawsuits in two Democratic-leaning Iowa counties that Trump lost by 40,000 votes in 2016, aimed at preventing election officials from easing the application process for absentee ballots. At issue: pre-populating the applications with the voter’s information to reduce rejection rates. The move could invalidate thousands of applications already returned. No lawsuit was filed in a third county that also pre-populated the applications. In that Republican-leaning county, Trump won in 2016 by 8,500 votes.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device
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