Even an inveterate liar like Donald Trump is capable of the occasional fugitive moment of honesty, however unintentional. The former president had just such an instant last spring, when he first began laying the foundation for the attacks on the integrity of the election that would, months later, lead to a deadly insurrection at the United States Capitol. Railing against proposals to ensure Americans could cast ballots safely in the pandemic, Trump in March betrayed the real reason efforts to expand the vote irked him so: “They had things,” he said, “levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Like much of what Trump says, this idea didn’t originate with him; it’s been implicit in the GOP’s longstanding efforts to suppress votes among likely Democratic constituencies, particularly those cast by Black Americans. What Trump did was to put it all more crudely, to be more obvious about it, and then to push it to its logical endpoint: An attempt to cling to power by force after literally demanding his vice president throw out millions of legally cast ballots in states he happened not to win. He’s recently been impeached for a second time over the ignoble episode and this week is once again facing conviction, with Democrats—and a few Republicans—hoping that some measure of accountability will keep such an outrage from playing out again in the future. But the GOP, the majority of which is likely to acquit him once more, seems to have its own ideas for preventing future insurrections: Steal the election before it gets to that point.
Dozens of states have continued to expand voting access following the 2020 election, which saw historic participation. But across the country, particularly in key battleground states Trump lost to Joe Biden, Republicans are mounting an equally powerful counter-campaign to restrict voting, with state legislatures—largely under GOP control—introducing more than 160 bills aimed at limiting ballot access just in the 2021 session alone. That’s more than four times the number of similar bills that had been proposed this time last year, according to a Brennan Center analysis released Monday. Republicans have framed the bills and laws, many of which involve mail-in voting and voter ID requirements, as a concerted effort to strengthen the electoral process against nonexistent mass voter fraud. “Heading into 2022, ensuring we have security and integrity in our election system is extremely important,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said earlier this month. But after an election with record historic turnout put Democrats in charge of the White House and Congress, the impetus behind the blitz of Republican voting legislation is obvious.
“The only reason they’re doing this is to make voting harder because they didn’t like the results,” attorney Marc Elias, who led the response to Trump’s slapstick legal challenges to last year’s election results, told the New York Times last week. “And that’s shameful.”
According to the Brennan report, 33 states have introduced legislation in the wake of the 2020 election that would roll back voting rights, including ones that target absentee ballots, impose or tighten existing voter ID requirements, and that could purge voters from registration rolls—measures that could disproportionately hurt voters of color. “It’s impossible to disentangle these efforts to restrict voting access with efforts to keep Black and brown voters from the ballot box,” Brennan Center attorney Eliza Sweren-Becker told NBC News recently.
The three states with the most anti-voting bills in the works? Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia—the three states Trump most aggressively attacked with his anti-democratic lies. Those lies weren’t always embraced by local officials—in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger resisted Trump’s stunning demand in January that he “find 11,780 votes” to lift him over Biden—but they form the basis for many of the bills currently under consideration, like the one a Republican introduced in Arizona that would allow the GOP-controlled state legislature to override the secretary of state’s certification of votes and allocate its electoral votes as it sees fit.
That notion that lawmakers can simply disregard the will of the people is an affront to the very idea of representative democracy. And yet Republicans no longer seem to be exerting so much effort trying to disguise their motives. One lesson Trump taught them is that they need not be so subtle about this kind of thing; much of the GOP base was emboldened, rather than turned off, by his increasingly audacious attacks on the electoral system. For a party that has no real platform and represents fewer Americans, and which apparently has no immediate interest in evolving, limiting or disregarding its opponents’ voters may be the most reliable path to power. Thanks to Trump, some of them may no longer be so shy about saying so. “They don’t have to change all of them,” a county-level election official in Georgia said of voting laws at a Republican meeting in January. “But they’ve got to change the major parts of them so that we at least have a shot at winning.”
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