By the most objective measure, November’s presidential election was an overwhelming success for both major parties resulting in the largest voter turnout in American history by Democrats and Republicans. But every election has winners and losers. Republicans benefitted by hanging onto House and Senate seats they thought they’d lose. President Joe Biden did even better by beating the nationally divisive Donald Trump by a whopping seven million votes. Then Democrats gained control of the Senate by winning both Senate seats in Georgia.
That’s prompted an all-out nationwide attack on democracy by Republican state legislators to try to prevent such enormous numbers of Americans from ever voting again. The Brennan Center for Justice counted more than 250 Republican bills submitted to drastically restrict absentee voting and mail-in ballots, severely limit days of early voting and even reduce voting hours on Election Day.
Wisconsin will be protected from Saukville Republican State Sen. Duey Stroebel’s bill, crammed full of new obstacles to easy access to early voting or by any other method than by waiting in lines that will intentionally get longer on Election Day. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers will veto the bill if it passes and Republicans can’t override him. That makes massive state turnout in 2022 to elect Democrats and remove Republicans even more important.
Many other states don’t have such voting protections. Essentially, Republicans will continue doing everything they can to deny ballot access to tens of millions of Americans, just like their unAmerican president tried to do with his preposterous lawsuits claiming a landslide election was stolen from him. Those lawsuits were dismissed by state, federal and appellate courts including the U.S. Supreme Court because of his complete lack of any credible evidence.
Violating Voting Rights
Historians and election experts say if the current Republican assault on democracy succeeds, it would be the greatest destruction of American voting rights since the late-19th century. That was when Southern states began openly violating the 15th Amendment to disenfranchise black Americans with unconstitutional poll taxes, literacy tests and hundreds of terrorist lynchings. All those criminal practices didn’t really end until passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960s.
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The latest wave of Republican voting restrictions reflect the racism Trump supercharged in their party. Georgia’s attempt to roll back early voting on weekends specifically targets popular “Souls to the Polls” vote drives in black churches after Sunday services. The same goes for Georgia’s drastic reduction of polling locations in black neighborhoods that results in voters waiting in line up to 11 hours. Their latest cruel twist would outlaw providing water or snacks to anyone waiting in line to vote.
It’s not just Southern states with large black voting populations where Republicans discriminate against voters based on race. One of the most brazen was Trump’s failed Wisconsin lawsuit challenging the legality of votes cast in the state’s two most racially diverse, urban counties of Milwaukee and Dane while accepting the votes in the 70 other mostly white counties following exactly the same state voting procedures.
Uniform Standards
Most of the undemocratic attacks on voting rights in nearly every state would end with final adoption of H.R. 1, the For the People Act to create uniform national voting standards and end the corrupt political gerrymandering in states like Wisconsin that freakishly distort voting boundaries to guarantee a Republican majority in the Assembly even when most voters statewide vote for Democratic Assembly candidates.
Not a single Republican supported the bill in the House and none are expected to vote for it in the Senate. But the bill is actually non-partisan. It would prevent any partisan officials from redrawing legislative and congressional voting districts to benefit themselves or their parties. Independent, nonpartisan commissions would draw boundaries to best replicate the electorate statewide. The bill also incorporates the best voting practices nationally to assure access for every legitimate voter including same day voter registration on Election Day like Wisconsin provides for those infuriating times you show up where you always vote and find some bureaucratic error has eliminated your registration. Other protections are no-excuse absentee voting, at least 15 days of early voting before every election and restoration of voting rights for felons who’ve completed their punishment.
The Biden administration will have to reform Senate rules to allow more laws to be passed with a simple majority vote before Democrats can begin repairing the damage Republicans keep inflicting on democracy and the right to vote.
But now at least it’s possible to dream there will come a day when future generations in America, the World’s Greatest Democracy, will be shocked to learn there was once a time when the nation’s two major political parties were the pro-democracy party and the anti-democracy party. The hardest part to explain will be that the party leading a violent, unAmerican rebellion to overthrow a national election and destroy democracy called itself conservative.
