American democracy is in danger. And the danger is simple: the Republican Party has taken steps in several states to invalidate the votes cast after the elections. The majority party in that state then determines the outcome – and that party is the Republican.
A year after the storming of the Capitol to prevent the ratification of Joe Biden’s election victory, there are a range of laws and proposals that affect voting rights. The Brennan Institute, which has been tracking changes in electoral laws since 2011, counted the past year 19 passed laws in 34 states restricting the ability to vote for eligible voters – more than ever.
All of the new provisions in those laws stem from Donald Trump’s empty allegations of electoral fraud he lost to Biden. A large majority of Republican voters believe Trump. In a poll from December 71 percent of Republicans polled said Biden is “probably” or “definitely” not the rightful president.
The Brennan Center also saw a new trend this year: laws that subordinate elections to partisan bodies or officials. take the law passed by the Georgia Senate this year. In it, the directly chosen secretary of state relieved of his responsibility for the lawful conduct of the elections. In the law he has been replaced by a committee, composed mainly of members of the majority party. This new and party political committee may intervene on its own authority in the composition of local electoral councils.
Or read Bill HB 2720 filed in Arizona. A majority of the House of Representatives in that state may “any time before the president’s inauguration, the ratification of the election results by the secretary of state revoke”.
In Georgia and Arizona, the Republican Party has a majority at the state level. As in Florida, Kansas, Kentucky and Montana, all states that passed laws this year that give the majority party heavy powers to oversee the elections. If Republicans in those states actually take advantage of that, the 2020 presidential election will be the last fair US election for now.
death blow
Political scientists and legal scholars from various universities and institutes are sounding the alarm. Harvard constitutional lawyers Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die (2018), wrote in July in The Atlantic that “the great majority” of the Republican Party is now behaving “anti-democratic”. Leading expert on U.S. electoral law, Richard Hasen, a professor at the University of California, writes in an email that he is concerned about “the danger of the presidential election loser being declared the winner.” In the report A Democracy Crisis in the Making analyze three independent think tanks the new voting rights legislation after the elections – the report dates from April, with an addition from June. “If the losing side tries to override the will of the voter, it would be the death knell for our polity,” the authors write.
It is certainly not inconceivable that the Republicans are prepared to do so. The delegate who introduced the bill in Arizona, Shawnna Bolick, signed a resolution in December 2020 asking Congress to award the 11 Arizona electoral votes to Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, who won the state. The Republican Party in Georgia gave in June secretary of state Brad Raffensperger a formal reprimand. His mistake? He had refused to give in to pressure from then-President Trump, who asked him by phone in thinly veiled terms to falsify Georgia’s election results (“I just need to find 11,780 votes.”)
Bloodshed
The storming of the Capitol has shown Republican politicians that the most ardent supporters of the former president are prepared to use force to back up his empty accusations. It is one of the developments that Hasen is concerned about. He cites in an upcoming article in the Harvard Law Review Forum Republican Representative Madison Cawthorn, who said at a local party rally: “If our electoral system remains corrupt and stolen, there is only one outcome: bloodshed.”
Read also Elections in the US? You win it at the drawing board
Nothing is easier than pointing out the Capitol storming and instigator Trump as the causes of the democracy rot. But the anti-democratic current already existed in the Republican Party before Trump ran as a candidate in 2015. Political scientist Jacob Grumbach of the University of Washington saw in an analysis of American democracy only one significant link: in Republican-majority states, democracy was more likely to be eroded. At the time, it was particularly evident in the redesign of constituencies in favor of the party — a practice Democrats also use in majority-majority states — and in measures to discourage specific voter groups. As a minority party, Republicans benefit from limiting the number of voters – theirs tend to show up more faithfully than Democrats. After November 3, Trump gave this a new impetus. In the words of Richard Hasen, “He took an exhausting debate about voter fraud to a new level of delegitimizing the entire electoral process.”
Also read this reconstruction of the storming of the Capitol: The Day American Democracy Stumbled
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 6, 2022
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