Tag: GOP has to cheat to win

GOP Strategy Combines Voter Suppression With Hypocrisy

Like many of the other distortions, deceptions and outright lies in which the Republican Party has engaged, its flagrant fabrications about “voter fraud” have been exposed for what they are: a desperate attempt to hold on to power. For decades now, Republicans have undertaken a far-reaching effort to suppress the vote among constituencies that tend to vote for Democrats: voters of color, the poor, the young.

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends widespread voting by mail to help curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, Republicans — including the president — are engaged in an all-out campaign to prevent voting by mail. The GOP knows that any initiative that makes it easier to cast a ballot will result in more ballots cast. Any genuine patriot — any American who sincerely believes in the ideals of the U.S. Constitution — should want that, right?

Nope. While some Republicans still manage to express their efforts to suppress the vote with less explicit rhetoric — using claims of “protecting the integrity of the ballot” as an excuse — President Donald J. Trump cannot manage the same discipline. In a recent call to one of his favorite propaganda outlets, Fox and Friends, Trump complained about Democratic efforts to expand alternatives to showing up physically at a polling place on a single, specific day. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” he said about initiatives that were removed from a stimulus bill because of GOP objections. Continue reading.

Why Republicans Are So Afraid of Vote-by-Mail

New York Times logoPublic health officials recommend absentee ballots to keep people safe. But President Trump and his party, without evidence, portray expanded voting measures as ripe for fraud.

President Trump and his Republican allies are launching an aggressive strategy to fight what many of the administration’s own health officials view as one of the most effective ways to make voting safer amid the deadly spread of Covid-19: the expanded use of mail-in ballots.

The scene Tuesday of Wisconsinites in masks and gloves gathering in long lines to vote, after Republicans sued to defeat extended, mail-in ballot deadlines, did not deter the president and top officials in his party. Republican leaders said they were pushing ahead to fight state-level statutes that could expand absentee balloting in Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona and elsewhere. In New Mexico, Republicans are battling an effort to go to a mail-in-only primary, and they vowed on Wednesday to fight a new move to expand postal balloting in Minnesota.

The new political effort is clearly aimed at helping the president’s re-election prospects, as well as bolstering Republicans running further down the ballot. While his advisers tend to see the issue in more nuanced terms, Mr. Trump obviously views the issue in a stark, partisan way: He has complained that under Democratic plans for national expansion of early voting and voting by mail, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Continue reading.

Trump Fans Flooded Iowa Caucus Hotline, Democrats Say

Supporters of President Donald Trump flooded a hotline used by Iowa precinct chairs to report Democratic caucus results after the telephone number was posted online, worsening delays in the statewide tally, a top state Democrat told party leaders on a conference call Wednesday night.

According to two participants on the call, Ken Sagar, a state Democratic central committee member, was among those answering the hotline on caucus night and said people called in and expressed support for Trump. The phone number became public after people posted photos of caucus paperwork that included the hotline number, one of the people on the call said.

The phone call Wednesday night between the Iowa Democratic Party staff and state central committee, the party’s elected governing body, came as the party was still counting results. Continue reading.

The decade Republicans hijacked our democracy — via the gerrymander

AlterNet logoAs this decade comes to a close, 59 million Americans live in a state where one or both chambers of the state legislature is controlled by the party that got fewer votes in the 2018 election.

In Wisconsin in 2018, voters elected a Democratic U.S. senator, defeated an incumbent Republican governor, picked Democrats for every statewide office, and favored Democratic candidates for the state assembly by more than 200,000 ballots. Republicans nevertheless controlled more than 63 percent of the seats.

We end the 2020s with voter purges in Ohio, Wisconsin and Georgia, with precinct closures weaponized to lower voter participation across the South, with Texas, Tennessee and Florida making it harder to register new voters. The ball drops on the 2010s with state legislatures in Florida, Michigan and Missouri willing to undo voting reforms approved by upwards of 60 percent of the people via initiative. Continue reading

A judge ordered up to 234,000 people to be tossed from the registered voter list in a swing state

Washington Post logoA Wisconsin judge ordered the state to take as many as 234,000 people off its registered-voter list Friday because they may have moved — a decision that could impede residents of this swing state from voting in next year’s presidential election.

The case centers on a letter that the state Elections Commission sent in Octoberto hundreds of thousands of voters, asking them to respond if they were still at that address or to update their registrations if they had moved.

Conservatives filed a lawsuit alleging that to avoid fraud, the commission should have thrown out the registrations of voters who did not respond to the mailing within 30 days, the Associated Press reported. The Elections Commission, composed of three Republicans and three Democrats, is challenging the suit by arguing that it has the legal power to manage the registered voter list and that removing people now would cause confusion if some of them had not actually moved.

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