Tag: GOP has to cheat to win

‘Exploited the crazies’: How the GOP used Trump’s election lies to hide the fact that they’re losing power

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According to a report from the Guardian’s Sam Levine, Republicans who have always dabbled in playing to the red meat crowd are now ramping up their efforts to use that voting bloc to remain in power by disrupting and questioning election results.

Faced with changing demographics and states — – notably Arizona and Georgia — that were once reliably Republican but are now sending Democrats to Congress, Republicans are looking for ways to stop the bleeding as their power melts away.

According to Levine, Donald Trump just gave them the roadmap by blatantly saying the election was stolen from him — which has been well-received by more than just conservative extremists. Continue reading.

The GOP’s brazen move to strip power from a fraud-narrative-busting secretary of state — again

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Georgia Republicans earlier this year passed new voting restrictions, leading corporations including Major League Baseball to protest. What followed was a big to-do about whether that was an overreaction. The bill didn’t exactly match up with Democrats’ claims of a modern-day “Jim Crow,” and many of the new provisions were within the mainstream of even blue states.

But the bill was also watered-down from much-bolder proposals that had previously passed, including one transparently targeted at limiting voter drives by Black churches. Mix in the effort’s proximity to Republicans losing the state for the first time in 28 years — and to similar efforts in other GOP-controlled states despite no proof of actual, significant voter fraud — and it wasn’t difficult to draw conclusions about why this was done.

And there was perhaps one part of the law that best drove home how much this was aimed at gaming the system. It removed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) from the state election board. This effectively allowed the GOP-controlled state legislature to appoint a majority of the board. Continue reading.

Republicans eye new House majority through redistricting

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Republican state legislators see this year’s decennial redistricting process as a prime opportunity to gain House seats in next year’s midterms — with some believing those gains alone can help the GOP take back the majority.

Legislators are preparing for the most public redistricting process in American history. Both Democrats and Republicans stand ready to accuse each other of radical gerrymandering, while advances in technology give each side the chance to draw ideal districts that are both pleasing to the eye and politically favorable.

Republicans start with an advantage. Continue reading.

Democrats confront reality on voting rights: Congress probably isn’t coming to the rescue

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Asked about the path to enact new voting-rights laws, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has repeatedly offered a pat reply: “Failure is not an option.”

Faced with a barrage of new state laws aiming to restrict voting outside Election Day — pushed by Republican legislatures egged on by former president Donald Trump’s false claims of rampant fraud — most Democrats agree with Schumer that the need for a federal backstop is essential.

But failure is very much an option — it is, in fact, the most likely one. Continue reading.

Top Dem lawyer blasts CBS News: ‘Do you really need to both-sides democracy?’

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Attorney Marc Elias, who coordinates Democratic Party lawsuits to protect voting rights, blasted CBS News on Saturday. 

“Senate committee to hold markup on controversial voting bill,” read a headline by CBS News.

“The Senate Rules Committee will hold a markup Tuesday of the For the People Act, a massive voting and elections bill. Democrats claim the bill is necessary to counter new voting restrictions being considered by multiple states, while Republicans decry it as federal overreach,” reported Grace Segers Continue reading.

Here are 4 reasons why GOP voter suppression bills ‘may backfire’ and hurt Republicans more than Democrats: conservative

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If Republicans have a majority in a state legislature in the U.S. — or even if they don’t — chances are they are proposing some type of voter suppression bill in 2021. The obvious goal is to make it more difficult for Democrats to vote in the 2022 and 2024 elections. But journalist David Frum, a Never Trump conservative, considers this terrible policy on the part of Republicans —and in an article published by The Atlantic, Frum lays out “four specific ways that their voter suppression measures may backfire” and hurt Republicans more than Democrats.

Reason #1, according to Frum: “Voter suppression can countermobilize its targets.”

Frum explains, “Requiring extra paperwork, imposing burdensome identification requirements and facilitating lengthy queues on Voting Day are effective ways of dissuading people who are only weakly committed to the political process; they are less effective against people strongly committed to the process. But in the 2010s, Republicans repeatedly used voter suppression to elect politicians — including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and President Donald Trump — who proceeded to convert their opponents’ weakly committed supporters into strongly committed voters.” Continue reading.

Republicans Target Voter Access in Texas Cities, but Not Rural Areas

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In Houston, election officials found creative ways to help a struggling and diverse work force vote in a pandemic. Record turnout resulted. Now the G.O.P. is targeting those very measures.

HOUSTON — Voting in the 2020 election presented Zoe Douglas with a difficult choice: As a therapist meeting with patients over Zoom late into the evening, she just wasn’t able to wrap up before polls closed during early voting.

Then Harris County introduced 24-hour voting for a single day. At 11 p.m. on the Thursday before the election, Ms. Douglas joined fast-food workers, nurses, construction workers, night owls and other late-shift workers at NRG Arena, one of eight 24-hour voting sites in the county, where more than 10,000 people cast their ballots in a single night.

“I can distinctly remember people still in their uniforms — you could tell they just got off of work, or maybe they’re going to work; a very diverse mix,” said Ms. Douglas, 27, a Houston native. Continue reading.

As the voting-rights fight moves to Texas, defiant Republicans test the resolve of corporations that oppose restrictions

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As the battle over a new Georgia law imposing identification requirements for mail ballots and other voting limits raged this month, Republicans in Texas knew they would be next — and acted quickly to try to head off the swelling number of corporations that had begun to scrutinize even more restrictive proposals being considered there and around the country.

Gov. Greg Abbott angrily declined to throw the first pitch at the Texas Rangers’ home opener, accusing Major League Baseball, which had announced plans to pull its All-Star Game from Atlanta, of buying into a “false narrative” about Georgia’s new law. The next day, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick responded to an early trickle of corporate statements denouncing the proposals under consideration in Austin, calling the critics, including Texas-based American Airlines and Dell Technologies, “a nest of liars.”

“Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy,” Patrick said in a separate statement. Continue reading.

Maddow: Al Qaeda used to instruct terrorists to ram their cars into crowds — just like GOP bills now legalize

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Oklahoma and Florida legislatures have legalized running a car into a crowd of people if one feels “threatened.” It’s being called a get-out-of-jail-free card for white supremacists and terrorists who want to commit murder during a Black Lives Matter rally.

Ironically, Oklahoma experienced an incident in which a disgruntled student plowed into a crowd of people at the homecoming parade in 2015, killing two people. Oklahoma was also home to large, armed tea party rallies that could now be targeted thanks to the law. There are generally much larger and louder protests from the right-wing in Oklahoma than from Black Lives Matter protests. 

In Florida, they’ve essentially nullified the right to assemble when it comes to confederate statues, which will likely get the law thrown off the books. Still, an all-white Republican group of lawmakers cheered on the freedom they now have to kill Black Lives Matter activists. Continue reading.

How Voting Laws Suppress the ‘New South’

GOP-backed proposals to restrict voting are steadily gaining traction across the Sun Belt, aiming to slow the effects of ongoing demographic shifts that favor Democrats.

LOOKING BACK IN AN election cycle or two, it may be that the political and economic fallout gripping Georgia today over its controversial new voter law proves to have been a sign of an inevitable march toward a very different electoral map.

The next frontier in the battle over voting rights is already creeping toward other states across the South and the Sun Belt that have two things in common: They are all seeing a similar rapid demographic shift in their electorates that stands to reimagine the American political landscape. And they have entrenched political interests trying to stop it.

After a year of record turnout, especially among voters of color in Southern states, and a barrage of unfounded fraud claims propagated by the former president, GOP-led state legislatures are leading the charge to challenge and amend voting laws. They saw their first big success last month in Georgia. That sweeping law among other things imposes identification requirements for absentee ballots, limits ballot drop boxes and shortens runoff elections. Continue reading.