Republicans Want ‘Election Police’ To Keep Blacks From Voting, Just Like The Ku Klux Klan Post-Reconstruction

The New York Times reports, Republicans Want New Tool in Elusive Search for Voter Fraud: Election Police:

Reprising the rigged-election belief that has become a mantra among their supporters, Republican politicians in at least three states are proposing to establish police forces to hunt exclusively for voter fraud and other election crimes, a category of offenses that experts say is tiny at best.

The plans are part of a new wave of initiatives that Republicans say are directed at voter fraud. They are being condemned by voting rights advocates and even some local election supervisors, who call them costly and unnecessary appeasement of the Republican base that will select primary-election winners for this November’s midterms and the 2024 presidential race.

The next round of voting clashes comes after the apparent demise of Democratic voting rights legislation in Washington on Thursday. It is a reminder that while the Democratic agenda in Washington seems dead, Republican state-level efforts to make voting harder show no sign of slowing down.

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Critics say the efforts can easily be abused and used as political cudgels or efforts to intimidate people from registering and voting. And Democrats say the main reason Republican voters have lost faith in the electoral system is because of the incessant Republican focus on almost entirely imagined fraud.

The most concrete proposal is in Florida, where Gov. Ron “DeathSantis” asked the State Legislature last week for $5.7 million to create a 52-person “election crimes and security” force in the secretary of state’s office. The plan, which Mr. DeSantis has been touting since the fall, would include 20 sworn police officers and field offices statewide.

That was followed on Thursday by a pledge by David Perdue, the former Georgia senator who is a Republican candidate for governor, to create his own force of election police “to make Georgia elections the safest and securest in the country.” Mr. Perdue, who lost his Senate seat in 2020, claimed that Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who is seeking re-election, weakened election standards and refused to investigate claims of fraud following President Biden’s narrow win in the state.

And in Arizona, a vocal supporter of former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about a stolen election, Oath Keeper insurrectionist State Senator Wendy Rogers, has filed legislation to establish a $5 million “bureau of elections” in the governor’s office with the power to subpoena witnesses and impound election equipment.

Ms. Rogers’s bill probably faces an uphill road in the Legislature, where Republicans are only narrowly in control and have been battered for their support of a widely ridiculed multimillion-dollar inquiry into 2020 election results. Prospects for the Florida and Georgia proposals are less clear.

Oh, New York Times. You vastly underestimate the depravity of authoritarian Republicans in the Arizona Legislature.

The proposals are the latest twist in a decades-long crusade by Republicans against virtually non-existent election fraud that has grown rapidly since Mr. Trump’s election loss in 2020 and his false claim that victory was stolen from him.

[N]one of the three states — and for that matter, none of the other 47 and the District of Columbia — reported any more than a minuscule number of election fraud cases after the 2020 races. Mr. DeSantis said after the 2020 vote that his was “the state that did it right and that other states should emulate.” The only notable hint of irregularity in Florida was the recent arrest on fraud charges of four men in a retirement complex [The Villages] north of Orlando. At least two of them appeared to be winter Floridians accused of casting ballots both there and in more frigid states to the north.

But Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Perdue say their strike forces are still needed to root out other election irregularities and to bolster their constituents’ sagging faith in the honesty of the vote. The same rationale has powered so-called audits of election results and clampdowns on election rules by Republican-run legislatures across the country.

Sweeping election-law revisions enacted by Florida and Georgia legislators last spring sharply limit the use of popular drop boxes for submitting absentee ballots, require identification to obtain mail-in ballots, make it harder to conduct voter-registration drives, and restrict or ban interactions — such as handing out snacks or water — with voters waiting in line to cast ballots.

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Mr. Trump comfortably won Florida by about 370,000 votes in 2020, and his narrow losses in Arizona and Georgia were confirmed by expert audits, recounts and even the notorious Cyber Ninjas inquiry into the vote in Maricopa County.

“We don’t need further investigations into elections that are freely and fairly conducted,” said Alex Gulotta, the Arizona director of the advocacy group All Voting Is Local. “We’ve established that again and again and again. This is more pablum to the people who believe in fraud and conspiracy theories and lies that the last election was stolen.”

Neither the new laws nor election autopsies appear to have shaken the conviction of many Trump supporters that the election system is suspect. Some scholars say they see the police forces as the latest bid by politicians to scratch that itch.

[T]he idea of an election police force is not new, even in the states where they are being proposed. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger already oversees 23 investigators whose purview includes election irregularities, and an assistant state attorney general exclusively prosecutes crimes in elections, the judiciary and local governments. The Arizona attorney general manages a relatively new “election integrity” investigative unit [which does nothing], and Florida election violations are prosecuted by both state and local authorities, as is true in most states.

The Times is correct, the idea of an election police force is not new. For many years there was a consent decree in place against the Republican Party for its voter intimidation practices. The National Ballot Security Task Force (BSTF) was a controversial group founded in 1981 in New Jersey, by the Republican National Committee (RNC) as a means of intimidating voters and discouraging voter turnout among likely Democratic voters in the gubernatorial election. The task force consisted of a group of armed, off-duty police officers wearing armbands, who were hired to patrol polling sites in African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods of Newark and Trenton. Armed members of the Task Force “were drawn from the ranks of off-duty county deputy sheriffs and local police,” who “prominently displayed revolvers, two-way radios, and BSTF armbands.” BSTF patrols “challenged and questioned voters at the polls and blocked the way of some prospective voters” in predominantly African-American and Hispanic areas.

A civil lawsuit was filed after the election by the DNC, which alleged that the RNC had violated the Voting Rights Act and engaged in illegal harassment and voter intimidation. The suit was settled in 1982, when the Republican National Committee and New Jersey Republican State Committee, instead of a trial, signed a consent decree in U.S. District Court saying that they would not allow tactics that could intimidate Democratic voters, though they did not admit any wrongdoing. In January 2018, a federal court lifted the consent decree barring the Republican National Committee from pursuing “ballot security” measures. The Republican Party Emerges From Decades of Court Supervision. A new GOP voter intimidation organization called True the Vote picked up where the RNC left off with the rise of the Tea Party in 2010. The Ballot Cops.

Barrett Holmes Pitner writes at The Daily Beast, The Klan Was the Original ‘Election Police’:

Days after blocking the advancement of vital voting rights legislation and corrupting the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Republican politicians are advancing their undemocratic agenda by advocating for the creation of “election police.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is asking for $5.7 million to create an Office of Election Crimes and Security. In Georgia, former senator and gubernatorial candidate David Purdue promises a new Election Law Enforcement Division. Other Republicans pushing Trump’s Big Lie are sure to follow.

They aren’t breaking new ground, but joining a long tradition of dressing up efforts to suppress and intimidate Black voters as somehow protecting the integrity of our American democracy.

A tipping point of the 1960s voting rights movement was the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965. Dr. Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and voting rights activists marching from Selma, Alabama, to the state’s capital were infamously attacked on what’s come to be known as “Bloody Sunday” by Southern police led by Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, the president of the Alabama Public Service Commission. Americans nationwide saw for themselves as Connor’s goons attacked citizens protesting non-violently with bully clubs, dogs, and militarized vehicles. Lewis nearly died in the confrontation.

That August, the Voting Rights Act became law, and Black Americans could finally vote without the threat of government-sponsored or -sanctioned terrorism—that is, the voting police.

This week, Senate Republicans voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that would have restored voting rights protections created by the 1965 legislation but removed by John Roberts’ Supreme Court in 2013, on the bizarre premise that racial disparities were no longer a problem. With those protections gone, conservative politicians in the South are again trying to militarize and police voting.

This was all too predictable to anyone who knows American history, and part of the Republican Party’s anti-Democratic agenda is to ensure that much of that history is ignored or forgotten. It’s good that many Americans know about the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but more of them should know about Edmund Pettus, a white terrorist and politician from Alabama.

Pettus, born in Alabama in 1821, was a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. Following the Civil War, he was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson along with thousands of other Confederates, and upon obtaining his freedom he became a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

From its inception, the Klan’s main purpose was to return, or “redeem,” the South to its pre-Civil War, antebellum status quo. The group existed to suppress newly emancipated Black voters and America’s first civil rights acts, known as the Force Acts, were created to outlaw the Klan and similar groups so that Black Americans could vote without the threat of terrorism.

Pettus’ status as a Grand Dragon reveals how the Klan was never the ragtag group of powerless, disgruntled Southerners that it sometimes presented itself as, but was actually led by the elites of Southern society and those with military experience. During Reconstruction, Pettus had his own law practice in Selma and was also the Alabama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Publicly, he helped the Democratic Party—in the 1860s the Democrats opposed voting rights—select their presidential candidates while privately he undermined democracy and orchestrated terrorism.

The Klan, the White League, and other domestic terrorist groups in the South, collaborated with “Redeemer” politicians and law enforcement to undermine American democracy and help Americans who opposed the expansion of voting rights win elections and maintain power. Sometimes, voter suppression would be enough for a Confederate sympathizer to win an election, but when that failed, America’s white terrorists would launch coups d’état claiming voter fraud and that the election had been stolen from them.

On Sept. 14, 1874, near the end of Reconstruction, the White League attacked the Louisiana state house, then in New Orleans, and took control of the government for three days after they refused to admit defeat in the 1872 gubernatorial elections where pro-voting rights Republican politician William Kellogg defeated the Redeemer-Democrat John McEnery, and a Black man, Caesar Carpentier Antoine, was elected lieutenant governor. Federal troops were forced to intervene to reclaim control and defeat the White League.

Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the Republican Party’s false claims of election fraud echo the Redeemers’ undemocratic, terrorist agenda.

As part of their dystopian agenda, Southerners after Reconstruction consciously named and re-named roads, bridges, and landmarks after treasonous, seditious Confederate “heroes,” and erected statues and monuments to celebrate the Confederacy. In 1891, Redeemers in New Orleans created the Battle of Liberty Place Monument to celebrate the terrorist coup d’état in 1874, and there was outrage from Republicans when the monument was finally removed in 2017.

In 1877, three years after the White League’s coup, Reconstruction came to an abrupt end and former Confederates quickly regained control of state governments across the South. Redeemer politicians then created poll taxes and literacy exams to suppress the Black vote, and advocated for “separate but equal” policies. They had a political agenda that created racist outcomes without racist language, and by the start of the 1900s their agenda had created Jim Crow in the South.

In 1897, Pettus was elected to the U.S. Senate, and represented Alabama until his death in 1907. In 1940, the Edmund Pettus Bridge was named after him.

Black people in the South were forced to live in a world named after people whose mission in life had been to oppress Black people.

This is our basic history and, unsurprisingly, today’s Republicans want to make sure it’s not what Americans learn in school. DeSantis is even pushing a bill that would ban the teaching of history that could cause white Floridians “discomfort.”

If Republicans can prevent Americans from knowing our own history, Americans will remain surprised and unprepared when Republicans use the oppressive tactics of the past to take away our rights and freedoms in the present.

As Colbert King wrote in 2020, “When it comes to voter suppression, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the goals of the post-Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan and the intention of today’s Donald Trump Republicans. Their common endeavor? Make it harder for people of color to vote.” When it comes to suppression of Black votes, it’s the 19th century all over again.