The GQP ‘Voter Fraud’ Fraud Behind Jim Crow 2.0 Voter Suppression Bills

The conservative Confederate Heritage Foundation’s database of purported fraud cases includes only one example of criminal charges centered on fraud in the general election last year: a case in which a father signed his daughter’s ballot while she was at college.

One friggin’ case – an epic failure of the GQP “voter fraud” fraud we have all had to endure every election cycle for decades.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post reports, new Research undercuts idea that changes to absentee voting in 2020 benefited Democrats:

For decades, Republicans have used nebulous allegations of fraud to advocate for changing voting rules in ways that tend to disproportionately disadvantage Democratic voters. At times they have been explicit in trying to lock out more Democrats. In the current moment, though, the offered arguments are different, using the same vagueness that Trump is using to rationalize losing to provide their own rationalizations for changes to existing laws. Often, those are framed as being necessary to prevent purported “fraud”; at other times, the changes are instead offered as a way to address “concerns” voters have about election security, concerns Republicans and Trump themselves amplified.

It’s become something of a legislative protection racket: [falsely] claim that there’s a threat and then offer to address the threat. [A solution in search of a nonexistent problem.] The result? Changes to laws that add restrictions to the ability to vote, particularly by mail.

Research from a team at Public Policy Institute of California offers a useful bit of context for those changes. It determined that the expansion of mail-in voting in 2020 often didn’t have a significant effect on turnout, with the exception of states that directly mailed ballots to voters. What’s more, the research found that there was no net benefit to Democrats from the changes relative to prior elections — and, in fact, that there may have been a small advantage for Republicans.

In a phone call with The Washington Post, one of the study’s authors — PPIC senior fellow Eric McGhee — explained the results of the research. The team considered not only mailed ballots but also mailed-ballot applications, and the elimination of excuse requirements for seeking a ballot. Only the first change yielded a significant effect.

“What we found was that mailing every voter a ballot actually has a pretty substantial positive effect on total turnout. It definitely boosts turnout,” he said. “That’s the one thing from the study that is robust across a wide range of different slices of the problem.”

Yet even that change doesn’t appear to have benefited Democrats, despite Trump’s insistences. The graph below, from the team’s report, shows that the relative Democratic vote share was down in 2020 across the methods of voting.

“You can’t count on these reforms to produce a partisan result in one way or the other,” McGhee said, summarizing their findings. “It certainly just doesn’t benefit Democrats, and it probably doesn’t benefit either party.”

“Would I go and counsel somebody who was trying to increase turnout to mail every voter a ballot? Absolutely,” he said at another point. “Would I go and counsel the GOP that they should adopt all these reforms so that they can improve their performance? No, because I think it’s too tentative, that finding.”

Republican performance, of course, was the heart of Trump’s complaints (specifically his own) and remains the subtext for many of the changes being advocated. There are unquestionably some Republican officials who think that election security is uncertain, despite the lack of evidence to that effect. Others, though, see this as another opportunity to effect changes that will benefit the party by reducing the number of Democratic-leaning voters.

“I understand why the parties, on both sides, why Democrats may think that they can improve their chances by having more people vote; Republicans think they can improve their chances by not having as many people vote,” McGhee said during our call. “Really, I think the better way to think about these reforms is: Do you want more people to vote or not?”

The answer to that is abundantly clear, The toxic elitism of declaring voters to be unworthy of the task (excerpt):

What emerged [from Trumpism] was an odd sort of alternative elitism. At his rallies, Trump would often proclaim that he and his supporters were the real elites, the cream of the American crop representing what the country was supposed to be, better than some jerk writing for The Washington Post. It was a sort-of ironic formulation, given who we generally consider to be “elite,” but like so many things in the Trump era it captured an actual sentiment. Trump supporters often viewed themselves as better Americans than his opponents, as more patriotic if not more pure. If “elite” simply means “the best,” they were, in their own understanding, the American elite.

This idea that there are good, valid Americans and bad, tainted ones permeates a lot of the current conversation. A poll released in February found that most Republicans see Democrats not as political opponents but as enemies, a group that poses a danger to the country. Most Republicans say they believe that Joe Biden only won election last year because of voter fraud, an obviously ridiculous assertion for which there’s no evidence — but one that overlaps with a sense that the political left is dangerous, dishonest and toxic.

In November, 81.3 million Americans voted to elect Biden president, nearly 10 percent more than the number who voted for Trump.

That so many more voters rejected Trump than supported him poses a bit of a conundrum for those who believe that they are the true political elite. How does one reconcile the un-Americanness of the left with the idea that so many more Americans preferred the candidate representing that position? One answer that’s newly in vogue: Those voters are somehow not worthy of voting, muddying up and misdirecting the system.

[B]arriers are fine if they prevent the wrong sorts of voters from voting. It was the motivating rationale for literacy tests that blocked Black voters from casting ballots in the South 75 years ago. That non-White Americans vote so much more heavily Democratic means it’s difficult to extricate systems that disadvantage Democrats from ones that disadvantage non-Whites, and vice versa. The result is that partisan motivations can often seem like racist ones.

Because they are.