There’s an old farm saying, “Once the horses are gone, it’s too late to close the barn door”. And that’s true about a lot of things in life. Something that might have been easy to prevent before it happened, might be impossible to fix after. But there is a corollary saying, “Don’t make the same mistake twice”. So while “closing the barn door” may be foolish once the horses are gone, it’s good to not let the new horses get out the next time.
At least that seems to be the view of the Republican Party in Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia.
Gerrymander
Over the past decade (and more) the Republican Party had a national plan to maintain political control. It started with making a concerted effort to gain control of state legislatures in 2010, in order to be in charge of the redistricting process. This was when the district boundary lines for state and federal legislative districts were last drawn. And in the old American tradition, dating back almost to the founding of the Republic, the lines were carefully drawn to maximize the number of Republican legislators, and minimize the Democratic representatives.
The traditional name for this is Gerrymandering, named for Elbridge Gerry who as Governor of Massachusetts in 1811, drew a district so convoluted that it resembled a salamander. The newspapers called it a “Gerrymander”, and so a man who signed the Declaration of Independence, was a part of the Constitutional Convention, and served in the House of Representatives, as a Governor and Vice President of the United States, is best known for manipulating district lines for political advantage.
The Republican RedMap project brought modern computer technology to bear, creating exquisitely drawn maps down to the block and address. The gerrymandered districts maximized the Republican advantage with technological precision. (By the way, Democrats did this too when they had the advantage, in Maryland for example, but without the national planning of the Republicans).
There was nothing illegal about the RedMap plan, nor gerrymandering, nor using computers to make the districts even better. It was, to quote Hamilton, “…how the game is played…how the sausage gets made”. The RedMap project just was better at making this particular sausage than anything before.
Voter Suppression
But the Republican Party also made another tactical decision that had a more profound impact on America. After the Presidential election loss of 2012, the Party did a study of why they lost, an “autopsy” of the election. They determined that unless the voting base of the GOP was expanded to include more minorities and women, they would become a permanent minority Party. But those that wanted to follow-up the “autopsy” with action to expand their base were also in the minority of the decision makers.
There was a corollary plan to that as well. If fewer minorities voted, than the impact of those votes would be reduced. So the Republican Party went on a campaign to keep people from voting. They called it “securing the vote” but it really was a concerted effort at voter suppression.
The first phase was to create an issue with election security. Traditionally, voter cheating in the United States has been miniscule. Most of the election fraud in the US has been by the people counting the votes, not the voters themselves. There have been forty-four voter fraud cases in the US since 2000, out of over a billion votes cast. That’s a rate of 0.0000044% (NPR). But if Americans could be convinced that voter fraud was rampant, then restrictive Voter ID laws requiring the presentation of state issued identity cards could be enacted.
Voter ID laws reduce minority voter participation. But that wasn’t enough. In addition, restricting opportunities to vote impacted minority voting, as well as reducing the number of polling places available. It was logical. Restrict voting hours, cut the number of poll locations, make sure the lines were long, and folks working a “day job”didn’t have time to vote.
They Can’t Vote – We Win
And it worked, and is still working. Georgia was a prime example. In 2016 lines at the Atlanta inner-city polls stretched so long it took over ten hours to vote. Many voters left, and many didn’t even try. This wasn’t an accident, or some surprise. This was a concerted Republican strategy to keep minority voters from casting their vote.
After the 2018 election, when the same situation resulted in the election of Republican Brian Kemp as Governor, his opponent Democrat Stacy Abrams made it her “life mission” to increase minority participation. Her “Fair Fight” program registered voters, pressed for more polling locations with extended hours, and relaxed Georgia’s restrictive absentee ballot laws. And then COVID struck, and Georgia (reasonably) made mail-in voting even easier to make voting safer during the pandemic.
What happened? Joe Biden won Georgia in the 2020 Presidential election. And, as states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania increased mail-in voting opportunities in response to COVID, Biden also won those. It might have taken a world pandemic to do it, but, from the Republican standpoint, the barn door was wide open.
Try as Donald Trump might, there’s no getting that horse back in the barn. But Republicans are now moving to reinstate the restrictions that kept their minority party in control. The Republican Georgia legislature has already tried to change the voting rules for the January 5th runoff election for US Senator in the state.
The GOP has made a choice to be a Party of exclusion. It’s going to take a lot more “barn door closing” in the next couple of years to maintain their power. And that, combined with the Trump myth of massive voter fraud, is about as anti-democratic as they can get.
