As it talks ‘unity,’ GOP moves to destroy free election

A ballot drop box sits outside the city government center, Thursday, Oct. 5, 2023, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Elimination of convenient ballot drop boxes is a major goal of the Republican attack on voting rights. | Julie Jacobson/AP

As the Republican National Convention got underway Monday with talk of “unity” against the political violence for which it is actually responsible, the party is already well on its way to running a massive voter suppression campaign that dwarfs what it did four years ago.

If they succeed, it will be next to impossible to achieve victory for anti-MAGA candidates up and down the line, especially in key battleground states. In addition, Black and minority voters will see their ability to influence elections severely reduced and anti-labor candidates in general will see their prospects increased.

Two main features of the drive they have already launched are plans to restrict voting in key states and elsewhere and to disrupt certification of the vote across the country.

They plan to contest the 2024 election across the country and are already arguing that the election has already been rigged against Donald Trump. If Trump wins, of course, they will cease those challenges.

Republican activists, often led by key figures in the Trump effort to steal the 2020 election, are involved. They are working in close cooperation with the Republican National Committee. Unlike their efforts four years ago they are making a thorough search of every election process in all the key states to locate areas in which they can go to work to destroy democracy in those locations.

They are working to convince voters that the election is on the verge of being stolen and therefore they have to change the way results in those areas are certified. These efforts are underway where Democrats use mail voting, drop boxes, and voter registration drives to increase the strength of the progressive vote. The Republicans are particularly active in key battleground states where groups like the Poor People’s Campaign are running massive voter registration drives for poor and low-income voters.

Where those efforts are underway, they are convincing Republican local lawmakers to take over the certification process, removing it from the independent election inspectors now responsible.

Their main propaganda tactic has been to convince voters in these key locations that the prosecution of Trump for his crimes is nothing more than a Democratic attempt to manipulate the election against the MAGA forces.

“As it stands now, there’s zero chance of a free and fair election,” according to Mike Howell, a voter project director at the American Heritage Foundation, the pro-MAGA think tank now controlled by pro-Trump forces. They are leaders of the push to overturn election laws, particularly those involving certification of the votes.

Howell said, “I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most responsible politicians and officials in good conscience cannot certify an election.”

And on all the other election rules they’re also moving now. In Nevada and elsewhere, they are pushing laws that will restrict voting by mail, a key part of making elections in the country more democratic. In Georgia, they have filed lawsuits that will give local election boards controlled by Republicans, the right to hold up or deny certification.

Already some of those local boards have held up certification of local primary results in Nevada.

The overall effort, at the very least, is already laying the groundwork for the Trump campaign to dispute election results across the country.

The GOP voter suppression campaign underway now clearly has the potential to deal a severe blow to democracy. A wide variety of voting rights groups are mounting challenges, state by state, to the GOP effort.

The latest voter suppression campaign is yet another proof that the MAGA Republicans, as they conduct their convention in Milwaukee, have anything but the best interests of the people in mind.

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CONTRIBUTOR

John Wojcik

John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People's World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and '80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper's predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.