“If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism,” predicted onetime Republican commentator David Frum.” They will reject democracy.”
That rejection of democracy is precisely where the party is headed. The repudiation of majority rule, in the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat, has escalated from its successful voter suppression techniques to what might be called “voter nullification” in preparation for the 2024 election.
In over 15 states, the Republicans are now moving decisively to undermine the popular vote in favor of Republican-led state legislatures and partisan officials making the call on the final winner in their states, Barton Gellman revealed in a much-discussed Atlantic article in its January/February 2022 issue. This is fundamentally aimed at assuring a Trump victory in 2024. The Republicans’ new drive to insert voter nullification provisions into election law threatens to “undo majority democracy for a very long time,” warns Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol.
“Voter nullification” proposals being widely considered mean that Republican legislators would declare that substantial fraud has occurred, and then substituting their partisan judgment that the losing candidate is actually the winner. Essentially, these proposals would serve to substitute rulings by partisan election officials and Republican-dominated legislatures, often where the GOP majorities have been crafted through glaring one-sided re-districting.
Georgia is one state where a version of this has already been passed. It removes Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger from the state election board, as he was tainted by his refusal to “find 11,780 votes” as Trump demanded. The new law permits the now-cleansed state election board to declare that some county is “under-performing” in scrutinizing for fraud, and then to replace local officials with election administrators who make the final decision. With enough counties judged to be deficient, the state’s victor could become the loster.
Bills for election nullification have been introduced in Missouri and Oklahoma, while Wisconsin US Sen. Ron Johnson is vigorously calling for a state takeover of federal elections.
The Atlantic’s Gellman calls this national Republican legislative campaign quite simply an effort to build “an apparatus for election theft.”
Similarly, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign director Matt Rothschild describes the current Republican movement set up to produce “elections so that partisan officials would be in charge and could decide who wins the election, even if it goes against the majority votes at the election … that’s not how our democracy is supposed to function.”
How did we arrive at this perilous moment for democracy? First, the Republican Party and its donors have increasingly come to view democracy as enabling dark forces to use majority rule to challenge established power centers and redistribute wealth. One revealing statement by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah):”Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
More immediately, Trump’s prolonged, incessant predictions of “fraud” eventually ignited a post-election prairie fire of outrage among his followers, exemplified by the Jan. 6 insurrection. A wave of fury roared across the nation, despite Joe Biden’s sizable 7-million popular vote edge, and the judgments that the election was free and fair by Attorney General William Barr, FBI director Christopher Wray, and United States Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Christopher Krebs.
Krebs called the 2020 vote “the most secure in American history.” Additionally, Trump lost an extraordinary 64 of 65 legal actions to challenge various facets of the director election count. But none of these official judgments testifying to a fair election matter to the 68% of Republicans who are impervious to evidence and fervently cling to the myth of an election snatched away from its rightful winner.
The Republican effort to turn back the results of a democratic election generated near-unanimous denunciations of the Jan. 6 coup attempt and the resulting deaths and mayhem-at least initially.
Where the Jan. 6 riot more generally generated fear and loathing despite the revisionist spin the right tried to pull off, the maneuverings of the Trump legal team inspired laughter and contempt.
However, despite their clumsy efforts to spread false “evidence” of fraud, Trump’s legal team and insiders gained a much clearer view of the democratic barriers that they must overcome to put Trump (or a clone) in the White House in the 2024 election.
“The legislatures that Republicans now control have in the past year become laboratories for legislation that would remove barriers that stood in the way of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 results,” the New York Times observed.
Under these plans, millions of votes cast by a state’s citizenry would be swept aside that, and electoral votes would be shifted to the Trump column. If this can be pulled off in a sufficient number of crucial swing states, Trump could be returned to power. Keep in mind that while Trump lost by some 7 million popular votes, Biden’s electoral-vote victory could have been turned around by redistributing 77,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. Flipping just a few key swing states can determine 2024’s ultimate result.
All the months of fraud accusation built up a tide of suspicion and rage about the “stolen” election generated demands for investigating voting methods and counts especially in swing states like Arizona, with a hunt for fraud still dragging on in Wisconsin. The constant allegations also generated a tidal wave of legislation – over 425 in 49 states at latest count — to restrict voting through every facet of the process, from limiting mail-in voting and voter drop-boxes, to more restrictive voter ID requirements, and the reduction of voting days and hours, among many others. Georgia gained wide notoriety as it banned the provision of free food and water to all comers (a measure later emulated under the increasingly dictatorial leadership of Hong Kong.)
“It’s like a perpetual motion machine — you create the fear of fraud out of vapors and then cut down on people’s votes because of the fog you’ve created,” said Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Instead, the Big Lie has fueled a widespread campaign that successfully enacted 33 laws in 19 states between Jan. 1 and Sept. 27 to make it harder to vote.
We can observe the Republicans pursuing two linked strategies: voter suppression and ballot nullification. Taken together, they are viewed by leading Republicans as a cure to a massive barrier to Republican power: the party has lost the popular vote in 7 of the 8 past presidential elections going back to 1992. The Republicans view about 47% of the voting public as dependent on government handouts, as Mitt Romney suggested in 2012, and that provides a huge and durable base upon which the Democrats can work to secure a majority.
The basic Republican perspective was expressed by the brilliant strategist Paul Weyrich, founder of the Moral Majority and the American Legislative Exchange Council:
“Many of our people [‘our Christians’] want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now,” Weyrich said.
“As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Voter suppression is aimed precisely at shrinking the “voting populace”, lopping off the votes of traditional Democratic constituencies like the poor, Blacks, Latinos, and college students. This is achieved through a range of methods, like requiring voter ID that these constituencies find hard to obtain, purging voter lists through ineffectual mailing procedures, cutting down the number of polling places, and limiting mail-in voting, among others.
Returning to the question of voter nullification, are there some institutional hurdles to this new strategy of what some analysts have called “election theft”?
Unfortunately, Republicans recent history suggest they will have no hesitancy about overturning the will of the voters, as amply witnessed.
One of the US Supreme Court’s most preeminent goals has been the preservation of democracy’s pillars, like the notion of majority rule. But the current court majority’s commitment to this idea is coming into question.
Going back to the 1800s, every state has given their electoral votes to the choice of their own voters. This automatically certifies electors who support the victor at the ballot box. “But in Bush v. Gore the Supreme Court affirmed that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors,” Gellman notes in his thorough analysis of anti-democratic threats.
In light of the Bush v. Gore ruling, the decision by the Supreme Court’s majority to uphold the Texas anti-abortion law looks like a significant step in the direction of “states’ rights.” The court’s ruling holds ominous implications for democracy, as it raises the prospect that states might be permitted to reject the historic model of voters directly choosing each state’s electors.
“This [approval of Texas anti-abortion law] is a brazen challenge to our federal structure,” declared Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “It echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to ‘veto’ or ‘nullify’ any federal law with which they disagreed.”
If the states are permitted to void rights established for the nation as a whole, what’s to prevent this precedent from being applied to elections?
Thus, the future of authentic democracy for America is literally on the table right now.
In the words of Zachary Roth, author of “The Great Suppression,” the Republicans are fiercely determined to to repudiate majority rule and test the premise that “being outnumbered doesn’t have to mean losing.”-
This prospect can only be headed off by a forceful campaign by Democrats and progressives to show that the genuine democracy is on the line as we head for 2022 and 2024.
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based labor studies instructor and and writer and former editor of the Racine Labor weekly. Email winterbybee@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2022
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us