All you need to know about Republican voter suppression

Two numbers: 361 and 150,000

The first number, 361, is the number of voter suppression bills that have been proposed around the country, almost all in states with Republican controlled legislatures and Republican governors.  That’s how badly the Republican Party does not want people to have an easy time casting their votes.  The “small government” party, the party that’s against passing regulations and nuisance laws, the kinds of laws that make it an offense to display your registration sticker in the window of your car a half inch too low or too high, that party, the Republican Party, has put forth 361 bills regulating how you vote in this country. 

They’ve got bills that limit the number of places where you can register to vote, bills that limit the number of days before an election you can register, bills that regulate who can register voters, bills that make it a crime for a person registering voters to get the names wrong, or written on the wrong lines, or allowing a misspelling of a name to get through without being corrected.  They’ve got bills that limit the number of days for early voting, bills that stop early voting on Sundays in states where that has been possible for years, sometimes decades, bills that limit the number of voting locations in voting precincts, bills that provide for punishments if you cast your vote in the wrong precinct, bills that cut the number of hours voting locations are open on election day or on the days of early voting.  Bills that set up so many hurdles to voting that they make it likely that fewer people will end up registering to vote, and of those who are registered, fewer people who will actually go to the polls on election day.

They’ve got 361 of these bills pending nearly everywhere Republicans control the making of laws in states around the country.  Recently, the Republican governors of Georgia, Florida, and Arizona signed laws suppressing the vote in their states.  In Florida, the act of signing the bill into law was so partisan, so entirely Republican, that only Republicans were permitted to attend the bill signing, and only Fox News was permitted to cover Governor Ron DeSantis when he sat down and signed the bill.  All other news gathering agencies, networks, and newspapers were banned from the bill signing.

The other number you need to know is 150,000.  That’s the number of voters who will be disenfranchised by the bill just signed into law today in Arizona by Governor Doug Ducey, a member of the Republican Party, naturally.  Arizona has had voting by mail for more than 25 years.  Seventy-five percent of Arizonans vote by mail.  The system has worked very well for the state of Arizona until 2020, when it didn’t work so well for Republican candidates, namely Donald Trump, who lost to Joe Biden, and Senator Martha McSally, who lost to former astronaut and Democrat Mark Kelly.

The bill signed into law by Ducey will expunge people from the list of voters who automatically receive vote-by-mail ballots every election if they don’t vote in two consecutive elections. The bill will purge a voter from the vote-by-mail rolls even if the voter decides, for convenience or any other reason, to vote in person one election cycle, rather than voting by mail. Until now, you didn’t have to vote in every election to remain on the list of voters who receive mail in ballots.  You could skip as many elections as you want, and still the state would send you a ballot for the next election.  Voters who will likely be purged from the rolls are said by election experts to be people of color, the elderly, young people, students, and independent voters who do not automatically receive ballots for primary elections.

It is useful to have a look at the number of votes that decided the two elections Republicans lost last year.  Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden by 10,457 votes.  Martha McSally lost to Mark Kelly by 78,806 votes.  Both numbers are of course within the number of voters who will be purged from the rolls by the bill signed into law today in Arizona, and according to election experts in the state, most of the voters purged will likely be Democratic voters.

It is also useful to know that each of the states that just passed laws suppressing the right to vote were covered under the clause in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required so-called “pre-clearance” with the Department of Justice before the states could make these sorts of changes to their voting laws.  That was the clause that was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in its decision in Shelby County v. Holder in a 5-4 decision, with five justices appointed by Republican presidents voting to limit the reach of the Voting Rights Act, and four justices appointed by Democrats voting to uphold the act. 

One Supreme Court decision made all the Republican voter suppression laws possible…not just possible, but inevitable. These Republican bills aren’t about “election integrity” and “voter fraud.”  They’re about one party winning, specifically, Republicans winning, by disenfranchising voters of the other party, the Democratic Party.  They can’t win with their candidates like Donald Trump and Martha McSally, and they can’t win with their policies like cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans while making health insurance expensive for everyone else.  So they go after the votes of the opposition. 

They are dying as a political party, but in their death throes, Republicans are doing all the damage to democracy they can.