Republican Voter Suppression Quotes

Using the targeted power of the criminal justice system as a tool of voter suppression meant that five times as many registered Democrats as Republicans were disfranchised. And for that, the nation paid dearly.

This is where racism becomes strategically useful. Whatever the Koch movement operatives (which now include many Republican politicians) believe in their hearts about race, they are comfortable with deploying strategic racism because popular stereotypes can help move unpopular ideas, including limiting democracy. Take for example the widespread unconscious association between people of color and criminals; anti-voting advocates and politicians exploited this connection to win white support for voter suppression measures. They used images of brown and Black people voting in ads decrying “voter fraud,” which has been proven repeatedly to be virtually nonexistent and nonsensical: it’s hard enough to get a majority of people to overcome the bureaucratic hurdles to vote in every election; do we really think that people are risking jail time to cast an extra ballot? Nonetheless, the combination of the first Black president and inculcation through repetition led to a new common sense, particularly among white Republicans, that brown and Black people could be committing a crime by voting. With this idea firmly implanted, the less popular idea—that politicians should change the rules to make it harder for eligible citizens to vote—becomes more tolerable.

Each has Republicans losing the Electoral College from 2024 to 2036.2 These trends have been evident for over two decades, and as someone who has sat in the room for five presidential campaigns and tried to figure out how to get a Republican candidate over the 270 mark, the math has been increasingly oppressive. The obvious choice for the party was to expand its appeal beyond white voters. That diagnosis was as obvious as telling a patient with lung cancer to quit smoking. But at the same time, Republicans were taking steps to change the electoral math by making it harder for nonwhites to vote. In this, they were continuing a long tradition of efforts by powerful white politicians to remain in power by suppressing votes.

If America were a house, they’d be the termites. It’s that bad,” said Georgia Republican and voter database expert Mark Davis about the lawfare engaged in fighting against voting integrity laws. Long before COVID-19, the Democratic Party of Georgia, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sued Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in November 2019 to get him to water down the state’s requirements for checking signatures on mail-in ballots.57 Governor Kemp, under pressure from Democratic groups alleging voter suppression, had already signed a law earlier in 2019 that relaxed signature requirements and made it more difficult to reject ballots for signature mismatch or other ballot problems. Elias, who was leading the lawsuits, wanted the requirements relaxed even more.58

Death threats. Gag laws. Book banning. Secret informants. Voter suppression and election intimidation. Vows to imprison political opponents.

The media, polling, and Big Tech rigging alone would have been enough to cause Republicans to doubt any election loss, but what Democrats did to the manner in which people vote was further destabilizing to the country... Long-standing historical concerns about the integrity of elections led to the development of a single Election Day, a secret ballot, and governmental running of elections--all developments that went a long way toward building up trust in America's electoral process. In recent years, Democrats have lobbied to move away from each of those things, saying that efforts to stop them from doing so were 'voter suppression.' In the months leading up to 2020, Democrats were able to convince legislators, courts, and election officials to open elections up to ballot trafficking, voting without showing identification, voting without following state laws or guidelines, and counting ballots without oversight from independent observers. Meager checks on fraud, such as signature matching, were watered down to the point of meaninglessness...And then Democrats tried to make permanent all of the radical changes they had made by passing legislation to ban voter ID, legalize vote trafficking weaken absentee voter verifications, and make it more difficult to keep updated lists of voters.

what do African Americans get in return for our loyalty? Very little. Democrats do not champion black causes with the same passion that Republicans champion issues that are dear to white evangelical voters. In fact, some Democrats seem terrified to advance any agenda that would explicitly serve the African American community. When state legislatures pass bills that might suppress black votes, mainstream women’s organizations and environmental organizations should be grabbing their legal briefcases and sprinting past lawyers from the NAACP, trying to get into court to defend black access to the ballot box. After all, we are their indispensable voters, without whom

YOU CAN BEAT THE OPPOSITION! If liberals and progressives really want to move America forward again, they have to marshal every single voter who is onboard with the program to turn Republicans out of Congress. This will not be easy. The Republicans have used their stranglehold on Congress to pile up money, gerrymander everything they can, suppress voting, and generally make it hard for liberals and progressives to prevail-—even though there are far more liberals and progressive than conservatives. (Trump lost the popular vote by three million—ten million if you count votes for third-party candidates!) If non-asshole voters can energize, if they come out in larger numbers than at the last election, and if they can stop bickering about ideological purity, they can swamp the Republicans.

For their part, Democrats constitute a diffuse majority of the electorate, but seem at times lukewarm toward a base that the party has often lectured to or taken for granted, chided, if ever there is lower-than-expected turnout, despite voter suppression, sadly buying into caste assumptions rather than bolstering their most loyal voters as do the Republicans with theirs. Democrats expend energy and weaken their power pining for the die-hard voters of their opponents, the homecoming queens of the electorate, while taking for granted the majority that they already have.

The Democrat Party has engaged in, and in numerous instances implemented, obvious and blatant fraud-inducing techniques to sabotage elections, and accused those who question these techniques as racist, supporters of voter suppression, and election deniers. These efforts include eliminating voter identification laws; eliminating signature and date requirements for absentee ballots; universal mail-in voting; automatic voter registration; preregistering voters under the age of eighteen; voter harvesting; voter drop boxes; early voting; extended voting; illegal-alien voting in local elections; the distribution of driver’s licenses to illegal aliens; etc. Since the objective of these recent changes to the election process is to actually incorporate fraud into the law, it becomes difficult if not impossible to establish “evidence of fraud.” Hence, if you ask about the outcomes of elections that use one or more of these voting devices, especially in close elections, you are said to be “an election denier.” And if a Republican state legislature takes steps to repeal or reform these notorious election devices, the legislature is accused by the Democrat Party and its surrogates of racism—“Jim Crow 2.0.”37

As a way of trying to justify voter-suppression steps, the Republican Party has invested heavily in the myth of voter fraud. The fraud is trying to convince the public there is voter fraud of any significance. I’ve worked in campaigns since 1978, and I don’t know of a single race in which illegal voters were remotely a factor.

As a way of trying to justify voter-suppression steps, the Republican Party has invested heavily in the myth of voter fraud. The fraud is trying to convince the public there is voter fraud of any significance. I’ve worked in campaigns since 1978, and I don’t know of a single race in which illegal voters were remotely a factor. Does some illegal voting happen? Sure, just as elephantiasis does occur in America. But should elephantiasis be the focus of the National Institutes of Health instead of cancer? Probably not.

A Republican seizure of power based not on the strength of the party's ideas but on massive disfranchisement denies citizens not only their rights, but also the "talisman" of humanity that voting represents. The lie of voter fraud breaks a World War II veteran down into a simple, horrifying statement: "I wasn't a citizen no more." It forces a man, a retired engineer who was instrumental in building this nation, into facing a bitter truth: "I am not wanted in this state." It eviscerates the key sense of self-worthy in a disabled man who has to pen the painful words "My constitutional rights have been stripped from me." It maligns thousands of African Americans who resiliently weathered the Missouri cold and hours of bureaucratic runarounds as nothing but criminals and frauds. It leaves a woman suffering from lung cancer absolutely "distraught" and convinced that "they prevented us from voting," because none of her IDs could penetrate Wisconsin's law. It shatters the dying wish of a woman who, in her last moments on earth, wanted to cast a vote for possibly the first woman president of the United States. But an expired driver's license meant none of that was to be.

The state of Texas, which generally has the same affection for democracy as North Korea, accepts concealed carry permits for voting, but not student IDs. Hmm, I wonder which party that policy helps? If the Republicans can’t win your vote, they will take your vote. This effort followed in the tradition of the Jim Crow policies put in place after Reconstruction to prevent newly freed slaves from having any political power. These laws are costing Democrats elections and helping Republicans maintain power despite appealing to fewer and fewer voters. According to one study, Wisconsin’s voter ID law potentially suppressed 200,000 votes. Donald Trump won that state by 22,700 votes.

Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which made Jim Crow voter-suppression laws illegal, was the defining moment for the modern Republican Party.

This is where Republicans thrive: in manipulating institutions like the Electoral College, in gerrymandering congressional and state legislative districts, in imposing voter suppression tactics, in preserving the filibuster. Like their leader, they are a party that specializes in the techniques of antidemocracy.