Democrats are working hard to increase voter turnout. From Vice President Kamala Harris Visiting the Georgia countrysideTo Governor Tim Walz The hype From the union crowd in Milwaukee to 34,000 Taylor Swift fans joining a Zoom fundraiser conference call. enter In the era of “Swifties for Kamala,” that effort is beginning to bear fruit. In contrast, former President Donald Trump and Gov. J.D. Vance Away from election campaigns President Trump has no events scheduled for Labor Day His Schedule Until September 7th.
Instead of rallying their supporters to the polls, Republicans are resorting to familiar tactics of voter suppression and unfounded claims of voter fraud.
Leading the way, as always, is Texas, but it’s not alone. But before we dig into just how bad things have gotten, it’s important to remember that while voter suppression is real, voter fraud on any meaningful scale definitely does not exist. Exposed and Exposed and ExposedLooking just at the battleground states, Breathless reporting In the eyes of the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, the numbers literally don’t add up.
These indisputable facts mean nothing to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is overseeing an almost comically evil attack on his state’s voters. I am sure President Joe Biden won the 2020 election because of widespread voter fraud. Paxton’s “election integrity” division is currently investigating multiple Armed Police Officers They execute search warrants and seize the property of people like 87-year-old Lydia Martinez, whose ostensible crime was to register people to vote.
On Tuesday, the League of Latin American Citizens, of which Martinez has been a member for more than 35 years, held a press conference. ask The Department of Justice should step in. The organization, the oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization in the United States, letter LULAC notified the Justice Department after Martinez’s home was raided late last month. Four other members of the organization were arrested. Similarly targeted By Paxton.
According to Paxton, LULAC members Under investigation Regarding “allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting that occurred during the 2022 election.” There’s a lot to unpack there. First, there is no election fraud. Remember, there was no such thing, not even the Trump-picked “voting integrity” commission. Not Found Where’s the evidence?
Next, “vote gathering” means A completely ordinary act The act of collecting absentee ballots and taking them to polling places or election offices. In the Republican world, where a higher voter turnout reduces the chances of winning, getting more people to vote is considered a bad thing.
Finally, these allegations stem not from efforts during this election, but from the 2022 midterm elections. It would take a lot to believe that Paxton took two long years of careful investigation and finally wrapped it up in time for the 2024 elections. Rather, it sounds a lot like what LULAC is calling it. Voter intimidationMany people would think twice about helping register voters if the next step was a dawn raid by armed police.
Paxton also Threatening Suing Bexar County and Harris County. It worked For President Joe Biden 2020 Elections—On the effort to send voter registration cards to everyone. In short, Paxton doesn’t want private groups to help people register to vote. He also doesn’t want the government to help them register to vote, at least not in Democratic-leaning counties.
But Paxton can’t do all of this voter suppression alone. Thankfully for Republicans, Texas also has Governor Greg Abbott, who is busy. Boast Since 2021, the state has removed more than 1 million voters from its rolls. Cleaning up voter rolls is a normal process, and states must remove people who have moved or died. In fact, the number of voters Texas has removed from its rolls this time is Not uncommon compared to The last election.
But by highlighting this massive purge so soon after the election and just days after the LULAC raids, Abbott is implying there is something sinister he is trying to prevent. In fact, he is simply trying to stop, say, thousands of people from foreigner There was suspicion that he had voted.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Texas made headlines in 2019 when it released some staggering numbers. 95,000 voters Regarding the “Citizenship Examination” Assert “Tens of thousands of foreign nationals” were not only registered to vote, but had already voted. It only took a few days for this to start to unravel, with the state nearly Immediately acknowledge 25,000 people were mistakenly put on the list, many of them citizens. The incident was quickly resolved when the state of Texas agreed to rescind the recommendation. settlement In three lawsuits filed against the state.
Ohio has joined the movement, with Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose also creating a list of people he considers non-citizens. But like Texas, the list is broken, and some of the people considered non-citizens are actually non-citizens. Recently naturalized citizens Therefore, they are fully eligible to vote.
LaRose continues to refer cases of voter fraud to investigators, but the state has only had 13 convictions across multiple elections. As the Ohio Capital Journal reported, this is a sign that Ohio’s voter fraud rate is on track to reach 100,000 votes. Approximately 0.0001%At the time, more than 14 million state votes had been cast.
In states that don’t have governments willing to attack their own citizens for voting, private right-wing groups like United Sovereign Americans are causing trouble. Pennsylvania and MarylandThey claim that these states improperly manage voter registration and rolls.State explicitly The group’s goal is to challenge multiple state voter rolls and get different rulings from different federal courts, thus forcing the Supreme Court to intervene.
It’s no surprise that Republicans are having to resort to improper voter purges and old, long-denied allegations of voter fraud when Trump has total control of the Republican National Committee. Earlier this yearOne of the first things he did was to divert funding from Bank Your Vote, the 50-state Republican National Committee’s initiative to encourage early voting. Rhetoric of 2020There, he continued to criticize his own party’s efforts to increase voter turnout by attacking postal voting.
Trump responded to this Over $80 million Instead of running for president, he’s using his Super PAC money to pay for legal fees, and it’s easy to see why the best course for Republicans is to stop people from voting.
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