Republican Voter Suppression Efforts Backfiring?
24 Oct '20 15:501 editWe've moved past 50 million votes already being cast and Republican efforts to suppress the votes of urban, mainly minority citizens seems to be failing big time. One example:
"In the last week of September, Chris Hollins, the county clerk of Harris County, Texas, sent out mail ballots to voters in the Houston area who had requested them and set up 12 locations where voters concerned about delays with the US Postal Service could drop their ballots off. Then, on October 1, just as voters had started to return their mail ballots, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued an emergency declaration limiting mail ballot drop-off sites to one per county. The move appeared designed specifically to make voting harder in Harris County, the largest county in the state, which has 2.4 million registered voters and a larger landmass than Rhode Island.
It was the latest attempt by Texas Republicans to depress turnout in a state with a long record of voter suppression. Texas has no online registration. Voters need a valid excuse to get a mail ballot—and for those under 65, fear of contracting COVID-19 doesn’t count. The state’s voter ID law allows you to vote with a gun permit but not a student ID.
Yet when early voting began in Texas on October 13, Abbott’s plan to limit Democratic participation appeared to backfire, as voters in Harris County, where voters of color make up a majority and where Hillary Clinton won by 12 points in 2016, surged to the polls.
In the last week of September, Chris Hollins, the county clerk of Harris County, Texas, sent out mail ballots to voters in the Houston area who had requested them and set up 12 locations where voters concerned about delays with the US Postal Service could drop their ballots off. Then, on October 1, just as voters had started to return their mail ballots, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued an emergency declaration limiting mail ballot drop-off sites to one per county. The move appeared designed specifically to make voting harder in Harris County, the largest county in the state, which has 2.4 million registered voters and a larger landmass than Rhode Island.
It was the latest attempt by Texas Republicans to depress turnout in a state with a long record of voter suppression. Texas has no online registration. Voters need a valid excuse to get a mail ballot—and for those under 65, fear of contracting COVID-19 doesn’t count. The state’s voter ID law allows you to vote with a gun permit but not a student ID.
Yet when early voting began in Texas on October 13, Abbott’s plan to limit Democratic participation appeared to backfire, as voters in Harris County, where voters of color make up a majority and where Hillary Clinton won by 12 points in 2016, surged to the polls.
The numbers in Harris County have been astonishing. A record 128,000 people voted on the first day of early voting, up from 68,000 in 2016 and a higher turnout than the entire state of Georgia on the same day. Turnout has barely dropped since then. On Friday, Harris County surpassed 1 million early votes, exceeding its total from 2016 with a week of early voting still left, and nearly equaling the 1.3 million people who voted overall in 2016.
Hollins, the first Black clerk in Harris County history and the youngest at 34, credits a backlash against voter suppression for the unexpectedly high turnout. “Efforts to suppress votes in Texas and across the South have very often been done in secret, in smoke-filled rooms, in ways the public can’t fully digest,” he says. “But a voter—a senior or a person with a disability—can feel when the governor says they have to drive 100 miles round-trip to drop off their mail ballot in person. When it’s thrown in your face like it has been this election season, voters are responding by saying, ‘I’ll show you,’ and coming out in record numbers to have their voices heard.”
https://www.motherjones.com/2020-elections/2020/10/voter-suppression-efforts-could-be-backfiring-on-republicans/
This echoes what happened in Wisconsin in May:
"There may have never been in living memory a more blatant voter suppression scheme outside the former Confederacy than the one Wisconsin Republicans and their federal and state judicial allies attempted this month. With the connivance of the legislature and the Wisconsin Supreme Court they controlled, the Badger State GOP insisted on holding an in-person election at the height of the coronavirus pandemic that was sure to disenfranchise many Democratic-leaning minority voters in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court stopped a federal judge from extending time for voters forced to vote by mail to receive and return their absentee ballots.
The big prize for Republicans in this maneuvering was a ten-year term on the state Supreme Court that would have ensured its judicial agents a majority on that powerful tribune until well into the next decade, making a Republican gerrymander of the legislature and the congressional delegation much more likely, along with a voter purge. The intended beneficiary was incumbent judge Daniel Kelly. But in a big upset delayed by slow-arriving absentee ballots (SCOTUS would not allow an extension of the April 7 voting deadline but left in place a ban on the announcement of results until April 13), Kelly’s progressive rival Jill Karofsky won the nonpartisan election.
It wasn’t close, and it was pretty clear Democrats were driven to the polls by anger at what the GOP was doing to the franchise. It could happen again in jurisdictions control by Republicans who are cooperating with Trump’s battle to discourage and intimidate voters likely to favor Democrats."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/is-republican-voter-suppression-starting-to-backfire.html
"In the last week of September, Chris Hollins, the county clerk of Harris County, Texas, sent out mail ballots to voters in the Houston area who had requested them and set up 12 locations where voters concerned about delays with the US Postal Service could drop their ballots off. Then, on October 1, just as voters had started to return their mail ballots, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued an emergency declaration limiting mail ballot drop-off sites to one per county. The move appeared designed specifically to make voting harder in Harris County, the largest county in the state, which has 2.4 million registered voters and a larger landmass than Rhode Island.
It was the latest attempt by Texas Republicans to depress turnout in a state with a long record of voter suppression. Texas has no online registration. Voters need a valid excuse to get a mail ballot—and for those under 65, fear of contracting COVID-19 doesn’t count. The state’s voter ID law allows you to vote with a gun permit but not a student ID.
Yet when early voting began in Texas on October 13, Abbott’s plan to limit Democratic participation appeared to backfire, as voters in Harris County, where voters of color make up a majority and where Hillary Clinton won by 12 points in 2016, surged to the polls.
In the last week of September, Chris Hollins, the county clerk of Harris County, Texas, sent out mail ballots to voters in the Houston area who had requested them and set up 12 locations where voters concerned about delays with the US Postal Service could drop their ballots off. Then, on October 1, just as voters had started to return their mail ballots, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued an emergency declaration limiting mail ballot drop-off sites to one per county. The move appeared designed specifically to make voting harder in Harris County, the largest county in the state, which has 2.4 million registered voters and a larger landmass than Rhode Island.
It was the latest attempt by Texas Republicans to depress turnout in a state with a long record of voter suppression. Texas has no online registration. Voters need a valid excuse to get a mail ballot—and for those under 65, fear of contracting COVID-19 doesn’t count. The state’s voter ID law allows you to vote with a gun permit but not a student ID.
Yet when early voting began in Texas on October 13, Abbott’s plan to limit Democratic participation appeared to backfire, as voters in Harris County, where voters of color make up a majority and where Hillary Clinton won by 12 points in 2016, surged to the polls.
The numbers in Harris County have been astonishing. A record 128,000 people voted on the first day of early voting, up from 68,000 in 2016 and a higher turnout than the entire state of Georgia on the same day. Turnout has barely dropped since then. On Friday, Harris County surpassed 1 million early votes, exceeding its total from 2016 with a week of early voting still left, and nearly equaling the 1.3 million people who voted overall in 2016.
Hollins, the first Black clerk in Harris County history and the youngest at 34, credits a backlash against voter suppression for the unexpectedly high turnout. “Efforts to suppress votes in Texas and across the South have very often been done in secret, in smoke-filled rooms, in ways the public can’t fully digest,” he says. “But a voter—a senior or a person with a disability—can feel when the governor says they have to drive 100 miles round-trip to drop off their mail ballot in person. When it’s thrown in your face like it has been this election season, voters are responding by saying, ‘I’ll show you,’ and coming out in record numbers to have their voices heard.”
https://www.motherjones.com/2020-elections/2020/10/voter-suppression-efforts-could-be-backfiring-on-republicans/
This echoes what happened in Wisconsin in May:
"There may have never been in living memory a more blatant voter suppression scheme outside the former Confederacy than the one Wisconsin Republicans and their federal and state judicial allies attempted this month. With the connivance of the legislature and the Wisconsin Supreme Court they controlled, the Badger State GOP insisted on holding an in-person election at the height of the coronavirus pandemic that was sure to disenfranchise many Democratic-leaning minority voters in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court stopped a federal judge from extending time for voters forced to vote by mail to receive and return their absentee ballots.
The big prize for Republicans in this maneuvering was a ten-year term on the state Supreme Court that would have ensured its judicial agents a majority on that powerful tribune until well into the next decade, making a Republican gerrymander of the legislature and the congressional delegation much more likely, along with a voter purge. The intended beneficiary was incumbent judge Daniel Kelly. But in a big upset delayed by slow-arriving absentee ballots (SCOTUS would not allow an extension of the April 7 voting deadline but left in place a ban on the announcement of results until April 13), Kelly’s progressive rival Jill Karofsky won the nonpartisan election.
It wasn’t close, and it was pretty clear Democrats were driven to the polls by anger at what the GOP was doing to the franchise. It could happen again in jurisdictions control by Republicans who are cooperating with Trump’s battle to discourage and intimidate voters likely to favor Democrats."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/is-republican-voter-suppression-starting-to-backfire.html
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