Why are Republicans Quicker to Steal Our Votes than to Take Our Guns?

“Both Texas and Georgia are actually Blue states; the only reason Republicans have as much power as they do in each is because of massive voter roll purges and voter suppression laws.”

Image by Sammy-Sander from Pixabay

If a state wants to take away your gun, they must first go to court and prove there’s a clear and legally defensible justification for that “extreme” action. You can appeal their move all the way to the US Supreme Court.

On the other hand, if a Republican governor, secretary of state, or local official wants to take away your voter registration or refuse to count your ballot, they don’t even have to tell you they’ve done it.

Thomas Paine, in his 1795 Dissertation on First Principles of Government, proclaimed:

“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.”

One of the ugliest legacies of slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow era is voter suppression, a tool widely used in Red states to keep Republicans in power against the will of the majority of the states’ citizens. BBC and Guardian reporter Greg Palast recently noted on my program that:

“Both Texas and Georgia are actually Blue states; the only reason Republicans have as much power as they do in each is because of massive voter roll purges and other voter suppression laws.”

Republicans embrace this. While the media focuses on “issues” like Critical Race Theory, immigration, and trans people using public bathrooms, the GOP knows well that they only hang onto power in swing states because they’ve succeeded in preventing Democratic constituencies from voting, or because they can reject minority, student, and elderly votes once cast.

This is why the party pushes the phony meme of “voter fraud” so hard: it provides them with an easy excuse, approved by five Republicans on the Supreme Court, to suppress the Democratic vote, which is how they obtain and hang onto power in multiple states.

No other advanced democracy in the world except Hungary plays these games with elections.

The reason states have to go to court to take away your gun is because the Supreme Court has proclaimed a “right to own a gun.” Walking around in public with the power to kill dozens of people in minutes is not a privilege, the Republicans on the Court tell us: it’s a right.

On the other hand, that same corrupt Republican majority on the Court tells us that voting is merely a privilege in America. As Chief Justice William Rehnquist (who rose to fame in the GOP by challenging Hispanic and Native American voters at polling places in Arizona in the 1960s) wrote in his notorious 5-4 Bush v Gore decision:

“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”

Based on that, Rehnquist wrote, the Court was justified in blocking the Florida Supreme Court’s order that all the votes in the state be recounted, a process that we now know would have handed the 2000 election to Al Gore.

The Supreme Court does this in open defiance of Congress, which passed into law — over loud Republican objections (Democrats then controlled both the House and Senate) — an absolute right to vote in 1993 with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), what’s popularly called the Motor Voter Act. It’s probably the most important but most ignored piece of legislation in the past thirty years.

The Act’s language that most freaked out the GOP was its preamble, which numerous Republicans thought would cause no end of problems if the Supreme Court were ever to try to enforce it. The opening of the bill, now Title 42, Section 1973gg, is a long, three-part run-on sentence that says, in clear and straightforward language,

“The Congress finds that—

“(1) the right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right;

“(2) it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right; and

“(3) discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures can have a direct and damaging effect on voter participation in elections for Federal office and disproportionately harm voter participation by various groups, including racial minorities.”

Republicans could have relaxed. The only significant ruling by the Republican-controlled US Supreme Court citing the NVRA was in 2018, in Husted v. Randolph, in which Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion allowing John Husted, Ohio’s secretary of state, to continue with an aggressive purge of mostly Democratic big-city voters from that state’s rolls heading toward the 2018 election.

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move every year, revealing the lie that Ohio’s Husted was “just trying to keep the voting rolls clean”:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because they changed their residences.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent was even more scathing:

“Congress enacted the NVRA against the backdrop of substantial efforts by States to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters, including programs that purged eligible voters from registration lists because they failed to vote in prior elections.

“The Court errs in ignoring this history and distorting the statutory text to arrive at a conclusion that not only is contrary to the plain language of the NVRA but also contradicts the essential purposes of the statute, ultimately sanctioning the very purging that Congress expressly sought to protect against.”

In other words, it should be as hard to take away your vote as it is to take away your gun. At the very least.

Other democracies around the world generally recognize their citizens’ absolute right to vote.

In Canada, every citizen’s right to vote is protected by a 1982 law known as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Taking away a Canadian’s right to vote post-1982 requires a court’s action: it is just as difficult in that nation as is taking away a person’s gun in America.

Canadians look at us, with all the obstacles and roadblocks Republicans throw up to voting, like we’re nuts. MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi, who grew up in Canada, recently discussed this with me in the context of his new book, Small Acts of Courage:

“This was the heart of the book,” he told me. “This is literally what I was trying to explain to people. Voting does not have to be complicated. We figured it out in Canada. You are assumed to be registered to vote. … There's none of this nonsense about it being illegal to help people vote or to help people register to vote or give them food when they vote.  

“When my dad was running [for office, in the] elections we literally fed people, which is the way it should be. We should be providing every incentive possible to make it easy for people to vote. Thom, voting is the price of admission into a democracy!”

In Europe, every country that joined the European Union had to agree to Article 22 of the EU treaty and Articles 39 and 40 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which establish voting not just as a right of citizenship but also as a fundamental human right associated with voters’ right of self-governance.

Most European countries register you to vote based on your birth records and automatically send you ballots when you turn the voting age (generally 18, but now 16 in several EU nations as part of an effort to increase young voter engagement).

Voting is also an absolute right in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia. No politician would dare, in any of these nations, to even suggest people should be purged from voter lists or prevented from voting because they don’t have the right kind of ID or were once in prison.

Here in America, though, Republicans base their electoral strategies on preventing people from voting or rejecting their ballots after they’ve voted, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the War on Voting.

Immediately after the five Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 14 GOP-controlled states moved, within a year (some within days), to restrict access to the vote, particularly for communities of color, students, and retired people.

In North Carolina, for example, 158 polling places were permanently closed in the 40 counties with the most African American voters just before the 2016 election, leading to a 16 percent decline in African American early voting in that state. An MIT study found that, nationwide, Hispanic voters wait 150 percent longer in line than white voters, and Black voters can expect to wait 200 percent longer in line to vote.

This is how Republicans work to win elections.

In Indiana, then-Governor Pence’s new rigorous voter ID law — the first in the nation at the time (2005) — caused an 11.5 percent drop in African American voting. Students are suing for their right to vote, and, in Red states, retired people who no longer drive but care passionately about their Social Security and Medicare are routinely turned away at the polls by the tens of thousands for lack of a “current” drivers’ license, another GOP trick. In 2008, around six million eligible voters did not vote because of difficulties associated with registration requirements, according to the Census Bureau.

In the months leading up to the 2012 election in Pennsylvania, Republicans had just passed that state’s first voter suppression law. It eliminated the right to vote of 758,000 registered voters because they lacked a Department of Transportation-issued ID, meaning over 9 percent of that state’s then 8.2 million registered voters could no longer cast a ballot.

It’s not like Republicans don’t know what they’re doing. This is at the core of their ability to seize and hold power. As Pennsylvania’s GOP House Majority Leader Mike Turzai famously bragged:

“Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

But the GOP was just getting warmed up. In 2018 in Georgia, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged 340,134 mostly Black and entirely legitimate voters (out of the 534,000 total purged) from the state’s rolls. He then “won” the election for governor against Stacy Abrams by about 55,000 votes.

Florida and Texas are among other “close” states where Republican officials hang onto office in part through aggressive culling of voters from the rolls. In just the past 18 months, the DeSantis administration has purged almost a million voters from the Florida voter rolls using the excuse (approved by five Republicans on the Supreme Court in 2018) that they failed to vote in the midterm election (and now won’t be able to vote in the presidential election).  

As I noted Monday, just between 2020 and 2022 fully 19,260,000 Americans — 8.5% of all registered voters — were purged. The purge rate in Republican-controlled Red states was 40% higher than the rest of the country. We won’t know this year’s purge numbers until well after the election is over.

There’s an odd asymmetry here.

If Democrats had suppressed Republican voters the way Red state politicians are purging and blocking Democrats, you can bet there’d be hell to pay. They’d scream to high heaven, and never let Americans forget how they were being screwed by those nasty Dems.

There’d be press conferences every week, and every election would see Republican politicians amplifying the complaints of every GOP voter turned away from the polls. Every piece of Democratic-passed legislation would bring new howls about how it wouldn’t have been possible if those nasty liberals hadn’t conspired to disenfranchise good Republican voters.

It’s downright crazy that it’s easier in America — and only in America — for corrupt, partisan hack politicians to take away your vote than it is to take away your gun.

Democrats must begin to play hardball: as Thomas Paine pointed out, there’s no more important issue than the right to vote.

It’s time to raise some hell.