By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
A recent op ed in the Tribune took the paper to task for responding to the actions of three current members of the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors who are also members of the Republican Party and who have recently advanced the cause of voter suppression, thereby making our county into a national news story.
He complained that the Tribune is “offering its readers a never-ending showcase of Republican efforts to cast ‘doubt on the integrity of the local election,’” and asked that the editorial board “stop its mission to tarnish all things Republican with the claim that our local branch is attempting to ‘undermine American voting rights.’”
In other words, even though our Republican supervisors, at the request of the local Republican Party, held a 15-hour hearing so fringe conspiracy theorists could recite the party’s talking points on rigged voting machines, corrupt election officials and fraud, and then passed a brace of measures designed to reduce the county’s historically high 2020 election turnout, and these things looked very similar to ongoing Republican efforts to cast doubt on the integrity of local elections and undermine American voting rights nationwide, what the county supervisors did has nothing to do with that.
Nor is the departure of the County’s top elections official after a campaign of harassment and intimidation based on imaginary election fraud related to the harassment and intimidation that has driven out scores of election officials across the country, as reported by the Associated Press. (“The once quiet job of election administration has become a political minefield thanks to the baseless claims of widespread fraud that continue to be pushed by many in the Republican Party.”)
In other words, “our local branch” of the Republican Party has nothing to do with the Republican Party.
The author claims that a voter fraud database compiled by the Heritage Foundation “establishes that the retail level of deceit during elections is alive and well.” Having studied that database, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law found it to be “a grab-bag of cases, few of them recent,” and that “Inadvertently, the Heritage Foundation’s database undermines its claim of widespread voter fraud,” showing instead that actual instances of fraud “add up to a molecular fraction of the total votes cast nationwide,” and “Many cases highlighted in the database show that existing laws and safeguards are already preventing voter fraud — the ineligible voters or individuals engaging in misconduct were discovered and prevented from casting a ballot.”
He floats the notion that voter suppression is a myth that no one had ever heard of before Democrats conjured it up when Stacey Abrams ran for Governor of Georgia in 2018. He would profit from a perusal of the history of voter suppression in the United States, which is also the history of the struggle for voting rights, and hence as old as the republic. Or he could just watch a 40-second video which also might give him pause about citing the Heritage Foundation as a source of information.
The author expresses his dislike for HR1, the For the People Act, which he claims would “federalize voting across America and destroy the Constitution’s balance of federal and state powers in the area of voting.” Presumably, he harbors an equal dislike for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which brought down the voting barriers of Jim Crow and required states with a long history of suppression to get preclearance from the Justice Department before changing their election laws. When the Supreme Court gutted this provision in 2013 -- immediately opening the floodgates for a resurgence of voter suppression -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
Why do Republican politicians fear HR1? Let us count the ways.
It will:
~ increase the voice and power of communities of color;
~ create more ways to choose our politicians and hold them accountable;
~ add up to 50 million voters to the voter rolls;
~ restore the right to vote for over 1.7 million formerly incarcerated people;
~ end partisan gerrymandering, which means the party in power can’t rig elections to their benefit;
~ mandate automatic voter registration, early voting, vote by mail, and make Election Day a federal holiday;
~ weaken restrictive and discriminatory voter I.D. laws and limit voter purges;
~ reduce money in politics and make it easier for women, young people, and people of color to run for office by creating a small donor matching system that gives candidates the opportunity to run without relying on wealthy donors.
If you support that – and 83 percent of Americans do, including 73 percent of Independents and Republicans -- go here.
If not, you may well be one of three current members of the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors.