The collective decision of conservative activists and Republican elected officials to stay on the anti-democratic, racist trajectory that the GOP had been on before Trump — but that he accelerated — is perhaps the most important story in American politics right now. At this moment, it’s unclear whether one of America’s two major political parties truly believes in democracy.
Perry Bacon Jr., "Why The Republican Party Isn’t Rebranding After 2020"
In Georgia, the state legislature rushed through in a single day a 98-page bill introducing a torrent of changes in election law, many that restricted voting (creating obstacles that deliberately make voting more cumbersome, inconvenient, and -- with the provision making it illegal for volunteers to give voters waiting in line food or drink -- more uncomfortable). A couple of provisions (regarding the Secretary of State, currently Trump nemesis Brad Raffensperger, and the State Election Board) empower the state legislature at the expense of local election officials to make it easier to overturn an election (which Trump tried and failed to do in the aftermath of the 2020 election he lost by 11,780 votes).
Since the law sanctions neither violence, nor guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, this is probably best described as Jim Crow Lite, rather than 'Jim Crow on steroids,' but it's plainly voter suppression (regardless of whether or not it succeeds). All credible evidence points to the November 2020 presidential election and the January 2021 senate run-off election in Georgia as free and fair. There was no fraud, no cheating, and no irregularities to speak of. There was no failure of election integrity. The count was accurate and the result clear in each case. Ballots cast for Democratic candidates surpassed ballots for the Republicans in the three races in Georgia that Trump and company dispute.
The Georgia law is a direct response to these three defeats, to Trump’s big lie (that he won the election in Georgia and nationally) but was denied the victory by fraud, and to the subsequent subterfuge that Republicans across the country have engaged in. (Ed Kilgore points to Arizona, Florida, New Hampshire, and Texas as the most significant states -- because of GOP control and increasingly competitive elections -- poised to follow Georgia's example.)
Jamelle Bouie comments ("The G.O.P Has Some Voters It Likes and Some It Doesn't"):
This is what it looks like when a political party turns against democracy. It doesn’t just try to restrict the vote; it creates mechanisms to subvert the vote and attempts to purge officials who might stand in the way. Georgia is in the spotlight, for reasons past and present, but it is happening across the country wherever Republicans are in control.
Again (while this law, contra Rich Lowry, will prevent actual voters from casting ballots), it may or may not succeed in suppressing the total vote of Democratic constituencies, since Democrats will be especially determined to organize and get to the polls. Voter suppression is still wrong. It constitutes an assault on democratic norms. Such laws show contempt for the Democratic constituencies they seek to disenfranchise. They represent an ideological, and anti-democratic, strand that has long been present in the Republican Party.
A year ago this month, President Trump expressed concern with efforts to make voting easier. "The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." The Georgia Speaker of the House, in opposing widespread mail-in voting, remarked that “the president said it best, this will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.” Why? Because "This will certainly drive up turnout."
At the beginning of the Reagan era, the late New Right activist, co-founder of both the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority, Paul Weyrich put it this way:
I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
In spite of these examples, Republicans generally avoid saying the quiet part loud. Instead, they advocate disqualifying voters on grounds other than partisan advantage, as Arizona state house member John Kavanaugh did:
“Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues,” Kavanagh said .... “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”
In 2007, Jonah Goldberg struck this theme, arguing that we risked "cheapening the vote" and "dumbed-down" democracy when we permitted everyone (including poorly informed Americans) to cast ballots.
In 1960, William Buckley expressed this view: "I think actually what is wrong in Mississippi, sir, is not that not enough Negroes are voting but that too many white people are voting." (Recall that white folks were part of the Democratic Solid South in 1960.)
Jim Crow still reigned when Buckley spoke -- five years before passage of the Voting Rights Act and more than half a century before Chief Justice John Roberts' decades-long quest to gut the law finally succeeded in the Shelby County v. Holder decision.
Twenty-first century voter suppression may not be Jim Crow, but it's close enough to reveal a contempt for democracy.