"The intent always matters, sir, and that is the point of this conversation. That is the point of the Jim Crow narrative, that Jim Crow did not simply look at the activities. It looked at the intent, it looked at the behaviors and it targeted behaviors that were disproportionately used by people of color."
-- Stacey Abrams responding to Texas Senator John Cornyn's question about whether the new Georgia election law was racist.
Whether or not the Georgia law targets African Americans with "surgical precision" (I'd say, Not, and moreover I think it's likely to backfire), it passed because turnout in November 2020 and January 2021 was huge, and Donald Trump and two Senate Republicans lost. The Georgia legislature, by hook or by crook, desperately seeks to keep this from happening again. The same vile spirit is ascendant in Texas (where Trump won, but demographic trends threaten future Republican victories, down-ballot most immediately): proposed legislation to suppress the vote targets counties with huge numbers of "voters of color."
Nor have Arizona Republicans gotten past Trump's November loss. Joe Biden carried Maricopa County (the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so since Harry Truman in 1948), which enabled him to carry Arizona (the first Democratic nominee to win since Bill Clinton's 1996 victory). Biden's statewide margin was 10,457 votes, less than a quarter of his his margin in Maricopa County (where more than 60% of Arizonans reside).
Republicans can't let go of the big lie. So the Arizona state senate designated Cyber Ninjas (the Florida-based company headed by Doug Logan, who has spun pro-Trump election conspiracy theories) as its agent for an election audit of the Maricopa County ballots. On Friday Cyber Ninjas (which has zero experience counting votes) took possession of the 2.1 million ballots cast in the county that propelled Biden to victory. This, after Republicans lost multiple court cases from the Maricopa County Superior Court to the U.S. Supreme Court for lack of a scintilla of evidence of fraud or errors in the balloting.
“It’s clear this audit has been bought and sold by hyper partisans intent on sowing doubt," according to Greg Burton, executive editor of the Arizona Republic. "Senate leaders have throttled legitimate press access and handed Arizona’s votes to conspiracy theorists.”
Things did not begin auspiciously on day one (with security breaches, violations of the election code, and locking out the press). I predict that things will not end well. This audit can't be expected to dispel any doubts about the integrity of the 2020 result, nor is it likely to increase confidence in the ability of the State of Arizona -- or anyplace else in the country where the party in power embraces the big lie -- to conduct free and fair elections. To the contrary, it will further divide. Most Americans -- with Chris Krebs and Bill Barr -- harbor no doubts about the integrity of the election or the result. The unbelieving Republican base won't be convinced by elected officials who are playing along with the charade of a stolen election.
Now Republican officials have begun to push their cynical anti-democratic campaigns even further. The Georgia law and a Texas proposal would make "cooking the electoral books" (in Rick Hasen's words) easier to pull off. Hasen observes:
A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.
. . . These efforts target both personnel and policy; it is not clear if they are coordinated. They nonetheless represent a huge threat to American democracy itself.
The Republican Party by and large, in Washington and across the country, has refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election. With this refusal, Republicans have declined to acknowledge Joe Biden's presidency as legitimate. Instead, implicitly or explicitly embracing the big lie, Republican legislatures are churning out voting restrictions aimed at Democratic constituencies. And taking a step further, as Hasen describes, they have begun to rig election laws to make it easier to overturn the results when they lose (as Trump tried and failed to do after his November defeat).
The Republican Party is at war with democratic governance in the United States.