What is Voter Suppression?

“There's very little tangible evidence of this whole voter-suppression nonsense that the Democrats are promoting.” -- Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, July 2020

“I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” -- Conservative activist Paul Weyrich, 1980


Voter suppression is a partisan political strategy to influence the outcome of an election by discouraging or preventing specific groups of people from voting. The goal is to reduce the number of voters who might vote against a candidate or proposition. Over the last few years, conservative states have engaged in massive voter suppression efforts to favor GOP candidates and to try to re-elect the president. The GOP sees no voter suppression, while other observers see it very clearly. The GOP has been actively engaging in nationwide voter suppression at least since the early 1980s.

ProPublica reports on some of the voter suppression tactics the GOP has in place in Georgia to hinder or block voters from voting for Joe Biden. ProPublica writes:

“Why Do Nonwhite Georgia Voters Have to Wait in Line for Hours? Their Numbers Have Soared, and Their Polling Places Have Dwindled. 

The clogged polling locations in metro Atlanta reflect an underlying pattern: the number of places to vote has shrunk statewide, with little recourse. Although the reduction in polling places has taken place across racial lines, it has primarily caused long lines in nonwhite neighborhoods where voter registration has surged and more residents cast ballots in person on Election Day. The pruning of polling places started long before the pandemic, which has discouraged people from voting in person.

In Georgia, considered a battleground state for control of the White House and U.S. Senate, the difficulty of voting in Black communities like Union City could possibly tip the results on Nov. 3. With massive turnout expected, lines could be even longer than they were for the primary, despite a rise in mail-in voting and Georgians already turning out by the hundreds of thousands to cast ballots early.

The metro Atlanta area has been hit particularly hard. The nine counties — Fulton, Gwinnett, Forsyth, DeKalb, Cobb, Hall, Cherokee, Henry and Clayton — have nearly half of the state’s active voters but only 38% of the polling places, according to the analysis.

Georgia law sets a cap of 2,000 voters for a polling place that has experienced significant voter delays, but that limit is rarely if ever enforced. Our analysis found that, in both majority Black and majority white neighborhoods, about nine of every 10 precincts are assigned to polling places with more than 2,000 people. 

Georgia’s state leadership and elections officials have largely ignored complaints about poll consolidations even as they tout record growth in voter registration. As secretary of state from 2010 to 2018, when most of Georgia’s poll closures occurred, Brian Kemp, now the governor, took a laissez-faire attitude toward county-run election practices, save for a 2015 document that spelled out methods officials could use to shutter polling places to show ‘how the change can benefit voters and the public interest.’”  

Clearly, if one defines the public interest as doing whatever cheating and law breaking it takes to keep the GOP in power, then what is going on really is to benefit the public interest. 

Once again, the GOP in its self-righteous lust for political power, ignores existing law and suppresses minority voters as much as they think they can get away with. In Georgia, they can get away with a lot. That poisoned GOP attitude undermines respect for the rule of law, a key trait of demagogues and dictators. Also, as discussed here before, this data accords with the attitudes of GOP activists who are telling republicans and Trump supporters that they should not even worry about voter suppression or the racism inherent in it. As one activist, J. Christian Adams, put it, “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth.”

There you go, be not afraid to cheat, lie, be a racist and/or break laws. Be comfortable and just let it all hang out.

So, instead of denying that GOP voter suppression is real, as Mitch McConnell does, the on-the-ground GOP soldiers are telling the faithful to just blow the criticisms all off as if the underlying reality does not even exist. That is blind GOP tribalism at work, as Mitch McConnell so adeptly describes it. GOP voter suppression is also deep immorality at work in the name of the tribe. 

If the president wins the election in 2020 it will be, in necessary part, because of the influence of GOP voter suppression. In that case, the president would once again be as illegitimate a president in 2021 as he was in 2017 when he was elected with the necessary help of Russian influence.