Republicans ramp up voter intimidation

Non-intimidating Republican patriots ensuring clean voting at the 

polls by limiting fraudulent democratic and minority votes

Apparently, it is not enough to just pass laws restricting and suppressing voting by democrats and minorities. Republican lawmakers are also passing laws that protect voter intimidation in urban areas with high levels of democratic and minority votes. The New York Times writes:

HOUSTON — The red dot of a laser pointer circled downtown Houston on a map during a virtual training of poll watchers by the Harris County Republican Party. It highlighted densely populated, largely Black, Latino and Asian neighborhoods.

“This is where the fraud is occurring,” a county Republican official said falsely in a leaked video of the training, which was held in March. A precinct chair in the northeastern, largely white suburbs of Houston, he said he was trying to recruit people from his area “to have the confidence and courage” to act as poll watchers in the circled areas in upcoming elections.

A question at the bottom corner of the slide indicated just how many poll watchers the party wanted to mobilize: “Can we build a 10K Election Integrity Brigade?”

As Republican lawmakers in major battleground states seek to make voting harder and more confusing through a web of new election laws, they are simultaneously making a concerted legislative push to grant more autonomy and access to partisan poll watchers — citizens trained by a campaign or a party and authorized by local election officials to observe the electoral process.

Republicans have offered little evidence to justify a need for poll watchers to have expanded access and autonomy. .... they have grounded their reasoning in arguments that their voters want more secure elections. That desire was born in large part out of Mr. Trump’s repeated lies about last year’s presidential contest, which included complaints about insufficient poll watcher access.

The NYT points out that republicans are working on 40 such laws in 20 states. The laws generally make it almost impossible for poll workers to throw intimidating poll observers out. That leaves republican goon free to intimidate voters in minority and liberal precincts. Republicans do not plan to observe polls in conservative White precincts because those people are all law abiding patriots and no poll watching is needed.

A proposed Texas law allows partisan goons to photograph and video-record voters receiving assistance. Maybe one option is for voters whose privacy is being intruded on by republican thugs videoing them is to overtly show proper respect, for example, like this:

As one can imagine, the video-recording measure is alarming to some folks. That intrusion on privacy could result in identification of a voter in a video posted on social media. Even worse, that could allow videos to be used by partisan propaganda outlets like Fox News to spread lies and slanders as they normally do. Maybe the formal slander industry itself could get involved to help make the democratic or minority voter's life as miserable as possible. That will teach people a well-deserved lesson for asking for help in voting.

Questions: Is this more evidence of how anti-democratic, fascist and mendacious the republican party is? Or, are these laws merely honest, patriotic attempts to protect against profoundly corrupt, fraudulent voting by democrats and minorities in corrupt, violent, communist urban areas? Or, are non-republican voters now well informed enough to not be intimidated by thuggish republican attempts to keep the opposition from voting, making this just a dust bunny in a teapot or whatever metaphor fits better?