Democracy failure update: GOP voter suppression laws are still in progress

In states where the Republican Party is in control, the New York Times reports about a slew of new voter suppression laws are aiming at suppressing disabled voters from voting. This is a big deal because there are about 38 million voters who are disabled. That is a big voting block. The GOP aims to make voting for as many of the disabled as hard as they can. Some of the proposed laws are rather creative in the barriers that are being put in place. 

For example, in Texas the legislature is planning a special session to pass laws that would disproportionately affect people with disabilities. One Texas bill bans drive-through voting, further limits absentee voting, and it would allow poll watchers video record voters as possible evidence of wrongdoing. The intent is to give Republican poll watchers a chance to allege that legal accommodations such as a poll worker helping a disabled voter complete a ballot, or a blind voter using a screen reader, is fraud. The law makes it a felony to commit this kind of “vote fraud.” The NYT writes on this tactic:

Breaking these rules would be a felony — a characteristic of bills in several states that advocates said could discourage people from helping friends or neighbors.

“It’s made organizations like ours start questioning, ‘Should we do that?’ because a simple mistake on our end could put them in jeopardy and our organization in jeopardy,” said Chase Bearden, deputy executive director of the Coalition of Texans With Disabilities. “That’s a pretty chilling effect.”

Indeed, being accused of committing felony vote fraud just for helping someone to vote would be chilling. That is the Republican intent. In recent elections, demands from the disabled community have increasingly exerted pressure on politicians to respond. But after the 2020 election where mail-in voting helped the disabled turn out in large numbers, new GOP voter suppression laws are threatening their rights in an attempt to limit their political influence. Similar measures are being advanced in the Georgia and Wisconsin legislatures.

In Florida, new absentee ballot applications rules required that people must apply every election cycle instead of every two elections. That imposes a significant obstacle because many counties’ websites are inaccessible to people with disabilities. In addition, people who have a hard time controlling their hand writing, e.g., people with visual impairment or brain injury, can be subject to signature verification challenges at the polls.

The Republican Party is clearly not yet finished with its intense nationwide campaign of voter suppression and vote subversion. It is probably the best tactic the GOP has to keep a minority of Republicans in power against the will of all Americans who want to vote.

The big question is how effective will Republican efforts to subvert democracy work? The elections in 2022 and 2024 should shed some light.