Republican attacks on inconvenient truth, and free and fair elections intensify

There's war going on not just in Ukraine. A huge one is going on in the US right now. The New York Times writes:

The Florida Legislature last week created a law enforcement agency — informally called the election police — to tackle what Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have declared an urgent problem: the roughly 0.000677 percent of voters suspected of committing voter fraud.

In Georgia, Republicans in the House passed a law on Tuesday handing new powers to police personnel who investigate allegations of election-related crimes.

And in Texas, the Republican attorney general already has created an “election integrity unit” charged solely with investigating illegal voting.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare — and often accidental. Still, ambitious Republicans across the country are making a show of cracking down on voter crime this election year. Legislators in several states have moved to reorganize and rebrand law enforcement agencies while stiffening penalties for voting-related crimes. Republican district attorneys and state attorneys general are promoting their aggressive prosecutions, in some cases making felony cases out of situations that in the past might have been classified as honest mistakes.

In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his new “election integrity unit” in October to investigate election crimes, The Houston Chronicle reported that the six-prosecutor unit had spent $2.2 million and had closed three cases.

And in Wisconsin, where a swath of Republicans, including one candidate for governor, are seeking to decertify the state’s 2020 presidential election results on the basis of false claims of fraud, a report released last week by the Wisconsin Election Commission said that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons’ voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to. From among those cases, district attorneys have filed charges against 16 people.

“The underlying level of actual criminality, I don’t think that’s changed at all,” said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who has collected years of data on election fraud in America. “In an election of 130 million or 140 million people, it’s close to zero. The truth is not a priority; what is a priority is the political use of this issue.”  

“It didn’t seem to me there was any attempt to defraud,” Mr. Gruenke said [about 25 voters who gave a PO box address instead of their actual residence address]. “It would be a felony charge, and I thought that would be too heavy for what amounted to a typo or clerical error.” (emphasis added) 

In another recent article, the NYT commented on the current state of affairs in the GOP: 

The proposals are the latest twist in a decades-long crusade by Republicans against election fraud that has grown rapidly since Mr. Trump’s election loss in 2020 and his false claim that victory was stolen from him. .... Sweeping election-law revisions enacted by Florida and Georgia legislators last spring sharply limit the use of popular drop boxes for submitting absentee ballots, require identification to obtain mail-in ballots, make it harder to conduct voter-registration drives, and restrict or ban interactions — such as handing out snacks or water — with voters waiting in line to cast ballots.

In other words, the Republican Party has been opposed to free and fair elections for a long time. The 2020 elections made the Republican fever intensify.

A Radical Republican elite rails against 

free and fair elections in 1980 

The Georgia law includes incentives for police to crack down hard on protesters, and a requirement for permits in advance of all protests. One good way to shut protesters up is to deny permits to protest. Another is to permit protesting only in obscure places that few people will notice. Georgia Republicans really want law and order inflicted hard on non-Republicans and by God, they're gonna get it. Clerical errors now rise to the level of felonies for average voters. The standards are far more relaxed for Republican elites -- their 'mistakes' are forgivable, even their knowing criminal acts.

In Memphis TN, a woman was sentenced to six years in prison in January after registering to vote because she had a felony conviction and registering to vote was illegal for felons. That will teach her a well-deserved lesson.

The Republican Party's authoritarian attacks on democracy and civil liberties remain focused on subverting elections, limiting open free speech opposition and some other key anti-democratic tactics. America's radical right war on democracy, inconvenient truth and civil liberties is not going to stop any time soon. Most who cannot see the urgency and danger by now are unlikely to ever see it.