To “suppress” means to forcibly end, to restrain, to stifle, hold back, deaden.
Suppress is a transitive verb. The action transits to the direct object of suppression.
To suppress the vote requires someone to suppress. It requires a reason to suppress.
Lots of white people believe they are going to be replaced by “colored” peoples, black or brown mostly.
These white people vote almost exclusively Republican.
Therefore, to keep their place, or so they believe, Republicans across the country are working to limit voting by people of color, by the young, by those who live in cities.
This is what it means to suppress the vote. This is what it means to try to end democracy.
Just over six months have passed since the election, almost five since the attempted overthrow of the Republic and I do not want to be writing about what I see happening now. I spent five years writing about Trump and the Republicans’ lies, corruption, and white nationalist poison. Biden’s win ensured the survival of the Republic for four years. That’s all.
I’ve tried to write about this before today but just could not bring myself to devote more time and thought to the powerful, evolving trends tearing this country apart. China and Russia, Putin and Xi-Jinping, are legitimate threats to a peaceful world and to democracy, and civil war and climate change has already created the beginnings of mass migration and resulting political turmoil in Europe and Central America and on our border with Mexico. But right now and in the immediate future, our own and the world’s primary cause for worry about us is internal. We have become a nation where about 40% to 45% of the voting population no longer believes in democracy.
Trump eliminated all moral bearings from the Republican Party. That is his great contribution. He said, in so many ways, that only power counts, not how one wins it or exercises it. He had a competent ally in Mitch McConnell, the most powerful legislative Republican leader, a man who despises Trump but who is cynical enough to see how Trump could benefit his only goal, to remain in power.
The one other indispensable Trump ally has been Fox News and Rupert Murdoch, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party for a generation and such a skillful purveyor of lies that Goebbels could never have imagined in his wildest dreams of information and population control.
The Republicans (with some outliers like Representatives Kinzinger and Cheney) have embraced a multi-step plan. Lie repeatedly, at all times, in every venue possible that the 2020 election was stolen. This sets up the legislative efforts in Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Texas and many other states to suppress the votes of those who may vote Democratic — black people, native Americans, the young, the residents of cities. If the 2020 election was stolen, these efforts can be sold to Republican supporters as an effort to ensure electoral integrity. Make sure that legislatures can override Secretaries of State in declaring an election valid. Add in anti-protest legislation such as Florida’s new law that even allows individuals to ram their cars into protestors.
In relentlessly proclaiming the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, the Republicans have, in effect, decided that no Democrat can ever be legitimately elected to the Presidency again. They have locked themselves into a self-perpetuating logic that begins with the proposition that Democrats cheat because they are Democrats. Therefore, because they are Democrats, they will always cheat. Therefore, no election where a Democrat wins the Presidency can be legitimate because Democrats always cheat.
They have chosen a path whose logical end is tyranny. They have pledged to use the power of the State to negate elections that go against them. Ultimately, they can only enforce this through a corruption of the election process so thorough it counts as massive fraud. They will back it up with prosecution and with state violence. There is no third way.
Let me repeat that. There is no third way. The logical end to their desire to retain power through undemocratic means is to use the violence of the State to enforce their power.
The Republican Party is now a doctrinaire Party, reflexively opposed to empirical evidence and to scientific reasoning. It is a Party of The Big Lie, a Party of The Insurrection and of voter suppression, a Party devoid of ideas on how to govern other than tax cuts, a Party that is inseparable from a Cult of Donald Trump and a Party now wholly committed to tyranny.
*What the Texas legislature is proposing is indicative of suppression efforts taking place in many States where Republicans control the legislature(s) and the position of Governor:
“Republicans in the Texas Legislature are attempting to dismantle provisions that helped bring about record turnout in urban areas last November through bills that would reportedly make Texas—which right before the presidential election was deemed “the state with the most restrictive voting process”—an even more challenging place to cast a vote.
On the single day that Harris County—where Houston is located—implemented 24-hour voting, more than 10,000 people reportedly showed up at the peak nighttime hours. Along with a ban on 24-hour voting, the two bills include a ban on drive-through voting, another flexible option introduced to residents this past election. One woman told the Times that the method “was a savior for me” as it provided a safer way to vote while eight-months pregnant during a pandemic, and avoided the logistical challenge of waiting in a long line while also taking care of her four-year-old. More than 127,000 voters used Harris County’s drive-through voting process in the general election. But even parts of the Republican bill that are not directly aimed at Harris County will most likely hit the area hardest, the Times reports, such as the call for a consistent number of voting machines in each precinct that “could hamper the ability to deploy extra machines in densely populated areas.”
“It’s about race,” Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, tweeted in response to the Times story. “And every time we use another descriptor ‘Democrat-run cities,’ ‘urban areas,’ we draw attention away from the fact that voter suppression is a fundamentally racist project.”
“In addition to GOP-backed attempts to limit voting, legal scholar Rick Hasen wrote that efforts to expand the legislature’s power over who counts votes and how they do so pose an equal, if not greater, threat to American elections and lays out a series of moves to combat such election interference, ranging from basic safeguards to the ultimate need to “create incentives for loyalty to the integrity of the democratic process, not to a political party.” Recent Republican attempts to undermine the fair conduction of elections and vote counting include the provision in the new Georgia law stripping the secretary of state of their decision-making power on the state election board, which Hasen notes is seemingly a direct response to Brad Raffensperger, the current Georgia secretary of state who refused to subvert the state’s results on Trump’s behalf, but also a change that will apply to his successor.”
Kelin, Charlotte. “Texas Republicans Are Taking Voter Suppression To The Next Level”. Vanity Fair, April 26, 2021.
