So, where are we suppressing votes on Tuesday? Well, Georgia, of course, but it’s clear that the Republicans in the Texas legislature have looked over at Georgia and saw the bandwagon heading for the horizon. From the Texas Tribune:
At a press conference in Houston, Abbott served up the opening salvo in the Texas GOP’s legislative response to the 2020 election and its push to further restrict voting by taking aim at local election officials in the state’s most populous and Democratically controlled county. The governor specifically criticized officials in Harris County for attempting to send applications to vote by mail to every registered voter and their bid to set up widespread drive-thru voting, teeing up his support for legislation that would prohibit both initiatives in future elections. “Whether it's the unauthorized expansion of mail-in ballots or the unauthorized expansion of drive-thru voting, we must pass laws to prevent election officials from jeopardizing the election process,” Abbott said on Monday. Harris County planned to send out applications to request a mail-in ballot, not the actual ballots.
Remember when that federal judge down in North Carolina said that state’s new election laws targeted minority voters with “almost surgical precision”? Well, the new Texas effort targets Harris County—and its minority populations—with the same kind of deadly accuracy.
Harris County officials quickly fired back at Republicans’ proposals in their own press conference. “These kinds of attempts to confuse, to intimidate, to suppress are a continuation of policies we’ve seen in this state since Reconstruction,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said. “It is a continuation as well of the big lie that’s being peddled by some far-right elements that the election in 2020 was somehow not true and should be overturned.”
Judge Hidalgo is, of course, correct. The political utility of the Big Lie is stubbornly persistent. In the immediate aftermath of the election, the tactic was to raise all kinds of fraudulent hell about phantom “voter fraud.” And, once the results were booked and official, the tactic became arguing for the necessity of these laws because of all the “questions” that had been ginned up by the conservative political and media ecosystems. The more daring among these bullshit artists even try to use the January 6 insurrection as a demonstration of how “controversial” the results last November were.
During his remarks, Abbott noted that the outcome of local elections in the past had been “altered by election fraud.” His office did not immediately provide specifics about which elections he meant. But Abbott conceded he was unaware whether that had been the case last year. “Right now I don't know how many or if any elections in the state of Texas in 2020 were altered because of voter fraud,” Abbott said. “What I can tell you is this, and that is any voter fraud that takes place sow seeds of distrust in the election process.”
We are seriously testing the limits of the classic law-school definition of “chutzpah” here. Unless the thin Democratic majority acts to kill the filibuster and pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the We The People Act, this incredible and dangerous sleight-of-hand campaign will succeed. And then we’ll all be orphans.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
