GOP Undermines Democracy In Possible Prelude To 2020

The Republican assault on our democracy has been an ongoing affair on multiple fronts. From extreme partisan gerrymandering to massive voter suppression reminiscent of the days of Jim Crow, Republicans have leveraged these tactics to continually win elections. But, in these last two election cycles, Republicans have added a new dimension.

In 2016, Trump, expecting defeat, continually threatened to defy the election results, claiming the vote would be rigged. In a typical Trumpism, he declared, "I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win". Even in victory, Trump falsely claimed that millions of "illegals" voted in the election and provided Clinton with her margin of victory.

Also in 2016, in North Carolina, Democrat Roy Cooper barely won election against incumbent Pat McCrory. Cooper's win broke the Republican stranglehold on all three branches of the state's government. The Republican-controlled legislature's response to the results of that election were to attempt to strip the governor of important powers.

Last year, Roy Moore refused to concede even after Doug Jones was certified the winner in the Alabama Senate race. At that time, Moore stated, "Election fraud experts across the country have agreed that this was a fraudulent election". And to this day, Moore has still not conceded.

Earlier this year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled the state's congressional districts an illegal gerrymander that violated the state's constitution. The Republican-controlled legislature responded by attempting to impeach every member of the Court who voted for that decision.

And, now, after the elections earlier this month, Republican across the board are engaging in these similar strategies. As their election day leads began to slip away as all of California's mail-in ballots were counted, Mimi Walters and Young Kim both declared that the reason the opposition Democrat was gaining votes was due to vote tampering. Neither of them presented a shred of evidence to support this charge. In Arizona, Republican county parties sued to stop counting the remaining mail-in ballots as Martha McSally's lead dwindled away. At least they had a basis for their suit, claiming there were no consistent standards within the state for verifying signatures on those ballots. That claim, however, was denied by the courts.

In Florida, Rick Scott was accusing Democrats of fabricating votes in order to steal the election even before all the votes had been counted. He was supported in that charge by Marco Rubio and Donald Trump. Scott, with the help of Attorney General Pam Bondi, even attempted to get Florida law enforcement officials to investigate their claims of fraud. None of them presented a shred of evidence to support that charge.

In Georgia, Brian Kemp  has spent the prior two years purging voters, challenging voter registrations, closing polling locations, not providing enough voting machines for heavily populated locations, and rejecting absentee ballots. Most of these actions were directed at restricting Democratic votes. Yet, even as he presided over his own election for Governor as Secretary of State, his campaign was pressuring Stacey Abrams to concede before all the votes were counted. At the same time, Trump was again talking about Democratic voter fraud in the state, again without a shred of evidence.

In Maine, which just instituted ranked-choice voting where second choice ballots get counted if no candidate gets above 50% of the vote, the GOP representative sued to stop that process, claiming that he was the victor "fair and square" because he won more votes initially, although not enough to give him more than the 50% required.

Now, in Wisconsin, the extremely gerrymandered Republican-controlled legislature is taking a page out of North Carolina's book from 2016 by passing laws in the lame-duck session that will limit the powers of the new, incoming Democratic governor. The lame-duck session is actually an emergency session that was initially called to deal solely with passing a tax package for Kimberly-Clark in order to save 500 jobs in the state. Now, however, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is open to the idea of taking some action, currently undefined, to limit the new Governor's power.

As Brendan Nyhan presciently writes, "The peaceful transfer of power is the core of democracy. The losing side stripping powers from the winning side undermines that compact". Attacking the legitimacy of the electoral process and attempting to strip powers from elections winners before they can even take office attacks on that peaceful transfer of power, however, has become the hallmark of the Trump Republican party.

Of course, all these GOP attacks on democracy, and especially the President's, appear to be a dry-run for the 2020 election. Rick Hasen even fears that Trump could "refuse to concede the 2020 presidential election if he is ahead in the count on election night and then ballot counts inevitably shift toward Democrats as the counting continues".

Unfortunately, Hasen, who usually knows better, descends into both-siderism when he criticizes Abrams for refusing to acknowledge Kemp as the "legitimate" winner of the Georgia election. Hasen believes that such an approach actually feeds into the Republican and Trump theme of fraudulent elections. The New York Times chimed in on that theme as well, equating Democrats' legitimate concerns about suppression and counting all the votes with Republicans' unfounded and unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

That kind of reporting actually does Trump's and the Republicans' work for them, falling into the trap outlined by Karl Rove and used by the GOP for nearly two decades now. The tactic is to baselessly accuse the opponent of the activity you are actually engaging in and then counting on the media to report it as a "both sides do it" kind of story, allowing you to continue to get away with the activity you're already engaged in.

There is only one party that is attacking what most people in this country would understand as the democratic process, continually trying to change the rules of the game while it is being played or even afterward. There is only one party that continually cries fraud without evidence whenever a race is close or has been lost. There is only one party who is increasingly relying on gaming the electoral system in order to win elections. Equating Democratic complaints of real issues with the electoral process with those kind of tactics not only will embolden Republican shenanigans in 2020 but further undermines our democracy.