The New Neo

A little while ago I wrote a post entitled “Magical thinking on the right about fixing the voting rules.” In it I wrote:

What do I see, though, around the blogosphere? Statement after statement to the effect of: the GOP could have changed these [lax voting security] rules and they didn’t even try because they don’t want to win. This is said by bloggers, opinion writers in publications on the right, and commenters galore. But I believe it’s a case of magical thinking, for the most part.

Compared to the volume of comments like that, I see very little realism about just how that should be done in states that are either blue or purple. I’m not even sure most people understand the formidable obstacles in the way, and I see very little acknowledgement of the many efforts the GOP actually has made to change things.

Then I went on to list just a few of those efforts and what became of them. So why am I writing another post on this today? Because I keep seeing those same statements all around the right side of the internet, and the ignorance is overwhelming. The result, of course, is people on the right dropping out of the entire voting process, which only helps the left.

One of the most frustrating states is Arizona. See this for an angry description of how that state, which has had a legislature and a governorship controlled by Republicans, failed to pass measures to tighten up security. One of the main factors blamed by the author is the GOP leadership in that state, held by GOP “moderates” who don’t like the populist wing of the GOP and who are accused of having squelched quite a few efforts by some of the legislature rank-and-file to make things better. However, although I didn’t see it mentioned in the article, the GOP control of the Arizona House and the Arizona Senate post-2020 has been very thin: 16 to 14 in the Senate and 31 to 29 in the House. That means that unless nearly all the Republican members are onboard, including the RINOesque ones, voting security measures will not pass.

Another fact the article does not see fit to mention is that Katie Hobbs, the Democrat who ended up winning the governorship in 2022, has been Secretary of State in Arizona, tasked with the following:

The highest profile duty of the office is oversight and administration of secure and accurate elections. The Secretary of State serves as Chief Election Officer for the State. One of the goals of the office is to register more voters and encourage their active participation in elections. As part of elections administration, the office certifies: voting devices, election results, candidates and measures to the ballot, as well as the results of statewide elections.

Please let that sink in: the person running on the Democratic ticket for governor in the state of Arizona is the very same person assigned to oversee the security and accuracy of the election. This is unconscionable, and prior to the election there were plenty of calls for her to recuse herself (some of them even from Democrats), but Hobbs simply refused.

But even apart from that, secretaries of state have a lot of power to block voting reform bills by engineering collusive lawsuits in court. If you don’t know how collusive lawsuits work, here’s a description of how the process worked in Minnesota:

The League of Women Voters, a solidly Democratic organization, is “suing” Minnesota’s Secretary of State, left-wing activist Steve Simon. The lawsuit seeks to suspend Minnesota’s election laws, ostensibly on account of COVID-19, so that persons mailing in absentee ballots won’t need to satisfy the statutory requirement of a witness to verify their identity. Without that requirement, voter fraud will be even easier than it is at present. If a Democrat finds a ballot lying around, as will happen many thousands of times in Minnesota, where the voter rolls include hundreds of thousands of names that are dead or otherwise not eligible voters, he can fill it out and send it in, no questions asked.

Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon, who consistently abuses his office to facilitate voter fraud, quickly agreed to the “settlement” that his party wanted…

…[A]collusive “settlement” is the easiest path to voter fraud.

Or certainly to blocking Republican efforts to stop it. And I have little doubt Hobbs would have done this, had the Republican reforms passed. However, they did not, but not due to lack of trying by the conservative wing of Arizona’s GOP. The problem was that there weren’t enough of them to pass the legislation in such a narrowly divided legislature, and the legislative leadership of the Arizona GOP didn’t seem strongly invested in pushing it nevertheless.

Here’s a different look at the same set of circumstances, written in March of 2022 when the process was ongoing. It is from NPR, and so of course there’s a leftward skew to it. But it mentions a lot of efforts by the GOP in Arizona, and how the opposition framed them:

By last count at the Arizona State Capitol, close to a hundred voting bills have been introduced, part of a nationwide push by far-right Republican-controlled legislatures to pass restrictive voting laws.

The swing state of Arizona is front and center — home to 10% of all the proposed legislation…

So there were many efforts. Some details:

Fillmore represents one of Arizona’s most conservative districts around Apache Junction, in the suburban desert east of Phoenix. The businessman often seen in a bolo tie says many of the proposed bills, which range from measures to require all ballots be hand counted to restrictions on ballot drop off boxes, are a response to concerns by his constituents.

What happened?:

“The fact that our elected officials in this country could even be introducing bills that so thoroughly undermine our democracy sends a really bad message,” says Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, which has analyzed every voting rights bill introduced in state legislatures since 2011…

…[A]nalysts are worried that their very mention and news coverage of them could lead to further distrust in the electoral system among the general public.

So mere discussions of bills to enhance voter security – designed to encourage trust in the minds of the enormous number of Americans who already believe our elections are now fraudulent – are described as causing more voter distrust, in one of those Orwellian twists of which the left is so very fond.

And then there’s – you guessed it – charges of racism:

During a recent debate on his bill to require all voting to be done on election day in a voter’s precinct only, Rep. Fillmore said he wanted to bring voting back to how it was in 1958.

That didn’t land well.

Arizona has a fraught history of Jim Crow laws. Today, Republicans hold just a slim majority in the legislature and Arizona’s population is getting more diverse thanks to in-migration from states like California.

For his part, Fillmore says Democrats are trying to misconstrue what he said, when he really just wants voting to get back to its basics.

“What I was referring to was back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, you had voting in the precinct, with government identification,” he says. “You had counting done in the precinct reported that day and that night.”…

“You can say that you didn’t mean it, but you said it,” [a black newspaper owner and former member of the Arizona legislature named Campbell] told NPR, in reference to the 1958 comment. “I think that to a certain extent a lot of people feel that they want to go back to the quote un-quote good old days for them, that wasn’t good ole days for everyone.”

The main guy who blocked the legislation was named Boyer:

Last year when Boyer refused to join Republicans who were trying to seize voting records from Maricopa County, party activists tried to recall him. He was also threatened and briefly had police security at his home. Today, Boyer says he’s disturbed by the GOP’s move toward populism, deficit spending and a cult of personality with Donald Trump.

So this guy is essentially the Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney of Arizona, and he has a lot of power in such a close legislature. Boyer declined to run again in 2022, by the way. The narrowly-divided party breakdown in the Arizona Senate has not changed as a result of the 2022 election, and same for the House, although now Hobbs will be governor and able to veto anything they might want to pass.

But from that history, you can see that, even in Arizona – the swing state the failed to tighten voter security after 2020 and yet had at least a chance of doing so – there were many bona fide efforts that were able to be stopped by one or two people. This is the problem with narrow majorities and a party that is divided against itself.

I could go into the history of state after state – in particular, Pennsylvania. But it would be a very long post. Suffice to say that in Pennsylvania, the Democrat governor was able to veto all efforts, and if that had failed the leftist appeals court would always be willing to fill in to the same effect. You can see some of this history here and here.

I fail to see how the GOP can get election security reform bills passed without a strong enough legislative majority, the governorship of the state involved, an appeals court that is not skewed to the left, and a secretary of state who is also Republican. However, states that have all of that in place probably don’t have voting security problems in the first place, or have already fixed them – such as, for example, Florida.

This continuing belief on the part of so many voters on the right that the GOP could wave a magic wand and fix it if only they wanted to do so, and that their failure to accomplish this task means that they didn’t try and don’t want to, is both ignorant and destructive – destructive because it causes some voters on the right to compound the problem by giving up and not voting at all.

It’s instructive to do some basic research and discover what actually was tried, and what failed, and why, and what the obstacles are that need to somehow be overcome. But the left feeds on ignorance – not only of its own voters, but of some GOP voters as well.