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      Defeating Trump Is Just a Start

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      The easy and obvious way to understand the various Republican power grabs underway in states across the country is to look at them as attempts to secure as much unaccountable political power as possible and to curtail the expression of identities and beliefs Republicans find objectionable. That’s how we get the “Don’t Say Gay” laws and attacks on gender-affirming care and aggressive efforts to gerrymander entire state legislatures.But there is another angle you can take on the Republican use of state power to limit political representation for their opponents or limit the bodily autonomy of women or impose traditional and hierarchical gender relations on those who would prefer to live free of them. You could say the point is the cultivation of political despair.Now, it is too much to say that this is premeditated, although you do not have to look hard to find Republican officeholders expressing the belief that political participation should be made more onerous.At the same time, it is hard not to miss the degree to which attempts to nullify popular referendums or redistrict opponents into irrelevance can also work to inculcate a sense of hopelessness in those who might otherwise seek political change. Yes, it is true that many people will push back when faced with a sustained challenge to their right to participate in political life or exercise other fundamental rights. But many people will resign themselves to the new status quo, persuading themselves that nothing has fundamentally changed or concluding that it is not worth the time or effort involved to pick up the fight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Georgia County Signs Up to Use Voter Database Backed by Election Deniers

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      The decision ignores warnings from voting rights groups and some election experts.A suburban county in Georgia agreed on Friday to use a new voter information database endorsed by the election denial movement, a move that defied warnings from voting rights groups, election security experts and state election officials.Columbia County, a heavily Republican county outside Augusta, is the first in the country known to have agreed to use the platform, called EagleAI. Its supporters claim the system will make it easier to purge the rolls of ineligible voters.Among the leading backers for this new system is Cleta Mitchell, a central figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and the leader of the Election Integrity Network, a national coalition of activists built around the false idea that the 2020 election was stolen.Ms. Mitchell and others have billed EagleAI as an alternative to the Election Registration Information Center, a widely used interstate system that made it easier for officials to track address changes and deaths as they maintain the voter rolls. That system, known as ERIC, has become the subject of conspiracy theories and misinformation that prompted nine states to withdraw with few backup plans.Ms. Mitchell declined to answer questions about the county’s decision.At an election board meeting Friday, around 40 people packed a room, with all speakers favoring the new system, according to Larry Wiggins, a Democratic member of the board who said he voted in favor.Mr. Wiggins said he was hopeful the tool would help the county handle an expected influx of voter eligibility challenges next year. A 2021 law made it easier for individuals to challenge large numbers of other voters’ registrations at once. Those challenges have often come from the same community of Republican activists now helping to push the EagleAI software.EagleAI was developed by a retired doctor in Columbia County, John Richards Jr., who did not response to a request for comment.Georgia state officials, who reviewed the EagleAI presentations, have found them riddled with errors and said the tools were unnecessary, according to documents provided by the groups American Oversight and Documented.In May, William S. Duffey Jr., the chairman of the State Election Board in Georgia, sent a letter to the county board of elections warning that EagleAI’s software might violate state privacy laws and state election statutes.The county responded in November that it would not allow access to private voter information and that the use of the tools would be limited.In a statement, the Georgia secretary of state’s office noted that the state still belonged to the Election Registration Information Center and that counties needed to follow state laws.Election experts have labeled the new system unnecessary and flawed.“EagleAI cannot be trusted to provide reliable information regarding who on the voter rolls is not eligible to remain there,” wrote seven voting rights and election organizations in a letter to Columbia County commissioners. It continued: “It will point you towards false positives and waste your staff’s time.”But Mr. Wiggins said the board wasn’t convinced. “We don’t put much faith in letters from outside groups,” Mr. Wiggins said. “We pay more attention to local individuals.” More

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      The Senate Is Getting Less Democratic by the Minute

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      Democrats and the independents who caucus with them will be playing defense in 23 of the 34 Senate seats on the ballot in the 2024 congressional elections. Four of the 23 are in swing states that President Biden won narrowly in 2020. Three are in states that Donald Trump won in both 2016 and 2020.If Democrats were to lose all seven, a catastrophic defeat, they would start the next session in Congress with a weak minority of senators — its smallest number since the days of President Herbert Hoover — who would nonetheless represent nearly half the population of the United States.Depending on where you stand in relation to partisan politics in this country, you may not find this disparity all that compelling. But consider the numbers when you take political affiliation out of the picture: roughly half of all Americans, some 169 million people, live in the nine most populous states. Together, those states get 18 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate.To pass anything under simple majority rules, assuming support from the sitting vice president, those 18 senators would have to attract another 32 votes: the equivalent, in electoral terms, of a supermajority. On the flip side, it is possible to pass an item out of the Senate with a coalition of members who represent a small fraction of the total population — around 18 percent — but hold an absolute majority of the seats. And this is before we get to the filibuster, which imposes a more explicit supermajority requirement on top of this implicit one.Last week, The Washington Post published a detailed look at the vast disparities of power that mark the Senate, which was structured on the principle of equal state representation: Regardless of population, every state gets two members. A carry-over from the Articles of Confederation, the principle of equal state representation was so controversial that it nearly derailed the Philadelphia Convention, where James Madison and others were trying to build a national government with near total independence from the states.It is not for nothing that in the Federalist Papers, neither Madison nor John Jay nor Alexander Hamilton attempts to defend the structure of the Senate from first principles. Instead, Madison wrote in Federalist No. 62, you should consider it a concession to the political realities of the moment:A government founded on principles more consonant to the wishes of the larger States, is not likely to be obtained from the smaller States. The only option, then, for the former, lies between the proposed government and a government still more objectionable. Under this alternative, the advice of prudence must be to embrace the lesser evil; and, instead of indulging a fruitless anticipation of the possible mischiefs which may ensue, to contemplate rather the advantageous consequences which may qualify the sacrifice.Today, the Senate is a distinctly undemocratic institution that has worked, over the past decade, to block policies favored by a large majority of Americans and even a solid majority of senators. And while there’s no immediate hope of changing it, a cleareyed analysis of the chamber’s structural faults can help answer one of the key questions of American democracy: Who, or what, is this system supposed to represent?As the Post piece notes, equal state representation has never been equitable: “In 1790, Virginia, the most populous state, had roughly 13 times the population of Delaware, the least populous, with a difference of about 700,000 people.” But as the country has grown larger and more diverse, the disparities have grown greater and more perverse. The population difference between the states is so large now that a resident of the least populous state, Wyoming, as many observers have pointed out, has 68 times the representation in the Senate than does a resident of California, the largest state by population. In fact, a state gets less actual representation in the chamber the more it attracts new residents.There is not just a disparity of representation; there is a disparity in who is represented as well. The most populous states — including not only California, but New York, Illinois, Florida and Texas — tend to be the most diverse states, with a large proportion of nonwhite residents. The smallest states by population — like Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire — tend to be the least diverse. And the structure of the Senate tends to amplify the power of residents in smaller states and weaken the power of those in larger states. When coupled with the potential for — and what is in truth the reality of — minority rule in the chamber, you have a system that gives an almost absolute veto on most federal legislation to a pretty narrow slice of white Americans.One response to these disparities of power and influence is to say that they represent the intent of the framers. There are at least two problems with this view. The first is that the modern Senate reproduces some of the key problems — among them the possibility of a minority veto that grinds governance to a halt — that the framers were trying to overcome when they scrapped the Articles of Confederation. The second and more important problem is that the modern Senate isn’t the one the framers designed in 1787.In 1913, the United States adopted the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, providing for the direct election of senators at the ballot box rather than their selection by state legislatures. This change disrupted the logic of the Senate. Before, each senator was a kind of ambassador from his state government. After the amendment went into effect, each senator was a direct representative of the people of that state.If each member was a kind of ambassador, then you could justify unequal voting power by pointing to the equal sovereignty of each state under the Constitution. But if each member is a direct representative, then it becomes all the more difficult to say that some Americans deserve more representation than others on account of arbitrary state borders.This brings us back to our question: Who, or what, is the American system supposed to represent? If it is supposed to represent the states — if the states are the primary unit of American democracy — then there’s nothing about the structure of the Senate to object to.It’s plain as day that the states are not the primary unit of American democracy. As James Wilson of Pennsylvania observed during the Philadelphia Convention, the new national government was being formed for the sake of individuals rather than “the imaginary beings called states.” And as we’ve expanded the scope of democratic participation, we have affirmed — again and again — that it is the people who deserve representation on an equal basis, not the states.There is no realistic way, at this moment, to make the Senate more democratic. But if we can identify the Senate as one of the key sources of an unacceptable democratic deficit, then we can look for other ways to enhance democracy in the American system.I know that, given the scale and scope of the problem, that does not sound very inspiring. But we have to start somewhere.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      When It Comes to Disdain for Democracy, Trump Has Company

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      It makes perfect sense to treat Donald Trump as the most immediate threat to the future of American democracy. He has an ambitious plan to turn the office of the presidency into an instrument of “revenge” against his political enemies and other supposedly undesirable groups.But while we keep our eyes on Trump and his allies and enablers, it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that anti-democratic attitudes run deep within the Republican Party. In particular, there appears to be a view among many Republicans that the only vote worth respecting is a vote for the party and its interests. A vote against them is a vote that doesn’t count.This is not a new phenomenon. We saw a version of it on at least two occasions in 2018. In Florida, a nearly two-thirds majority of voters backed a state constitutional amendment to effectively end felon disenfranchisement. The voters of Florida were as clear as voters could possibly be: If you’ve served your time, you deserve your ballot.Rather than heed the voice of the people, Florida Republicans immediately set out to render it moot. They passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed, a bill that more or less nullified the amendment by imposing an almost impossible set of requirements for former felons to meet. Specifically, eligible voters had to pay any outstanding fees or fines that were on the books before their rights could be restored. Except there was no central record of those fees or fines, and the state did not have to tell former felons what they owed, if anything. You could try to vote, but you risked arrest, conviction and even jail time.In Wisconsin, that same year, voters put Tony Evers, a Democrat, into the governor’s mansion, breaking eight years of Republican control. The Republican-led Legislature did not have the power to overturn the election results, but the impenetrable, ultra-gerrymandered majority could use its authority to strip as much power from the governor as possible, blocking, among other things, his ability to withdraw from a state lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — one of the things he campaigned on. Wisconsin voters would have their new governor, but he’d be as weak as Republicans could possibly make him.It almost goes without saying that we should include the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as another example of the willingness of the Republican Party to reject any electoral outcome that doesn’t fall in its favor. And although we’ve only had a few elections this year, it doesn’t take much effort to find more of the same.I’ve already written about the attempt among Wisconsin Republicans to nullify the results of a heated race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Voters overwhelmingly backed the more liberal candidate for the seat, Janet Protasiewicz, giving the court the votes needed to overturn the gerrymander that keeps Wisconsin Republicans in power in the Legislature even after they lose a majority of votes statewide.In response, Wisconsin Republicans floated an effort to impeach the new justice on a trumped-up charge of bias. The party eventually backed down in the face of national outrage — and the danger that any attempt to remove Protasiewicz might backfire electorally in the future. But the party’s reflexive move to attempt to cancel the will of the electorate says everything you need to know about the relationship of the Wisconsin Republican Party to democracy.Ohio Republicans seem to share the same attitude toward voters who choose not to back Republican priorities. As in Wisconsin, the Ohio Legislature is so gerrymandered in favor of the Republican Party that it would take a once-in-a-century supermajority of Democratic votes to dislodge it from power. Most lawmakers in the state have nothing to fear from voters who might disagree with their actions.It was in part because of this gerrymander that abortion rights proponents in the state focused their efforts on a ballot initiative. The Ohio Legislature may have been dead set on ending abortion access in the state — in 2019, the Republican majority passed a so-called heartbeat bill banning abortion after six weeks — but Ohio voters were not.Aware that most of the voters in their state supported abortion rights, and unwilling to try to persuade them that an abortion ban was the best policy for the state, Ohio Republicans first tried to rig the game. In August, the Legislature asked voters to weigh in on a new supermajority requirement for ballot initiatives to amend the State Constitution. If approved, this requirement would have stopped the abortion rights amendment in its tracks.It failed. And last week, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to write reproductive rights into their State Constitution, repudiating their gerrymandered, anti-choice Legislature. Or so they thought.Not one full day after the vote, four Republican state representatives announced that they intended to do everything in their power to nullify the amendment and give lawmakers total discretion to ban abortion as they see fit. “This initiative failed to mention a single, specific law,” their statement reads. “We will do everything in our power to prevent our laws from being removed upon perception of intent. We were elected to protect the most vulnerable in our state, and we will continue that work.”Notice the language: “our power” and “our laws.” There is no awareness here that the people of Ohio are sovereign and that their vote to amend the State Constitution holds greater authority than the judgment of a small group of legislators. This group may not like the fact that Ohioans have declared the Republican abortion ban null and void, but that is democracy. If these lawmakers want to advance their efforts to restrict abortion, they first need to persuade the people.To many Republicans, unfortunately, persuasion is anathema. There is no use making an argument since you might lose. Instead, the game is to create a system in which, heads or tails, you always win.That’s why Republican legislatures across the country have embraced partisan gerrymanders so powerful that they undermine the claim to democratic government in the states in question. That’s why Republicans in places like North Carolina have adopted novel and dubious legal arguments about state power, the upshot of which is that they concentrate power in the hands of these gerrymandered state legislatures, giving them total authority over elections and electoral outcomes. And that’s why, months before voting begins in the Republican presidential contest, much of the party has already embraced a presidential candidate who promises to prosecute and persecute his political opponents.One of the basic ideas of democracy is that nothing is final. Defeats can become victories and victories can become defeats. Governments change, laws change, and, most important, the people change. No majority is the majority, and there’s always the chance that new configurations of groups and interests will produce new outcomes.For this to work, however, we — as citizens — have to believe it can work. Cultivating this faith is no easy task. We have to have confidence in our ability to talk to one another, to work with one another, to persuade one another. We have to see one another, in some sense, as equals, each of us entitled to our place in this society.It seems to me that too many Republicans have lost that faith.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      How Did Democrats Lose Control of State Agriculture Policy?

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      How Did Democrats Lose Control of State Agriculture Policy?Democrats once dominated statewide elections for the influential post of agriculture commissioner. Now they’re hoping to win just one.Kentucky is one of 12 states with elected agriculture commissioners. Clockwise from top left: A soybean farm in Adairville; harvesting apples in Nancy; a tractor caution sign in Pulaski County; a livestock auction in Somerset.Nov. 1, 2023Jonathan Robertson was preparing to start the workday on his family cattle farm when a campaign ad in the race for agriculture commissioner of Kentucky flashed across his television.He couldn’t hear the narrator, but he noticed that the candidate — the name was Shell, he believed — was shown on the screen baling hay and driving farm equipment.“I haven’t heard anything about who’s running,” Mr. Robertson, 47, recalled a few hours later, stopping with his brother for the $5.99 lunch special at the Wigwam General Store in Horse Cave., Ky. “Who’s his opponent?”Neither Mr. Robertson nor his brother, Josh, 44, knew who was in the race, but they had no doubt how they would vote: “I’m a straight-ticket Republican,” Josh said.Democrats face daunting odds in races for the under-the-radar but vitally important position of state agriculture commissioner — and not just in Kentucky, where the two people competing on Nov. 7 are Jonathan Shell, a former Republican state legislator, and Sierra Enlow, a Democratic economic development consultant.Jonathan Shell, the Republican candidate for Kentucky agriculture commissioner, is a former state legislator and a fifth-generation farmer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Turnover of Election Officials in Swing States Adds Strain for 2024, Report Says

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      A tide of resignations and retirements by election officials in battleground states, who have increasingly faced threats, harassment and interference, could further strain the election system in 2024, a national voting rights group warned in a report released on Thursday.The group, the Voting Rights Lab, said that the departures of election officials in Arizona, Pennsylvania and other swing states had the potential to undermine the independence of those positions.The 28-page report reveals the scope of challenges to the election system and underscores the hostile climate facing election officials across the nation. Resignations have swept through election offices in Texas and Virginia, while Republicans in Wisconsin have voted to remove the state’s nonpartisan head of elections, sowing further distrust about voting integrity.In Pennsylvania, more than 50 top election officials at the county level have departed since the 2020 election, according to the report, which said that the loss of their expertise was particularly concerning.In Arizona, the top election officials in 13 of 15 counties left their posts during the same period, the report said. Some of the defections have taken place in counties where former President Donald J. Trump’s allies have sought to require the hand-counting of ballots and have spread misinformation about electronic voting equipment.“They are leaving primarily due to citing harassment and security concerns that are stemming from disproven conspiracy theories in the state,” said Liz Avore, a senior adviser for the Voting Rights Lab.The Justice Department has charged at least 14 people with trying to intimidate election officials since it created a task force in 2021 to focus on such threats, according to the agency. It has secured nine convictions, including two on Aug. 31 in Georgia and Arizona, both battleground states.“A functioning democracy requires that the public servants who administer our elections are able to do their jobs without fearing for their lives,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement at the time.Along with the departures, the Voting Rights Lab report examined a series of issues that it said could create obstacles for the 2024 election, including the approval of new rules in Georgia and North Carolina since 2020 that are likely to increase the number of voter eligibility challenges and stiffen identification requirements.In another area of concern for the group, it drew attention to the expiration of emergency rules for absentee voting in New Hampshire that were enacted during the pandemic.At the same time, some other battleground states have expanded voting access. Michigan will offer at least nine days of early voting in 2024, accept more forms of identification and allow voters to opt in to a permanent mail voting list, while Nevada made permanent the distribution of mail ballots to all voters, the report said. More

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      Pennsylvania Will Start Automatic Voter Registration

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      Nearly half of all states have similar programs that combine getting a driver’s license or state ID card with registering to vote.Pennsylvania, a battleground state that could play an outsize role in the 2024 presidential election, will begin to automatically register new voters as part of its driver’s license and state ID approval process, officials said on Tuesday.The program, which was announced by Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, is similar to those offered in 23 other states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Voters must meet certain eligibility requirements, which include being a U.S. citizen and a Pennsylvania resident for at least 30 days before an election. They also must be at least 18 years old on the date of the next election.“Automatic voter registration is a common-sense step to ensure election security and save Pennsylvanians time and tax dollars,” Mr. Shapiro said in a statement. “Residents of our Commonwealth already provide proof of identity, residency, age and citizenship at the D.M.V. — all the information required to register to vote — so it makes good sense to streamline that process with voter registration.”In the 2020 election and the midterm races last year, Pennsylvania was a hotbed of falsehoods about voter fraud, promoted by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies. Republicans in the state have mounted a series of unsuccessful legal challenges over voters’ eligibility and absentee ballots that did not have dates written on their return envelopes, which a state law requires.The move to automatic voter registration, which begins Tuesday, comes as both Republicans and Democrats keep an eye on the state as the 2024 race heats up.The state where President Biden was born, Pennsylvania could determine not only whether he is elected to a second term, but also whether Democrats maintain control of the closely divided Senate. Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat in his third term, is facing a key re-election test.In the near term, a special election in the Pittsburgh area on Tuesday was expected to determine the balance of power in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives.Pennsylvania had about 8.7 million registered voters as of December 2022, according to state officials, who, citing census figures, estimated that about 10.3 million residents were eligible to register to vote. More

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      in Elections

      The Surprising Places Where Abortion Rights Are on the Ballot, and Winning

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      IdahoN.D.S.D.TexasOkla.Mo.Ark.La.Miss.Ala.Tenn.Ky.Ind.Wis.W.Va.S.C.Ga.Ky.Kan.Mont.Mich.OhioMo.S.D.Fla.Ariz. Before Dobbs, abortion was legal in all 50 states. In the 14 months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, 15 states have enacted near-total bans () on abortion, and two states have imposed six-week limits (). But in the same time frame, the results of a series of ballot measures have revealed […] More