Democracy rots slowly. Sometimes its decay is perfectly legal, helped along by legislatures and embraced by the courts. It happens when elected officials deliberately tilt the game to their own advantage.On Sunday, the Washington Post published smoking-gun audio of Donald Trump pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to reverse the election outcome and declare Trump the winner, or face potential legal consequences. Even some Republicans have recognized that the bright line between democracy and authoritarianism had been breached.That line, however, has been melting for quite some time. It did not begin with Trump’s presidency. And it will not end when he leaves the White House. The rot runs deep inside a Republican party that has not only lost faith in democracy but bet its future on rule-rigging and minority rule. The party has subverted free and fair elections for years, in ways so ordinary that they’ve been accepted as politics as usual for far too long.Republican gerrymandering – the manipulation of electoral constituencies in favor of one party – in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin has locked in Republican control of state legislatures even when their candidates win hundreds of thousands fewer votes statewide. When Democratic governors won in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Republican-led legislatures stripped power from them in extraordinary lame-duck sessions.Republicans drew themselves similarly friendly maps for Congress and state legislatures in Texas, Ohio and Florida. Then these gerrymandered legislatures – with the blessing of a US supreme court that has gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act – have tried to make it harder for Democrats and minorities to cast their ballots, by using surgically targeted voter ID bills, shuttering voting precincts, or eliminating days of early voting.Then, when large majorities of citizens, from both parties, come together to make voting fairer for everyone, these legislatures often run right over them.When Floridians, for example, overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights to former felons in a 2018 constitutional amendment backed by almost two-thirds of voters, it was hailed as the largest expansion of the franchise since the passage of the voting rights act. An estimated 1.4 million citizens who served their time won back their voice in civic affairs.In any functioning representative democracy, that resounding vote should have been the last word. However, this is Florida where, in 2011, Republicans ignored a state constitutional amendment that banned partisan gerrymandering and locked themselves into such advantageous districts that the will of the people hardly matters at all.And so the Florida legislature not only replaced the voters’ judgement with its own, but turned the amendment on its head. If voters sought to end restrictions designed after the civil war to limit black voting power, the legislature substituted another reminder of those days: a poll tax. Republican legislators insisted that formerly incarcerated people pay all fines and fees related to their sentence – often amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars – before reinfranchisement.This is the time bomb that threatens American democracy. The threat only grows more urgent.As suppressors of the vote well know, poll taxes are extraordinarily effective. Last fall, ProPublica, the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times cross-referenced the voting rolls with a list of those released from prison over the past 23 years, and found just over 31,000 of those 1.4 million former inmates had been able to register to vote. Trump carried this perennial swing state by just 370,000 votes.This is the time bomb that threatens American democracy. The threat only grows more urgent. Republicans’ gerrymandering strategy, known as Redmap, was executed in 2010. The supreme court undid the voting rights act in the Shelby county case in 2013. These efforts came long before Trump descended a Trump Tower escalator and announced his campaign. They may even grow more virulent after Trump leaves, as 2024 presidential hopefuls such as Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, decide that doubling down on “fraud” claims is the best path to claiming the Trump vote, and as red state legislatures use those false fraud assertions to justify new voting restrictions.These efforts are already underway. In Pennsylvania, the new legislature hasn’t even been sworn in yet – but lawmakers are already seeking co-sponsors for a restrictive new voter ID bill, as well as a repeal of no-excuse absentee voting that was expanded due to Covid-19.And that’s not the only chicanery. In 2018, the Pennsylvania state supreme court struck down a congressional map so gerrymandered that Republicans consistently won 13 of the state’s 18 US House seats even when they won fewer statewide votes. Now, on the verge of the next redistricting cycle, Republicans’ gerrymandered state legislative majorities are looking to take revenge – by gerrymandering the courts, essentially creating judicial districts that can then be gerrymandered by the already gerrymandered legislature. Minority rule begets more minority rule.Texas, already one of the most restrictive states in the nation for voting, is readying a raft of new measures. In Georgia, Republican senators have indicated their support for an end to drop boxes as well as no-excuse absentee voting. A movement is also underway to require voter ID for mail-in voting. Many Republicans, meanwhile, frustrated that Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has stood up for the integrity of Biden’s win of the state, have sought to make his position one appointed by the legislature rather than elected by the people.The practice of state legislatures ignoring the will of their own voters is not limited to Florida. Several states worked to make it harder for voters to reform their government via direct democracy. Others brazenly undid the citizens’ efforts and ignored their will. In Missouri, where more than 60% of voters voted for an independent redistricting amendment, Republican lawmakers pushed, and won, a 2020 amendment that masqueraded as campaign finance reform but actually unwound the redistricting effort. Utah’s Republican legislature also worked to undermine an advisory commission that voters enacted in that conservative state in 2018. The conservative political establishments in Arkansas and North Dakota used the courts to knock qualified initiatives off the 2020 ballot that would have opened up the closed primaries that make it easier for them to maintain power.Arizona’s independent redistricting commission remains, but Republicans there stacked the appellate court personnel commission, which vets applications and selects the five finalists for its nonpartisan chair. Their selections include a lobbyist and a gun store owner whose shop hosted a Trump rally and a shooting event for the president last fall.So, yes, Trump will leave the White House in less than three weeks. Democracy teetered but held. Some Republicans played important roles in making that happen, and their bravery should be noted. But Trump did not unleash this anti-democratic fever inside the Republican party. It’s worth noting that two of the other people on that brazen audio obtained by the Post were veteran Republican election lawyer Cleta Mitchell – heard teaching Republican state legislators how to gerrymander and duck legal discovery in leaked audio from a 2019 Alec conference – and Mark Meadows, the Trump chief of staff who first won office – running as a birther who would send Obama “back to Kenya” – from one of those gerrymandered congressional districts in 2012.Trump was created, in part, by the preceding years of gerrymandering and voter suppression that put the most extreme voices in control. They’re not going anywhere. They remain in power. They have not been chastened. There will be a next time. Our democracy may not be so lucky. More
