Paul Weaver/Sipa USA via AP Images
Supporters of President Donald Trump urged legislators to decertify the election during a rally at the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, January 5, 2021.
There’s nothing new about Republicans’ voter suppression. Indeed, to cite just one instance, there’s compelling evidence that 60 years ago, when he was a young lawyer in Arizona, future Chief Justice William Rehnquist threatened suspicious-looking (i.e., Latino) prospective voters who’d lined up to cast their ballots at a polling place to which local Republicans had dispatched him to damp down Democratic voting. So there’s precedent, if not entirely legal, for the current Republican justices’ hostility to just letting Americans vote.
But even as Republicans have tried for decades to suppress vote casting, it’s only in the past year that they’ve declared war on vote counts themselves. To be sure, when vote margins were very close, as they were in Florida in 2000, the Republican majority on the Court (then led by the same Bill Rehnquist) stopped the count lest Al Gore become president, but heck—that was really close. This year, though, Republicans are moving to skew the vote not only going in (i.e., restricting access to the polls) but coming out (alleging fraud if their candidate loses, and giving legislatures the power to overturn the actual vote).
For this, we have two peculiar psychological conditions to thank. The first, of course, is Donald Trump’s, and the condition in question is his inability to acknowledge his failures (in this case, his failure to win the presidency last November), even when that requires denying reality. The second is his party’s, which took Trump’s psychological deficiency and attendant denial of reality and turned it into a doctrine: When a Republican loses, it’s because the vote count was rigged.
For the past month, the California right has been declaring that if Gavin Newsom survives next week’s all-mail-ballot recall election (and it’s increasingly likely that he will), it will be due to nefarious vote-fixing by nefarious Democrats. The holes in the return ballot envelopes, which have been placed on those envelopes for decades to help visually impaired voters know where to sign, are now alleged to be a way that ballots marked with a “yes on the recall” vote can be detected and discarded, though the vote markings actually won’t be visible through the holes.
Another complaint is that ballots arrive in the mail folded in such a way that some of the candidates to replace the governor have the fold over their name, and that this is designed to make it harder to vote for these folded few. Of course, there are 46 such candidates—too many to put on a ballot that could fit into an envelope without folding (plus which, the order of the candidates varies from assembly district—there are 80 of them—to assembly district).
On the right wing’s social media, these folds and holes are adduced as sinister Democratic plots, and even if Newsom wins in a landslide (which is distinctly possible), Republicans are sure to allege that the vote was cooked. Moreover, I’ve already seen Republican cries that this November’s Virginia gubernatorial election, in which Democrat Terry McAuliffe holds the lead, is being fixed by the Democrats as well.
My fear—an altogether rational fear, alas—is that Republicans will create such fantastical allegations to challenge a multitude of Democratic victories in the 2022 midterm elections. Nevada Republican Senate hopeful Adam Laxalt has already announced he’s preparing litigation to overturn next year’s election outcome should he lose. The new Republican normal is that no Democrat can legitimately win. This is not only very dangerous for democracy; it is also, in magnifying the malformations of Trump’s psyche, very sick.
