By Joe Miller
This Week: MAGA Voter Suppression Efforts Dominate GOP Agenda In Key States
Election deniers have been hard at work launching new anti-voter initiatives and applauding overt voter suppression laws in key states this week. In the Texas state legislature, lawmakers filed over 100 election-related bills in just a few days, many aimed at suppressing the will of the voters and making it more difficult to vote. Several of the new bills look to usurp the power of local prosecutors who refuse to follow the Trump playbook on investigating so-called voter fraud, giving state prosecutors more sway. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who spearheaded the infamous lawsuit aimed at overturning the 2020 election results in the Supreme Court, stands to gain even more power to prosecute voters with several of these bills. He has been fervently investigating election-related cases based on Trump’s conspiracy theories about so-called voter fraud ever since 2020, and recently called for all anonymous ballots used in the last election to be publicly released—a demand that several county officials are suing Paxton over, claiming that it violates state and federal protections which require voting records to stay sealed for at least 22 months after an election.
These election bills are not just an isolated instance of MAGA tampering. Last week, a right-wing think tank was exposed for providing templates for anti-voter laws as part of a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort since the 2020 election in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin (among others). This effort has been highly influential in the development of state-level voter suppression bills; reporters found that nearly one-third of the voting bills filed in Georgia alone contained language lifted from the proposals.
Voter suppression efforts are a key part of the MAGA agenda, and multiple prominent Republicans have openly lauded successful anti-voter policies over the past week. In Wisconsin, Republican election commissioner and 2020 fake elector Bob Spindell said he was “especially proud” of lower turnout in urban areas like Milwaukee during the last election, attributing the turnout to a “well thought out multi-faceted plan” by MAGA Republicans in the state to suppress unfavorable votes — particularly Black voters. In response, several Wisconsin officials are calling for his resignation from the state Elections Commission. Similarly, former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler is bragging that Republican victories in the midterm elections can be attributed to the state’s voter suppression bill, SB 202, which made it significantly harder to vote in the state.
Even as Trump and his MAGA allies continue to threaten democracy, state officials are still demanding accountability for the criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. In Michigan, three of Michigan’s presidential electors who cast votes for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 filed a lawsuit last week against a group of 16 Republicans who submitted official documents falsely claiming Donald Trump had won the state. The lawsuit comes just over a week after Michigan state prosecutors re-opened an investigation into the 16 fake electors for potentially violating state election law. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson called for new criminal penalties for election deniers, specifically individuals who threaten or harass election officials and pressure officials to break state and federal election law.
Elsewhere, other election deniers are working to undermine the will of voters as part of the Trump playbook:
In Georgia, a state legislator is being fined by the GOP-led State Election Board for handing out water to voters while wearing a shirt with his name on it during the 2020 election. It is one of the first fines levied against a sitting lawmaker for violating Brian Kemp’s extensive voter suppression law, SB 202, which criminalized handing out food and water to voters waiting in line at polling precincts.
In Michigan, all nine candidates vying to lead the state GOP endorsed unproven election fraud claims at a forum this weekend.
In Pennsylvania, a hand recount of the 2020 presidential election in Lycoming County found no significant changes in vote totals. The mid-sized county held up the 2022 election after briefly refusing to certify midterm results.
And finally, in Florida, all requests for mail-in ballots made in the leadup to the 2020 election have been voided by the state registry without any notice that voters will need to re-apply to receive absentee ballots in the future. MAGA Republicans in Florida have sought to reduce the number of mail-in ballots by making mail-in ballots more difficult to obtain and keep long-term, though more than one in three Florida voters voted by mail in the midterm elections last year.
