Zero tolerance for Republican voter intimidation
A Florida resident named Isaac Menasche received a home
visit this September from a police officer asking whether he’d signed a
petition for a ballot measure.
The petition, which Menasche had indeed signed, was for a
November initiative overturning a strict abortion ban that Florida Governor
Ron DeSantis
signed last year. Now the governor is attempting to discredit those
signatures using state-funded cops. According to the Tampa
Bay Times, state law enforcement officers have visited the homes of
other signers as well.
DeSantis created an elections police unit in 2022 to
investigate so-called election
crimes. By that August, he’d arrested
20 “elections criminals” for allegedly voting improperly in the 2020
election.
A majority of those arrested — some at gunpoint —
were Black. Most had been formerly incarcerated and thought
they were eligible to vote, since Floridians had overwhelmingly passed a
ballot measure restoring their voting rights. But DeSantis and his GOP allies
in the state legislature used
every maneuver they could to thwart that popular decision.
If anyone is breaking voting laws intentionally in Florida and elsewhere, it’s white conservatives who’ve been caught engaging in deliberate voter fraud numerous times, including attempting to vote multiple times and voting under the names of their dead spouses.
Further, given that voter intimidation is patently illegal,
DeSantis is clearly the one flouting laws.
DeSantis’s fellow Republican, Texas Attorney General Ken
Paxton, is on a similar crusade. He recently authorized
police raids on the homes of people associated with a Latino civil
rights group called the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC),
including grandparents in their 70s and 80s.
Like DeSantis, Paxton has been aggressively
prosecuting voters of color based on little to no evidence of
nefarious intent. The most egregious example is the conviction and harsh
sentencing of a Black voter named Crystal
Mason. Mason spent six years fighting her case and was acquitted last May
because of a lack of evidence.
Bruce Zuchowski, a Republican county sheriff in Ohio, called
on supporters to “write down all the addresses of the people who had
[Kamala Harris] signs in their yards” so they can be forced to take in migrants
— whom he called, in a garbled Facebook post, “human locusts.” Local residents
say they feel intimidated.
It’s not just government officials. The extremist Heritage
Foundation sent
staffers to the homes of Georgia residents thought to be immigrants,
in an effort to find voter fraud where none existed. (This is the same behind
Project 2025, a playbook for a future Republican president promising the
dystopian destruction of federally funded programs.)
And of course, the loudest and most bizarre conspiracy
theories come from Donald
Trump, who invokes non-existent fraud to explain why he lost the 2020
election. His billionaire backer Elon Musk has added fuel to the fire by amplifying
these false claims.
If their rhetoric weren’t so dangerous, it would be funny
that Trump is a felon and Musk is an immigrant.
There’s a long and disturbing history of voter suppression
aimed at communities of color, from poll taxes to lynchings.
Although the 1965
Voting Rights Act was aimed at preventing such race-based suppression,
right-wing justices on the Supreme Court gutted parts of the law, opening the
door to systematic disenfranchisement and intimidation.
Numerous investigations of voter fraud claims have
repeatedly been found to
be utterly baseless. So why do Republicans make them?
As a
federal judge in Florida concluded, “For the past 20 years, the majority in
the Florida Legislature has attacked the voting rights of its Black
constituents. They have done so … as part of a cynical effort to suppress
turnout.” And that’s precisely the point.
There are strict
laws in place against voter intimidation. And while the Biden
administration is ready
to enforce them with a small army of lawyers, it’s critical that
voters know
their own rights and ask for
help if they believe their right to vote is under threat.
Sonali Kolhatkar is the host of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.