"It’s bad enough when a trio of voter suppression groups led by charlatans gets together at an annual secret conference that is sponsored, in part, by a group created by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to talk about all the ways they might make it harder for people to register or vote in future elections. But it is much worse when the participants in that secret conference also include secretaries of state and other top election officials from 13 Republican-led states, plus Don Palmer, a member of the United States Election Assistance Commission, plus counsels to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the House Administration Committee’s Republican staff, and a sitting Texas state senator. The entire conference—whose existence was revealed in a blockbuster report by the Guardian and Documented last week—shows that there is a thriving network of interlocking organizations working with elected and election officials to use unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud to try to mess with fair elections for partisan advantage.
"It is understandable if this particular report flew below the radar for
you. We are all living in Steve Bannon’s Trumpian dreamworld in which 'flooding the zone with shit' has become a remarkably successful
political tactic. From the past week’s stories of Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas failing to report lavish free vacations, including a
$500,000 jaunt on a private plane, to a bonkers anti-abortion ruling
from a Texas judge that bans an abortion drug and lays the groundwork
for recognizing a fetus as a human being entitled to full constitutional
protection, to the expulsion of two Black state legislators from the
Tennessee Legislature because they had the temerity to protest gun
violence fueled by a Supreme Court stuck in the 1790s to—yes—more mass
shootings, it is too easy to be distracted. But that doesn’t change the
fact that there are people meeting, behind closed doors, to plot out new
paths to voter suppression, with direct implications for the type of
democracy that we may have in the United States in 2024 and beyond..." -- Richard L. Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate, writing about how voter suppression efforts by fringe anti- democratic forces are now thriving in the Republican/ Seditionist/ Shooters Party. Losing the popular vote in 7 out of 8 of the last Presidential elections, plus seriously underperforming in the 2022 elections (even with the advantage of gerrymandered districts), has created a crisis in a party whose radical and unpopular policies, grievance politics, and demographics are leading it to permanent minority status. Holding onto power at any cost has been the only object for them for some time, which has been accelerated by the desperation of their cult leader to remain out of jail by regaining power.
