Nov. 3, 2020--election day in US
N0V. 3, 2020—ELECTION DAY
Hurry up and get the election over or I won’t have any
fingernails left.
My party is destroying
itself on the altar of Trump
A man casts his ballot on the
floor of the Forum arena in Inglewood, Calif., on Saturday. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
Opinion by Benjamin L. Ginsberg
November 1, 2020 at 11:35 p.m. GMT+2
Benjamin L. Ginsberg practiced election law for 38
years. He co-chaired the bipartisan 2013 Presidential Commission on Election
Administration.
President Trump has failed the test of leadership.
His bid for reelection is foundering. And his only solution has been to launch
an all-out, multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters — first
by seeking to block state laws to ease voting during the pandemic, and now,
in the final stages of the campaign, by challenging the ballots of individual voters unlikely to support him.
Follow the latest on Election 2020
This is as un-American as it gets. It returns the
Republican Party to the bad old days of “voter suppression” that landed it
under a court order to stop such tactics — an order lifted before
this election. It puts the party on the wrong side of demographic changes in
this country that threaten to make the GOP a permanent minority.
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These are painful words for me to write. I spent
four decades in the Republican trenches, representing GOP presidential and
congressional campaigns, working on Election Day operations, recounts,
redistricting and other issues, including trying to lift the consent decree.
Opinion | Trump has changed the GOP. Its future looks more like Tucker
Carlson than Larry Hogan.
The jockeying for the post-Trump
future of the Republican Party has started, says Post columnist Max Boot.
(Video: Joy Sharon Yi, Kate Woodsome/Photo: Johnathan Newton/Danielle
Kunitz/The Washington Post)
Nearly every Election Day since 1984 I’ve worked with
Republican poll watchers, observers and lawyers to record and litigate any
fraud or election irregularities discovered.
The truth is that over all those years Republicans
found only isolated incidents of fraud. Proof of systematic fraud has become
the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party. People have spent a lot of time
looking for it, but it doesn’t exist.
As he confronts losing, Trump has devoted his
campaign and the Republican Party to this myth of voter fraud. Absent being
able to articulate a cogent plan for a second term or find an attack against
Joe Biden that will stick, disenfranchising enough voters has become key to his
reelection strategy.
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Perhaps this was the plan all along. The
president’s unsubstantiated talk about “rigged” elections caused by absentee
ballot “fraud” and “cheating” has been around since 2016; it’s just increased in recent weeks.
Trump has enlisted a compliant Republican Party in
this shameful effort. The Trump campaign and Republican entities engaged in
more than 40 voting and ballot court cases around the country this year. In exactly none
— zero — are they trying to make it easier for citizens to vote. In many, they
are seeking to erect barriers.
Opinion | The U.S. election is under attack — from Trump
Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center warns
that the president is doing the work of our foreign adversaries by undermining
the legitimacy of the U.S. election. (Video: Joy Sharon Yi, Kate Woodsome,
Danielle Kunitz/Photo: Evan Vucci/AP/The Washington Post)
All of the suits include the mythical fraud claim.
Many are efforts to disqualify absentee ballots, which have surged in the
pandemic. The grounds range from supposedly inadequate signature matches to
burdensome witness requirements. Others concern excluding absentee ballots
postmarked on Election Day but received later, as permitted under state deadlines.
Voter-convenience devices such as drop boxes and curbside voting have been
attacked.
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Texas Republicans even thought it was a good idea
to challenge 100,000 ballots already cast at a Harris County drive-through
voting center that they want retroactively declared illegal. Perhaps they
forgot the Republican expressions of outrage in Florida in 2000 when Democrats
sought unsuccessfully to exclude 25,000 absentee ballots in GOP counties because of administrative
error, not voter fault.
I was there, and I haven’t.
The GOP lawyers managing these lawsuits may
have tactical reasons for bringing each. But taken as a whole, they shout the
unmistakable message that
an expanded electorate means Trump loses.
This attempted disenfranchisement of voters cannot
be justified by the unproven Republican dogma about widespread fraud.
Challenging voters at the polls or disputing the legitimacy of mail-in ballots
isn’t about fraud. Rather than producing conservative policies that appeal to
suburban women, young voters or racial minorities, Republicans are trying to
exclude their votes.
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“We have volunteers, attorneys and staff in place
to ensure that election officials are following the law and counting every
lawful ballot,” Justin Riemer, chief counsel for the Republican National
Committee, said Friday.
That’s not precisely true. The Republican
challenging effort is focused almost exclusively in heavily Democratic areas.
Signature mismatches will go unheeded by Trump forces in friendly precincts.
This is not about finding fraud and irregularities. It’s about suppressing the
number of votes not cast for Trump.
Maybe the president foreshadowed his real purpose
at a Pennsylvania rally Saturday night, predicting “bedlam” if the results aren’t known Nov. 3. In fact,
challenged ballots aren’t reviewed until days later. So in a tight race,
Trump’s demands for a quick result could cause the very bedlam he rails
against. Or allow him to claim a false election night victory based on bad-faith challenges.
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How sad it is to recall that just seven years ago
the Grand Old Party conducted an “autopsy” that
emphasized the urgency of building a big tent to reach communities of color,
women and young voters. Now it is erecting voting barriers for those very
groups. Instead of enlarging the tent, the party has taken a chain saw to its
center pole.
My party is destroying itself on the Altar of
Trump. Republican elected officials, party leaders and voters must recognize
how harmful this is to the party’s long-term prospects.
My fellow Republicans, look what we’ve become. It
is we who must fix this. Trump should not be reelected. Vote, but not for him.
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