Hold GOP Officials Accountable For Illegal Voter Intimidation – OpEd
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 RonDeSantis signedlast year. Now the governor is attempting to discredit those signatures using state-funded cops. According to theTampa 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-calledelection crimes. By that August, he’darrested 20 “elections criminals”for allegedly voting improperly in the 2020 election.
A majority of those arrested — some atgunpoint— were Black. Most had been formerly incarcerated andthought 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 legislatureused every maneuverthey could to thwart that popular decision.
If anyone is breaking voting laws intentionally in Florida and elsewhere, it’swhite conservativeswho’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 ispatently illegal, DeSantis is clearly the one flouting laws.
DeSantis’s fellow Republican, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is on a similar crusade. He recentlyauthorized police raidson 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 beenaggressively prosecuting votersof color based on little to no evidence of nefarious intent. The most egregious example is the conviction and harsh sentencing of a Black voter namedCrystal 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 supportersto “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 extremistHeritage Foundationsent staffersto the homes of Georgia residents thought to be immigrants, in an effort to find voter fraud where none existed. (This is the same organization behind Project 2025, a playbook for a future Republican president promisingthe dystopian destruction of federally funded programs.)
And of course, the loudest and most bizarre conspiracy theories come fromDonald 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 byamplifying 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, frompoll taxestolynchings. Although the1965 Voting Rights Actwas 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 beenfoundto be utterly baseless. So why do Republicans make them?
Asa 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 arestrict lawsin place against voter intimidation. And while the Biden administration isready to enforce themwith a small army of lawyers, it’s critical that votersknow their own rightsandask for helpif they believe their right to vote is under threat.