The Texas GOP takes the party's hostility to democracy to a new level
One of the more remarkable responses to Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election has been the vilification not of voter fraud but, instead, of voting.
Because Trump claimed that the election had been tainted by rampant fraud and because no evidence of fraud emerged, many of his allies scrambled to find a middle ground in which they could claim that the election was somehow suspect without having to amplify those claims. Many settled on the idea that the election was unfair because states had expanded voting mechanisms because of the pandemic.
These arguments often centered on exaggerated or untrue claims that these expansions violated state constitutions. But they also shared another quality: They were complaints that too many people voted. Sometimes these criticisms were at least layered with hand-wringing that, say, ballot drop boxes allowed for more fraudulent votes to be cast, which is not true. Often, though, they were just complaints that it was too easy to cast a ballot and, by extension, that too many legitimate voters were able to cast votes for Joe Biden.
This line of rhetoric (which is omnipresent once you start noticing it) is a reflection of the Republican Party’s long-standing apathy about the process of submitting issues to voters and tallying their responses. The electoral college has been hailed by the right as not only necessary but wise, even though it can award the presidency to the less-popular candidate (as it did for the Republican nominees in 2000 and 2016). Republicans have trotted out the hoary, overstated dichotomy between democracy and republicanism; some, like Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), went on to try to help Trump retain power despite losing the 2020 election.
Over the weekend in Texas, the state Republican Party offered up perhaps the most explicit example of separating election results from actual voting. At its convention, the party proposed — and its delegates approved — a platform demanding that winning statewide office necessitate also winning at least half of Texas counties.
https://wapo.st/4bMQ854