Dear Friend,

It seems like ages ago that Republicans lost two Senate seats in Georgia’s runoff elections, on January 5. When the votes were certified by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, he noted that Georgia was “the first state in the country to implement the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 16 days of early voting (which has been called the ‘gold standard’), and no-excuse absentee voting.”

The New Republic’s staff writer Matt Ford reports that “a group of Republican state lawmakers now seek to end all that. Donald Trump and his allies spent the last three months trying to sue, pressure, and cajole state officials into somehow overturning his defeat there. At the same time, they sowed seeds of doubt in Republican voters’ minds about the result, convincing many of them that the Democratic victory in Georgia and other key states was illegitimate and stolen.” 

Georgia GOP legislators are now proposing new voter suppression laws, and, as Ford notes, “When a Republican elected official says that they have to act because ‘the electorate has lost confidence in the legitimacy of the system,’” they forget to mention that “it was Republicans themselves who baselessly undermined confidence in the electoral system.”  

We won’t waste your time trying to build a false equivalency argument around a story that’s this clear. That’s why The New Republic is often the go-to destination for in-depth election coverage. You can try our brand of independent journalism with three months of unlimited digital access for just $5.

The voter suppressions tactics range from requiring registrars to obtain lists of deaths from coroners and funeral homes to requiring absentee voters to provide ID, to narrowing the categories of voters who can apply in the first place, and much more. 

And Ford warns that this “problem isn’t limited to Georgia. GOP lawmakers in multiple states are introducing bills that would suppress turnout and throw up new barriers between the electorate and the ballot box.”

Matt Ford and his colleagues at TNR understand that voter suppression is fundamentally at odds with democracy and that shining a light on the abuse is a step toward ending it.

Subscribe to The New Republic today.

Sincerely,

Kerrie Gillis, publisher

Read Matt Ford’s Georgia Republicans Are Working to Rig Elections So They Never Lose Again