The Wisconsin Roots of Republican Election Denial

BY JOEL MCNALLY

America is proudly proclaimed to be “the world’s greatest democracy” every Fourth of July by every politician in the land. So why do two-thirds of Republicans continue to deny the legitimacy of President Biden’s election two years ago?

Political parties go morally and politically bankrupt the same way a businessman in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises described going financially bankrupt, “Two ways, gradually and then suddenly.”

Donald Trump didn’t invent the Republican tactic of using racial and religious bigotry to win elections. Nor did he invent publicly lying about nationwide Democratic election fraud that really doesn’t exist. All he did was tell bigger lies to inflame racial and religious hatred and undermine confidence in American democracy. Those political tactics have always been related.

Republicans have appealed to racism for half a century ever since Richard Nixon betrayed the party of Lincoln with his Southern strategy to win the votes of racist southern Democrats angered by their party’s support for civil rights and equal voting rights for all Americans.

It's not just a coincidence the drive by Republican state legislatures to destroy equal voting rights in America began immediately after the racist Republican tea party midterms of 2010. It was a white supremacist protest of President Barack Obama’s election as America’s first African American president two years earlier.

Obama won Wisconsin in both of his presidential elections, but the predominantly white state joined others in the 2010 political backlash by electing extreme rightwing Republicans—Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Ron Johnson.

Suppressing Voter Rights

Walker is most remembered for destroying union rights for public employees in his first year as governor. But 2011 also was the year Walker and Ohio Gov. John Kasich became the first two Republicans setting off the national frenzy in their party to require designated photo IDs many Americans didn’t possess to vote in elections.

From the start, Republicans justified the photo ID requirement with an election lie. They claimed photo IDs were necessary to prevent voter fraud. That’s always been a ridiculous lie. The only instance of vote fraud that can be prevented by photo IDs is someone attempting to impersonate another voter.

In 2014 after Republican states throughout the country had followed Wisconsin’s lead in requiring photo IDs, a nationwide study by Loyola Law School found only 31 credibly documented incidents of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States since 2000.

Federal judges in states as diverse as Wisconsin, Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, North Dakota and Kansas struck down voter ID laws as unconstitutional restrictions on voting Wisconsin federal Judge Lynn Adelman struck down Wisconsin’s voter ID law in 2014, writing such laws endangered the voting rights of “300,000 plus citizens who lack an ID,” disproportionately impacting Black and Latino voters even though Republican lawmakers “could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time.”

Partisan Politics

That victory for state voting rights was short-lived. Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Diane Sykes, appointed by the second President Bush to the 7th District Court of Appeals in Chicago, headed a three-judge panel that quickly reinstated Wisconsin’s voter ID. That partisan political decision was one reason Sykes made the short lists of both Bush and Trump for the US Supreme Court.

Never mind the amount of actual vote fraud in elections today is infinitesimal. As Adelman noted in his decision, someone would have to be “insane” to cast more than one vote using a false identity. The legal consequences were severe (a $10,000 fine and three years in prison) for no actual benefit (an additional vote for a preferred candidate that really wouldn’t make any difference).

Voter ID was just the foot in the door. Republican legislatures ever since have continued to create tidal waves of voting restrictions aimed “with almost surgical precision” in the words of a North Carolina court to reduce voting by specific racial groups and geographic areas that are likely to vote against them.

The 2008 Republican campaign by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan against Obama was the first to openly defend lying as a political tactic. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” campaign pollster Neil Newhouse told ABC News.

REPUBLICANS HAVE APPEALED TO RACISM FOR HALF A CENTURY EVER SINCE RICHARD NIXON BETRAYED THE PARTY OF LINCOLN WITH HIS SOUTHERN STRATEGY TO WIN THE VOTES OF RACIST SOUTHERN DEMOCRATS.

To return to the original question: How could two-thirds of Republicans support throwing out the results of a presidential election in our democracy that President Biden clearly won by more than seven million votes and 74 electoral votes?

Trump, who lies like he breathes, and those who blindly follow him have done what they’ve always done. They take all the sins of Republicans to toxic extremes

Let Republicans get away with a few election lies and the next thing you know a mob of violent insurrectionists are storming the Capitol to overthrow democracy attempting to murder members of Congress and lynch the vice president.