EDITORIAL:

Republicans’ assault on democracy puts sanctity of elections at risk

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Yasmina Chavez

Lawrence Bleitz, a Navy veteran who flew missions in the Korean and Vietnam wars, protests in front of the Lloyd D. George Courthouse in downtown Las Vegas during a “Stop the Steal” protest Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021.

Wed, Jun 16, 2021 (2 a.m.)

The Associated Press reported recently that elections officials in several states are leaving their jobs in waves amid threats and intimidation by right-wing extremists and Republican lawmakers pushing bogus claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

This exodus is infuriating and troubling.

Not only is it abhorrent that these officials are being vilified, but their exits raise concern that they’ll be replaced by the right-wing forces trying to dismantle fair elections and suppress the vote within communities of color.

The good news first: This doesn’t appear to be the case in Nevada. Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske has stood up to intimidation by Big Lie provocateurs and even an outrageous vote by the Nevada state Republican Party to censure her. Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria also has remained on the job, thank goodness, despite volatile protests during the vote count that drew armed individuals and, reportedly, others with ties to violent extremist groups like the Proud Boys.

But officials elsewhere are being hounded out, the AP reports, including in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The numbers are scary: A third of Pennsylvania’s county elections officers have walked away in the past 18 months, for example, and more than two dozen elections clerks in Wisconsin have done the same since the election.

Americans should have no illusion about the nature of the threats and harassment of election officials. The intent here, by a growing faction within the radicalized GOP, is to make political violence a permanent feature of life in the U.S. In a matter of five years, we’ve moved from the most hallowed democracy in the world to one facing existential threats from Republican leadership on one hand and a savagely radicalized portion of their base on the other, both determined to tamper with future elections.

The exodus of impartial election officials — a bedrock in democracy — isn’t happening simply because of ugly behavior among “Stop the steal” protesters. Several states have either considered or passed laws hostile to local and state election officials. Texas Republicans would establish criminal punishments for local election officials who send unsolicited absentee ballot materials to voters. Georgia’s package of voter suppression legislation included a provision allowing the GOP-majority legislature to usurp the decisions of county elections officials.

Such state-sanctioned attacks on election officials’ authority are demoralizing, which is sad but understandable. These are officials who, contrary to the mischaracterizations coming from the right, are civic-minded and work diligently within systems containing checks and balances designed to ensure that free and fair elections continue in the U.S.

As one Wisconsin clerk told the AP, “It’s hard to convince someone it’s a good way to give back to the community when you’re afraid of going to clerk jail. It’s harder and harder to get people to work in government as a whole.”

The potential ramifications of this squeeze on elections officials — both top-down from lawmakers and bottom-up from “Stop the steal” thugs — are alarming. Anti-democratic forces would only need to usurp the voting process in a few key states to swing an election, as we saw in 2020 and other elections in recent years. The prospect of this group gaining vacant positions in elections offices is quite troubling.

We applaud elections officials in other states who are soldiering on despite the attacks of the right. To them we say keep up the good fight, not only for the people of your states but for the entire nation.

As we’ve said before in this space, the right-wing attack on the legitimacy of the election was an affront to everyone involved, from top election officials to the thousands of patriotic Americans who volunteered. They deserve commendation for overcoming the challenges of the pandemic to safely facilitating the largest election in the nation’s history — period. These individuals put themselves in harm’s way to ensure that Americans from coast to coast could vote as safely as possible, and their efforts led to a fair and widely accessible vote.

And while there’s no need to rehash the Big Lie — the courts already reduced it to ashes by throwing out lawsuit after lawsuit — the results clearly showed that there were vanishingly few voting irregularities. There weren’t enough to change the results of a city council race, much less a presidential election.

We offer our strongest support to the Clark County and state election officials whose leadership made the 2020 vote honest and a success. We also commend Nevada lawmakers for rejecting the Republican politics of other states that are attacking the core of American democracy by adopting suppressive, racist voting laws designed to disempower minority populations. By contrast, Nevada’s legislators and Gov. Steve Sisolak approved several measures in recent years to expand mail-in balloting, protect drop-box voting, etc., while also guarding election security.

In doing so, they’ve fostered an environment that contributes to the recruitment and retention of capable, highly principled election officials. Let’s hope election officials in other states can fill their vacancies with such officials, and hold the line for democracy within their borders and across the country.

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