The Point Is To Delegitimize The Election

TPM Muckraker has a good rundown of the various voter suppression schemes that Republicans have attempted thus far this election season. Fortunately, most of them have failed to this point. Despite pressure from George W. Bush, the Justice Department has decided not to step in and challenge over 200,000 voter registration forms in Ohio that have not been checked against federal documents (in which case something as small as a typo could disqualify a voter). In Pennsylvania, a favorable ruling forces election officials to supply paper ballots to voters if half of the voting machines in a precinct malfunction on Election Day. Without this measure, long lines would have surely deterred people from voting.

And there are many more wins too, some through the courts, some through elections officials who stand up for justice. But as Zachary Roth notes, that's not quite the point from the Republican perspective.

Of course, the whole point of the voter-suppression game is to throw up as many gambits as possible, and hope that just a few succeed. And there's no way to measure the effect that even the unsuccessful ploys have in generating cynicism about the process itself, and thereby reducing turnout, to Republicans' advantage. So in a close election, it's still possible that voter suppression could make the difference -- as it may well have done in 2000.

But it's worth noting that -- thanks largely to Democratic control of the secretary of state's offices in some key states; the skepticism with which many courts have looked on efforts to put obstacles in the way of voting; and the role of voting-rights groups and the press in exposing the bankruptcy of Republican claims -- the nationwide GOP voter-suppression effort appears to have been far less successful than the party might have hoped.

It's true that we've done a better job ferreting this out this year. But Roth, while correct that suppression is often an end in itself, fails to capture the other element of this - the goal to delegitimize the election and create a "big lie" that a potential Obama victory is fraudulent. This will become accepted dogma on the right and will be returned to again and again to sap away at his public support. And if public confidence in elections becomes brittle, they become easier to steal - not to mention that more people become alienated from the process, leading to the very suppression that the GOP seeks.