To hear GOP candidates for secretary of state talk about elections, voters have nothing to do with them.
Jim Marchant, the GOP candidate in Nevada, promised a Trump rally this weekend that if he’s elected, Trump will get Nevada’s electoral votes in 2024.
It’s not that simple, of course. Partisans can mess with voters by making it a felony crime to pass a water bottle to your wife while waiting in line to vote (see story here). Or uprooting mailboxes so you have to drive miles to mail your ballot (see story here; Republicans don’t like absentee or mail-in ballots). They can’t exactly make it illegal for black people vote, although they sure want to, but they can throw up a plethora of hurdles (see story here). And a partisan Supreme Court will bless all of it.
Polls show Marchant’s Democratic opponent at best tied with him, but mostly trailing him, so Marchant get an opportunity to mess with Nevada’s 2024 presidential election (see details here). But how?
You may think the most he could do is purge the voting rolls, eliminate drop boxes, close a lot of polling stations, and toss out ballots for slight signature mismatches, etc., all targeting Democratic-heavy precincts, but you’d be wrong.
What partisan GOP secretaries of state likely will do is gin up some “irregularities,” real or imagined, to give partisan GOP governors an excuse to refuse to certify election results, in order to throw presidential elections into the House of Representatives.
What does this mean? California has a huge population advantage over Iowa, but when the House chooses a president, each state gets one vote. In 2020, Biden handily won the popular and electoral votes, but if Trump’s minions had succeeded in blocking certification and left it up to the House to decide, 26 states would’ve voted for Trump and 24 states for Biden.
But suppose all the Republicans who buy into voting conspiracies are elected to run their states’ elections, and even with them in charge, their candidates lose anyway? Who and what will they blame then?
Will it ever occur to them that they’re an unpopular minority party because, well, they make themselves unpopular?
Photo: The mail voting that Republicans prefer