Permanent minority rule

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First, make it illegal to count votes quickly. Second, paint the slow count as suspicious.
Republicans are becoming increasingly blunt about their plan to win the election: don’t let everyone’s votes be counted. As Astead Herndon and Annie Karni reported for the New York Times Saturday evening: “Trump advisers said their best hope was if the president wins Ohio and Florida is too close to call early in the night, depriving Mr. Biden a swift victory and giving Mr. Trump the room to undermine the validity of uncounted mail-in ballots in the days after.”

This is a very plausible scenario. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop has explained, due to differences in local election law, “the general expectation is that Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona are in a good place to count most of their votes on election night or soon afterward” but “Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — the trio of states that clinched Trump’s victory in 2016 — are a different story.”

Trump and Republican efforts to curtail mail vote counting, explained - Vox

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The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is operating under a judicial order to report its on-time performance every day, and those reports are trending badly in some key battleground states. For the third day in a row, on Sunday it reported moving fewer ballots on time than the previous day, That puts ballots in the system at risk of not being received in time in 28 states that require ballots be received on or before Election Day. The USPS reported moving 97% of ballots on time Wednesday, then 93% on Friday, and 91% on Saturday. That's at a national level. In battleground states, the on-time rate is below 90% and in some of these states, it's disastrously low. In central Pennsylvania, the on-time rate for ballots was just 62% on Saturday. Atlanta's was just 64%, same as ballots processed in Maine and New Hampshire. Less than half—43%—of ballots were on time Saturday in Colorado. Colorado conducts its elections by mail, sending ballots to everyone, with some in-person early voting. Ballots there must be received by Election Day. "Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Carolina, the rest of Pennsylvania and parts of Texas and Florida were under the 90% mark as well," CNN reports..

Mail delays escalated over the last 3 days in critical battleground states - Alternet.org

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The Postal Service ignored a federal judge’s order to sweep processing plants on Tuesday after more than 300,000 scanned ballots could not be traced.... Nearly 7 percent of ballots in U.S. Postal Service sorting facilities on Tuesday were not processed on time for submission to election officials, according to data the agency filed Wednesday in federal court, potentially leaving hundreds of thousands of ballots caught in the mail system during an especially tight presidential race.

USPS disregards judge’s order to conduct ballot sweep in 12 districts covering 15 states - The Washington Post

A federal judge earlier on Tuesday ordered Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to have postal inspectors sweep USPS facilities and find 300,000 election ballots across the country that have been scanned into the postal system but not delivered to election authorities. If the ballots are not delivered today, Election Day, in most cases they will not be counted. DeJoy has just said he was "unable" to meet the judge's order to have the ballots located and processed by 3 PM, he said. Instead of displaying any sense of seriousness about the ballots or his job performance, he offered up a stunning response. In short, DeJoy, through his USPS attorneys, told Judge Emmet Sullivan that they couldn't meet the deadline because doing so would have disrupted postal inspectors' other work. As if on Election Day there is anything more important than getting all ballots delivered so they can be counted. But not only did he say they were just too busy to meet the judge's orders, they didn't realize, he claims, the judge had put the deadline in place.

DeJoy delivers stunning response after failing to meet judge’s contempt deadline on hundreds of thousands of ballots - Alternet.org

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Voters in multiple states have received suspicious calls urging them to "stay home and stay safe" on Election Day — an effort state and local officials say is an attempt to suppress votes across the country. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel took to Twitter on Tuesday morning to raise awareness about the robocalls reported by residents in Flint, MI. She made it clear that the calls were completely false as she described the tactic as "an effort to suppress the vote."

Listen: Voters in at least 6 swing states are receiving robocalls designed to spread election misinformation - Alternet.org

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) failed to meet a court-imposed deadline Tuesday afternoon for the urgent processing of some 300,000 mail ballots that had not been delivered to election offices as deadlines neared. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who set the deadline, said it appeared the Postal Service had failed to comply with his order, and told the organization to be prepared to discuss the matter at a noon hearing Wednesday.

Postal Service misses court-ordered deadline for unsent mail ballots | TheHill

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In 2020, voters turned out at the highest level in 100 years, thanks in part to expanded vote-by-mail. In response, state-level Republicans are introducing an unprecedented amount of legislation to restrict voting rights, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice. State legislators in 28 states have filed 106 bills restricting the franchise thus far in 2021 — and the overwhelming majority have come from Republicans. Compare that to last year at this time: Then, only 35 such bills had been filed in six states..

State GOPs have already introduced dozens of bills restricting voting access in 2021 - Vox

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In late March, Georgia passed a restrictive new voting law that, in effect, permits the Republican state legislature to put partisan operatives in charge of disqualifying ballots in Democratic-leaning precincts. The law is one of at least eight proposals from GOP lawmakers in state legislatures around the country for increasing partisan influence over electoral administration — and one of more than 360 state bills that would curtail voting rights in one way or another. New political science research suggests this wave of attempts to restrict the franchise is not an anomaly: Republican control over state government is correlated with large and measurable declines in the health of a state’s democracy.

The paper, by University of Washington professor Jake Grumbach, constructs a quantitative measure of democratic health at the state level in the US. He looked at all 50 states between 2000 and 2018 to figure out why some states got more democratic over this period and others less. The conclusions were clear: The GOP is the problem. “Results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period,” he writes..

Study: Republican control of state government is bad for democracy - Vox

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In addition to voter suppression, one of the tools that Republicans will have in their effort to retake the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022 is gerrymandering. And according to a new report by the nonpartisan RepresentUs, severe gerrymandering could result in "rigged" election maps in 35 different states. The report explains, "The redistricting laws in these states provide little protection against politicians manipulating district maps for partisan or personal gain. Unless these systems change in the next few months, more than 188 million people will live with the threat of gerrymandering and rigged maps for the next 10 years.""

35 states are at risk for 'rigged' elections because of severe gerrymandering: report - Alternet.org

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In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.” The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones. Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration. All of these recommendations came straight from Heritage’s list of “best practices” drafted in February. With Heritage’s help, Anderson said, Georgia became “the example for the rest of the country.” The leaked video reveals the extent to which Heritage is leading a massive campaign to draft and pass model legislation restricting voting access, which has been swiftly adopted this year in the battleground states of Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and Iowa. It’s no coincidence that so many GOP-controlled states are rushing to pass similar pieces of legislation in such a short period of time.

Leaked Video: Dark Money Group Brags About Writing GOP Voter Suppression Bills Across the Country – Mother Jones

• Dark money meets permanent minority rule..
  

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Republicans who sought to undercut or overturn President Joe Biden’s election win are launching campaigns to become their states’ top election officials next year, alarming local officeholders and opponents who are warning about pro-Trump, “ends justify the means” candidates taking big roles in running the vote.

The candidates include Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia, a leader of the congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 Electoral College results; Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, one of the top proponents of the conspiracy-tinged vote audit in Arizona’s largest county; Nevada’s Jim Marchant, who sued to have his 5-point congressional loss last year overturned; and Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who made dozens of appearances in conservative media to claim fraud in the election.

Now, they are running for secretary of state in key battlegrounds that could decide control of Congress in 2022 — and who wins the White House in 2024. Their candidacies come with former President Donald Trump still fixated on spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election, insisting he won and lying about widespread and systemic fraud. Each of their states has swung between the two parties over the last decade, though it is too early to tell how competitive their elections will be..

They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one. - POLITICO

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The rightwing stranglehold on the courts has been a long-term project achieved by devious means. Republicans blocked Barack Obama from appointing dozens of judges to the federal bench, leaving those slots open for Donald Trump to fill. He stacked the courts with conservative reactionaries, many of whom were so unqualified that they failed to get the basic endorsement of the American Bar Association (ABA). Instead of appointing qualified candidates over rightwing stooges, the Trump administration simply cut the ABA out of the judicial vetting process.

The most egregious of these Republican blockades came when Obama tried to appoint Merrick Garland to the supreme court seat vacated by Antonin Scalia. The right cried foul: it was wrong to change the balance of the court, they said, and it was an election year and therefore unfair to allow Obama a supreme court appointment; voters should decide the next president to pick a supreme court judge.

A majority of voters wanted Hillary Clinton to have that role. But our undemocratic and archaic electoral college rules handed the victory to Donald Trump – the second time in less than two decades that the winner of the majority vote lost the White House.

Trump, who ran on a promise of appointing anti-abortion judges who would overturn Roe v Wade, set about doing just that. He appointed Neil Gorsuch to the seat that should have been Garland’s. Then he appointed Brett Kavanaugh, despite the judge facing credible accusations of sexual assault. Finally, and most insultingly, Trump and his Republican Senate allies rammed through the appointment of the explicitly anti-abortion Amy Coney Barrett to the seat vacated by the feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg – in his last year of office, and despite the supposed rule about a president letting the voters decide before an election.

Ending Roe v Wade is part of a long campaign to roll back democracy itself | Jill Filipovic | The Guardian