Programming Note: The Voting Rights Roundup will be on hiatus for the holidays and will return the first week of January.
Leading Off
● Voter Suppression: In a damning audio recording obtained by the Associated Press, the Donald Trump re-election campaign's senior adviser and counsel Justin Clark can be heard at a private event, which included the state Senate leader and state GOP executive, telling his fellow Republicans:
"Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places … Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are. ... Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program."
Clark claimed in response to the AP that his comments were about Republicans having been traditionally “falsely accused of voter suppression” based on the context, but the context instead suggests something entirely more nefarious, as we’ll explain below. Back in December 2017, a federal court allowed the expiration of a legal settlement between the Republican National Committee and their Democratic counterpart that had barred the RNC from engaging in voter suppression activities under the guise stopping voter fraud, and an appeals court refused to reinstate it earlier this year.
Campaign ActionThis consent decree had been in place since 1982 following the GOP’s efforts to purge and intimidate voters in New Jersey's 1981 election for governor. In that race, the RNC had mailed sample ballots to voters in areas with large black and Latino populations, then tried to get election administrators to purge the registrations of anyone whose sample ballot was undeliverable in the mail. They also hired off-duty police officers to patrol precincts in those same neighborhoods under the guise of a "National Ballot Security Task Force."
These acts of voter intimidation and attempts to remove eligible voters from the rolls might very well have determined the outcome of that race, as Republican Tom Kean defeated Democrat Jim Florio by less than one-tenth of 1% of the vote, just 1,779 ballots. They also landed the GOP in hot water, and the RNC had to take steps to avoid even the appearance that it supports voter suppression until the decree expired two years ago.
The 2020 election will be the first presidential contest in four decades in which the RNC hasn’t been bound by this consent decree. With Trump hellbent on doing everything within his authority to suppress the political power of communities of color, the GOP may be emboldened to run a voter suppression campaign of unprecedented organization. Without from the consent decree, Trump and the RNC he controls will be able to freely coordinate with state Republican Parties.