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Amid the GOP’s rapid push to institute voter suppression measures ahead of next year’s midterm elections, House Republicans held a hearing Tuesday in support of the election-rigging efforts.
As CyberScoop summed it up:
Republicans on the House Administration Committee were united around common sentiments: It is too easy for citizens to register to vote and too easy for them to stay on voter rolls, states aren’t doing enough to remove ineligible voters, and it’s all led to the country’s elections being vulnerable to mass voter fraud and noncitizen voting.
There was little evidence presented to back up most of those claims.
CyberScoop noted that the hearing, which you can watch in full here, featured J. Christian Adams and Justin Riemer, two right-wing lawyers who have sought to get voter suppression policies instituted throughout the government. The event comes as Texas Republicans are plotting a functionally racist, mid-decade gerrymander of their state’s congressional districts at the president’s urging and amid reporting that Donald Trump’s administration has been pushing states to give the federal government access to voter rolls and election equipment.
In essence, Tuesday’s hearing served as a pep rally encouraging Republicans to pursue voter purges and stricter voter ID laws — both of which are voter suppression tactics that have been found to disproportionately disenfranchise nonwhite voters.
But House Republicans, as one might expect, didn’t seem to mind. In a revealing exchange, Rep. Greg Murphy of North Carolina told Mary Kay Heling — a witness from his state who testified that her vote had been jeopardized as Republicans sought to toss thousands of ballots in last year’s North Carolina Supreme Court race — that her potentially canceled vote wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.
“The experience that you went through, ma’am, was horrible,” Murphy said, before going on to say that “it’s much worse if we have somebody voting who shouldn’t than somebody — sadly enough — who had to go through what you did.”
Sounds a lot like “sorry, not sorry” to me. And that sentiment tells you all you need to know about the sacrifices Republicans are willing to make to peddle their bogus conspiracy theories about voting fraud and manipulate electoral processes in their favor.
It’s a blatantly illiberal power grab in plain sight.