Republicans Could Use the Coronavirus to Suppress Votes Across the Country. This Week We Got a Preview

In 1946, Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo instructed his followers that the way to keep black people from voting was to get “the tar and feathers and don’t forget the match.” In the Jim Crow South, African Americans faced bullets, beatings, lynching and more for trying to cast a ballot.

Over the years the weapon has gotten much more sophisticated, the language a bit more genteel, but the goal has been just the same: maintain power by keeping American citizens away from the voting booth. As Paul Weyrich, founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council that crafted an array of voter-suppression laws, explained in 1980, “I don’t want everybody to vote… Our leverage, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Today, even in the face of a global pandemic, the GOP seems determined to maintain that leverage. The coronavirus spreading rapidly around the world has led to numerous statewide stay-at-home orders and, as of April 8, more than 13,000 dead and 400,000 infections in the United States. Its transmission via people who are asymptomatic is the stuff of apocalyptic nightmares. It’s no wonder then that the question of how to hold an election while maintaining public health has been front and center in deliberations in statehouses, courthouses and in Congress.

The Democrats have sought a range of prophylactic measures, such as vote-by-mail, to ensure that the right to vote does not have to compete with the right to live. Far too many Republicans, however, seem to have decided that a deadly virus for which there is no vaccine can be used to suppress voter participation.