This isn’t just voter suppression. It’s a war on local control.

This isn’t just voter suppression. It’s a war on local control.

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Columnist

April 10, 2021 at 2:32 a.m. GMT+9

Georgia state Rep. Park Cannon (D-Atlanta) is arrested after she attempted to knock on the door of Gov. Brian Kemp's office after he signed into law a sweeping, Republican-sponsored overhaul of state elections. (Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

Efforts by Republicans to make voting more difficult — especially for people who might vote for Democrats — have garnered widespread condemnation, with many people analogizing those proposals to Jim Crow laws. But there’s a key aspect of that war on voting that has gotten less notice than some of the more obviously appalling provisions of these bills.

In state after state, Republicans aren’t just going after voters, they’re going after local officials to make sure it’s the GOP-dominated state legislatures that are in control.

You might find this surprising. Aren’t Republicans the ones who offer eloquent tributes to “local control,” insisting that as much power as possible should reside not with faraway bureaucrats in Washington, or even the state capital, but with those closest to the people? Isn’t that suspicion of distant power and faith in local communities foundational to modern conservatism?

Story continues below advertisement

Well, no. It’s what they say. But, in practice, they don’t believe in that principle at all. In fact, the way they want to snatch authority away from local election officials fits in with a long tradition of what’s known as “preemption” laws, in which local governments are forbidden from making their own rules in ways Republicans don’t like.

The most potentially dangerous of these measures is Georgia’s new voter suppression law. You probably know about the more colorful provisions that seem targeted at Black voters, but less attention has been paid to how the Georgia law directly targets local election officials, forbidding them from using mobile voting locations (as heavily Democratic Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, did in 2020) or accepting outside grants to run elections.

Most egregiously, the law gives the legislature — which is firmly in Republican hands despite recent statewide Democratic success there — control over the State Election Board, and allows that board, in turn, to appoint someone of its choosing to essentially take over a local election board.

Story continues below advertisement

Had the law been in effect in 2020, Georgia Republicans could have simply said they didn’t approve of how Fulton County did things, then installed their hand-picked representative. It isn’t hard to see, in a race as close as Georgia’s was, that all kinds of mischief could have happened.

Georgia is just the beginning:

In Texas, Republican lawmakers were angry that Harris County, where Houston is located, took steps in 2020 to make it easier to vote, including extending voting hours and planning to mail absentee ballot requests to every eligible voter. Their new voter suppression bill would forbid county officials from expanding voting hours or mailing absentee ballot requests to voters who haven’t requested them. It would also keep local officials from allocating their own resources by requiring that every polling location in a county, no matter how many voters it serves, has the same number of voting machines, which all but guarantees long wait times in dense urban districts.

A law recently passed in Iowa forbids local election officials from sending absentee ballot applications to voters who haven’t requested them, and stops local officials from setting up satellite voting locations.

In Michigan, a Republican-sponsored bill would bar local election officials from giving voters absentee ballot return envelopes with prepaid postage.

In Arizona, Republican bills would prevent local election officials from sending unrequested absentee ballot applications, and stop them from holding voter registration drives anywhere but on government property.

You might argue that both Democrats and Republicans are happy to substitute their judgment for that of local officials to get the outcomes they want. Which is true to a degree, but there are two differences. First, Democrats don’t pretend to have some abstract commitment to local control: Any liberal would say that sometimes local control works better, and sometimes it doesn’t. Republicans are the only hypocrites on that score.

Story continues below advertisement

But, more importantly, Republicans have been far more aggressive in reaching down to the local level to dictate how cities and counties are run.

In recent years, Republicans at the state level around the country have passed preemption laws forbidding localities from raising their minimum wage, requiring paid leave or otherwise promoting workers’ rights. They’ve moved to keep localities from passing gun laws more restrictive than Republicans would like. They’ve told cities they aren’t allowed to remove Confederate monuments without the legislature’s permission. They’ve forbidden localities from setting up municipal broadband systems, or raising taxes, or banning single-use plastic bags.

Here and there, a few Democrats may have joined in those efforts. But they’re overwhelmingly driven by Republicans, and it isn’t hard to see why.

Story continues below advertisement

The impulse comes from the fact that states run by Republicans always include cities run by Democrats — often among the centers of commerce and culture in the state, whether it’s Austin or Boise or Salt Lake City or St. Louis. Republicans just don’t like it when those cities make rules in line with the values of the people who live in them.

In addition, those cities are almost always more racially and ethnically diverse than the rural areas where Republicans dominate. This is one of the key political divides in America today: Democratic power residing in diverse cities while Republican power — boosted by gerrymandering and other anti-democratic features of the American system — is increasingly dependent on White rural areas, and hostile to what comes out of those cities.

The clearer that divide becomes, the more the GOP will try to reach down and determine what happens in those cities, and whether their residents will even be able to vote. In that effort, “local control” isn’t just something Republicans no longer believe in, it’s a profound threat to their power, and they’ll do whatever is necessary to quash it.

Story continues below advertisement

Read more: