John, here is an alarming statistic. 51% of Americans believe that a political party will overturn the results of a future election that doesn’t go their way. [1]
And I’ll be honest -- I’m one of them.
Just look at the conduct of not just Donald Trump, but huge swathes of the GOP after the 2020 presidential election: Refusing to accept the legitimacy of the results. Filing dozens of frivolous lawsuits. Wasting public money on sham ballot audits in states like Arizona and Pennsylvania to push Trump’s Big Lie.
And of course, all of these fraudulent acts culminated in the failed insurrection on January 6th -- not to mention hundreds of anti-voter laws introduced in state legislatures across the country.
But there’s one part of Georgia’s infamous voter suppression law you might not know about -- and it's already being used to destabilize our democracy.
You see, like many other states, Georgia’s GOP-dominated government has granted themselves the ability to override local election administrators for any reason it pleases.
And, they’re already using that authority in a brazen attempt to remove a nonpartisan election official in Atlanta and replace them with a handpicked partisan operative. [2]
John, one of the scariest outcomes I can imagine is seeing more bills like Georgia’s passed – and more public servants who work tirelessly to make our elections work replaced with political operators who seek to skew the results and override the will of the voters.
Here’s the unfortunate fact: many of the purple states that decided the 2020 presidential election are presently controlled by Republican majorities or supermajorities, thanks to out-of-control partisan gerrymandering.
That means that they’re free to pass dangerous laws like Georgia’s -- even though a majority of voters, Republican, Democratic, and Independent, oppose this shameful attempt at election rigging.
Here’s the good news: the Senate’s new voting rights bill -- the Freedom To Vote Act -- includes new, strong protections against this sort of election sabotage.
It’s based on the groundbreaking For the People Act -- but adds new safeguards championed by Sen. Raphael Warnock that are sadly necessary to stop the attempts at election meddling we're already seeing in his home state of Georgia and others. [3]
That makes our fight to pass this bill – which will likely come to a head in the next few weeks, a true make-or-break moment for American democracy.
John, the 2022 election is only slightly more than a year away -- and it’ll mark the first major test of the Trump GOP’s sinister new strategy: ignoring the will of the voters as their pathway to victory.
I can’t let that happen to our democracy -- and I know you won’t let it happen either. That’s why I hope you will rush your Stop Election Sabotage contribution of $3 or more today.
Frankly, we should not be required to uphold such a basic principle of our democracy. The will of the voters should be what matters most in our democracy, period.
But in this dangerous moment when that simple idea, and so much more, are under grave threat, I’m glad to know I can count on your action and support to hold strong.
Thanks for all you do,
Sylvia Albert, Director of Voting and Elections
and the team at Common Cause
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/15/politics/cnn-poll-most-americans-democracy-under-attack/index.html
[2] https://apnews.com/article/elections-georgia-46c13960e11733e23b195e5aeca75d10
[3] https://www.democracydocket.com/alerts/congressional-democrats-introduce-bill-to-prevent-election-subversion/
