“We’re already late.” She drummed her fingers impatiently on the sides of the steering wheel.

“We’re not late. The reservation’s at eight,” I said, thumbing through two thousand or so in twenties and fifties without looking up. I secured them with a rubber band and put the roll of cash in a freezer bag along with one of my old watches swaddled in bubble wrap and a cheap burner phone with an expensive prepaid international calling card. She looked over. I pointed up through the windshield: “The light’s green.” She pressed the accelerator, lunging us forward.

“It’s five ’til. They’re probably already there and you know how he is.” She was driving too fast. “Slow down. And your dad can f–kin’ wait. All the money I spend on that bulls–t Duckhorn he thinks is Lafite. And those Best Buy trips to feed your brother’s Wii addiction. Yeah, he can definitely wai–” She cut me off: “Stop. It’s fine. I just don’t understand why we have to do this now. Is he leaving tonight?” “It’s tomorrow I think.”

We pulled onto a side street and then into the parking lot of a once-genial dive bar. Nine months ago, the clientele and staff were the Cheers cast. Now they were extras from the “Thriller” set. Somebody introduced the wrong stimulant.

“There he is. Gray Civic with the rims.” She scoffed: “Of course it’s a Civic with rims.” “Don’t be a b–ch,” I chided. “I’m not.” “Ok, well don’t be a racist, how’s that?” “My nephew’s black,” she shot back. I rolled my eyes.

She parked, I got out and so did he. I handed him the farewell package. He squeezed the roll of bills through the bag, trying to get a sense of how much. “That.” I pointed to the ball of bubble wrap. “Air-King.” A quizzical look. “Rolex.” A grin. It was old and scratched. He’d be lucky to get $3,000 for it, but I knew he wouldn’t sell it.

He put the bag in his driver’s seat then slapped me on the shoulder. “Thank you.” Then, awkwardly: “My friend.” The stilted English was a show of sincerity. There was a tinge of sentimentality in it too, which caught me off guard. Or struck me as odd. Both.

A bulky bruiser with a penchant for aggressive horseplay and a lamentably stereotypical affinity for tequila-fueled bar fights, there wasn’t a mawkish bone in José’s six-foot three-ish frame. Every bit of two hundred and thirty pounds, he was (and, I’m sure, still is) the antithesis of soppy.

He had two brothers, one younger, one older but only he was going back. And not by choice. Maybe he could’ve appealed. Or something. I had no idea. I didn’t know the first thing about that process. Still don’t. From what I understand it’s a Kafka nightmare and besides, I had my lawyer tell him there was no use fighting it. I felt vaguely bad about that but… well, he got himself picked up. He was a loose end. And cutting this one was as easy as blaming the system. It was business, it wasn’t personal.

“When are you leaving?” He understood English far better than he spoke it. “Mañana.” I lit a Camel, inhaled and leaned against a second generation Lexus GS — hers, according to the title anyway. She faked a cough and rolled up the passenger side window. (Never mind she smoked Reds when she was “stressed.”)

“Figuratively or literally?” I asked, on the exhale. He looked at me blankly. I rephrased: “Actually tomorrow? You’re gone tomorrow?” “Sí.” He paused. “Maybe two days.” There wasn’t much else to say. We looked at the bar. It was nearly empty. “No más?” he wondered. I shook my head. “Bled dry.”

She rolled the window back down, cleared her throat for effect and pointed to her Aquaracer, a Valentine’s consolation prize in lieu of the Lady Datejust she wasn’t mature enough to own. “Well, good luck,” I told him. He got into the Civic, put the freezer bag in his console and reached his right hand out the window. I took it. “You come to Mexico,” he said, squeezing. “Maybe you work for me.” I laughed, then repeated myself. “Good luck, José.”

Settling back into the passenger seat of the GS, I teased her: “How late are we?” “Pretty f–kin’ late,” she snapped. “Well, what are you waitin’ on? Drive.”

During an April interview with Time magazine, Donald Trump sketched the contours of a plan to deport millions of Hispanic immigrants during a hypothetical second term in the Oval Office. The effort would rely, initially, on the National Guard, but in the event the operation proved too daunting, Trump indicated he’d override a 146-year-old law forbidding the use of military force on civilians. “These aren’t civilians,” he told Eric Cortellessa. “This is an invasion.”

The Republican party’s wholesale embrace of xenophobic nationalism — and various iterations of so-called “replacement” theories — is one pillar of a last ditch effort to avert electoral oblivion in the face of inexorable demographic shifts which hastened America’s transition from an exclusionary experiment in limited democracy (a de facto Christian Anglo-Saxon caste system) to the kind of multiracial, pluralistic society which could condemn the GOP to political also-ran status. The other pillar entails the systematic disenfranchising of minorities.

The strategy has an offensive element. Republicans have endeavored to delay the inevitable by tapping into and monetizing a vast reservoir of political rage capital buried beneath the ruins of working-class white America. The strategy also has a defensive element. Rather than adapt to the changing character of the electorate in an effort to stay competitive by building new, durable coalitions, the GOP has instead embarked on a sweeping effort to roll back voting rights. It didn’t have to be this way.

March 18 is Reince Priebus’s birthday. When he turned 45 in 2013, Priebus spent the day detailing the results of what he famously described as “the most comprehensive post-election review in the history of any national party.” The 100-page “autopsy” — officially the “Growth & Opportunity Project” — was an effort on the part of the Republican National Committee to understand how voters felt about the party following Mitt Romney’s defeat in the 2012 election.

Comprised of more than 50,000 “contacts,” including an online survey of 36,000 people, 3,000 listening sessions, interviews with some 2,600 voters and GOP operatives, 800 conference calls and dozens of focus groups in Iowa and Ohio, the postmortem was unsparing. At the federal level, the GOP “is increasingly marginalizing itself and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future,” it warned, ominously (and, as it turned out, mistakenly).

The report’s authors described a party that “needs to stop talking to itself.” “We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue,” it assessed, noting that “young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”

The autopsy dryly noted that if Hispanic Americans don’t think a GOP nominee or candidate wants them in the US, those voters “will not pay attention to our next sentence.” “It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy,” the report pressed. “If Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”

At the time, Republicans were terrified. Romney won just 27% of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 election (his support was almost uniformly white, at 88%) and alarmists like Pat Buchanan had for years predicted a demographic disaster both for the party and the country. The GOP report cited a familiar statistic: By 2050, whites would be 47% of the US, a minority. In 2018 and again in 2020, the Census Bureau projected non-Hispanic whites will cease to constitute a majority five years earlier, in 2045.

“America is changing demographically,” the RNC report said. “And unless Republicans are able to grow our appeal the way GOP governors have done, the changes tilt the playing field even more in the Democratic direction.”

Demographic change was an obsession for Buchanan, who sought the GOP presidential nomination twice (in 1992 and 1996) before leaving the party and running as an independent in 2000. To listen to a 90s-era Buchanan stump speech is to listen to a Trump rally, only with more statistics and less charisma. During a 1995 event in Hillsborough County, Florida, for example, Buchanan railed against bad trade deals, multilateral organizations, the alleged liberalization of history textbooks and, of course, immigrants. “Why can’t we put along [the southern border] a security fence?” he wondered. “And I say, if necessary, let’s use American troops… to defend our border against what is actually an invasion.”

Ari Berman, Mother Jones’ national voting rights correspondent, has called Buchanan “the conservative who turned white anxiety into a movement.” Buchanan features prominently in Berman’s 2024 volume Minority Rule, a meticulous history of “how Republicans are trying to rig our political system,” as Hillary Clinton indelicately put it, in a review. “For Buchanan and Trump, immigration isn’t just about America’s ethnic identity, it’s also about electoral power,” Berman wrote.

Buchanan’s solution to Republicans’ demographic challenge made for a stark juxtaposition with the recommendations from the 2013 RNC report. In 2011, Buchanan described a binary choice: “Either the Republican Party puts an end to mass immigration, or mass immigration will put an end to the Republican party.” The quote comes from Suicide Of A Superpower, a 500-page, grievance-fueled remonstrance that finds Buchanan fulminating against immigrants and the establishment while lamenting “the slow death of the people who created and ruled” America.

By contrast, Priebus and the RNC in 2013 recommended the GOP “embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.” Absent such an effort, Republicans’ “appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only,” the report warned. The RNC described the GOP as “a tale of two parties”: A struggling federal wing and a thriving gubernatorial wing. “It is time,” Priebus’s autopsy declared, for Republicans at the federal level “to learn from successful Republicans on the state level.”

That assessment was ironic in the extreme. The implication was that state-level Republicans were somehow ahead of the game when it came to advancing the sort of inclusive, coalition-building efforts championed by the report. In fact, they were ahead of the game in doing just the opposite.

“At the same time that RNC leaders were holding press conferences laying out their plans to appeal to nonwhite Americans, state-level Republicans — backed by the same RNC leadership — were working to make it harder for those Americans to vote,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote, in Tyranny Of The Minority. “Following Republicans’ victory in the 2010 midterm elections, in which they won control of eleven state legislatures and established supermajorities in several others, the GOP carried out a wave of defensive reforms aimed at restricting access to the ballot.”

Republican ballot “reforms” weren’t reforms at all. As Levitsky and Ziblatt noted, they were an attempt to defend the GOP from certain electoral defeat and they accelerated in 2013, after conservatives on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder.

Since 2013, 29 states passed 94 restrictive voting laws on the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice’s count. Most of those laws are still in effect, according to a 2023 study which noted, somewhat irritably, that “at least” 29 of the laws “were passed in 11 states that had been subject to preclearance” under the Voting Rights Act. The implication, from the same linked study: “If not for the Supreme Court’s decision [in Shelby] approximately one-third of the restrictive laws passed in the last 10 years would have been subject to pre-approval by the Justice Department or a panel of federal judges, and many of them may have been barred from implementation.”

Almost without exception, GOP-led electoral “reforms” implemented over the past decade and a half disproportionately impacted minority voters, sometimes in laughably transpicuous ways. Just weeks after the Shelby decision, North Carolina instituted new election laws which, among other things, strengthened voter ID laws, banned same-day registration, curbed Sunday voting and, as Politico noted at the time, eliminated “a high school civics program that register[ed] tens of thousands of students to vote each year in advance of their 18th birthdays.”

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit set up in 1963 on a direct request from JFK, detailed the impact of Shelby on North Carolina. “40 out of 100 North Carolina counties were covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and were required to seek federal approval before making changes to their election laws,” a fact sheet reads. “Many of the cuts [in the 2013 elections bill] were made to programs that had been designed and shown to increase turnout and participation among black and young voters.”

After the NAACP and a group of churches sued Republican governor Pat McCrory and a host of state election officials, the Fourth Circuit Court Of Appeals described the state’s response to claims of witting discrimination as “meager,” derided the reforms as an effort to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and accused North Carolina of “impos[ing] cures for problems that did not exist.”

That assessment speaks to a reality that Republicans have sought, for years, to downplay or outright deny: Instances of voter fraud in the US are vanishingly rare. In fact, voter fraud doesn’t exist in any statistically meaningful sense. As Levitsky and Ziblatt put it, voter ID laws of the sort championed by Republicans are “a solution without a problem.”

When George W. Bush’s Justice Department went hunting for voter fraud in 2002, the department stumbled into a historic boondoggle. Over half a decade, the Bush administration managed to charge just 120 people out of hundreds of millions of votes cast. “Many of those charged… appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules,” The New York Times wrote, in a 2007 investigation based on court records and interviews with attorneys. An assistant US attorney in Florida told the Times that “many cases [in Miami] involved… mistakes by immigrants, not fraud.” A mere 35 people were convicted of voter fraud from 2002 to 2005, Levitsky and Ziblatt counted, adding that “none would have been prevented by voter ID law[s].”

In a 32-page report, the Brennan Center called the Bush-era crackdown a “scandal.” The Justice Department “pursued a partisan agenda… under the guise of rooting out suspected ‘voter fraud'” and acted “well outside the bounds of rules and accepted norms of neutral law enforcement,” the scathing assessment reads.

The Brennan Center’s report, released in 2017, doubled as a warning. “As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump made extraordinary and unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud, declaring that the election was ‘rigged’ against him and even suggesting that he would not accept the outcome if he lost,” the alarmed authors wrote, seven years ago. Trump’s voter fraud claims have only intensified since. Indeed, they were the baseless basis for his campaign to overturn the 2020 election. The same claims are poised to play prominently in November.

In May, House Speaker Mike Johnson made a show of promoting voter ID legislation, even as he conceded there’s no evidence to support Trump’s fraud claims, nor any Republican voter fraud claims for that matter. “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” Johnson said. “But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.”

Johnson, a lawyer, should know better: If you’re going to accuse people of crimes, you have to prove it. Even when it isn’t easy. “Intuitively” guilty isn’t sufficient. The Speaker was joined at the press conference by attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was on the conference call when Trump pressured Georgia’s election officials to “find” thousands of nonexistent votes, naked election fraud for which Trump was ultimately indicted. Johnson, Mitchell and a cast of other Trump surrogates convened on the steps of the Capitol, the site of the bloody riot instigated by Trump’s spurious fraud claims.

A month earlier, as Johnson fought off a Marjorie Taylor Greene-led effort to strip him of the House gavel, Johnson met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The two held an ad hoc press event during which Johnson, flanked by Trump, promoted the same voter ID bill, which the two men said is necessary to prevent noncitizens from casting ballots. Johnson linked the superfluous measure (noncitizens can’t vote in federal elections) to Buchanan’s “invasion” narrative, which Trump adopted and adapted to unimaginable success. “Election integrity is tied to the lack of border security,” Johnson said, as a glowering Trump stared a hole through his back.

To reiterate: It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. And there’s no evidence (none) to support the contention that they do, certainly not at scale and probably not at all. Equally rare (so, nonexistent) is proof of voter ID fraud. Study after study shows Republicans’ claims to be meritless at best. Lies, at worst.

In 2014, Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who specializes in election administration and redistricting, penned an amusingly frank Op-Ed for The Washington Post. Beginning in 2008, when the Supreme Court weighed in on voter ID laws in Crawford v. Marion, Levitt started tracking “every single credible allegation [that] someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix,” including all of the evidence presented to the Court and all claims dating back to 2000. Levitt managed to tally just 31 incidents across all general, primary, special and municipal elections conducted over that 14-year period. So, 31 incidents out of more than a billion (with a “b”) votes cast.

Arizona State University — specifically the award-winning Carnegie-Knight News21 national reporting initiative, which is headquartered at the university’s journalism school — conducted a study in 2012 aimed at putting a number to rampant allegations of voter fraud. News21 sent “thousands” of requests to elections officials in all 50 states, “asking for every case of fraudulent activity including registration fraud, absentee ballot fraud, vote-buying, false election counts, campaign fraud, casting an ineligible vote, voting twice, voter impersonation fraud and intimidation.” The investigation found just 10 real cases nationwide out of 146 million registered voters over the sample period. The implication: The incidence of voter fraud was about one in 15 million. “Infinitesimal,” as the study put it.

Four years later, the same journalism initiative reviewed cases in Arizona, Ohio, Georgia, Texas and Kansas, all states where politicians have suggested voter fraud may be problematic. From 2012 to 2016, attorneys general successfully prosecuted just 38 voter fraud cases in those states and none of them — not a single one — was for voter impersonation. As Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers political scientist who wrote the book on voter fraud — literally — told News21, the sort of voter impersonation fraud that Trump habitually alleges (in which a voter steals another’s ballot), would be as difficult as “pick-pocketing a cop.” In other words: It’s for all intents and purposes impossible. The notion that it would occur at scale isn’t just laughable, it’s inconceivable.

In 2014, researchers from Harvard and UMass, Amherst, warned on “the perils of cherry-picking [from] large sample surveys,” like the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. “Low-level measurement error for survey questions generally agreed to be highly reliable can lead to large prediction errors,” they wrote, cautioning specifically on “biased estimate[s] of the rate at which noncitizens voted in recent elections.” You can read the full study here, but suffice to say one key takeaway was that “the likely percent of noncitizen voters in recent US elections is 0.”

The Heritage Foundation, not exactly a bastion of liberal propaganda, has a database of noncitizen voting which appears to show just 29 cases in 20 years. That database is the subject of some debate. Former Kansas Secretary of State and current state Attorney General Kris Kobach, a central figure in GOP efforts to root out alleged voter fraud, relied (in part anyway) on the database to justify the establishment of Trump’s infamous “Fraud Commission” (officially the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity). Also on that commission: Heritage fellow and Alabama native Hans von Spakovsky.

Von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official, is best known for championing a controversial Georgia voter ID law over internal department objections. The 2005 law was widely criticized as an attempt to disenfranchise African Americans. At the time, Democrats suggested it could reduce overall participation by up to 3%, a burden that was likely to fall disproportionately on the poor and African Americans. As one angry Georgia Democrat despaired, “It’s announcing that the state is designed to look more like 1954 than 2005.” This was before Shelby, so the new law was subject to DoJ review under the Civil Rights Act.

Von Spakovsky was supposed to be impartial, but it eventually emerged that the one-time Fulton County GOP chief published an article under a pseudonym in the spring 2005 issue of the Texas Review of Law & Politics. In one passage, Von Spakovsky, writing under the pen name “Publius,” downplayed the impact of voter ID laws on African Americans. “The objections are merely anecdotal,” he said, calling the notion that minorities are impacted more by such laws than whites an “unproven perception.” When the authorship of the article came to light, the American Civil Liberties Union complained to the Justice Department that it demonstrated Von Spakovsky “had already made up his mind on the issue,” as The Washington Post later wrote, adding that the editorial was published before Georgia’s proposal “was even submitted to Justice for review.”

In 2006, Von Spakovsky was nominated by George W. Bush for the Federal Election Commission in a recess appointment. His nomination was withdrawn in 2008 amid intense opposition from Senate Democrats, who accused von Spakovsky of leveraging voter ID laws and roll purges to suppress the vote. (Von Spakovsky denied the allegations.) He then joined the The Heritage Foundation.

In early 2017, when Trump was busy deciding who should serve on his fraud panel, von Spakovsky wrote an email lamenting that Democrats — and even moderate Republicans — were being considered for seats. “There isn’t a single Democratic official that will do anything other than obstruct any investigation of voter fraud,” he said. “If they are picking mainstream Republican officials… to man this commission it will be an abject failure.” That letter eventually found its way to Jeff Sessions.

At the panel’s very first meeting, von Spakovsky handed out a copy of The Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud database. The Brennan Center subsequently conducted an exhaustive (and devastating) analysis of the ~1,100 fraud claims Kobach and von Spakovsky touted as evidence to support Trump’s narrative. “In reviewing decades of cases and billions of votes cast, the Heritage Foundation has identified just 10 cases involving in-person impersonation fraud at the polls, fewer than the number of members on [Trump’s] commission,” the Center’s report reads. Across eight pages, Rudy Mehrbani (a decorated attorney) castigated Heritage’s claims in the most derisively mocking terms imaginable. “It it is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than impersonate another voter at the polls,” he wrote, describing the share of noncitizen votes and voter impersonation as “a molecular fraction” of total votes cast nationwide.

Trump’s commission, which Kobach helped chair, was unceremoniously dissolved in 2018 when the panel’s work was handed off to DHS. Trump blamed Democrats for the committee’s inability to prove its case. “Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the [commission] with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” The White House said, in a short statement alluding to “endless legal battles.” In reality, the panel simply failed to uncover any real evidence, and certainly none that would validate Trump’s claims of widespread fraud.

In one especially amusing example of litigation related to Trump’s voter fraud council, the panel was sued by one of its own commissioners, then Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (he’s the state auditor today) who said he was intentionally left in the dark on key matters. “[T]he Commission’s superficial bipartisanship has been a facade,” Dunlap alleged. Kobach called him “paranoid.”

In 2018, Kobach showed up to court with von Spakovsky, who was trotted out as an expert on voter fraud during Kobach’s (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to defend a Kansas voter ID law that critics said disenfranchised thousands of eligible voters. When pressed at trial, Kobach turned up a mere 18 noncitizen voter registrations over a 20-year period (and out of a constellation of 1.8 million voters). Just five of those 18 succeeded in casting a ballot. Kobach was unable even to prove that the 18 illegitimate registrations he did surface were in fact willful fraud. As the American Civil Liberties Union noted, von Spakovsky, during cross-examination, “was unable to name a single federal election where the outcome was changed by noncitizen voting” and appeared to be unapprised of America’s actual citizenship laws. In 2020, the Supreme Court declined to revive the Kansas law, “clos[ing] this chapter on Kobach’s sorry legacy of voter suppression,” as Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, put it.

In July of 2019, after a failed attempt to get a citizenship question added to the census, Trump issued an executive order demanding citizenship data from federal agencies. As Berman, the Mother Jones reporter, detailed in Minority Rule, conservative operatives quickly suggested state lawmakers capitalize on Trump’s order. At a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, von Spakovsky told dozens of state lawmakers to “seriously consider using citizen population to do redistricting.” In August, just a month after Trump’s executive order, Cleta Mitchell (the attorney who was on the line when Trump’s asked Georgia election officials to “find” votes) appeared with von Spakovsky at a panel on redistricting. According to Berman, she later “urged lawmakers to destroy their notes from the conference so they couldn’t be cited in future lawsuits.”

Republicans everywhere and always traffic in the same straw man when it comes to defending voter ID laws: If even one person votes illegally, that disenfranchises someone who voted legally (by “canceling” out the legal vote). That argument’s especially compelling for Republican voters because the implication is that an illegal immigrant voting for a Democrat negated a vote for a GOP candidate. Or that an African American felon did. What Republicans never mention is that the “fixes” for this (mostly nonexistent) problem very often disenfranchise scores of minorities, with the effect of making white votes count multiple times.

As the American Bar Association wrote in a simple explainer, voter ID laws have “underlying racial biases.” It’s not always cheap and easy to get a government-issued ID quickly when you need one, and “individuals who lack government-issued IDs are more likely to be younger, less educated, impoverished and — most notably — nonwhite.” That’s not lost on the GOP politicians and Republican operatives who advocate for voter ID laws.

The ABA cited Georgia’s infamous “exact match” system as perhaps the quintessential example of how these laws can be leveraged against minorities. “Exact match” strips voters of the franchise if the name on their registration form doesn’t exactly match the name on their driver’s license and/or in Social Security records. 51,000 voters were affected by the law in Georgia in 2018, 80% of whom were African American. Stacey Abrams lost the gubernatorial race to Brian Kemp that year by around 55,000 votes. During that race, Kemp ran a series of wildy ridiculous campaign ads featuring, among other things, a shotgun, a chainsaw, a staged explosion and, famously, his own pickup truck. “I got a big truck,” Kemp told Georgia voters. “Just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take ’em home myself.”

The previous year, Kemp, then secretary of state, canceled 670,000 registration forms, according to the AP, which noted that “the list of voter registrations on hold with Kemp’s office [was] nearly 70% black” even as Georgia’s population is only around 32% African American. As Bloomberg not-so-gently put it in October of 2018, “it should probably be a conflict of interest that one of the gubernatorial candidates, Kemp, is also in charge of supervising an election system that could potentially disenfranchise thousands of voters.” Yes, “probably.”

It should be noted that Kemp’s first attempt to institute “exact match” was struck down in 2009 by the Justice Department, which called it “a flawed system [that] frequently subjects a disproportionate number of African American, Asian and/or Hispanic voters to additional and, more importantly, erroneous burdens on the right to register to vote.” (Emphasis mine.)

Kemp eventually managed to implement the system (in 2010) but suspended it in 2016 after he was sued by civil rights groups who claimed that out of some 35,000 voter registrations impacted over a three-year period, more than three quarters were for African American, Asian and Latino voters.

“Since July 2013, white applicants have submitted 47.2% of all voter registration applications in Georgia [but] constitute only 13.6% of [rejections] during that period,” the 2016 suit read. “By contrast, 63.6% of rejected applicants are black, even though black applicants submitted [just] 29.4% of all applications.” Hispanics constituted a mere 3.6% of total applicants over the same period, but nearly 8% of rejections under the exact match protocol.

Reprimanded but not deterred, Georgia pressed ahead with legislation aimed at instituting exact match in 2017 against the protestations of critics, who alleged the “new” system was insufficiently different from the one Kemp suspended just months previous. “Georgia Act 250’s voter registration protocol is similar to one that had been previously adopted administratively by Secretary of State Kemp and which was challenged in federal court by voting rights advocates in 2016,” The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law complained. “Despite the fact that the ‘no match, no vote’ protocol had been shown to have a high error rate and a substantial, negative impact upon voting-eligible African American, Latino and Asian American Georgians, this discriminatory process was nevertheless codified into Georgia law.”

In 2017, researchers from the University of California San Diego published what they billed as one of the first studies to deal comprehensively and empirically with voter ID laws and their impact on minorities. One of the key points the authors made is that because these laws are a fairly recent phenomenon, studies conducted prior to the proliferation of such restrictions were by definition inadequate to answer the relevant questions. The study’s methodology was straightforward. “The key test is not whether turnout is lower in strict voter ID states but instead whether the turnout gap between whites and non-whites is greater in strict voter ID states, ceteris paribus,” they wrote.

Not surprisingly, the authors found that “strict photo identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of Hispanics, blacks and mixed-race Americans in primaries and general elections.” Specifically, the gap between predicted participation rates for whites and Latinos in a general election doubled from 5.3ppt in states without strict photo ID laws to 11.9ppt states with strict photo ID laws. For African Americans, the predicted gap in primaries nearly doubled from 4.8ppt to 8.5ppt.

The predicted decline in turnout is dramatically skewed against Democrats. In general, Republicans and conservatives vote at higher rates than Democrats and liberals, but the study noted that the gaps “grow considerably in strict photo ID states.” Specifically, the study suggested Democratic turnout plunges by nearly 8ppt in general elections when strict photo ID laws are in place. That figure for Republicans is just 4.6ppt. As the authors went on to note, “the skew for political ideology is even more severe.” Turnout among “strong liberals” is predicted to fall by nearly 11ppt in the presence of strict photo ID laws. For “strong conservatives,” that estimate is a mere 2.8ppt.

I suppose I don’t have to say this, but just in case: The GOP is absolutely aware of that skew, even if Republican politicians and operatives would publicly deny the findings. The UCSD authors were unequivocal: “Voter ID laws skew democracy in favor of whites and those on the political right.”

Although nearly eight in 10 Americans support some form of photo ID law, it’s safe to say the vast majority don’t understand how, why and to what extent, such laws impact minorities. Over the last four years alone, eight states have instituted new voter ID restrictions. The laws are estimated to impact nearly 30 million adults, and as NBC noted in March, “one in six voters live in anticipated 2024 battleground states with new ID requirements.”

In the decade since Priebus’s 2013 election autopsy, the GOP worked overtime not to implement the recommendations of the report, but rather to “fix” the problem by demonizing immigrants and curtailing the franchise. “The 2013 autopsy was [an] example of what losing parties are supposed to do in democracies: Adapt to changes in the electorate,” Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote. “But much of the Republican base — the local leaders, activists and reliable primary voters who dominate the party’s grassroots organization — was radicalizing, and it was pulling the party in another direction.”

By the time Priebus unironically praised them as a model for how the party might go about reforming itself at the federal level, state-level Republicans were years into a shameless attempt to stave off irrelevancy through the adoption of institutionalized election fraud. As Berman detailed in the very first chapter of Minority Rule, “[2010] gerrymandering in Wisconsin, which was replicated by Republicans across the country in 2011,” was indicative of intent and served as a harbinger of a larger effort “to systematically tilt [states’] democratic institutions in the GOP’s favor.” Then Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, Berman said, “wanted to concentrate power in the hands of an elite and wealthy conservative white minority.” He quoted Walker. If the effort could work in Wisconsin, Republicans could “do it anywhere in the country.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby accelerated and white washed the GOP’s efforts, while Eric Cantor’s stunning defeat (at the hands of anti-immigration Tea Party candidate Dave Brat ) in a 2014 primary effectively killed the last serious effort at immigration reform on Capitol Hill. As one conservative advocate put it at the time, “The fact that an under-funded candidate has upset the sitting majority leader in a primary is not only a statement that the Tea Party is alive and well, but that amnesty and comprehensive open borders is dead on arrival.” Fast forward a decade and the Tea Party’s effectively indistinguishable from the House Freedom Caucus which, in turn, is a surrogate for Trump’s MAGA movement. Pat Buchanan usurped the party after all. And Priebus stepped down as RNC chair in 2017 to become, however briefly, Trump’s chief of staff.

Needless to say, voter ID laws and shifting electoral maps aren’t the only obstacles to minority voter rights. Writing in 2019 for the Journal of Healthcare, Science and the Humanities, attorney Latasha McCrary noted that more than six million Americans are denied the right to vote under felon disenfranchisement laws. African Americans are incarcerated at far higher rates than whites. “The majority of these individuals have ‘paid their debt to society.’ They live, work and pay taxes in our communities, yet are unable to elect the politicians who serve them,” McCrary wrote, adding that “a disproportionate number of these individuals are black.” In the US, she went on, African Americans “are banned from voting at four times the rate of other races.” In the south, “more than one in five African Americans are unable to vote due to felony convictions.”

Whoever conducted my funeral rites forgot Charon’s obol. My present tense is illusory. Only memories are real and tangible.

“Somebody loves his aunt.” He stepped out onto the deck and sat down behind me. It was the summer of 2010. We rented a beach house on the Isle of Palms, just east of Charleston. It was nearly dark but I was still enjoying the view.

“You hear me?” I heard him. I lingered over the ocean for another second, knocked back the shot of reposado sitting beside me on the porch rail and turned around. I looked past him through a big window into the living room, where she wowed a wide-eyed toddler with Steve Jobs’s latest, and last, miracle.

He repeated himself. “Somebody loves his aunt.” “Somebody loves that iPad,” I said.” Both of ’em!” he boomed.

She wasn’t really an aunt and I wasn’t really an uncle. But I was the father’s “brother.” The rest — sisters, aunts, uncles and so on —  followed from that. If this is your family, this is your family.

His wife was scolding her from the kitchen. I couldn’t hear them, but I knew the gist of it. “That child gon’ want a damn iPad now!” Or some similar reprimand. “Auntie E,” hopelessly spoiled in her own right, had a habit of indulging the baby.

I poured another shot. I don’t remember exactly, but I never stopped pouring myself drinks back then, so I can only assume.

“This place is niiiice, C,” he effused, leaning forward on the patio sofa and rolling a Black & Mild between his palms. His skin was dark enough to hide the bullet wound if you didn’t know it was there. Between his left forefinger and thumb. There were more on his thighs.

I sat down next to him. “Nicer than last year?” It was gallows humor. He spent half the previous summer in the hospital. The other half in jail.

“Daaaamn sure nicer than last summer,” he said.

We sat for a few minutes watching the last light die.

“Whaddayathink about Obama so far?” I wondered.

He chuckled. “Sh-t, it don’t make no difference, C.”

“How do you mean?” I pressed. “You think nothing’s changed?”

He turned towards me: “Bro, you forgot already? I can’t vote anymore.” He looked out pensively at the beach. “It don’t matter what I think.”

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