Milbank: Weakened Republicans go low to hold onto power

In North Carolina, state authorities have refused to certify Republican Mark Harris as the winner of the 9th Congressional District while investigators look into election-fraud allegations swirling around a consultant who worked for Harris.

In Wisconsin, Republicans in the state legislature, reacting to their party’s loss of both the governorship and attorney general’s post, have introduced a flurry of bills to weaken the power of the incoming Democrats and to deter future Democratic voters. A similar effort is underway in Michigan.

What the efforts have in common is thievery: the alleged theft of Democratic votes in the North Carolina case and, in the Wisconsin and Michigan power grabs, a more open heist of authority. What Republicans didn’t win at the polls, they would seek to preserve by pilfering.

This follows efforts at voter-ID laws in many states and other restrictions that disproportionately affect minority voters. This was most prominent in Georgia last month, where Secretary of State Brian Kemp narrowly won the governorship after his office pruned more than 100,000 people from voter rolls, invalidated many absentee ballots and limited polling in some minority communities.

And the Trump administration has continued to champion the gerrymandering that served as a firewall against even greater GOP losses, most recently with the judicial nomination of Thomas Farr, who helped to create a North Carolina voting law that an appellate court said discriminated against African-Americans “with almost surgical precision.” Opposition from Tim Scott, S.C., the lone black Republican in the Senate, doomed the nomination last week.

A telling silence

The Republican strategy is anti-democratic but not irrational. Trump has accelerated the flight from the GOP of young, minority, female and college-educated voters. Without a new leader, Republicans’ only option may be increasingly flagrant efforts to stop would-be Democratic voters from casting ballots.

It would be difficult to get more flagrant than Wisconsin Republicans have been this week with their legislation to seize control of economic, health, legal and gun policy from the incoming governor and attorney general.

Then there’s North Carolina’s 9th District, where, after a suspicious spike in absentee-ballot requests from Bladen County, many voters said that people came to collect their ballots, and a disproportionate number of ballots mailed to minority voters were never returned.

This is just the sort of thing you’d think would attract the attention of Trump, who repeatedly rails about voter fraud. Trump set up an ill-fated commission to find the millions of illegal voters he claims cost him the popular vote in 2016, and he recently alleged that people vote repeatedly by changing hats in their cars.

Now there are serious and well-substantiated accusations of election fraud in North Carolina, in support of the Republicans. And from Trump? A telling silence.