Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine: “After Georgia Republicans experienced the shocking setback of losing the state’s presidential election, the party descended into bitter internal recriminations. President Trump blamed Republican officials for allowing massive voter fraud to steal the state; many state Republicans blamed Trump’s rhetoric for losing a winnable race. But both Republican factions heartily agree on the proper corrective steps: a sweeping bill curtailing voting rights and handing new powers to Republican legislators to prevent the unfortunate events of 2020–21 from happening again. After the Gov. Brian Kemp, a target of Trump’s rage, signed the measure, the former president offered his hearty congratulations. ‘They learned from the travesty of the 2020 Presidential Election, which can never be allowed to happen again,’ the former President wrote in an official statement. ‘Too bad these changes could not have been done sooner!'”

“If you want to understand why this is happening, a timely new paper by University of Washington political scientist Jacob Grumbach helps explain. Grumbach surveys the performance of every state government across a broad array of measures of democratic health, such as indices of voting access like wait times and same-day and automatic voter-registration policies, felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and civil rights. His paper finds that the states that backslid on democratization over the past 16 years were shared a single characteristic: Republicans gained full control of their state government. In other words, states that are rolling back democratic protections are not responding to demographic change nor to any change internal to their state. They are following the agenda of the national Republican Party. That agenda is spreading throughout the states, which are imposing voter restrictions almost everywhere their party has the power to do so. Restricting the franchise has become perhaps the party’s core policy objective.”