And it was deliciously simple. If the majority of voters don't like what you're selling, then just don't let them vote.
Paul Weyrich had promoted this idea back in 1980 when he was campaigning for Reagan (after co-founding the Heritage Foundation), and, indeed, many Republican luminaries (like William Rehnquist, who went from poll-intimidator in the 1960s to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) rose up through the ranks by participating in Republican-run voter intimidation schemes.
While they used smear and innuendo to attack Al Gore (ridiculing him for helping write the legislation that created the modern internet, for example), the main thing that got George W. Bush into the White House was voter suppression crimes committed by his brother, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and Bush's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris. Throwing somewhere between 50,000 and 90,000 African American voters off the rolls, they were able to get the vote close enough that five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court functionally awarded Bush the presidency. (The BBC covered this in 2001 in two major investigative reports here and here that were literally seen all over the world except on any American media.)But it became the foundational go-to tactic for the GOP in 2000.
By 2016, the Republican Party had fine-tuned their voter suppression and intimidation systems to the point that they ran in nearly 30 states like well-oiled machines. Between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, for example, Ohio had purged more than 2 million voters from its rolls, the vast majority (more than 2:1) in heavily African American and Hispanic counties. (And the Supreme Court ruled last year that they can keep it up; other states have since adopted their new tactic of caging voters.)
The New York Times noted that in Wisconsin, around 300,000 registered voters were turned away at the polls because they didn't have the particular types of ID necessitated by Scott Walker's ALEC-recommended new voter ID law (in Texas, the Times reported, the number was 900,000).
It's symbiotic: billionaires and corporations spend hundreds of millions to fund Republicans, who pass laws and tax breaks that give billions to the corporations and billionaires, who then recycle a fraction of that, mere millions, back to the legislators they own. To keep the cycle going, both must prevent people who object to this system from voting.
ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), funded by the Koch network and other billionaires and big corporations, has been at the forefront of these efforts, with the majority of voter suppressive state laws passed having been introduced by ALEC-affiliated Republican legislators. ALEC itself facilitated the production of voter suppressive "model legislation."
Average American voters generally don't like billionaires and corporations running politics, so the billionaires and their corporations have organized major efforts to keep those people from voting. Numbers are sketchy, because Republican Secretaries of State are unwilling to release purge numbers and details without being sued to do so.
Fortunately for America, investigative reporter Greg Palast is executing such lawsuits right now, and the purge lists he's acquired in the past two weeks include over 90,000 people in largely Democratic parts of Nevada, 769,436 voters purged in Colorado, 340,134 in Georgia, 550,000 in Illinois, a large but as-yet-uncounted list from Nebraska, and 469,000 just purged in Indiana. More are coming in virtually daily, as Palast continues his lawsuits, along with the NAACP and Rainbow Push.
True the Vote, the latest Astroturf group pushing for voter purges, is partly funded by the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), the group that spent millions to run nationwide TV ads for Judge Brett Kavanaugh disparaging Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony as a "sham."
JCN, in turn, is funded by the Wellspring Committee that, according to investigative reporter Ken Vogel, was started by billionaires Charles and David Koch. (Their father, Fred Koch, was a founder and major funder of the John Birch Society, which ran "Impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice] Earl Warren" billboards and ads across America in the 1950s and 1960s decrying the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation order in Brown v. Board, and funded publications and efforts characterizing the voter drives of Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist plot.)
Republicans, instead of helping working people, love to lecture Americans that only their elected officials and Federal and Supreme Court justices are actually channeling the "original intent" of the founders and framers of the Constitution. ("Originalism" is a scam run uniquely by Republican justices, for example.)
Like their rigged elections and their ads saying that they want to defend Social Security and protect us against insurance companies viz preexisting conditions, it's a lie.
Although about half of the founders were slaveholders, practicing their own form of voter suppression, they nonetheless held egalitarian values for the future of this country and worried obsessively about a takeover by the very rich. It's hard to imagine that they'd ever sanction interpreting the First Amendment as a license for billionaires and corporations to buy our political system (as the Supreme Court first did in 1976 in the Buckley case, and then supercharged in 2010 with Citizens United).
In the summer of 1785, James Madison was essentially running the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he gave a speech (you can read in his Notes on the Convention) about the importance of not allowing the new country they were forming to become an oligarchy, run of, by, and for the rich. He noted that there are "two cardinal objects of government, the rights of persons and the rights of property."
He added that if only the rights of property were written into the Constitution, the rich would ravage the few assets of the poor. "Give all power to property," he said, "and the indigent will be oppressed."
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