For years, voter suppression has been a mostly unspoken but obvious Republican election strategy. But as Democrats and others call for reforms to ensure Americans can safely cast ballots amid the coronavirus threat, Republicans from the president on down have gotten stunningly candid about their electoral playbook.

Politico reported on Friday that Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has launched a massive, pricey legal fight to block changes to the voting process, including a vote-by-mail proposal for November’s contest. The Trump campaign, Republican officials, and GOP lawyers have framed their efforts through the lens of election integrity, claiming that the Democratic proposals would allow for the illegal voting like the kind the president has falsely claimed prevented him from winning the popular vote in 2016. “It is beyond disgusting that the Democrats are using this crisis to try to dismantle the integrity of our voting system,” Justin Clark, a senior Trump campaign counsel, told the outlet. “The American people won’t stand for this, and the campaign and the party intend to fight with them for a free, fair, and open vote in November.”

Putting this legal pushback in such terms almost makes the campaign’s pursuit sound noble. But Trump himself has already made clear what this is really about. “The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said this week of Democratic voting proposals. “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Trump’s candor seemed to invite lower-level Republicans to speak openly about how voter suppression was necessary to the party’s survival. “This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives,” Georgia State House Speaker David Ralston said this week, citing proposals that will “certainly drive up turnout.”

Those pitches, for which Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden has expressed support, include the possibilities of remote voting and drive-through voting—ideas that could, indeed, result in larger voter turnout. “This is about making sure that we're able to conduct our democracy while we're dealing with a pandemic,” Biden said this week. “We can do both.” But Republicans have spent years attempting to make it harder, not easier to vote—especially for the minorities and younger Americans who tend to lean Democratic. They may lean even more heavily on suppression efforts this cycle, in trying to reelect a historically unpopular president and the lawmakers who have enabled him.

“Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” Clark, the Trump campaign adviser and legal counsel, was taped saying at a closed-door meeting of the Republican National Lawyers Association chapter in Wisconsin last year. (Clark later told the AP he was talking about false accusations against Republicans). “Let’s start playing offense a little bit,” Clark told the Republican lawyers group. “That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”

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