Republican says voter suppression is response to party being ‘scared’

A senior Georgia Republican and former target of Donald Trump has delivered a damning analysis of the party’s attempts at restricting voting access, which he says was because GOP leaders “got scared” by defeat in 2020.

Geoff Duncan, the Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia, claimed in a book published on Tuesday that Republicans were restricting turnout — and particularly in big swing states such as Florida, Georgia and Texas — because they feared losing in future.

The remarks, which were reported by The Washington Post on Wednesday, were published on the same day that Texas’s Republican governor Gregg Abbott signed a bill into law that restricts voting access, and according to campaigners, will disproportionately target Democratic voters.