When we talk about the Republican Party’s authoritarian direction and GOP officials’ increasingly overt hostility toward democracy, we tend to focus on events such as the period after the 2020 election and Jan. 6. It was, after all, a crisis in which a Republican president and most of the GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill tried to overturn the results of a free and fair election.

But in some instances, the party has a different kind of approach — one in which Republicans recognize the results of an election as legitimate but simply choose to ignore Americans’ will anyway.

Take GOP officials in Missouri, for example.

Republicans in the Show Me State had a lot to celebrate after Election Day 2020, scoring easy wins up and down the ballot, but there was one big exception: A majority of Missouri voters also approved Medicaid expansion in the state. GOP officials, who’d fought against the ballot measure, realized they’d lost fair and square, but they decided to ignore the results and refused to enact the voter-approved policy.

Several months later, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that state officials could not veto the will of the state’s voters, ending the bizarre dispute.

Almost exactly four years after that ruling was issued, an eerily similar story is unfolding in the same place. The New York Times reported late last week:

When Missouri voters were asked last year whether they wanted to increase the minimum wage and require employers to provide paid sick leave, 58 percent of them said yes. Not long after that vote, the Republicans who control the state government mobilized to unwind those changes. On Thursday, Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican, signed into law a bill that limited the voter-approved minimum wage increase and scrapped the paid sick leave requirement altogether.

There can be no doubt that Missouri shed the “battleground state” reputation it had a generation ago: This is a ruby red state, which Donald Trump won by 19 points last fall. It has a Republican governor, a Republican supermajority in the legislature, two Republican U.S. senators and a Republican-dominated congressional delegation.

But while most of the state’s voters appear wholly uninterested in voting for Democratic candidates, they do appear rather fond of voting for Democratic policy priorities. The Times’ report, noting the results of ballot questions in Missouri in recent years, noted that the state’s voters have “restored abortion rights, expanded Medicaid and legalized marijuana.”

With this in mind, GOP officials in the state have done exactly what you’d expect them to do: Missouri Republicans have tried to make it harder for the state’s voters to exercise their will through ballot measures and referenda, to prevent the public from circumventing the legislature and approving progressive measures the right doesn’t like.

But while trying to rig democracy is offensive in its own right, it’s even more dramatic to see Missouri Republicans veto election results they find objectionable.

In this latest instance, Missouri voters, on the same ballot in which they rallied behind far-right GOP candidates, endorsed mandatory paid sick leave for workers in the state, while simultaneously hiking Missouri’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, with future increases tied to the rate of inflation.

Republican legislators and the Republican governor didn’t contest the legitimacy of the outcome — no one has said the results were “rigged,” for example — but since they didn’t like the voters’ choices, they approved new laws to undo what Missourians did, scrapping paid sick leave and blocking future increases to the minimum wage.

Court fights appear likely, but in the meantime, the broader circumstances are unsettling. As the Times’ Jamelle Bouie summarized, “‘Freedom’ for republicans means the freedom to do whatever Republicans want you to do — and if you decide otherwise, they’ll just nullify your choices.”