If any of this stuff should cost Democrats an election, Democrats should fight back with similar measures wherever possible, particularly since the Trump Court has backed partisan purges of voters. Just send a hyper-innocuous piece of junkmail to rural voters asking for confirmation they still live at the address and purge any voter who has not responded within 7 days. Let’s see how the Republicans like it. Obviously one would wait until about a month before the election before doing it, so that if anyone were to bring the matter to court, it would be too late to disturb the outcome. It should be borne in mind that Republicans will be doing this in any case.
Voter purges have become the right’s new voter suppression tool of choice.
New? WTF? They’ve been doing this for decades! The Republican’t Party has been under a consent decree for voter caging since the 1980s!
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party wasted the last two years yammering on about Russians. Unfortunately, our enemies are entirely homegrown…
This all got an incredible boost in 2013, when John Roberts—the oleaginous, smarmy, “respectable” Chief Justice of the Republican Court—pushed through the ruling in Shelby v Holder that vitiated the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act: a ruling at least as consequential as the horrendous and corrupt ruling he had pushed through in 2009 in time to enable the billionaires he serves to buy the crucial 2010 mid-terms, Citizens United.
It was what Roberts was placed on the Court to do. He is a truly vile man, despite the acres of ink that have been expended on presenting him as someone of stature, a wise, learned, objective arbiter of great intellect and modest demeanor, rather than what he is in fact—a very, very pretty, very, very demure fascist technocrat.
He first came to prominence in Republican political circles as a voter suppression specialist in the Reagan Justice Department, back in the first decade of the Powell project, when Republicans—anticipating the point at which a demographic shift would cost them power----decided to install, for want of a better term, a firewall.
That firewall came in the form of a kind of American apartheid that would allow a tiny, privileged class of wealthy white capitalist men to retain absolute power indefinitely.
One of the earliest, and easiest, ways to accomplish that end was to attack the vote, which—since, unlike the right to own a gun, it is not enshrined in our constitution, but is merely a presumptive right—was immensely vulnerable to all kinds of filthy Republican machinations.
Roberts (and his cruder, more openly and obviously partisan colleagues) have maneuvered to, among other things, nationalize the very tactic—stripping Democrats from the voter rolls— that .allowed the Republicans to steal the presidency in Florida in 2000 (which really was the quiet coup d’etat that took down our democracy—we’ve just needed an additional 18 years to wake up to the fact).
It gets worse from here on in, largely because it has already been immensely effective: in a desperate situation, in which voting is the only remedy, huge numbers of Democrats have been stripped of their ability to vote—and of course, our tragedy is that even huger numbers still don’t seem to see why it even matters.
Election fraud: a republican tradition.
Denying a citizen the right to vote or removing a citizen from a voter list should be a crime worthy of a month in prison and up to $10,000 in fees per voter removed .
Such a law might just stop these flagrantly abusive purges and most of the shenanigans that happen at the poles.
Not a month in prison but 5 years, like the woman in Texas was sentenced to for voting while on probation. Preventing someone from voting has the same exact impact on results as someone ineligible voting or someone voting twice. Even if there was recourse (as with the postcard mailed by Harris County), falsely putting names on a list to be challenged as Vera did has the same potential impact and should be treated for what it is, felony voter fraud.
The way to deal with voter purges is to simply vote. These purge laws don’t target regular voters. They target irregular voters. We can fix this by voting and checking/updating registration. It’s not hard. After we win some elections, then we can change some laws relating to elections and voting.
Some of these purges (according to the article) also target regular voters. Anybody who has moved. Anyone who republicans in a personal-challenge state know or believe to be a democrat.
Some good news:
NV EV: Dems continue to hold a 3 point lead in ballots cast (42-39). The Clark/Washoe firewall is up over 31,500 votes. When the Clark absentees come in today, that lead will edge closer to 32k. GOP turnout is a little hit and miss: Good in Clark, bad in Washoe, Inconsistent in some rurals. In Clark, we’re seeing signs of a GOP slowdown as the Dems have overtaken the GOP in the absentee vote over the last 3 days (this is usually a GOP strength). If Dems have a good last 3 days in the EV, they can get an over 40k firewall. Given where Indies are leaning nationwide, I would expect the Dems to be favored in the Senate race here going into e-day with current trends.
FL EV: Dems narrowed the statewide gap in ballots cast to under 2 points. In a sample of FL’s 32 largest counties, the Dems have narrowed the gap to under 1000 ballots. In addition, the Dems have presently improved their per county margins as compared to 2014 in 20 of the 32 counties. The trend appears to be the Dems friend in FL. It’s quite possible that the Dems get the overall statewide ballot margin to 1.5% or under. There’s a possibility that they end up in a draw or a nominal lead. That would be bad news for the GOP imho. Per Steve Schale and others, the Dems are also getting more minority voters and low propensity voters to participate.
That’s why people need to vote, update and check. If you’re a regular voter, you do these things. If people refuse to be apathetic, they’ll end these GOP games overnight.
I’m not depending on low propensity voters when looking at polls or analyzing elections. I think they’re gravy votes. It’s about regular voters first, for me. Low pro voters have to prove themselves by voting.
So does that mean D&R votes more or less cancel, and the fight is just among independents?
This election is only the beginning. After that the real fight begins. And there can be no moving forward until those criminals and traitors on the right are dragged into court and punished for their voter suppression conspiracy.
There need to be HUNDREDS of indictments and lawsuits from coast to coast. Not only do these evil people deserve prison but they deserve to be personally bankrupted. Target all of the leaders of this voter suppression and attack them mercilessly. Drive them and their families into the streets so they can pay for what they have done.
That and turn this around on those Republican assholes. They need to pay for the next 30 years for this. And their voters need to be targeted.
The only way conservative repugs can be or stay in power is by cheating; and appealing to the lowest, most savage parts of humanity. The racists and crazys.
Republicans are mobsters.
These laws target minority voters and Democrats, duh.
What it means is that the electorate may be expanding beyond the point where the GOP’s models don’t work, and that the distribution of that vote is also not trending in the GOP’s favor. They bring a big mid-term vote. They need low propensity Dems to not show up; they need Indies to not lean Dem; and they need to avoid crossover votes to the Dems.
If you look under the hood, purple county and red county Dems are turning out to vote and are narrowing the GOP margins. The GOP is voting big, but they’re basically using their RVs in big counties in order to stay ahead of the Dems, because Dems are narrowing margins elsewhere. The Dems are now starting to expand their advantage in the bigger counties without losing their improved ground in the smaller ones. You’re seeing situations emerge where a county the Dems lost in the 2014 EV by 15 points is now running only 7 points etc. That stuff matters a lot in FL.
Polls show Indies leaning Dem and Dems getting a net positive crossover vote. Now, Dems are voting in big numbers but they’re also getting low propensity voters to participate which means that they won’t get killed on eday. In fact, in 2014, the Dems won the e-day vote in a number of the big counties.
There’s a long way to go, but the Dems look to be in position to close out the remaining 5 days of EV strong. Then it will be an e-day turnout game to decide the election.
The contemporary Rs are a national political machine. We’ve never had that in this country before, though Lord knows that for most of our history we’ve had national major parties that were coalitions of more or less well-organized state and city political machines. That’s why national nominating conventions were once a vital part of the process, but are now vestigial. But the state and local machines have gone dark, died out except as very local and fleeting machines scattered across rural America.
The essential trick a political machine has to master in order to survive is stealing elections. I’m not sure we’ve ever had an election in this country stolen by outsiders, because, just as owning a bank is the best way to rob a bank, owning the election process is the best, and really only, way to steal an election. You have to control the process, set the rules, to win elections predictably and continuously, despite what silly notions of voting for the other party the majority of the people might be tempted towards from time to time. That means controlling the state legislatures who make the voting rules, state election officials who carry them out, and courts at all levels to make sure those first two sets of crooks never face justice.
This R political machine will come up with whatever rules they need to in order to keep winning. Voter ID laws were useful, but not really terribly strong in their favor, so of course they have to move on to purges of the rolls. As long as that works, where that works, that’s all they’ll do. But in states they have to hold onto despite the demographic tide, states like TX, they will soon have to come up with more drastic rule changes.
Understand that they will do whatever it takes to keep their machine in power. They can change rules in ways so egregiously contrary to popular opinion in the general public that this would doom them to ouster at the next election, except for this saving (damning?) grace to malicious election law, that it allows them to select their voters. As long as their rules succeed at getting rid of voters who will be outraged by their behavior in office, those rules can be as unpopular as you like among the poor boobs who won’t be able to vote once these rules come into force.
Purging the rolls is going to get more egregious, and will not be the worst they will get to before they go so far as to cause a revolution.
Lets try this approach with guns by secretly removing people from eligibility on the grounds that they might not be citizens until they provide their birth certificate, and proof of residency in the same district where they want to buy a gun. Until they satisfy our demands, they are not eligible for constitutional protections.
Tsk, tsk.
You still expect them to be the least bit shamed by hypocrisy and inconsistency.
Thank you.