Republicans Need to Cull the Voter Rolls to Win

 

Republicans Need to Cull the Voter Rolls to Win

At Least That’s What They Believe

"You know, I mean, I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen. So, look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state."

Donald Trump, at 3 p.m. Jan. 2, 2021, on an hourlong phone call with Georgia election officials including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, office General Counsel Ryan Germany and Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs

It seems that those who complain the most about “rigged elections” and promoting “election integrity” are the champions of rigging elections, and ensuring election integrity is redefined to mean guaranteed GOP victories. Even as a vast pool of political Trump believers from the “stop the steal” campaign in 2020/2021 have traded office hours for visiting hours, the MAGA right seems hell-bent on legitimizing what used to be criminal acts… by using fun lawyers and elected representatives to rewrite election laws and rules where they can… and to prepare to barrage the system with lawsuits culling voters and stopping certification of elections, where they can, if and when Donald Trump loses in November.

Indeed, where bona fide state inquiries are made to determine whether “undocumented aliens” are voting in droves to tilt the result in favor of democrats, the results are uniformly the same: a very small number of violators found (almost always less than a dozen) and prosecuted. But “ensuring election integrity” sounds so much better than “keeping likely Democrats from voting.”

It’s a general reality that many minorities, focus on people of color, are generally lower on the economic ladder and often lack the hallmarks of normal citizenship that most non-minorities have: notably a birth certificate (and hence a passport). They’re not as likely to have a driver’s license and for a disproportionate number of such voters, a birth certificate (because they were not born in a hospital). Blacks and Indigenous People are disproportionately those who lack that birth certificate… even as their family have lived in the United States for decades, if not centuries or even millennia.

So, look at that map above, identifying the demographic spread of minorities across the land. Focus on black (African Americans), red (Indigenous Peoples) and orange (Hispanic)… and then look at the states, discussed below, where efforts to cull these people from the voting roles are rampant. Such efforts general take two paths, often both: (i) eliminating or making voting difficult for those likely to vote Democratic and (ii) refusing to certify elections in districts where Democrats seem to have won based on highly undefined standards of review, attempting to disqualify legitimate voters, after the fact, any way they can. I already have deep-dived into the Arizona efforts – see my August 22nd You Ain’t Like Us, So You Cain’t Vote blog – but Mariah Timms, writing for the August 28th Wall Street Journal, after reviewing Arizona rulings, views examples of the nationwide MAGA ramp-up to ensure “election integrity” dies in order to elect Trump to a second term:

“The recent lawsuits return to battleground states where Donald Trump and his allies refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election—places where the race was won or lost on narrow margins and where the 2024 race between him and Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to be close… Similar arguments have already been ruled on for this cycle—regarding absentee ballot rules in Wisconsin, Michigan, Mississippi and New York; voter-registration regulations in North Carolina and Florida; and voter roll cleaning in Nevada…

“Lawyers are ramping up battles over who gets to vote and how those votes are counted in the presidential election… Democrats sued Georgia’s state election board Monday [8/26] about its contentious new rule for certifying results. Republicans filed lawsuits in North Carolina and Arizona challenging voter registration procedures there. The Supreme Court also stepped into the fray: [A week earlier,] the justices took a mixed approach over proof-of-citizenship rules in Arizona.

“Election lawyers say that the volume of lawsuits is an unprecedented surge from previous contests, but that the last-minute litigation follows a familiar playbook… The recent lawsuits return to battleground states where Donald Trump and his allies refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election—places where the race was won or lost on narrow margins and where the 2024 race between him and Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to be close… Twice in the past week [of 8/26], the Republican National Committee and the North Carolina Republican Party sued the state’s Board of Elections over its voter rolls.

“RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said the board ‘has chosen to blatantly ignore the law, undermine basic election safeguards, and neglect a fundamental principle of our election integrity.’.. The state of North Carolina has yet to respond in court, but the election board has released lengthy statements rebutting the premise of the lawsuits.

“In a Thursday [8/24] suit, the GOP claimed the election board’s process for removing noncitizens from the rolls was flawed and improperly delayed. GOP challengers allege the election board hasn’t acted to remove noncitizens from the rolls after the state alerted the people that they were excused from jury duty for not meeting citizenship requirements… Pat Gannon, the board’s public information director, pointed out that the law requiring the comparison between the jury rolls and voting rolls was just passed in July. Since then, the state has compiled the records and found a total of nine individuals who might need to cancel their registrations, he said, and the checks of state and federal records continue…

“[Meanwhile, Georgia is all about empowering the election board discretion to question poll results, with no guidelines, as basis to delay or deny certification. So,] Democrats have asked a Georgia judge to block a postelection rule put in place this month, a rare proactive lawsuit from the party in a cycle in which they have mostly played defense.

“The Republican-controlled election board approved a new interpretation of the state’s election certification law that challengers say adds uncertain discretion to the election process. The law now requires local election officials to conduct an undefined ‘reasonable inquiry’ before they sign off on the results, a shift from a process that is typically little more than simple math and checking a box.”

Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who incurred Trump’s wrath by not forcing his election board to move in favor of Trump in the last election – the two clearly have feuded since – recently found a scared Trump (facing a popular Kamala Harris) now thanking Kemp for his “help and support.” Really? It may well be up to a very rightwing Supreme Court to reverse course and choose continuing the United States as a true representational democracy or simply to send the Constitution to the trash heap Trump would prefer, a pattern they seem to favor.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while I truly believe we need to replace our two-plus centuries old Constitution with a new version reflecting the world we live in today… until that happens, I would prefer that we at least follow the old one… if were cherish freedom.