Georgia Republicans So Mad Genteel Election-Stealing Methods Of Yesteryear Not Working Anymore
Sucks when you have to invent new racisms to stop Black people from voting.
For the next four years at least, the state of Georgia is going to have two Democratic senators. And Republicans are PISSED.
How could this possibly happen? Could it be that their platform of racism, gay bashing, and redistributing resources ever upward is toxic to young voters and minorities? Might their recent electoral failures be due to the extraordinarily shitty candidates foisted upon them by that bloated orange parasite? Perhaps telling voters the election is rigged and claiming that early voting is fraud is a crappy GOTV strategy ?
Is the GOP out of touch? No, it is the voters who are confused!
Or perhaps it's the voting procedures which need tweaking to make them even more favorable to Republicans. That seems to be the conclusion of officials in Georgia, where Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is calling to end the runoff system which sent Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to Washington in 2020, and then repeated the trick this year, awarding Warnock a full six-year term. This aggression will not stand, man!
Brad Raffensperger may have been unwilling to "find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have" for Donald Trump in 2020, but he's no one's idea of a non-partisan civil servant. So now that Georgia's runoff system, which forces the top two candidates into a re-vote if no one gets to 50 percent, is sending Democrats to Congress, it's got to go .
Ironically, the runoff system has explicitly racist origins, as Time pointed out in November. It was enacted in the 1960s to ensure that white candidates didn't split the white vote and allow a Black candidate to win an election through "Negro bloc voting." The thinking was that it would force a one-on-one contest between the white candidate and the Black candidate, with the added advantage of forcing voters to show up at the polls twice, something which poses a greater burden on minorities and the poor.
And making it harder to vote is pretty much the entire Republican game plan at this point. The RNC is singularly devoted to filing lawsuits to curtail early voting, limit ballot drop boxes, and impose pointless "security" measures which serve only to invalidate legitimately cast ballots. What legitimate interest is served by tossing out a ballot received before Election Day simply because it's undated? Indeed, Georgia Republicans, backed by the RNC and NRSC, sued to curtail early voting on the weekends during the runoff — they lost .
But Secretary Raffensperger has an answer for that, and it WHY DO YOU HATE CHRISTMAS?
“No one wants to be dealing with politics in the middle of their family holiday,” he said in defense of the plan to eliminate the runoff. “It’s even tougher on the counties who had a difficult time completing all of their deadlines, an election audit and executing a runoff in a four-week time period.”
This might be more credible if Republicans in Georgia hadn't just moved the runoff forward a month, perhaps reasoning that the longer the electorate gets to look at GOP candidates, they more appalled they'll be. That was certainly the case with Herschel Walker and his ranting about werewolves and Chinese air , although David Perdue never said an interesting word in his life, and he also lost vote share between the general and the runoff in 2020.
In any event, Raffensperger can only make suggestions to the Republican-dominated Legislature. To his credit, he's also floated extending the early voting period, or replacing the runoff with ranked choice voting. But since the GOP is pretty firmly against both of those — Tom Cotton called ranked choice voting "a scam to rig elections" — the only proposal getting attention is the one to ditch the runoffs or to lower the threshold to 45 percent, something a Republican might reasonably expect to pull off.
It doesn't appear to have occurred to them that they could have probably unseated Warnock if they'd run a halfway normal candidate. Or, you know, had policies that weren't totally repellant to wide swathes of the electorate. LOL, like that would ever happen!
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Wake me when Trump is featured on a prayer card.
The resurgence of the Klan in the early 20th Century was kicked off in Georgia, after the lynching of Leo Frank in 1913. That was when Jews were driven out of small towns in Jawja.