Supreme Court To Voting Rights Act: AND STAY DEAD!
IT'S A BAD COURT BRANT.
Yesterday, the US Supreme Court, which loves "state's rights" just as long as you're attacking women's bodily autonomy, trans people, or people of color, decided to jump into Wisconsin's redistricting war. Because why not?
And, of course, this Court is never just going to fuck things up in the normal Republican-evil way of the past. No, they are in the midst of an all-out attack on voting rights — especially for Black and brown Americans. (Full disclosure: In my other life, I'm the Policy Director for Wisconsin Voices and have been working on redistricting and ensuring Black and Brown voices are represented in our state's maps. This is not my first rodeo.)
When this Court goes for it, they really go for it. And so, the Court didn't just issue a stay or decide to hear Wisconsin Legislature v. Wisconsin Elections Commission; in an unsigned opinion, it summarily reversed the Wisconsin Supreme Court's ruling on the state's electoral maps without any argument or briefing on the merits. And in that unsigned opinion, they made it pretty clear that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is next on the chopping block.
Here's the background
Since before the 2020 Census results were even released, we knew redistricting in Wisconsin was going to be a shitshow and that a court was going to end up drawing our maps. The Wisconsin Constitution requires that the legislature and the governor agree on electoral maps, and we have a batshit insane legislature hell-bent on destroying our democracy as well as a reasonable governor in Tony Evers. When the legislature and the governor can't agree, the issue goes to the courts.
In the past, the Seventh Circuit has drawn Wisconsin's maps when there was no agreement, but this year our state supreme court decided to step in. The majority-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that it would choose the maps that presented the least change from our uber-gerrymandered 2011 maps. And earlier this month, the court did just that, finding that Governor Evers's maps presented the least change from the 2011 maps and also complied with the Voting Rights Act by creating a new majority-Black district in Milwaukee because of the increase of Black voters in the area.
Let's talk law
When race can be considered in redistricting is a very normal legal doctrine — by which I mean it's one full of rules and exceptions and "well, it depends" answers to what sound like simple questions.
The general rule is that the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause prohibits making race a primary consideration when drawing political maps. To use race as a predominant factor in map-drawing, you have to pass the strict scrutiny test: You have to show the maps are (1) narrowly tailored to further a (2) compelling state interest.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. This includes a ban on diluting minority vote by doing things things like packing minority voters into a small number of districts or cracking minority voters across several districts. Since 1965, the Supreme Court and lower courts have considered compliance with the Voting Rights Act to be a compelling government interest.
After the US Supreme Court decimated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (aka the Plessy v. Ferguson of our time), Section 2 became the most important federal tool for challenging racist election practices. But don't you worry, racists who hate it when Black and brown people vote, because our esteemed Supreme Court justices are working to destroy Section 2, too.
Last summer, the Court weakened Section 2 by ruling in Brnovich v. DNC that it was totally fine for Arizona to enact racist voting laws that target racial minorities, as long as those laws might also disenfranchise some poor white people. And yesterday, the Court showed us once again just how excited it is to do away with these so-called "voting rights" once and for all.
Let's talk Milwaukee
During the five months the Wisconsin Supreme Court spent on the redistricting litigation, all parties pretty much agreed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act applies to Milwaukee. Per long-standing SCOTUS precedent (Gingles v. Thornburg), Section 2 applies when a minority population is "sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district," is "politically cohesive," and the "majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it ... usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate."
Milwaukee ticks all of those boxes. And I agree with Governor Evers that Section 2 requires seven majority-Black districts in Milwaukee. The problem isn't the idea of an additional majority-Black district, but ensuring any Section 2 districts actually create opportunity for minority voters.
As Senator Lena Taylor, one of just three Black Wisconsin state senators, argued to SCOTUS, the issue with the maps wasn't carving out seven majority-Black districts — it was creating "majority-Black districts" that didn't have enough Black people to comply with the Voting Rights Act. (The Republican maps would have reduced the number of majority-Black districts from six to five, despite a growth in Milwaukee's Black voting age population and a corresponding drop in Milwaukee's white voting age population, but that's an issue for another court and another day.)
But this, of course, is not the Supreme Court's problem with our maps. Rather, the Court stepped in here to try to ensure the Wisconsin Supreme Court takes even more power from Black voters if possible, Voting Rights Act be damned.
For most of the redistricting litigation, it was essentially undisputed that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act applied to Milwaukee. Even Wisconsin's 2011 maps, often declared the most gerrymandered in the country, created six majority-Black state Assembly districts in Milwaukee County. But now, the US Supreme Court is saying that the analysis done by the Wisconsin Supreme Court wasn't enough to justify the creation of seven majority-Black districts.
One of the scariest parts of all of this is that Governor Evers never argued that his maps were primarily drawn to create majority-minority districts. Historically, the rule has always been that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits using race as the predominant factor in map-drawing. The maps that were submitted weren't drawn specifically with race in mind — they were created to follow the Wisconsin Supreme Court's guidance of creating the least change from the 2011 maps. They also created seven majority-Black districts in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
The posture of this case is different from normal Voting Rights Act cases. Usually, when a court is considering a Section 2 issue, it is in a Voting Rights Act case filed in federal court — and the court creates a large record analyzing maps, legislative history, historic voting patterns, and the local history of minority disenfranchisement. That gives the courts the ability to consider all of the relevant facts and do a full analysis.
That just isn't going to be possible in certain cases where courts are acting as map drawers. The Wisconsin Supreme Court was creating the maps, not reviewing them for Section 2 compliance. The governor submitted maps to the court specifically to follow the court's "least change" measure. The governor also considered compliance with the Voting Rights Act when drawing his maps.
This is what should happen! It has been the law for decades that compliance with the Voting Rights Act is a valid reason to take race into consideration when drawing maps. Requiring states to completely ignore Section 2 compliance when drawing maps will, at the very best, result in justice delayed. Minority voters will be required to wait until illegal maps are drawn and then litigate the issue, likely for years, before any corrective measure can be taken. But that is essentially what SCOTUS said must happen when it wrote:
The question that our VRA precedents ask and the court failed to answer is whether a race-neutral alternative that did not add a seventh majority-black district would deny black voters equal political opportunity. Answering that question requires an "intensely local appraisal" of the challenged district. When the Wisconsin Supreme Court endeavored to undertake a full strict-scrutiny analysis, it did not do so properly under our precedents, and its judgment cannot stand.
The rule in Section 2 cases has never been that the court must consider race-neutral alternatives. And if this is applied in all Section 2 cases, that part of the Voting Rights Act is, at least in practice, probably going the way of Section 5 à la Shelby County.
The Court's suggestion to the Wisconsin Supreme Court is that "the court is free to take additional evidence if it prefers to reconsider the Governor’s maps rather than choose from among the other submissions. Any new analysis, however, must comply with our equal protection jurisprudence."
No mention of the Voting Rights Act.
This is fine
While the impending decimation of the rest of the Voting Rights Act is the scariest thing about this opinion, it's far from the only fucked up part. The Court issued a summary reversal without full briefing — parties had only filed briefing on the legislature's request to stay the state court ruling and had not even briefed the merits. Summary reversal is rare and generally requires six justices to sign-off, so even though the opinion is unsigned (cowards), we can be reasonably sure John Roberts, who hates Black voting rights as much as anyone, sided with the five fullblown fascists. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were the only noted dissents.
This case is also another example of the Supreme Court using the "shadow docket" to make important rulings. Most major Supreme Court rulings come after months of briefing, oral arguments, and consideration by the Court. But in recent years, the Roberts Court has increasingly enjoyed issuing major rulings on the merits of cases without any of this. Precedents intended to last for decades if not longer are created, as in this case, after just a couple of weeks and no full picture of the issue at hand.
Between this case and the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Merrill v. Milligan (another shadow docket case), the Voting Rights Act is, at best, on life support. In Merrill, the Court overruled a decision requiring Alabama to create a second majority-Black congressional district. (The very "liberal activist" three-judge panel the Supreme Court overturned included two Trump appointees.)
In the Alabama case, the judges said it was just too close to the state's May primary to bother worrying about the Voting Rights Act. Sorry, Black voters!
Here in Wisconsin, on the other hand, our maps were summarily reversed and sent back despite the Wisconsin Elections Commission repeatedly saying that it needed the state's maps finalized by March 15 at the latest. That's because the candidate nomination period starts April 15 and people need to know what district they live in. Oh well! If you don't know what district you're going to be in for the next decade, too bad, so sad.
For the record, I part from most Dems in that I don't think it's a bad thing for a court to take a second look at Governor Evers's maps. But my issue is that the governor's maps didn't give enough power to Black voters — and SCOTUS is out here trying to diminish the power of Black voters even more than they already have.
But all of this is par for the course with the Roberts Court. I'm almost surprised they didn't just force the Wisconsin Supreme Court to just choose the Republican maps, like the legislature asked them to.
[ SCOTUS ]
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Something Good Happened In Wisconsin?!
Turn around three times, knock wood, and spit!
Wisconsin is going to have halfway decent legislative maps for the first time in over a decade!
Yesterday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court surprised a lot of people, rejecting mega-gerrymandered maps drawn by the Republican legislature, in Johnson v. Wisconsin Elections Commission.
Currently, Wisconsin is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. And don't worry, we still stay plenty gerrymandered with these new maps. But even this is still a pretty big deal — particularly coming from a state supreme court with a conservative majority that could have used this as an opportunity to create terrible case law for decades to come.
Here’s the background
States have to redraw their political maps every 10 years, after the nation's Census results are released. The last time Wisconsin’s maps were drawn, Scott Walker was governor and Republicans controlled the legislature … you can already see where this is going, right?
Wisconsin ended up with some of the most gerrymandered maps in the country. Multiple courts found them unconstitutional before John Roberts & Co. ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering is just fine and not something federal courts should bother themselves with, as long as it continues to benefit Republicans.
Here, have a nice infographic about how bad Wisconsin's maps are!
I’ll bet a really cool and awesome person named Jamie made that.
Anyway, yeah. The maps are bad. And it looked like they were going to get even worse.
Republicans have majorities in both houses of the Wisconsin legislature and they were intent on keeping their gerrymandered maps. Thankfully, we have a decent governor in Tony Evers, who vetoed the new and unimproved super-gerrymandered maps.
And that's when the real fight started.
It’s a miracle!
I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by this outcome. The Wisconsin Supreme Court handed the Republicans some major victories early on. And the fact that the state supreme court chose to get involved at all was not a great sign — in the past, when the legislature and governor couldn’t agree, our maps were drawn by the Seventh Circuit in federal court, not the elected state supreme court.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has a 4-3 conservative majority. But in Justice Brian Hagerdorn, we have our very own John Roberts, and the other conservatives go too far even for him sometimes. So, while still certainly a conservative, and even fine with ratfucking up to a point, Justice Hagerdorn has ended up as the swing vote simply by virtue of not being a total fucking fascist. For example, Justice Hagerdorn is also the reason the state supreme court didn’t take up any of the crazy "Trump really won the 2020 election" lawsuits.
Let’s take a look at the opinion
So, that really sucked. With that decision, the court decided that Wisconsin's maps were going to remain super gerrymandered. But the Democrats proved that they are better at math than the Republicans and created more accurate maps. Statistically, the governor's map "moves the fewest number of people into new districts. It is not a close call."
But some of the most important parts of the decision came in the court's discussion of the Voting Rights Act.
The Voting Rights Act
The Concurrence
Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, who voted with the majority, wrote separately to make it clear that she still didn't think the decision should have been based on faithfulness to the Scott Walker maps.
I join the majority opinion, which selects the Governor's congressional and state legislative maps, not because I approve of the "least change" approach. I do not.
Having previously voiced my dissent to the adoption of that approach, a majority of the court in a prior order nevertheless embraced "least change" as the framework that would govern the proceedings in this case. Circumscribed by that decision and the parties' reliance upon it when crafting their submissions, I join today's majority opinion because the Governor's maps adhere most closely to the court's earlier directive. Accordingly, I respectfully concur.
The other liberal justices joined the concurrence. And they're right, of course. The court decided very early on in this process that we were going to have shitty maps, and from there it was all a matter of degree. But at least we didn't end up with the worst option.
The Dissents
Naturally, the court's remaining conservatives felt the need to put their crazy on full display.
Justice Annette Ziegler went for the tried and true Republican complaint of any decision they don't like being "judicial activism" and any decision they do like being principled constitutionalism.
The majority opinion demonstrates a complete lack of regard for the Wisconsin Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause. Short on legal analysis and long on ipse dixit, the majority opinion amounts to nothing more than an imposition of judicial will. The majority deems the language of the Wisconsin and United States Constitutions to be mere policy. I dissent because here, the majority's decision to select Governor Tony Evers' maps is an exercise of judicial activism, untethered to evidence, precedent, the Wisconsin Constitution, and basic principles of equal protection.
There's also lots of fun, horrible stuff about how drawing majority-minority districts, as required by the Voting Rights Act, is "an unconstitutional gerrymander," because reasons. She also basically begs SCOTUS to take up the case, and gods help us all if that happens.
Chief Justice Patience Roggensack also dissents separately to write about how there shouldn't be majority-Black districts in Milwaukee. All three joined in both dissents, just to really drive home how much they hate Black people having voting power in their state.
These dissents paint a clear picture of just how poorly this case could have gone — and how close we came to that nightmare scenario. If Justice Hagerdorn were as bad as his Republican colleagues, we would have terrible precedent on the books calling it unconstitutional to create majority-minority districts — and two fewer majority-Black districts in the state Assembly.
So yay!
Listen, I will be the first to say that Wisconsin's new maps are far from perfect. And our maps still heavily favor Republicans, which is why descriptions of this as a "major win for Democrats" are pretty absurd. Like a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article analyzing the proposals back in December found, the decision was "between a map that's very good for GOP and one that's even better for GOP."
But this is the closest Wisconsin was going to come to decent maps this time around. And, especially when compared to the alternative, this is something to celebrate.
Keep an eye on Wisconsin as the year unfolds! That turd Ron Johnson is up for reelection! And so is Governor Evers, who is currently the only thing standing in the way of a fascist Republican trifecta that would inevitably make the Scott Walker days look downright pleasant.
Here's the opinion:
Follow Jamie on Twitter! She has a lot to say about Wisconsin.
Oh, Trump Took Top Secret Documents To Mar-A-Lago? Is There A Phrase For That Do You Suppose?
How about the stuff he flushed?
Golly, who could have predicted this one, except everybody? The Washington Post reports that among the 15 boxes of White House documents the National Archives retrieved from Donald Trump's trash palace, it seems, some of them were clearly marked as "Top Secret." The Post says that, according to "two people familiar with the matter,"
While it was unclear how many classified documents were among those received by the National Archives and Records Administration, some bore markings that the information was extremely sensitive and would be limited to a small group of officials with authority to view such highly classified information[.]
Also too, the people who know what's what said that, as of Thursday afternoon, the FBI had not yet reviewed the classified materials, whatever they are.
It's not clear whether the Justice Department will do a full investigation (honestly, at this point, how could it not?), but at least now the recovered classified documents are "being stored in a sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as an SCIF, while Justice Department officials debated how to proceed," according to the two people in the know. Thank goodness someone's finally protecting those secrets!
FLUSH: Once Again It Comes Back To Trump And A Goddamn Terlet
We'll just assume that while they were kept at Mar-a-Lago for over a year, the sensitive documents may have just sat in storage. Or Trump might have been looking through them for dirt on his political enemies. Most likely, he just used them to build a little fort to hide in.
Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich insisted everything was on the up and up, because of how normal it is for huge troves of documents, some classified, to be dragged out of the White House and kept for more than a year by former presidents.
It is clear that a normal and routine process is being weaponized by anonymous, politically motivated government sources to peddle Fake News. The only entity with the ability to credibly dispute this false reporting, the National Archives, is providing no comment.
Yes, yes, and Trump would just love to release his tax returns, but he can't because they're being "audited."
While the number and exact nature of the classified stuff isn't clear yet, we do learn a bit more about how that might have happened, perhaps because he never intended to leave the White House at all for the rest of his life:
Officials had to scramble to pack up before Joe Biden took office, and one person familiar with the events surmised that some of the documents from the residence likely made their way into boxes destined for Mar-a-Lago rather than being turned over as they should have been.
Gosh, he was just such a chaotic guy! Guess he really can't be held accountable because paranoia, chaos, and utter indifference to norms and protocols are just how the guy rolls, you can't change him, he's just that way. That extends to Trump's apparently grudging decision to return the documents:
It is not precisely clear who packed up the classified materials at Mar-a-Lago, or how they got there in the first place. Trump was very secretive about the packing of boxes that were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago last month, and did not let other aides — including some of his most senior advisers — look at them, according to people close to him.
Oh, well maybe he wouldn't let aides see the boxes because of his very great concern for the security of that classified information. Golly, you people try to make everything look so bad!
We also find out a bit more about the mechanics of the National Archives' discovery that documents were missing. Mostly, it came down to archivists realizing that things they knew existed simply hadn't been turned over, like that map of Hurricane Dorian's path that Trump drew dicks on to prove he knew which way the wind blows, or the "love letters" sent to him by Kim Jong Un. That led the Archives to contact Trump's people at Mar-a-Lago, to ask them to look under the couch maybe.
DICKS: Who Knew Trump's Mental Breakdown Would Involve Drawing Dicks On Hurricane Maps?
As we noted yesterday, the expert opinion seems to be that it could be very difficult to actually charge Trump with a crime for any of this sloppy handling of classified information, for a bunch of reasons, a point the Post explains again.
Even with documents marked classified found where they don’t belong, prosecutors have a high legal bar to get to criminal charges. Prosecutors would have to prove someone intentionally mishandled the material or was grossly negligent in doing so — which can be a steep hurdle in its own right. And Trump, as president, would have had unfettered latitude to declassify material, potentially raising even bigger challenges to bringing a case against him.
Former federal prosecutor Brandon Van Grack said that some of the laws about classified information require someone to act “without authorization, and potentially the president would be able to argue he gave himself that authorization.”
Thing is, even presidents can't just grab a pile of classified documents, wave their hands, and say "I declare thee no longer secret!" There's supposed to be a formal process, and if stuff found at Mar-a-Lago really had been declassified, it should have had "Declassified" printed at the top. No, not scrawled in Sharpie. Haha, as if "rules" applied to the Great Man!
Also too, even if there's somehow no formal criminal investigation, former prosecutor Van Grack told the Post that the FBI will "want and need to review the information and conduct an investigation to determine what occurred and whether any sources and methods were compromised."
Oh, and then there's this complication thrown on the pile, too: While he was pretending to be president, Trump regularly handled official documents while he was working hard at Mar-a-Lago and definitely not just fucking around on the golf course. That might mean "it could be difficult in some instances to establish the chain of custody of specific classified documents."
The Post says that yeah, normal presidents handle lots of classified information, but then, normal presidents followed protocols for keeping classified documents secure, like locking it in a safe. Trump, not so much. He'd take documents to the residence and he'd just let them pile up, presumably accumulating Big Mac and Diet Coke stains.
One White House staffer said it became a problem that eventually led records staff to search for materials in classified burn bags, which are used to dispose of documents.
Hilariously, another former White House official took the opportunity to say Trump's haphazard treatment of official documents proves that the Great Man was much more on the ball than people might think:
“For all the things written about him that he didn’t read, he often would take things with him to the residence or bring things down with him,” said a second Trump White House official. “But I don’t know that that is out of the ordinary.”
No word in this story, however, about Maggie Haberman's scoop that White House staff periodically had to clear clogs of paper from toilets in the residence. We're fairly sure Barack Obama never flushed foreign matter apart from the occasional illicit cigarette butt, and maybe occasional secret messages he received from the Muslim Conspiracy.
[WaPo / Photo: "Scott," Creative Commons License 2.0]
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TN Judge Sentences Woman To Six Years For Attempting To Register To Vote While Black
No, a different woman.
A judge in Memphis, Tennessee, threw the book at voting rights activist Pamela Moses this week for the crime of illegally trying to register to vote in 2019. Moses was on probation for a 2015 felony conviction, but says she was never told that the conviction took away her right to vote. What's more, Tennessee state officials admit they made a number of mistakes that led to Moses thinking it was actually legal to vote, although that didn't seem to matter to the prosecutor who pursued the stiffest possible sentence, or to Judge Mark Ward, who insisted that Moses had "tricked" the officials into signing documents saying it was OK for her to vote. On Monday, Ward sentenced Moses to six years and a day in state prison.
Moses has said from the start that she made a mistake, but the state has treated her as the most dangerous frauder that ever tried to steal an election, although she never actually completed the registration process in 2019; her application was denied due to the prior conviction. Moses was convicted in November of "making or consenting to false information on an election document."
Last night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow contrasted the heavy sentence given to Moses with the slaps on the wrist handed to four white men who deliberately voted fraudulently for Donald Trump in the 2020 election:
Three of the fine gentlemen who voted twice got probation, and one served three whole days in jail. Again, they actually voted, knowing full well they were submitting fraudulent ballots. You might recall that one of the dudes, Donald "Kirk" Hartle of Las Vegas, Nevada, voted the absentee ballot of his late wife and then enjoyed wingnut fame for a while when he insisted terrible Democrats had stolen her ballot and frauded with it. Nevada Republicans and rightwing media hyped the story for months, until Hartle was arrested in October 2021 for having been (allegedly!) the actual frauder.
Read More: Vegas Republican Learns Voter Fraud Is Not As Easy As Fox News Promised
Hartle was convicted and sentenced to probation and a $2,000 fine. If he keeps his nose clean on probation for a year, he'll even be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea and plead to a misdemeanor charge instead. No judges or Republican officials that we know of have called for Hartle to be sent to prison for years on end to set an example for would-be election thieves.
Funny how the courts are so nice to white guys who deliberately do fraud, but they come down like a million-pound shithammer on Black people who insist they made understandable mistakes.
Ms. Moses, on the other hand, says that after she pleaded guilty to felony charges in 2015, she was never told that she had lost her right to vote under Tennessee law. She told The Guardian's Sam Levine in an interview last year,
They never mentioned anything about voting. They never mentioned anything about not voting, being able to vote … none of that.
To complicate matters further, elections officials should have removed her from the voting rolls when she was convicted, but they failed to, oopsie! Levine explains that
[The] the court never sent election officials in Memphis the documents they needed to do so, according to a letter from an election official I obtained.
In 2019, Moses announced she was running for Memphis mayor, in an admittedly long-shot campaign, but was informed by elections officials she was ineligible because of her conviction, the first time she'd heard of it. Like any good citizen, she tried to get herself legal:
Moses went to court and asked a judge to clarify whether she was still on probation, and the court confirmed that she was. What happened next is at the crux of the case against her.
Moses did not believe the judge had correctly calculated her sentence. So she went to the local probation office and asked an officer to figure it out. An officer filled out and signed a certificate confirming her probation had ended. In Tennessee, people with felony convictions who want to vote need that document from a correction official. Moses submitted it to local election officials along with a voter registration form.
But the day afterwards, an official at the corrections department wrote an email to election officials saying a probation officer had made an “error” on Moses’ certificate. Moses was still serving an active felony sentence, they wrote, and was not eligible to vote. The department offered no explanation for the mistake.
At trial, the prosecution argued that even if elections officials had made mistakes, Moses knew she was ineligible to register because the judge had told her so when she went to court, and therefore everything she did after that was proof that she was out to do fraud of the most nefarious sort. At her sentencing Monday, Judge Ward told her he didn't believe her filthy lies:
It’s that simple. You went down to the probation office, told them you weren’t on probation, tricked them into giving you a form so you could re-register to vote when you had a court order in your hand from the judge presiding over your case.
Levine notes that in fact, it's not all that unusual for people to be confused about the status of their voting rights, according to Campaign Legal Center attorney Blair Bowie, who is part of a lawsuit to fix Tennessee's voting rights restoration process but isn't involved in Moses's criminal case. She noted a study finding that about eight percent of former felons' applications for restoration of voting rights are rejected because the applicants haven't actually completed their probation, but said she'd never heard of anyone being prosecuted after mistakenly submitting an erroneous certificate.
The judge's insistence that Moses deliberately tricked the probation office didn't hold much water with Bowie, who said it "seems absurd to me on its face."
The instructions on the certificate of restoration form are very clear to the probation officer or the clerk. They say you will check these records and you will sign off on this based on what the records say.
They’re saying that she tricked the probation officer into filling out this form for her. That creates a really scary prospect for people who think they’re being wrongly told they’re not eligible.
Moses is likely to appeal, and depending on her behavior, it's possible she could be eligible for release as soon as her May 20 status update hearing, according to her attorney.
But for now, she's gone to prison, and no doubt all the rightwing media that said nothing about frauders deliberately voting for Trump will point to Moses and insist her case proves that elections just can't be trusted. And all voters of color will be assumed to be up to something, because look what that one lady in Tennessee did.
We also have no doubt that even more Republicans, absolutely convinced that Democrats steal all the elections, will be voting multiple times this fall, to even things out. That's only fair, right?
[Guardian / WREG-TV / KLAS-TV]
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