Desperate Republicans Try Even More Voter Suppression in GA, AZ

What else is new?

The Republicans sure have a problem! What to do when your policies are deeply hated, your poll numbers are tanking, and you’ve lost the popular vote in every election since George W. Bush? Why, you try your very hardest to keep people from voting, of course!

The latest in voter suppression news: Even more hinky shit going down in Georgia, and they are now asking the Supreme Court to decide by Thursday to block 41,128 Arizonans from voting.

In Arizona, Republicans crying “illegal voting” has been going on for decades. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act, aka the “motor voter” law, let prospective voters fill out a form to register, and sign a sworn statement that they were US citizens. It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote, and a deportable offense with offenders facing five years in prison. So it’s simply not happening, not in Arizona, and not anywhere else, either.

But in 2004, Arizona required newly registered voters to provide “documentary proof of citizenship,” making voting more difficult for people who don’t have a handy birth certificate, or a driver’s license. People like, say, students, or those who work long hours and don’t have time track down their birth certificate. If the GOP could limit voting only to retired people who watch Fox News eight hours a day, well, that would be just peachy!

In 2013 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Arizona didn’t have the power to demand those documents, and a motor-voter law was fine, with the majority opinion by Anton Scalia of all people (and with dissents from Clarence “$4 million in gifts from billionaires” Thomas and Samuel “Vergogna” Alito). Then to get around the Supreme Court, Arizona passed a law with a two-track registration system, barring voters who didn’t show proof of their citizenship with a driver’s license or a birth certificate from voting in statewide elections. The confusing two-level system was challenged too, of course, in 2018, Arizona entered a consent decree that threw it out.

But never easily deterred, in 2022 the Republicans controlling the Legislature passed another law, once again barring voters who haven’t shown proof of citizenship from voting by mail or in a presidential election. A judge in Phoenix blocked that law, and this August 1, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also agreed that it was some bullshit. But now Arizona Republicans are trying their luck with the Supreme Court, again, with less than 70 days to go until the election. In 2020, Biden beat Trump in Arizona by 10,457 votes, so as the GOP knows very well, these hair-thin margins matter.

And then there’s Georgia, oh boy! Monday the State Elections Board — which was taken over by pro-Trump election-denying MAGAs too rabid for even the likes of mainstream Republicans like Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger — adopted another rule to help steal elections.

See also:

Georgia: Let Them Eat Jim Crow!

New Georgia Election Laws Are Some F*ckeroony F*ckulence!

This latest one will prevent counties from certifying the election tallies until officials can investigate every precinct with any report no matter how unfounded of any kind of irregularity. AND there’s another new rule that requires the hand-counting of ballots, which not only screws up the chain of custody and gets grubby fingerprints all over the ballots, but will make counting take until the eleventyeth of never. Is passing new rules this close to an election against the law? Yes! Is there time to legally challenge new rules before the election? No! That is the point! 

This is on top of the rule the Elections Board passed two weeks ago that empowered county election board members to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into allegations of voting irregularities. What would be a reasonable irregularity to inquire about? How long should an investigation take? They don’t say! Could this investigating possibly make Georgia miss their deadlines to certify results? Maybe! And what would happen then? Lawsuits, chaos, and who knows?

Is there good news? Yes! Kamala Harris has assembled a large and formidable anti-election-fuckerooney team of hundreds of lawyers, 10 times the size it was in 2020, including Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias. The Federalist and Breitbart are already publishing articles calling Elias a “democracy meddler” and “Russian collusion hoaxer,” so you know he’s good at his job. Republicans do keep trying this shit, but they also do keep losing in court.

And there IS a cure for election suppression, which is getting out the vote! They can’t suppress everybody.