Georgia Election Now Featuring Slightly Less F*ckery, So Hooray!

Thanks, ACLU!

One of the common themes of the 2018 midterms has been all the fuckery Republicans have been engaging in to deny (mostly minority) people their lawful right to vote. In other words, it's basically every American election in modern history! Georgia, in particular, has been just full of self-created problems as the GOP Georgia secretary of state, Brian Kemp, who just so happens to be the GOP nominee for governor, does every single thing he can to #rig the election for himself and against his opponent, the badass Democrat Stacey Abrams.

But hooray, things just got a little bit better! No, the "exact match" thing that's threatened to disenfranchise so many (black) voters is still intact, but people are working on that. And also no, Brian Kemp has not resigned his secretary of state post citing EXTREMELY OBVIOUS CONFLICTS OF INTEREST.

But! The ACLU has just been handed a victory involving people with absentee ballots!

Breaking: A federal judge has blocked election officials in Georgia from throwing out absentee ballots because of s… https://t.co/Xr7duldMd7

— Electionland (@Electionland) 1540406941.0 

Oh, that is good! As a person with a signature that is literal chicken-scratching with no rhyme or reason to anybody but OURSELVES, we would be pretty mad if the board of elections said the chicken-scratching on our absentee ballot application was different from the chicken-scratching in our voter file. (You should see our bar receipts!) That's exactly what's been happening in Georgia, particularly in Gwinnett County outside Atlanta, a suburban county of almost 1,000,000, which has been the epicenter of Georgia's current voting fuckery. The county has been rejecting an unusually large number of absentee ballots, and you would be shocked to learn that an inordinate percentage of those ballots have come from black voters.

The ACLU had argued that untrained idiots, we mean SMART ELECTION OFFICIALS, were being required to act as "handwriting experts," and ultimately the ACLU prevailed, because a proposed injunction was issued today against that dumb state law. Also at issue has been the fact that stupid state laws require voters handing in absentee ballots to list their birth year on their absentee ballot envelope, so people who accidentally write today's date were having their votes disappeared. Democracy!

This ruling doesn't affect that (it's being addressed in a different lawsuit), but hey, at least the signature fuckery is being put on hold, at least for now. According to the proposed injunction (parties have until Thursday at noon to respond to Judge Leigh Martin May's proposal), ballots with signature issues would instead be marked as provisional, giving voters time to resolve any discrepancies and maybe try to sign their name better, so their votes can be counted, as American Jesus intended.

Here is the whole ruling if you'd like to read it. (Warning: don't. It's boring AF and doesn't even have any dick jokes in it.)

As we said, this ruling is just scratching the surface in solving all the problems in Georgia's election this year. But at least we can rest easy knowing that Brian Kemp won't be able to pull   quite as much fuckery as he was able to yesterday. In other words, it's a start!

And with that, here is your open thread.

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