Erick Erickson Romancing A Goat, Georgia Voter Suppression Edition!

Isn't that, like, a sin or something?

Great rightwing thought leader Erick Erickson saw a news story today that proved there is NO VOTER SUPPRESSION in Georgia, and in fact, if there's any problems with voting, they were actually caused by LAZY VOTERS. So he took to the Tweeting Machine to tell the world all about it. Without providing a link to the original story, of course, because there's no chance he'd ever fib.

Now, thanks to years of experience parsing rightwing lies, Yr Wonkette was a tad suspicious about this. For one thing, what the hell is the original story? We scanned down the thread, and some helpful soul had posted the link, to a story by Macon teevee station WMAZ, with a triumphant, "see, it's REAL!" or some such comment. Except golly, Erick is stretching things more than just a tiny bit.

Erickson got a couple of things right!

1) A voting rights group, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, is indeed one of several groups suing Brian Kemp over Georgia's "exact match" law, which shunted off 53,000 voter registration applications into "pending" status. People can still vote, but they could be purged from the rolls if they don't resolve a discrepancy between the name on their registration application and other state or federal records, even something as simple as a hyphen or accent mark.

2) The group did indeed hold a voter registration drive, and then one person working for them screwed up and failed to submit a "stack" of applications to the state, causing an unclear number of students at Mercer University to be unable to vote early. How many? As many as "a few" or even "some." AAAJ-A apologized, fired the responsible irresponsible person, and did what it could to contact the students so they could re-register in time, but it missed some, all right.

And that's about all the truth in Erickson's summary. This was a few people affected by one person's screwup. Definitely a bad thing, but a far cry from the whole group having forgotten "to hand in the voter registration applications they collected" and thus creating a voter registration crisis of their own making, for which the group then hypocritically blamed poor innocent Brian Kemp. Hell, even the idea that "a lot" of people were affected isn't even remotely borne out by the real story.

Mind you, this makes no difference to people insisting Erickson had NAILED the libs who just make up fake news alla time, because hey, Erickson was right about two things, so the tweet is truthful and there's no need to explain 53,000 "pending" applications, half a million people purged from voter rolls in 2017 alone, and the arbitrary rejection of thousands of absentee ballots for very flimsy -- but "legal" -- reasons. At least the courts told Kemp to STFU with that last example, so that's a thing.

We'd worry a bit about the state of Erick Erickson's soul, what with all the lying, but let's not be too harsh: He's forgiven, after all, so he has a license to go out and lie all he wants for the greater good of taking the heat off Republican ratfuckery.

Besides, it's SO OBVIOUS that everything in Georgia is going just great, and if not, it's certainly not Brian Kemp's fault.

Brian Kemp is a true villain. Years from now, his supporters on the right–pretending not to see all this, but quiet… https: //t.co/xKk66c2NXS

— Brian Beutler (@Brian Beutler) 1541527423.0 

But hey, if people can't vote, that's hardly the Secretary of State's fault, is it? Let's find some liberals to blame. Like the nice folks at Dead Breitbart's Institute For Bad-Faith Bullshit did, with a story from Houston proving BOTH SIDES SUPPRESS VOTES:

What are you gonna do now, liberals, sue MSNBC? HYPOCRITES!

PRESUMABLY this is the last post of the day until Evan's 6ish p.m. LIVEBLOG! So consider it an OPEN THREAD.

[ Erick Erickson on Twitter / WMAZ-TV ]

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