I Bet Election Theft And Voter Suppression Would Stop If They Were Capital Crimes And A Few People Got Executed For It

Georgia's primary elections were a mess yesterday. Look at the race for the Democratic slot in Georgia's first district. Progressive Lisa Ring, the progressive in George's first district will be in a runoff with Joyce Griggs. With 96.89% of precincts reporting (204 out of 225), Lisa had 17,181 votes to Griggs' 17,164. Every vote counts. The Senate race looked like it was coming down to a runoff between a progressive (Teresa Tomlinson) and a nothing (Jon Ossoff) as well, but by last night, the nothing had avoided the runoff and is likely to lose the chance to beat Perdue; leave it to Schumer! The important race in GA-07 also looks like it will be determined in a runoff, as will Democratic primaries in GA-09 and in GA-13, where longtime incumbent and useless Blue Dog David Scott has been forced into a runoff, the only Georgia incumbent who was.

The Associated Press headline tells the real story of the Tuesday primary: 'Chaos in Georgia': Is messy primary a November harbinger?. Bill Barrow wrote that "The long-standing wrangle over voting rights and election security came to a head in Georgia, where a messy primary and partisan finger-pointing offered an unsettling preview of a November contest when battleground states could face potentially record turnout. Many Democrats blamed the Republican secretary of state for hours-long lines, voting machine malfunctions, provisional ballot shortages and absentee ballots failing to arrive in time for Tuesday’s elections. Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential campaign called it “completely unacceptable.” Georgia Republicans deflected responsibility to metro Atlanta’s heavily minority and Democratic-controlled counties, while President Donald Trump’s top campaign attorney decried 'the chaos in Georgia.'"

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the primary quickly turned into an ordeal for voters who waited for hours Tuesday when it became clear officials were unprepared for an election on new voting computers during the coronavirus pandemic. Poll workers couldn’t get voting machines to work. Precincts opened late. Social-distancing requirements created long lines. Some voters gave up and went home. The primary was a major test of Georgia’s ability to run a highly anticipated election in a potential battleground state ahead of November’s presidential election, when more than twice as many voters are expected. Elections officials fell short."

Is it just incompetence? Or is there more to Georgia's Republican-controlled dysfunctional voting system? The last Secretary of State, Brian Kemp blatantly stole the gubernatorial election from Stacey Abrams two years ago. Now he's governor. The new issue of Mother Jones carries an essay by election fraud expert Ari Berman, How the Coronavirus Handed the GOP New Ways to Squash the Vote, which isn't specifically about Georgia. In fact, he starts in Texas, where H. Drew Galloway is executive director of MOVE Texas and "spends his life trying to register young voters. Typi­cally, in the spring of an election year, Galloway would be overseeing a staff of about four dozen who, before classes end for the summer, register newly eligi­ble voters on 55 college campuses and at dozens of high schools. Last year, MOVE Texas signed up more than 25,000 new voters. It reached nearly 8,000 more this year before the state’s March 3 presidential primary. But then the coronavirus outbreak scattered students, and MOVE Texas, like every other political group, suspended in-person registration drives. 'We’ve gone from registering 2,000 people a week to registering maybe 100,' Galloway told me in April. 'Voter registration is decimated in Texas.'"

Texas is one of those states controlled by the GOP-- like Georgia-- where the state works hard to keep as many people from voting as they can, especially people of color, poor people and young people and, wrote Berman, "What’s happened in Texas is happening nationwide: The coronavirus has heightened the already considerable obstacles blocking citizens from exercising their right to vote. In the last decade, Republicans have enacted new voting restrictions in 25 states. The Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act, unleashing new efforts in states with long histories of voting discrimination to make it harder for voters of color to cast ballots."

Even before the pandemic, Texas was a hard place to register. As of May, it was one of 10 states with no way to do so online. Anyone who wants to sign up voters must be deputized by each county they work in, every two years. Texas has an estimated 5.5 million unregistered but eligible voters-- more people than the individual populations of 28 other states. The majority of them, according to the Texas Demo­cratic Party, are young, people of color, or both, who would likely favor Democrats if they voted. Luke Warford, who directs the party’s efforts to expand voting, told me that Texas Democrats had hoped to see 2 million new people register this year as part of its push to tip the state blue. “We had plans to run the largest statewide voter registration program in history,” he said. “Introduce a pandemic and that makes everything you were planning to do in person quite a bit more difficult.”

Even if new voters succeed in registering, without changes to the existing system they’ll face unequal access to mail-in ballots. Texas limits mail-in voting for those under 65 to people who are out of town during the election, in jail, or have a “sickness or physical condition” that prevents them from going to the polls. Meanwhile, any voter 65 or older-- the strongest age demographic for Donald Trump in 2016-- can request an absentee ballot with no questions asked.

In April, a state judge ruled that people afraid of contracting the coronavirus while voting had a legitimate reason to get an absentee ballot. Texas’ Republican attorney general has opposed the ruling, claiming that “a fear of contracting COVID-19” is “an emotional condition and not a physical” one, and has raised the prospect of “criminal sanctions” for groups like MOVE Texas that help voters under 65 obtain mail-in ballots. In late May, the state’s all-Republican Supreme Court agreed a lack of immunity to the virus alone was not a valid reason, but said voters could weigh their health history and make their own decision-- a ruling that could cause confusion and leave some people requesting mail ballots open to prosecution. A separate appeal on the matter is pending in federal court.

...In key states like Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, the number of new voters who registered in March was half or less than it was during the same time period in 2016.

Public health and election expert agree that voting by mail us the safest way to cast a ballot in a pandemic. Yet most states are unprepared to hold mail elections in a way that won’t lead to significant voter disenfranchisement. The six best-positioned states-- California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington-- ­have already put in place systems where a ballot is sent to every registered voter. In three other Western states-- Arizona, Montana, and New Mexico-- a majority of votes are cast by mail, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. With Florida and pockets of other mail-in voters added in, a quarter of Americans voted by mail in 2018, a record number. But in the 40 other states, mail-in ballots made up just 9 percent of votes cast. Fewer than 8 percent of people voted by mail in key states like Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

“Because it’s been a minor method of voting in a lot of the key states, the rules and practices involving mail voting have gotten less scrutiny and haven’t been thought out to make sure they’re fair and accessible,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

While quickly expanding voting by mail could help many people cast ballots in November, it poses its own risks. If election officials, especially in places unused to the method, are overwhelmed by a surge of requests, ballots might not reach voters in time. The United States Postal Service, which faces a major budget shortfall and attacks from the Trump administration (a major fundraiser for the Republican National Convention was just named postmaster general), could lack the resources to handle increases in sent and returned ballots. And a sizable chunk of the electorate will be unfamiliar with the intricate rules governing mail-in voting and could see their ballots thrown out on technicalities.

...While groups like Rock the Vote and Voto Latino have reported a major increase in voter registrations amid the protests over George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer, calls for young people and people of color to reshape the 2020 elections by voting in record numbers must contend with the reality that those communities most affected by racism and police brutality could also have the toughest time voting this year.

“As we push more people to vote by mail, which is a good thing, the number of ballots that aren’t counted is going to increase. And we know those ballots are not equally distributed. This burden is shared disproportionately by young and minority voters,” Elias said.

Wisconsin's disastrous election on April 7, when officials proceeded with a primary and state Supreme Court race despite a statewide shelter-in-place order, provided a vivid illustration of how not to vote during a pandemic. Republican leaders in the state legislature rebuffed calls by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, to postpone the election or mail an absentee ballot to every registered voter. With many people afraid to leave their homes, and cities closing the bulk of their polling places because of poll worker shortages-- Milwaukee opened just 5 of 180-- anxious Wisconsinites were forced to wait hours in line to vote. Just 6 percent of the state’s voters cast ballots by mail in 2018; this spring around 60 percent did.

While photos of masked voters and poll workers in protective gear drew national outrage, they may have obscured the fact that the state was ill-equipped to handle that huge increase. Though officials worked around the clock-- Madison’s city clerk said she logged more than 100 hours a week during the close of the election--121,000 mail-in ballots were not returned, as voters complained they didn’t receive them in time or at all, because of mistakes by election workers or the post office.

A spokesperson for the Wisconsin Elections Commission confirmed that the dramatic increase in absentee voting “certainly caught us by surprise,” conceding that Milwaukee and Green Bay, both home to many Democratic voters, had failed to get every requester a ballot, unlike “the vast majority” of the states’ 1,850 municipalities.

Wisconsin also shined a light on the restrictive rules for mail-in ballots. Voters had to get a witness to watch them fill out their ballots, difficult for anyone living alone at a time of social distancing. Many voters had to include a copy of their photo ID to request an absentee ballot, which at a minimum required uploading a picture of their ID or photocopying it. Such rules, which Republicans refused to waive, helped lead to an estimated 23,000 absentee ballots being rejected-- almost the same number that Trump carried the state by in 2016.

... Despite Trump’s false claim that mail-in voting benefits Democrats, the parties’ voters made roughly equal use of the option in 2016, and it’s helped Republicans in key swing states like Arizona and Florida. Older and whiter voters tend to vote by mail more than the overall electorate. According to a Brennan Center analysis of voting in seven presidential battlegrounds, voters 65 or over were roughly twice as likely to vote by mail than those under 40. Nationwide, in 2018, just 11 percent of Black voters cast ballots by mail while 23 percent of white voters did.

Trump and the RNC have signaled they’ll fight expansions of mail-in voting that would make the process more accessible for younger and more diverse voters, but not for their most reliable voters, such as mailing absentee ballot applications to anyone over 64.

Ben Wikler, who helped thousands of voters cast their first mail-in ballots in April as chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, warns that “the danger is Republicans will apply the ruthless cynicism they’ve used for in-person voter suppression to absentee voter suppression and we’ll be fighting against a whole new set of tactics.”

Another worry is the spread of disinformation about how to vote, which could be particularly disruptive in a year when Americans will have to adopt unfamiliar procedures. The potential methods go well beyond what’s known about Russia’s 2016 playbook. Shady political organizations could send people genuine-seeming but fake absentee ballots, set up bogus websites to trick people into thinking they’ve requested ballots, spread the wrong deadline for returning mail-in ballots, or give incorrect information about the type of documentation or identification needed to vote.

“The pandemic could likely be weaponized in the hands of those that already had the intent to suppress the vote,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “There are a lot more challenges now to conducting elections. There’s a lot more potential for mischief.”

“The silver lining” of Wisconsin, Gupta said, “was it raised the alarm for folks who weren’t necessarily focusing on the elections and democracy component of COVID. It certainly awakened local and state officials-- ­they don’t want those same Wisconsin photos on their watch.”

...The electoral response to the coronavirus mirrors the public health one, with little national leadership, and state action varying widely. Some states, like California, which is sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters, are doing a lot to make voting easier while others, like Texas, are fighting common­sense steps to expand voter access. Elements of the federal government and state-level Republicans may be working quietly to respond responsibly and ensure a free and fair election, but Trump is actively undermining that goal by lying about the prevalence of voter fraud and opposing mail-in voting.

The president’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus outbreak may have imperiled his reelection chances. But its disproportionate impacts could play to his advantage. The counties with the highest rates of covid-19 as of mid-April voted for Clinton by 19 points, while the areas with the lowest rates supported Trump by 15 points. If the virus surges or stay-at-home orders return for Election Day, residents of these large and staunchly Democratic cities could be afraid to vote in person-- and in most states, they’ll face untested election systems with their own potentially decisive faults. As Wikler noted in the wake of Wisconsin’s primary, “The harder it is to vote, the more people wind up getting pushed to the side.”