How did I get through fifteen posts about how Republicans and self-identified conservatives are wrecking American democracy, and yet I haven't even started on Republican members of Congress? Furthermore, how can I possibly give justice to the topic? I might as well start a blog post called, "A Description of Everything in the Smithsonian Museum."
Let's begin with some ideas as building blocks. For democracy to function, elected officials have to do their jobs. Politicians can, within the existing framework of the republic, believe that government should be made smaller and less intrusive. But there's no argument to be made that democracy is made stronger when government is gridlocked, dysfunctional and on its way to financial bankruptcy.
Submitted for your approval, a sequence of events.
First, at the end of 2017, the Republican Congress passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut. 83% of the tax cut's benefits go to the wealthiest 1% of Americans. Within the next few years, the bill actually raises taxes on poor and middle Americans.
Second, robbing the poor to give to the rich is bad enough for democracy, but there's also the not-at-all small problem of the federal deficit to consider. At the time the tax bill was under consideration, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office calculated that the bill would add $1.4 trillion to the national debt. Republicans dismissed this finding, claiming (without evidence) that not only would the tax bill pay for itself through increased economic activity, but that it would generate so much new taxable income that it would actually reduce the federal deficit. Republicans also claimed the bill would create a stock market boom.
Third, fast forward one year. The federal deficit has increased 17% over the previous year, and the stock market indexes have fallen. And the CBO has increased its estimate of the increase in the national debt as a result of the bill from $1.4 trillion to $1.9 trillion.
Finally, consider this: The same Republicans who showed indifference to the dire warnings regarding the deficit-hole their tax cut would create are now reluctant to ensure that government performs its most basic and necessary functions... because of their alleged concern about the deficit.
From Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos:
"In June, the House voted 382-0 to pass the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act, which would extend veterans’ benefits to the numerous men who served off the coast of Vietnam during the war. Many of these men have had to spend a considerable part of their lives trying to prove that they were exposed to Agent Orange, leading to some, if not most, of their health problems. Since June, the act has been stuck in the Republican-led Senate. Last Monday, Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) attempted to get the unanimous consent of the Senate to pass the bill."
"The only drawback to asking for a unanimous approval on the Senate floor is that the moment a single senator opposes the bill, the entire unanimous consent enterprise is scuttled. Of course, who would object to extending healthcare benefits to Vietnam veterans? Like, for real? Who? According to the Stars and Stripes, that would be Senator Mike Enzi (WY-R), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee."
""There’s clearly more work to do just on figuring out the spending and administration of this and the deficit impacts this bill will have," Enzi said on the Senate floor."
"Yup. The man that ignored the enormous deficit cost estimates the CBO calculated for his tax cuts is suddenly worried about how much paying for care for veterans with terminal illnesses—the result of them going to war for our country."
So why do Republicans do these things? For one thing, for congressional Republicans to prove their philosophy that the federal government can't do anything right, they only have to keep getting elected and keep doing their jobs badly. But the problem goes deeper than that. Next time we'll dig further into the Republican penchant for what author Garrison Keillor called, "generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent".
Saturday, February 09, 2019
Sunday, January 27, 2019
The Eclipse of American Democracy, Part Fifteen: Why Didn't Everyone Love the Government Shutdown?
We've just completed the longest-ever partial shutdown of the federal government: 35 days. Now if everything that conservatives have been telling us since the 1960s is true, Americans should have fallen in love with the shutdown, because it lifted the yoke of government tyranny from their lives, and empowered them in o-so-many ways.
Strangely enough, that didn't happen. Before we examine the shutdown in detail, let's get some context by looking at how the conservative movement has evolved since World War II, and the effect of that evolution on people-power and in America. Take a look at social media meme below. Everything it says is true. In 1956, the Republican platform really did call for big government solutions to national problems.
President Eisenhower famously said, "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
Boy, did Ike get that one wrong. After he left office in 1961, Republican leadership was first dominated by Senator Barry Goldwater and later by President Ronald Reagan, both of whom believed in essence that the only good government is a dead government. (That is of course, unless the government is policing women's reproduction, putting most of America's young black men in prison, spying on college campus radicals, etc. But I digress.)
So here's our study question for the day: Ronald Reagan and the conservative Congresses of the 1980s and later taught that big government liberalism, designed to bring about greater equality in our society, does not work. Instead, government soaks up taxpayer money while bossing everyone around, effectively becoming a tyranny. So by radically reducing government, there will be less tyranny and thus more power to the people in every aspect of daily life. How did that all turn out? And as a case study, how did folks react to an extended government shutdown?
A picture worth a thousand words: the productivity of the American worker has grown steadily since the mid-20th century, and until 1980 wages rose in proportion. But since the era of Republican ascendancy, an era marked by union busting, a lower minimum wage and dramatically increased power for businesses to make government a tool of corporate interests, wages have been flat.
The rollback of New Deal-era protections for workers was of course just the beginning for Reagan conservatives; they were also successful in rolling back every kind of regulation designed to protect consumers from abuses by banks and corporations. These rollbacks have had consistently disastrous results. In the early 1980s, deregulation led to the Savings and Loan crisis.
Having learned nothing, the country suffered from the far worse crisis of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Now it must be said that if one looks into the claim that deregulation caused the Great Recession, many sources will point out that the crisis was not caused by any specific regulatory rollback. They are correct. The debt crisis was caused by totally irresponsible practices by lenders, Wall Street brokers and bond rating agencies that went unchecked because of an environment that did not regulate those practices. The economy was pulled back from the abyss by big government in the form of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, otherwise known as the Bailout, which saved banks and major industry.
The era of deregulation also opened the door for government to become a tool of corporate interests, rather than a tool of the interests of the American people. For a good study of the problem, I recommend a 2015 article entitled, How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy by Lee Drutman of The Atlantic:
"For every dollar spent on lobbying by labor unions and public-interest groups together, large corporations and their associations now spend $34. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 consistently represent business.
One has to go back to the Gilded Age to find business in such a dominant political position in American politics. While it is true that even in the more pluralist 1950s and 1960s, political representation tilted towards the well-off, lobbying was almost balanced by today's standards. Labor unions were much more important, and the public-interest groups of the 1960s were much more significant actors. And very few companies had their own Washington lobbyists prior to the 1970s."
Moving on to our current study smaller government, let's consider the recent government shutdown. President Trump was forced to back down from his refusal to reopen government on Friday of this week. Charlie Pierce of Esquire made some observations regarding the public reaction to the shutdown -they didn't like it- and how that reaction reflects on everything that's happened in the smaller-government-is-better era:
"The White House got rolled on Friday by Nancy Pelosi, to be sure. But it also got rolled by TSA agents, and air-traffic controllers, government employees standing at food co-ops and pantries, as well as thousands of inconvenienced ordinary Americans standing in line at airports. This is more important than the fact that the president* got beaten again by the new-slash-old Speaker of the House.
It was said by more than a few people that the shutdown would prove to be an alpha test for small government. Instead, it became a demonstration that 40 years of that kind of thinking may finally have run out of energy. Without necessarily meaning to do so, those thousands of Americans made the opposite case by standing in all those lines. Without necessarily meaning to do so, those thousands of Americans decided that government was the solution, and not the problem, at least as far as getting from the ticket counter to the jetway.
I'm stressing the whole air-traffic business because that's where the long slide toward Trumpism began. When Ronald Reagan broke the controllers' union, he signaled that the federal government was a) open for business, and b) on the side of management, and therefore on the side of capital and not labor, and the Republican Party committed itself to that equation as a matter of faith. Simultaneously, it adopted supply-side economics as its only real policy in that area. And that's where it's been since 1981. Until, I suspect, maybe, now."
A final observation: The Republican claim that big government is tyranny does have some truth to it when the President is Donald Trump. Demanding a border wall that most people don't want, then holding everyone hostage until he gets it? Yeah, that's tyranny all right. As blogger Laurence Lewis of dailykos.com observed this week:
"The modern Republican Party has shattered every norm of democratic governance. The shutdown is an attack on the republic itself. It is an attack on government by the people. (It's) an attempt to enforce authoritarian rule against the will of the people.
In recent years, shutdowns have become standard Republican Party operating procedure, although they still haven’t figured out that they won’t work. And in Donald Trump, Republicans have found their apotheosis. He’s a liar and a bully and a bigot and a sadist, and they’re terrified of crossing him. He is a clear and present danger to the United States, and everything he does must be seen in that context."
---
Post script: Richard North Patterson of huffingtonpost has posted some thoughts similar to those I've written above in an article called, Republicans Cynically Demonized Government For Decades. The Shutdown Belongs To Them.
Strangely enough, that didn't happen. Before we examine the shutdown in detail, let's get some context by looking at how the conservative movement has evolved since World War II, and the effect of that evolution on people-power and in America. Take a look at social media meme below. Everything it says is true. In 1956, the Republican platform really did call for big government solutions to national problems.
President Eisenhower famously said, "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
Boy, did Ike get that one wrong. After he left office in 1961, Republican leadership was first dominated by Senator Barry Goldwater and later by President Ronald Reagan, both of whom believed in essence that the only good government is a dead government. (That is of course, unless the government is policing women's reproduction, putting most of America's young black men in prison, spying on college campus radicals, etc. But I digress.)
So here's our study question for the day: Ronald Reagan and the conservative Congresses of the 1980s and later taught that big government liberalism, designed to bring about greater equality in our society, does not work. Instead, government soaks up taxpayer money while bossing everyone around, effectively becoming a tyranny. So by radically reducing government, there will be less tyranny and thus more power to the people in every aspect of daily life. How did that all turn out? And as a case study, how did folks react to an extended government shutdown?
A picture worth a thousand words: the productivity of the American worker has grown steadily since the mid-20th century, and until 1980 wages rose in proportion. But since the era of Republican ascendancy, an era marked by union busting, a lower minimum wage and dramatically increased power for businesses to make government a tool of corporate interests, wages have been flat.
The rollback of New Deal-era protections for workers was of course just the beginning for Reagan conservatives; they were also successful in rolling back every kind of regulation designed to protect consumers from abuses by banks and corporations. These rollbacks have had consistently disastrous results. In the early 1980s, deregulation led to the Savings and Loan crisis.
Having learned nothing, the country suffered from the far worse crisis of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Now it must be said that if one looks into the claim that deregulation caused the Great Recession, many sources will point out that the crisis was not caused by any specific regulatory rollback. They are correct. The debt crisis was caused by totally irresponsible practices by lenders, Wall Street brokers and bond rating agencies that went unchecked because of an environment that did not regulate those practices. The economy was pulled back from the abyss by big government in the form of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, otherwise known as the Bailout, which saved banks and major industry.
The era of deregulation also opened the door for government to become a tool of corporate interests, rather than a tool of the interests of the American people. For a good study of the problem, I recommend a 2015 article entitled, How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy by Lee Drutman of The Atlantic:
"For every dollar spent on lobbying by labor unions and public-interest groups together, large corporations and their associations now spend $34. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 consistently represent business.
One has to go back to the Gilded Age to find business in such a dominant political position in American politics. While it is true that even in the more pluralist 1950s and 1960s, political representation tilted towards the well-off, lobbying was almost balanced by today's standards. Labor unions were much more important, and the public-interest groups of the 1960s were much more significant actors. And very few companies had their own Washington lobbyists prior to the 1970s."
Moving on to our current study smaller government, let's consider the recent government shutdown. President Trump was forced to back down from his refusal to reopen government on Friday of this week. Charlie Pierce of Esquire made some observations regarding the public reaction to the shutdown -they didn't like it- and how that reaction reflects on everything that's happened in the smaller-government-is-better era:
"The White House got rolled on Friday by Nancy Pelosi, to be sure. But it also got rolled by TSA agents, and air-traffic controllers, government employees standing at food co-ops and pantries, as well as thousands of inconvenienced ordinary Americans standing in line at airports. This is more important than the fact that the president* got beaten again by the new-slash-old Speaker of the House.
It was said by more than a few people that the shutdown would prove to be an alpha test for small government. Instead, it became a demonstration that 40 years of that kind of thinking may finally have run out of energy. Without necessarily meaning to do so, those thousands of Americans made the opposite case by standing in all those lines. Without necessarily meaning to do so, those thousands of Americans decided that government was the solution, and not the problem, at least as far as getting from the ticket counter to the jetway.
I'm stressing the whole air-traffic business because that's where the long slide toward Trumpism began. When Ronald Reagan broke the controllers' union, he signaled that the federal government was a) open for business, and b) on the side of management, and therefore on the side of capital and not labor, and the Republican Party committed itself to that equation as a matter of faith. Simultaneously, it adopted supply-side economics as its only real policy in that area. And that's where it's been since 1981. Until, I suspect, maybe, now."
A final observation: The Republican claim that big government is tyranny does have some truth to it when the President is Donald Trump. Demanding a border wall that most people don't want, then holding everyone hostage until he gets it? Yeah, that's tyranny all right. As blogger Laurence Lewis of dailykos.com observed this week:
"The modern Republican Party has shattered every norm of democratic governance. The shutdown is an attack on the republic itself. It is an attack on government by the people. (It's) an attempt to enforce authoritarian rule against the will of the people.
In recent years, shutdowns have become standard Republican Party operating procedure, although they still haven’t figured out that they won’t work. And in Donald Trump, Republicans have found their apotheosis. He’s a liar and a bully and a bigot and a sadist, and they’re terrified of crossing him. He is a clear and present danger to the United States, and everything he does must be seen in that context."
---
Post script: Richard North Patterson of huffingtonpost has posted some thoughts similar to those I've written above in an article called, Republicans Cynically Demonized Government For Decades. The Shutdown Belongs To Them.
Sunday, December 23, 2018
The Eclipse of American Democracy, Fourteen: Southern-Fried Election Theft in 2018
Secretary of State Brian Kemp of Georgia just stole the election for Governor, and got away scot-free. He beat Democrat Stacy Abrams by about 55,000 votes out of nearly four million cast. Kemp stole the election by using the power of his office to make sure that voters unlikely to support him in his gubernatorial race lost their franchise. The scheme went like this:
* In 2017, (from Greg Palast of Truthout), "Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state canceled the registrations of over half a million Georgians because they left the state or moved to another county. Except they didn’t. The nation’s top experts in address location reviewed Kemp’s list of purged voters — and returned the names and addresses of 340,134 who never moved at all."
How does the scam work? It's "purge by postcard," used in Georgia and other mostly Republican-controlled states, and it disproportionately affects poor and minority voters who tend to vote Democratic. Again from Greg Palast: "If you miss an election, Kemp sends you a postcard. It looks like junk mail. But if you read the block of print carefully, it asks you to return the card to Kemp after you’ve filled in the address that’s already on the front of the card."
"However, in June of this year, the Supreme Court said election officials can purge voters if they miss elections and don’t return that postcard, but only if the failure to return the postcard is a reasonable indication the voter has moved."
"Kemp has steadfastly refused to look at evidence that would show a voter has not moved. (Heck, Kemp didn’t even wonder why the purged voters paid Georgia taxes if they had left the state.)"
Note that voters do not receive any notification when they are purged.
* Kemp put 53,000 new voter registration applications, mostly from black voters, on hold using Georgia's "exact match" registration verification process, which requires information on voter applications to precisely match information on file with the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. "Mismatches" occur under the law, (from Shannon Van Sant of NPR, "for such reasons as missing hyphens, accent marks and middle initials. Those who are flagged can still vote ("provisonally") if they settle the discrepancy by providing proof of identity."
So let's say you try to vote provisionally. Guess what? That system is broken. When Phoebe Einzig-Roth went to vote in Georgia, from Eliza Carney of The American Prospect, "Einzig-Roth —who was born in New York and grew up in Boston—was told that "she might not be a citizen of the United States," and was directed to a supervising official. That official ultimately handed her a provisional ballot, but gave her no receipt, and no instructions on how to ensure that it would be counted. Einzig-Roth’s confusion turned to anger when she later tried to verify her eligibility, and was rebuffed for the lack of a receipt. "THIS is what voter suppression looks like in Georgia,” she fumed in a widely-circulated Facebook post."
More problems: (Again from Greg Palast on Salon.com)
"My team went to the campus of Emory University on Tuesday night, where nearly all the students who showed up to vote were black (although Emory is not a historically or predominantly black institution). Long lines kept the polls open until 10 p.m., and they ran out of provisional ballots by 4. When Kemp’s office sent over a stack, students filled out more than 100 provisionals in this precinct alone. And that was just one of thousands in the state."
"How many provisional ballots were cast in this election? Given the number of purged voters, given the arcane rule of "exact match" of driver’s license data and voter forms, given Georgia’s racially targeted voter ID laws – I could go on – it’s reasonable to project provisional ballots reaching 50,000."
"Then there are voters like Yasmin Bakhtiari of Atlanta, who tried to vote and was flatly denied even a provisional ballot — she asked three times within two hours — in direct violation of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
They tried to do that to Ashlee Jones in DeKalb County. She had registered to vote twice on Kemp’s website and got no confirmation. Jones was told she could not even get a provisional ballot. (I admit I got a little heavy with the precinct officials, and turned on the cameras. Jones got her provisional ballot. But that tiny victory was Pyrrhic: She knows Kemp or his replacement is likely to shred it.) Our researcher Rachel Garbus called several rural counties whose supervisors told her that no purged voter would get a provisional ballot, only those who "deserved" it. Having witnessed the scary Kemp-Trump rally last Sunday, I can tell you the color of "deserving" voters.
So far, it appears that most provisional ballots, and stacks of absentee ballots, have simply been rejected. Yet there is zero evidence that even one of these voters who signed their ballot envelopes under penalty of perjury is not a qualified voter."
Were Georgia's provisional ballots ultimately counted in a legal manner? It's not entirely clear. On the one hand, the state, to its credit, instructed county election officials to count absentee ballots even if they lack a voter’s date of birth, as long as the voter’s identity can be verified. But State Election Board member David Worley, a Democrat, said he was, "deeply disturbed" by the Secretary of State's instructions . "It makes it sound permissive, that counties can reject an absentee ballot if they want to," Worley said. "It’s a cheap, underhanded trick to allow some counties to reject ballots that federal law requires that they count. Frankly, I think it’s despicable."
* Finally Georgia doesn't ignore the classic voter suppression tactics. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "One-third of Georgia’s counties — 53 of 159 — have fewer precincts today than they did in 2012, according to the AJC’s count. Of the counties that have closed voting locations, 39 have poverty rates that are higher than the state average. Thirty have significant African-American populations, making up at least 25 percent of residents."
Though Stacy Abrams lost her race for Governor, she isn't giving up the fight for the right to vote in Georgia. From Richard Fausset of the New York Times, "Allies of Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who narrowly lost the Georgia governor’s race, filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday calling for sweeping changes to the state’s election procedures, and accusing Brian Kemp, the Republican victor, of systematically disenfranchising poor and minority voters when he was secretary of state."
"The lawsuit...would seek "wide, large-scale reforms" to improve future elections. One of its demands is for renewed federal oversight to protect minority voting rights."
Lack of federal oversight is definitely a problem. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Acts, and the outcome has been predictable. Rob Arthur and Allison McCann of VICE.com noted recently that the end of federal oversight has precipitated the widespread closing of polling places in states where voter suppression was the norm during the 20th century:
"VICE News found that for every 10 polling places that closed in the rest of the country, 13 closed within the jurisdictions once under oversight. Policies that introduce barriers to voting — like Texas’ strict voter ID requirements and North Carolina’s elimination of same-day registration and limits on early voting — have been widely criticized for discouraging minority voters, who disproportionately vote Democratic. The vast majority of the jurisdictions once under federal supervision are in states with GOP leadership."
On a separate note, there's good news from another southern state with a long history of disenfranchising minority voters. Did you know that one out of every ten voting-age residents of Florida is a convicted felon? In that state "grand theft" of $300 or more is a felony, and felons permanently lose the right to vote. This has long been an easy way for Florida Republicans to keep the poor and minorities from voting. In November, Florida voters approved a ballot measure restoring voting rights to citizens convicted of certain felonies after they have served their sentences, including prison terms, parole and probationary periods. Florida Republicans are dragging their feet about implementing the new law, but appear to be resigned to let it go into effect.
* In 2017, (from Greg Palast of Truthout), "Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state canceled the registrations of over half a million Georgians because they left the state or moved to another county. Except they didn’t. The nation’s top experts in address location reviewed Kemp’s list of purged voters — and returned the names and addresses of 340,134 who never moved at all."
How does the scam work? It's "purge by postcard," used in Georgia and other mostly Republican-controlled states, and it disproportionately affects poor and minority voters who tend to vote Democratic. Again from Greg Palast: "If you miss an election, Kemp sends you a postcard. It looks like junk mail. But if you read the block of print carefully, it asks you to return the card to Kemp after you’ve filled in the address that’s already on the front of the card."
"However, in June of this year, the Supreme Court said election officials can purge voters if they miss elections and don’t return that postcard, but only if the failure to return the postcard is a reasonable indication the voter has moved."
"Kemp has steadfastly refused to look at evidence that would show a voter has not moved. (Heck, Kemp didn’t even wonder why the purged voters paid Georgia taxes if they had left the state.)"
Note that voters do not receive any notification when they are purged.
* Kemp put 53,000 new voter registration applications, mostly from black voters, on hold using Georgia's "exact match" registration verification process, which requires information on voter applications to precisely match information on file with the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. "Mismatches" occur under the law, (from Shannon Van Sant of NPR, "for such reasons as missing hyphens, accent marks and middle initials. Those who are flagged can still vote ("provisonally") if they settle the discrepancy by providing proof of identity."
So let's say you try to vote provisionally. Guess what? That system is broken. When Phoebe Einzig-Roth went to vote in Georgia, from Eliza Carney of The American Prospect, "Einzig-Roth —who was born in New York and grew up in Boston—was told that "she might not be a citizen of the United States," and was directed to a supervising official. That official ultimately handed her a provisional ballot, but gave her no receipt, and no instructions on how to ensure that it would be counted. Einzig-Roth’s confusion turned to anger when she later tried to verify her eligibility, and was rebuffed for the lack of a receipt. "THIS is what voter suppression looks like in Georgia,” she fumed in a widely-circulated Facebook post."
More problems: (Again from Greg Palast on Salon.com)
"My team went to the campus of Emory University on Tuesday night, where nearly all the students who showed up to vote were black (although Emory is not a historically or predominantly black institution). Long lines kept the polls open until 10 p.m., and they ran out of provisional ballots by 4. When Kemp’s office sent over a stack, students filled out more than 100 provisionals in this precinct alone. And that was just one of thousands in the state."
"How many provisional ballots were cast in this election? Given the number of purged voters, given the arcane rule of "exact match" of driver’s license data and voter forms, given Georgia’s racially targeted voter ID laws – I could go on – it’s reasonable to project provisional ballots reaching 50,000."
"Then there are voters like Yasmin Bakhtiari of Atlanta, who tried to vote and was flatly denied even a provisional ballot — she asked three times within two hours — in direct violation of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
They tried to do that to Ashlee Jones in DeKalb County. She had registered to vote twice on Kemp’s website and got no confirmation. Jones was told she could not even get a provisional ballot. (I admit I got a little heavy with the precinct officials, and turned on the cameras. Jones got her provisional ballot. But that tiny victory was Pyrrhic: She knows Kemp or his replacement is likely to shred it.) Our researcher Rachel Garbus called several rural counties whose supervisors told her that no purged voter would get a provisional ballot, only those who "deserved" it. Having witnessed the scary Kemp-Trump rally last Sunday, I can tell you the color of "deserving" voters.
So far, it appears that most provisional ballots, and stacks of absentee ballots, have simply been rejected. Yet there is zero evidence that even one of these voters who signed their ballot envelopes under penalty of perjury is not a qualified voter."
Were Georgia's provisional ballots ultimately counted in a legal manner? It's not entirely clear. On the one hand, the state, to its credit, instructed county election officials to count absentee ballots even if they lack a voter’s date of birth, as long as the voter’s identity can be verified. But State Election Board member David Worley, a Democrat, said he was, "deeply disturbed" by the Secretary of State's instructions . "It makes it sound permissive, that counties can reject an absentee ballot if they want to," Worley said. "It’s a cheap, underhanded trick to allow some counties to reject ballots that federal law requires that they count. Frankly, I think it’s despicable."
* Finally Georgia doesn't ignore the classic voter suppression tactics. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "One-third of Georgia’s counties — 53 of 159 — have fewer precincts today than they did in 2012, according to the AJC’s count. Of the counties that have closed voting locations, 39 have poverty rates that are higher than the state average. Thirty have significant African-American populations, making up at least 25 percent of residents."
Though Stacy Abrams lost her race for Governor, she isn't giving up the fight for the right to vote in Georgia. From Richard Fausset of the New York Times, "Allies of Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who narrowly lost the Georgia governor’s race, filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday calling for sweeping changes to the state’s election procedures, and accusing Brian Kemp, the Republican victor, of systematically disenfranchising poor and minority voters when he was secretary of state."
"The lawsuit...would seek "wide, large-scale reforms" to improve future elections. One of its demands is for renewed federal oversight to protect minority voting rights."
Lack of federal oversight is definitely a problem. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Acts, and the outcome has been predictable. Rob Arthur and Allison McCann of VICE.com noted recently that the end of federal oversight has precipitated the widespread closing of polling places in states where voter suppression was the norm during the 20th century:
"VICE News found that for every 10 polling places that closed in the rest of the country, 13 closed within the jurisdictions once under oversight. Policies that introduce barriers to voting — like Texas’ strict voter ID requirements and North Carolina’s elimination of same-day registration and limits on early voting — have been widely criticized for discouraging minority voters, who disproportionately vote Democratic. The vast majority of the jurisdictions once under federal supervision are in states with GOP leadership."
On a separate note, there's good news from another southern state with a long history of disenfranchising minority voters. Did you know that one out of every ten voting-age residents of Florida is a convicted felon? In that state "grand theft" of $300 or more is a felony, and felons permanently lose the right to vote. This has long been an easy way for Florida Republicans to keep the poor and minorities from voting. In November, Florida voters approved a ballot measure restoring voting rights to citizens convicted of certain felonies after they have served their sentences, including prison terms, parole and probationary periods. Florida Republicans are dragging their feet about implementing the new law, but appear to be resigned to let it go into effect.
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