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2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate and Fair Fight Georgia founder Stacey Abrams. Photo: Cheriss May/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Georgia will not reinstate 98,000 voters who had their registrations purged on December 16, marking another victory for state Republicans whove spent years shrouding their efforts to winnow the electorate in the guise of electoral integrity. A federal judge ruled late last week that it wasnt in his purview to block the states decision, adding that the plaintiffs who challenged the purge had failed to show they were likely to prove its unconstitutionality, according to the Washington Post.

After Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger de-registered more than 300,000 voters earlier this month, Fair Fight Georgia, the voting-rights organization founded by 2018 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, challenged the deletion of 120,000 on the basis that those voters had their rights stripped owing to capriciously defined inactivity meaning they either hadnt voted or made contact with state election officials, such as responding to mailers, for three years, then failed to vote in the two subsequent federal elections.

Fair Fight Georgias challenge alone prompted the secretary of states office to voluntarily reinstate 22,000 registrations later that same week. The fate of the rest hinged on a pending lawsuit filed by the organization, which argues that Georgias use it or lose it approach to voter-roll maintenance was so overzealous as to be unconstitutional. A law signed in April by Governor Brian Kemp extended the inactivity threshold from three years to five. Fair Fight Georgia argued that this more generous standard should apply retroactively to newly purged voters whod been marked inactive under the previous law. Judge Steve C. Joness decision not to stop Raffensperger means that the remaining 98,000 inactives will still be unable to vote unless they reregister possibly giving Republicans a decisive advantage in the upcoming 2020 elections.

Joness ruling was the latest in an ongoing voting-rights battle in Georgia, which has increasingly been regarded as a potential 2020 swing state. Though Republican Brian Kemp prevailed over Democrat Stacey Abrams to win the governorship in 2018, he did so by the narrowest margin for a Republican in nearly 20 years, and only after overseeing nearly a decade of aggressive voter-suppression measures as secretary of state.

Kemps enforcement of Americas most expansive array of state-level suppression regulations including voter-ID laws, proof-of-citizenship requirements, purges, polling-site closures, and cuts to early voting and rejection of federal help after Georgias notoriously glitchy digital voting machines were shown to be easily hacked drew condemnation. His actions were part of a trend in Republican-governed states whose leaders grew emboldened after the Supreme Courts decimation of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Suddenly free from the burden of having to get federal preclearance before changing their voting laws, states with long histories of racist restrictions on the franchiselike Georgia and others, largely in the South pursued a barely concealed effort to make it harder for constituencies that tend to vote Democratic to cast their ballots, particularly black people, Latinos, young people, and poor people.

The Raffensperger era has seen a loosening of some of these restrictions in the form of an extended inactivity threshold, the return of paper ballots (while still keeping the digital machines), and wider availability of early voting and vote-by-mail options. But the costs of suppression continue to reverberate. An analysis last year from American Public Media found that targets of then-Secretary Kemps purges were significantly more likely to live in Democratic precincts, with close to 47 percent living in precincts that Abrams carried by at least ten points in 2018. An analysis earlier this month from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution determined that if Kemp hadnt overseen the closure or relocation of nearly half of the states precincts and polling sites between 2012 and 2018, anywhere from 54,000 and 85,000 more voters wouldve cast ballots in the gubernatorial election that Kemp ended up winning. There are counterarguments to this claim research in other states suggests that such closures tend to be offset by early-voting options, which Georgia has. But the victims remain unaltered: According to the AJCs analysis, Kemps closures and relocations were 20 percent more likely to be prohibitive for black voters than their white counterparts.

The difficulty in determining precisely how impactful suppressive measures like Georgias are lies in how their effects reveal themselves primarily in retrospect. Republicans cannot legally bar black people from voting, at least not statedly. But they can ensure that the path to the ballot box is littered with enough administrative confusion and logistical inconveniences that it makes the process close to unnavigable for people whose lives are already marked by precariousness like a lack of access to reliable transportation, steady housing, or the ability to circumnavigate work obligations in order to vote. These deficits tend to afflict black people and poor people disproportionately. All Republicans have to do to reap the spoils is watch the speed bumps theyve implemented take effect and their fallout reveal themselves in the results of the elections that follow or the findings of subsequent data analyses.

Equally difficult to parse is how many of these speed bumps are determinative. In Georgia, they seem to have mostly assured what was already the likely outcome in 2018. The states electorate is still majority white, and that white majority is still mostly conservative, so Kemp had a good chance of winning regardless. The AJC also found that, even though Kemps precinct closures and poll-site relocations may have reduced that years electorate by 1.2 to 1.8 percentage points (Abrams lost the election by only 1.4), his opponent still wouldve needed upwards of 80 percent of those absent votes to claim victory an unlikely prospect.

But the shifting partisan makeup of some of the states biggest metropolitan areas, like Atlanta, suggest that even if such measures didnt alter the outcome of 2018, theyll play a crucial role in future elections. An electorate trimmed to the GOPs liking is more likely to determine outcomes in a state where Republicans are winning by narrow margins than where their victories are already more or less assured. But even as Judge Joness ruling is a boon for Republicans seeking to prevail in Georgia in 2020, it more egregiously advances the idea that the right to vote applies only to people who exercise it with some arbitrary degree of regularity. The particulars of that degree have been devised in Georgia by a party that wants fewer black people and poor people to vote. Its the mark of a party whose definition of electoral integrity hews increasingly toward any measure that lets it become a minority and still win.

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Georgia Republicans Secure Another Victory in Their Voter Purge - New York Magazine

The final weeks of December may have been dominated by news of Donald Trumps impeachment, but another development with potentially serious implications for the 2020 election and the future of American democracy attracted less global attention.

It took place not in the halls of Congress but hundreds of miles away, in Wisconsin. This was where a conservative advocacy group convinced a circuit court judge to order the state to remove more than 230,000 people removed from the states voter rolls. Wisconsin was already considered a crucial swing state in 2020 bearing in mind that Donald Trump won the state by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016. More than half of the voters at risk of being purged lived in areas that favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump that year, according to an analysis by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

A week later, one of Trumps reelection advisers was caught on tape telling a Wisconsin Republicans that the party has traditionally relied on voter suppression. Traditionally its always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. Lets start protecting our voters. We know where they are, the adviser, Justin Clark, said in audio obtained by the Associated Press. Lets start playing offense a little bit. Thats what youre going to see in 2020. Its going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.

There was now even less doubt that the Republicans intended to rely on both encouraging, and discouraging, voters as a key part of their 2020 election strategy.

Wisconsin wasnt the only state where removing voters from the rolls en-masse came under scrutiny. The same week, in Georgia, the state voted to remove more than 300,000 people from the rolls. 120,000 of those people were removed because they hadnt voted since 2012 and also failed to respond to multiple notices from the state asking them to confirm their address. The removals drew national outcry in a state that has been at the epicenter of accusations of voter suppression.

In 2017 the-then secretary of state, Brian Kemp, removed more 500,000 from voter rolls and a month before the Gubernatorial election in 2018 he held up registrations of 53,000 under the states exact match law where a misplaced hyphen or comma in a voter registration record could mean more obstacles for someone to vote. Brian Kemp stood in that election and defeated Stacy Abrams by just 55,000 votes. Abrams later called Kemp a remarkable architect of voter suppression.

The controversies in Wisconsin and Georgia underscore how the mass removal of voters from the rolls often called voter purging has moved to the center of the polarized fight over voting rights in the United States. Although there is a consensus that purging, done carefully, is a useful tool to keep voting rolls accurate and remove people who move and die, there is growing alarm over how aggressively it is being used to penalize people, essentially, for not voting.

Overall, at least 17 million people have been removed from the voter rolls since the 2016 election, an uptick from the number of voters who were removed between 2006 and 2008, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice. Although its not known how many of those removals were legitimate, the increase comes even as the number of Americans who move has dropped to historic lows.

Folks who benefit from having fewer people participate are constantly looking for new ways to suppress turnout, said Stuart Naifeh, an attorney at Demos who was involved in a high-profile voter purge case at the United States supreme court last year. Voter purges is one that seems to have become more popular.

Purging is not new federal law has required it for more than two decades but there is a new awareness of how purges can remove eligible voters from the rolls and target populations that move a lot: the young, the poor and people who live in cities, all groups that tend to favor Democrats.

Its only bad when its done poorly. When it captures people who are still in the state or who are still eligible voters and shouldnt be removed, said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, who works with states cleaning their voter rolls.

Myrna Prez, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, pointed out that there used to be an important tool to keep voting jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination from bad purges: the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. Until 2013, if a state covered by the law wanted to make a change in its purge process, it would have to show the federal government that it wasnt to the detriment of minority voters.

The oversight helped prevent both discriminatory purge practices and allowed states to catch errors in their methodology, Perez said. But it was lifted in 2013 when the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act. When the law was still in full effect, Prez said, it had the effect of stalling and stopping intentional and accidental sloppiness.

Another legal blow came in 2018, when the supreme court ruled in favor of a controversial way of carrying out purges.

Folks who benefit from having fewer people participate are constantly looking for new ways to suppress turnout

The case involved Larry Harmon, a software engineer in Ohio, who sued the state when he discovered in 2015 that, after sitting out several elections, he was unable to vote on a marijuana initiative because he had been purged. If someone misses a federal election in Ohio, the state sends them a postcard asking them to confirm their address. If they dont respond to the postcard and fail to vote in two more consecutive elections, they are removed from the rolls. Voting rights groups call the Ohio rule the use it or lose it law.

Harmon argued that he was being punished for not voting, which is prohibited by federal law. And critics said that linking ones ability to stay on the voter rolls to ones ability to vote can discriminate against people who face more obstacles getting to the polls, such as those who cant get childcare or time off from work. But in a 5-4 ruling, the supreme court said the process was legal because Harmon wasnt removed solely for not voting he had also received the postcard.

The ruling opened the floodgates to aggressive voter purging, said Kathy Culliton-Gonzalez, a voting rights attorney.

Mailers and postcards are a controversial way of asking voters to confirm their voter registration. In 2018, states reported sending more than 21 million address confirmation notices and only around 20% of them were returned, according to federal data. The fact that so few people return the postcards signals that theyre not really a reliable way of assessing whether people have moved, voting advocates argue.

But voter purges are more than just a question of lapsed bureaucracy, they are now emerging as a new political battleground.

In Ohio, for instance, Democrats and Republicans have overseen voter purges for two decades, but recently, the practice seems to have clearly benefited Republicans. Voters in Democratic neighborhoods in the states three largest counties were struck from the rolls at nearly twice the rate as voters in Republican ones, according to a 2016 Reuters analysis. In largely African American neighborhoods in Cincinnati, over 10% of voters were purged, compared to just 4% in the suburbs.

Earlier this year, Ohio purged 158,000 voters from its rolls using that process, according to an analysis by the Columbus Dispatch. The removals came even after activists in the state discovered around 40,000 errors on the list of voters set to be purged. Oklahoma, which employs a similar purge process to Ohio and Georgia, also removed more than 88,000 inactive voters from its rolls in April.

Even so, there has been some recent successes in stopping unfair purges. Earlier this year, voting groups successfully blocked an Indiana law that would have allowed the state to cancel a voter registration if they had information the voter moved, but without giving the voter a chance to confirm that. Civil rights groups also stopped Texas from cancelling voter registrations of nearly 100,000 people it accused of being non-citizens based on faulty data.

In Wisconsin, election officials have declined to move ahead with the purge while an appeal is pending. The Wisconsin Democratic party has also pledged to contact voters and urge them to re-register (the state allows people to register online, through their local clerk, or at the polls on election day.)

And in Georgia, there has been another victory of sorts. Earlier this month, Brad Raffensperger, Georgias top election official, announced he made a mistake. Days after his office scrubbed 300,000 people from its voter rolls, he revealed 22,000 of them had been incorrectly removed. The voters should have been given several more months to confirm their voter registration.

Raffensperger said he was reactivating their voter registrations to give them more time.We are proactively taking additional steps to prevent any confusion come the day of the election, he said in a statement.

Some crucial protections against bad voter purging also remain in place. Federal law prohibits states from systematically cleaning their rolls within 90 days of a federal election and says the systems state develop to remove people from the rolls must be non-discriminatory.

It is clear that next years election is already becoming an epic battle to try and preserve the voting rights of millions of voters. The lessons from the 2016 election should sound a cautionary tale.

As Professor Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote, a history of voting suppression in the US, writing in the Guardian, said: The 21st century is littered with the bodies of black votes. In 2016, pummeled by voter suppression in more than 30 states, the black voter turnout plummeted by seven percentage points. For the GOP, that was an effective kill rate. For America, it was a lethal assault on democracy.

Originally posted here:
Voter purges: are Republicans trying to rig the 2020 election? - The Guardian

Dec. 30 To the Editor:

We can finally say goodbye, or perhaps good riddance, to 2019. It was certainly not the best of times politically; it may well have been the worst of times.

It was another year of Donald Trump's monumental mendacity, as evidenced by the 15,000 false and misleading statements documented during his tenure. This single statistic alone is a stark reminder that Trump is unfit to be president. It was also another year of the president denying climate change, hiding his tax returns, opposing renewable energy and environmental protections, coddling dictators and muddling international relations, attempting to destroy Obamacare, and artificially inflating the economy using massive amounts of borrowed money (trillion dollar deficits). It was a year of presidential conspiracy theories, false narratives, foreign intrigue, abuse of power, cover-up and obstruction of Congressional oversight. It was a year of presidential impeachment and the infamous "Quid Pro Quo."

But most importantly, it was a year of desecration and betrayal, a year when the Founding Fathers and the rule of law were betrayed by this nation's conservative party, a year when the desecrated body of our Constitution lay stretched out before us on the funeral pyre of America, awaiting the torch of autocracy. Our republic was on the verge of going up in smoke before our very eyes as partisan members of Congress refused to defend the Constitution against a rogue president who denied the Mueller report and Russian interference in our elections in 2016.

Meanwhile, as America struggled with the debilitating consequences of that election interference, it was easy to imagine Vladimir Putin, the wily old patriarch of Russia, quietly whispering "Mission Accomplished" while giving a thumbs up to comrade Trump, in consummation perhaps of another Quid Pro Quo.

Such is the way that the master of bleakness, Charles Dickens, might have described the recent course of political events in America. We have been on this bleak course for several years now, under the influence of a political party that has turned our government, or at least its executive branch, into a squalid cesspool of deceit, corruption and treachery. I refer of course to the Republican Party and its cult of Trumpism.

We have recently experienced one of the most spectacular examples of Trumpism to date, in the almost unbelievable antics of Republican politicians during the impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives. It was a bravura performance of gratuitous outrage and indignation, full of angry diatribes that ignored the facts and evidence. It was nothing less than the full monty: Trumpian deceit and denial on an industrial scale.

Of course, there was no reason to expect facts and truth from a party which asserts that "climate change is a hoax" and calls everything it doesn't like a witch hunt, a sham, a scam or a conspiracy. After all, denial of facts and sheer fabrication are the very essence of Trumpian politics, which attempts to create a false reality. This is the kind of reality that sustains Trumpism and many other corrupt political regimes.

History confirms this view. Whether it's the bogus divinity of the Egyptian pharaohs, or the mystical divine right of kings, or the propaganda machines of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, or Trump's 15,000 lies, or the Republican party's counterfeit conservatism, false realities have always been handy for deceiving and manipulating the masses.

New Hampshire is fortunate in not having Republican representatives in Congress who might subscribe to the false realities of Trumpism. As for our neighboring state of Maine, I think it may be time for Susan Collins to repudiate this Trumpian horror show and say goodbye to the Republican Party by declaring herself an Independent.

Better yet, perhaps it is time for conservatives of good conscience to regroup and form a new party, one that really believes in the Constitution, the rule of law and the integrity of our electoral system. Conservative America desperately needs such a party.

Ron Sheppe

Rochester

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Letter: Republican Party has become the cult of Trump - Foster's Daily Democrat

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Republicans failed to repeal ObamaCare in 2017 by a single vote in the Senate. But they are still trying to drive a stake through its heart in secret using yet another tendentious legal Calvinball case to try to get the courts to strike it down as unconstitutional.

With a recent decision from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, there are some signs that it might actually happen. As the 2020 election campaign picks up, it's worth remembering that the Republican Party is dead set on taking millions of Americans' health insurance away, or failing that, making it as expensive and terrible as possible, by any means they can dream up.

First, the legal background. The suit is Texas vs. United States, filed by a number of right-wing state attorneys general. It is very obviously a backfilled pretext trying to get through judicial activism what the Republican Congress could not pass. Here's how the logic goes. Back in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that ObamaCare could stand in part by reinterpreting its individual mandate to buy insurance as a tax. Then, in 2017, Congress passed a tax cut for the rich that also got rid of the individual mandate tax leaving a legal requirement with no teeth.

So the suit argues the mandate must be struck down since you can't have a tax that collects no money and because, when Congress was designing ObamaCare, most agreed that the individual mandate was a key part of the law, the whole thing needs to go. (The Trump administration has also refused to defend the law.)

As Slate's Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explain, on the legal merits this argument is absolutely preposterous. The suit argues that Congress repealed ObamaCare in secret with the 2017 tax bill despite voting against an explicit repeal that very same year. And when Congress was designing the ACA, they included the individual mandate because all the liberal wonks agreed you needed one to stave off the dreaded cost death spiral within the ObamaCare exchanges. The Supreme Court has previously held that a law can stand with an unconstitutional portion removed so long as it is "fully operative" without it and not only does it turn out that you don't actually need the individual mandate to keep the exchanges functioning, there are tons of parts of ObamaCare that have nothing to do with the mandate or exchanges at all, like the Medicaid expansion or allowing children to stay on their parents' insurance until age 26.

Like the Halbig v. Burwell case from years ago, this is a "Monty Python-esque exercise in extreme tendentiousness" from bug-eyed Federalist Society crackpots. If it weren't this it would be something else, like maybe arguing ObamaCare is unconstitutional because it enslaves doctors, thus violating the 13th Amendment. The only problem would be the legal team huffing just enough paint thinner so that they could make the argument with a straight face before the bench.

And yet, the notoriously reactionary 5th Circuit basically accepted this argument in a ruling from earlier this month. They ruled that the mandate is unconstitutional, but remanded the question of whether the whole law should therefore be thrown out back to the lower court. There very likely won't be a final decision before the 2020 election which is almost certainly a political move. The partisan Republican hacks President Trump has been stuffing onto the federal bench obviously don't want to blow up his chances of reelection. If millions of people are going to lose their insurance via conservative judicial rule-by-decree, best not to do it during an election year when your party is the presidential incumbent.

But make no mistake, ObamaCare is still very much on the ballot in 2020. If Trump wins reelection, he will very likely be able to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the Supreme Court, and that will almost certainly spell doom for the law (with this lawsuit or another one). If that happens, something like 20 million people will lose their insurance immediately as Medicaid is drastically rolled back, the exchanges are shut down, and anybody between 18 and 25 who is still on their parents' coverage is kicked off. Protections for people with preexisting conditions would be removed, and private insurers could once again place annual and lifetime coverage limits on their policies.

The slow-motion collapse of the private health insurance system would accelerate as well, as cost-control policies designed to slow the cancerous cost bloat that is eating the American economy from the inside would be deleted. More broadly, there would be spectacular chaos within the health care system, which was totally overhauled to accommodate ObamaCare changes and this time there will be no guiding hand from Congress.

So while there is a never-ending parade of war crimes, corruption, and general insanity from the Trump regime to distract us, let's not forget that Republicans are also gunning for your health insurance. If they can't take it away, by God they'll make it as crummy and expensive as possible.

See more here:
Republicans are still trying to steal your health insurance - The Week

Criminal justice reforms that take effect tomorrow put public safety at risk, according to Republican members of the state legislature, who called a press conference this morning outside the criminal court building and correctional facility in Riverside to sound an alarm.

The new laws eliminate cash bail for all misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, requiring police to issue appearance tickets to people arrested for an array of alleged crimes, including manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and nearly all drug crimes.

They also impose new disclosure requirements on police and prosecutors that opponents say jeopardize victims and witnesses.

We voted against every one of these fake criminal justice reforms, State Senate Minority Leader John Flanagan said. The public is going to be less safe as a result of the enactment of these laws by one-party rule, he said.

The criminal justice reform package was passed as part of the legislatures budget bill in March. There were no hearings on any of the legislative proposals, Flanagan said no input from corrections officers, law enforcement or us, he said. The Democrats own this.

Democrats in control of both houses of the State Legislature and the executive office pushed through an agenda including the criminal justice reform measures without Republican support.Assemblyman Anthony Palumbo speaking at a press conference outside the Suffolk County Correctional Facility Dec. 31. Photo: Julia-Anna Searson

Second District Assemblyman Anthony Palumbo (R-New Suffolk) called 2019 the year of the defendant.

Palumbo said comparisons to the law already in effect in New Jersey were disingenuous.

This does not mirror New Jersey, Palumbo said. The New York proposal, like New Jerseys law, originally had a level of dangerousness assessment. There was a presumption of release, he said, but the criminal court judge had discretion to determine a person was dangerous and should be required to post bail.

But the Democrats decided to eliminate that, Palumbo said, removing all discretion from the local judge.

If I sold enough Fentanyl to kill the city of Albany Id be home before the police officer who arrested me, he said.

This is unsafe, Palumbo, a former prosecutor, said. In session 2020 this needs to be fixed.

Lou Viscusi, president of the Suffolk County Corrections Officers Association, said his experience working in the jail for over 20 years, gives him firsthand knowledge of just how dangerous these people are the are being let back into our communities.

Theyre not just shoplifters or good people that had a bad day, Viscusi said. They are criminals with long rap sheets drug dealers, sex offenders and gang members that have proven they will recommit every chance they get.

Viscusi said judges have been applying the new rules for the past two months to avoid a mass release. As a result, he said, the jails population count is down about 300.

Republicans have introduced bills that would establish a one-year moratorium on the new laws.

In the face of mounting public backlash, some Democrats have also begun to express concerns. South Fork Assemblyman Fred Thiele (I, D- Sag Harbor) introduced a bill that would expand the list of crimes that judges have discretion to require bail for.

But the governor and Democratic leadership do not want to revisit the issues, Flanagan said.

It is change, and change is often opposed by the system, Cuomo said in a news conference earlier this month. This change has been done by other states The wheels did not fall off the car.

The purpose of bail is to secure a defendants return to court. But people who are arrested and cannot afford to post bail are incarcerated before theres any adjudication of guilt often for long periods of time. Six out of 10 people in U.S. jails nearly half a million people are awaiting trial, according to the U.S. Department of Justices Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The money bail system disproportionately impacts African-Americans and Hispanics, according to the Pretrial Justice Institute, which advocates for bail reform. Compared to white men charged with the same crime and with the same criminal histories, African-American men receive bail amounts 35% higher; for Hispanic men, bail is 19% higher than white men, PJI says.

Suffolk County Comptroller John Kennedy decried the financial impact of the changes on local municipalities.

Town and village justice courts will be absolutely overwhelmed by the economic impact, Kennedy said. They cannot absorb it.We are an eyelash away from financial collapse now, he said. This is the governor pushing us further over the edge.

Riverhead Town Councilwoman Jodi Giglio said she is very concerned about the unfunded mandate, but in addition to that, downtown businesses are already being affected in that this law comes without any funds for transportation or transportation to get back to where they live or committed the crime, she said.

A solution is an expedited review of three judges, within 3 days, to determine if bail is warranted based on the crime, Giglio said.

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Republican lawmakers sound an alarm on elimination of cash bail for most crimes in NY - RiverheadLOCAL