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Republicans are gearing up a major legal effort to undermine the November elections [1]
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Date: 2022-10-27
Republican lawsuits are aimed at limiting mail-in voting and early voting, making it harder to get an absentee ballot to count, allowing outsiders to inspect voting machines (the subject of so many 2020 conspiracy theories), and ensuring access for the army of partisan poll watchers they’ve been training up to try to suppress votes in real-time. They’ve already been successful in beating back Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s attempt to set rules for poll watchers.
The new Republican push to train and place poll watchers is enabled by the recent expiration of a decades-long consent decree that put limits on how Republicans could intimidate voters at the polls. That originated after, in 1982, Republicans put armed off-duty police officers at urban polling sites wearing “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands, in an obvious effort to intimidate Black voters. That consent decree expired in 2019, and now, in 2022, we’re seeing masked, armed “poll watchers” lurking outside ballot drop boxes in Arizona.
Voto Latino and the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans are suing to try to end that intimidation, which counts among the 35 or so lawsuits Democrats have filed in the run-up to the elections, most of them trying to make it easier to vote or to push back on Republican voter suppression.
Similar voter intimidation efforts are happening in Michigan, with voters being filmed, photographed, and confronted at early voting locations. Gee, it’s such a mystery why Democrats might want to make sure there are strong rules in effect for poll watchers.
Republicans also continue to whip up their base both to try to personally confront voters from groups or in places where they don’t want to see a lot of votes, and to refuse to accept Democratic wins.
x Tucker is priming his viewers to reject Democratic victories in November as fraudulent pic.twitter.com/Jh8dnx3HXZ — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 27, 2022
In 2020, Donald Trump basically created election denial out of his sore loserdom, but the basic level of competence on Team Trump was such that the legal efforts, at least, were a bust. (The violent insurrection was worse.) In 2022, election denial has the full force and assembled legal talent of the institutional Republican Party behind it, and they’ve gotten a big head start on any actual results they don’t like coming in. We’re heading for an election where one of the two major parties is committed to undermining democracy, and our system may not be equipped to handle this threat.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2022/10/27/2131646/-Republicans-are-gearing-up-a-major-legal-effort-to-undermine-the-November-elections
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