re: #14 Backwoods_Sleuth

Here’s an Advanced Course in Ratf*cking to Collapse Representative Democracy, Charlie Pierce

Among other things:

Gellman cites a little-known—OK, I didn’t know about it—legal maneuver that may prove consequential. For 40 years, elections were held under a consent decree by which the Republican Party was required to pre-clear a whole syllabus of ratfcking techniques, most of them aimed at intimidating minority voters, that the Republicans used under the rubric of “ballot security.” (The order had its beginnings in the 1981 gubernatorial election in New Jersey.) Among their other benefits to democracy, these techniques were how William Rehnquist got his start in Republican politics. Anyway, in 2018, employing the same umbrella-in-the-rain Chief Justice John Roberts applied to the Voting Rights Act, a federal judge let the order mandating pre-clearance lapse. The result, according to Gellman, was pretty much what you’d have expected.

This year, with a judge no longer watching, the Republicans are recruiting 50,000 volunteers in 15 contested states to monitor polling places and challenge voters they deem suspicious-looking. Trump called in to Fox News on August 20 to tell Sean Hannity, “We’re going to have sheriffs and we’re going to have law enforcement and we’re going to have, hopefully, U.S. attorneys” to keep close watch on the polls. For the first time in decades, according to Clark, Republicans are free to combat voter fraud in “places that are run by Democrats.”