A reader writes concerning the voting situation in Georgia:
how bout that Georgia voter purging!
It appears to be just one small part of the current state of Republican politics, which is to find there’s virtually no floor to which they won’t stoop. If it were an isolated incident, then I’d shrug and hope it’d get straightened out, but within the context of the national political scene, it’s disappointing that alleged adults would stoop to shit like this. It’d be one thing if voter fraud had any sort of plausibility, but to the best of my knowledge, outside of the concerns of statistician Professor Clarkson, who has never gotten access to the records she wanted[1], there’s so laughably little voter fraud that the alleged concerns of the Republicans are frivolous. I know the Democrats claim they are really voting suppression tactics by making demands on voters that minority voters are less likely to be able to meet, and so far these claims seem to have some merit – although I’m not sure that’s conclusively proven.
WaPo reports that the voter roll purge can be circumvented by determined voters:
[Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacy] Abrams added she is confident that the election will be fair because the 53,000 whose registration applications were flagged will still be able to vote — although they will be at the mercy of “subjective” verification by thousands of precinct poll workers across the state.
“We are creating another set of hurdles for people who simply want to exercise their right to vote,” Abrams told NBC News’s Chuck Todd. “But . . . we have national organizations that are also paying attention [to voter protections], and I think we can make this work.”
I suspect the lawyers are clearing their calendars for November 6 and the days following.
Incidentally, in that same report is a note on Senator Perdue (R-GA), in Atlanta to campaign for the star of this little drama, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, and how he reacted when he ran into someone willing to ask uncomfortable questions on the campus of Georgia Tech:
An attempted conversation between a Georgia Tech student and Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) ended abruptly with the lawmaker snatching the student’s cellphone away while he was being asked about possible voter suppression in the state. The senator’s office has said the exchange, part of which was captured on video, was a misunderstanding.
On Saturday, a student member of the Young Democratic Socialists of America at Georgia Tech approached Perdue, who was visiting the Atlanta campus to campaign for Brian Kemp. …
That was as far into the question as the student got. Before he could continue, Perdue snatched the phone out of the student’s hands, as evidence shows in a video [omitted].
“No, I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that,” the senator can be heard saying in the cellphone recording.
“You stole my property,” the student tells Perdue. “You stole my property.”
“All right, you wanted a picture?” the senator replies.
“Give me my phone back, Senator,” the student repeats.
That, apparently, is how you cover up the attempted theft of someone’s not-inexpensive smartphone. On role reversal, the student would be sitting in a jail cell, but Perdue just walks away free.
But I highlight this to suggest that Senator Perdue may be fully aware of the strategy of Kemp. I’m hoping that if he continues to campaign in Georgia for Kemp, citizen after citizen will continue to raise this question with him.
1 As I recall, the unsettling patterns were actually in primary data from Republican contests, suggesting certain candidates were being aced out for nominations to statewide offices by their own Party. Not particularly shocking, but of course entirely unethical.
