Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.
The immediate response of the North Carolina Republican party to a federal court decision striking down that state's voter suppression laws was to find the loophole. A memo to Republican county elections board members from NCGOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse encouraged those boards to do what is still in their power—shut down early voting hours and locations. As Ed Kilgore smartly argues, this is what Republicans do.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because county election boards were where much of the mischief occurred in Florida in 2000 — particularly the odd things that happened before Election Day, in the way of voter purges, as well as on Election Day, when precincts abruptly moved, voters got intimidating messages, ballots were designed in peculiar ways, and ballot security was compromised.
It's all a reminder that our insanely decentralized system of electing public officials can, in the wrong hands, become a game of voter suppression whack-a-mole, in which practices prohibited at one level not-so-mysteriously pop up at another. And it's one of the central reasons that a supposedly national constitutional right to vote can become a threatened privilege, depending on where, exactly, you happen to live.
Republicans will never stop trying to keep people who don't vote Republican out of the polls. That includes Republican Supreme Court Justices. Until, someday, we can centralize and modernize our elections, it will keep happening. That's why we need as many pro-voting for everyone senators.
Please donate $1 today to each of our slate of Senate candidates to rid the nation of the scourge of a Republican Senate majority.
Below, you'll find some briefs what else has happened this week in the war on voting.