As Election Day dawns, the GOP continues to pursue lawsuits focused on keeping people from voting or, if they manage to vote, making sure those votes aren’t counted. It’s the only strategy they have available as their candidate melts down when his microphone makes him sad, threatens former Rep. Liz Cheney with violent imagery, and declares he should never have left the White House in 2021. So the GOP is going to keep doing what it has been doing since Trump’s 2020 loss: using the legal system to make voting harder and more chaotic.
In Pennsylvania, a right-wing group calling itself Citizen_AG waited until Oct. 29 to sue the state over supposed concerns about the state’s voter rolls. This lawsuit allows the right to inject into the discourse a big scary-sounding number, alleging that over 277,000 registrants on the voter rolls didn’t respond to confirmation notices ahead of the 2020 election and didn’t vote in 2020 or 2022, and that, therefore, they may not be eligible to vote in the state.
The group’s preferred solution? Unsurprisingly, it asked the state to be ordered to bar any of those allegedly inactive voters from voting unless they follow a procedure in federal law.
Citizen_AG, which Democracy Docket’s Matt Cohen notes had never filed any voting-related lawsuits before last week, filed a similar lawsuit in Arizona. However, in the Grand Canyon State, the big scary number is supposedly 1.2 million potentially ineligible voters still on the rolls.
On Friday, a federal district judge in Arizona denied the request that those voters be stopped from voting, but granted Citizen_AG’s request that the state provide its voter rolls. Mercifully, the state has until Dec. 2 to do so. Of course, the GOP can also still appeal that decision.
And it doesn’t end there.
Citizen_AG’s Arizona lawsuit is different from another Arizona lawsuit brought by the comically named “Stronger Communities Foundation,” which apparently seeks to build community by making voting fraught and by targeting immigrants.
The foundation successfully got a court to require Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, to give them a list of 98,000 registered voters who may not have provided proof of citizenship. Fontes, understandably, was concerned because right-wing groups have been more than happy to attack voters they’ve somehow decided shouldn’t be allowed to vote. The judge dismissed this, saying that there was a “lack of any evidence that any individual life was in danger.”
Sorry that the secretary of state wasn’t able to zero in on how a particular person might be harmed, but the judge’s stance overlooks the fact that the top of the GOP ticket is occupied by someone urging harm against immigrants—and ginning up tall tales of voter fraud—every single day.
Fontes was required to provide the group with that list on Monday—while he also oversees an election in a swing state. Sure, the judge wagged his finger at the Stronger Communities Foundation and told them they could give the list to only county recorders, the president of the Arizona Senate, the speaker of the state house, and members of the state House and Senate election committees before Nov. 6.
Also in Arizona, Maricopa County Republicans have sued the county, claiming that the county has allowed the use of passwords supplied by voting-machine vendors. Their ostensible request for relief is that the county block anyone from using machines with protected passwords. Their real request, though, is getting a court to let them gum up the works and turn the post-election period into a grueling nightmare for election workers by requiring the county to produce records from all voting machines used in the 2024 election within 24 hours after polls close.
Citizen_AG is making an appearance in Wisconsin as well, but they’ve got a different conspiracy theory there. They’re unhappy that the state may have worked with the Electronic Registration Information Center and the Center for Election Innovation and Research, providing them with Wisconsin Department of Transportation records to help keep voter rolls accurate and to locate eligible but unregistered voters.
Election deniers have forced at least nine states to withdraw from ERIC, a grimly hilarious outcome given that ERIC is a terrific tool for helping states do exactly the things the right claims they want: remove people from voter rolls in one state when they move to another, remove ineligible voters, and investigate potentially illegal voting.
But ERIC also tries to make sure that people who may be eligible to vote get accurate registration information, and the right-wing enterprise right now rests on fewer, more confused voters instead.
The lawsuit was filed on Oct. 28, and conservatives are likely very irritated that the courts haven’t jumped to force the state to deal with this right away.
In perhaps the most confusing attack on swing-state voting, two Wisconsin citizens have sued to stop the state from using its own online system to let people register to vote or request absentee ballots. Displaying their lack of understanding about how both elections and computers work—even though one of them is an elections clerk—the plaintiffs allege that if someone were to log onto the system with a virtual private network, they would be able to change someone else’s voter registration information.
Naturally, the lawsuit doesn’t bother explaining how a VPN, which simply masks where traffic originates from, would somehow also grant the user magic powers to change registration information.
In Georgia, the GOP just lost their attempt to block Fulton County—a Democratic stronghold—from accepting hand-delivered ballots, but you can’t keep a bad party down.
Over the weekend, the Republican National Committee sued seven counties for policies allowing voters to hand-deliver ballots to county election offices from Nov. 2 to 4. The RNC wants the court to rule that none of those ballots can be counted. Yes, they waited to file until Sunday (Nov. 3), so it wouldn’t hit the news until Monday (Nov. 4), conveniently after people would have been dropping ballots off all weekend.
The conspiracy-addled notion that a standard good government group like ERIC is somehow powering a massive voter fraud, that voting machines are insecure and switch votes, and that undocumented people are voting in droves—all of these have their roots in the 2020 election. They’re all favorite hobby horses of Trump. They’re also the only strategies available to a party that is no longer interested or able to appeal to the majority of voters.
And they’re the perfect way to create chaos that will last long, long past Election Day 2024.
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