This is a VERY good analysis of why the Georgia vote suppression law is, in fact, very bad nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/…
The bill cuts the time frame for requesting absentee ballots in half. (Note -- and this will be a theme -- this is just pure vote suppression, with no even remotely colorable connection to fraud)
Compare how vote suppression apologist Rich Lowry poo-poos the dramatic cutback in ballot drop boxes with what the statute actually does. (Again, pure vote suppression -- there is zero evidence of fraud at drop boxes.)
The state made it illegal for local government to mail absentee ballot applications. Again, pure vote suppression, with no connection to claims of fraud whatsoever:
The law gratuitously bans the mobile voting centers used by Fulton County, not because of any evidence of fraud but because Georgia Republicans think Black people voting is bad in principle
The statute also makes it harder for people with 9-to-5 jobs to vote early
The purely cruel and gratuitous ban on bringing water to people waiting in deliberately long lines has already been widely noted. (And contrary to that the National Review will tell you, electioneering was already illegal.)
The law deliberately makes ballot counting slower, to allow for the cultivation of Trump-like conspiracy theories
And, critically, Georgia's undemocratic, gerrymandered Republican legislature has taken over election machinery and punished the officials who refused to go along with Trump's lies, making a stolen election more likely in the future
In short, this is an appalling statute, the comparisons with Jim Crow are perfectly appropriate, and Savvy takes that it's not that bad should go away now
Good on Major League Baseball. Vote suppression should entail costs:
I don't disagree with everything in @Nate_Cohn analysis of the potential effects of the law, but this argument that it actually expands day-of access is way too charitable:
In terms of the early voting provisions, as the more detailed analysis that appeared in the Times yesterday makes clear, it will be irrelevant to the urban areas with the biggest lines, since they already had these early voting days: nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/…
Higher ed is a real microcosm for the American political economy. Revenues -- mostly tuition -- have skyrockted (these are inflation-adjusted numbers): lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/03/univer…
But despite what the Republican nominees on the board of trustees might like to believe faculty compensation has actually *declined* during this period:
Mean salaries for full-time faculty have increased modestly, although far less than the growth in revenue, but far less faculty are full-time, and part-time faculty are generally compensated with starvation wages.
When Republican elites write stuff like this about their vote suppression laws, you wonder if they're lying to their readers or to themselves:
Does the Georgia law expand access to the ballot on net? Evaluating this requires looking at provisions that will be ignored if you're an NRO reader, and the answer is straightforward: slate.com/news-and-polit…
The NRO defending indefensible vote suppression efforts targeted at minority voters is inevitable -- they have a brand going back to 1957 to protect, after all -- but this would-be gotcha is hilarious stuff nationalreview.com/2021/03/joe-bi…
Biden said the law forbids providing water to voters standing in line, and that's exactly what it does. It's true that the law does not forbid bringing your own water but since Biden didn't say that it did I have no idea what the point is supposed to be.
Also, genuine LOL at the idea that the state will step in to alleviate the long lines in urban areas that Republicans have INTENTIONALLY MADE LONGER by eliminating both polling places and now drop boxes (the latter of which, needless to say, goes unmentioned.)
Your reminder that the vote suppression law Georgia passed today will go into effect only because John Roberts decided to read Section 2 of the 15th Amendment out of the Constitution in the 21st century Dred Scott
The persons responsible for the Voting Rights Act understood that legislatures could be very creative about inventing vote suppression measures, and created an elegant solution. The Supreme Court threw it out with a decision that barely even pretended to be constitutional law.
It's worth noting that Shelby County is not the only Roberts Court atrocity deeply implicated in the wave of Republican vote suppression efforts. Rucho v. Common Cause is also a huge contributing factor lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/03/john-r…
"On one hand, disenfranchising 700,000 people is bad. O the other hand, enfranchising them would make the Senate slightly less unrepresentative. In conclusion, this would be bad because it would make Republicans mad." 👌
The most remarkable bullshitting done in this op-ed is to discuss the norms of statehood before the Civil War and not the addition of multiple empty western states AFTER the Civil War, because bringing up the latter would completely destroy his argument lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/03/is-dem…