Georgia purges 1 in 10 voters from voter rolls

Politics & Elections
101

Except that this set of circumstances is by no means less likely than this set:

Why would you assume that 700,000 people in Georgia are mostly lazy or stupid, rather than mostly “SOL”?

You’re assuming they’re too lazy or stupid to fulfill the requirements. But the requirements are trying to push out the people who would struggle to deal with this. People who move around a lot. People without stable living conditions. People who might not speak the best english. People who don’t have time to obsessively comb political forums (be honest - did you hear about this outside of StraightDope?). And as has been pointed out several times, these letters are easy to miss - there are a lot of people who just straight-up do not read direct mail.

(bolding mine)

Is kayaker lazy and stupid? Or the other 20% of people?

How about Snowboarder Bo? Lazy? Stupid? Or is there something else going on here? Most direct mail is bullshit. Everyone knows that. Most people just don’t have the time or interest to sift through it.

That’s why they’re doing it like this.

And the fact that at least 100,000 legitimate voters got caught up in this should be an indication that it’s not just a matter of laziness or stupidity. It cannot be this easy to strip someone of their rights.

And it wouldn’t be such a big deal if Georgia had same-day registration or provisional ballots, two procedures that help ensure that minor snafus like this don’t turn into voter suppression. But it doesn’t. I’d say I wonder why, but let’s be honest, I already know why.

No, but equally, adults should not expect the government to play this kind of “blink-and-you-miss-it” game with our fundamental rights. Remember, many of these people - tens of thousands of which have not even moved - will go to the polls in November thinking that they’re still registered to vote and nothing has changed, and be turned away, because they did not return a direct mail postcard that looks like any other piece of direct mail marketing. And you’re okay with this, because they had their chance. A chance that one in ten registered voters apparently didn’t take.

You want to tell me that most or all of those people were too stupid or lazy, and that therefore it’s okay to do this? For the sake of “keeping the rolls up to date”, something we have to do to prevent the vanishingly rare issues of impersonation voter fraud and double voting?

That’s just fucking bonkers.

Also, “I don’t watch the news”? This wasn’t in the fucking news until a few days before the deadline ended! :mad:

102

Georgia does have provisional ballots, of the sort that say you can cast your vote, then run to the nearest correct state office, file your paperwork…

which paperwork you do not have, or you would have already voted…

…file that stuff with the certain assurance that it will be processed lickety-split, so you can dash back to the elections board and get your vote legitimized. But yes, there are “provisional ballots”. Here endeth the quibble.

103

I swear I just looked and couldn’t find anything on that… Cite?

104

BPC, could you explain in some detail what you mean by 100,000 “legitimate” voters?

I’ve only skimmed a couple of articles on this, but it seems that something like 1.5M voter registrations were struck from the rolls. Your focus on “100,000” makes it sound like you, and presumably the rest of the Democrats, don’t have a quibble with the other 1.4M. Is that right? If so, what’s the difference that makes these 100,00 special? Is it that the others were felons / dead / moved and these ones didn’t, but they failed to respond to the mailing and that’s why they were removed? Or did Kemp just throw a dart at a list of voters 100,000 times and just decided to strike them for the hell of it?

105

Here’s the first link I found: http://sos.ga.gov/admin/files/GAInfoguide.pdf

106

“But they have not moved,” notes Swedlund, who says not returning a postcard is an “absurd, dangerous” way to determine if voters have moved — especially if their rights are at stake. And basing cancellations on non-responses to postcards is, Swedlund notes, endemically biased against voters who move often, including the poor, students, and Black and Latino voters — in other words, Democrats.

Notably, Swedlund’s analysts found that 108,000 of the names on Kemp’s hit list were also on the notorious “Interstate Crosscheck” list, which my investigations team had obtained from an insider in Kemp’s office as part of my investigations for Rolling Stone.

The lists were created for Georgia by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, President Donald Trump’s “fraudulent voter hunter.” Kobach himself, interviewed in Kansas, told me the list was sent to Kemp and others to indicate a voter had moved out of state. In fact, we went through each and every Crosscheck-tagged voter’s name — and only 2,000 of the 108,000 Crosschecked voters who were purged have left the state. And the majority of others purged had not moved from their original registration address. In simple terms, most of those whose registrations have been cancelled are legitimate Georgia voters.

The purges have, in total, hit hundreds of thousands - something like 700,000 this year IIRC. It’s possible that some portion of those have left the state; very unlikely that it is all or even the majority of them. But we know at least 100,000 were incorrectly purged, and that should be more than enough for anyone to stop and say, “holy shit, that’s not okay!”

107

I was invited.

108

I would. You have to miss two successive elections after ignoring your mail.

And then you can still cast a provisional ballot, and fix your registration.

109

No, it shouldn’t.

I think lots of things Democrats do are not okay. But if there are no laws in place, then I recognize that my opinion isn’t a substitute for the law.

If only Democrats realized this.

110

I feel like if you ever tried to argue against a position someone actually held, you’d have a really hard time.

111

That was … not very helpful. That article is written by one party in the lawsuit. It’s just his spin. I was hoping to get past that and work on understanding the facts a bit better. If we’re just going to throw up spin in this thread, here is Kemp’s:

112

In reality, laws often give the people executing and enforcing them discretion. This is the reason that the people who do enforce our laws are either elected, or appointed by people who get elected.

For any case where an official abuses their power, the public backlash can cause them to lose their job, as long as it translates into voters voting against the elected official responsible. In this particular case, since the people directly affected by the abuse will not be able to vote, either the remaining voters who benefit from the abuse have to decide that it isn’t worth the erosion of rights and turn on the official (at the ballot box) or our institutions erode.

113

Yeah, why didn’t the blacks just vote to abolish Jim Crow?

114

Christ on a cracker.

I had a student who could tap out sounds in words, but when it came time to put them together, she’d say something entirely different than the actual sounds she just tapped out. She missed the middle step–she didn’t get that the sounds she tapped out had to be transformed into the actual word.

You understand that people have opinions. You understand that there are laws. Do you understand that the opinions are a necessary precursor to the laws, and that the expression of those opinions, along with the provision of reasons for them, are a part of the process of building support for changing laws?

If you understand that, what the hell is your point with all these posts about what the law currently is, when everyone realizes that already?

115

Could this policy be challenged as illegal discrimination under the “disparate impact” principle? At the very least, Kemp would have to provide an evidence-backed defense of his policy.

116

I think this is one of the fundamental differences between right and left wingers. Those on the right expect people to take as much responsibility as they can, those on the left expect the government to provide as much as possible.

Then there’s the extremes - the extreme right want to refuse people things they are (for whatever reason) unable to take responsibility for, the extreme left wants to force people to take things from the government whether they want it or not, and regardless of whether it would help.

In this specific case, the only people being “unfairly” removed from the electoral rolls have made it clear they want nothing to do with voting by, well, repeatedly not voting, as well as ignoring communications about it and failing to take any of the many steps they could have taken to restore their registration. These are not helpless victims who’ve had their rights cruelly stripped, they are mature, competent actors who’ve chosen not to involve themselves in democracy. And that’s why this is not a big deal.

117

Even if that is so, what remit have you to refuse to let them change their minds? They didn’t want to vote before, now they do, and you can’t have that? What? National security?

Maybe these feckless layabouts had a Come to Obama moment, and are suddenly blazing with civic virtue and commitment. Now, they want nothing less than their rights, endowed by their Creator, etc. The right to vote is a core value, our foundation and our aspiration for justice. Why, sometimes in a moment of rash enthusiasm, I think it may even be more important than private property!

Abridging voting rights ought to be done like porcupines make love, with the utmost caution. And with all this pondering and chin-stroking, nobody noticed the demographics? Does anyone here believe that Mr Kemp had no idea about the racial makeup of the affected group? I have heard that innocence is the ignorance of evil, but does it work when the ignorance is willful, even stubborn?

Of course he knew! And what a splendid opportunity was lost, to be a hero, to set aside partisan self-interest for the sake of justice! Justice done, and justice seen to be done! A Profile in Cracker Courage!

Alas.

118

It already got a seal of approval from SCOTUS. I doubt challenging it again would be a fruitful exercise.

119

I don’t think “everyone realizes that already”. For evidence, I provide the cite immediately following yours:

120

Well, lucky you, you can keep coming in and making the same rebuttal, don’t have to set up a straw man, done for you! Same principle why Baylor had a football team, because Aggies were too stupid to use tackling dummies.