From Georgia to Nevada, Republicans are trying to undermine and delay early voting.
Absentee ballots are prepared to be mailed at the Wake County Board of Elections in Raleigh, North Carolina.(Allison Joyce / Getty Images)
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re about to have a general election. Low-information voters, many of whom cannot answer basic civics questions such as “What are the formal powers of the vice president of the United States?” and “Why can’t we just murder people who are in the country illegally?” will soon tell the rest of us what kind of country we’re allowed to live in. It’s painful to admit but, for the most part, arguments and persuasion are of no use at this point: All that’s left to do is get people who believe in a pluralistic democracy to the polls, and hope there are more of us in key states than those who believe in an ethno-nationalist regime organized around Christofascist principles.
Toward that end, early voting starts in many states in a couple of weeks. Early voting should favor Democrats, not only because Vice President Kamala Harris has seized the energy and momentum in this campaign but also because Democrats encourage people to make a plan for voting and not leave things to the last minute; Republicans, in contrast, discourage early voting as part of their general strategy of suppressing turnout and sowing distrust in the country’s election process. They want people to think early voting is somehow suspect, which then helps them claim that the election was “stolen” if early mailed ballots overcome the Election Day advantage Republicans usually enjoy. That’s probably why Republicans and Republican-aligned forces are doing everything they can to delay and screw up early voting in key battleground states.
The most critical problem is in Georgia. Trump cultists have captured the state board of elections there by a margin of 3 to 2, and it would appear that they’re doing everything they can to find Trump 11,000 votes before he has to ask. A series of last-minute changes, authorized by the board, including hand-counting early-voting ballots and changes to how the ballot is designed, has thrown early voting in Georgia into disarray.
The Georgia secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger (who refused to commit election fraud when Trump asked him to in 2020), had his general counsel send a scathing letter to the state board, highlighting the “absurdity of the board’s actions.” The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, a nonpartisan organization, also opposes the last-minute changes, which are set to take effect this Friday. The Democratic Party has sued. But a victory for democracy is far from assured.
While the situation in Georgia is part of the general Republican plan to sow confusion in the electoral process, what’s happening in North Carolina is that plus general incompetence and bad faith. There, bear-dumper and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a late decision to withdraw from the presidential race. I believe Kennedy withdrew because, after Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, Kennedy’s candidacy was doing more to hurt his buddy Donald Trump than the Democrats. To minimize the damage RFK supporters could do to Trump’s chances, Kennedy moved to have his name removed from the North Carolina ballot.
The problem is, he’d already missed the deadline to remove his name. But the Republican-controlled state supreme court in North Carolina ruled, by a party-line vote of 4 to 3, to remove Kennedy’s name anyway.
The ruling, again, sparked chaos. North Carolina has already begun the process of destroying 3,000,000 already-printed ballots, and, according to Mark Joseph Stern, will have to redesign 2,348 different ballot layouts across the state. This will, at best, cause a massive delay in sending out absentee and mail-in ballots and push back early voting, which will therefore abridge the early-voting time in North Carolina—which is supposed to start on October 17—by an unknown number of days.
In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, another person who is being used by Trump, Dr. Cornell West, tried to cause a similar delay with a last-minute attempt to get on the ballot there. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected West’s 11th-hour paperwork, clearing the way for Pennsylvania to start printing and sending its mail-in and absentee ballots.
Even so, there is still mail-in litigation happening in the commonwealth. Pennsylvania allows voters to “cure” their mail-in ballot, which means that if they misdate or fail to sign their ballot, election officials will send it back to them to give them an opportunity to correct their mistake instead of throwing the ballot in the bin and disregarding the votes of people who attempted to vote legally and have no reason to believe their votes won’t be counted. You already know which party thinks throwing away votes is OK and which party wants to give voters a chance to have their ballots counted. Lawsuits complaining about Pennsylvania’s curing policy have already been filed and await court review.
Speaking of stooges, in Nevada, the state supreme court ruled to remove the Green Party, and its candidate, Jill Stein, from the presidential ballot, because of errors in its paperwork. Now, Republicans are suing to have the Green Party reinstated, forcing Nevada to destroy and reprint its mail-in ballots, which would delay the state’s early voting time. If Republicans want your third party on the ballot, it’s because Republicans know that voting third-party helps Donald Trump regain power.
All of these last-minute Republican tactics should fail at the Supreme Court, based on the logic generally embraced by the Republican supermajority that controls the court. Republican justices, especially alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, profess to believe in the “Purcell Principle,” a court doctrine that holds that changes to operation of elections should not be made close to the actual election. What “close” means is up for some debate, but people like Kavanaugh have ruled that even eight months before the election is too close.
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Onwards,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
However, Republican justices have generally made these Purcell-inspired rulings only when the changes would increase minority participation in the election or strike down racist gerrymandering of congressional maps. Since the current slate of changes is aimed at helping Republican candidates, including the preferred candidate of the conservative justices, Donald Trump, it’s foolish to count on the Supreme Court to stick with its avowed principles.
More important, even if these tactics are ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court, the election-interference damage will likely already be done. Again, the Republican goal is to delay early voting and cause confusion. They are accomplishing both simply by trying to get ballots thrown out, redesigned, or reprinted. It’s an asymmetrical war where the pro-democracy forces have to maintain an entire, intricate electoral process, while Trump’s forces just have to smash it. Trump’s people don’t care if mail-in ballots are never sent out in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Please note the states that we are talking about here. All of them are states that Trump needs to win if he is to become president again. Republicans are not messing with the electoral process in Missouri, where Trump is expected to win easily, or California, where Trump is expected to lose. That strongly suggests that they’re not raising broad-based, good-faith objections to how elections are run generally but trying to gum up the works in the states where confusion and chaos could help Trump win close contests.
Since we are down to the wire and winning lawsuits won’t stop these people from causing delay and chaos, the only thing pro-democracy forces can really do is try to keep everyone informed, even as the rules change in real time.
If everybody reading this could become an expert in their state’s electoral rules, that would begin to help. You should know exactly how to vote, where to vote, and when you can vote in your state, and you should be able to produce that information on command to anybody who asks you. You should tell people in your social networks, or literally just anybody who happens to be standing in line next to you at the grocery store, when and how to vote in your state, and the exact addresses of all the polling locations in your town.
We all must become beacons of information over the next few weeks, as Republicans try to shroud the election process in darkness. Republicans win when people are uninformed. We have to try to be the antidote of knowledge to their poison of chaos.
Elie MystalTwitterElie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and the host of its legal podcast, Contempt of Court. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. His first book is the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, published by The New Press. Elie can be followed @ElieNYC.