With Donald Trump’s words (Every thing is ‘fixed’ that doesn’t ‘fix’ things for him…) ringing in their ears…
Republican led states are doubling down on laws that would cut voting down and even allow some government officials to impose their will on election officials …
Lawsuits are being dropped against those actions in those states…
But lawsuits take time and in some of those states?
Republican judges would rule on the suits….
Democrats are struggling to build a surefire legal strategy to block new Republican-backed restrictions on voting rights, relying on broadly worded warnings and urgent pleas that are designed, in part, to build political pressure on the White House, Congress and the Justice Department to act, as well as to engage their supporters to mobilize in advance of the 2022 midterm elections.
The approach is aimed at persuading recalcitrant Senate Democrats in Washington to pass a sweeping federal elections bill, painting the new Republican laws in the news media as suspect on arrival, and convincing the swing voters who last year helped elect President Biden that the G.O.P. is more interested in fixing elections for itself than in winning those voters back.
Locked out of power in the Republican-run states that are enacting laws making it harder to vote, Democrats are engaged in a partywide effort to push back against the legislation that has as much to do with winning hearts and minds outside courtrooms as it does legal victories inside them.
“We’re taking an all-of-the-above approach because we can’t allow these things to stand,” Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in an interview on Friday. “As Democrats, we have to make this personal and we have to tell the story as to why this is important. This is fundamental. The most fundamental thing we have to do is protect the right of all folks to vote.”…
I doubt if many ,if any, of these lawsuits are going to be successful.
Courts are loathe to interfere in state election matters absent overwhelming proof of invidious discrimination and that’s a difficult hurdle to clear.(especially now that the Voting Rights Act is essentially gone).
In Arizona death threats have been pouring in to Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs coinciding with something called an “audit” in Maricopa County where a motley collection of Republican kooks, hooligans and some unknown Florida outfit are trying to prove that the election results there were somehow tainted.
Among the adsurdities going on : the scanning of ballots with UV light allegedly to detect bamboo fibers to “prove” that ballots were flown in from Asia.
In addition one of the” auditors “ has bern identified as one of the terrorists who invaded the Capitol Jan.6.
Hobbs gained the enmity of these kooks when she smacked down their bonkers theory that Republican voters were told to vote with Sharpie markers so their ballots would be invalidated.
The Republican Party 2021.
One hundred and fifty years ago, this was exactly the sort of treatment meted out by Southern Democrats to any Republican who had the bare-faced brazen temerity and gall to seek or hold public office.
Everything old is NEW again, eh?
Across the country, Republican-controlled state legislatures have done more than pass voting restrictions after losing the 2020 presidential contest.
They’ve enacted or drafted provisions that create new election powers, change election administration and punish election officials who don’t perform their duties — which all have the potential of injecting chaos into the counting of the next presidential race.
More…