Mass Challenges: The Worst Provision of Georgia’s Very Bad Law. In part:
. . . The new law greenlights the type of mass challenges the Republican Party has sought to use for its electoral purposes in the past. By using faulty data and discredited tactics, the GOP can intimidate and inconvenience voters that it wants to exclude from the electorate. It is not hard to see that in the future, the party of Trump will create lists of Black, Brown, and young voters and then find local operatives to submit them as mass challenges to voter eligibility. Those voters will then be required to appear or participate in a hearing or risk being disqualified from voting. Even worse, failure to appear at a hearing will be spun by the right wing as a tacit concession that the voter was ineligible to vote – and may have committed voter registration fraud.
. . . Republicans in Georgia don’t want Black, Brown, and young voters to vote because when they do, Democrats win. Expanding the opportunity to engage in discriminatory mass challenges should offend anyone who cares about participating in our elections. Yet this provision has received scant attention from the media and the public.
. . . No state should permit mass challenges, much less expand them. Voters who submit challenges should be required to do so based on their own personal knowledge and should be subject to sanctions for filing frivolous or bad faith challenges. . . .
Can you imagine being forced to take a day off from work, ride a bus or two, and appear at a hearing to secure your right to vote? Georgia’s legislators should be ashamed.
BONUS:
Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy — Until You’re 80 And Beyond — as reviewed here by my pal Jesse.