The Erickson Report for October 28 to November 10, Page 1: More on voter suppression

The Erickson Report for October 28 to November 10, Page 1: More on voter suppression

We start, as we have been doing, with more updates on the GOPper - that is, Republican, that is, fanatical right-wing - attempts to undermine elections through voter suppression. As before, some of the news is good, some of it is bad.

We do this because you need to be aware of at least some of the literally hundreds of court battles going on now on voting rights and procedures, almost every one of them pushed by the right-wing in an effort to limit, hinder, block, or otherwise interfere with the ability of people to vote - especially people of certain groups, particularly the elderly, the young, and non-whites, because those folks are expected to favor the other side, that is, the non-reactionaries.

You also need to understand that this is part of an on-going campaign by the rightwing to constrain voting to its preferred groups. This is not new, in fact trying to control who gets to vote is as old as the country, but it has intensified recently: Since 2014, 40 states have passed laws making it harder to vote and more than 17 million voters have been purged from - kicked off - voter rolls. But this blizzard of court cases is new. You have to figure they know that in the long run they are losing and think that they are running out of time to screw things up enough to prevent that.

So, starting with the bad news:

On October 5, the US Supreme Court upheld a South Carolina rule requiring state voters who vote absentee have a witness sign their ballot. Now, the rule itself is not new but it was suspended during the February primary because local judges found it put an undue burden on voters who were unable to have someone sign their ballot during the ongoing pandemic.

But apparently figuring hey, we've turned the corner on COVID, SCOTUS decided the tradition of the feds keeping out of state-level decisions about running their elections didn't count, and the witness requirement is back in force.

Capitalizing on that, just two days later on October 7, the South Carolina State Election Commission barred election officials from what's called ballot curing - that is, it blocked those officials from giving voters who submitted a ballot without a signature a change to remedy the issue.

The result could be any ballot received after October 7 without a signature could be tossed, potentially invalidating unknown thousands of votes and voters, doubtless making Lindsey Grahamcracker very happy. That ruling by the Election Committee as been challenged in federal court, but either way it is a case of election chaos deliberately created by the right wing.

On October 21, a double-punch: The US Supreme Court allowed Alabama to ban curbside voting for voters with disabilities and those who face a high risk of contracting COVID-19, and an Iowa court upheld a law that makes it harder to fix problems with absentee ballot requests; that is, hinders ballot curing.

And on October 26, SCOTUS blocked a lower court order that allowed Wisconsin to accept mailed ballots received within six days of the election provided they were postmarked by election day.

Speaking of slow mail, as I expect you know, Postmaster General Only Because He Was A Big Tweetie-pie Campaign Donor Louis DeJoy made numerous changes to US Postal Service operations in a transparent attempt to disrupt mail-in voting by interfering with timely mail delivery.

Despite multiple federal courts having issued orders blocking those changes, some USPS divisions still have not complied, with the result that election mail is still not being processed as fast as it had been before the changes.

Mail disruptions have been particularly pronounced in key swing states. The Postal System standard is to have first class mail delivered in no more than three days. Before DeJoy started his kill-the-vote campaign, about 92% or a little more of mail met that standard.

But now, in 17 postal districts across 10 swing states, on-time first-class mail arrival rates are just 84%: More than 15% does not meet the standard.

One place notable is Detroit, Michigan, with a significant minority population and a strong history of voting for Democrats: The rate of on-time mail delivery there has dropped from 92.2% in January to 71% in October.

News reports say that some major cities in North Carolina have experienced 10% drops in on-time arrival rates, while according to a report from the USPS Inspector General, "timeliness also varied widely in postal districts in Pennsylvania and Florida."

I can't help but notice that the places affected seem to be swing states and cities, the latter of which are often Democratic strongholds.

On top of that, Tweetie-pie's calls for voter intimidation appear to be bearing fruit.

For one example, in St. Petersburg, Florida, two armed men dressed as security guards set up a tent outside an early voting site and claimed they had been hired by Tweetie-pie's campaign. They hadn't been.

News accounts say that "at several sites across the country, including California and New Mexico, Trump supporters have gathered near polling sites," reportedly "worrying those waiting to vote," which does clearly mean they felt some degree of intimidation.

And even if you're able to dodge the lies and misinformation, even if you get through the bureaucratic mazes thrown your way, even if you run the gauntlet of people with guns hoping to scare you away from voting, the GOPpers still look for ways to throw out your vote. A sleazy one is signature matching - which could result in thousands of perfectly legitimate ballots being thrown out.

Signature matching involves comparing the signature on an absentee or mail-in ballot with the signature on the voter's original registration card. It is used in 31 states as a fraud-prevention measure, but placed in the hands of those wanting to suppress votes and just like voter purges, a seemingly innocent procedure becomes a useful tool to do just that. Signature matching has been described as "election phrenology" and "witchcraft" and depends on the subjective judgement of people not trained in the forensic principles and methods involved and using procedures that, according to Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, "would not stand up in a court of law."

The result, according to an analysis by Dr. Alexander Street, Associate Professor of Political Science at Carroll College in Helena, Montana and regarded as an expert in voting and ballot procedures, is that 97% of ballots that are rejected because of supposed signature mismatches are, in fact, valid.

Writing in the Atlantic recently, journalist David Graham said that "Even in normal election cycles, signature-matching requirements result in many ballots being rejected. Hundreds of thousands of such ballots were disqualified this way in 2016." More significantly, "Rejections disproportionately hit certain demographic groups - including elderly voters, young voters and voters of color." That is, the usual suspects.

For a specific example, exact match requirements in Georgia lead to Latinx and Asians being disqualified six times more often than whites, eight times more likely in the case of black voters.

By the way, two other groups adversely affected are immigrants and people with disabilities.

As a quick sidebar, you may be thinking "Yeah, but they'll  invalidate a lot of pro-GOPper votes, too." Which may be true, but they don't care. Remember that it is universally expected that same-day voting will favor the right, while mail-in voting will favor Democrats, so the right wing would be happy to have all mail-in ballots disqualified. Overall, they figure that any suppression of mail-in ballots is going to hurt Democrats more than GOPpers.

But we'll end this time by adding that even on this front there is some good news.

Pennsylvania's Supreme Court ruled on October 23 that, quoting "county boards of elections are prohibited from rejecting absentee or mail-in ballots based on signature comparison conducted by county election officials or employees, or as the result of third-party challenges based on signature analysis and comparisons." In other words, you can't do it.

And one other bit of good news: Earlier this month, Pennsylvania's state Supreme Court allowed officials to count mail-in ballots received up to three days after Election Day, even if the postmark was illegible.

Some state GOPpers filed an emergency appeal to the US Supreme Court, looking to block that decision. On October 19, SCOTUS refused to hear the appeal, which means the state decision stands.

One sort of amusing sidenote is that a part of the GOPpers argument to the Supreme Court was that the state court decision presents what they called an "open invitation" to voters to cast their ballots after November 3.

For that to work, a voter would have to choose to not vote until after November 3rd, then send their mail-in ballot - which wouldn't be picked up until the 4th, giving it just two days to arrive. And it would have to have an illegible postmark, because otherwise, it would be discarded as having been submitted too late. I wonder if anyone asked the GOPper lawyers how the voter would arrange for that last part.