The Erickson Report for October 14 to 27, Page 2: Some Good News

On the other hand, I do have to say that not all the news is bad, in fact, there is some good news to be found.

For example, in Montana. In August, Governor Steve Bullock issued a directive allowing counties to accept voter-requested mail-in ballots for the 2020 election.

The Trump Campaign, the Republican National Committee and Montana Republican State Central Committee jointly filed a lawsuit to block mail-in voting.

On September 30, US District Dana Christensen dismissed the suit in its entirety, calling claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election "fiction."

Also in August, Nevada passed legislation sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters. The T-P campaign, of course, sued. And lost. On September 21, in Nevada, U.S. District Judge James Mahan dismissed the case, saying the Trump campaign does not represent Nevada voters and does not have legal standing to bring the complaint, which he called “impermissibly generalized.”

Meanwhile, another group of right-wing vote-haters sued in state court over the same legislation. And also lost.

On October 7 the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the suit, saying the GOPpers had not presented substantial evidence that the parts of the law being challenged “are not rationally related to the State’s interest in ensuring that all active registered voters have an opportunity to exercise their right to vote in a safe and secure manner during a pandemic” and that they had “presented no concrete evidence" that fraud would occur.

On October 6, US District Judge Michael Shipp rejected the attempt by the Trump campaign to block a plan approved by New Jersey lawmakers allowing election officials to begin counting mailed ballots 10 days before Election Day and accept mailed ballots up to two days after November 3 even if they lacked a postmark.

Shipp noted that while there have been real allegations of voter fraud in New Jersey in previous elections, none of them have anything to do with the issues at hand.

We go back to Pennsylvania, where Philadelphia recently opened seven satellite election offices, deemed legal by the state Supreme Court, where people can register to vote, apply for a mail-in ballot, fill it out and turn it in.

Trump campaign employees promptly showed up at the offices, demanding they be allowed to go in and watch what people were doing. City election officials prevented them. The Tweetie-pie campaign sued.

On October 9, Judge Gary Glazer threw them out of court, finding that Pennsylvania law does not allow such representatives to observe in election offices.

Also in Pennsylvania, the Tweetie-pie campaign and the Republican National Committee sued to block the state from having ballot drop boxes, to force it to do signature matches between voter registration records and ballots, which is a notoriously faulty way to confirm a voter's identity because it takes no account of how handwriting can change over time, and to enable the GOPpers to bring in an army of nonresident “poll watchers” to intimidate voters. They lost on all three issues.

In an opinion issued on October 10, US District Judge Nicholas Ranjan wrote that "While Plaintiffs may not need to prove actual voter fraud, they must at least prove that such fraud is ‘certainly impending.’ They haven’t met that burden. At most, they have pieced together a sequence of uncertain assumptions."

This is all Good News, but we need to bear in mind that all of them, with the possible exception of the one by the Nevada Supreme Court, are subject to appeal which means it's possible in each case for the Good News to turn bad. But unless it is done for consciously partisan and ideological reasons - which you have to admit is a possibility - it's unlikely any court would want to overturn one of these decisions just three weeks from Election Day.

But even if this Good News remains good, it still illustrates what has has been going on. It is all part of, the legal face of, a coordinated multi-million dollar, multi-state, campaign to block, hinder, and undermine access to voting for tens of millions of people. These suits are not separate from voter ID laws, not separate from voter purges, not separate from daily screeching about non-existent "fraud," not separate from the deliberate creation of hours-long lines. They are all one and the same, a campaign of deception, intimidation, lies, and deceit to denigrate and delegitimize voting and thorough that undermine the concept of voting as a means of seeking justice, undermine the very concept of self-government that could challenge the power of our social and economic elites.