Georgia’s Primary Voting Snafu Isn’t a Bug, It’s a Feature (of White Supremacy)

There are many things you can say about conservatives, but one thing that has to rank in the top five is that they are cowards. And there may be nothing more cowardly politically then trying to manipulate a vote to ensure a victory.

The conservative movement to undermine the vote is steeped in a very simple truth: the longer time wanes on, the harder it is for conservative politicians to win hearts and minds. Pick an issue, any issue, and you will see that Republicans are on the wrong end of it.

Health care? The majority of Americans now support some sort of universal healthcare plan, be it via the public option or through Medicare-for-All; Republicans unilaterally oppose it. Abortion? Most Americans want Roe vs. Wade to stay in place (even if they differ on the degree to which it should be regulated); Republican legislatures keep shoving through anti-abortion bills to try get the Supreme Court to overturn it. The economy? Every Republican president since Nixon has steered the country into a recession. Stricter gun laws? They’re on the wrong side of that too. Family values? The Republican President has been married three times, fathered 5 children by three different mothers, and has had countless affairs, along with allegations of sexually assaulting women.

Republicans and the conservatives who seek to install them in power have precious little to offer the American people other than fear, racism, sexism and homophobia. If those don’t work, they’ve got nothing.

So, in the absense of having any sort of plans or ideas to advance the country forward, they’re doing the only thing that’s consistently worked for them: cheating.

Take the disaster that was Georgia’s primary election on Tuesday. It should be mentioned that it’s not like elections went off without a hitch everywhere else; trying to figure out how to run a safe, efficient election in the middle of a goddamn pandemic is going to come with a few hiccups.

But Georgia in particular is a case study is just how spectacularly cowardly Republicans can be when they know that demographics and math aren’t on their side. Rather than changing their ideology, they just change the math.

Here’s just a few things that Georgia Republicans have done since 2006;

1.) Brian Kemp refused to implement a patch that would have prevented hackers for negatively impacting voting.

2.) Brian Kemp personally oversaw a mass purge of the voting rolls, disproportionately effecting black people.

3.) Brian Kemp personally oversaw the closure of a mind numbing 214 voter precincts.

4.) In the meantime, Brian Kemp got elected governor, barely edging out Democrat Stacey Adams, in a race where he oversaw the tallying of votes.

5.) Kemp’s secretary of state Brian Raffensperger spent $106 million on new voting machines that are known to malfunction and can still be hacked.

6.) Brian Raffensperger blamed poll workers when his stupid machines that he was told would malfunction fucked around and started to malfuction, in the middle of an election.

The goal of these actions is perhaps the most cowardly part of it. Conservatives know that they can’t outright game the system in their favor, lest there be legal challenges that even a conservative judge or Supreme Court couldn’t ignore. (Probably.) Instead they just want to skim just enough votes off the top to edge out the competition.

Look no further than the electoral college, a painfully undemocratic system that allowed Donald J. Trump to ascend the presidency in spite of Hillary Clinton beating him in the popular vote, or the Senate being controlled by Republicans despite representing less people than the Democrats do.

Again; if the math doesn’t work in the Republicans favor, they just change the math.

Since Shelby County vs. Holder invalidated the preclearance requirements for states that had a history of disenfranchising voters, more than 1600 polling stations across the country have closed, and almost all of them were in cities and counties that skew Democrat. Hell, you don’t even need bullshit voter ID laws if you restrict access to where people can vote, don’t have enough paper ballots in case voting machines break (which they will because the thing that taxpayer money went towards buying is prone to breaking), and you can assume a decent chunk of people aren’t going to want to stand in line all day to vote. And that’s not even during a pandemic. That’s during normal times.

There is no right more fundamental to a functioning democracy than the right to vote. Conservatives understand that, and have spent the better part the last two centuries trying to ensure that as few people are able to vote as possible. Even the Founding Fathers never codified the right to vote in the Constitution; if you’re optimistic, you may think that they never thought the right to vote would be infringed upon in this way, and if you’re a realist, you know that they probably never intended anyone who wasn’t a white man of some sort of wealth to vote in the first place.

The only way to stop these criminals from undermining democracy is to vote in numbers too large to be manipulated, either by conservatives or by Russians who seek to install morons like Donald Trump in office.

Georgia is just the beginning of things to come. If/when Democrats take back the Senate and the White House, Republican efforts to trip dick first into office despite having nothing to offer the American people will ramp up even more.