I’m going to open with a line from the late Trinidadian author and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul (no leftist, btw): a million mutinies now! The primary election this past Tuesday in Georgia was an utter disaster, thanks to a republican-dominated political class dedicated to denying the vote to people of color and anyone else inclined to vote against the GOP. Once again, we’re seeing endless lines in predominately black districts, people waiting for three or more hours, standing in the rain, coping with dysfunctional machines and poorly trained poll workers. It’s a system designed to fail, and it did not disappoint. The combination of this chicanery and striking half a million people from the voter rolls was enough in 2018 to ensure Kemp’s election as governor, and it appears they have the pieces in place to game the November races as well.

The proximate reason for this meltdown was a precipitous replacement of all of the voting machines with new, touch-screen devices designed by a small company connected to the Governor’s campaign manager. Of course, they didn’t work properly. Poll workers were not properly trained on the devices, as they had only just been installed. Access keys were not working, so poll workers and voters were locked out of the machines. In many locations, provisional ballots were in short supply, so it’s likely that many thousands of people were disenfranchised, despite the court orders to keep the polls open beyond the designated closing time. In addition (or I should say, in subtraction), many polling locations had been eliminated prior to the vote, a decision that was not subject to prior review thanks to the Supreme Court’s striking down of the pre-clearance provision in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Shelby County v. Holder).

I’ve said this numerous times on this blog: when the Republicans win office, the first thing they do is try to lock the door behind them. With the presidency, the senate, many state legislatures and more than half of the nation’s governorships in their hands, they have been able to rewrite the rules, gerrymander the living shit out of districts, appoint hundreds and hundreds of reactionary judges, and basically stack the deck against progressive or even watery centrist challengers. On top of that, the President has been setting the predicate for crying fraud in the event he loses his re-elect this fall. That means the Democratic ticket, Biden presumably, needs to win big in order to overcome the shit-storm of challenges and heated rhetoric from the Trump camp. Because of the power dynamic between the two major parties (Republicans fanatically aggressive, Democrats a bit on the limp side), the GOP can afford to win narrow victories, like 2016. Democrats can’t. They need a blowout this November.

Can that happen? We shall see. Biden’s a bit fragile looking for a landslide, but hell … anything can happen. We know that, right? Til then, a million mutinies now!

luv u,

jp