The Ratfucking of 2020, an ongoing series

It will not surprise you in the least to discover that the Peach State is getting in on the action:

Georgia took a hatchet to its voter rolls this week despite widespread objections and a lawsuit: A federal judge okayed the Republican Secretary of State’s plan to purge 4 percent of its registered electorate, reducing the number of eligible voters by 309,000 on Monday night alone and possibly gifting the GOP with a decisive advantage in upcoming elections. The excuse for doing so was standard maintenance. Republican officials who pursue aggressive purges, like Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger, claim they’re ensuring electoral integrity by clearing dead people and those who’ve switched residences off the list. Yet more than 100,000 of those purged this week simply hadn’t voted for several years, or failed to make capriciously defined “contact” with state election officials, like responding to the secretary’s mailers. Mother Jones reports that the populations most likely to be disenfranchised by these purges — as evidenced by the outcome of those pursued by Brian Kemp, Georgia’s current governor and Raffensperger’s predecessor, between 2012 and 2018 — have been in jurisdictions that supported Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, including racially diverse metropolitan areas and their suburbs.

None of this is new. Winnowing the electorate to their liking has been a mandate for GOP legislators at the state level for nearly a decade, most intensely since 2013, when the Supreme Court nullified key portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The collaboration between Republican judges and Republican legislators to salvage an increasingly unpopular party by disenfranchising voters is a massive ongoing crisis, and is very unlikely to end well.