US Voters: Check Your Registration for Republican Mischief!

Republican voter suppression and other electoral mischief is already starting. It’s time now to check your registration, and keep checking it until November.

Republican Rules of Elections: Calvinball!

It seems like Republicans think elections are run not just by moving the goalposts, but by the rules of Calvinball.

For those who are not cognoscenti of American comics, there used to be a strip by Bill Watterson, called Calvin and Hobbes. It chronicled the exploits of a young boy named Calvin, and his imaginary friend Hobbes (who was actually a stuffed tiger when anyone else was present). They would periodically play a game they called “Calvinball”, of with the strip shown here is representative.

The rules were a gemisch of every possible game, involving flags, balls, decks of cards, songs, and anything else you can imagine along with a good deal that you cannot imagine. The rules changed wildly from moment to moment, to benefit one player or another.

And so it is here: Republicans keep re-imagining the rules in ways that are wildly at variance both with their clear legal meaning, historical practice, and even common sense. Somehow, each variation is to advantage Republicans: voter de-registration and voter suppression to prevent voting, threats not to certify a Harris win so the system literally cannot function, actual death threats to the nice retired little old ladies who are usually the election workers, and so on.

Mass De-Registration of Voters

What got my goat today is the mass de-registration of voters, without notice, in the red states.

For example, Ohio has deregistered about 155,000 voters. ^[1] Initially officials published a list of 158,857 voters as “eligible for cancellation”, based on some criterion or other that didn’t seem to matter until now, on the eve of election season. Then 3862 people woke up and protested, demanding to be kept on the registry. So in the end, 154,995 voters were removed.

Still, it’s a numbers game: that means almost 97.5% of those “eligible for cancellation” were in fact eventually de-registered. In theory, if they realize it in time, those now-former voters can re-register before the election, but there are deadlines coming on apace.

(We should also note that Ohio officials claim, but offer no evidence, that they found 499 non-citizens registered. This is a very tiny fraction even of the allegedly problematic registrations: 499 / 154,995 = 0.32%.)

Ohio officials have also pulled out of the Election Registration Information Center (ERIC), the multi-state program that lets states share information. This makes it easier for Ohio Republicans to wreak local havoc, not being more broadly detectable by linkages to scrutiny in other states.

It’s just really, really ugly.

“Everything is bigger in Texas”, as the saying goes. So too is what looks like dirty tricks around their elections: they have suspended 2.1 million voters out of a total of 18 million, or about 12% of their entire voting population! ^[2]

It appears that “suspended” in Texas means they need to confirm your address, though it’s suspicious that this need for confirmation comes up so suddenly right before an election. It still puts an additional hurdle between voters and voting.

It’s extremely hard to believe that they just now noticed that 12% of their voters have suspicious addresses!

How Your Humble Weekend Editor Checked Registration

Here in Massachusetts, I’m not particularly worried about Republican skulduggery, since there are so few of them and they are so easily identifiable. However, stuff happens. I’ve had occasion to correspond with my Town Clerk, and found her to be quite competent, happy to answer questions, and a generally pleasant person.

In spite of that, I checked my registration in the most direct way: by actual mail-in voting in a Democratic primary to be held on 2024-Sep-03. (A largely pointless Democratic primary, it must be said. All the races were unopposed within the Democratic party, with the exception of the delegate to the Governor’s Council. Like everybody else, I have no idea what that is.)

As you can see here, my ballot was mailed to me on 2024-Jul-25 and received back safe in the arms of the Town Clerk on 2024-Jul-30. The “Accepted” status means it’s been received, passes all the checks, and is ready to be counted on the appointed day.

That’s good, but I’ll keep checking my registration periodically to make sure no mishaps occur between now and the election.

If you’re an eligible US voter, you should check yours, too.

But beware of scam sites: there are apparently a lot that if you say you’re a Trump voter, they send you to the real registration site, but if not they just collect all your data and then do not help you register! (No, I will not supply a link to an example.)

The right way to do this is via the nonprofit, nonpartisan vote.org web site. If you visit their ‘Am I registered to vote?’ page, a simple form will figure out what to do, starting with your name and address. Typically, it will forward you to a page run by the secretary of state for your state, where you can fully, formally, and legally register.

Further Mischief

As we opined after the last election, the baroque US election system has many pain points where it can be brought to a halt. The founders never anticipated anyone like Trump and the way he has corrupted an entire party. Republican willingness to burn down the system was just… epochal:

• they sued in every relevant state (and lost every time),
• they obstructed the certification process (trying, e.g., to remove deeply Democratic Detroit and only count the rest of mostly-rural, mostly-Republican Michigan),
• they created slates of false electors to subvert the Electoral College (many of those fake electors now having been criminally indicted),
• they engaged in violent insurrection, causing several deaths, to prevent Congress from tabulating the Electoral College votes (many insurrectionists, though not enough, now incarcerated).

Aaaaaaaand… they’re gearing up now to do it again, this time with more competent lawyers and more deeply embedded election deniers.

This video, which I highly recommend, is from a series called “Talking Feds” run by Harry Litman, a former US Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, now a law professor and political commentator. I’ve enjoyed his explanations of exactly what’s going on (or not!) with Trump’s federal criminal trials. Here he’s interviewing Marc Elias, a lawyer who litigates around voting rights, gerrymandering, and election fairness issues. He runs a series called “Democracy Docket”, which is also worth your attention.

They outline some of the ways Republicans are planting legal land mines to prevent a fair election. This includes strategies right down to the the county level, where a Republican election commissioner just digs in and refuses to certify the count. That encumbers the state election certification, which then cripples the Electoral College. That would throw the election into the House, where basically each state gets 1 vote, ensuring a Trump win due to the rural, low-population red states blocking the will of the majority of Americans.

That is, they have plans in place to ignore the election and install Trump no matter what.

Sure, people like Litman and Elias (and the Democratic leadership generally) are preparing. At the individual level, we can help most by (a) ensuring nobody tampers with our voter registrations, (b) voting Democratic up and down the ticket, and (c) getting acquainted with our local election officials.

Only if it’s an absolute landslide will they back off trying to subvert it all for Trump.

The Weekend Conclusion

As you can see from this photo of the Weekend Publisher and the Assistant Weekend Publisher, the boys are on the lookout for any nefarious dealings in our vicinity. Your humble Weekend Editor will do the same, checking registration every 2 weeks or so between now and November.

You should also do the same, especially if you live in a red state or even in a county where the people running the election are Republicans. When it comes to defending democracy, try to be at least as vigilant as my cats, ok?

And then use that registration: vote!

• Please do not under any circumstances vote for any Republican, not for any conceivable office, not under any imaginable circumstance.
• Do not fail to vote. Do not vote 3rd party. Those don’t send a message beyond “I don’t care”. They are half a vote for Trump.
• You must vote Democratic, up and down the ticket, starting with Harris/Walz at the top.

Then we can get back to the serious business of dealing with Trump in the proper fashion which he has worked so hard to earn: Ceterum censeo, Trump incarcerandam esse.

Addendum 2024-Aug-12: The Bulwark on Republicans Refusing to Certify Elections

Someone just pointed me to an article at The Bulwark ^[3], a nominally conservative site which gives some more details on the Republican strategy to refuse to certify the election.

An investigation by Rolling Stone identified “in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania . . . at least 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results.” Of those 70, 22 of them already have “refused or delayed certification” in recent past elections. Nationwide, Republicans have refused to certify results at least 25 times since 2020, in eight states—the most in Georgia.

Again, it’s hard for me to accept that our media is in such a state of collapse that Rolling Stone is a source of good political reporting… but here we are. (Other sources are, of course, used in the RS article: Justia, US government archives, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Wasington Post, CBS, and so on.)

Republicans are aleady identifying voters in each county who could serve as plaintiffs for the tsunami of election anti-certification lawsuits. Apparently even President Biden, speaking to CBS, is “not confident at all” that the transfer of power will be peaceful if Trump loses.

Yes, it’s ugly out there now. But Republicans are about to make it worse.

So get off the couch and check your voter registration, ok?

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Notes & References

1: H BeMiller, “Ohio purged 155,000 voters from the rolls. See if your registration was affected”, The Columbus Dispatch, 2024-Aug-02. ↩

2: S Bahari, “Texas’ voter suspense list tops 2.1 million. Here’s what to do if you’re on it”, The Dallas Morning News, 2024-Aug-05. ↩

3: AB Stoddard, “Get Ready Now: Republicans Will Refuse to Certify a Harris Win”, The Bulwark, 2024-Aug-08. ↩