A federal judge okayed the Republican Secretary of State’s plan to purge 4 percent of its registered electorate, which could possibly give the GOP a decisive advantage in upcoming elections
A Georgia polling site. Photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images 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.
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 hardest part of ascertaining precisely how detrimental to voting rights these efforts are is that the most damning evidence often presents itself after the fact, once an election has already been decided.
Republicans are counting on this confusion. Whereas Jim Crow–era voter suppression was often marked by violence and physical intimidation, its bureaucratic components — like the levying of poll taxes and literacy tests — were designed to fall well within the law’s established parameters.
In this light, Georgia’s recent efforts to expand access to the ballot box — from early voting and vote-by-mail options to automatic registration upon receiving a new driver’s license — can easily be seen as gestures of goodwill, evidence that Republicans actually want a wide range of people to vote.
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