Swing state voting rights chaos

Plus: The Great Abandonment, by the numbers

Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.

If the near-universal praise for Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate hasn’t fully convinced you that the genial Midwesterner was the right call, I recommend listening to his speech from yesterday’s rally in Philadelphia — specifically the part where he made a joke about JD Vance having sex with a couch.

Walz is already impressing me, and not simply because he’s already making JD Vance furniture fetish jokes (which I’ve long argued is legitimately smart thing to do). Thus far, he’s proving that he was the best choice because he’s got very keen populist instincts.

The newly minted Democratic VP nominee is going after his GOP counterpart with the exact narrative that I laid out on Tuesday morning: Vance can pitch himself as a white working class whisperer, but he’s really just a resentful backstabber who has long since pledged total allegiance to the elites of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and DC.

There is a fair bit of news to cover tonight, so let’s dive into key headlines from all over the country, including breaking news on elections, voting rights decisions, ballot initiatives, and more.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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Georgia: Republican extremists, cynics, and deranged election deniers continue to attack the state’s election system from all angles.

Last week, it was Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger introducing a tool that makes it easy for people to impersonate Georgians and cancel their voter registrations — a crime made even easier by the accidental, temporary upload of a file with every voter’s personal information.

Yesterday, the Republican majority on the state Board of Elections approved a new rule that will make it easier for partisans, cheats, conspiracy theorists, and reality deniers to intervene in vote counting and certification, which all evidence indicates is likely to be a huge problem.

Each county now must hold a “reasonable inquiry” into any potential mistakes or voter fraud before certifying election results, a sop to the fringe maniacs who took over many of Georgia’s county election boards after the 2020 election.

”The proposed rule changes will give authority to local election officials to halt the counting of votes and slow down, or even outright refuse certification if they contend there are any irregularities, essentially making the certification of election results discretionary,” said Democratic House Minority Whip Sam Park. “The key word there is discretionary. This would essentially give partisan county board of elections personal control over Georgia’s election results, allowing them to uphold certifying the election if they disagree with the results.”

Some officials have already tried to delay certification of primary elections, and now they’ll have the legal cover to mess with results in November.

Meanwhile, in Fulton County, the state’s biggest and bluest enclave, the same partisan Board of Elections ordered yet another inquiry info a screw-up that led to the double-counting of 3,000 votes. Conspiracy theories abound, yet multiple prior investigations have failed to turn up any evidence of fraud. Ironically, it may actually be illegal for Republicans to go through with this.

It’s not all bleak news from psychopath conservative activists, though: The Cobb County election board this week rejected challenges to 2500 voters’ registrations that had been lodged by a local far-right activist. The names were flagged by EagleAI, the enormously inaccurate and algorithmically racist software that conservatives like to pretend can identify ineligible voters.

There’s more where that came from: Georgia has been plagued by election conspiracy theorists who constantly push to have people removed from the rolls, and since 2020, there been more than 350,000 challenged registrations. Georgia Republicans just passed a law to make it even easier to mass-challenges registrations, too.

Arizona: In better election administration and voting rights news out of a Sunbelt swing state, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a major part of the GOP’s controversial voter suppression law, which was passed while Gov. Doug Ducey was still in office.

The appeals court ruled that the law is onerous and violates peoples’ rights. Its ruling means that voters no longer need to prove that they are citizens to cast a ballot; those without proper ID will simply have to swear under penalty of law that they are eligible to vote.

The rest of this post, with key election, ballot initiative, housing, voting rights, and health care news, is for premium subscribers.