The Intentional Georgia Voting Shambles

The state that brought us a rigged election controlled by a Trumper who just happened to be running in that same election is at it again:

Thousands of voters in Georgia participating in Tuesday’s primary elections have experienced major delays, with reports of long lines and defective voting machines across the state, including in Atlanta, the state’s majority-Black, most populous city.

Georgia is one of five states holding primary elections Tuesday, along with North Dakota, South Dakota, South Carolina and Nevada. States continue to hold in-person elections amid the coronavirus pandemic, even as voting rights activists and several Democrats in Congress push for more federal investment in mail-in voting.

Georgia is shaping up to be a battleground state, not just in the presidential election, but in the race for the two Senate seats currently held by Republicans.  The long lines at polling places, new machines that didn't work, and poorly trained poll workers seemed to mysteriously occur at predominantly black areas around Atlanta, Savannah and Columbus.

Meanwhile, Georgia's Republican crackers are tussling about the best way to suppress the vote, either through the methods employed above and/or denying absentee balloting in the midst of a pandemic:

Georgia, in particular, has been roiled by a fight over access to voting during the pandemic. In April, the state’s Republican House leader, David Ralston, publicly denounced the Republican secretary of state for sending absentee ballots to registered voters ahead of Tuesday’s primary, which was postponed from its original May 19 date due to the pandemic. Ralston claimed mail-in voting is ”devastating to Republicans.”

That's saying the quiet part out loud, not that they're hiding anything any more.

As Steve Benen points out,

... [T]his was a disaster that many saw coming: Georgia's 2018 elections were a mess, as then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R), administering his own gubernatorial election, kicked hundreds of thousands of voters off the ballot rolls, leading to widespread breakdowns and dysfunction.

In the cycle's wake, Kemp, in his capacity as governor, set out to replace all of the Georgia's voting machines, hiring an electronic-voting-machine company that hired Kemp's former campaign manager as a lobbyist. The company had never tackled a project of this scale, but it nevertheless tried to roll out the largest and fastest installation of elections equipment in American history.

And Georgia crackers aren't alone in attempting this heist:

... Georgia's Republican-led state government helped create the mess; Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court helped pave the way for the mess by gutting the Voting Rights Act; the U.S. Justice Department hasn't shown any interest in protecting the franchise since 2017; and Donald Trump's White House is actively involved in an aggressive campaign to make voting more difficult in the hopes that it will increase the odds of the president holding onto power.

The good news is that voters, for the most part, weren't buckling to these suppression tactics. Shining a light on the abuses now helps, but expecting Republicans to make it easier for people to vote just isn't in their DNA.  Organizations like Stacy Abrams' Fair Fight aims to counter Republican sabotage in Georgia and around the country, and they deserve our support.

Meanwhile, the Republican Georgia Secretary of State has begun an investigation of the foul- ups, which should be completed, if past is prologue, by =checks notes=  November 4.