Rigging Elections, Republican Style

We have two examples today of how Republicans are busily rigging the electoral landscape while at the same time loudly proclaiming that they're "stopping the steal."

IOWA

If you can't beat 'em, cheat 'em!  An Iowa Democrat running to challenge ossified Republican Sen. Charles Grassley just had a Republican judge kick her off the ballot:

A state court judge has ruled that Democrat Abby Finkenauer cannot appear on the June 7 Iowa primary ballot for U.S. Senate because she didn’t gather enough petition signatures, potentially knocking off the candidate considered by many to be the party’s best chance to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley.

Judge Scott Beattie, a 2018 appointee of Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, filed a ruling late Sunday that overturned a decision by a three-member panel of state elected officials. The panel concluded last week that Finkenauer’s campaign staffers had substantially complied with Iowa law that requires candidates to obtain 3,500 names, including at least 100 signatures from at least 19 counties.

Finkenauer plans to appeal the decision and the Iowa Supreme Court scheduled a hearing Wednesday with a promise to rule on the matter by the end of the week to meet deadlines for sending ballots to overseas voters.

Most observers think Grassley will win comfortably in increasingly red Iowa.  That doesn't mean they should get away with heavy- handed, anti- democratic tactics like this.

ALABAMA

In Alabama, where the Old South never gave way to the New South, the fate of racist redistricting by the overwhelmingly Republican white state legislature is in the hands of the Republican hacks in the U.S. Supreme Court:

Driving through downtown one misty, humid morning, Evan Milligan pointed out landmarks historic and personal. There once stood the Black barbershop where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. got his hair cut. There was the street corner where Rosa Parks boarded a city bus and, later, refused to give up her seat to a White passenger. There was the church where King organized a bus boycott after Parks’s arrest.  [snip]

Now Milligan, 40, is on the front lines of the latest discrimination fight, lending his family name to what will be the marquee Supreme Court case over racial gerrymandering, centered on the invisible district line that divides the Black neighborhoods of eastern Montgomery. In Milligan v. Merrill — that’s Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (R) — the nation’s highest court will determine whether federal law requires states such as Alabama with large minority populations and racially polarized voting to take race into account in redistricting or whether they have free rein to squeeze minority voters into as few districts as possible — one, in Alabama’s case — giving White politicians dominance in all the others.

The decision could have sweeping implications across a huge swath of the South where the Black population and those of other minorities are growing at a faster rate than the White population but the power is disproportionality held by White politicians.

We won't be holding our breaths that a Republican SCOTUS that gutted the Voting Rights Act with a smaller majority is going to let this opportunity to maintain white Republican political power pass. Having a third of the justices appointed by the Malignant Loser in a mere 4 years makes the observation that "elections matter" all the more meaningful.