"...Reading the indictment carefully, you find yourself drawn inexorably toward Count Four — the charge that the former president engaged in a conspiracy against the rights of voters. This is the one that's based on a provision of the Enforcement Act passed in 1870, a law aimed to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1868, aka The Ku Klux Klan Act. This is the one that has set much of the MAGA set howling about the unfairness of it all. But it also is the count that sums up the other three. All of the various plots and schemes set out in the other three counts of the indictment all come down to a massive conspiracy to deny the effective franchise to voters in Georgia and Arizona, and Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In a way, Smith has arraigned the entire voter-suppression program that the conservative movement has put the Republican party behind. Here, Count Four says, here is where all the tricks and traps set out in state laws inevitably lead...." (our emphasis) -- Charles P. Pierce, writing in Esquire, noting how the Malignant Loser's massive plot to deny voters' rights is basically the Christofascist Republican Party's state- by- state voter suppression project on steroids. Simply put, the Malignant Loser and his cult/ party want to choose what voters (theirs) to count.
And, no, much as Republicans and their media enablers would like to have it, this indictment is NOT about the First Amendment. Full stop.
