I don't mean to harsh Jason Palmer's mellow after his great upset victory out there in American Samoa, but while most of the elite political media was at the track handicapping the increasingly irrelevant horserace, the traditional Republican ratfcking of the eventual 2024 election has begun in earnest, and voter-suppression is already working smoothly and according to plan.

For example, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act — aka John Roberts' Day of Jubilee — is operating in the real world precisely the way it was meant to. From NPR:

A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank that advocates for expanded voting access, measured the impact of the Shelby County decision between 2012 and 2022. The researchers looked at nearly a billion voter records and compared the rate at which white and nonwhite Americans vote in elections. The study refers to the difference between white voters and other groups as the "turnout gap." The gap can be wide: In three elections from 2018 to 2022, 43% of eligible white voters cast their ballots every time, while that figure for Black voters was 27%, 21% for Asian American voters and 19% for Hispanic voters, according to the Pew Research Center...the think tank found that the turnout gap was growing faster in places formerly covered under Section 5 and that it was growing fastest between white and Black voters in those areas. "What we found was that these jurisdictions fell back into their pattern of adopting laws and policies that made voting difficult for people of color," says Kareem Crayton, the center's senior director for voting rights and representation.

Yes, there are the perpetually cited "other factors" that may play into this situation, but the fact is that the destruction of the Voting Rights Act was central to the decades-long conservative project to roll back the achievements of the civil rights movement. Hell, it was the Chief Justice's reason for living from the time he was a baby reactionary. And we are now seeing how successful that project has become.

The study compared the turnout gap between white and nonwhite voters in areas once covered under Section 5 with estimates of the turnout gap in places that were never part of Section 5 but had similar demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. It found that between 2012 and 2022, the turnout gap between white and nonwhite voters in counties once covered under Section 5 grew by 9 percentage points, while the gap in noncovered counties went up by 5 points. Similarly, the gap between white and only Black voters in Section 5 areas grew by 11 points, while the gap in noncovered comparable areas rose by 6 points since the Supreme Court ruling.

And, as a rather overlooked story in the New York Times reported on Sunday, there are forces at work to shore up the famous victory over voting rights that the Supreme Court handed to the conservative movement and to its public manifestation, the Republican Party.

Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push. In one Michigan town, more than 100 voters were removed after an activist lobbied officials, citing an obscure state law from the 1950s. In the Detroit suburb of Waterford, a clerk removed 1,000 people from the rolls in response to a similar request. The ousted voters included an active-duty Air Force officer who was wrongly removed and later reinstated.

Round up the usual suspects.

The Michigan activists are part of an expansive web of grass-roots groups that formed after Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020. The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation. Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections. The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental.

I thought we were pretty much done with the dangerous nuisance that is True The Vote when it got beaten like a tin drum down in Georgia back in the fall. From the AP:

A Fulton County Superior Court judge in Atlanta signed an order last year requiring True the Vote to provide evidence it had collected, including the names of people who were sources of information, to state elections officials who were frustrated by the group’s refusal to share evidence with investigators. In their written response, attorneys for True the Vote said the group had no names or other documentary evidence to share...True the Vote’s assertions were relied upon heavily for “2000 Mules,” a widely debunked film by conservative pundit and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. A State Election Board investigation found that surveillance camera footage that the film claimed showed ballot stuffing actually showed people submitting ballots for themselves and family members who lived with them, which is allowed under Georgia law.

Unfortunately, in this, I had ignored my hard and fast rule regarding conservative chicanery — that, due to an almost limitless reservoir of corporate and conservative legacy money, nothing is ever truly settled, nothing is ever truly solved. No rights are entirely secure.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.