Friday, July 02, 2021

The Supremes Upheld Arizona's Ban on Out-of-Precinct Voting. Will NCGOP Attempt To Exploit the Decision?


Gov. Cooper, 
our defense against the dark
arts of voter suppression


So you're a regular voter who even on bright days doesn't know the name/number/designation of your precinct, let alone the fact that after the last election, the local authorities moved your precinct polling place to a new location, so it's the next Election Day and you don't know where to go to vote -- the local authorities may have mailed you something, but you sure as hell don't remember what it said -- so you drive to the old location, which is closed, and then to the nearest polling place that you know about or that someone told you about, which is out of your precinct, but your vote will count anyway, because you're still eligible to vote all the races on the ballot in your home county, no matter the precinct. According to state law.

Except in Arizona, where the Republican overlords passed a law making out-of-precinct voting illegal, and yesterday, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the conservative majority, ruled that baffling inconvenience could in fact be willfully imposed for partisan advantage and that confused voters are just plain shit outta luck.

You know that the famed voter ID law passed by the NCGOP in 2013 contained a clause outlawing out-of-precinct voting? That law was thrown out by the courts in 2016. So people in the state of North Carolina voting out-of-county in both 2016 and 2020 continued to have their votes count in races in which they were otherwise eligible to vote and as long as they were voting in the county where they were registered.

In other words, the NCGOP is already versed on how to write a law outlawing out-of-precinct voting, especially a law that would target with outstanding precision voters of color and young voters (who are sometimes foggy on which planet, let alone which precinct). Will the Berger-Moore people try again to outlaw out-of-precinct voting on the basis of Samuel Alito's prose? How could they resist?

Except there stands Roy Cooper, with the veto stamp, and a veto-sustaining minority of Democrats in the General Assembly.

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