So much happens at the margins
The authoritarian right takes an Everything Everywhere All at Once approach to undermining, well, most everything that undergirds this democracy.
A friend at Daily Kos pointed to this notice from the League of Women Voters:
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Today voting rights advocates agreed to dismiss a lawsuit that pitted them against conservative activist group Judicial Watch, in a lawsuit Judicial Watch originally filed in 2020 to force three Pennsylvania counties to remove thousands of voters from the rolls ahead of the 2020 election.
The settlement agreed to by the parties simply requires the Department of State to separately publish online data it already collects and publishes under Pennsylvania law. Under the settlement, the Department will carve out the data for five county defendants and publish it separately. The lawsuit did not show any failure of the state of Pennsylvania to comply with either federal or state law governing voter roll list maintenance. Judicial Watch was unsuccessful in forcing any purges of the voter rolls.
“This is undeniably a victory for voters,” said Samantha Apgar, president of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania. “We are proud to have joined this case to prevent voters from being wrongfully purged from the voter rolls. The League will continue to fight for Pennsylvanians and prevent anti-voter groups like Judicial Watch from bullying states and counties into excessive purging and voter disenfranchisement.”
“Today, we put Judicial Watch’s false claims about the security of our elections to rest. This settlement confirms what the vast majority of Pennsylvanians know: our elections are free and fair,” said Jill Greene, voting and elections manager at Common Cause of Pennsylvania. “We’ll continue to protect our neighbors from attempts by outside groups to rob them of their right to vote.”
Judicial Watch, an organization known for disenfranchising voters, filed a lawsuit in 2020 against three Pennsylvania counties and then-Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar. It then amended the suit in 2021 to sue five other counties instead – Luzerne, Cumberland, Washington, Indiana, and Carbon Counties. The group sought to enforce a purported violation of the National Voter Registration Act based on unverified, self-generated data. The case followed similar lawsuits filed by other anti-democratic organizations in the lead up to the 2020 election seeking to purge voters in Allegheny County, as well as heavily-populated counties in Michigan and North Carolina.
Despite gerrymandering efforts, many elections turn on what happens at the margins. “Heads I win, tails you lose” efforts to ensure Republicans (and increasingly white Christian nationalists) maintain a grip on this country no matter what the majority wants have escalated from bogus voter fraud claims and fudging census results to voter roll purges and insurrection.
So much happens at the margins. Efforts to eradicate public education range from intimidating school boards to promoting charters, vouchers, and opportunity scholarships, to demonizing public employees, to eliminating tenure for college faculty. There is never one strategy afoot, but several, and new ones all the time.
Efforts to re-exile women to kitchens, barefoot and pregnant, take too many forms to ennumerate. From state legislatures to federal courts, there is a multi-pronged on the right effort to roll back women’s freedoms.
Get busy fighting back on multiple fronts yourselves. There’s plenty of fight for everyone.
(h/t BF)