States’ Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal
So, not to be a gloomy gus or anything, but allow me to submit a theory on conspiracy theories for just a second.
We’ll start with a little Duh Philosophy 101 and the very simple understanding that civil society is a human construction to protect us from the chaos of the universe. Well, that’s part of it. The more interesting part is that it is also hinged on the illusion of safety–we invent justice within civil society because there is no justice; the tsunami that devestated Indonesia, Katrina, Pompeii, we are all Job at the mercy of Yaweh. In order to function, a society must remove or alleviate the anxiety of constantly being threatened with one’s own mortality. Security against these disasters, whether man-made or natural, is false. Ernest Becker pretty convincingly told us so. Kim Jong Il said, “mass delusion is the only thing that keeps a people sane.”
Bummers, but like, those two are dead as doornails. Who really understands modern malaise? Who really understands the disillusionment of the disenfranchised? Who speaks for the youth of today?
Obviously there is only one man.
And he is the Joker.
Chaos, as the Joker reminded us with such bittersweet eroticism, is simple. Society is unraveled almost effortlessly; one only has to pull a single pin in a trusted machine and the whole thing seizes up completely.
(I’m not typically one who loses her shit for dudes dressed like women, but this scene is sortof devestatingly fucking hot. Not because he’s wearing a dress, but because he’s so fucking crazy that the pettiness of gender is beyond irrelevant. Imagine watching this movie and looking over at your sad, limp dicked conservative husband who works as an IT tech at a financial analyst firm, doesn’t know how to speak to you anymore, and hasn’t given you an orgasm in six years. Jesus christ life is depressing.)
Anyway, what I’m saying is that conspiracies don’t have to be master maneuvers by secret operatives who have gradually infiltrated every level of an agency’s infrastructure. It takes just one person with enough insight into an organization’s informational flow to jam it up completely. In the case of these voting registrars, all it takes is a directive to take Social Security cards first.
Voting rights groups and federal election officials have raised concerns that the methods used to add or remove names vary by state and are conducted with little oversight or transparency. Many states are purging their lists for the first time and appear to be unfamiliar with the 2002 federal law….By using the Social Security database so extensively, states are flagging extra registrations and creating extra work for local officials who are already struggling to process all the registration applications by Election Day.
“I simply don’t have the staff to keep up,” said Ann McFall, the supervisor of elections in Volusia County, Fla.
It takes 10 minutes to process a normal registration and up to a week to deal with a flagged one, said Ms. McFall, a Republican, adding that she was receiving 100 or so flagged registrations a week.
Interesting. The result of that small change in the order of operations leaves you with this.
In Colorado, some 37,000 people were removed from the rolls in the three weeks after July 21. During that time, about 5,100 people moved out of the state and about 2,400 died, according to postal data and death records.
In Louisiana, at least 18,000 people were dropped from the rolls in the five weeks after July 23. Over the same period, at least 1,600 people moved out of state and at least 3,300 died.
It’s especially hard for me to process this as a naive mistake given that six out of the nine states violating federal law are swing states, and the remaining three (Alabama, Georgia, and Louisianna) are Republican mainstays historically. Given that new voter registration is overwhelmingly in favor of the Democrats, only a total rube would believe this wasn’t an orchestrated effort to hack the election. I’m sure they’ll be throwing in their 2 hayseeds soon enough.
Obvious prior election history aside, it’s always fascinating to how easily bureaucratic institutions become a means of denying certain populations access to the very resources they were erected to provide. If you’ve ever seen a form to enroll in a food stamp program, for example, many states seem to use impossibly nuanced language and require suspiciously banal information in order to even start processing an application, and that’s no guarantee that even the most trivial errors will not be cause for immediate disqualification.
Even in RI, I believe the 2nd most liberal state in the nation, looking over the applications for both fuel assistance and food stamps were surprisingly overwhelming–and I’m a native English speaker from the like, 32nd best public school in the country and half a college education. The language and instructions were at points so obtuse and ambiguous, I found myself reading passages two or more times. Some parts appeared so difficult that I could not imagine any reason to phrase them so cryptically other than to intentionally exclude. Would someone without as confident a command over English be able to successfully receive the help they needed? After how long? Would they be informed about existing programs to help with translation and literacy without having to be denied or disqualified the first time? I wasn’t, though there might be several contributing factors there.
So the programs exist, but because they are so astonishingly inefficient, it isn’t unreasonable to wonder why: do they exist to serve, or do they exist to pacify? Why are they never streamlined? Why are they always completely opaque? The registration offices in 9 critical states have found yet another way to find themselves broken–WHY?
When I ask myself that question, I can think only of this interchapter from The Grapes of Wrath. It’s nearing the end of the harvesting season. Everything is ripe and plump and heavy, every limb on every tree is being pulled to the ground it’s got so much fruit. Everyone is pleased and proud of themselves, it’s all green and all the blossoms have opened. There’s so many grapes they’ve flooded the market, so they make wine instead. They get drunk. They ignore their growing debt. In fact, there’s so much to harvest they don’t know what to do with it all, the fruit begins to rot, their farms soon belong to the banks.
Other people elsewhere are starving, and they come for miles to take the fruit before it spoils for good, but the trip was for nothing. The farmers are angry and bitter, they hate everyone who didn’t buy their fruit, they hate the system that has failed them, they look at the hungry people as criminals and thieves because they need someone to blame, anyone, for all of this devastation. They cover the fruit in kerosene instead and they set it on fire.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates–died of malnutrition–because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
