PHILADELPHIA—For almost eight years, various Republican governors and their pet Republican majorities in their respective state legislatures have had great good fun constructing legal barriers to keep the people they don't want to be voting from voting. From the fanciful faux-motive of non-existent "voter fraud," to the old Republican standby of face-to-face voter intimidation, these folks have spent a great deal of time congratulating themselves on their cleverness and their political je ne sais quoi. It was only a matter of time before this galloping sham found itself in front of an unsympathetic judge or three. Now, it's happened on the weekend before the most critical presidential election since 1932 and the judges are playing Edward Scissorhands with all those clever little death warrants for the franchise. Let's take them one by one.

In Arizona, a federal appeals court blocked a state law forbidding what is called "ballot harvesting," the practice of collecting completed ballots en masse by going door-to-door. As Mother Jones reports, the argument over the law was conducted within the customary parameters with Republicans pretending that the measure had anything to do with protecting the integrity of the ballot, the Democrats calling bullshit and, increasingly, a judge getting fed up with the sheer magnitude of the bad faith involved in the whole thing, as the Arizona Capitol Report describes in detail.

But Chief Justice Sidney Thomas, writing for himself and five others on the 11-member panel, said he and his colleagues believe it is appropriate to prevent the law from taking effect for this election.Thomas pointed out that "ballot harvesting" was never considered illegal until this year. He said that weighed heavily on the decision of the majority to conclude there would be no real harm to the state in perhaps only delaying its implementation while its legality is decided by the courts. "The injunction does not affect the state's election process or machinery," he wrote. "It simply would enjoin enforcement of a legislative act that would criminalize the collection, by persons other than the voters, of legitimately cast ballots."

The state's lawyers conducted a limo race to Kinko's—or something—and threw their case into the lap of Supreme Court Justice Anthony (Weathervane) Kennedy, begging him to stay the appeals court's order so that the law could be implemented in the current election. Kennedy joined the majority in the Court's unfortunate 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the ruling that defanged the Voting Rights Act, so maybe Arizona has a shot.

In Ohio, a federal judge dropped the hammer on the efforts of the Trump campaign and its auxiliaries—including the Oath Keepers—to muscle people at the polls themselves. From Reuters:

The Ohio ruling does not prevent the state Republican Party from sending trained volunteers into polling places to make sure election laws are being followed. However, it does impose restrictions on Trump supporters who take it on themselves to monitor voting activity, saying they may not interrogate voters within 100 feet of a polling place, block them from entering, or photograph them as they come and go. Many of those activities are already illegal, but the judge's order means that anybody who engages in them could be held in contempt of court, exposing them to additional civil or criminal penalties. "It backs the law with the power of contempt," said Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California at Irvine.

There's some serious ratfcking at the basis of the Republican suit here.

The order also deals a blow to a Trump-allied "exit poll" that aims to mobilize supporters to canvass voters in an effort to sniff out instances of voter manipulation. The organizer of that effort, Republican operative Roger Stone, told Reuters he would fight the ruling regardless of the outcome of the election. "The Democrats' lawyers have perjured themselves and perpetrated a fraud before the court," he wrote in a text message.

Roger Stone is what you find gorging itself at the bottom of democracy's compost heap, which is something of an insult to worms and grubs, I guess.

Out in Kansas, a state judge went upside the head of Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is a Roger Stone who gets elected to things, and told him that the whole voter-fraud business wasn't flying in his court, either. Per Reuters:

"The right of citizen suffrage forms the foundation of a democratic society," Larry Hendricks, District Judge in Shawnee County, wrote in a 19-page ruling. "Whenever the laws of a state and the federal government clash with respect to this right, cracks are bound to appear in the framework of democracy." Kansas has had one of the strictest voter identification statutes in the United States, making the state a symbol for mostly Republican Party supporters who say the rules are meant to prevent voter fraud. Opponents, mostly Democrats, say the rules discriminate against minorities…The ACLU said the system would have denied the right to vote in state and local elections to residents who registered through a federal voter registration form or when they applied for or renewed their driver's license. Under the rejected system, those people could have voted in federal elections but would have had to show proof of citizenship to vote in state and local ones.

The amount of imagination that's gone into creating these laws is truly stunning. Would that a third of it had gone into laws to help us from immolating the planet. Anyway, as we pointed out yesterday, the newly insane state of North Carolina was slugged by federal judge Loretta Biggs. Later, Biggs issued an injunction that would grant the right to vote to thousands of residents disenfranchised by the state's new law. She left a mark, too.

"The court concludes that the balance of the equities and public interest factors weigh decidedly in favor of protecting eligible voters who are being removed from the voter rolls."

But the grandpappy of all developments on this issue probably went unnoticed with all the activity out in the several states. In 1981, the Republicans in New Jersey hit on the uncomplicated strategy of sending armed off-duty cops to the polls to, ahem, "police" possible shenanigans. They even gave them armbands and a spiffy name—The National Ballot Security Task Force. (It must have cost the party a fortune to buy as many boxes of Cracker Jacks as it took to produce that many plastic badges.) After getting caught at it, the national Republican Party signed a consent decree promising never to do it again, cross its black heart and hope to not get caught again. Now, the Democrats are in court alleging that the Republicans have violated that agreement. Per the Chicago Tribune:

Joshua Kaul, an attorney representing the Democratic National Committee, told the judge in Newark, New Jersey, on Friday that Trump has "repeatedly encouraged his supporters to engage in vigilante efforts" in the guise of ferreting out potential voter fraud. Kaul said the RNC is participating. Bobby Burchfield, an attorney for Republicans, told the judge that party volunteers are engaging in normal poll-watching and that Democrats haven't found one instance in which someone was intimidated or prevented from voting. Judge John Michael Vazquez did not immediately rule.

This is a remarkable election for so very many reasons. I would feel much better about the Republican Party's plans for itself if El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago augurs in on Tuesday if a single prominent Republican would stand up and condemn attempts to restrict the franchise simply because to restrict the franchise is to hobble self-government, period. One Republican anyone's ever heard of. That's all I ask.

UPDATE (Saturday, 3:15 P.M.): SCOTUS wants lower-court judges to calm the fck down until next Wednesday.

UPDATE (Sunday, 10:00 A.M.): Breaking: District Court in DNC v. RNC Case Denies Injunction, Contempt, and Extension of Voter Intimidation Decree, For Now

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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