I am not a complete purist about political chicanery. I grew up in Massachusetts, after all, and cut my teeth covering one of the only state legislatures in America that wants to stay in session. In Worcester, long ago, my grandfather was tasked by a local Democratic politician to check into a room in the immortal Hotel Vernon and listen to a rival's strategy session in the next room courtesy of a water glass held up to the wall. The real problems arise when the chicanery passes over the line into ratfcking, and the easiest way for that to happen is to have the power of government and the color of law engage in it.

A case in point is what's going on in Georgia, where people are getting thrown in jail for registering voters whom the Republicans in power find inconvenient. From Yahoo! News:

[Nancy] Dennard, a county school board member who had just turned 50 and recently helped elect a slate of new candidates, slept in that morning and was still in bed when her husband left for work a little after 7 a.m. She thought it odd when he returned a few minutes later to wake her. “There’s some people here that want to see you,” he told her. “They’re law enforcement.” Dennard was taken away in handcuffs, placed in a squad car and spirited into the police station.

The early-morning arrest began a multiyear nightmare for the mother of two. The state government, operating under the authority of a newly appointed secretary of state named Brian Kemp, arrested Dennard and 11 of her political allies and charged them with 120 separate felonies. To Dennard and her allies, who became known as the Quitman 10+2, the reasons for their arrests were simple. They were black candidates who won an election in the Deep South, upsetting a white-dominated power structure.

“They thought they could make an example out of me, and that would kill the spirit of this movement,” said Dennard, who has a master’s degree in speech pathology, as well as an educational doctorate. “I knew we had done nothing wrong.”

Brian Kemp, it should be noted, is presently the governor of Georgia.

Yahoo News interviewed two dozen people involved in the case, including members of the Quitman 10+2, prosecutors, local officials and state law enforcement officials. Yahoo News also reviewed more than 1,100 pages of documents obtained through open-records laws from the Georgia secretary of state and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The Quitman story, according to those records and interviews, is of an overzealous law enforcement response to a school board election, which exacerbated racial divisions and demonstrates how voter suppression plays out at the local level.

Also important to this story is the right-wing media universe, which blew up this "overzealous law enforcement response" into a national story because, look, look, we found voter fraud! No, but that's what they got to say on radio and teevee and the Intertoobz for long enough to embed it in the soggy brains of their primary audiences.

Kemp narrowly defeated Stacey Abrams in the Georgia gubernatorial election. John Bazemore Getty Images

And to hell with what it did to the lives of the people who were targeted.

It was almost a full year before any charges were brought against Dennard and the others. The same week that those charges were filed, authorities arrested two more women: Debra Dennard and Brenda Monds, making the Quitman 10 into the Quitman 10+2. A different district attorney, Joe Mulholland, filed 120 felony counts against the 12 individuals on Nov. 22, 2011. Five days later, Mulholland appeared on Fox News and talked about the Quitman case.

“We don’t ask a lot of our electorate. We ask them to serve on juries, and we ask them to vote for whoever they might want to vote for,” Mulholland said. “And when they see that kind of corruption and they see this kind of malfeasance in office, it really just leaves everyone with a bad taste in their mouth. So obviously we’re going to do everything that we can to make sure that those people are held accountable in a court of law.”

The whole story is flatly amazing. Nobody was convicted. Nobody went to jail. The whole damn thing was just a smokescreen to intimidate minority voters and minority candidates.

And did I mention that Brian Kemp is now the governor of Georgia?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution documented in late 2015 that Georgia’s attorney general’s office had planned to offer guidance about the law earlier that year, to make clear that delivering a sealed ballot to a mailbox or the post office was not a crime. But then Kemp himself told a reporter for the paper that he might not follow the attorney general’s guidance, because he thought the state’s enforcement was proper.

“I don’t know that there can be just an arbitrary decision by the attorney general’s office. … We have precedent that’s out there and we have what the law and the rules say today,” Kemp told the newspaper.

This is the process under which the 2020 election will be held, being created right out there in the open. The whole country is the Hotel Vernon, and there are lots of water glasses being held against the walls.

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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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