With less than two weeks remaining until Alabama's special election, Republican candidate Roy Moore is locked in an unexpectedly tight contest with Democrat Doug Jones for Jeff Sessions' vacant Senate seat, a development explainable in large part by recent revelations that the former Alabama Supreme Court justice is a reprehensible lecherous creep. Jones even held a brief lead over Moore in polls earlier this month, and while a new survey has Moore ahead by five points, the mere possibility of a Democrat winning an election in reddest-of-blood-red Alabama has Moore and his people grabbing at everything around them that looks like a dog whistle and blowing as loudly as they can. Today, the candidate issued an urgent warning to his followers on Twitter, apprising them of a horrifying new development in the race: Alabama citizens are now registering to vote.

That link is to a recent AL.com story about a local organization working to register individuals convicted of a felony to vote before the deadline passed on Monday. While this country has traditionally imposed harsh restrictions on the ability of felons to vote in elections subsequent to their convictions, Alabama is one of many states to have enacted statutory reforms to the practice in recent years. State law disenfranchises felons who have committed crimes of "moral turpitude," but the task of determining which offenses fall within this nebulous category had been left to the discretion of individual county registrars—a practice that often resulted in disparate outcomes for people who had committed the same crime, and that (surprise!) disproportionately affected the African-American community.

In an effort to resolve this unfairness, Alabama enacted something called the "Definition of Moral Turpitude Act" earlier this year, which specifically delineates the crimes of "moral turpitude" that justify restricting an ex-offender's right to vote. If a given offense is not on the list, the person who committed it gets to have their franchise restored. This bill passed through the Alabama Senate and the Alabama House of Representatives—both of which are controlled by overwhelming Republican majorities—and was signed into law by Governor Kay Ivey, also a Republican. This means that Moore, desperate to save a campaign that threatens to collapse under a bevy of sexual abuse allegations, is now trying to scare Alabamians with the ramifications of a policy championed by his own party.

It isn't difficult to identify the string of bigoted assumptions and reductive stereotypes that Moore is leveraging here in an effort to rile up his most ardent supporters. (Scary OPERATIVES are helping CRIMINALS to elect a DEMOCRAT! Look, there's even a picture of two BLACK MEN in this story!) And while Roy Moore was a known repulsive human long before stories of his predatory ways ever came to light, it is nonetheless disgusting to see a candidate for national political office stoop to raging publicly about American citizens exercising their constitutional right to vote. People like this have no business governing. If you're upset that a group of lawful voters—felons or otherwise—might not be inclined to support your candidacy, perhaps you shouldn't have been such a wholly-unqualified candidate in the first place.

Interestingly, Alabama Code § 13A-6-67 provides that a person commits the crime of second-degree sexual abuse if they are 19 years old or older and a court finds them to have subjected a person between the ages of 12 and 16 to sexual contact. This is defined as a Class A misdemeanor, unless the individual is convicted of a subsequent offense within a year. In that case, second-degree sexual abuse becomes a Class C felony, which happens to be one of the felonies enumerated in Alabama's Definition of Moral Turpitude Act.