Republican Party uses Georgia as Testing Ground for State-sponsored Voter Disenfranchisement
5th Circuit guts Voting Rights Act and the FCC Universal Service Fund, DC Bar Panel recommends suspension for Jeffrey Clark, and Utah Supreme Court upholds block on abortion ban
Republican Party uses Georgia as Testing Ground for State-sponsored Voter Disenfranchisement
Georgia Republicans officially established an easy way to cancel voter registration as they make registering to vote and voting more difficult. Meanwhile, the party continues to purge tens of thousands from state voter rolls across the country because #electionintegrity.
On Monday, Georgia GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger launched a web portal that allows voters to cancel their voter registration online by simply typing in one’s date of birth, driver’s license number, and last four numbers of one’s Social Security number.
Shortly after going live, a bug in the website exposed that personal information to anyone who had knowledge of at least one of the personal identifiers. While the bug was fixed within an hour, one Georgia state lawmaker spoke with the press about her information being among those exposed. Democratic State Sen. Gloria Butler, who represents District 55, told Atlanta broadcast station WSB-TV that another state lawmaker alerted her about the issue and that her staff was able to access some of her personal information by inputting her date of birth.
Georgia has more than 8M registered voters, including 900K inactive voters. This website could be exploited by anyone who intends to unjustifiably cancel voter registrations, especially of the most vulnerable communities who already face disenfranchisement.
Making it harder to vote, but effortless to cancel one’s ability to vote is certainly on brand for a party that knows it can’t win without cheating.
Georgia’s GOP-controlled State Election Board (SEB) goes rogue and gets caught
Speaking of cheating, Republicans on the State Election Board tried to get away with breaking the law to approve voter disenfranchisement and voter oppression measures. If this course of action took place in any other country, we’d call it an abuse of power and tyrannical one-party rule, but we live in a country that is stuck in “both sides!” land.
Last month, 3 election denying Republicans on the 5-member Georgia Election Board attempted to unlawfully pass new voting rules even after being warned by the state Attorney General. They may have gotten away with it if the blatant antidemocratic action didn’t anger Georgia voters and catch the attention of national media outlets, as well as a lawsuit.
On Tuesday, the full board reconvened and unanimously voted for a do-over of the infamous July 12 meeting that violated Georgia’s Open Meetings Act. Following a July 9 meeting, Rick Jeffares, a former state senator, Janelle King, a former deputy director of the Georgia GOP, and Janice Johnston, a retired OBGYN, didn’t feel they got their way after the board only advanced some rules so they scheduled a meeting on July 12—when the 2 democratic board members were not available and without providing timely public notice—to pass more rules.
The state AG Christopher Carr told the three on July 11 that holding the meeting would violate state law, but they unlawfully convened anyway. They approved modified guidelines for certifying voting results, expanding a previously administrative duty to an investigative authority that allows local election officials to probe voting records, as well as access to election-related materials before certification.
They also approved 2 proposals: one proposed by Jeffares requiring county election boards to post daily online ballot counts on their websites and one increasing the number of partisan poll monitors and allowing them access to ballot counting. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the text of the rule changes and talking points were provided by Georgia GOP Chairman Josh McKoon with approval by the RNC.
The nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog American Oversight filed a lawsuit against the board on July 18, alleging the 3 republican members failed to provide adequate public notice about the July 12 meeting and that they did not make quorum. The organization also requested the court issue a preliminary injunction against the board from moving forward with the rules approved at the meeting.
Since the GOP-controlled board agreed to reconvene about the rules, the full board will meet on August 6 to discuss which ones to advance, if any. If rules are approved, the board will provide 30 days notice to the public of proposed action before it meets again to finalize adoption.
The Republican Party will likely get its way since it has a majority on the board, and so will Donald Trump since his RNC drafted the rules to give the GOP nominee an advantage in the battleground state. And that alone should raise the alarm for how fragile the state of U.S. Democracy is in going into an already contested by one-party presidential election.
5th Circuit guts Voting Rights Act, queues up SCOTUS to overturn another landmark law and cement Chief Justice John Roberts’ dishonorable legacy
On Thursday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned its own precedent set in 1988 in Campos v. City of Baytown, which allowed a coalition of racial and ethnic groups to file claims under the Voting Rights Act. In the 30-page ruling, the 12-5 majority held that “Nowhere does Section 2 indicate that two minority groups may combine forces to pursue a vote dilution claim. On the contrary, the statute identifies the subject of a vote dilution claim as ‘a class,’ in the singular, not the plural.”
The decision is now in effect for Louisiani, Mississippi, and Texas and stems from 3 gerrymandering lawsuits filed by a group of voters, civil rights organizations, and the Biden administration against Galveston County, Texas. The case centered around the redistricting maps that were drawn by the GOP-controlled county’s commissioner court in 2021, which eliminated a predominantly Black and Latino precinct that historically voted for the county’s sole Democratic commissioner. The district court ordered the maps be redrawn to comply with Section 2 of the VRA and the county appealed.
Judge Dana M. Douglas did not mince her words in her dissent, writing, "Today, the majority finally dismantled the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act in this circuit, leaving four decades of en banc precedent flattened in its wake."
5th Circuit Court of Appeals rules FCC Universal Service Fund is unconstitutional as Leonard Leo-funded lawsuits seek to eliminate the agency
On July 24, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals—the most conservative circuit court after being packed with Federalist Society justices—ruled that the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Universal Service Fund is unconstitutional. And the Federalist Society Chairman Leonard Leo is funding the effort against the FCC via his dark money network with the help of billionaire Charles Koch’s dark money network.
In the 108-page opinion, the 9-7 majority determined that the Universal Service fees on phone bills are a "misbegotten tax,” finding that the combination of the FCC delegating its taxing power for the Universal Service Fund to a private corporation—the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC)—with Congress delegating authority to the FCC, violates the Legislative Vesting Clause in Article I, § 1. It also remanded the case to the FCC for further proceedings.
The fund exists because the FCC mandates telecommunications service providers to contribute a percentage of their interstate and international revenues on a quarterly basis. Many telcos offset this contribution to customers by charging a “Universal Service” fee each month, which the court exploited in its decision. The opinion notes that USAC relies on “for-profit telecommunications companies to determine how much American citizens would be forced to pay for the ‘universal service’ tax that appears on cell phone bills across the Nation.” This is deliberately misleading because the FCC does not require the contribution to be passed on to customers.
The decision reverses the 3-judge panel ruling on the court that unanimously upheld the fund last year and splits the circuit—the 6th and 11th circuit courts both rejected claims that the fund is unconstitutional. The dark money-backed organizations that brought the lawsuits appealed the 5th Circuit panel ruling to be heard en banc and it agreed.
One of the plaintiffs is Consumers’ Research, an illegally registered nonprofit that claims to fight “woke corporations.” Tax filings show that it has received at least $725K from Leo’s Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, as well as significant funds from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has donated tens of millions of dollars to several far-right figures and former senior Trump administration officials’ nonprofits—including those that sponsor Project 2025—as well as to the Heritage Foundation. It also has board members that are part of Koch’s Americans for Prosperity and Leo’s network.
The other plaintiff is an obscure Ohio-based company called Cause Based Commerce that is so secretive there is no information about clients, funding, profit, employees, etc., and only a single-page website.
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a press release, “This decision is misguided and wrong” and plans to appeal to the Supreme Court. Three telco lobbying groups also released a joint statement condemning the ruling.
DC Disciplinary Panel recommends 2 year law license suspension for Jeffrey Clark
On Thursday, the DC Disciplinary Panel recommended a two-year suspension from practicing law for Jeffrey Clark, a slap on the hand for his participation in Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. The panel also proposed a requirement that he prove his “fitness” to resume practicing law once his suspension ends.
In the 213-page report, the panel found that while Clark’s conduct was egregious, it was less serious than that of other Trump attorneys facing disbarment. It notes that John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani engaged in a prolonged campaign to mislead the courts; Clark’s conduct involved internal discussions at the Department of Justice, which never reached any court.
The panel made it clear that Clark “attempted to engage in reckless dishonesty,” adding that his conduct “risked disabling the Justice Department, throwing the Presidential election into chaos.” The panel also raised concerns about Clark’s refusal to take responsibility for his actions. The report writes, “we conclude that his personal beliefs blinded him from objectively assessing the facts and the reality of his proposed course of action, and caused him to rationalize a broader role for the Department of Justice, failing to distinguish President Trump from candidate Trump.” It added, “It is admirable, not wrong, to believe in a cause, but it is wrong and dangerous to the public and our legal system to let that belief operate to the exclusion of judgment.”
The panel’s recommendation will be reviewed by the D.C. Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility, which will make its a separate recommendation to the D.C. Court of Appeals.
Utah Supreme Court upholds block on state’s near-total abortion ban
On Thursday, the Utah Supreme Court upheld a stay on the state’s near-total abortion ban, keeping in place a law that allows abortion up to 18 weeks while litigation continues. The 4-1 ruling from the majority-woman, all Republican Supreme Court was a narrow decision that only answered whether the lower court erred in issuing the injunction on the state abortion ban. In the majority opinion, Associate Chief Justice John Pearce wrote, “the district court did not abuse its discretion” and made it clear that the court was not ruling on the merits of Planned Parenthood Association of Utah’s (PPAU) claim that the law was unconstitutional.
Utah’s GOP-controlled legislature passed the near-total abortion ban in 2020 as a “trigger law,” in anticipation of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which the high court did in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah and PPAU sued the state in 2022 and filed a motion for a temporary injunction to block the law from going into effect. The state appealed the district court ruling, arguing that PPAU did not have standing to challenge the constitutionality of the law on behalf of its patients.
If the courts uphold the ban, the law would prohibit all abortions except in cases of rape, incest or serious risk to one’s health. It also allows an exception for fetal inviability if 2 physicians determine that the fetus has a lethal defect or severe brain abnormality. The law criminalizes the procedure, allowing physicians who perform abortions to be charged with a felony, which carries a hefty fine and up to 15 years in prison.