Have we finally reached peak outrage in the latest fight over Georgia election laws?

Lost in all the current furor, between Florida banning gay students, Elon Musk setting the Constitution on fire by employing the First Amendment, and the country being cast into the dark ages over the right to kill infants, there is more attempted outrage simmering in the state of Georgia. More voting controversies are being claimed, and the rationale offered is only getting dumber.

On the surface, it sounds like a serious challenge is being waged against an iniquity. Three separate voting groups have filed suit against the Georgia State Elections Board over new rules put in place stemming from the recent voter integrity law the state passed that had the country in an imbalanced uproar, which would appear to indicate there is a severe violation in place threatening.

That is until you read the court filing and see how ludicrous this current claim turns out to be.

The suit has been brought by Democratic Party legal bomb-thrower Marc Elias, helping to file this by a coalition of Vote.org, the Georgia Alliance of Retired Americans, and Priorities USA. The suit takes issue with the requirement that submissions for absentee ballots must be filled out by the voter and submitted with a written signature by the deadline date in order to receive a ballot in the mail. The issue? As stated in the court filing: 

The question posed by this lawsuit is simple: can the State of Georgia use arcane rules and administrative traps to deny absentee ballots to eligible voters? 

What specifically do they have a problem with this filing? This rule prohibits the submission online and the use of a digital signature, something that can aid those looking to submit ballots in bulk or through other nefarious means. What angers these groups is the requirement of a request needing to be submitted with a name and signature appearing with ink – that is, what is dubbed to be a “wet signature.” The opposition to this most basic operation in document verification is the ridiculous part – it is said to be racist.

Priorities USA explains in a statement: 

“The requirement of a ‘wet’ signature on an absentee ballot application simply creates a pretext to unfairly disqualify voters, particularly Black and brown voters, from their constitutional right to vote. This rule is yet another attempt by the Georgia Legislature to suppress voting rights,” said Guy Cecil, Chairman of Priorities USA. “Onerous requirements like this have historically been used to dilute the political power of marginalized communities. Priorities USA has been fighting voter suppression in the courts since 2015 and we will continue to work against these discriminatory policies.”

Taking it even further, in the court filing the coalition also invokes the Civil Rights Act.

Section 101 of the Civil Rights Act prohibits election officials from denying any individual the right to vote “because of an error or omission on any record or paper relating to any application.”

What works against this claim is the phrase from that section clarifying, “if the error or omission is immaterial in determining whether the individual is qualified to vote.” It appears to be rather obvious that a valid signature is quite material in determining the qualification of the person claiming to request an absentee ballot.

We get served all the usual buzzwords in this latest effort to eliminate sound voting requirements: disenfranchised citizens, voting rights restricted, voting suppression, impacting minority communities, and the like. New laws, meant to prevent abuse through those efforts implemented in 2020 as an emergency response to the pandemic, were put in place to restore voting integrity.

These arguments are falling on a growing number of deaf ears, as the promises of oppression have not materialized and the need to employ more reductive race-based claims continues to undermine their arguments. Then, factor in that minorities regularly show support for voter integrity measures like voter ID, and you start to see that these groups are being used by the ruling class in the party to install measures to facilitate their voting tactic goals.

Look at how during the pandemic, extreme locations like New York City or Washington D.C. were requiring people to carry two or three forms of ID to show they were properly vaccinated. Acquiring those shots and boosters was more onerous than getting a standard state ID in order to vote, essentially nullifying that argument going forward.

Now they are reduced to saying it is racist to require a handwritten signature on a voter document. The people allegedly fighting for the rights of minorities are taking more insulting positions on what these groups are incapable of doing for themselves.