The Republican war on voting has a sneaky side: Far-right groups pushing for local voter purges

Republican voter suppression warriors aren’t waiting for Kris Kobach and Donald Trump’s commission to start kicking qualified voters off the rolls. They’ve been out there trying to purge voting lists for years; Mother Jones does a fascinating deep dive on three such enemies of voting who work for organizations like the “American Civil Rights Union” (it’s like the ACLU, but for taking away people’s right to vote!) and Judicial Watch and the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

For years, these groups have been sending threatening letters to small, poor counties—often heavily non-white counties—telling them to purge their voter rolls or else. Since the counties rarely have money to fight back, they often just fold. And if they want to fight, they find themselves up against well-resourced former Justice Department lawyers. But it doesn’t always work out that way, and it turns out that counties that have the resources can push back pretty effectively:

In 2014, the ACRU and the Public Interest Legal Foundation targeted largely Hispanic counties in southern Texas. The first two cases were against Terrell County, a community of fewer than 1,000 people, about half of them Hispanic, and Zavala County, population 12,000 and 94 percent Hispanic. Both counties lie within Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, the only swing district in the state.

Terrell County’s sheriff signed a consent decree. But Zavala County, which sits on one of the largest oil fields in Texas history, had the money to go to court. The county hired a small team of lawyers in response to the ACRU lawsuit. Ultimately, the county and the ACRU agreed to a much weaker consent decree than other counties had. In November 2016, the ACRU, by then under Coates’ leadership, sent letters to eight more Texas counties. Four of them lie in the 23rd district, including two counties that are overwhelmingly Hispanic.

But if the voter suppressors had a little trouble with Zavala County, they may have bit off more than they could chew with a new strategy: they’re moving from going after rural counties in the South to going after blue areas in swing states. That’s the sort of thing that gets the attention of actual public interest lawyers and civil rights groups.