Alabama Court Issues Order Requiring Every County to Keep a Copy of Every Ballot

From [HERE] Yesterday, Monday December 11, voting rights attorney John Brakey won a court order – in Montgomery, Alabama no less – requiring every county to keep copies of their ballots after the voting Tuesday.

Now, you may think that in a democracy, in the United States of America, in the 21st Century, you wouldn’t simply throw away ballots, announce a winner, and say, “trust us, we counted the ballots fairly.”

But this is not exactly America, nor the 21st Century.  This is Alabama; Alabama after the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act.

Then, by 6pm Alabama time, the voting rights victory dance came to an end. GOP state officials, in an "ex-parte" (i.e. private) meeting with an Alabama Supreme Court judge, obtained a "stay" of the ballot protection, effectively killing it. Alabama counties may now destroy ballot images, destroy any record of the true vote.

But they’ll tell you the winner: Likely Republican Judge Roy Moore, the former chief of the court that just blocked any possible challenge to a suspect election.

Even without Judge Moore’s cronies taking away this protection of voter ballots, the GOP had nine other methods already in motion to prevent a true and fair election. If the Democrat Doug Jones loses, it won’t be to Judge Moore; rather, it will be to Jim Crow and the ten little cheats perfected by the GOP.

Ballot-box stuffing

The TRO (Temporary Restraining Order) that Brakey won, then lost, would have stopped what I call the “Baldwin Ballot Bandit” trick or, as my co-author Bobby Kennedy calls it, “good old ballot box stuffing.”

Background:  In 2002, Gov. Don Siegelman won a close re-election. But, after the Associated Press announced the result, rural Republican Baldwin County locked the courthouse doors. Beginning at midnight, GOP officials claimed to have counted thousands of ballots that they mysteriously “found”—enough to flip the election.  No one was allowed to see those ballots—if they even existed.

This is what the Brakey TRO intended to stop.