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welcome to reality ~ triva
election news and items of interest
jan 2020
Noam chomsky: “Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites,”
what kind of democracy condones vote suppression?
The Informed American Voter
headlines
*Here are the real reasons so many people don’t vote
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Florida Republicans’ Voter Suppression Scheme May Backfire
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Voter Suppression Exposes the Paradox of Black Citizenship in a Racist Society
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Georgia does not have to put 100,000 voters back on rolls, judge rules
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TRUMP ADVISER CAUGHT ON RECORDING DISCUSSING HOW GOP “TRADITIONALLY” RELIES ON “SUPPRESSING VOTES”(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Georgia’s History of Voter Suppression Shows Other States What Not to Do
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*WISCONSIN REPUBLICANS JUST CAN'T GET ENOUGH VOTER SUPPRESSION
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Kansas Kills Kris Kobach’s National Voter Purge System
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*REPUBLICANS WIN IN EFFORT TO LIMIT STUDENT VOTE AHEAD OF KEY 2020 RACES
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE MYTH OF VOTER FRAUD – AND THE TRUTH ABOUT WHAT’S THREATENING OUR ELECTIONS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*More Students Are Voting — But Republicans Are Trying to Get in Their Way
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The Way America Votes Is Broken. In One Rural County, a Nonprofit Showed a Way Forward.(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Off-year Election Day in Kentucky, Virginia and elsewhere: Big impact, bad for democracy(ARTICLE BELOW)
*‘It makes elections fair’: New York to vote on system that may curb polarized politics
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The Long Fight to Use Student IDs to Vote in North Carolina
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*GERRYMANDER GURU'S SECRET FILES: HE USED RACIAL DATA TO DISENFRANCHISE BLACK VOTERS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*‘DEMOCRACY FOR SOME, BUT NOT FOR ALL’: REPORT REVEALS NEARLY 1,700 POLLING PLACES CLOSED SINCE SUPREME COURT WEAKENED VOTING RIGHTS ACT(ARTICLE BELOW)
*OHIO WILL PURGE MORE THAN 200,000 VOTERS — FROM A LIST RIDDLED WITH ERRORS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*No, both sides are not the same
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Political Fundraising Has a Big, Nasty Secret
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*A List -- Why A Majority of Whites No Longer Vote Democratic at the Presidential Level
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*LAWSUIT CALLS MISSISSIPPI'S WAY OF CHOOSING GOVERNORS RACIST
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*WHITE WOMEN ARE HELPING STATES PASS ABORTION RESTRICTIONS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
MAP OF THE HYPOCRITES!!!
THE DAILY KOS ELECTIONS GUIDE TO THE NATION'S RELIGIOUS POPULATIONS, BY CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*PART 1: GOP RACIAL GERRYMANDERING MASTERMIND PARTICIPATED IN REDISTRICTING IN MORE STATES THAN PREVIOUSLY KNOWN, FILES REVEAL
THOMAS HOFELLER AND GOP STRATEGISTS EXPERIMENTED WITH USING RACE AS THE PRIMARY FACTOR IN DRAWING DISTRICTS IN ALABAMA, FLORIDA, AND WEST VIRGINIA.
*PART 2“WORTH THIS INVESTMENT”: MEMOS REVEAL THE SCOPE AND RACIAL ANIMUS OF GOP GERRYMANDERING AMBITIONS
IN A TROVE OF NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED MEMOS AND EMAILS, HOWEVER, GOP LEADERS COME CLEAN: THEIR NATIONWIDE ADVANTAGE IN STATE LEGISLATURES AND CONGRESS IS BUILT ON GERRYMANDERING. AND TOP REPUBLICAN STRATEGISTS AND POLITICAL OPERATIVES ADMIT TO WEAPONIZING RACIAL DATA AND THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT IN ORDER TO FLIP THE SOUTH RED AND TILT ELECTORAL MAPS IN THEIR DIRECTION.
*Status of National Popular Vote Bill in Each State
*MAP PORN: IF "DID NOT VOTE" WAS A CANDIDATE...( article below)
The Political Punchline
Putting the Mock in Democracy
Here are the real reasons so many people don’t vote
Andrew Joseph Pegoda, The Conversation - alternet
January 17, 2020
At least 40% to 90% of American voters stay home during elections, evidence that low voter turnout for both national and local elections is a serious problem throughout the United States.
With the 2020 presidential election approaching, directives for people to “get out and vote” will be firing up again.
Some people might be indifferent or simply not care, but many who forgo voting have legitimate reasons.
Over the past decade, through my extensive research on civil rights and oppression, through my observations of social media comments and through my conversations with hundreds of college students, I have concluded that such reasons are both important and, generally, unnoticed.
1. Voter suppression
Republican-led efforts to diminish participation in voting and voter registration have greatly contributed to the number of nonvoters.
Since 2010, 25 states have adopted measures specifically aimed at making voting more difficult. Such measures include additional voter identification requirements.
Sometimes lawmakers said these were necessary to curb illegal voting, which research shows is an all-but-nonexistent problem.
Some counties and states have also created confusion and uncertainty about how to initially register or re-register after a voter has moved.
In other cases, people might not know where to vote, due to the distribution of deliberately false information.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 that key aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were unconstitutional, states have closed over 1,000 polling locations, half of these in Texas.
2. Personal choice
Some people decide to forgo voting.
I hear again and again that sometimes people make such choices because they were intimidated by friends, by family members or by people at polling places.
When facing the complexities of races with dozens of candidates and complicated issues, others say they don’t feel they know enough to make informed decisions.
People have also told me they worry about feeling personally responsible if they vote for a candidate or position and there are unforeseen consequences, such as cuts to important aid programs. Members of any group, but especially those of underrepresented groups, may long to vote for desirable candidates but not feel that current candidates offer the possibility that anything will really change.
Individuals have shared with me that they have not voted because they do not trust a nation that they feel has lied and perpetuated systemic abuse against minorities, aggravated further by widespread gerrymandering and for presidential elections, by an Electoral College system that doesn’t weigh each vote the same.
In France and India, for example, people who dislike all of the candidates can formally “vote” without endorsing any candidate by selecting “none of the above.” Not having this option in the U.S. might affect turnout, too.
3. Obstacles to access
For others, voting may simply be too difficult.
I often hear of people who – even with early voting or absentee options – cannot vote because they lack transportation. They are homeless. They lack child care. They are disabled. They work, go to school and live in different cities.
This is even more applicable for the 7 to 8 million in the U.S. who hold multiple jobs. Laws guarantee time off for voting but aren’t enforceable and aren’t always workable.
Such people are effectively disenfranchised.
4. Lack of rights
Only nonincarcerated, mentally competent, registered citizens of age can vote.
Based on 2015 data, the right to vote was not extended to an over 13 million people with green cards, work visas or refugee status. Given the total population of people 18 and older exceeded 248 million in 2015, one out of every 20 adults living, working and spending money in the U.S. was not eligible to vote.
Using vague and inconsistent language, states have also worked to deny disabled or mentally ill people a political voice. This affects potentially over a million people nationwide.
As discussed in the books “The New Jim Crow” and in “Race, Incarceration and American Values,” an additional 6 million Americans cannot vote because of felony convictions, an issue that disproportionately affects black people. In some states, this disenfranchisement remains in effect for life.
The future
Given the legitimacy of reasons why they don’t participate, nonvoters certainly shouldn’t be scolded with, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Or with even harsher words, as one friend on Facebook put it: “If you don’t vote, everything wrong in the world is your fault.”
People long to be heard and deserve fair representation. Instead of bashing nonvoters, I recommend taking some deep breaths and initiating friendly conversations. Listen and learn. At a time when public trust in government is at historic lows, such conversations might even encourage someone to demand a voice.
With the 2020 presidential election approaching, directives for people to “get out and vote” will be firing up again.
Some people might be indifferent or simply not care, but many who forgo voting have legitimate reasons.
Over the past decade, through my extensive research on civil rights and oppression, through my observations of social media comments and through my conversations with hundreds of college students, I have concluded that such reasons are both important and, generally, unnoticed.
1. Voter suppression
Republican-led efforts to diminish participation in voting and voter registration have greatly contributed to the number of nonvoters.
Since 2010, 25 states have adopted measures specifically aimed at making voting more difficult. Such measures include additional voter identification requirements.
Sometimes lawmakers said these were necessary to curb illegal voting, which research shows is an all-but-nonexistent problem.
Some counties and states have also created confusion and uncertainty about how to initially register or re-register after a voter has moved.
In other cases, people might not know where to vote, due to the distribution of deliberately false information.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 that key aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were unconstitutional, states have closed over 1,000 polling locations, half of these in Texas.
2. Personal choice
Some people decide to forgo voting.
I hear again and again that sometimes people make such choices because they were intimidated by friends, by family members or by people at polling places.
When facing the complexities of races with dozens of candidates and complicated issues, others say they don’t feel they know enough to make informed decisions.
People have also told me they worry about feeling personally responsible if they vote for a candidate or position and there are unforeseen consequences, such as cuts to important aid programs. Members of any group, but especially those of underrepresented groups, may long to vote for desirable candidates but not feel that current candidates offer the possibility that anything will really change.
Individuals have shared with me that they have not voted because they do not trust a nation that they feel has lied and perpetuated systemic abuse against minorities, aggravated further by widespread gerrymandering and for presidential elections, by an Electoral College system that doesn’t weigh each vote the same.
In France and India, for example, people who dislike all of the candidates can formally “vote” without endorsing any candidate by selecting “none of the above.” Not having this option in the U.S. might affect turnout, too.
3. Obstacles to access
For others, voting may simply be too difficult.
I often hear of people who – even with early voting or absentee options – cannot vote because they lack transportation. They are homeless. They lack child care. They are disabled. They work, go to school and live in different cities.
This is even more applicable for the 7 to 8 million in the U.S. who hold multiple jobs. Laws guarantee time off for voting but aren’t enforceable and aren’t always workable.
Such people are effectively disenfranchised.
4. Lack of rights
Only nonincarcerated, mentally competent, registered citizens of age can vote.
Based on 2015 data, the right to vote was not extended to an over 13 million people with green cards, work visas or refugee status. Given the total population of people 18 and older exceeded 248 million in 2015, one out of every 20 adults living, working and spending money in the U.S. was not eligible to vote.
Using vague and inconsistent language, states have also worked to deny disabled or mentally ill people a political voice. This affects potentially over a million people nationwide.
As discussed in the books “The New Jim Crow” and in “Race, Incarceration and American Values,” an additional 6 million Americans cannot vote because of felony convictions, an issue that disproportionately affects black people. In some states, this disenfranchisement remains in effect for life.
The future
Given the legitimacy of reasons why they don’t participate, nonvoters certainly shouldn’t be scolded with, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Or with even harsher words, as one friend on Facebook put it: “If you don’t vote, everything wrong in the world is your fault.”
People long to be heard and deserve fair representation. Instead of bashing nonvoters, I recommend taking some deep breaths and initiating friendly conversations. Listen and learn. At a time when public trust in government is at historic lows, such conversations might even encourage someone to demand a voice.
fighting the fascists!!!
Florida Republicans’ Voter Suppression Scheme May Backfire
Blue counties are restoring ex-felons’ voting rights. Red counties are leaving them disenfranchised.
By MARK JOSEPH STERN - slate
JAN 07, 20204:38 PM
After Floridians approved an initiative to restore voting rights to approximately 1.4 million people with felony convictions, Republican lawmakers immediately moved to sabotage the historic effort. The GOP-controlled legislature passed a law along party lines that effectively required a poll tax from a majority of those poised to regain their right to vote. The GOP’s brazenly partisan measure, however, appears to be backfiring. Democratic counties are taking advantage of a compromise buried in the statute to give residents their voting rights. Meanwhile, Republican counties are taking a hard line against suffrage—meaning a substantial majority of Floridians who do manage to register to vote are likely to be Democrats.
For more than a year, Florida’s politicians have been embroiled in a fight over Amendment 4, which 65 percent of Florida voters approved in 2018. Amendment 4 abolished a Jim Crow era law that permanently stripped the right to vote from anyone convicted of a felony. But Florida Republicans quickly kneecapped it, passing a bill that forced individuals to pay all fines and fees associated with their sentences before regaining their voting rights. This legislative assault on Amendment 4 threatened to take away the franchise from more than 1.1 million Floridians; the state is a pioneer of cash register justice, imposing a mind-boggling array of “user fees” on defendants to finance its criminal justice system.
Following immense backlash from Democrats and civil rights advocates, though, legislators added a conciliatory section to their bill. It allowed courts to modify “the original sentencing order to no longer require completion” of the initial sentence. In other words, courts can waive fines and fees imposed as part of a sentence. By doing so, courts can clear the way for former felons to complete their sentences and immediately become eligible to vote.
To implement this section, Florida’s four most populous counties created “rocket dockets” to waive fines and fees en masse. Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Hillsborough—which, together, make up more than a third of the state’s population—launched programs to identify individuals who owe fines and fees and fast-track their cases to the courts. A judge then waives their financial obligations (except restitution to victims) and provides them with a court order declaring their sentences complete. This order reestablishes their right to vote. Courts, prosecutors, and public defenders all support these programs, and celebrity activist John Legend helped to publicize them by sitting in on a “rocket docket” session. Local officials provide individuals with voter registration forms as soon as their fines and fees are waived.
As WLRN pointed out on Sunday, these four counties’ swift action raises the possibility that Republicans’ plan to undercut Amendment 4 may backfire. There is little doubt that GOP legislators opposed the amendment because they feared it would disproportionately enfranchise Democrats. But their bill has led to a bizarre system in which Democratic counties are reenfranchising their voters while Republican-majority counties are not. Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Hillsborough all overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. They are Democratic strongholds in a state with notoriously close elections. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by about 113,000 votes. Meanwhile, Miami-Dade hopes to grant about 150,000 former felons the right to vote. The reenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of voters in primarily Democratic counties may very well swing the 2020 election.
Trump probably needs to win Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, in order to win in November. That is why he has been relentlessly campaigning there and even made the state his legal home. But there are signs of trouble. Former Republican Gov. Rick Scott unseated Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by just 10,333 votes out of 8.19 million despite dramatically outspending him. Since Trump took office, his approval rating in Florida has plummeted by 23 percentage points; in December, his net approval dipped underwater in the state.
Yet no Republican counties have initiated any kind of program to help voters take advantage of Amendment 4. As Kathryn DePalo-Gould, a political science professor at Florida International University, told WLRN, the effect of this asymmetry “could be dramatic,” since “some of these very, very red counties who had huge turnouts for Trump in 2016 could be missing out on some of these felons.”
A Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald analysis found that 52 percent of Floridians who lost their voting rights because of a felony conviction were Democrats. A third were independents, while just 14 percent were Republicans. In recent years, black voters were five times more likely to lose their voting rights than white voters; Democrats were three times more likely to lose their voting rights than Republicans. Overall, the majority of former felons in the state are white.
Given these odds, GOP-controlled counties will undoubtedly suppress the votes of some Democratic ex-felons within their borders. But they may well depress their own turnout numbers in a tight election year while their neighbors gain voting power.
In a better world, we would not view formerly incarcerated people in such starkly partisan terms. But that is not the world Republicans created when they mangled Amendment 4. Instead, they left ex-felons’ fundamental rights at the mercy of individual counties. And they did not, it seems, foresee the fact that this scheme might disenfranchise their own supporters.
For more than a year, Florida’s politicians have been embroiled in a fight over Amendment 4, which 65 percent of Florida voters approved in 2018. Amendment 4 abolished a Jim Crow era law that permanently stripped the right to vote from anyone convicted of a felony. But Florida Republicans quickly kneecapped it, passing a bill that forced individuals to pay all fines and fees associated with their sentences before regaining their voting rights. This legislative assault on Amendment 4 threatened to take away the franchise from more than 1.1 million Floridians; the state is a pioneer of cash register justice, imposing a mind-boggling array of “user fees” on defendants to finance its criminal justice system.
Following immense backlash from Democrats and civil rights advocates, though, legislators added a conciliatory section to their bill. It allowed courts to modify “the original sentencing order to no longer require completion” of the initial sentence. In other words, courts can waive fines and fees imposed as part of a sentence. By doing so, courts can clear the way for former felons to complete their sentences and immediately become eligible to vote.
To implement this section, Florida’s four most populous counties created “rocket dockets” to waive fines and fees en masse. Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Hillsborough—which, together, make up more than a third of the state’s population—launched programs to identify individuals who owe fines and fees and fast-track their cases to the courts. A judge then waives their financial obligations (except restitution to victims) and provides them with a court order declaring their sentences complete. This order reestablishes their right to vote. Courts, prosecutors, and public defenders all support these programs, and celebrity activist John Legend helped to publicize them by sitting in on a “rocket docket” session. Local officials provide individuals with voter registration forms as soon as their fines and fees are waived.
As WLRN pointed out on Sunday, these four counties’ swift action raises the possibility that Republicans’ plan to undercut Amendment 4 may backfire. There is little doubt that GOP legislators opposed the amendment because they feared it would disproportionately enfranchise Democrats. But their bill has led to a bizarre system in which Democratic counties are reenfranchising their voters while Republican-majority counties are not. Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Hillsborough all overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. They are Democratic strongholds in a state with notoriously close elections. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by about 113,000 votes. Meanwhile, Miami-Dade hopes to grant about 150,000 former felons the right to vote. The reenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of voters in primarily Democratic counties may very well swing the 2020 election.
Trump probably needs to win Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, in order to win in November. That is why he has been relentlessly campaigning there and even made the state his legal home. But there are signs of trouble. Former Republican Gov. Rick Scott unseated Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by just 10,333 votes out of 8.19 million despite dramatically outspending him. Since Trump took office, his approval rating in Florida has plummeted by 23 percentage points; in December, his net approval dipped underwater in the state.
Yet no Republican counties have initiated any kind of program to help voters take advantage of Amendment 4. As Kathryn DePalo-Gould, a political science professor at Florida International University, told WLRN, the effect of this asymmetry “could be dramatic,” since “some of these very, very red counties who had huge turnouts for Trump in 2016 could be missing out on some of these felons.”
A Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald analysis found that 52 percent of Floridians who lost their voting rights because of a felony conviction were Democrats. A third were independents, while just 14 percent were Republicans. In recent years, black voters were five times more likely to lose their voting rights than white voters; Democrats were three times more likely to lose their voting rights than Republicans. Overall, the majority of former felons in the state are white.
Given these odds, GOP-controlled counties will undoubtedly suppress the votes of some Democratic ex-felons within their borders. But they may well depress their own turnout numbers in a tight election year while their neighbors gain voting power.
In a better world, we would not view formerly incarcerated people in such starkly partisan terms. But that is not the world Republicans created when they mangled Amendment 4. Instead, they left ex-felons’ fundamental rights at the mercy of individual counties. And they did not, it seems, foresee the fact that this scheme might disenfranchise their own supporters.
PART OF THE SERIES: Voting Wrongs
Voter Suppression Exposes the Paradox of Black Citizenship in a Racist Society
BY William C. Anderson, Truthout
PUBLISHED December 28, 2019
Back citizenship has always been up for debate in the United States. The conditions in which Black people live — or survive — are a testament to this. Whether rich or poor, Black people live under the constant threat of state violence. There is no escape from it, and any Black person can fall victim to it. For many, citizenship can feel like a saving grace, despite continually being subject to constant threats. But the category of citizenship itself is a contradiction when we take Black people’s past and present circumstances into consideration. The state invalidates Black citizenship through violence in many ways. One specific way the state reveals this paradox is through voter suppression.
For Black America, gaining the right to vote has never been a complete event. Black suffrage following “emancipation” from slavery never completely materialized, despite constitutional amendments and reforms guaranteeing Black men, and later Black women, the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is seen as a momentous turning point for Black people and while its impact should not be lost on us, our rights have been under attack ever since. Not to mention, following that legislation, many more reforms have had to be implemented to continue trying to uphold Black people’s supposed right to vote. A “right” that requires consistent protection through reform begins to feel like a farce — especially when, despite those reforms, exercising that right remains a constant struggle.
More clarity on the matter comes when we fully take the history of Black citizenship into account. The Dred Scott case is one of many examples from the past that still has real life implications today. Scott was an enslaved man who sued for his freedom in 1847 and lost. That infamous decision stated that Black people were not and could not be citizens. A key takeaway here is that since Scott was not a citizen, he didn’t have the right to sue, and he didn’t have the right to be free. The ruling stated that Black people “were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” It’s hard to argue that’s not still the case now.
Voting is supposed to be the right of a citizen and is widely accepted as a human right throughout the world. But for Black people, being designated either citizen or human has never been a guarantee. Therefore, by extension, Black people can gather that efforts to suppress the Black vote are much deeper than partisan politics. Voter suppression is a modern-day reminder that Black people have still not been granted full citizenship. Black voters are especially susceptible to being “purged,” a process of removal where names can be removed from voter rolls due to ineligibility. Black voters are purged at higher rates now than they were a decade ago and it’s no accident.
Furthermore, rates of Black voters being removed from voter rolls are higher in places that were subject to federal oversight. To make matters even worse, oversight itself is weaker due to the fact that the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While it’s certain this did damage to Black voting ability, that certainty is shadowed by the precariousness that’s all Black residents of the United States have ever known.
One of the most flagrant examples of this in modern times was the 2018 defeat of Stacey Abrams, who nearly became Georgia’s governor. Had she won, she would have been the first Black woman to win a governor’s race anywhere in the nation. However, she lost due to what some experts describe as “the largest mass disenfranchisement in U.S. history.” Hundreds of thousands were purged and voting machines were locked up creating unnecessary lines at Black polling places. A 2018 study also found this was a trend, in which Black voters were waiting longer on average than white voters.
The problem is much more insidious than reformers would have people think. If reform itself were working, the cases above would not be so easily executable by the most blatantly staunch opponents of Black voters. The reason that these things can happen is because at the very foundation of the country itself is the racist notion that Black people are incapable of citizenship. Though many people are upset by racist voter suppression efforts, few are truly surprised; they are simply different manifestations of a long-running status quo.
At the national level, the Electoral College originally only counted Black people as three-fifths of a person for elections’ sake. The Black vote is now disregarded in other ways by this voting system that allows presidents to be elected despite not securing the popular vote. We often hear criticisms of Black people themselves, exhorting more voter participation in the Black community – but this misses the point. Black people could participate fully and that wouldn’t change the fact that an anti-Black system renders us neither human, nor citizen. We’re not going to vote our way into either category, either; voter suppression is actually a manifestation of our reality.
Anyone that suggests that “America wasn’t a democracy until Black Americans made it one,” neglects the fact that this is no democracy. The experience of Black people in the United States is one marked by the death and destruction wrought by racism, and we cannot escape that through the system that perpetuates it. We also won’t escape it through patriotism or nationalist sentiments that suggest Black people are forcing the United States to live up to its foundation. As pointed out by theorist Sylvia Wynter, those very ideals require the exclusion of Black people to situate who is and who is not a human, or a citizen for that matter, today.
The solution is clear: The abolition of racial capitalism and white supremacy is the only way out. Though voting can be useful in achieving incremental changes, it is not a requirement and is not a route to ultimate liberation. Only through the death of the oppression that kills us can we find new life.
For Black America, gaining the right to vote has never been a complete event. Black suffrage following “emancipation” from slavery never completely materialized, despite constitutional amendments and reforms guaranteeing Black men, and later Black women, the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is seen as a momentous turning point for Black people and while its impact should not be lost on us, our rights have been under attack ever since. Not to mention, following that legislation, many more reforms have had to be implemented to continue trying to uphold Black people’s supposed right to vote. A “right” that requires consistent protection through reform begins to feel like a farce — especially when, despite those reforms, exercising that right remains a constant struggle.
More clarity on the matter comes when we fully take the history of Black citizenship into account. The Dred Scott case is one of many examples from the past that still has real life implications today. Scott was an enslaved man who sued for his freedom in 1847 and lost. That infamous decision stated that Black people were not and could not be citizens. A key takeaway here is that since Scott was not a citizen, he didn’t have the right to sue, and he didn’t have the right to be free. The ruling stated that Black people “were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” It’s hard to argue that’s not still the case now.
Voting is supposed to be the right of a citizen and is widely accepted as a human right throughout the world. But for Black people, being designated either citizen or human has never been a guarantee. Therefore, by extension, Black people can gather that efforts to suppress the Black vote are much deeper than partisan politics. Voter suppression is a modern-day reminder that Black people have still not been granted full citizenship. Black voters are especially susceptible to being “purged,” a process of removal where names can be removed from voter rolls due to ineligibility. Black voters are purged at higher rates now than they were a decade ago and it’s no accident.
Furthermore, rates of Black voters being removed from voter rolls are higher in places that were subject to federal oversight. To make matters even worse, oversight itself is weaker due to the fact that the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While it’s certain this did damage to Black voting ability, that certainty is shadowed by the precariousness that’s all Black residents of the United States have ever known.
One of the most flagrant examples of this in modern times was the 2018 defeat of Stacey Abrams, who nearly became Georgia’s governor. Had she won, she would have been the first Black woman to win a governor’s race anywhere in the nation. However, she lost due to what some experts describe as “the largest mass disenfranchisement in U.S. history.” Hundreds of thousands were purged and voting machines were locked up creating unnecessary lines at Black polling places. A 2018 study also found this was a trend, in which Black voters were waiting longer on average than white voters.
The problem is much more insidious than reformers would have people think. If reform itself were working, the cases above would not be so easily executable by the most blatantly staunch opponents of Black voters. The reason that these things can happen is because at the very foundation of the country itself is the racist notion that Black people are incapable of citizenship. Though many people are upset by racist voter suppression efforts, few are truly surprised; they are simply different manifestations of a long-running status quo.
At the national level, the Electoral College originally only counted Black people as three-fifths of a person for elections’ sake. The Black vote is now disregarded in other ways by this voting system that allows presidents to be elected despite not securing the popular vote. We often hear criticisms of Black people themselves, exhorting more voter participation in the Black community – but this misses the point. Black people could participate fully and that wouldn’t change the fact that an anti-Black system renders us neither human, nor citizen. We’re not going to vote our way into either category, either; voter suppression is actually a manifestation of our reality.
Anyone that suggests that “America wasn’t a democracy until Black Americans made it one,” neglects the fact that this is no democracy. The experience of Black people in the United States is one marked by the death and destruction wrought by racism, and we cannot escape that through the system that perpetuates it. We also won’t escape it through patriotism or nationalist sentiments that suggest Black people are forcing the United States to live up to its foundation. As pointed out by theorist Sylvia Wynter, those very ideals require the exclusion of Black people to situate who is and who is not a human, or a citizen for that matter, today.
The solution is clear: The abolition of racial capitalism and white supremacy is the only way out. Though voting can be useful in achieving incremental changes, it is not a requirement and is not a route to ultimate liberation. Only through the death of the oppression that kills us can we find new life.
Georgia
Georgia does not have to put 100,000 voters back on rolls, judge rules
Ruling is blow to efforts by Democrat Stacey Abrams, though judge says those removed should receive more warning
Associated Press
the guardian
Sat 28 Dec 2019 10.01 EST
Georgia doesn’t have to put almost 100,000 voters back on its rolls, a federal judge ruled Friday.
The US district judge Steve C Jones ruled that a voting rights advocacy group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams is improperly asking him to interpret state law. Jones also said the group hasn’t proved that people who have been removed had their constitutional rights violated.
However, Jones also ordered Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to do more to warn people that they had been removed. The judge is especially singling out a south-west Georgia state House district where a 28 January special election is scheduled. Voters there who have been removed have only until Monday to re-register.
Raffensperger in October released a list of over 313,000 voters whose registrations were at risk of being canceled. Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, had asked for the purge to be halted.
Voter purges in Georgia became a hot-button issue during last year’s race for governor between Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, who won the race. Kemp served as secretary of state before being elected governor and oversaw aggressive voter purges during his tenure. Over 1.4m voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012 and 2018.
At issue is a Georgia law that says that voters should be moved to inactive status if they have no contact with the state for a period of time. Until earlier this year, the standard was three years of no contact, with voters then removed if they did not vote for another two general elections, a period of about seven years.
However, the general assembly amended the law in early 2019 to lengthen the no-contact period to five years, meaning voters have about nine years before their registrations are canceled. But the Republican Raffensperger went ahead with canceling registrations for people who were already on the inactive list instead of giving them two more years.
Abrams’ group didn’t contest the removal of about 190,000 voters who had moved or to whom mail couldn’t be delivered.
However, it said removing a remaining 120,000 would be unfair because it would disenfranchise or burden them solely because they chose not to vote, and because people who were removed might not find out until they showed up to vote. It would be too late for them then because Georgia doesn’t offer same-day registration.
The US district judge Steve C Jones ruled that a voting rights advocacy group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams is improperly asking him to interpret state law. Jones also said the group hasn’t proved that people who have been removed had their constitutional rights violated.
However, Jones also ordered Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to do more to warn people that they had been removed. The judge is especially singling out a south-west Georgia state House district where a 28 January special election is scheduled. Voters there who have been removed have only until Monday to re-register.
Raffensperger in October released a list of over 313,000 voters whose registrations were at risk of being canceled. Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, had asked for the purge to be halted.
Voter purges in Georgia became a hot-button issue during last year’s race for governor between Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, who won the race. Kemp served as secretary of state before being elected governor and oversaw aggressive voter purges during his tenure. Over 1.4m voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012 and 2018.
At issue is a Georgia law that says that voters should be moved to inactive status if they have no contact with the state for a period of time. Until earlier this year, the standard was three years of no contact, with voters then removed if they did not vote for another two general elections, a period of about seven years.
However, the general assembly amended the law in early 2019 to lengthen the no-contact period to five years, meaning voters have about nine years before their registrations are canceled. But the Republican Raffensperger went ahead with canceling registrations for people who were already on the inactive list instead of giving them two more years.
Abrams’ group didn’t contest the removal of about 190,000 voters who had moved or to whom mail couldn’t be delivered.
However, it said removing a remaining 120,000 would be unfair because it would disenfranchise or burden them solely because they chose not to vote, and because people who were removed might not find out until they showed up to vote. It would be too late for them then because Georgia doesn’t offer same-day registration.
the truth comes out!!!
Trump adviser caught on recording discussing how GOP “traditionally” relies on “suppressing votes”
The remark came during a discussion about poll watching, which Democrats called GOP attempts to intimidate voters
IGOR DERYSH - salon
DECEMBER 21, 2019 4:20PM (UTC)
A Trump campaign adviser told prominent Republicans in Wisconsin that the party “traditionally” relied on “suppressing votes,” according to an audio recording obtained by The Associated Press.
Justin Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to the Trump campaign, made the comment during a private meeting of the Republican National Lawyers Association’s Wisconsin chapter in November while discussing plans for more aggressive poll watching in 2020.
“Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” Clark said in the recording, according to the AP. “Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are. ... Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”
Clark later claimed to the AP that he was referring to false allegations that Republicans suppress voters.
“As should be clear from the context of my remarks, my point was that Republicans historically have been falsely accused of voter suppression and that it is time we stood up to defend our own voters,” Clark told the outlet. “Neither I nor anyone I know or work with would condone anyone’s vote being threatened or diluted and our efforts will be focused on preventing just that.”
But Democrats say Republicans have repeatedly used poll watching as a voter suppression tactic. Earlier this year, courts lifted a decades-long consent decree that banned the Republican National Committee from using “ballot security” measures. The consent decree was put in place in 1982 after the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit claiming that the RNC “attempted to intimidate the minority voters” in a New Jersey governor’s race.
“The RNC hired off-duty law enforcement officers to patrol polling places in minority precincts,” the lawsuit said.
“The officers wore armbands that read: ‘National Ballot Security Task Force,’ and some carried two-way radios and firearms.”
The RNC agreed to settle the case with a consent decree. The consent decree was later modified and extended in 1987 and 2009 after evidence showed additional violations.
Some Republican leaders have expressed concerns about watching polling places to police virtually nonexistent voter fraud because “many minorities view it as a fig leaf for racially charged voter suppression,” Politico reported earlier this year. But the party is not likely to back away after Trump urged his supporters ahead of the election to watch polling places in Democratic strongholds.
Clark said in the recording that the poll watching plan was initiated by Trump’s concerns about voter fraud.
“We’ve all seen the tweets about voter fraud, blah, blah, blah,” he said. “Every time we’re in with him, he asks what are we doing about voter fraud? What are we doing about voter fraud?’ The point is he’s committed to this, he believes in it and he will do whatever it takes to make sure it’s successful.”
Clark said the campaign would focus on areas near Green Bay and other mid-size cities where he baselessly alleged Democrats “cheat.”
“Cheating doesn’t just happen when you lose a county,” Clark said in the recording. “Cheating happens at the margin overall. What we’re going to be able to do, if we can recruit the bodies to do it, is focus on these places. That’s where our voters are.”
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, rejected Clark’s unsubstantiated cheating allegation and said the effort amounts to an attempt to “prevent people from voting.”
“This is bad for democracy,” he told the AP. “And frankly, I think… whoever does that, it will work to their disadvantage. It will make them look, frankly, stupid.”
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, said he is prepared to fight any voter suppression efforts. Kaul represented the DNC in 2016 when it accused the RNC of coordinating a voter intimidation effort with the Trump campaign. Kaul argued at the time that the campaign “repeatedly encouraged his supporters to engage in vigilante efforts” under the guise of finding potential voter fraud.
“It is vital that Wisconsinites have free and fair access to the polls, and that we protect the security and integrity of our elections,” Kaul told the AP in response to Clark’s comments. “The Wisconsin Department of Justice has been and will continue working with other agencies to protect our democratic process.”
Mike Brown, the deputy director of the progressive advocacy group One Wisconsin Now, told the AP that Clark’s comments show that Trump campaign is once again planning to use “underhanded tactics” in the election.
“The strategy to rig the rules in elections and give themselves an unfair partisan advantage goes to Donald Trump, the highest levels of his campaign and the top Republican leadership,” Browne said. “It’s clear there’s no law Donald Trump and his right-wing machine won’t bend, break or ignore to try to win the presidency.”
Justin Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to the Trump campaign, made the comment during a private meeting of the Republican National Lawyers Association’s Wisconsin chapter in November while discussing plans for more aggressive poll watching in 2020.
“Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” Clark said in the recording, according to the AP. “Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are. ... Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”
Clark later claimed to the AP that he was referring to false allegations that Republicans suppress voters.
“As should be clear from the context of my remarks, my point was that Republicans historically have been falsely accused of voter suppression and that it is time we stood up to defend our own voters,” Clark told the outlet. “Neither I nor anyone I know or work with would condone anyone’s vote being threatened or diluted and our efforts will be focused on preventing just that.”
But Democrats say Republicans have repeatedly used poll watching as a voter suppression tactic. Earlier this year, courts lifted a decades-long consent decree that banned the Republican National Committee from using “ballot security” measures. The consent decree was put in place in 1982 after the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit claiming that the RNC “attempted to intimidate the minority voters” in a New Jersey governor’s race.
“The RNC hired off-duty law enforcement officers to patrol polling places in minority precincts,” the lawsuit said.
“The officers wore armbands that read: ‘National Ballot Security Task Force,’ and some carried two-way radios and firearms.”
The RNC agreed to settle the case with a consent decree. The consent decree was later modified and extended in 1987 and 2009 after evidence showed additional violations.
Some Republican leaders have expressed concerns about watching polling places to police virtually nonexistent voter fraud because “many minorities view it as a fig leaf for racially charged voter suppression,” Politico reported earlier this year. But the party is not likely to back away after Trump urged his supporters ahead of the election to watch polling places in Democratic strongholds.
Clark said in the recording that the poll watching plan was initiated by Trump’s concerns about voter fraud.
“We’ve all seen the tweets about voter fraud, blah, blah, blah,” he said. “Every time we’re in with him, he asks what are we doing about voter fraud? What are we doing about voter fraud?’ The point is he’s committed to this, he believes in it and he will do whatever it takes to make sure it’s successful.”
Clark said the campaign would focus on areas near Green Bay and other mid-size cities where he baselessly alleged Democrats “cheat.”
“Cheating doesn’t just happen when you lose a county,” Clark said in the recording. “Cheating happens at the margin overall. What we’re going to be able to do, if we can recruit the bodies to do it, is focus on these places. That’s where our voters are.”
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, rejected Clark’s unsubstantiated cheating allegation and said the effort amounts to an attempt to “prevent people from voting.”
“This is bad for democracy,” he told the AP. “And frankly, I think… whoever does that, it will work to their disadvantage. It will make them look, frankly, stupid.”
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, said he is prepared to fight any voter suppression efforts. Kaul represented the DNC in 2016 when it accused the RNC of coordinating a voter intimidation effort with the Trump campaign. Kaul argued at the time that the campaign “repeatedly encouraged his supporters to engage in vigilante efforts” under the guise of finding potential voter fraud.
“It is vital that Wisconsinites have free and fair access to the polls, and that we protect the security and integrity of our elections,” Kaul told the AP in response to Clark’s comments. “The Wisconsin Department of Justice has been and will continue working with other agencies to protect our democratic process.”
Mike Brown, the deputy director of the progressive advocacy group One Wisconsin Now, told the AP that Clark’s comments show that Trump campaign is once again planning to use “underhanded tactics” in the election.
“The strategy to rig the rules in elections and give themselves an unfair partisan advantage goes to Donald Trump, the highest levels of his campaign and the top Republican leadership,” Browne said. “It’s clear there’s no law Donald Trump and his right-wing machine won’t bend, break or ignore to try to win the presidency.”
Georgia’s History of Voter Suppression Shows Other States What Not to Do
BY Susan McWethy, Truthout
PUBLISHED December 17, 2019
No one who was cognizant during the 2000 election will ever forget it. Hanging chads, pregnant chads, dimpled chads. Butterfly ballots. Men in suits. Nepotism. Voter purges. Bush v Gore.
Secretaries of state around the nation were breathing sighs of relief that it didn’t happen in their states. Poor Katherine Harris.
Nowhere was that sigh more audible than in Georgia, which had an even higher rate of undercounted votes than Florida (3.51 percent versus 2.9 percent). Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox was understandably relieved that the focus was on Florida that year, and she became determined to eradicate any possibility that Georgia might be next.
The cliché that the cure can be worse than the disease aptly describes the steps that many states have taken since that time, ostensibly in the pursuit of improving elections.
Georgia was at the head of the pack. By 2001, it had established a commission that made recommendations to the governor and legislators regarding a touchscreen electronic (DRE) system to be implemented uniformly throughout the state. Diebold was chosen from among several options, even though it wasn’t the most cost-effective bid, but the now-notorious revolving door between Diebold (now ES&S) and Georgia’s state government was just kicking in.
Georgia would be the first in the nation to hand management of its entire state’s elections over to a partisan, private company. Nothing could go wrong with this, right? Especially with untested voting equipment that leaves absolutely no paper evidence of voters’ intent, or even the possibility of audits or meaningful recounts.
But Georgia did not act alone. Enabled by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), other states responded with similar knee-jerk reactions and replaced their voting systems with unproven technology. HAVA’s newly-founded Election Assistance Commission had not yet fully established the voluntary standards and guidelines for election technology, so states were already spending the funds and interpreting the rules variously. By the 2004 presidential election, nearly one-third of registered voters were expected to cast their votes on unaccountable touchscreen computers.
Perhaps Americans should thank the Russians for finally jolting the nation out of its denial about the vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems, and the mess in which the U.S. finds itself almost 20 years later.
The genius of unaccountable systems is that, short of a court-mandated order, rigging, hacking or errors remain undetectable. Even so, many problems have always been obvious to voters: selected votes “jumping” on screens from one candidate to another, screens freezing, units randomly shutting down. These common failings cannot be hidden. How can voters trust that their votes were recorded correctly? Or even recorded at all?
As states such as Georgia bulldoze over these concerns, the nation careens into another possible election debacle, leaving voters fearing that the results of the 2020 election could lead to doubt and rancor.
Rinse, Repeat…
In 2018 a new commission was convened by Georgia’s then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp to review options for the next election system. The commission heard testimony from the cybersecurity community and election integrity activists who strongly urged them to change to a hand-marked, optical-scan paper ballot system with risk-limiting audits (and one machine per precinct for accessibility compliance). Cybersecurity experts advised that any computer that comes between a voter and her/his vote introduces the possibility of hacking or error. Machines malfunction. Audits cannot be performed without trustworthy recorded votes.
Despite that advice, but with the competing “help” of corporate lobbyists, the commission recommended a ballot-marking device (BMD) system. The state legislature, which had also heard compelling arguments recommending a hand-marked paper ballot system, quickly moved ahead to adopt a BMD system, potentially costing $150 million.
The Dominion BMD system Georgia selected is barely an improvement over the old DRE one. Basically, it’s another touchscreen computer system with a newer operating system, paper printouts and other tweaks, but is still vulnerable to attack. Secret, proprietary software and hardware are still at the heart of the system. Public oversight of the chain of command of the vote is still broken.
All Paper Ballots Are Not Equal
Voters are being lulled into a false sense of confidence that all is now well because the new BMDs provide paper printouts.
This paper feature is insidious for many reasons. First, it should not be called a paper ballot. Unfortunately, that is the vernacular that has been adopted by the media. An official name was coded into Georgia law: scanning ballot. A scanning ballot is not a full-face ballot that contains the names of all candidates and wording of initiatives. It is simply a summary list of voter selections that also contains a proprietary QR barcode that allegedly encodes what’s on the list. The QR barcode, not the human readable portion, is what is tabulated. Meanwhile, the human readable portion is barely readable: apart from the dearth of information it provides, the summary list is printed in tiny font.
It is unreasonable to burden voters with responsibility for identifying machine errors in the tiny print, especially with a long list of candidates and ballot measures. It is even worse to expect them to trust that a barcode accurately reflects what is in those lists. Research indicates that most voters do not take sufficient time to review these summary lists; many do not even glance at them before they are tabulated.
Finally, cognitive limitations, such as imperfect recall, prevent accurate and complete verifiability. This system takes longer to complete, creating longer lines at polling places.
Georgia’s Race to the Bottom
As states focus on getting every legitimate voter registered and equipped to vote, they must not take their eyes off the biggest prize of all: the technology undergirding the actual vote counts.
Voter suppression takes many forms. Georgia has earned itself a reputation as the epicenter of voting nightmares, especially for voters of color. Notorious as one of the first states to require photo voter ID, it continues to make news with its voter purges, polling location closures and numerous other affronts. It is hardly surprising that Fair Fight Action rose from the incompetence and malfeasance that Stacey Abrams perceived as a candidate for governor in 2018 against the man then in charge of elections, Secretary of State Brian Kemp.
The role that Georgia’s unverifiable electronic voting system has played in this suppression cannot be understated. Because entire elections can be rigged without detection, no one can be certain that any election in the state of Georgia since 2002 accurately reflected the will of the voters. Even with that lack of transparency, enough has been exposed to paint a dismal picture of the system: the state’s Election Center server was breached in 2016; confidential voter information for the entire state has been exposed; the state wiped election data from the state server just days after a lawsuit was filed requiring the data for examination; an unexplained undervote of possibly 127,000 votes occurred in the lieutenant governor’s race in 2018; the 2018 ballots were built on home equipment by corporate employees.
If this is what is known, imagine the jaw-dropping truth lurking in proprietary cybermemory, and what, if insecure voting technology continues to proliferate, it portends for the future of our democracy’s most treasured ritual.
As other states and districts consider different voting technologies, they would do well to avoid Georgia’s example. Most of the new BMD systems offer little confidence that matters will improve. They are within the purview of private companies whose trade secrets give them greater access to the voting process than voters are entitled to. They are still computer-based systems, with all the vulnerabilities implicit with computers. The ones with barcode summary lists fall far short of providing adequate voter verifiability.
It is enough to make voters long for the days of hanging chads.
Secretaries of state around the nation were breathing sighs of relief that it didn’t happen in their states. Poor Katherine Harris.
Nowhere was that sigh more audible than in Georgia, which had an even higher rate of undercounted votes than Florida (3.51 percent versus 2.9 percent). Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox was understandably relieved that the focus was on Florida that year, and she became determined to eradicate any possibility that Georgia might be next.
The cliché that the cure can be worse than the disease aptly describes the steps that many states have taken since that time, ostensibly in the pursuit of improving elections.
Georgia was at the head of the pack. By 2001, it had established a commission that made recommendations to the governor and legislators regarding a touchscreen electronic (DRE) system to be implemented uniformly throughout the state. Diebold was chosen from among several options, even though it wasn’t the most cost-effective bid, but the now-notorious revolving door between Diebold (now ES&S) and Georgia’s state government was just kicking in.
Georgia would be the first in the nation to hand management of its entire state’s elections over to a partisan, private company. Nothing could go wrong with this, right? Especially with untested voting equipment that leaves absolutely no paper evidence of voters’ intent, or even the possibility of audits or meaningful recounts.
But Georgia did not act alone. Enabled by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), other states responded with similar knee-jerk reactions and replaced their voting systems with unproven technology. HAVA’s newly-founded Election Assistance Commission had not yet fully established the voluntary standards and guidelines for election technology, so states were already spending the funds and interpreting the rules variously. By the 2004 presidential election, nearly one-third of registered voters were expected to cast their votes on unaccountable touchscreen computers.
Perhaps Americans should thank the Russians for finally jolting the nation out of its denial about the vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems, and the mess in which the U.S. finds itself almost 20 years later.
The genius of unaccountable systems is that, short of a court-mandated order, rigging, hacking or errors remain undetectable. Even so, many problems have always been obvious to voters: selected votes “jumping” on screens from one candidate to another, screens freezing, units randomly shutting down. These common failings cannot be hidden. How can voters trust that their votes were recorded correctly? Or even recorded at all?
As states such as Georgia bulldoze over these concerns, the nation careens into another possible election debacle, leaving voters fearing that the results of the 2020 election could lead to doubt and rancor.
Rinse, Repeat…
In 2018 a new commission was convened by Georgia’s then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp to review options for the next election system. The commission heard testimony from the cybersecurity community and election integrity activists who strongly urged them to change to a hand-marked, optical-scan paper ballot system with risk-limiting audits (and one machine per precinct for accessibility compliance). Cybersecurity experts advised that any computer that comes between a voter and her/his vote introduces the possibility of hacking or error. Machines malfunction. Audits cannot be performed without trustworthy recorded votes.
Despite that advice, but with the competing “help” of corporate lobbyists, the commission recommended a ballot-marking device (BMD) system. The state legislature, which had also heard compelling arguments recommending a hand-marked paper ballot system, quickly moved ahead to adopt a BMD system, potentially costing $150 million.
The Dominion BMD system Georgia selected is barely an improvement over the old DRE one. Basically, it’s another touchscreen computer system with a newer operating system, paper printouts and other tweaks, but is still vulnerable to attack. Secret, proprietary software and hardware are still at the heart of the system. Public oversight of the chain of command of the vote is still broken.
All Paper Ballots Are Not Equal
Voters are being lulled into a false sense of confidence that all is now well because the new BMDs provide paper printouts.
This paper feature is insidious for many reasons. First, it should not be called a paper ballot. Unfortunately, that is the vernacular that has been adopted by the media. An official name was coded into Georgia law: scanning ballot. A scanning ballot is not a full-face ballot that contains the names of all candidates and wording of initiatives. It is simply a summary list of voter selections that also contains a proprietary QR barcode that allegedly encodes what’s on the list. The QR barcode, not the human readable portion, is what is tabulated. Meanwhile, the human readable portion is barely readable: apart from the dearth of information it provides, the summary list is printed in tiny font.
It is unreasonable to burden voters with responsibility for identifying machine errors in the tiny print, especially with a long list of candidates and ballot measures. It is even worse to expect them to trust that a barcode accurately reflects what is in those lists. Research indicates that most voters do not take sufficient time to review these summary lists; many do not even glance at them before they are tabulated.
Finally, cognitive limitations, such as imperfect recall, prevent accurate and complete verifiability. This system takes longer to complete, creating longer lines at polling places.
Georgia’s Race to the Bottom
As states focus on getting every legitimate voter registered and equipped to vote, they must not take their eyes off the biggest prize of all: the technology undergirding the actual vote counts.
Voter suppression takes many forms. Georgia has earned itself a reputation as the epicenter of voting nightmares, especially for voters of color. Notorious as one of the first states to require photo voter ID, it continues to make news with its voter purges, polling location closures and numerous other affronts. It is hardly surprising that Fair Fight Action rose from the incompetence and malfeasance that Stacey Abrams perceived as a candidate for governor in 2018 against the man then in charge of elections, Secretary of State Brian Kemp.
The role that Georgia’s unverifiable electronic voting system has played in this suppression cannot be understated. Because entire elections can be rigged without detection, no one can be certain that any election in the state of Georgia since 2002 accurately reflected the will of the voters. Even with that lack of transparency, enough has been exposed to paint a dismal picture of the system: the state’s Election Center server was breached in 2016; confidential voter information for the entire state has been exposed; the state wiped election data from the state server just days after a lawsuit was filed requiring the data for examination; an unexplained undervote of possibly 127,000 votes occurred in the lieutenant governor’s race in 2018; the 2018 ballots were built on home equipment by corporate employees.
If this is what is known, imagine the jaw-dropping truth lurking in proprietary cybermemory, and what, if insecure voting technology continues to proliferate, it portends for the future of our democracy’s most treasured ritual.
As other states and districts consider different voting technologies, they would do well to avoid Georgia’s example. Most of the new BMD systems offer little confidence that matters will improve. They are within the purview of private companies whose trade secrets give them greater access to the voting process than voters are entitled to. They are still computer-based systems, with all the vulnerabilities implicit with computers. The ones with barcode summary lists fall far short of providing adequate voter verifiability.
It is enough to make voters long for the days of hanging chads.
Wisconsin Republicans Just Can't Get Enough Voter Suppression
From gerrymandering to voter caging, Wisconsin Republicans will stop at nothing to suppress the voice of the people.
By Chris capper Li.. - crooks & liars
12/14/19 7:05am
Republicans really, really hate it when people vote. They know that the more people that vote, the worse things will go for them. But instead of coming up with policies that the people would support, the Republicans would rather just squash the voice of the people. One would be hard pressed to find where this is truer than Wisconsin.
There was the sordid gerrymandering which was done in secret which boxed in Democrats so badly that even when they receive the majority of voters, they still have a minority in the legislature.
The Republicans also passed a Voter ID law so oppressive that it's caused an estimated one percent reduction in voter turnout:
How much did Wisconsin’s voter identification requirement matter in 2016? We conducted a survey of registered nonvoters in the counties surrounding the cities of Milwaukee and Madison to estimate the number of registrants who experienced ID-related voting difficulties in the 201 presidential election. We estimate that 10 percent of nonvoters in these counties lack a qualifying voter ID or report that voter ID was at least a partial reason why they did not vote in 2016, and six percent of nonvoters lacked a voter ID or cited voter ID as their primary reason for not voting. Theoretically, we argue that voter ID requirements ‘‘directly’’ affect voters who lack qualifying IDs but also ‘‘indirectly’’ affect voters who are confused about their compliance with the law. We find evidence of such confusion, with many respondents mistakenly believing that they did not have th necessary ID to vote when they actually did. Our analysis permits us to calculate bounds on the possible turnout effect in 2016. Most of our credible estimates suggest that the voter ID requirement reduced turnout in these counties by up to one percentage point.
For their latest stunt, the right returned to one of their favorite things - voter caging.
The misnamed Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty - a Bradley Foundation front group - filed a law suit demanding that nearly a quarter million voters be purged from voter rolls because they may have moved because they didn't respond to a letter within a month to voter caging letters.
Oh, and in what I am sure is just pure coincidence (not really), these voter caging letters just so happened to not be sent out in an impartial manner, but to target Democratic areas and areas with the highest African American populations, like Milwaukee and Madison:
The letters went to about 7% of Wisconsin's registered voters, but were concentrated more heavily in some parts of the state than others.
Milwaukee and Madison — the state's Democratic strongholds — account for 14% of Wisconsin's registered voters but received 23% of the letters.
Across the state, 55% of the letters went to municipalities where Democrat Hillary Clinton out-polled Trump in 2016.
This decision will be almost certainly appealed immediately, but don't hold your breath for a better outcome. The right wing special interests control five of the seven seats on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The real kicker is that these right wing snowflakes are the first to scream about changing the will of the people when the issue is something like holding a criminal Republican president* accountable for his criminal behaviors.
There was the sordid gerrymandering which was done in secret which boxed in Democrats so badly that even when they receive the majority of voters, they still have a minority in the legislature.
The Republicans also passed a Voter ID law so oppressive that it's caused an estimated one percent reduction in voter turnout:
How much did Wisconsin’s voter identification requirement matter in 2016? We conducted a survey of registered nonvoters in the counties surrounding the cities of Milwaukee and Madison to estimate the number of registrants who experienced ID-related voting difficulties in the 201 presidential election. We estimate that 10 percent of nonvoters in these counties lack a qualifying voter ID or report that voter ID was at least a partial reason why they did not vote in 2016, and six percent of nonvoters lacked a voter ID or cited voter ID as their primary reason for not voting. Theoretically, we argue that voter ID requirements ‘‘directly’’ affect voters who lack qualifying IDs but also ‘‘indirectly’’ affect voters who are confused about their compliance with the law. We find evidence of such confusion, with many respondents mistakenly believing that they did not have th necessary ID to vote when they actually did. Our analysis permits us to calculate bounds on the possible turnout effect in 2016. Most of our credible estimates suggest that the voter ID requirement reduced turnout in these counties by up to one percentage point.
For their latest stunt, the right returned to one of their favorite things - voter caging.
The misnamed Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty - a Bradley Foundation front group - filed a law suit demanding that nearly a quarter million voters be purged from voter rolls because they may have moved because they didn't respond to a letter within a month to voter caging letters.
Oh, and in what I am sure is just pure coincidence (not really), these voter caging letters just so happened to not be sent out in an impartial manner, but to target Democratic areas and areas with the highest African American populations, like Milwaukee and Madison:
The letters went to about 7% of Wisconsin's registered voters, but were concentrated more heavily in some parts of the state than others.
Milwaukee and Madison — the state's Democratic strongholds — account for 14% of Wisconsin's registered voters but received 23% of the letters.
Across the state, 55% of the letters went to municipalities where Democrat Hillary Clinton out-polled Trump in 2016.
This decision will be almost certainly appealed immediately, but don't hold your breath for a better outcome. The right wing special interests control five of the seven seats on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The real kicker is that these right wing snowflakes are the first to scream about changing the will of the people when the issue is something like holding a criminal Republican president* accountable for his criminal behaviors.
Kansas Kills Kris Kobach’s National Voter Purge System
BY Greg Palast, Truthout
PUBLISHED December 13, 2019
It’s Jim Crow all over again,” is how 98-year-old civil rights legend Rev. Joseph Lowery describes “Interstate Crosscheck,” the questionable “purge” operation run by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach that has cost 1.1 million voters their registrations in 30 states. The victims: mostly voters of color.
Now, thanks to legal action by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Kansas, Mr. Crow may be dead… at least temporarily.
Truthout talked with the ACLU’s chief litigator in Kansas, Lauren Bonds, about the settlement the group reached with Kansas’ secretary of state’s office. Since Kansas compiles and supplies the purge lists for other states (most of them Republican controlled), shutting down the Kansas program shuts down Crosscheck nationwide.
Here’s how Crosscheck works — and how the ACLU has shut it down, at least for now.
“Interstate Crosscheck” purported to be a way to hunt down anyone voting or registering in two states — by “crosschecking” registration rolls from 30 states.
Removing voters registered in two states sounds reasonable, except for this: Less than one in a million of the astonishing 7.2 million voters tagged had, in fact, voted twice.
In 2017, President Trump appointed Kobach to head a federal commission on voter fraud, which Kobach was hoping to use to force all 50 states to adopt Crosscheck. The commission was disbanded when it refused to open its records to the public.
Rolling Stone and Truthout reported that Crosscheck tagged a breathtaking one in six Latinx voters, one in seven Asian Americans and one in nine Black voters in Crosscheck states for removal from the rolls — ultimately scrubbing an estimated 1.1 million registrations before the 2016 election.
But the ACLU did not halt Crosscheck because it is grossly inaccurate and racially biased. Rather, the civil liberties group sued because of the sloppy way Kobach’s office handled voters’ private data. Using unencrypted files and insecure servers led to the public release of more than 1,000 Kansans’ private information, including at least part of voters’ social security numbers.
Kobach’s cavalier mishandling of citizens’ private information violated the Kansas Public Records Act and the 14th Amendment’s right to privacy.
Now, given that Crosscheck has been proven to be a racially biased attack on the right to vote, the ACLU’s collateral attack reminds one of jailing mobster Al Capone for tax evasion. But, it worked. The ACLU’s Bonds says that this “ends Crosscheck as we know it.”
The state agrees not to accept any more voter registration lists nor create scrub lists for other states unless Kansas gets all the other states to agree to elaborate data security procedures, unlikely in the foreseeable future.
While this does not technically prohibit the return of Crosscheck, Bond says that the “underlying theme” of the settlement agreement with current Secretary of State Scott Schwab is that “this won’t be revived for 2020.”
No other state is known to have come forward to take the place of Kansas to operate the system, though Kobach, the “CEO,” could, as a private citizen, continue to create purge lists for states.
That makes Kansas voting rights activist Anita Parsa more than concerned. The founder of #StopCrosscheck says, “Even if Secretary Schwab cleans up Crosscheck’s data security flaws, … the matching issues [remain] equally as bad.”
Kobach, currently running for Kansas’ open U.S. Senate seat, did not respond to our request for comment.
99 Percent “False Positives”
The ACLU noted that, Kobach’s Crosscheck matching algorithm “produced false positives more than 99 percent of the time.”
No wonder. Here is a typical, unedited segment of the computer list of voters supposed to be registered in two states.
Note that not a single middle name matches. James RANDOLPH Johnson of Virginia is supposed to be the same voter as James BIDIE Johnson of Kansas. James HUNTER Johnson of Virginia is supposed to be the same voter as James CODY Johnson of Kansas.
What is clearly seen here is that Crosscheck is merely a compendium of common names: Johnson, Jones, Rodriguez, Garcia and Kim. That’s how Crosscheck effectively targets voters of color. According to the census, 85 of the 100 most common names are those most commonly held by people of color.
As database expert Mark Swedlund noted, there are 858,000 Garcia’s in the U.S. If your name is José Garcia, the chances are you will be accused of voting in 27 states.
When confronted by this reporter with the Crosscheck list as shown here, Kobach launched into a series of prevarications, denying the authenticity of the match list (verified by the state of Virginia), and denying that anyone would lose their vote based on this information. In fact, despite Kobach’s denial, Virginia reported the removal of 41,637 voters in a single year based on Kobach’s list.
Given that Kansas won’t be generating new Crosscheck scrub lists, the danger appears to be over. However, Gary Flowers, former national field director for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, reached in Richmond, Virginia, noted that his state is still purging voters based on Kobach’s old lists. “We’ve still got a problem — despite a new Democratic governor and legislature.” Flowers, now a well-known Virginia radio host, is preparing his own legal actions against the state’s continued use of Crosscheck.
One victim of Crosscheck, Hank Sanders, interviewed in Selma, Alabama, said he was particularly shocked to find his name missing from the voter rolls, because his name was on the ballot — as Senator Sanders, who has represented Selma for two decades.
After he was informed he’d been “purged,” the senator took a walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, famed as the scene of the “Bloody Sunday” beatings of the marchers who originally won the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Sanders, a voting rights attorney, said the secretive use of Crosscheck, despite the passage of the Voting Rights Act, proves that “the right to vote is always going to be under attack.” That’s why, he says, we must literally and figuratively, “march over the [Edmund Pettus Bridge] every chance we get. Because when we march, we go forward. When we stop marching, we go back.”
Now, thanks to legal action by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Kansas, Mr. Crow may be dead… at least temporarily.
Truthout talked with the ACLU’s chief litigator in Kansas, Lauren Bonds, about the settlement the group reached with Kansas’ secretary of state’s office. Since Kansas compiles and supplies the purge lists for other states (most of them Republican controlled), shutting down the Kansas program shuts down Crosscheck nationwide.
Here’s how Crosscheck works — and how the ACLU has shut it down, at least for now.
“Interstate Crosscheck” purported to be a way to hunt down anyone voting or registering in two states — by “crosschecking” registration rolls from 30 states.
Removing voters registered in two states sounds reasonable, except for this: Less than one in a million of the astonishing 7.2 million voters tagged had, in fact, voted twice.
In 2017, President Trump appointed Kobach to head a federal commission on voter fraud, which Kobach was hoping to use to force all 50 states to adopt Crosscheck. The commission was disbanded when it refused to open its records to the public.
Rolling Stone and Truthout reported that Crosscheck tagged a breathtaking one in six Latinx voters, one in seven Asian Americans and one in nine Black voters in Crosscheck states for removal from the rolls — ultimately scrubbing an estimated 1.1 million registrations before the 2016 election.
But the ACLU did not halt Crosscheck because it is grossly inaccurate and racially biased. Rather, the civil liberties group sued because of the sloppy way Kobach’s office handled voters’ private data. Using unencrypted files and insecure servers led to the public release of more than 1,000 Kansans’ private information, including at least part of voters’ social security numbers.
Kobach’s cavalier mishandling of citizens’ private information violated the Kansas Public Records Act and the 14th Amendment’s right to privacy.
Now, given that Crosscheck has been proven to be a racially biased attack on the right to vote, the ACLU’s collateral attack reminds one of jailing mobster Al Capone for tax evasion. But, it worked. The ACLU’s Bonds says that this “ends Crosscheck as we know it.”
The state agrees not to accept any more voter registration lists nor create scrub lists for other states unless Kansas gets all the other states to agree to elaborate data security procedures, unlikely in the foreseeable future.
While this does not technically prohibit the return of Crosscheck, Bond says that the “underlying theme” of the settlement agreement with current Secretary of State Scott Schwab is that “this won’t be revived for 2020.”
No other state is known to have come forward to take the place of Kansas to operate the system, though Kobach, the “CEO,” could, as a private citizen, continue to create purge lists for states.
That makes Kansas voting rights activist Anita Parsa more than concerned. The founder of #StopCrosscheck says, “Even if Secretary Schwab cleans up Crosscheck’s data security flaws, … the matching issues [remain] equally as bad.”
Kobach, currently running for Kansas’ open U.S. Senate seat, did not respond to our request for comment.
99 Percent “False Positives”
The ACLU noted that, Kobach’s Crosscheck matching algorithm “produced false positives more than 99 percent of the time.”
No wonder. Here is a typical, unedited segment of the computer list of voters supposed to be registered in two states.
Note that not a single middle name matches. James RANDOLPH Johnson of Virginia is supposed to be the same voter as James BIDIE Johnson of Kansas. James HUNTER Johnson of Virginia is supposed to be the same voter as James CODY Johnson of Kansas.
What is clearly seen here is that Crosscheck is merely a compendium of common names: Johnson, Jones, Rodriguez, Garcia and Kim. That’s how Crosscheck effectively targets voters of color. According to the census, 85 of the 100 most common names are those most commonly held by people of color.
As database expert Mark Swedlund noted, there are 858,000 Garcia’s in the U.S. If your name is José Garcia, the chances are you will be accused of voting in 27 states.
When confronted by this reporter with the Crosscheck list as shown here, Kobach launched into a series of prevarications, denying the authenticity of the match list (verified by the state of Virginia), and denying that anyone would lose their vote based on this information. In fact, despite Kobach’s denial, Virginia reported the removal of 41,637 voters in a single year based on Kobach’s list.
Given that Kansas won’t be generating new Crosscheck scrub lists, the danger appears to be over. However, Gary Flowers, former national field director for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, reached in Richmond, Virginia, noted that his state is still purging voters based on Kobach’s old lists. “We’ve still got a problem — despite a new Democratic governor and legislature.” Flowers, now a well-known Virginia radio host, is preparing his own legal actions against the state’s continued use of Crosscheck.
One victim of Crosscheck, Hank Sanders, interviewed in Selma, Alabama, said he was particularly shocked to find his name missing from the voter rolls, because his name was on the ballot — as Senator Sanders, who has represented Selma for two decades.
After he was informed he’d been “purged,” the senator took a walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, famed as the scene of the “Bloody Sunday” beatings of the marchers who originally won the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Sanders, a voting rights attorney, said the secretive use of Crosscheck, despite the passage of the Voting Rights Act, proves that “the right to vote is always going to be under attack.” That’s why, he says, we must literally and figuratively, “march over the [Edmund Pettus Bridge] every chance we get. Because when we march, we go forward. When we stop marching, we go back.”
The fight to vote
New Hampshire
Republicans win in effort to limit student vote ahead of key 2020 races
‘They are kids voting liberal,’ a New Hampshire Republican said in 2011 as legal battle over student voting in the state continues
Sam Levine in New York
Thu 5 Dec 2019 06.00 EST
Maggie Flaherty grew up in a small town in California, but after she moved to New Hampshire to attend Dartmouth College, she registered to vote in the state where she would be spending at least four years.
Now she is embroiled in a fight against Republicans in the state that is being watched across the country.
Flaherty and a fellow student are challenging a Republican-backed law that is making it harder for many out-of-state students and other temporary residents to cast a ballot in a state with outsized national influence.
The lawsuit has been endorsed by the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic presidential hopefuls. But last week, Flaherty and her colleague Caroline Casey hit another obstacle when the US district judge Joseph LaPlante denied a request to block the law just months before the primary elections.
New Hampshire is a small swing state where both local and state-wide races can be decided by razor-thin margins. Donald Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by just 2,736 votes in 2016. The same year, Maggie Hassan, also a Democrat, defeated Kelly Ayotte for a Senate seat by just 1,017 votes. The Democratic primary in February and general election in November are expected to be closely fought.
Republicans in the state have complained about college students voting before. “They are kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience,” William O’Brien, a Republican and then the New Hampshire house speaker, said in 2011. There are nationwide efforts to restrict the surging student vote, but the party says the new law is merely intended to bring New Hampshire in line with other states.
The law, which went into effect on 1 July, mandates that anyone who has registered to vote and intends to drive while living in the state must obtain a New Hampshire driver’s license and register their vehicle within 60 days of signing up.
The ACLU of New Hampshire, which is bringing the suit, contends that in fact many states allow out-of-state students and other transient people, such as military personnel, to vote and exempts them from the requirement to get an in-state license, said the ACLU lawyer Gilles Bissonnette.
It may seem like a benign change, but critics of the law say it has created mass confusion and imposes an unfair burden on college students, and amounts to a “poll tax” on voting because of the costs involved in getting a license. “There’s nothing that’s really gained by this, there’s no way to really enforce it, so what’s the point of it?” said Kate Corriveau, the New Hampshire director of America Votes, an advocacy group. “The point of it, as we’ve kind of seen, is that it’s confusing. And it’s a little bit intimidating.”
It is also not clear how New Hampshire officials will check and enforce whether new voters with out-of-state documents get an in-state license. That uncertainty could deter students from signing up to get on the voter rolls, said Joseph Ramirez, a senior at the University of New Hampshire who has worked to educate people about the new law. “It’s almost like a scare tactic,” he said. “I’ve heard things like if you’re going to get pulled over, then they might fine you” if you have an out-of-state license, he said.
Warren’s campaign said in a court filing that the law was so confusing that her campaign could not advise college students on what they should do if they have an out-of-state license and want to vote in New Hampshire.
“We’re here to say two things: principle, everybody ought to be able to vote, but the second part is to say we have evidence that it’s causing a great deal of confusion,” Warren told New Hampshire Public Radio in November. “And when you’ve got confusion, you suppress voting.”
Michael Herron, a Dartmouth professor retained as an expert by the ACLU in the court case, found that the law would impact the young and transient population the most. While 1% of the total number people who cast a ballot in New Hampshire in the 2016 general election used an out-of-state ID, at least 36% of the college students who voted used one.
In his Wednesday ruling, LaPlante denied that the law was confusing and pointed to a November memo from New Hampshire officials outlining how it would work. Still, LaPlante asked the New Hampshire supreme court to clarify several aspects of the law, only adding to the uncertainty. The court could interpret the law in a way that is less restrictive to the students.
Flaherty, who is hoping to help students register to vote regardless of the decision, said students shouldn’t be penalized for wanting to vote.
“We fall into this unique category of wanting to be engaged, being informed people that are getting a higher education, but also we don’t know where we’re going to be,” she said. “We’re in kind of a limbo.”
Now she is embroiled in a fight against Republicans in the state that is being watched across the country.
Flaherty and a fellow student are challenging a Republican-backed law that is making it harder for many out-of-state students and other temporary residents to cast a ballot in a state with outsized national influence.
The lawsuit has been endorsed by the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic presidential hopefuls. But last week, Flaherty and her colleague Caroline Casey hit another obstacle when the US district judge Joseph LaPlante denied a request to block the law just months before the primary elections.
New Hampshire is a small swing state where both local and state-wide races can be decided by razor-thin margins. Donald Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by just 2,736 votes in 2016. The same year, Maggie Hassan, also a Democrat, defeated Kelly Ayotte for a Senate seat by just 1,017 votes. The Democratic primary in February and general election in November are expected to be closely fought.
Republicans in the state have complained about college students voting before. “They are kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience,” William O’Brien, a Republican and then the New Hampshire house speaker, said in 2011. There are nationwide efforts to restrict the surging student vote, but the party says the new law is merely intended to bring New Hampshire in line with other states.
The law, which went into effect on 1 July, mandates that anyone who has registered to vote and intends to drive while living in the state must obtain a New Hampshire driver’s license and register their vehicle within 60 days of signing up.
The ACLU of New Hampshire, which is bringing the suit, contends that in fact many states allow out-of-state students and other transient people, such as military personnel, to vote and exempts them from the requirement to get an in-state license, said the ACLU lawyer Gilles Bissonnette.
It may seem like a benign change, but critics of the law say it has created mass confusion and imposes an unfair burden on college students, and amounts to a “poll tax” on voting because of the costs involved in getting a license. “There’s nothing that’s really gained by this, there’s no way to really enforce it, so what’s the point of it?” said Kate Corriveau, the New Hampshire director of America Votes, an advocacy group. “The point of it, as we’ve kind of seen, is that it’s confusing. And it’s a little bit intimidating.”
It is also not clear how New Hampshire officials will check and enforce whether new voters with out-of-state documents get an in-state license. That uncertainty could deter students from signing up to get on the voter rolls, said Joseph Ramirez, a senior at the University of New Hampshire who has worked to educate people about the new law. “It’s almost like a scare tactic,” he said. “I’ve heard things like if you’re going to get pulled over, then they might fine you” if you have an out-of-state license, he said.
Warren’s campaign said in a court filing that the law was so confusing that her campaign could not advise college students on what they should do if they have an out-of-state license and want to vote in New Hampshire.
“We’re here to say two things: principle, everybody ought to be able to vote, but the second part is to say we have evidence that it’s causing a great deal of confusion,” Warren told New Hampshire Public Radio in November. “And when you’ve got confusion, you suppress voting.”
Michael Herron, a Dartmouth professor retained as an expert by the ACLU in the court case, found that the law would impact the young and transient population the most. While 1% of the total number people who cast a ballot in New Hampshire in the 2016 general election used an out-of-state ID, at least 36% of the college students who voted used one.
In his Wednesday ruling, LaPlante denied that the law was confusing and pointed to a November memo from New Hampshire officials outlining how it would work. Still, LaPlante asked the New Hampshire supreme court to clarify several aspects of the law, only adding to the uncertainty. The court could interpret the law in a way that is less restrictive to the students.
Flaherty, who is hoping to help students register to vote regardless of the decision, said students shouldn’t be penalized for wanting to vote.
“We fall into this unique category of wanting to be engaged, being informed people that are getting a higher education, but also we don’t know where we’re going to be,” she said. “We’re in kind of a limbo.”
The myth of voter fraud – and the truth about what’s threatening our elections
November 24, 2019
By Robert Reich - raw story
Donald Trump and his enablers have been making claims of widespread voter fraud, alleging millions of people are voting illegally in order to rig our elections.
Baloney. Let’s look at the facts and debunk their myths once and for all.
They claim millions of Americans are voting twice, using multiple registrations in different districts.
So how often does double voting really occur? An analysis of the 2012 presidential election found that out of 129 million votes cast, 0.02% – that’s two one hundredths of one percent – were double votes – which were likely the result of measurement error. This is a far cry from Donald Trump’s claims that millions of people were registered in two different states in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump and his enablers claim non-citizens are voting in droves. Trump himself said that thousands of undocumented immigrants voted in 2016.
Another lie. According to the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice, of 23.5 million votes cast in districts with high populations of non-citizens only 30 – I repeat, thirty – possible incidents of improper non-citizen voting were referred for further investigation.
They claim voter impersonation is rampant at the polls.
False. A 12-year study of election data found only 10 cases of voter impersonation out of 146 million registered voters. Ten.
So if voter fraud really isn’t a problem, why do Trump, Republicans in Congress, and their allies at Fox News keep perpetuating this myth? For one simple reason: To enact restrictive voting laws intended to keep voters from the polls.
Policies established in the name of election security – including voter ID laws, needless registration deadlines, limited access to polling places, and purges of the voter rolls – make it harder for Americans to vote. It is the same tactic that has been used throughout our history to disenfranchise low-income Americans and people of color.
Luckily, many of these laws have been struck down in the courts. In 2016, a district judge in Wisconsin found “utterly no evidence” of widespread voter fraud justifying its voter ID law. In Texas, another judge found their voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act, making it harder for African-Americans and Latinos to vote.
But many of these laws are still on the books because in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted crucial aspects of the Voting Rights Act.
Congress needs to update the Act to prevent states from suppressing votes.
Meanwhile, Trump and Republicans in Congress are turning a blind eye to the real threats facing our democracy: election fraud, and foreign interference.
In 2018, a Republican operative stole votes from Democrats in a North Carolina congressional race with a quote, “coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme.” After the ballots were counted, the Republican candidate appeared to have won by about 900 votes. But the fraud was so glaring that the state board of elections refused to certify the results and called for a special election.
The other real threat is foreign interference in our elections, as Russia did in 2016.
We now know for a fact that Trump is encouraging foreign leaders to interfere in our elections — asking the President of Ukraine to investigate his political opponents in exchange for military aid and publicly calling on Russia and China to also interfere.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell continues to block common-sense legislation to protect our elections against future foreign interference, such as requiring all voting machines to have backup paper ballots and imposing automatic sanctions for nations that interfere in elections. To have safe and secure elections in 2020 and beyond, we need to pass this legislation.
The next time you hear Trump and his enablers claim widespread voter fraud, know the truth. Their lies are intended to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, while they ignore the real threats to our democracy.
Baloney. Let’s look at the facts and debunk their myths once and for all.
They claim millions of Americans are voting twice, using multiple registrations in different districts.
So how often does double voting really occur? An analysis of the 2012 presidential election found that out of 129 million votes cast, 0.02% – that’s two one hundredths of one percent – were double votes – which were likely the result of measurement error. This is a far cry from Donald Trump’s claims that millions of people were registered in two different states in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump and his enablers claim non-citizens are voting in droves. Trump himself said that thousands of undocumented immigrants voted in 2016.
Another lie. According to the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice, of 23.5 million votes cast in districts with high populations of non-citizens only 30 – I repeat, thirty – possible incidents of improper non-citizen voting were referred for further investigation.
They claim voter impersonation is rampant at the polls.
False. A 12-year study of election data found only 10 cases of voter impersonation out of 146 million registered voters. Ten.
So if voter fraud really isn’t a problem, why do Trump, Republicans in Congress, and their allies at Fox News keep perpetuating this myth? For one simple reason: To enact restrictive voting laws intended to keep voters from the polls.
Policies established in the name of election security – including voter ID laws, needless registration deadlines, limited access to polling places, and purges of the voter rolls – make it harder for Americans to vote. It is the same tactic that has been used throughout our history to disenfranchise low-income Americans and people of color.
Luckily, many of these laws have been struck down in the courts. In 2016, a district judge in Wisconsin found “utterly no evidence” of widespread voter fraud justifying its voter ID law. In Texas, another judge found their voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act, making it harder for African-Americans and Latinos to vote.
But many of these laws are still on the books because in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted crucial aspects of the Voting Rights Act.
Congress needs to update the Act to prevent states from suppressing votes.
Meanwhile, Trump and Republicans in Congress are turning a blind eye to the real threats facing our democracy: election fraud, and foreign interference.
In 2018, a Republican operative stole votes from Democrats in a North Carolina congressional race with a quote, “coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme.” After the ballots were counted, the Republican candidate appeared to have won by about 900 votes. But the fraud was so glaring that the state board of elections refused to certify the results and called for a special election.
The other real threat is foreign interference in our elections, as Russia did in 2016.
We now know for a fact that Trump is encouraging foreign leaders to interfere in our elections — asking the President of Ukraine to investigate his political opponents in exchange for military aid and publicly calling on Russia and China to also interfere.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell continues to block common-sense legislation to protect our elections against future foreign interference, such as requiring all voting machines to have backup paper ballots and imposing automatic sanctions for nations that interfere in elections. To have safe and secure elections in 2020 and beyond, we need to pass this legislation.
The next time you hear Trump and his enablers claim widespread voter fraud, know the truth. Their lies are intended to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, while they ignore the real threats to our democracy.
More Students Are Voting — But Republicans Are Trying to Get in Their Way
BY Candice Bernd, Truthout
PUBLISHED November 25, 2019
Students at the historically Black Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, lost their on-campus polling place this semester after the Republican-dominated state legislature outlawed polling places that do not stay open for the entire 12-day, early-voting period — commonly referred to as “pop-up” polls. The new law took effect in September, and Huston-Tillotson students who voted on November 5 had to trek over to the Austin Public Library’s Carver Branch a half-mile away.
“The way I see it is disenfranchisement upon students of color,” says Jared Breckenridge, a senior majoring in education and the former president of the university’s NAACP chapter. The loss of the campus polling place, he says, comes on top of other barriers Huston-Tillotson students regularly face as they navigate the state’s voter ID law, which doesn’t allow them to use their student ID cards to cast a ballot.
The university’s NAACP regularly organizes student registration and education efforts on campus, and is working on formulating what its new voter engagement strategy will look like now with the loss of the school’s polling place, Breckenridge says.
Along with Huston-Tillotson’s polling place, Austin Community College, which has a diverse student body of 72,000 mostly low-income students, lost polling places across nine of its 11 campuses. Other campuses across the state also took major hits, with six polling places shuttered at colleges in Fort Worth, and two shuttered in the border town of Brownsville.
It’s not only happening in Texas. Republican lawmakers across the country are erecting new barriers to keep students from the voting booth precisely because young people, who lean heavily to the left, are beginning to flex their electoral power in force: College student turnout more than doubled from 2014 to 2018, according to numbers tracked by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education.
Issues like the climate emergency and Trump’s attacks on vulnerable communities motivated 40.3 percent of 10 million students tracked by Tufts to vote during the 2018 midterm election, surpassing even the overall increase in the national turnout rate. With 20 million students enrolled at colleges and universities across the U.S., this young and diverse population is emerging as a crucial voting bloc that could potentially determine the outcome of the 2020 general election.
Republican lawmakers are taking these numbers seriously. In response, they are impeding voting eligibility for out-of-state students, outlawing pop-up and early voting sites, and enacting increasingly strict requirements on student IDs under the guise of preventing “electoral fraud” (which is practically nonexistent) in Republican-controlled, presidential battleground states.
Republicans in Texas argue their new ban on pop-up polls is intended to prevent abuse in school bond elections. Voting rights advocates, however, point out that the new law was crafted just broadly enough to outlaw the routine practice of moving polling places to reach as many voters as possible during the early voting period.
In the broader right-wing effort to keep poor people, people of color, immigrants, and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people from the ballot, students are just the latest population to become a target of increased suppression efforts.
Voting Barriers Spread Ahead of 2020
Florida is adopting Texas’s strategy: The state legislature reinstated a 2014 ban on early-voting sites at state universities this year after a federal court overturned the ban in 2018. Republicans there effectively skirted the court’s ruling by adding a clause into a new elections law requiring densely packed campus voting sites to offer “sufficient non-permitted parking.”
In New Hampshire, where six in 10 college students come from outside the state, a Republican-backed law now requires newly registered voters who drive to secure expensive New Hampshire driver’s licenses and auto registrations. (Students who don’t drive can still obtain a state ID without these requirements.)
Republicans in North Carolina and Wisconsin are cracking down on student IDs. Wisconsin now requires student IDs to have signatures in order to function as voter identification, even as many schools are removing such signatures as they issue updated IDs that also serve as debit cards and dorm room keys. The IDs must expire within two years in order to be used for voter identification, but most college IDs expire in four. Even IDs that meet these stringent standards aren’t enough: Students must also show proof of enrollment in their educational institution before being allowed to vote.
After the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down North Carolina’s voter ID law as racially discriminatory in 2016, Republicans enacted a voter ID law last year that allowed student IDs but mandated that universities attest under penalty of perjury that their ID cards are issued only after a student’s citizenship status, Social Security number and birthday have been verified. A later revision eliminated the mention of perjury, but confusion remains over the law’s new requirement that schools submit “documentation satisfactory to the State Board of Elections,” proving that the ID requirements have been met.
Iowa recently passed a voter ID law that excludes student IDs while imposing new restrictions and requirements on registration, early voting and absentee voting. Arkansas codified its voter ID requirements in the state’s constitution during the 2018 elections. Lastly, Arizona recently passed a new law that extends its voter ID requirements, which exclude student IDs, to early voting.
But these new restrictions aren’t being enacted without a fight. Back in Texas, state Democrats and the Democratic campaign arms for the U.S. House and Senate are suing the state over its move to end temporary polling places, arguing the new law is unconstitutional because it discriminates against young voters.
“It’s not the first time we’ve seen a tactic like this used against us on this campus,” Huston-Tillotson’s Breckenridge says. “We’re just going to have to fight against it.” And that’s exactly what many students are doing.
Students Surmount Suppression Efforts
Young people on college campuses are finding creative ways to get around these barriers and register more of their peers in advance of the 2020 election. At the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, the nonpartisan voter education group TX Votes, which doesn’t engage in advocacy work, has vastly increased turnout through its registration efforts by engaging dozens of student organizations and professors. According to a Tufts report, undergraduate turnout at UT increased from 17.6 percent in 2014 to 54.8 percent during the 2018 midterm election — one of the largest turnout increases at any university in the nation.
Kassie Phebillo, a political communications Ph.D. student at UT and coordinator of TX Votes said the organization, in coalition with other student groups, has registered more than 5,000 UT students so far this year. The group’s student registrars canvassed more than 200 classrooms during this month’s early voting period, reaching out to professors directly for an invitation. They also make sure to hit on-campus events and campus move-in dates.
“We have this goal of student organizations across campus creating a tradition around voting, so that they do the same thing for every election, and that’s something that they know they’re going to do together, because we know we just have to get people into that habit of voting,” Phebillo tells Truthout.
The ball really got rolling in 2016, she says, when the organization grew to about 20 members, reflecting a larger national trend in student turnout and engagement in the electoral process. This year, she says, the group has ballooned to 62 members. “We were shocked. We were actually really not prepared for that,” Phebillo says of the explosion in interest.
UT’s two polling sites are permanent, meaning they operate for the entirety of the early voting period and on Election Day, so the campus wasn’t impacted by the new ban on pop-up polls. Still, Phebillo says she has encountered problems at the polls before, thanks to the state’s ID law. TX Votes aims to help students figure out the ID process ahead of voting.
The group’s tight partnership with Travis County election officials has made all the difference in its success rates. The county tax assessor, who oversees voter registration, and the county clerk provide the group every assistance they can. Their support helped UT students win a second on-campus polling site in March of 2018. County officials even hold deputy registrar trainings on campus for the group’s organizers.
“The open communication that we have with their office and also with the county elections office is super helpful,” Phebillo says. “So, if something weird does happen at a polling location, I can email our county clerk and say, ‘Hey, I want you to know this happened,’ … and then the problem gets fixed immediately.”
Phebillo says the group hopes to work with other universities in the county to potentially facilitate a space for students from other campuses to vote at UT’s permanent polling spots. The idea is still in its beginning stages, Phebillo says, but with enough backing, could make a difference as mobile polling places are shuttered across the state. “We can certainly make our campus a more welcoming space to other college students if we can figure out how to get them to us,” she says.
Moreover, TX Votes is networking with universities and colleges in other states through a network of national organizations that provide funds, share information and help students develop their voter engagement plans. The network is already paying off, Phebillo says: A new student voter education group at the University of Oklahoma is adopting the TX Votes model.
“We’re incredibly effective at what we’re doing, … where we just understand the law incredibly well, make sure no one’s breaking it, and still find ways to turn out students to vote,” Phebillo says.
A robust student turnout could easily tip the scales in favor of Democrats in many close contests throughout the country, including in states like Texas where Republican control is beginning to erode. In the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Texas, Rep. Beto O’Rourke performed best in counties with a high percentage of young voters, whose turnout in the state tripled between 2014 and 2018. UT’s registration efforts could represent just the beginning of a student engagement model that could eventually help unseat entrenched Republican stalwarts like Sen. Ted Cruz, as O’Rourke’s close challenge shows.
Other close contests across the country could be determined by the population of a single college or university alone. Donald Trump carried the state of Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes; if more than 170,000 University of Wisconsin students voted en masse in 2020, they could make an election-deciding impact. North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was elected in 2016 by about 10,000 votes in a state with nearly 500,000 undergraduates. New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan was likewise elected in 2016 by just 1,017 votes over her Republican rival, incumbent Kelly Ayotte.
High school students could also make a significant dent in such contests, but likewise find themselves locked out of the process: Texas doesn’t allow high school students to register to vote until two months before their 18th birthday, for instance, even though many other states allow students to preregister at 16 or 17, and vote in primaries if they turn 18 by Election Day. Moreover, while Texas law requires high school teachers to distribute voter registration forms to their students, that requirement is simply bypassed by most of the state’s secondary schools.
For advocates like Phebillo, the solution is simple, even if a state’s voting requirements are complex and difficult. “If we treated young people as the smart and driven individuals that many of them are, they wouldn’t kind of rebel against voting in the first place,” she said. “I like to think that we’re seeing that start to happen, where people are starting to give the voter back their agency in the process.”
“The way I see it is disenfranchisement upon students of color,” says Jared Breckenridge, a senior majoring in education and the former president of the university’s NAACP chapter. The loss of the campus polling place, he says, comes on top of other barriers Huston-Tillotson students regularly face as they navigate the state’s voter ID law, which doesn’t allow them to use their student ID cards to cast a ballot.
The university’s NAACP regularly organizes student registration and education efforts on campus, and is working on formulating what its new voter engagement strategy will look like now with the loss of the school’s polling place, Breckenridge says.
Along with Huston-Tillotson’s polling place, Austin Community College, which has a diverse student body of 72,000 mostly low-income students, lost polling places across nine of its 11 campuses. Other campuses across the state also took major hits, with six polling places shuttered at colleges in Fort Worth, and two shuttered in the border town of Brownsville.
It’s not only happening in Texas. Republican lawmakers across the country are erecting new barriers to keep students from the voting booth precisely because young people, who lean heavily to the left, are beginning to flex their electoral power in force: College student turnout more than doubled from 2014 to 2018, according to numbers tracked by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education.
Issues like the climate emergency and Trump’s attacks on vulnerable communities motivated 40.3 percent of 10 million students tracked by Tufts to vote during the 2018 midterm election, surpassing even the overall increase in the national turnout rate. With 20 million students enrolled at colleges and universities across the U.S., this young and diverse population is emerging as a crucial voting bloc that could potentially determine the outcome of the 2020 general election.
Republican lawmakers are taking these numbers seriously. In response, they are impeding voting eligibility for out-of-state students, outlawing pop-up and early voting sites, and enacting increasingly strict requirements on student IDs under the guise of preventing “electoral fraud” (which is practically nonexistent) in Republican-controlled, presidential battleground states.
Republicans in Texas argue their new ban on pop-up polls is intended to prevent abuse in school bond elections. Voting rights advocates, however, point out that the new law was crafted just broadly enough to outlaw the routine practice of moving polling places to reach as many voters as possible during the early voting period.
In the broader right-wing effort to keep poor people, people of color, immigrants, and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people from the ballot, students are just the latest population to become a target of increased suppression efforts.
Voting Barriers Spread Ahead of 2020
Florida is adopting Texas’s strategy: The state legislature reinstated a 2014 ban on early-voting sites at state universities this year after a federal court overturned the ban in 2018. Republicans there effectively skirted the court’s ruling by adding a clause into a new elections law requiring densely packed campus voting sites to offer “sufficient non-permitted parking.”
In New Hampshire, where six in 10 college students come from outside the state, a Republican-backed law now requires newly registered voters who drive to secure expensive New Hampshire driver’s licenses and auto registrations. (Students who don’t drive can still obtain a state ID without these requirements.)
Republicans in North Carolina and Wisconsin are cracking down on student IDs. Wisconsin now requires student IDs to have signatures in order to function as voter identification, even as many schools are removing such signatures as they issue updated IDs that also serve as debit cards and dorm room keys. The IDs must expire within two years in order to be used for voter identification, but most college IDs expire in four. Even IDs that meet these stringent standards aren’t enough: Students must also show proof of enrollment in their educational institution before being allowed to vote.
After the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down North Carolina’s voter ID law as racially discriminatory in 2016, Republicans enacted a voter ID law last year that allowed student IDs but mandated that universities attest under penalty of perjury that their ID cards are issued only after a student’s citizenship status, Social Security number and birthday have been verified. A later revision eliminated the mention of perjury, but confusion remains over the law’s new requirement that schools submit “documentation satisfactory to the State Board of Elections,” proving that the ID requirements have been met.
Iowa recently passed a voter ID law that excludes student IDs while imposing new restrictions and requirements on registration, early voting and absentee voting. Arkansas codified its voter ID requirements in the state’s constitution during the 2018 elections. Lastly, Arizona recently passed a new law that extends its voter ID requirements, which exclude student IDs, to early voting.
But these new restrictions aren’t being enacted without a fight. Back in Texas, state Democrats and the Democratic campaign arms for the U.S. House and Senate are suing the state over its move to end temporary polling places, arguing the new law is unconstitutional because it discriminates against young voters.
“It’s not the first time we’ve seen a tactic like this used against us on this campus,” Huston-Tillotson’s Breckenridge says. “We’re just going to have to fight against it.” And that’s exactly what many students are doing.
Students Surmount Suppression Efforts
Young people on college campuses are finding creative ways to get around these barriers and register more of their peers in advance of the 2020 election. At the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, the nonpartisan voter education group TX Votes, which doesn’t engage in advocacy work, has vastly increased turnout through its registration efforts by engaging dozens of student organizations and professors. According to a Tufts report, undergraduate turnout at UT increased from 17.6 percent in 2014 to 54.8 percent during the 2018 midterm election — one of the largest turnout increases at any university in the nation.
Kassie Phebillo, a political communications Ph.D. student at UT and coordinator of TX Votes said the organization, in coalition with other student groups, has registered more than 5,000 UT students so far this year. The group’s student registrars canvassed more than 200 classrooms during this month’s early voting period, reaching out to professors directly for an invitation. They also make sure to hit on-campus events and campus move-in dates.
“We have this goal of student organizations across campus creating a tradition around voting, so that they do the same thing for every election, and that’s something that they know they’re going to do together, because we know we just have to get people into that habit of voting,” Phebillo tells Truthout.
The ball really got rolling in 2016, she says, when the organization grew to about 20 members, reflecting a larger national trend in student turnout and engagement in the electoral process. This year, she says, the group has ballooned to 62 members. “We were shocked. We were actually really not prepared for that,” Phebillo says of the explosion in interest.
UT’s two polling sites are permanent, meaning they operate for the entirety of the early voting period and on Election Day, so the campus wasn’t impacted by the new ban on pop-up polls. Still, Phebillo says she has encountered problems at the polls before, thanks to the state’s ID law. TX Votes aims to help students figure out the ID process ahead of voting.
The group’s tight partnership with Travis County election officials has made all the difference in its success rates. The county tax assessor, who oversees voter registration, and the county clerk provide the group every assistance they can. Their support helped UT students win a second on-campus polling site in March of 2018. County officials even hold deputy registrar trainings on campus for the group’s organizers.
“The open communication that we have with their office and also with the county elections office is super helpful,” Phebillo says. “So, if something weird does happen at a polling location, I can email our county clerk and say, ‘Hey, I want you to know this happened,’ … and then the problem gets fixed immediately.”
Phebillo says the group hopes to work with other universities in the county to potentially facilitate a space for students from other campuses to vote at UT’s permanent polling spots. The idea is still in its beginning stages, Phebillo says, but with enough backing, could make a difference as mobile polling places are shuttered across the state. “We can certainly make our campus a more welcoming space to other college students if we can figure out how to get them to us,” she says.
Moreover, TX Votes is networking with universities and colleges in other states through a network of national organizations that provide funds, share information and help students develop their voter engagement plans. The network is already paying off, Phebillo says: A new student voter education group at the University of Oklahoma is adopting the TX Votes model.
“We’re incredibly effective at what we’re doing, … where we just understand the law incredibly well, make sure no one’s breaking it, and still find ways to turn out students to vote,” Phebillo says.
A robust student turnout could easily tip the scales in favor of Democrats in many close contests throughout the country, including in states like Texas where Republican control is beginning to erode. In the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Texas, Rep. Beto O’Rourke performed best in counties with a high percentage of young voters, whose turnout in the state tripled between 2014 and 2018. UT’s registration efforts could represent just the beginning of a student engagement model that could eventually help unseat entrenched Republican stalwarts like Sen. Ted Cruz, as O’Rourke’s close challenge shows.
Other close contests across the country could be determined by the population of a single college or university alone. Donald Trump carried the state of Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes; if more than 170,000 University of Wisconsin students voted en masse in 2020, they could make an election-deciding impact. North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was elected in 2016 by about 10,000 votes in a state with nearly 500,000 undergraduates. New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan was likewise elected in 2016 by just 1,017 votes over her Republican rival, incumbent Kelly Ayotte.
High school students could also make a significant dent in such contests, but likewise find themselves locked out of the process: Texas doesn’t allow high school students to register to vote until two months before their 18th birthday, for instance, even though many other states allow students to preregister at 16 or 17, and vote in primaries if they turn 18 by Election Day. Moreover, while Texas law requires high school teachers to distribute voter registration forms to their students, that requirement is simply bypassed by most of the state’s secondary schools.
For advocates like Phebillo, the solution is simple, even if a state’s voting requirements are complex and difficult. “If we treated young people as the smart and driven individuals that many of them are, they wouldn’t kind of rebel against voting in the first place,” she said. “I like to think that we’re seeing that start to happen, where people are starting to give the voter back their agency in the process.”
The Way America Votes Is Broken. In One Rural County, a Nonprofit Showed a Way Forward.
In Mississippi last week, a seamless performance by a new set of voting machines took place amid widespread anxiety about election integrity.
by Jessica Huseman - pro publica
Nov. 12, 5 a.m. EST
ACKERMAN, Miss. — Choctaw County’s election centers opened at 7 a.m. last Tuesday, and voters were greeted by poll workers who’d just set up brand-new voting machines.
“If you need any help, just holler,” poll worker Albert Friddle told a voter as he walked her through the new system.
She didn’t holler. Using a machine the size of a briefcase, she selected her choices, printed and double-checked her ballot, and dropped it into a secured blue box provided by the county.
Indeed, the day went without anyone hollering.
“Everything went just fine,” said Amy Burdine, Choctaw County circuit clerk. “Just as expected.”
The scene in Mississippi, if modest in its particulars, was seen by some as a telling moment at a time of great anxiety about the accuracy and security of the nation’s voting systems.
Mississippi is one of only a few states in the country to allow the use of voting machines that have not been certified by federal authorities, and the state has no certification process of its own. As a result, the machines at work for the first time in Choctaw County last week were built by VotingWorks — a small nonprofit organization founded by Ben Adida and Matt Pasternack. Adida and Pasternack selected the state both for its regulatory environment and because many counties in the state continue to use paperless voting systems, allowing the company, Adida said, to “very quickly improve the security of voting in Mississippi by reintroducing paper.”
The machines, VotingWorks said, were inexpensive to make, easy to fix and no problem to set up and take down. The hope, the organization said, was to produce shorter lines and more reliable results, a wish that seemed realized on Nov. 5.
“To be on the ground floor of something like this as one of the poorest counties in the state, that’s pretty exciting,” said Wayne McLeod, an election commissioner in Choctaw County.
For VotingWorks and the election officials in Mississippi, the fact that the machines had not been federally certified was a plus, not a risk. Set up nearly two decades ago to try and improve the reliability of voting systems, the federal certification process is today seen by many as an impediment to the kind of technological progress urgently needed in the field.
The process — overseen by the federal Election Assistance Commission — is both lengthy and costly. And the long track record over the years of election scandals and controversies makes clear it hasn’t been all that effective.
“Certification can be a double-edged sword,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “On the one hand, we want and need minimum standards for access and integrity in our voting machines. But on the other hand, certification can be a significant barrier to innovation.”
Experts and election officials across the country have argued that the certification process has helped the small handful of major voting systems companies to dominate without a great incentive to invest in more effective and trustworthy technology.
Last Tuesday, machines made by ES&S, the nation’s largest voting machine company, were at the center of yet another controversy.
In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, voters suffered through long lines only to learn that the voting results were severely inaccurate, forcing a count of paper ballots.
“I’m shaking here. I have no idea if these numbers are right,” Lee Snover, head of the Northampton County Republican Party, told local media last week. The county executive described the situation as a “three-alarm, raging fire.”
The ES&S machines deployed in Northampton County went through more than two years of development and testing before the episode on Election Day. ES&S did not respond to requests for comment or written questions on how it plans to proceed in Northampton.
Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure said that it may be several weeks before the cause of the problem is determined. “It wasn’t great,” he said. “We must fix it.”
In an interview last month, Ben Hovland — vice chairman of the federal voting assistance agency — recognized that the certification process was often too slow to spark innovation. The standards are currently being updated (a process that has dragged on since 2015), which he says is allowing the agency to rethink a variety of issues.
“I think it’s a great time to really step back and look at the process as a whole and see if there are ways that we can make it better make it more efficient,” he said.
Adida and Pasternack, the VotingWorks officials, said its machines were first tested in Mississippi in a single precinct in Choctaw County during the state’s primaries, monitoring for problems and features that confused voters and poll workers. After the initial trial and a second user test at a retirees potluck lunch, the county election commissioners enthusiastically allowed the company to test the machines countywide during the general election on Tuesday.
“When the other commissioners saw these machines, they said, ‘We want these in November,’” said McLeod, the Choctaw County election commissioner.
VotingWorks machines are housed in a black case, light and easily carried by poll workers, many of whom can be older. The case contains a simple touch-screen tablet that can be purchased off the shelf and that has custom software installed on it. Voters are given a card by a poll worker that has a chip in it loaded with the appropriate ballot, and they install it in a card reader so that their ballot pops up on the touch-screen device. When they finish, they take the card to a separate station and print the ballot. The printing station erases the data on the card, and the voter reviews the ballot for accuracy before inserting it into a thick blue cloth ballot box that can be sealed.
Unlike most voting machines, they did not come with a stand and are meant to be propped up on tables. At polling places in Choctaw County — mostly volunteer fire stations — the machines were sitting on top of folding tables. In others, they were on desks. The machines took poll workers less than two minutes to fully construct, shortening lines and keeping voters calm. Poll workers uniformly said they loved this feature, as it made the machines easier to maneuver and take down.
Adida said the company hasn’t ignored existing standards. “We’ve looked at the aspects of certification that we think are meaningful,” he said.
“The certification process would not have helped us with building something that works for poll workers,” said Adida, who said VotingWorks set out to build a product that poll workers with little training could manage securely and set up easily.
Adida and Pasternack recognize that there is justified trepidation around proceeding with machines that haven’t been formally certified, but they said that they are confident that their process will result in a more secure, affordable and user-friendly machine.
“I’ve never seen any technology product built that’s great for users if the users don’t get to touch it for the first two years of development,” Pasternack said.
“If you need any help, just holler,” poll worker Albert Friddle told a voter as he walked her through the new system.
She didn’t holler. Using a machine the size of a briefcase, she selected her choices, printed and double-checked her ballot, and dropped it into a secured blue box provided by the county.
Indeed, the day went without anyone hollering.
“Everything went just fine,” said Amy Burdine, Choctaw County circuit clerk. “Just as expected.”
The scene in Mississippi, if modest in its particulars, was seen by some as a telling moment at a time of great anxiety about the accuracy and security of the nation’s voting systems.
Mississippi is one of only a few states in the country to allow the use of voting machines that have not been certified by federal authorities, and the state has no certification process of its own. As a result, the machines at work for the first time in Choctaw County last week were built by VotingWorks — a small nonprofit organization founded by Ben Adida and Matt Pasternack. Adida and Pasternack selected the state both for its regulatory environment and because many counties in the state continue to use paperless voting systems, allowing the company, Adida said, to “very quickly improve the security of voting in Mississippi by reintroducing paper.”
The machines, VotingWorks said, were inexpensive to make, easy to fix and no problem to set up and take down. The hope, the organization said, was to produce shorter lines and more reliable results, a wish that seemed realized on Nov. 5.
“To be on the ground floor of something like this as one of the poorest counties in the state, that’s pretty exciting,” said Wayne McLeod, an election commissioner in Choctaw County.
For VotingWorks and the election officials in Mississippi, the fact that the machines had not been federally certified was a plus, not a risk. Set up nearly two decades ago to try and improve the reliability of voting systems, the federal certification process is today seen by many as an impediment to the kind of technological progress urgently needed in the field.
The process — overseen by the federal Election Assistance Commission — is both lengthy and costly. And the long track record over the years of election scandals and controversies makes clear it hasn’t been all that effective.
“Certification can be a double-edged sword,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “On the one hand, we want and need minimum standards for access and integrity in our voting machines. But on the other hand, certification can be a significant barrier to innovation.”
Experts and election officials across the country have argued that the certification process has helped the small handful of major voting systems companies to dominate without a great incentive to invest in more effective and trustworthy technology.
Last Tuesday, machines made by ES&S, the nation’s largest voting machine company, were at the center of yet another controversy.
In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, voters suffered through long lines only to learn that the voting results were severely inaccurate, forcing a count of paper ballots.
“I’m shaking here. I have no idea if these numbers are right,” Lee Snover, head of the Northampton County Republican Party, told local media last week. The county executive described the situation as a “three-alarm, raging fire.”
The ES&S machines deployed in Northampton County went through more than two years of development and testing before the episode on Election Day. ES&S did not respond to requests for comment or written questions on how it plans to proceed in Northampton.
Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure said that it may be several weeks before the cause of the problem is determined. “It wasn’t great,” he said. “We must fix it.”
In an interview last month, Ben Hovland — vice chairman of the federal voting assistance agency — recognized that the certification process was often too slow to spark innovation. The standards are currently being updated (a process that has dragged on since 2015), which he says is allowing the agency to rethink a variety of issues.
“I think it’s a great time to really step back and look at the process as a whole and see if there are ways that we can make it better make it more efficient,” he said.
Adida and Pasternack, the VotingWorks officials, said its machines were first tested in Mississippi in a single precinct in Choctaw County during the state’s primaries, monitoring for problems and features that confused voters and poll workers. After the initial trial and a second user test at a retirees potluck lunch, the county election commissioners enthusiastically allowed the company to test the machines countywide during the general election on Tuesday.
“When the other commissioners saw these machines, they said, ‘We want these in November,’” said McLeod, the Choctaw County election commissioner.
VotingWorks machines are housed in a black case, light and easily carried by poll workers, many of whom can be older. The case contains a simple touch-screen tablet that can be purchased off the shelf and that has custom software installed on it. Voters are given a card by a poll worker that has a chip in it loaded with the appropriate ballot, and they install it in a card reader so that their ballot pops up on the touch-screen device. When they finish, they take the card to a separate station and print the ballot. The printing station erases the data on the card, and the voter reviews the ballot for accuracy before inserting it into a thick blue cloth ballot box that can be sealed.
Unlike most voting machines, they did not come with a stand and are meant to be propped up on tables. At polling places in Choctaw County — mostly volunteer fire stations — the machines were sitting on top of folding tables. In others, they were on desks. The machines took poll workers less than two minutes to fully construct, shortening lines and keeping voters calm. Poll workers uniformly said they loved this feature, as it made the machines easier to maneuver and take down.
Adida said the company hasn’t ignored existing standards. “We’ve looked at the aspects of certification that we think are meaningful,” he said.
“The certification process would not have helped us with building something that works for poll workers,” said Adida, who said VotingWorks set out to build a product that poll workers with little training could manage securely and set up easily.
Adida and Pasternack recognize that there is justified trepidation around proceeding with machines that haven’t been formally certified, but they said that they are confident that their process will result in a more secure, affordable and user-friendly machine.
“I’ve never seen any technology product built that’s great for users if the users don’t get to touch it for the first two years of development,” Pasternack said.
today's iq test!!!
Off-year Election Day in Kentucky, Virginia and elsewhere: Big impact, bad for democracy
Elections in odd-numbered years often mean abysmal turnout. So results this week could measure enthusiasm
SOPHIA TESFAYE - salon
NOVEMBER 5, 2019 11:00AM (UTC)
Nearly every state in the union is set to vote on Tuesday. If you haven't heard about it, you're not alone.
Voters in Kentucky and Mississippi will decide on statewide offices like governor, attorney general and secretary of state. In Virginia, the entire state legislature is up for election. Democrats in New Jersey are seeking to retain their supermajority in the lower house of the state legislature, while special elections in Texas could bring Democrats even closer to taking control of the state House for the first time in modern history. These off-year elections for state legislature will play a crucial role in the redistricting that will follow the 2020 Census.
In San Francisco, there’s a high-profile four-way race for district attorney. New York City’s ballot includes ranked-choice voting, an election system in which voters mark not only their first choice in a race, but also who they’d prefer to win if their top candidate doesn’t make the cut.
Voters in Tucson may decide to make their hometown Arizona’s first so-called sanctuary city. And progressive cities like Seattle, Boulder, Colorado, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, will vote on zoning laws that have exacerbated the growing housing crisis. Tuesday will also decides whether at least 140,000 Americans have their voting rights restored.
With such impactful measures and offices on the ballot across the country, however, the prevailing coverage leading up to Tuesday’s election has barely existed, ignoring most of this in favor of polls and predictions about the national election in 2020 — just under a year away. Off-year elections can have high stakes, but it has long been evident that when compared to presidential and even midterm elections, they result in far lower voter turnout across the board. Yet most U.S. cities continue to hold local elections separate from federal and state elections, which tends to mean that local representation is less demographically reflective of the electorate. The voting population already skews older and whiter than the population as a whole, and this is even more disproportionate in off-year elections.
On Friday, a federal district court declined to stop the country’s most egregious example of such disenfranchisement. Mississippi has the largest population of African American voters in the nation, yet no African American has won statewide office there in more than 130 years. That’s because of a Jim Crow-era provision that makes Mississippi the only state in the nation where candidates for statewide office must win a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the House districts in the state. If no candidate manages that, the Republican-controlled state House would pick the winner.
While Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood, the only statewide elected Democrat in Mississippi, is running a surprisingly strong race to replace a retiring Republican governor, he has little chance of carrying a majority of House seats. So even if Hood were to win the most votes statewide, the GOP-controlled House could still install Republican candidate Tate Reeves as governor. Black people are 37 percent of Mississippi's population and overwhelmingly vote Democratic. But thanks to the widely dispersed white majority, which overwhelmingly votes Republican, it’s all but impossible for a Democrat to win a statewide election.
In Kentucky 300,000 voters, including more than one in four of all African-American voters, can't vote in Tuesday's closely-watched governor’s race because of past felony convictions. Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, who is up for re-election against Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear, recently reversed a policy restoring rights to nonviolent ex-offenders. The two candidates are tied in the latest Mason-Dixon survey, and several polls have shown that Bevin is deeply unpopular in the Bluegrass State — despite his evident affinity for President Trump. Beshear is the son of Kentucky’s last Democratic governor, but this disenfranchisement could be enough for Republican defeat in a state, where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016.
In Texas, Democrats need to flip just nine seats to take control of Texas' state House in 2020. One big reason for that was Beto O'Rourke's unsuccessful 2018 Senate run, which dramatically increased turnout and helped beat back GOP voter suppression efforts. A special election pits one Democrat on the same ballot as six Republicans vying for the same state House seat. The race will result in a likely runoff, but if Democrat Eliz Markowitz finishes in the top two today it could prove critical to stopping the GOP from gerrymandering the congressional map after the 2020 census.
Heading into 2020, Tuesday’s elections could dramatically help Democrats. But low turnout may prove to be worse for democracy than the long lines we are almost guaranteed to see next year.
Voters in Kentucky and Mississippi will decide on statewide offices like governor, attorney general and secretary of state. In Virginia, the entire state legislature is up for election. Democrats in New Jersey are seeking to retain their supermajority in the lower house of the state legislature, while special elections in Texas could bring Democrats even closer to taking control of the state House for the first time in modern history. These off-year elections for state legislature will play a crucial role in the redistricting that will follow the 2020 Census.
In San Francisco, there’s a high-profile four-way race for district attorney. New York City’s ballot includes ranked-choice voting, an election system in which voters mark not only their first choice in a race, but also who they’d prefer to win if their top candidate doesn’t make the cut.
Voters in Tucson may decide to make their hometown Arizona’s first so-called sanctuary city. And progressive cities like Seattle, Boulder, Colorado, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, will vote on zoning laws that have exacerbated the growing housing crisis. Tuesday will also decides whether at least 140,000 Americans have their voting rights restored.
With such impactful measures and offices on the ballot across the country, however, the prevailing coverage leading up to Tuesday’s election has barely existed, ignoring most of this in favor of polls and predictions about the national election in 2020 — just under a year away. Off-year elections can have high stakes, but it has long been evident that when compared to presidential and even midterm elections, they result in far lower voter turnout across the board. Yet most U.S. cities continue to hold local elections separate from federal and state elections, which tends to mean that local representation is less demographically reflective of the electorate. The voting population already skews older and whiter than the population as a whole, and this is even more disproportionate in off-year elections.
On Friday, a federal district court declined to stop the country’s most egregious example of such disenfranchisement. Mississippi has the largest population of African American voters in the nation, yet no African American has won statewide office there in more than 130 years. That’s because of a Jim Crow-era provision that makes Mississippi the only state in the nation where candidates for statewide office must win a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the House districts in the state. If no candidate manages that, the Republican-controlled state House would pick the winner.
While Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood, the only statewide elected Democrat in Mississippi, is running a surprisingly strong race to replace a retiring Republican governor, he has little chance of carrying a majority of House seats. So even if Hood were to win the most votes statewide, the GOP-controlled House could still install Republican candidate Tate Reeves as governor. Black people are 37 percent of Mississippi's population and overwhelmingly vote Democratic. But thanks to the widely dispersed white majority, which overwhelmingly votes Republican, it’s all but impossible for a Democrat to win a statewide election.
In Kentucky 300,000 voters, including more than one in four of all African-American voters, can't vote in Tuesday's closely-watched governor’s race because of past felony convictions. Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, who is up for re-election against Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear, recently reversed a policy restoring rights to nonviolent ex-offenders. The two candidates are tied in the latest Mason-Dixon survey, and several polls have shown that Bevin is deeply unpopular in the Bluegrass State — despite his evident affinity for President Trump. Beshear is the son of Kentucky’s last Democratic governor, but this disenfranchisement could be enough for Republican defeat in a state, where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016.
In Texas, Democrats need to flip just nine seats to take control of Texas' state House in 2020. One big reason for that was Beto O'Rourke's unsuccessful 2018 Senate run, which dramatically increased turnout and helped beat back GOP voter suppression efforts. A special election pits one Democrat on the same ballot as six Republicans vying for the same state House seat. The race will result in a likely runoff, but if Democrat Eliz Markowitz finishes in the top two today it could prove critical to stopping the GOP from gerrymandering the congressional map after the 2020 census.
Heading into 2020, Tuesday’s elections could dramatically help Democrats. But low turnout may prove to be worse for democracy than the long lines we are almost guaranteed to see next year.
‘It makes elections fair’: New York to vote on system that may curb polarized politics
Advocates see ranked-choice voting as effective way to ensure winning candidate received true majority of electorate’s support
Lauren Aratani in New York
the guardian
Sat 26 Oct 2019 07.00 EDT
When most Americans cast their ballots, their vote counts for one candidate a race. The person who gets more votes than any other competitor wins, even if they do not get a majority of votes.
But New York City could become the biggest city in the country to change this age-old system altogether. Starting 26 October, voters have the option of switching to ranked-choice voting (RCV). In this scenario, even if someone’s top-choice candidate fails to get enough votes, their vote can still count.
Advocates of RCV see it as an effective way to ensure a winning candidate has received a true majority of the electorate’s support. They argue that it may encourage candidates to run on platforms that appeal to a broader range of people, without any worry of splitting the vote. In an era when Donald Trump failed to win a majority of voters, this could change the way American politicians think of their campaigns.
Under RCV, voters can rank candidates, from one to four if there are four candidates, for example. If no candidate is the top choice of a majority of voters, an “instant runoff” takes place. The candidate with the fewest No 1 votes is eliminated, and their supporters’ votes will automatically go to whoever was listed as their second choice. The process continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes. Voters can opt out of ranking and vote for just one candidate.
“[It] makes our elections more fair. It helps voters hold politicians accountable to all communities, and it saves taxpayers money and voters time,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan grassroots organization that led the push to get RCV on New York City’s ballot.
If implemented, RCV could address a problem that has long plagued New York City, which is that long lists of candidates will run for the same role. The last election for public advocate – first in line to succeed the mayor – had 17 candidates run. More candidates, despite giving voters multiple options, can lead to the “spoiler effect” – which happens when a vote is split between multiple candidates with similar ideologies, leading to a candidate with an opposing platform to win.
Maine voters saw that during the state’s 2010 gubernatorial race. Paul LePage, a member of the state’s conservative Tea Party movement (who has gone on to say that he was “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular”), was up against two other major candidates – an independent and a Democrat. LePage won with just over 38% of the vote – 61% of the electorate voted for other candidates.
“There was a political sensibility that said here’s this person who was never terribly popular, wins with two pluralities, extremely extemporaneous governor and candidate, and yet he wins,” said Amy Fried, political science department chair at the University of Maine.
Fried said many voters were upset that LePage won without a majority, which happened again during LePage’s re-election in 2014. Utilizing that anger, good government activists convinced voters that elections did not have to be that way. They introduced RCV to the electorate, a majority of which voted in support of the system during the state’s 2016 election.
RCV was used in Maine congressional races for the first time during the 2018 midterms, and it will be used for the state’s 2020 presidential general election.
In 2018, the system ended up having a huge impact on one US representative in the state. Democrat Jared Golden edged his Republican competitor, incumbent Bruce Poliquin, with RCV. Initially, Poliquin received 46.2% of the vote, while Golden got a close 45.5% of the electorate. The state announced that ranked-choice voting procedures would take place, and over a week later, Golden was announced the winner with get 50.5% of the vote with RCV, while Poliquin received 49.5% of the vote.
In response, Golden filed a lawsuit against the state, testing the constitutionality of RCV. The federal judge Lance Walker dismissed the case, saying that ranked-choice voting “actually encourages first amendment expression” by encouraging third-party and independents to participate in elections.
While RCV is relatively new to the US, it has been largely popular in places that have taken the system up. Australians use RCV to elect members of their House of Representatives, and the system has been used for local elections in Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong.
Other cities in the US such as San Francisco, Minneapolis and Santa Fe have used RCV in their elections for years, but New York, a city of 8 million people, would still be the largest. The main challenge is getting voters used to a new system.
Lerner said that Common Cause and other advocacy organizations have been trying to educate New York voters on RCV by going to local events and asking people to rank their favorite ice-cream flavor or beer brands. If passed in New York, RCV will be used in local elections beginning in 2021.
“It’s not going to solve everything that people dislike about our election, but I think it is going to address some things that bother New York City voters,” Lerner said.
But New York City could become the biggest city in the country to change this age-old system altogether. Starting 26 October, voters have the option of switching to ranked-choice voting (RCV). In this scenario, even if someone’s top-choice candidate fails to get enough votes, their vote can still count.
Advocates of RCV see it as an effective way to ensure a winning candidate has received a true majority of the electorate’s support. They argue that it may encourage candidates to run on platforms that appeal to a broader range of people, without any worry of splitting the vote. In an era when Donald Trump failed to win a majority of voters, this could change the way American politicians think of their campaigns.
Under RCV, voters can rank candidates, from one to four if there are four candidates, for example. If no candidate is the top choice of a majority of voters, an “instant runoff” takes place. The candidate with the fewest No 1 votes is eliminated, and their supporters’ votes will automatically go to whoever was listed as their second choice. The process continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes. Voters can opt out of ranking and vote for just one candidate.
“[It] makes our elections more fair. It helps voters hold politicians accountable to all communities, and it saves taxpayers money and voters time,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan grassroots organization that led the push to get RCV on New York City’s ballot.
If implemented, RCV could address a problem that has long plagued New York City, which is that long lists of candidates will run for the same role. The last election for public advocate – first in line to succeed the mayor – had 17 candidates run. More candidates, despite giving voters multiple options, can lead to the “spoiler effect” – which happens when a vote is split between multiple candidates with similar ideologies, leading to a candidate with an opposing platform to win.
Maine voters saw that during the state’s 2010 gubernatorial race. Paul LePage, a member of the state’s conservative Tea Party movement (who has gone on to say that he was “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular”), was up against two other major candidates – an independent and a Democrat. LePage won with just over 38% of the vote – 61% of the electorate voted for other candidates.
“There was a political sensibility that said here’s this person who was never terribly popular, wins with two pluralities, extremely extemporaneous governor and candidate, and yet he wins,” said Amy Fried, political science department chair at the University of Maine.
Fried said many voters were upset that LePage won without a majority, which happened again during LePage’s re-election in 2014. Utilizing that anger, good government activists convinced voters that elections did not have to be that way. They introduced RCV to the electorate, a majority of which voted in support of the system during the state’s 2016 election.
RCV was used in Maine congressional races for the first time during the 2018 midterms, and it will be used for the state’s 2020 presidential general election.
In 2018, the system ended up having a huge impact on one US representative in the state. Democrat Jared Golden edged his Republican competitor, incumbent Bruce Poliquin, with RCV. Initially, Poliquin received 46.2% of the vote, while Golden got a close 45.5% of the electorate. The state announced that ranked-choice voting procedures would take place, and over a week later, Golden was announced the winner with get 50.5% of the vote with RCV, while Poliquin received 49.5% of the vote.
In response, Golden filed a lawsuit against the state, testing the constitutionality of RCV. The federal judge Lance Walker dismissed the case, saying that ranked-choice voting “actually encourages first amendment expression” by encouraging third-party and independents to participate in elections.
While RCV is relatively new to the US, it has been largely popular in places that have taken the system up. Australians use RCV to elect members of their House of Representatives, and the system has been used for local elections in Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong.
Other cities in the US such as San Francisco, Minneapolis and Santa Fe have used RCV in their elections for years, but New York, a city of 8 million people, would still be the largest. The main challenge is getting voters used to a new system.
Lerner said that Common Cause and other advocacy organizations have been trying to educate New York voters on RCV by going to local events and asking people to rank their favorite ice-cream flavor or beer brands. If passed in New York, RCV will be used in local elections beginning in 2021.
“It’s not going to solve everything that people dislike about our election, but I think it is going to address some things that bother New York City voters,” Lerner said.
The Long Fight to Use Student IDs to Vote in North Carolina
BY Rebekah Barber, Facing South - truthout
PUBLISHED October 25, 2019
When North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature passed the nation’s most suppressive state voting law in 2013, college students were among the most vocal opponents. They viewed it as discriminatory because it required voters to show identification at the polls but excluded student IDs from the acceptable forms.
The law set off a legal and political fight over using student IDs to vote that’s finally nearing a resolution. Critical deadlines are now looming for the state’s schools in advance of the 2020 election, in which North Carolina voters will have to show an ID to cast a ballot.
The state is among the 35 nationwide with voter ID laws on the books. Of those states, 18 allow voters who lack an acceptable form of ID to sign an affidavit and vote using a provisional ballot. Of the 17 states that reject ballots if the voter lacks acceptable ID, seven do not accept student IDs, including South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Another five states including Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia have strict voter ID laws but accept all student IDs. And five states — among them Georgia, Kentucky, and North Carolina — accept student IDs if the issuing institutions meet certain requirements.
Three years after North Carolina lawmakers passed the voter ID law that excluded student IDs, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down as racially discriminatory. But GOP lawmakers almost immediately began devising a plan to put a new voter ID law on the books through the state constitutional amendment process. Last November, despite a campaign waged against it by voting rights advocates, North Carolina voters passed an amendment that mandated voters show some form of ID when they cast ballots starting in 2020.
Lawmakers released an early draft of the voter ID requirements the following month — and once again students were among those expected to be most impacted. The measure initially banned students at the state’s private colleges from using their student IDs to vote, though that provision was removed from the bill as it moved through the legislature.
However, the version that ultimately passed still presented challenges for both private and public schools. For example, it required that the photo used on the student ID be taken by the university itself, even though many schools allow students to submit their own photos for ID cards. It also mandated that universities submit an attestation letter under penalty of perjury that said the student IDs were issued following a verification of students’ citizenship status, Social Security number, and birthdates.
Many North Carolina schools were unable to meet the requirements. Some schools did not even bother to apply with the state elections board by the March 2019 deadline because they knew they could not qualify. Of the 850 colleges, universities, state and local employers and tribal entities eligible to submit requests to use their IDs for voting, only about 80 did. While all of the 17 schools in the University of North Carolina system applied for approval, only five qualified: Appalachian State, Elizabeth City State, North Carolina Central, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
In response to the confusion and controversy surrounding the student ID requirements for voting, a bipartisan group of North Carolina state House members including two freshmen Democrats and two GOP leaders began working on a remedy earlier this year in the form of House Bill 646. It says the photo on the student ID no longer has to be taken by the school, which must instead detail the process used to attain it. It also strikes the mention of a penalty of perjury but requires the school to submit “documentation satisfactory to the State Board of Elections” that the requirements have been met. The measure passed the state House and Senate overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Gov. Roy Cooper (D) in June.
The law’s deadlines for submitting that documentation are now looming. Schools that did not previously apply to have their student IDs qualify as voter ID have until Oct. 26 to do so, and the state elections board has until Nov. 1 to issue a ruling. Schools that previously applied but had their applications denied — including the 12 schools in the UNC system — have until Nov. 15 to resubmit their applications, and the board has until Dec. 1 to make a decision in those cases.
Students at institutions whose applications are denied will not be able to use their student IDs to vote in 2020. According to Rep. Zack Hawkins, a Durham Democrat and one of the primary sponsors of HB646, over 900,000 students could be affected.
The law set off a legal and political fight over using student IDs to vote that’s finally nearing a resolution. Critical deadlines are now looming for the state’s schools in advance of the 2020 election, in which North Carolina voters will have to show an ID to cast a ballot.
The state is among the 35 nationwide with voter ID laws on the books. Of those states, 18 allow voters who lack an acceptable form of ID to sign an affidavit and vote using a provisional ballot. Of the 17 states that reject ballots if the voter lacks acceptable ID, seven do not accept student IDs, including South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Another five states including Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia have strict voter ID laws but accept all student IDs. And five states — among them Georgia, Kentucky, and North Carolina — accept student IDs if the issuing institutions meet certain requirements.
Three years after North Carolina lawmakers passed the voter ID law that excluded student IDs, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down as racially discriminatory. But GOP lawmakers almost immediately began devising a plan to put a new voter ID law on the books through the state constitutional amendment process. Last November, despite a campaign waged against it by voting rights advocates, North Carolina voters passed an amendment that mandated voters show some form of ID when they cast ballots starting in 2020.
Lawmakers released an early draft of the voter ID requirements the following month — and once again students were among those expected to be most impacted. The measure initially banned students at the state’s private colleges from using their student IDs to vote, though that provision was removed from the bill as it moved through the legislature.
However, the version that ultimately passed still presented challenges for both private and public schools. For example, it required that the photo used on the student ID be taken by the university itself, even though many schools allow students to submit their own photos for ID cards. It also mandated that universities submit an attestation letter under penalty of perjury that said the student IDs were issued following a verification of students’ citizenship status, Social Security number, and birthdates.
Many North Carolina schools were unable to meet the requirements. Some schools did not even bother to apply with the state elections board by the March 2019 deadline because they knew they could not qualify. Of the 850 colleges, universities, state and local employers and tribal entities eligible to submit requests to use their IDs for voting, only about 80 did. While all of the 17 schools in the University of North Carolina system applied for approval, only five qualified: Appalachian State, Elizabeth City State, North Carolina Central, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
In response to the confusion and controversy surrounding the student ID requirements for voting, a bipartisan group of North Carolina state House members including two freshmen Democrats and two GOP leaders began working on a remedy earlier this year in the form of House Bill 646. It says the photo on the student ID no longer has to be taken by the school, which must instead detail the process used to attain it. It also strikes the mention of a penalty of perjury but requires the school to submit “documentation satisfactory to the State Board of Elections” that the requirements have been met. The measure passed the state House and Senate overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Gov. Roy Cooper (D) in June.
The law’s deadlines for submitting that documentation are now looming. Schools that did not previously apply to have their student IDs qualify as voter ID have until Oct. 26 to do so, and the state elections board has until Nov. 1 to issue a ruling. Schools that previously applied but had their applications denied — including the 12 schools in the UNC system — have until Nov. 15 to resubmit their applications, and the board has until Dec. 1 to make a decision in those cases.
Students at institutions whose applications are denied will not be able to use their student IDs to vote in 2020. According to Rep. Zack Hawkins, a Durham Democrat and one of the primary sponsors of HB646, over 900,000 students could be affected.
Gerrymander guru's secret files: He used racial data to disenfranchise black voters
Former Salon editor David Daley reveals Thomas Hofeller's plans to stop black people and students from voting
IGOR DERYSH - salon
SEPTEMBER 11, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)
Secret files found on a longtime Republican operative’s computer after his death revealed that he compiled racial data to help his party draw new political maps and impose voter ID laws.
Thomas Hofeller, who is considered the master of modern gerrymandering, left behind at least 70,000 files that were found by his estranged daughter after his death in August 2018. Some of those files have already been used to successfully challenge North Carolina’s gerrymander and the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census, which Hofeller argued would help “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
More files, obtained by former Salon editor David Daley at The New Yorker, show that Hofeller and his race research played a key role in Republican gerrymandering efforts in North Carolina and other states, as well as other efforts intended to make it harder for African-Americans and college students to vote.
Though North Carolina Republicans have argued that their maps discriminate based on partisanship and not race, Hofeller’s files show that he compiled maps with overlays of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that racial data was a key part of the gerrymander, which is at the center of a years-long legal battle.
The files contradict claims Republicans have long used to defend their maps in court. Republicans had long denied that a congressional-district line that cuts right down the middle of the largest historically black college in the United States, North Carolina A&T State University, was intentionally drawn to dilute the black vote, even though it effectively guaranteed two Republican districts. But Hofeller’s files show that the effort clearly focused on the race of students.
Hofeller created “giant databases that detailed the racial makeup, voting patterns, and residence halls of more than a thousand North Carolina A&T students,” Daley reported. “He also collected similar data that tracked the race, voting patterns, and addresses of tens of thousands of other North Carolina college students. Some spreadsheets have more than fifty different fields with precise racial, gender, and geographic details on thousands of college voters.”
A spreadsheet found on Hofeller’s computer shows that the operative sorted students by the residence halls they lived in along with racial data and voting status information.
Hofeller also had dozens of “intensely detailed studies” of the racial makeup of North Carolina college students that was cross-referenced with driver’s license files to determine whether these students likely had a proper ID to vote, according to the report.
Emails on his computer also show that Hofeller billed North Carolina Republicans tens of thousands of dollars for his work. Federal Election Commission filings also show that the national Republican Party paid Hofeller more than $2 million for his work.
Other files show that Hofeller, a key player in the Trump administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the census, compiled data on the citizen voting-age population in North Carolina, Texas, Arizona and other states going back to 2011. In memos, Hofeller argued that drawing maps based on the number of citizens rather than the population would “clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and help “non-Hispanic whites.”
Hofeller also submitted memos to the Trump administration urging them to justify the census question with the dubious argument that it was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The New Yorker report shows that he also worked for a Massachusetts Republican who wanted to use the Voting Rights Act to turn Boston into a single district, so Republicans could contend for suburban Massachusetts congressional seats. Though Hofeller’s efforts were unsuccessful in Massachusetts, the files show he also compiled data on states like Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama.
Emails found on Hofeller’s computer also show that he advised top Republicans in Florida on gerrymandering effort, despite a state constitutional amendment that bars partisan gerrymandering. Florida officials have denied that Hofeller played any official role in the effort but a state judge later ruled that the Republicans “conducted a stealth redistricting operation that snuck partisan maps into the public process and made a ‘mockery’ of the state’s constitutional amendments,” The New Yorker reported.
The files show that Hofeller also traveled around the country to educate Republicans about redistricting and urged them to push for prison gerrymandering, which allows inmates to be counted as residents of the area where the prison is located, often helping Republican lawmakers.
Hofeller’s emails also show that he grew concerned that his maps would be undone by the anti-Trump wave that followed his election.
“Meanwhile the GOP continues to bury its collective heads in the sand or in other higher places. Trump is only a product to this stupidity,” he wrote to a Republican consultant in 2016. “Do not worry about us in North Carolina in terms of redistricting. Even in the coming political bloodbath we should still maintain majority control of the General Assembly. The Governor cannot veto a redistricting map, so the Democrats hope is that the Obamista judiciary will come to their rescue.”
Last week, a North Carolina court struck down the state’s legislative maps that Hofeller helped create, ruling that they violated the Constitution. The new map had been drawn after the Supreme Court struck down North Carolina's previous map as a racial gerrymander.
The court ruled that Hofeller’s maps “deliberately minimized the effectiveness of the votes of citizens with whom they disagree,” arguing that the map amounted to “viewpoint discrimination” against Democrats and an effort to “retaliate against voters” for voting for Democrats.
The court said that the files on Hofeller’s computer showed evidence of “predominant focus on maximizing Republican partisan advantage in creating the 2017 Plans.”
“The evidence establishes that Dr. Hofeller drew the 2017 Plans very precisely to create as many ‘safe’ Republican districts as possible, so that Republicans would maintain their supermajorities, or at least majorities even in a strong election year for Democrats,” the court said. “Hofeller drew the maps with an intent to preserve Republicans’ control of the House and Senate.”
The court gave state lawmakers two weeks to draw nonpartisan maps. Republicans have sued to try to get a court to seal or destroy the files, arguing that they should remain confidential because they were obtained from his daughter and not from him.
The files could be a treasure trove for voting rights groups as they seek to challenge years of Republican efforts to gerrymander districts in order to gain an unfair advantage, as well as to impose voter ID laws to make it harder for certain populations to vote.
“We’ve already seen that these files have been instrumental in exposing lies around the effort to add a citizenship question to the census and around subverting a court’s order to redraw gerrymandered lines,” Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, told The New York Times. “The Hofeller files are important because they’re the only thing that will allow the American people to know the truth behind the efforts to rig redistricting and elections.”
The files show only a fraction of the work Hofeller did, which stretches back to the 1980s. Files obtained by The New Yorker show that Hofeller continued to work to help Republicans even after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“I still have time to bedevil the Democrats with more redistricting plans before I exit,” he wrote to a friend. “Look my name up on the Internet and you can follow the damage.”
Thomas Hofeller, who is considered the master of modern gerrymandering, left behind at least 70,000 files that were found by his estranged daughter after his death in August 2018. Some of those files have already been used to successfully challenge North Carolina’s gerrymander and the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census, which Hofeller argued would help “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
More files, obtained by former Salon editor David Daley at The New Yorker, show that Hofeller and his race research played a key role in Republican gerrymandering efforts in North Carolina and other states, as well as other efforts intended to make it harder for African-Americans and college students to vote.
Though North Carolina Republicans have argued that their maps discriminate based on partisanship and not race, Hofeller’s files show that he compiled maps with overlays of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that racial data was a key part of the gerrymander, which is at the center of a years-long legal battle.
The files contradict claims Republicans have long used to defend their maps in court. Republicans had long denied that a congressional-district line that cuts right down the middle of the largest historically black college in the United States, North Carolina A&T State University, was intentionally drawn to dilute the black vote, even though it effectively guaranteed two Republican districts. But Hofeller’s files show that the effort clearly focused on the race of students.
Hofeller created “giant databases that detailed the racial makeup, voting patterns, and residence halls of more than a thousand North Carolina A&T students,” Daley reported. “He also collected similar data that tracked the race, voting patterns, and addresses of tens of thousands of other North Carolina college students. Some spreadsheets have more than fifty different fields with precise racial, gender, and geographic details on thousands of college voters.”
A spreadsheet found on Hofeller’s computer shows that the operative sorted students by the residence halls they lived in along with racial data and voting status information.
Hofeller also had dozens of “intensely detailed studies” of the racial makeup of North Carolina college students that was cross-referenced with driver’s license files to determine whether these students likely had a proper ID to vote, according to the report.
Emails on his computer also show that Hofeller billed North Carolina Republicans tens of thousands of dollars for his work. Federal Election Commission filings also show that the national Republican Party paid Hofeller more than $2 million for his work.
Other files show that Hofeller, a key player in the Trump administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the census, compiled data on the citizen voting-age population in North Carolina, Texas, Arizona and other states going back to 2011. In memos, Hofeller argued that drawing maps based on the number of citizens rather than the population would “clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and help “non-Hispanic whites.”
Hofeller also submitted memos to the Trump administration urging them to justify the census question with the dubious argument that it was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The New Yorker report shows that he also worked for a Massachusetts Republican who wanted to use the Voting Rights Act to turn Boston into a single district, so Republicans could contend for suburban Massachusetts congressional seats. Though Hofeller’s efforts were unsuccessful in Massachusetts, the files show he also compiled data on states like Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama.
Emails found on Hofeller’s computer also show that he advised top Republicans in Florida on gerrymandering effort, despite a state constitutional amendment that bars partisan gerrymandering. Florida officials have denied that Hofeller played any official role in the effort but a state judge later ruled that the Republicans “conducted a stealth redistricting operation that snuck partisan maps into the public process and made a ‘mockery’ of the state’s constitutional amendments,” The New Yorker reported.
The files show that Hofeller also traveled around the country to educate Republicans about redistricting and urged them to push for prison gerrymandering, which allows inmates to be counted as residents of the area where the prison is located, often helping Republican lawmakers.
Hofeller’s emails also show that he grew concerned that his maps would be undone by the anti-Trump wave that followed his election.
“Meanwhile the GOP continues to bury its collective heads in the sand or in other higher places. Trump is only a product to this stupidity,” he wrote to a Republican consultant in 2016. “Do not worry about us in North Carolina in terms of redistricting. Even in the coming political bloodbath we should still maintain majority control of the General Assembly. The Governor cannot veto a redistricting map, so the Democrats hope is that the Obamista judiciary will come to their rescue.”
Last week, a North Carolina court struck down the state’s legislative maps that Hofeller helped create, ruling that they violated the Constitution. The new map had been drawn after the Supreme Court struck down North Carolina's previous map as a racial gerrymander.
The court ruled that Hofeller’s maps “deliberately minimized the effectiveness of the votes of citizens with whom they disagree,” arguing that the map amounted to “viewpoint discrimination” against Democrats and an effort to “retaliate against voters” for voting for Democrats.
The court said that the files on Hofeller’s computer showed evidence of “predominant focus on maximizing Republican partisan advantage in creating the 2017 Plans.”
“The evidence establishes that Dr. Hofeller drew the 2017 Plans very precisely to create as many ‘safe’ Republican districts as possible, so that Republicans would maintain their supermajorities, or at least majorities even in a strong election year for Democrats,” the court said. “Hofeller drew the maps with an intent to preserve Republicans’ control of the House and Senate.”
The court gave state lawmakers two weeks to draw nonpartisan maps. Republicans have sued to try to get a court to seal or destroy the files, arguing that they should remain confidential because they were obtained from his daughter and not from him.
The files could be a treasure trove for voting rights groups as they seek to challenge years of Republican efforts to gerrymander districts in order to gain an unfair advantage, as well as to impose voter ID laws to make it harder for certain populations to vote.
“We’ve already seen that these files have been instrumental in exposing lies around the effort to add a citizenship question to the census and around subverting a court’s order to redraw gerrymandered lines,” Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, told The New York Times. “The Hofeller files are important because they’re the only thing that will allow the American people to know the truth behind the efforts to rig redistricting and elections.”
The files show only a fraction of the work Hofeller did, which stretches back to the 1980s. Files obtained by The New Yorker show that Hofeller continued to work to help Republicans even after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“I still have time to bedevil the Democrats with more redistricting plans before I exit,” he wrote to a friend. “Look my name up on the Internet and you can follow the damage.”
‘Democracy for some, but not for all’: Report reveals nearly 1,700 polling places closed since Supreme Court weakened Voting Rights Act
September 10, 2019
By Common Dreams - raw story
Civil rights advocates said Tuesday that The U.S. Supreme Court must restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act after a sweeping new report showed how the court’s decision led to the closure of nearly 1,700 polling places across the American South.
The Leadership Conference Education Fund’s study, “Democracy Diverted,” revealed Tuesday that nearly 1,200 of the polling places were closed between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, “underscoring the scale of this assault on U.S. democracy.”
The group is the research and education arm of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Under Law, the nation’s largest coalition of civil rights groups.
“We must recognize that closures are taking place at alarming speed amid broader efforts to prevent people of color from voting,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference. “And meanwhile, states are under no obligation to evaluate the discriminatory impacts of such closures. This is exactly why we need to restore the Voting Rights Act and all of its protections.”
In its 2013 ruling on Shelby County vs. Holder, the Supreme Court invalidated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The provision mandated that voting precincts and counties with a history of racial discrimination must seek “preclearance” or approval of any changes in voting rules that could affect minority voters’ access to the polls.
Gupta testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday hours after the report was released, explaining Shelby County vs. Holder’s far-reaching impact on marginalized communities, especially under the Trump administration.
“Restoring preclearance is all the more important under an administration that refuses to challenge discriminatory voting measures,” Gupta said. “Not a single case has been opened, including barriers to registration, restrictive voter ID requirements, and polling place closures.”
States across the South have shuttered hundreds of polling locations in the wake of the decision, with many of the closures in counties heavily populated by black and Latinx voters.
Texas, Arizona, and Georgia were the worst offenders between 2012 and 2018, the Leadership Conference revealed.
Texas alone closed 750 locations, and 13 out 15 counties in Arizona—a state where 30 percent of the population is Latinox—shuttered polling places. Maricopa County, where 31 percent of residents are Latinx, closed more locations than any of the 757 counties the Leadership Conference examined.
“Without Section 5 of the VRA, we cannot assess the impact these mass closures have on communities of color,” the group said.
In Georgia, where nearly a third of the population is African American, seven counties were left with a single polling place. Voters in Warren County, which is 61 percent black, saw 83 percent of their polling locations shut down while Lumpkin County closed 89 percent of its polling places.
On social media, Heather Hargreaves, manager for Democrat Tom Steyer’s 2020 presidential campaign, suggested the closure of nearly 2,000 polling places across the South—like Republicans’ opposition to laws expanding access to the polls for all Americans—reveals the party’s fear of a true democracy.
The Supreme Court’s failure to defend all Americans’ right to participate in the democratic process, said Gupta, “will only lead to more of the same: a democracy for some, but not for all.”
The Leadership Conference Education Fund’s study, “Democracy Diverted,” revealed Tuesday that nearly 1,200 of the polling places were closed between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, “underscoring the scale of this assault on U.S. democracy.”
The group is the research and education arm of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Under Law, the nation’s largest coalition of civil rights groups.
“We must recognize that closures are taking place at alarming speed amid broader efforts to prevent people of color from voting,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference. “And meanwhile, states are under no obligation to evaluate the discriminatory impacts of such closures. This is exactly why we need to restore the Voting Rights Act and all of its protections.”
In its 2013 ruling on Shelby County vs. Holder, the Supreme Court invalidated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The provision mandated that voting precincts and counties with a history of racial discrimination must seek “preclearance” or approval of any changes in voting rules that could affect minority voters’ access to the polls.
Gupta testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday hours after the report was released, explaining Shelby County vs. Holder’s far-reaching impact on marginalized communities, especially under the Trump administration.
“Restoring preclearance is all the more important under an administration that refuses to challenge discriminatory voting measures,” Gupta said. “Not a single case has been opened, including barriers to registration, restrictive voter ID requirements, and polling place closures.”
States across the South have shuttered hundreds of polling locations in the wake of the decision, with many of the closures in counties heavily populated by black and Latinx voters.
Texas, Arizona, and Georgia were the worst offenders between 2012 and 2018, the Leadership Conference revealed.
Texas alone closed 750 locations, and 13 out 15 counties in Arizona—a state where 30 percent of the population is Latinox—shuttered polling places. Maricopa County, where 31 percent of residents are Latinx, closed more locations than any of the 757 counties the Leadership Conference examined.
“Without Section 5 of the VRA, we cannot assess the impact these mass closures have on communities of color,” the group said.
In Georgia, where nearly a third of the population is African American, seven counties were left with a single polling place. Voters in Warren County, which is 61 percent black, saw 83 percent of their polling locations shut down while Lumpkin County closed 89 percent of its polling places.
On social media, Heather Hargreaves, manager for Democrat Tom Steyer’s 2020 presidential campaign, suggested the closure of nearly 2,000 polling places across the South—like Republicans’ opposition to laws expanding access to the polls for all Americans—reveals the party’s fear of a true democracy.
The Supreme Court’s failure to defend all Americans’ right to participate in the democratic process, said Gupta, “will only lead to more of the same: a democracy for some, but not for all.”
Ohio will purge more than 200,000 voters — from a list riddled with errors
Journalists and voting rights groups have identified numerous errors, but the GOP secretary of state will go ahead
IGOR DERYSH - salon
SEPTEMBER 9, 2019 9:00AM (UTC)
Ohio is set to purge nearly a quarter-million people from its voter rolls Friday despite journalists and voting rights groups finding repeated mistakes on the state’s list.
Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose published a list in August targeting 235,000 voters the state says are inactive, meaning voters who have not voted for the past six years that the state was unable to contact.
The list of voters was fraught with errors. The secretary of state’s office announced hundreds of changes to the list almost immediately. Two weeks later, voting rights groups discovered that 4,000 people had been erroneously added to the list, the Columbus Dispatch reported. The paper reported days later that another 1,600 people had been incorrectly added to the list because of an error by a software vendor.
The list also included thousands of people who were apparently unaware they had bee targeted for removal, even though the state is required to attempt to contact them. More than 11,800 people included on the list have updated their voter registrations so they won’t be canceled, HuffPost reported.
Ohio removes people from the rolls if the state suspects they have moved or died. The list includes people who have not responded to an address confirmation mailing and people who have not voted or participated in any board of elections activity for six years. But voting rights groups say the purge lists are filled with errors that could disenfranchise thousands of legitimate voters. Ohio has already purged 265,000 voter registrations this year, and at least 17 million people have been purged from voter rolls around the country since the 2016 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Ohio Democratic Party sued to try to stop the state from carrying out the purge, citing the repeated errors on the list. LaRose’s office argued that the errors had been fixed and that the office was taking additional steps to contact people on the list. A federal judge on Tuesday rejected the Democrats’ lawsuit seeking to halt the purge, despite acknowledging problems with past purges. The Supreme Court last year ruled that Ohio’s “supplemental process” that targets voters it suspects have moved or died was legal despite putting eligible voters at risk.
“As we prepare to finalize this process, we’re confident that there has never been a more intensive review of Ohio’s voting rolls, and we’re satisfied that the proper safeguards are in place to ensure any eligible voter will have the opportunity to have their voice heard,” LaRose spokeswoman Maggie Sheehan said in a statement to HuffPost.
But Democrats say that the dubious process all but guarantees that eligible voters will be removed.
“Someone asked me on a call today, 'Well, what’s the margin of error that’s acceptable in this purging?' And I said, this isn’t a poll. This is voting. You should not ever be limiting people from the rolls by government error,” Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper told WOSU.
The party’s executive director, Greg Beswick, told Cleveland.com that it was “disturbing” that LaRose planned to go forward with the purge despite admitting to “errors that resulted in thousands of Ohio voters being improperly … and unlawfully flagged to be removed from the rolls.”
“The specter that any active voters are purged due to government error, and no fault of their own, is unacceptable,” he added.
With no legal recourse left, voting rights groups like All Voting is Local are scrambling to contact as many people as possible to encourage them to update their registrations.
“Thousands of voters at risk of being purged have already alerted the state that they are still very much alive and wish to vote,” Mick Brickner, the group’s Ohio state director, said in a statement. “This shows how deeply broken the purge process is and the need for voter registration modernization now.”
Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose published a list in August targeting 235,000 voters the state says are inactive, meaning voters who have not voted for the past six years that the state was unable to contact.
The list of voters was fraught with errors. The secretary of state’s office announced hundreds of changes to the list almost immediately. Two weeks later, voting rights groups discovered that 4,000 people had been erroneously added to the list, the Columbus Dispatch reported. The paper reported days later that another 1,600 people had been incorrectly added to the list because of an error by a software vendor.
The list also included thousands of people who were apparently unaware they had bee targeted for removal, even though the state is required to attempt to contact them. More than 11,800 people included on the list have updated their voter registrations so they won’t be canceled, HuffPost reported.
Ohio removes people from the rolls if the state suspects they have moved or died. The list includes people who have not responded to an address confirmation mailing and people who have not voted or participated in any board of elections activity for six years. But voting rights groups say the purge lists are filled with errors that could disenfranchise thousands of legitimate voters. Ohio has already purged 265,000 voter registrations this year, and at least 17 million people have been purged from voter rolls around the country since the 2016 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Ohio Democratic Party sued to try to stop the state from carrying out the purge, citing the repeated errors on the list. LaRose’s office argued that the errors had been fixed and that the office was taking additional steps to contact people on the list. A federal judge on Tuesday rejected the Democrats’ lawsuit seeking to halt the purge, despite acknowledging problems with past purges. The Supreme Court last year ruled that Ohio’s “supplemental process” that targets voters it suspects have moved or died was legal despite putting eligible voters at risk.
“As we prepare to finalize this process, we’re confident that there has never been a more intensive review of Ohio’s voting rolls, and we’re satisfied that the proper safeguards are in place to ensure any eligible voter will have the opportunity to have their voice heard,” LaRose spokeswoman Maggie Sheehan said in a statement to HuffPost.
But Democrats say that the dubious process all but guarantees that eligible voters will be removed.
“Someone asked me on a call today, 'Well, what’s the margin of error that’s acceptable in this purging?' And I said, this isn’t a poll. This is voting. You should not ever be limiting people from the rolls by government error,” Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper told WOSU.
The party’s executive director, Greg Beswick, told Cleveland.com that it was “disturbing” that LaRose planned to go forward with the purge despite admitting to “errors that resulted in thousands of Ohio voters being improperly … and unlawfully flagged to be removed from the rolls.”
“The specter that any active voters are purged due to government error, and no fault of their own, is unacceptable,” he added.
With no legal recourse left, voting rights groups like All Voting is Local are scrambling to contact as many people as possible to encourage them to update their registrations.
“Thousands of voters at risk of being purged have already alerted the state that they are still very much alive and wish to vote,” Mick Brickner, the group’s Ohio state director, said in a statement. “This shows how deeply broken the purge process is and the need for voter registration modernization now.”
No, both sides are not the same
Mark E Andersen for Daily Kos
Community
Sunday July 28, 2019 · 6:30 PM PDT
Read the comments on any political post and sooner or later you will run across the obligatory “Both sides are the same” argument, or some variant of that sentiment. It is normally said by someone who thinks they are smarter than everyone else, and when they say it, they talk down to all who disagree with them. They also happen to be wrong.
There are two distinct sides in American politics today. The differences between the two sides could not be any more apparent or clear, especially since the election of the current White House occupant.
On one side is the American right, where facts and reason have been cast off as if they were a worthless trinket won at the country fair. Members of the Republican Party are expected to walk lockstep with party leadership: There is no dissent, and very little, if any, diversity. They are a party that uses racism, hatred, and fear to drive voters to the polls. Someone is always coming to get their guns or bring sharia law to the country, and scary brown people are constantly trying to take their jobs.
The GOP is a party that claims fiscal restraint yet cuts taxes with abandon, never worrying about the impacts those tax cuts will have on the very institutions that rely on government funding to function. Infrastructure crumbles, college tuition climbs, and elementary and secondary education suffer. Parents have to pick up the slack by selling wrapping paper, magazine subscriptions, discount cards, and various other schemes to replace funding that has been cut to pay for ill-advised tax cuts, while the Air Force gets all the money they want for a bomber that we really don’t need. You can bet the Air Force won’t be holding a bake sale to raise $600 million to buy a new bomber.
The Republican Party also claims the moral high ground. With the backing of American evangelicals, they claim to be the soul of America, yet they support a thrice-married cheater who epitomizes everything Jesus preached against.
On the left you have the Democratic Party which, while not perfect, is a damn sight better than anything on the right. On the left there are actual proposals that will make peoples lives better, and not just rich folks.
The Affordable Care Act was a long time coming and is the first step in making health care a right, and not a privilege. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has a plan for everything, recently released a plan to eliminate student debt, a plan that could help millions of Americans and prevent an economic collapse.
Democrats stand for taxes and decry income equality, arguing that billionaires and large corporations should not be paying less in taxes than the average American making a median income. Democrats believe that no one should suffer from food insecurity, while Republicans have no issue with kicking 3 million people off the SNAP program.
Democrats want inclusivity and as a result, it often seems like getting the Democratic Party to agree on anything is like herding cats. Every group has a voice and every voice has a different priority, but eventually a consensus is achieved, and moved forward.
Some of America’s greatest achievements have been shepherded in by the American left. In the throes of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced Social Security. John F. Kennedy gave us the moon. Lyndon Johnson gave us Medicare. Barack Obama gave us the Affordable Care Act.
Is the Democratic Party perfect? Not by a long shot. But that is what is so great about it: We can all complain about the party, we can argue about its future, we can agree, and we can disagree. We do not have to march in lockstep with the party leaders, and that is the strength of the American left.
So the next time you hear someone smugly say that “both parties are the same,” do not engage them, and do not argue with them. Let them have their little moment, and know that they are not as smart as they think they are. There is a stark difference between the parties. Anyone who says any different is doing nothing more than displaying their ignorance of American politics.
There are two distinct sides in American politics today. The differences between the two sides could not be any more apparent or clear, especially since the election of the current White House occupant.
On one side is the American right, where facts and reason have been cast off as if they were a worthless trinket won at the country fair. Members of the Republican Party are expected to walk lockstep with party leadership: There is no dissent, and very little, if any, diversity. They are a party that uses racism, hatred, and fear to drive voters to the polls. Someone is always coming to get their guns or bring sharia law to the country, and scary brown people are constantly trying to take their jobs.
The GOP is a party that claims fiscal restraint yet cuts taxes with abandon, never worrying about the impacts those tax cuts will have on the very institutions that rely on government funding to function. Infrastructure crumbles, college tuition climbs, and elementary and secondary education suffer. Parents have to pick up the slack by selling wrapping paper, magazine subscriptions, discount cards, and various other schemes to replace funding that has been cut to pay for ill-advised tax cuts, while the Air Force gets all the money they want for a bomber that we really don’t need. You can bet the Air Force won’t be holding a bake sale to raise $600 million to buy a new bomber.
The Republican Party also claims the moral high ground. With the backing of American evangelicals, they claim to be the soul of America, yet they support a thrice-married cheater who epitomizes everything Jesus preached against.
On the left you have the Democratic Party which, while not perfect, is a damn sight better than anything on the right. On the left there are actual proposals that will make peoples lives better, and not just rich folks.
The Affordable Care Act was a long time coming and is the first step in making health care a right, and not a privilege. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has a plan for everything, recently released a plan to eliminate student debt, a plan that could help millions of Americans and prevent an economic collapse.
Democrats stand for taxes and decry income equality, arguing that billionaires and large corporations should not be paying less in taxes than the average American making a median income. Democrats believe that no one should suffer from food insecurity, while Republicans have no issue with kicking 3 million people off the SNAP program.
Democrats want inclusivity and as a result, it often seems like getting the Democratic Party to agree on anything is like herding cats. Every group has a voice and every voice has a different priority, but eventually a consensus is achieved, and moved forward.
Some of America’s greatest achievements have been shepherded in by the American left. In the throes of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced Social Security. John F. Kennedy gave us the moon. Lyndon Johnson gave us Medicare. Barack Obama gave us the Affordable Care Act.
Is the Democratic Party perfect? Not by a long shot. But that is what is so great about it: We can all complain about the party, we can argue about its future, we can agree, and we can disagree. We do not have to march in lockstep with the party leaders, and that is the strength of the American left.
So the next time you hear someone smugly say that “both parties are the same,” do not engage them, and do not argue with them. Let them have their little moment, and know that they are not as smart as they think they are. There is a stark difference between the parties. Anyone who says any different is doing nothing more than displaying their ignorance of American politics.
Political Fundraising Has a Big, Nasty Secret
U.S. campaign-finance laws have been written to prevent donors from taking advantage of politicians—but do little to protect donors from being scammed.
6:00 AM ET
David A. Graham
Staff writer at The Atlantic
It’s nice work if you can get it—“it,” in this case, being other folks’ hard-earned cash.
The world of political fundraising has a big problem. Consider an excellent investigation by ProPublica and Politico published Friday about a political-action committee called the Conservative Majority Fund, which, the authors write:
has raised nearly $10 million since mid-2012 and continues to solicit funds to this day, primarily from thousands of steadfast contributors to conservative causes, many of them senior citizens. But it has made just $48,400 in political contributions to candidates and committees. Public records indicate its main beneficiaries are the operative Kelley Rogers, who has a history of disputes over allegedly unethical fundraising, and one of the largest conservative fundraising companies, InfoCision Management Corp., which charged millions of dollars in fundraising fees.
Such groups, often labeled “scam PACs,” are not new, and though they seemed to gain a toehold on the right first, liberal counterparts have been catching up in the Trump era. The basic setup is something like this: A group raises money it claims will go to some political cause, but ends up spending no money, or effectively no money, on that goal, instead directing the funds to other ends—often to its founders or staff in the form of salaries, payment for services rendered, travel, and the like. The Conservative Majority Fund is just an especially extreme example.
Broadly speaking, U.S. campaign-finance laws have been written to prevent nefarious influence by donors over politicians. To that end, the government limits (for now, at least) how much an individual can give to a candidate. It prevents “straw donations,” in which an individual routes donations through other people, since that would give a single individual undue influence. It prevents donations from foreigners to U.S. political campaigns. It requires that campaigns and some other bodies disclose who has given to them. The unifying principle is the presumption that the public needs to worry about who might influence a politician. Scam PACs bypass that principle. Here, it’s not the donors who are taking advantage—it’s the donors who are being taken advantage of, by operators who have spotted a shadow in the law in which they can operate.
Politics is a lucrative business, and campaign operatives routinely take office seekers for rides. Sometimes that is because they are unscrupulous, and sometimes that is simply because the operative makes errors or because the candidate just can’t cut it. (After all, most candidates lose.) “The consultant is selling something to the candidate,” the political scientist Adam Sheingate told Molly Ball in The Atlantic in 2016. “The confidence game is that the candidate is always a little afraid. They’re always a little scared they can lose, and that’s what the consultant exploits.”
It’s hard to feel much pity for candidates who light their campaign cash on fire. But the kind of people who give to scam PACs are more sympathetic. CMF, for example, relied heavily on telemarketing, which is both an extremely expensive method of raising funds—it requires live people to call would-be donors—and one that, like direct mail, is particularly effective at targeting older and often less sophisticated, more vulnerable people.
About $9 million of what CMF raised went to an Akron, Ohio–based telemarketing firm called InfoCision, according to ProPublica. Devoted readers will not be surprised to see the firm’s name here. As I reported in a pair of pieces on Ben Carson’s 2016 presidential run, the Carson campaign was raising astonishing amounts of money—but it was also spending eye-popping amounts. FEC reports showed that much of the money was being plowed back into direct mail and telemarketing fundraising. A lot of it went to a direct-mail firm run by Carson’s chief fundraiser, and big chunks also went to InfoCision and Eleventy, another company based in Akron.
In summary, Carson was raising cash from possibly unsophisticated donors and then spending it to raise more cash from unsophisticated donors. Carson didn’t end up with much to show for it—he was polling fourth, in single digits, when he dropped out in March 2016, though he did end up with a Cabinet position for which, by his own account, he was not qualified. But the vendors made a neat buck. InfoCision had previously been a major payee for a dubious PAC run by Newt Gingrich, which, as of mid-2015, had raised $1.25 million and spent $1.38 million, but gave just $2,500 to candidates.
Still, those numbers look like a model of efficiency compared with CMF’s ratios. The modus operandi—call people up, solicit money for a specific cause, and then spend next to no money on that—sounds a great deal like a standard variety of scam, Carolyn Carter, the deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center, confirmed to me. (Carter noted that the state and federal laws that govern what tax-exempt organizations can do are complicated, but in general deceptive practices are barred.)
The catch here is who regulates the behavior. If you call people up, ask them for money, and claim most of the donation will go to a charity but don’t actually do that, you’re liable to get in trouble with the government. In fact, that has happened to InfoCision: In 2012, the Ohio attorney general reached a settlement with InfoCision in which the company paid a fine and agreed to abide by state laws. The company also settled a class-action lawsuit based on the same practices in 2014. (Those are not its only scrapes with the law. In 2018, the Federal Trade Commission fined InfoCision $250,000 for claiming that it was not asking for money in phone calls in which it asked for money. InfoCision also settled a class-action lawsuit in which employees said they’d been underpaid.)
But the FTC, state attorneys general, and other bodies that might regulate this kind of behavior in other spheres are constrained in their ability to intervene, because this is all happening under election law—which seems to be an ingenious loophole for bad behavior. As ProPublica notes, the FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction over political fundraising. That’s the province of the Federal Election Commission.
The FEC, however, is notoriously toothless, effectively created to deadlock. But even setting aside that problem, two Democratic commissioners acknowledged in 2016 that “the power of the Commission to directly and comprehensively protect political contributors is limited.” In 2018, the FEC asked Congress to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act to allow the commission to regulate fraud.
The Daily Beast also reported in 2018 that the Justice Department had brought charges against a scam PAC in Arizona, and a defendant pleaded guilty in November 2018. “This is the first-ever federal prosecution of fraudulent scam PACs, but it won’t be the last,” U.S. Attorney for Manhattan Geoffrey Berman said at the time.
One hopes Berman is correct. For the time being, scam PACs seem to have found a clever way to get away with behavior that might be illegal in other areas simply by doing it in the election sphere. It’s hard to besmirch any pursuit as routinely maligned as politics, but they have found a way.
The world of political fundraising has a big problem. Consider an excellent investigation by ProPublica and Politico published Friday about a political-action committee called the Conservative Majority Fund, which, the authors write:
has raised nearly $10 million since mid-2012 and continues to solicit funds to this day, primarily from thousands of steadfast contributors to conservative causes, many of them senior citizens. But it has made just $48,400 in political contributions to candidates and committees. Public records indicate its main beneficiaries are the operative Kelley Rogers, who has a history of disputes over allegedly unethical fundraising, and one of the largest conservative fundraising companies, InfoCision Management Corp., which charged millions of dollars in fundraising fees.
Such groups, often labeled “scam PACs,” are not new, and though they seemed to gain a toehold on the right first, liberal counterparts have been catching up in the Trump era. The basic setup is something like this: A group raises money it claims will go to some political cause, but ends up spending no money, or effectively no money, on that goal, instead directing the funds to other ends—often to its founders or staff in the form of salaries, payment for services rendered, travel, and the like. The Conservative Majority Fund is just an especially extreme example.
Broadly speaking, U.S. campaign-finance laws have been written to prevent nefarious influence by donors over politicians. To that end, the government limits (for now, at least) how much an individual can give to a candidate. It prevents “straw donations,” in which an individual routes donations through other people, since that would give a single individual undue influence. It prevents donations from foreigners to U.S. political campaigns. It requires that campaigns and some other bodies disclose who has given to them. The unifying principle is the presumption that the public needs to worry about who might influence a politician. Scam PACs bypass that principle. Here, it’s not the donors who are taking advantage—it’s the donors who are being taken advantage of, by operators who have spotted a shadow in the law in which they can operate.
Politics is a lucrative business, and campaign operatives routinely take office seekers for rides. Sometimes that is because they are unscrupulous, and sometimes that is simply because the operative makes errors or because the candidate just can’t cut it. (After all, most candidates lose.) “The consultant is selling something to the candidate,” the political scientist Adam Sheingate told Molly Ball in The Atlantic in 2016. “The confidence game is that the candidate is always a little afraid. They’re always a little scared they can lose, and that’s what the consultant exploits.”
It’s hard to feel much pity for candidates who light their campaign cash on fire. But the kind of people who give to scam PACs are more sympathetic. CMF, for example, relied heavily on telemarketing, which is both an extremely expensive method of raising funds—it requires live people to call would-be donors—and one that, like direct mail, is particularly effective at targeting older and often less sophisticated, more vulnerable people.
About $9 million of what CMF raised went to an Akron, Ohio–based telemarketing firm called InfoCision, according to ProPublica. Devoted readers will not be surprised to see the firm’s name here. As I reported in a pair of pieces on Ben Carson’s 2016 presidential run, the Carson campaign was raising astonishing amounts of money—but it was also spending eye-popping amounts. FEC reports showed that much of the money was being plowed back into direct mail and telemarketing fundraising. A lot of it went to a direct-mail firm run by Carson’s chief fundraiser, and big chunks also went to InfoCision and Eleventy, another company based in Akron.
In summary, Carson was raising cash from possibly unsophisticated donors and then spending it to raise more cash from unsophisticated donors. Carson didn’t end up with much to show for it—he was polling fourth, in single digits, when he dropped out in March 2016, though he did end up with a Cabinet position for which, by his own account, he was not qualified. But the vendors made a neat buck. InfoCision had previously been a major payee for a dubious PAC run by Newt Gingrich, which, as of mid-2015, had raised $1.25 million and spent $1.38 million, but gave just $2,500 to candidates.
Still, those numbers look like a model of efficiency compared with CMF’s ratios. The modus operandi—call people up, solicit money for a specific cause, and then spend next to no money on that—sounds a great deal like a standard variety of scam, Carolyn Carter, the deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center, confirmed to me. (Carter noted that the state and federal laws that govern what tax-exempt organizations can do are complicated, but in general deceptive practices are barred.)
The catch here is who regulates the behavior. If you call people up, ask them for money, and claim most of the donation will go to a charity but don’t actually do that, you’re liable to get in trouble with the government. In fact, that has happened to InfoCision: In 2012, the Ohio attorney general reached a settlement with InfoCision in which the company paid a fine and agreed to abide by state laws. The company also settled a class-action lawsuit based on the same practices in 2014. (Those are not its only scrapes with the law. In 2018, the Federal Trade Commission fined InfoCision $250,000 for claiming that it was not asking for money in phone calls in which it asked for money. InfoCision also settled a class-action lawsuit in which employees said they’d been underpaid.)
But the FTC, state attorneys general, and other bodies that might regulate this kind of behavior in other spheres are constrained in their ability to intervene, because this is all happening under election law—which seems to be an ingenious loophole for bad behavior. As ProPublica notes, the FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction over political fundraising. That’s the province of the Federal Election Commission.
The FEC, however, is notoriously toothless, effectively created to deadlock. But even setting aside that problem, two Democratic commissioners acknowledged in 2016 that “the power of the Commission to directly and comprehensively protect political contributors is limited.” In 2018, the FEC asked Congress to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act to allow the commission to regulate fraud.
The Daily Beast also reported in 2018 that the Justice Department had brought charges against a scam PAC in Arizona, and a defendant pleaded guilty in November 2018. “This is the first-ever federal prosecution of fraudulent scam PACs, but it won’t be the last,” U.S. Attorney for Manhattan Geoffrey Berman said at the time.
One hopes Berman is correct. For the time being, scam PACs seem to have found a clever way to get away with behavior that might be illegal in other areas simply by doing it in the election sphere. It’s hard to besmirch any pursuit as routinely maligned as politics, but they have found a way.
A List -- Why A Majority of Whites No Longer Vote Democratic at the Presidential Level
Stephen Nelson
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Wednesday March 06, 2013 · 2:59 PM PST
In seven of the nine Presidential elections that took place in the United States from 1932 through 1964 a majority of white voters in the country voted for the Democratic nominee for President. However, not once in the twelve President elections since 1964 has a majority of white voters voted for the Democratic nominee for President. What has happened to cause this rather dramatic and consistent shift among white voters?
There is no single simple answer. It's a complex confluence of many different causes and issues. Below is simply a list, in my opinion, of some of the causes of white flight from the Democratic party at the Presidential level.
Race --
The 1964 Civil Rights Act -- Lyndon Johnson reportedly said to Bill Moyers after Johnson signed the 1964 Civil rights act, "We have last the South for a generation." Johnson actually underestimated the length of time that the Democrats would lose the South as it's been almost 50 years since the Civil Rights Act was signed and with very few exceptions Democratic Presidential nominees have not won states in the South (I'm not considering Florida to be part of the original South). Out of the 132 opportunities to win states in the South between 1968 and 2012 Democratic nominees have won only 24 times, and 10 of those wins occurred during a single election, the post-Watergate backlash election of 1976 when Georgia native Jimmy Carter was on the Democratic ticket.
The 1965 Immigration Law --
Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration Law which changed the immigration policy toward non-Europeans. In 1970 Europeans accounted for almost 60% of the foreign born population but by 2000 Europeans accounted for only 15% of the foreign born population. Many white xenophobes blame the Democrats for what they see as the browning of America.
Affimative Action --
White backlash to affirmation action (the 1978 Bakke case held that racial quotas were unconstitutional) which was started started by executive orders of the Kennedy (10925) and Johnson (11246 and 11375) administrations.
The Perceived Breakdown of "Law and Order" --
The term "Law and Order" was used as coded racism by the right-wing as they used it to dissolve a liberal consensus about crime that involved federal court decisions and a pushback against illegal drugs and violent gang activity. Many whites turned against the Democratic party, blaming it for being soft on crime and rioters, including the Watts riots in 1965 and the Newark and Detroit riots in 1967.
The Warren Court --
many "law abiding" citizens blamed the "activist" Warren Court and Democrats for its "liberal" decisions, such as Escobedo vs. Illinois and Miranda vs. Arizona, which they believed handcuffed law enforcement and allowed criminals to evade justice.
Student Demonstrations --
In the Fall of 1964 the Free Speech Movement erupted on the Berkeley campus of the Univeristy of California, and many, including Ronald Reagan, blamed the "permissive, liberal" establishment, including Pat Brown, who was California governor, Clark Kerr, who was President of the University of California, and Edward Strong, who was chancellor at Berkeley, all of whom were Democrats. The FSM demonstrations were just the beginning, as later in the decade the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations become center stage.
1968 Democratic National Convention --
There was the chaos and disorder at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago which was seen by millions of Americans on television and reinforced the view that the Democrats could not maintain order in their own party, much less in the streets of America.
General Distrust of Goverment --
Democrats have tended to be seen as the pro-government party and the Republicans have been the anti-government party and there has been, in general, a mistrust of government including:
The Warren Commission -- 25 years after the JFK assassination a majority of the American public believed (rightly or wrongly) that JFK was assassinated as part of a conspiracy and not by a lone assassin as the Warren Commission concluded.
The Vietnam War --
The American public was constantly told by government officials that there was light at the end of the Tunnel, then early in 1968 the Tet Offensive occurred and it became obvious that the light at the end of the tunnel was the headlight of an oncoming train. Then, of course, there was Nixon's non-existant secret plan to end the war.
Watergate --
If people at the highest levels of the Federal government are corrupt, then government in general must be corrupt by definiation.
Democrats seen as weak on Defense/Foreign Policy --
Vietnam War-- One reason the Vietnam War divided and discredited Democrats and splintered the liberal consensus was because it was a Democratic adminstration that effectively started that war. Opposition to the war didn’t unify the party, it divided it. Nixon won the 1968 election, in part, because Humphrey was associated with the war, and couldn’t split with Johnson, and Nixon promised a non-existant secret plan to end the war. The national security gap for Democrats first appeared in polls in 1967, because Johnson was held responsible for the war itself, not because Democrats were associated intially with antiwar activists. But the anti-war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention permantly linked anti-war protesters to the Democratic party.
Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion --
After tne 1972 Massachusetts Democratic primary, long before Thomas Eagleton was chosen as George McGovern's running mate, Thomas Eagleton told reporter Robert Novak "The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot," Once "middle America—Catholic middle America, in particular" — once they find out, "he’s dead." Somewhere along the way the "pot" was dropped and the alliterative acid was substituted. The Acid, Amnesy, and Abortion label stuck to Democratic party for many years afterwards. In reality, of course, in 1972 McGovern was not for the legalization of marijuana, much less acid, as his daughter was an addict, and on abortion McGovern was to the Right of Roe, as he believed that abortion was better left to the states.
Iranian Hostage Crisis --
Throughout 1980 in the United States, constant media coverage -- yellow ribbons, footage of chanting Iranian mobs, even a whole new television news program, ABC's Nightline (orignally titled American Held Hostage) -- provided a dispiriting backdrop to the presidential election season. Because people felt that Jimmy Carter had not been tough enough in foreign policy, this symbolized for them that some bunch of students could seize American diplomatic officials and hold them prisoner and thumb their nose at the United States. This associated Carter and the Democrats with American impotence the in world.
Of course, this list is incomplete as these are just some of the major reasons that Democrats at the Presidential level no longer receive a majority of the white vote. The reasons are quite numerous and very complex and can't be adequately addressed in detail in a single diary.
There is no single simple answer. It's a complex confluence of many different causes and issues. Below is simply a list, in my opinion, of some of the causes of white flight from the Democratic party at the Presidential level.
Race --
The 1964 Civil Rights Act -- Lyndon Johnson reportedly said to Bill Moyers after Johnson signed the 1964 Civil rights act, "We have last the South for a generation." Johnson actually underestimated the length of time that the Democrats would lose the South as it's been almost 50 years since the Civil Rights Act was signed and with very few exceptions Democratic Presidential nominees have not won states in the South (I'm not considering Florida to be part of the original South). Out of the 132 opportunities to win states in the South between 1968 and 2012 Democratic nominees have won only 24 times, and 10 of those wins occurred during a single election, the post-Watergate backlash election of 1976 when Georgia native Jimmy Carter was on the Democratic ticket.
The 1965 Immigration Law --
Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration Law which changed the immigration policy toward non-Europeans. In 1970 Europeans accounted for almost 60% of the foreign born population but by 2000 Europeans accounted for only 15% of the foreign born population. Many white xenophobes blame the Democrats for what they see as the browning of America.
Affimative Action --
White backlash to affirmation action (the 1978 Bakke case held that racial quotas were unconstitutional) which was started started by executive orders of the Kennedy (10925) and Johnson (11246 and 11375) administrations.
The Perceived Breakdown of "Law and Order" --
The term "Law and Order" was used as coded racism by the right-wing as they used it to dissolve a liberal consensus about crime that involved federal court decisions and a pushback against illegal drugs and violent gang activity. Many whites turned against the Democratic party, blaming it for being soft on crime and rioters, including the Watts riots in 1965 and the Newark and Detroit riots in 1967.
The Warren Court --
many "law abiding" citizens blamed the "activist" Warren Court and Democrats for its "liberal" decisions, such as Escobedo vs. Illinois and Miranda vs. Arizona, which they believed handcuffed law enforcement and allowed criminals to evade justice.
Student Demonstrations --
In the Fall of 1964 the Free Speech Movement erupted on the Berkeley campus of the Univeristy of California, and many, including Ronald Reagan, blamed the "permissive, liberal" establishment, including Pat Brown, who was California governor, Clark Kerr, who was President of the University of California, and Edward Strong, who was chancellor at Berkeley, all of whom were Democrats. The FSM demonstrations were just the beginning, as later in the decade the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations become center stage.
1968 Democratic National Convention --
There was the chaos and disorder at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago which was seen by millions of Americans on television and reinforced the view that the Democrats could not maintain order in their own party, much less in the streets of America.
General Distrust of Goverment --
Democrats have tended to be seen as the pro-government party and the Republicans have been the anti-government party and there has been, in general, a mistrust of government including:
The Warren Commission -- 25 years after the JFK assassination a majority of the American public believed (rightly or wrongly) that JFK was assassinated as part of a conspiracy and not by a lone assassin as the Warren Commission concluded.
The Vietnam War --
The American public was constantly told by government officials that there was light at the end of the Tunnel, then early in 1968 the Tet Offensive occurred and it became obvious that the light at the end of the tunnel was the headlight of an oncoming train. Then, of course, there was Nixon's non-existant secret plan to end the war.
Watergate --
If people at the highest levels of the Federal government are corrupt, then government in general must be corrupt by definiation.
Democrats seen as weak on Defense/Foreign Policy --
Vietnam War-- One reason the Vietnam War divided and discredited Democrats and splintered the liberal consensus was because it was a Democratic adminstration that effectively started that war. Opposition to the war didn’t unify the party, it divided it. Nixon won the 1968 election, in part, because Humphrey was associated with the war, and couldn’t split with Johnson, and Nixon promised a non-existant secret plan to end the war. The national security gap for Democrats first appeared in polls in 1967, because Johnson was held responsible for the war itself, not because Democrats were associated intially with antiwar activists. But the anti-war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention permantly linked anti-war protesters to the Democratic party.
Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion --
After tne 1972 Massachusetts Democratic primary, long before Thomas Eagleton was chosen as George McGovern's running mate, Thomas Eagleton told reporter Robert Novak "The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot," Once "middle America—Catholic middle America, in particular" — once they find out, "he’s dead." Somewhere along the way the "pot" was dropped and the alliterative acid was substituted. The Acid, Amnesy, and Abortion label stuck to Democratic party for many years afterwards. In reality, of course, in 1972 McGovern was not for the legalization of marijuana, much less acid, as his daughter was an addict, and on abortion McGovern was to the Right of Roe, as he believed that abortion was better left to the states.
Iranian Hostage Crisis --
Throughout 1980 in the United States, constant media coverage -- yellow ribbons, footage of chanting Iranian mobs, even a whole new television news program, ABC's Nightline (orignally titled American Held Hostage) -- provided a dispiriting backdrop to the presidential election season. Because people felt that Jimmy Carter had not been tough enough in foreign policy, this symbolized for them that some bunch of students could seize American diplomatic officials and hold them prisoner and thumb their nose at the United States. This associated Carter and the Democrats with American impotence the in world.
Of course, this list is incomplete as these are just some of the major reasons that Democrats at the Presidential level no longer receive a majority of the white vote. The reasons are quite numerous and very complex and can't be adequately addressed in detail in a single diary.
White Women Are Helping States Pass Abortion Restrictions
Their support for Republican officials has been key to the GOP’s strength in the South.
RONALD BROWNSTEIN - the atlantic
12:23 PM ET
It’s common for critics of the new wave of state laws severely limiting access to abortion to say the measures are part of a Republican “war on women.”
But strong support from most white women, especially those who identify as evangelical Christians, has helped Republicans dominate local government in the states passing the most restrictive measures, from Alabama and Georgia to Kentucky and Missouri. In some of those states, polling shows that opposition to legal abortion is higher among white women than among white men.
These attitudes underscore why it’s too simplistic to forecast that the renewed push against abortion will uniformly drive women away from the GOP. There’s no question that abortion-rights supporters everywhere are mobilizing in opposition to the highly restrictive new laws, which range from bans starting at six weeks of pregnancy to total prohibition. Activists held some 500 events in all 50 states on Tuesday to protest the new laws—a preview, they say, of the energy the measures will ignite in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections, particularly among the roughly 60 percent majority of women who support legalized abortion. “We will power this movement into 2020,” NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue insisted in a conference call on Wednesday. “There will be political consequences.”
But it’s much less clear that abortion-rights supporters can exact political consequences in the states actually approving these laws, which are explicitly designed to prompt the Supreme Court to reconsider the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing nationwide access to the procedure. Their success will depend on whether the restrictions dislodge meaningful numbers of white women in these states from their respective Republican coalitions. And that is far from certain, particularly in the southern and border states advancing most of the laws.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who works extensively across the South, says that white women, “particularly suburban white women … have been absolutely critical” to the GOP’s strength in states approving the abortion bans. Election Day exit polls showed that most white women in these areas joined big majorities of white men to provide insuperable leads for Republican candidates.
In 2018, for instance, exit polls conducted by Edison Research found that fully three-fourths of white women supported the Republican Brian Kemp over the Democrat Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. That same year, just 16 percent of white women picked the Democrat Mike Espy for Mississippi’s Senate seat. In the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, 63 percent of white women backed the Republican Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations that he had dated teenage girls as an adult, over the Democrat Doug Jones (who narrowly triumphed anyway).
In all of these races, southern white women’s preferences diverged sharply from those of African American women, who gave 97 percent of their votes to Abrams, 98 percent to Jones, and 93 percent to Espy.
In most southern states, white women express at least as much opposition to legal abortion as white men, and in some cases more. The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) examined state-by-state attitudes on abortion in 2014. It found that just over three-fifths of white women in Alabama and Mississippi said that abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances, almost exactly the same percentage as white men in those states. About three-fifths of white women in Kentucky and a narrow majority in Georgia said that abortion should be mostly illegal; in both cases, that was a higher share than among the state’s white men. Only in Missouri did a 51 percent majority of white women say that abortion should mostly remain legal.
Across the South, the core of female opposition to abortion—and of support for the GOP—is women who identify as evangelical Christians. These women now consistently support Republicans in overwhelming numbers. Fully 80 percent of southern white evangelical women backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to previously unpublished exit-poll results provided to me by Edison. Three-fourths of white evangelical women in Alabama backed Moore over Jones in 2017, and an even more emphatic 88 percent of them in Georgia backed Kemp over Abrams in last year’s governor’s race. Across the South overall, three-fourths of white evangelical women said they approved of Trump’s performance in the 2018 exit poll, according to Edison, and just 20 percent of white evangelical women backed Democratic House candidates that year.
Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America, says that for evangelicals and other culturally conservative Americans, abortion has become a crucial symbol of attitudes toward the larger demographic, cultural, and even economic changes reshaping the nation.
In PRRI polling, Americans who oppose abortion expressed much more negative views on a broad array of social changes than those who support legal access, according to a new analysis it conducted at my request. Looking back at its 2016 Annual Values Survey, the group found that abortion opponents and supporters provided mirror-image responses to a core question: whether “American culture and way of life” has changed mostly for the better or for the worse since the 1950s. Two-thirds of abortion opponents picked worse, while two-thirds of supporters picked better. Similarly, while 60 percent of abortion opponents said the growing ranks of immigrants “threaten American customs and values,” a matching 60 percent of abortion supporters said having more immigrants “strengthens American society.” Women who opposed abortion were as likely as male opponents to express conservative views on those other social changes.(READ MORE)
But strong support from most white women, especially those who identify as evangelical Christians, has helped Republicans dominate local government in the states passing the most restrictive measures, from Alabama and Georgia to Kentucky and Missouri. In some of those states, polling shows that opposition to legal abortion is higher among white women than among white men.
These attitudes underscore why it’s too simplistic to forecast that the renewed push against abortion will uniformly drive women away from the GOP. There’s no question that abortion-rights supporters everywhere are mobilizing in opposition to the highly restrictive new laws, which range from bans starting at six weeks of pregnancy to total prohibition. Activists held some 500 events in all 50 states on Tuesday to protest the new laws—a preview, they say, of the energy the measures will ignite in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections, particularly among the roughly 60 percent majority of women who support legalized abortion. “We will power this movement into 2020,” NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue insisted in a conference call on Wednesday. “There will be political consequences.”
But it’s much less clear that abortion-rights supporters can exact political consequences in the states actually approving these laws, which are explicitly designed to prompt the Supreme Court to reconsider the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing nationwide access to the procedure. Their success will depend on whether the restrictions dislodge meaningful numbers of white women in these states from their respective Republican coalitions. And that is far from certain, particularly in the southern and border states advancing most of the laws.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who works extensively across the South, says that white women, “particularly suburban white women … have been absolutely critical” to the GOP’s strength in states approving the abortion bans. Election Day exit polls showed that most white women in these areas joined big majorities of white men to provide insuperable leads for Republican candidates.
In 2018, for instance, exit polls conducted by Edison Research found that fully three-fourths of white women supported the Republican Brian Kemp over the Democrat Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. That same year, just 16 percent of white women picked the Democrat Mike Espy for Mississippi’s Senate seat. In the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, 63 percent of white women backed the Republican Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations that he had dated teenage girls as an adult, over the Democrat Doug Jones (who narrowly triumphed anyway).
In all of these races, southern white women’s preferences diverged sharply from those of African American women, who gave 97 percent of their votes to Abrams, 98 percent to Jones, and 93 percent to Espy.
In most southern states, white women express at least as much opposition to legal abortion as white men, and in some cases more. The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) examined state-by-state attitudes on abortion in 2014. It found that just over three-fifths of white women in Alabama and Mississippi said that abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances, almost exactly the same percentage as white men in those states. About three-fifths of white women in Kentucky and a narrow majority in Georgia said that abortion should be mostly illegal; in both cases, that was a higher share than among the state’s white men. Only in Missouri did a 51 percent majority of white women say that abortion should mostly remain legal.
Across the South, the core of female opposition to abortion—and of support for the GOP—is women who identify as evangelical Christians. These women now consistently support Republicans in overwhelming numbers. Fully 80 percent of southern white evangelical women backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to previously unpublished exit-poll results provided to me by Edison. Three-fourths of white evangelical women in Alabama backed Moore over Jones in 2017, and an even more emphatic 88 percent of them in Georgia backed Kemp over Abrams in last year’s governor’s race. Across the South overall, three-fourths of white evangelical women said they approved of Trump’s performance in the 2018 exit poll, according to Edison, and just 20 percent of white evangelical women backed Democratic House candidates that year.
Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America, says that for evangelicals and other culturally conservative Americans, abortion has become a crucial symbol of attitudes toward the larger demographic, cultural, and even economic changes reshaping the nation.
In PRRI polling, Americans who oppose abortion expressed much more negative views on a broad array of social changes than those who support legal access, according to a new analysis it conducted at my request. Looking back at its 2016 Annual Values Survey, the group found that abortion opponents and supporters provided mirror-image responses to a core question: whether “American culture and way of life” has changed mostly for the better or for the worse since the 1950s. Two-thirds of abortion opponents picked worse, while two-thirds of supporters picked better. Similarly, while 60 percent of abortion opponents said the growing ranks of immigrants “threaten American customs and values,” a matching 60 percent of abortion supporters said having more immigrants “strengthens American society.” Women who opposed abortion were as likely as male opponents to express conservative views on those other social changes.(READ MORE)
map of the hypocrites!!!
The Daily Kos Elections guide to the nation's religious populations, by congressional district
By David Jarman
Sunday Jan 07, 2018 · 5:15 PM PST
Religion is one of the driving forces in American culture; it always has been, and continues to do so even as American religiosity, in general, has declined. It tends not to loom as large as race in the American consciousness, but it’s still one of the main ways that Americans tend to identify themselves, and to divide themselves along “us” and “them” boundaries.
More specifically, religion is something that tends to correlate with, and be predictive of, one’s politics. This is especially the case in an era where cultural issues supplant economic issues in many people’s ideological framework. If you genuinely believe, for instance, that abortion means killing people, that often creates a moral imperative against which, say, your marginal tax rate pales in comparison.
You probably have a vague idea of which parts of the country are more religiously active, and where religion is more suffused into local politics (usually taking it in a more conservative direction), versus which parts of the country are more laissez-faire about religion and about social issues in general. You may also have a general sense of, say, which parts of the country are more likely to be Southern Baptist or Catholic or Lutheran; you may have even seen state or even county-level maps that depict this. What I’m doing in this article that hasn’t been done before, though, is to quantitatively show those differences at the level of congressional districts, where much of our politics actually happens, so we can get a better sense of how religiosity corresponds with people’s electoral choices.
I’ve put together a spreadsheet that covers every CD, and what percentage of each CD’s residents belong to which religious tradition and denomination. One additional advantage of using district-level data is that it, as seen above, it lets us use the Daily Kos Elections 435-CD cartogram map, which breaks out the nation’s metropolitan areas into proper focus, and de-emphasizes the nation’s empty spaces (which has the effect of not making the country seem more evangelical, or more Mormon, than it actually is). As we continue, we’ll talk more about the methods and limitations behind these maps, and then zoom in on some additional data for certain denominations. Read More
More specifically, religion is something that tends to correlate with, and be predictive of, one’s politics. This is especially the case in an era where cultural issues supplant economic issues in many people’s ideological framework. If you genuinely believe, for instance, that abortion means killing people, that often creates a moral imperative against which, say, your marginal tax rate pales in comparison.
You probably have a vague idea of which parts of the country are more religiously active, and where religion is more suffused into local politics (usually taking it in a more conservative direction), versus which parts of the country are more laissez-faire about religion and about social issues in general. You may also have a general sense of, say, which parts of the country are more likely to be Southern Baptist or Catholic or Lutheran; you may have even seen state or even county-level maps that depict this. What I’m doing in this article that hasn’t been done before, though, is to quantitatively show those differences at the level of congressional districts, where much of our politics actually happens, so we can get a better sense of how religiosity corresponds with people’s electoral choices.
I’ve put together a spreadsheet that covers every CD, and what percentage of each CD’s residents belong to which religious tradition and denomination. One additional advantage of using district-level data is that it, as seen above, it lets us use the Daily Kos Elections 435-CD cartogram map, which breaks out the nation’s metropolitan areas into proper focus, and de-emphasizes the nation’s empty spaces (which has the effect of not making the country seem more evangelical, or more Mormon, than it actually is). As we continue, we’ll talk more about the methods and limitations behind these maps, and then zoom in on some additional data for certain denominations. Read More
election funnies, etc
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Map Porn: If "Did Not Vote" Was a Candidate...
NeoGreen
From Demo. Underground: ... posted in response to all those who want to blame their friends and neighbors who did their civic duty and opted to vote:
what stupid americans voted for
*destruction of medicare, social security, obamacare, abolition of women's rights
*keystone pipeline renewed
*dapl will be finished and destroy indian burial grounds and missouri river
*lower taxes for rich, death of social safety net
*destruction of public schools
*high probability of middle east war
*more racism, discrimination, and injustice
*thieves and conmen running the federal government
*no minimum wage hikes
*cut in food stamps, more starving poor children and families
elections do matter
when you allow a piece of shit to win office, don't be surprised when your state starts to smell
*gop plans in the house: The entire rest of the party is committed to gigantic cuts to welfare, as shown by the budget formulated by House Republicans. Their most recent plan would slash $5.3 trillion in spending over a decade, 69 percent of which would come from programs for the needy.
"THE ARKANSAS TRAVELLER" 1840
AN ELITE POLITICIAN CANVASSING IN THE BACKCOUNTRY ASKS A SQUATTER FOR REFRESHMENTS. THE SQUATTER, SEATED ON A WHISKEY BARREL BEFORE HIS RUN-DOWN CABIN, IGNORES THE MAN'S REQUEST. FOR A BRIEF INTERLUDE(BECAUSE IT WAS ELECTION SEASON), THE POLITICIAN WAS OBLIGED TO BRING HIMSELF DOWN TO THE LEVEL OF THE COMMON MAN. TO GET HIS DRINK AND THE SQUATTER'S VOTE, THE POLITICIAN, HAD TO DISMOUNT HIS HORSE, GRAB THE SQUATTER'S FIDDLE, AND SHOW THAT HE COULD PLAY HIS KIND OF MUSIC. ONCE THE POLITICIAN RETURNED TO HIS MANSION, HOWEVER, NOTHING CHANGED IN THE LIFE OF THE SQUATTER, NOR FOR HIS DRUDGE OF A WIFE AND HIS BROOD OF DIRTY, SHOELESS BRATS.
Henry A. Giroux
Trump is simply the most visible and vocal member of a fractured party made up of frightened Americans, religious fundamentalists, and self-serving economic extremists who believe that the market should arbitrate and dominate all aspects of government and society. Trump represents a new form of social disorder -- intolerant, authoritarian, and violent -- that sees preventable inequality as part of the natural order of things. Guns, walls, laws, surveillance, prisons, media, and wars are there to serve the interest of the wealthy winners, and to keep the rest of the population in check. Bankers who commit theft, fraud, and acts of economic mass destruction never feel the cold steel of handcuffs tighten on their wrists. Corporate suspects never get shot down accidently in the streets, as do unarmed Blacks, by white cops who feel threatened by skin color. Trump's rise reinforces these injustices and gives anxious whites a boastful businessman and TV celebrity to rule as their strongman.
The State Of America’s Voting Rights, In One Map
Power has shifted.
by Ian Millhiserby
From Think Progress: The Supreme Court announced on Wednesday that it would not reinstate North Carolina’s comprehensive voter suppression law, and the big headlines out of this announcement rightly touted this decision as good news for voting rights. Just below the surface, however, this order has ominous news for many Americans.
In 2016, a voter’s right to the franchise — even when that right is protected by the Constitution itself — may not amount to much if they do not live in the right state...
...Below is a map of the federal appellate circuits, the level of federal court below the Supreme Court, which predicts how these courts are likely to vote in voting rights cases. Dark blue circuits are dominated by left-of-center judges and are likely to be strong supporters of voting rights, while dark red circuits are the opposite. Lighter colored circuits still lean to the left or to the right on voting rights, but are more ideologically mixed.
In 2016, a voter’s right to the franchise — even when that right is protected by the Constitution itself — may not amount to much if they do not live in the right state...
...Below is a map of the federal appellate circuits, the level of federal court below the Supreme Court, which predicts how these courts are likely to vote in voting rights cases. Dark blue circuits are dominated by left-of-center judges and are likely to be strong supporters of voting rights, while dark red circuits are the opposite. Lighter colored circuits still lean to the left or to the right on voting rights, but are more ideologically mixed.
In coloring this map, I made several judgment calls. The Seventh Circuit, for example, is colored white because, although a majority of its judges were appointed by Republicans, two of its GOP-appointed members have broken with their more conservative colleagues in at least one major voting rights case. The Eleventh Circuit is colored light blue, despite the fact that Democratic appointees enjoy a significant advantage, because several of the judges on this court were appointed due to a compromise between a Democratic president and Republican senators — and at least one of these appointees is very conservative. The Fifth Circuit is coded light red because, although Republican appointees dominate this court, the full court recently held that Texas’s voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act.[...]