Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label voting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label voting. Show all posts

Monday, March 11, 2024

Are They Waking Up?

This popped up on my Twixter feed this morning:


The rhetoric coming from the MAGA leaders is still pretty vehemently about "voter fraud", and wanting to do nothing but paper ballots, and only one day for voting, and hand counting, and announcing the results that evening. Which, of course, when taken together all but guarantees failure - which, of course again, is probably the point. Kill everybody's confidence in the process, and you can do away with all that inconvenient democracy stuff.

Then this was down the page in the replies:


It may not be so much that the rubes are being fooled, though some certainly are. It seems more like a lot of them have become thoroughly conditioned to accept the contradictions - or they're so caught up in the power game that they've decided to take a full part in it, passing the bullshit on to whoever might buy it, and reinforcing their own commitment to it (?)

Like they know what they're being told is bullshit, but they have to internalize it and rationalize it in order to make it through the day without their heads imploding.

It's a puzzlement, and I have to feel some encouragement that Ayn Rand's rule about contradictions is playing itself out.

Contradictions can and do exist, but they don't prevail, because they can't.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

SCOTUS


Kinda lost in the hubbub swirling around the court's fucked up decision to overturn the Colorado Supremes' ruling that Trump is disqualified from holding office, is the fairly simple fact that both the Colorado Supreme Court and now SCOTUS have let Judge Wallace's finding of fact stand.

ie: Donald J Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States of America.


Thursday, February 29, 2024

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

The Race Is On

So Trump won in Iowa yesterday, and for the most part, the reaction has been a mix of:
  • Yeah, so what? He'll be in prison by Labor Day, and then I'll have the excuse I need to stop acting so stupid
  • I'm not goin' out there in this weather
  • Of course Trump won - it's rigged
  • Yay - Trump's still popular, so I'm still popular by proxy

Trump won in all but 1 county, and even though DeSantis took 2nd overall, Haley finished 2nd in 20 counties, winning outright in Johnson County of them (something DeSantis didn't manage).

The campaigns spent $123 million on this thing, which works out to almost $1,150 per vote.

11% of all Iowa Republicans, including almost half of Haley voters, say they'll vote for Joe Biden if Trump is the nominee.

There's nothing that sats we can extrapolate that across the board to show Biden's got the edge, but it might be helpful to keep it mind as we try to decipher polling (which is IMO pretty fucked up to begin with).

Anyway - no matter what - get out and vote dammit.

Wednesday, November 08, 2023

Better Than Expected

... but at 37%, not worthy of any great praise.



Voter turnout in Colorado sits around 21 percent ahead of Election Day
(Published 11-06-2023)

Only one-fifth of eligible Colorado voters have cast their ballots as of Sunday night, according to the latest tally from the state’s Secretary of State.

The number – 830,000 – is slightly above recent off-year elections in 2019 and 2021. Unaffiliated voters and people 55 years or older make up the largest share of the electorate.

“Turnout is always a little slower at the beginning, but we are seeing Coloradans making their voices heard,” said Secretary of State Jena Griswold.

Registered Democrats and Republicans are almost evenly split, with 245,000 and 260,000 ballots respectively, according to the count. Jefferson, El Paso, and Arapahoe counties saw the largest turnout by sheer volume.

Voters this year are deciding between several statewide ballot questions around property and nicotine taxes. Some cities and towns are also electing new leaders for city councils and school boards.

Ballots for Tuesday’s coordinated election were mailed to all registered voters in October. Drop boxes opened shortly after and will remain open until 7 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 7.

Voters can fill out their ballot and return it to a drop box or polling center any time before then. It’s too late to mail a ballot back in, though, Griswold said.

“There's over 400 ballot boxes, there's over 130 voting centers. So Coloradans can go vote in person or drop their ballot at a Dropbox or a voting center,” she said.

Voters can track their mail-in ballot using BallotTrax, the state’s online system. Anyone 18 years and older can register same-day at an in-person voting center.

DEMOCRACY ISN'T SOMETHING WE HAVE
UNLESS IT'S SOMETHING WE DO

Tuesday, November 07, 2023

Today's Today


There's always a lot riding on every election, and these odd-year elections are always considered harbingers of things to come.




   (Pay wall - live updates)

Kentucky governor, Virginia legislature, Ohio abortion rights on ballots

Voters are heading to the polls Tuesday in several states with key offices and issues on the line. In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear (D) is seeking a second term in a red state. In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves (R) is seeking reelection against a cousin of Elvis Presley. In Virginia, every seat in the General Assembly is on the ballot, and those races could determine whether Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) can further advance his political agenda. In Ohio, voters are deciding whether to add abortion rights to the state constitution and to legalize marijuana for recreational use.



Sunday, October 22, 2023

Oh So Very Nerdy


I get lost in the weeds - a lot. And I'm not asking anyone to get as lost as I do.

I will, however, insist on people paying enough attention to the process so as to get some working knowledge of the tangled, fucked up mess Republicans (mostly) have been making of our "democracy".

"Fair Congressional District Maps" must not be the oxymoron it's becoming.

Law suits in ...
  • Alabama
  • Louisiana
  • Georgia
  • Florida
  • Arkansas
  • Kentucky
  • New Mexico
  • Ohio
  • South Carolina
  • Texas
  • Utah
  • North Carolina
  • New York
... could square things up and add 11 Democratic seats in the House for the election in 2024.



This is not Democrat fuckery of the kind we've seen from The GOP. Republicans have gerrymandered the fuck outa things to the point where 55-65% of the votes cast for House candidates go to Democrats, while 55-60% of the seats are "won" by Republicans.

Fair Districting gets us closer to realizing "the will of the people".

Think this:






Not this:

Wednesday, August 09, 2023

Way To Go Buckeyes




Ohio voters reject higher bar for altering constitution, a win for abortion rights supporters

Ahead of a November vote on abortion rights, Republican lawmakers wanted voters to make it more difficult to amend the state constitution


Ohio voters rejected a measure Tuesday that would have made it more difficult to amend the state constitution ahead of a November vote to ensure access to abortion.

For more than a century, Ohioans have been able to amend the state constitution with a simple majority. The failed measure would have changed that threshold to 60 percent.

With about 88 percent of votes counted Tuesday night, 56.5 percent voted against the proposal, while 43.5 percent supported it. The Associated Press projected the measure would fail.

Republican state lawmakers decided to try to make it tougher to amend the constitution as reproductive rights advocates gathered signatures of support this spring for a November measure that would guarantee access to abortion. Because of those stakes, Tuesday’s election became a proxy fight over abortion, which is expected to again be a defining issue in the 2024 election.

From the start, Republican leaders were clear that they wanted to make the abortion rights measure more difficult to pass, but they also embraced the proposal more broadly, arguing that modifications to the state constitution should have overwhelming support. Opponents of changing the rules called the measure anti-democratic, saying the nation is founded on the idea of majority rule.

“People showed up, they were fired up, and quite frankly they were fed up,” said Rep. Shontel M. Brown (D-Ohio), an opponent of the ballot measure. “I think this demonstrated that issues are still important, messaging still matters and the power still belongs to the people.”

When the race was called, cheers went up at the Northwood Cider Company in suburban Cincinnati, where Democrats gathered to watch results roll in. They clinked their glasses in celebration and said they would quickly turn their attention to passing the abortion rights measure in November.

“Tomorrow we sleep, and Thursday we get back to work,” Isaac Goff-Mitchell, the executive director of the Hamilton County Democratic Party, told the crowd of about 100.

The antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America called the results “a warning for pro-life states across the nation,” arguing that Republicans had not done enough to persuade voters to change the rules for amending the constitution.

“So long as the Republicans and their supporters take the ostrich strategy and bury their heads in the sand, they will lose again and again,” the group said in its statement.

The measure, known as Issue 1, was the only item on the ballot. Supporters and opponents spent millions of dollars on their campaigns, and early turnout was high for an election held during a normally sleepy political season. More than 600,000 people voted early, more than twice as many as voted early in the May 2022 primary for U.S. Senate.

The special election drew national attention. Mike Pence, the former vice president seeking the GOP nomination for president, released a video Tuesday urging Ohioans to vote “yes” so they could block the November abortion rights amendment, “stop the radical left” and “save Ohio.” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), meanwhile, in a Twitter post called on voters to cast “no” ballots because “voting rights and reproductive freedoms are on the line.”

Since the Supreme Court last year ended a nationwide right to abortion, voters in three states backed state constitutional amendments ensuring access to the procedure: Michigan, Vermont and California. In addition, voters in two conservative-leaning states, Kansas and Kentucky, rejected referendums that would have changed their constitutions to explicitly say they do not provide a right to abortion.

Tuesday’s vote could foreshadow the outcome of the abortion measure in November. According to a July poll from USA Today and Suffolk University, 58 percent of likely voters in Ohio supported the abortion rights ballot measure.

Voters had abortion on their minds as they went to the polls Tuesday.

Retired attorney Richard Russeth, 67, voted against the measure Tuesday at an elementary school in Middletown, a city of 50,000 between Cincinnati and Dayton.

“I am not against having a supermajority, but they are only doing this to defeat abortion,” he said. “They are changing the rules in the middle of the game and that doesn’t fly with me.”

Several miles away, in rural Wayne Township, Jim Gentry, 84, said he voted for the measure because of his opposition to abortion.

“I don’t want them fooling with the constitution,” said Gentry, a retired truck driver.

In recent years, Republicans in a handful of states have sought to make it more difficult to pass citizen-led initiatives after a string of liberal policies — from expanding Medicaid to raising the minimum wage — have been placed on the ballot.

Last year, such efforts to raise the voter threshold failed in South Dakota and Arkansas, and attempts to schedule a similar vote in Missouri were unsuccessful this spring. In Arizona, voters narrowly approved a state constitutional amendment requiring 60 percent of voters to greenlight measures enacting a new tax.

“Ohio is going to shape the contours of this conversation going forward,” said Sarah Walker, the policy and legal advocacy director at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which helps with liberal ballot measures.

Speaking before the race was called, she said: “If it’s a resounding defeat, it will send a very strong message that it is not in the interest of policymakers to attempt to restrict the citizen-initiative process.”

In Ohio, millions of dollars flowed to both opponents and proponents of the measure, from within the state and outside it. Groups that support the November abortion rights effort and those opposing Tuesday’s ballot measure have raised about $25 million. Those on the other side have secured about $20 million, according to campaign finance filings.

Michael Gonidakis, the president of Ohio Right to Life, lobbied the state legislature for months to try to make it harder to pass constitutional amendments. Those efforts were successful in May, and since then, he has traveled across the state pitching the argument that powerful out-of-state groups want to wield outsize influence on Ohio.

“Bottom line is we’re going to have to work harder now — we know that,” Gonidakis said Tuesday night.

He added: “I think Ohioans are going to regret not taking this opportunity to protect our constitution because hundreds of millions of dollars are going to be poured in this state.”

Supporters of Tuesday’s measure argued that raising the threshold for constitutional amendments was about more than abortion. They pointed to an array of other liberal-leaning issues that could appear on future ballots, such as raising the minimum wage and legalizing marijuana. They contended that it is too easy to amend the state constitution and that there should be a high bar for modifying it like there is for the U.S. Constitution.

“A simple 50 percent-plus-one majority shouldn’t be able to change the rules that we use to govern our state,” said Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, who has launched a bid for U.S. Senate. “This is about protecting our state constitution.”

Abortion rights advocates banded with other groups to reject Tuesday’s measure, and they cheered the results.

“Seeing this Issue 1 go down in this crushing defeat just is proof that these extremists are out of touch with what the people of Ohio want,” said Lauren Beene, executive director of Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights.

Her group and others are now turning their attention to November.

“This is the first step, but it was an important step,” said Kellie Copeland, the treasurer of Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights. “We have our work cut out for us, and we’re confident that we’re going to win in November, but there’s a lot of miles to go before we get there.”

Other groups largely avoided discussion of abortion when they talked about Issue 1, and they argued that it is unfair to let a minority block the will of the voters.

“This ability to take something to the ballot and have a constitutional amendment is our last line of defense,” said Melissa Cropper, the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. “That’s the beauty of being in Ohio, is that we have the ability to go to the ballot and make a change. And we shouldn’t be sacrificing it.”

Tim Burga, the president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, said Issue 1 failed because of “massive overreach by the legislative backers.”

“They just disregarded the will of the people,” he said. “They overstepped and overplayed their hand in epic proportions.”


Translated: Republicans know they're losing so they're taking steps to make a majority not a majority. They want 57% of the votes not to count, so they can "win" with the other 43%.
The GOP has made it impossible for me to vote Republican ever again - on anything.
Ever.

The day the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, a ban went into effect in Ohio on abortion after fetal cardiac activity is detected, often at six weeks of pregnancy. But nearly three months later, in September 2022, a Hamilton County judge blocked the abortion ban, and a lawsuit is wending its way through the courts.

More recently, abortion rights supporters gathered signatures at places like grocery stores, religious centers, large concerts and festivals in a quest to get a measure protecting access to abortion on the ballot this November. The secretary of state determined in July that their effort was successful. Two Republicans have sued to try to block the November election.

The focus of Tuesday’s vote was on the higher threshold it would set for passing future constitutional amendments. But the measure would also have made it tougher to place initiatives on the ballot in the first place by requiring signatures to be gathered in all 88 of Ohio’s counties instead of just 44.

Brenda Perkins, 66, voted against the measure at Rosa Parks Elementary School in Middletown. Perkins, a retired teacher, reflected on the national attention on the special election.

“The whole world,” she said, “is watching Ohio.

Monday, June 12, 2023

SCOTUS


Anybody thinking John G Roberts would actually stick to "calling balls-n-strikes" - as he told us in his confirmation hearings - should've left that one go with the Shelby decision.

He completely blew the call on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act; he got booed for it something awful, and tried to explain it with one the most tone-deaf eye-gouging opinions ever, and now he's tacked over in a whole different direction because (IMHO) he and his handlers can see the fact that the plutocracy agenda he's helping to promulgate is way more out of whack than they figured.

I'll take the "win", but holy fuck, Batman - are you really trying to tell me there's nothing of value in 

Another smart guy doing stoopid things, still believing the Daddy State always knows best, but realizing that sometimes the shit work needs to be done where nobody can see it quite so well.

Jennifer Rubin nails it.


Roberts isn’t an institutionalist. He’s a weather vane.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Allen v. Milligan, holding that Alabama’s redistricting map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, shocked the legal world. This was the same court that eviscerated Section 2 in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, creating a “guideline” that would make most states’ plans impervious to challenge. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who held in the 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that “things have changed dramatically” in the decades since the Voting Rights Act, wrote the majority opinion.

My how things have changed.

In striking down the preclearance process in Shelby, Roberts insisted that “no one can fairly say that it shows anything approaching the ‘pervasive,’ ‘flagrant,’ ‘widespread,’ and ‘rampant’ discrimination that faced Congress in 1965, and that clearly distinguished the covered jurisdictions from the rest of the Nation at that time.” Now, he staunchly defended a district-court ruling striking down districts gerrymandered to the detriment of Blacks and sang the praises of Section 2.

Roberts warned the risk of inequality “is greatest ‘where minority and majority voters consistently prefer different candidates’ and where minority voters are submerged in a majority voting population that ‘regularly defeat[s]’ their choices. … A district is not equally open, in other words, when minority voters face — unlike their majority peers — bloc voting along racial lines, arising against the backdrop of substantial racial discrimination within the State, that renders a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter.”

The turnaround is even more dramatic when one considers that Roberts’s conservative colleagues, including Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, stayed the district court’s ruling, a move that allowed Alabama (and other states) to proceed with discriminatory maps that could well have tilted the House to Republicans in 2022.

Roberts’s defenders might argue that he reads each case on its merits. But others have postulated that Roberts and the other conservative justices are setting us up for decisions in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, cases in which, civil rights groups fear, the court will invalidate race-conscious affirmative action programs. Still others surmise that Roberts has heard the rising anger at the court on everything from Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to Justice Clarence Thomas’s financial reporting scandal; the “institutionalist” Roberts, they posit, wants to soothe the public by showing he’s not a partisan hack, enlisting Kavanaugh, who concurred, to calm the waters.

If it is the latter, then this would hardly be the first time Roberts turned on a dime, not as a matter of jurisprudential analysis but apparently for political reasons — to assuage the public, which he knew would erupt if the court issued a radical decision out of step with public opinion. Recall his switch in position on the Affordable Care Act.

As detailed in “The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.” by Joan Biskupic and in other reporting, Roberts was initially part of a 5-4 majority in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius to strike down the law. But Roberts got cold feet. After assigning the majority to himself, he groped around for a way to preserve the law and avoid public outrage that would likely have erupted had the court struck down then-President Barack Obama’s greatest legislative achievement and the first national health-care plan for healthy, working-age adults. The resulting opinion, widely criticized as logically attenuated and downright weird, preserved the statute based on Congress’s taxing power. This was not jurisprudence but politics, as Roberts put his finger to the wind.

In Dobbs, Roberts struggled to avoid the political backlash he saw coming. In oral argument and in his concurrence, Roberts struggled to come up with a political compromise. Could the court protect abortions before 16 weeks? The legal grounds for such a compromise were shaky at best. His desperate effort to save the court from itself amounted to a failed attempt to bargain colleagues down from a risky, radical position. He was unsuccessful, but he surely saw the result: a political backlash of such force that it swamped the expected midterm red wave and drove the court’s approval to historic lows.

If political opinion “tester” explains Roberts’s past compromises and the shift from Shelby to Milligan, he should be viewed not so much as an institutionalist (who would protect the jurisprudential integrity of the court and insist on abiding by the highest ethical standards) but as an unprincipled politician, trying to prevent his radical colleagues from sinking the court and the Republican Party when he suspects blowback to decisions from the court’s right-wing majority.

In that sense, Roberts has become the worst sort of results-oriented judge. Rather than legal consistency, respect for precedent or even a judicial philosophy, he’s become the quintessential weather vane. How much can the public tolerate? How far must he let his conservative colleagues drift before the court falls into political oblivion?

Roberts’s transformation from the umpire calling balls and strikes to the stadium manager (how do we excite the fans but keep them from rioting?) underscores the need for a complete restructuring of the court. If the court’s decisions are now the result of radical ideology tempered only by Roberts’s political barometer, then it cannot be considered a court at all. It’s a purely political body. A political response — expanding the court — would be in order. At the very least, the justices should serve limited terms.

Though Section 2 has gotten a reprieve from the court, Roberts has given the game away. The court has not solved its credibility problem. To the contrary, it has made it worse.

Sunday, November 20, 2022

Today's Qult45 Item


The guy is this weird shit that we're going to spend decades scraping off the bottom of our shoes.


Trump's White House blocked government websites aimed at helping Americans vote, fighting human trafficking, easing homelessness, and stopping fraud, federal records show
  • Federal agencies asked the Trump White House to approve dozens of new ".gov" websites.
  • But Trump officials rejected many of them, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
  • In contrast, the Biden White House has approved almost all such website requests.
Donald Trump's White House blocked dozens of federal agencies from creating new government websites aimed at aiding homeless people, fighting human trafficking, and helping people vote, according to records obtained by Insider through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The requests for new websites came from agencies small and large at a time when Trump had grown openly hostile toward his own administration, often deriding the federal government's executive branch as an out-of-control "deep state" conspiring to undermine him.

The Department of Defense, Department of Labor, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Central Intelligence Agency, and Environmental Protection Agency are among the more than two-dozen agencies that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rebuffed.

Proposed websites that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rejected include HumanTrafficking.gov (Department of State); ReportFraud.gov (Federal Trade Commission); Telehealth.gov (Department of Health and Human Services), FindShelters.gov (Department of Housing and Urban Development), and FiscalData.gov (Department of the Treasury), according to federal records.

Such custom ".gov" website domains enhance government agencies' ability to effectively provide and market services to an American public that's all but universally connected to the internet.

Without them, agencies can still create new sections on their primary websites, but with long and unmemorable subdomain names replete with slashes and hyphens — not exactly prime fodder for a billboard or public service announcement.

The documents obtained by Insider listed no reasons for why the Office of Management and Budget rejected or accepted an agency's ".gov" website domain request.

Neither did the Office of Management and Budget, whose spokesperson, Isabel Aldunate, declined to answer Insider's questions.

Representatives for Trump, who this week officially launched his 2024 presidential campaign, did not reply to several messages.

Wednesday, November 09, 2022

Today's Beau

Let us (ie: me) pause in my goddamned-fuckin'-idiots-how-do-you-vote-for-those-assholes downward spiral, and reflect on how we didn't see the wipeout so many Press Poodles told us to expect.


Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

The youngsters showed up and stopped the Red Wave.


BTW, the Roberts kids turnout was 100%
Again

Thursday, October 20, 2022

A Golden Oldie






Op Eds
A Sacred Right Remains Threatened


January 26, 2015

In November, we released a video featuring several Harvard students as they struggled to pass the 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test. While the project has received overwhelmingly positive feedback, in the comments sections of many sites across the web, several debates have been sparked in response to the video. Some commenters have questioned the comparison between literacy tests and voter identification laws and others have even questioned the purpose of this project.

With this op-ed, we hope to explain exactly why this project is so important and why the comparison between literacy tests and voter ID laws is absolutely valid.

Five decades ago, states in the American South gave literacy tests to any voter who could not “prove a fifth grade education.” In reality, the only people who ever saw this test were blacks and, to a lesser extent, working class whites. In order to pass the 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test, voters needed to answer all 30 questions correctly in 10 minutes. Just one question wrong was grounds for disenfranchisement.

While it may be disturbing to read about barriers to voting such as poll taxes and literacy tests in history books, it is an entirely different experience to stand in the shoes of a black voter who had to take this test in 1964. We asked a group of Harvard students to take the test under the conditions stipulated in the directions of the original test. Thirty questions. Ten minutes. Not a single question wrong. If anyone could pass a basic literacy test, it would be Harvard students, right?

As brilliant as the students who took this test are, none of them passed it. None of them passed because no one can pass. The 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test, like the other literacy tests given to black and poor white voters at the time, did not have a legitimate answer key. Most of the test’s questions seem purposely ambiguous. No matter what was written down, the registrar official would simply say the person’s interpretation of the question was wrong. These literacy tests were devious and instituted to disenfranchise people who had the wrong skin tone or belonged to the wrong social class.

Literacy tests and other mechanisms used to disenfranchise citizens were outlawed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but the primary purpose of this project is to bring attention to the fact that the sacred right to vote remains threatened. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act, empowering Southern states to change their election laws without federal oversight. Eight states have established strict voter ID laws that disproportionately prevent people of color and the poor from voting. Just last month, the Supreme Court upheld Texas’ voter ID law, which potentially disenfranchised as many as 600,000 people in the 2014 midterm elections alone.

What motivates voter ID laws today is no different from what motivated past malicious barriers to voting. Those who support voter ID laws are claiming to be sincerely guarding against voter fraud in the same way that those who supported literacy tests claimed to be issuing a legitimate test of one’s literacy. Loyola University Law School Professor Justin Levitt’s comprehensive study of over 1 billion ballots cast in general, primary, special, and municipal elections across the nation from 2000 to 2014, could only find 31 possible incidents of voter fraud.

Another study by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School has found that the costs related to obtaining an ID to vote can range from $75 to $125, a sum that disproportionately burdens minority and working class voters. This is a cost that, when adjusted for inflation, is significantly higher than the poll tax that was explicitly established to prevent blacks and working class whites from voting. To put it simply, voter fraud is an imaginary problem being used to justify discrimination by another name.

We created this project because we want everyone to understand that the right to vote has never been guaranteed and should never be taken for granted. Lawmakers have been devising clever schemes to disenfranchise American citizens since the earliest days of this country’s founding. The voter ID law is only the most recent ploy in a long legacy of voter disenfranchisement efforts in this country’s history.

We must remain vigilant in the face of dishonest laws that are disenfranchising our fellow citizens. The midterm election has passed, but our message remains the same. The right to vote is sacred and we all have a responsibility to protect it.

Friday, October 14, 2022

Can I Vote

In most states, there's a rule that says no matter what, every registered voter gets to vote on election day. Whether it's after a quick review of their registration status, or upon completion of a form ("The Gold Form" here in Virginia) or whatever.


They all get to vote.


That said, it pays to check on your individual standing. Check on the laws in your state. Then show up and vote, dammit.



Wednesday, July 06, 2022

Get Ready


124 days until Election Day - Nov 8, 2022


Friday, June 10, 2022

Jan6

In keeping with Daddy State Awareness, Rule 3

Every prediction of some dire consequence is a threat.
Either they intend to do some shitty thing, or cause some shitty thing to happen - or it's a signal that they’re already doing it or causing it - in an attempt to coerce us into doing what they want.


That's not simple political bravado. It's not a prediction, and it's not a warning.

It's a threat.

They'll try it again. And they'll keep trying until they pull it off - unless we put a definitive stop to it by showing up at the polls every fucking chance we get, so we can stomp the GOP until there's nothing left but a greasy spot on the pavement.

Saturday, June 04, 2022

New Voters



Sign 'em and then turn 'em out.

It's not an unreasonable thing to want kids to participate in democracy. This place belongs to them too - we need to teach them how our little experiment in self-government is conducted.

And it's not unreasonable to say most of them want something better, and most of them are willing to work at it.

Friday, February 04, 2022

Jan6 Stuff

Talk openly about the shit you'd like to see happen - making no reference to anyone or even anything in particular - and someone will take it upon himself to do something he thinks fits with what you want.

Stochastic Probability.


Timothy Snyder's #1 admonition from his work "On Tyranny"
  1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You've already done this, haven't you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
Rachel Maddow:


USAmerica Inc is nine kinds of fucked up.