“In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.”
- Angela Davis (1979)
Today we’re honoring activist and author Angela Davis on her birthday.
"I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I'm changing the things I cannot accept.", Angela Davis ✊
Via @actdottv, this is how the Republican Party suppresses the vote to maintain power.
Retweet if you think it's time to #VoteThemAllOut.
— George Takei@GeorgeTakei
Please don’t quote #MLK on #MLKDay, then suppress the vote and support systemic oppression on Tuesday.
— Be A King @BerniceKing
The map below shows the purge rates for the counties that reported their information to the EAC. Some counties did not report their information. Because North Dakota does not have voter registration, it does not have a voter purge rate. Therefore, the state is grayed out below to mirror the non-reporting jurisdictions in Texas and Alabama.
The idea of popular voting winning a national election scares Republicans because they have no plan, other than to suppress votes in Red States.
More people voting is the death of the Republican Party.
The half that makes all the money.
Trump and Republicans punished states that make all the money:
Population Distribution. Popular Vote NOW. Fix the #12thAmendment
The irony is pretty rich. For years, and with ever-increasing intensity, Republicans have claimed with virtually no evidence that our democracy is menaced by election fraud. It has been their all-purpose excuse for voter suppression tactics, their rationalization for election defeats, and a central element of a Big Conspiracy Theory alleging that Democrats want open borders so they can drown good white taxpaying citizens in a sea of illegal voting by immigrants and other minorities seeking to give themselves welfare benefits.
So now, from North Carolina, there’s finally a clearly documented case of election fraud that actually appears to have changed an election result. The cruel irony for Republicans is that operatives from their own party — particularly “consultant” Leslie McCrae Dowless — allegedly did the deed…
[T]ighter voter-ID laws or voter-roll purges or more closely scrutinized voter-registration drives, the most frequent GOP prescriptions for “election security,” wouldn’t have mattered at all… [W]hat happened in North Carolina is the functional equivalent of old-fashioned, 19th-century ballot-box stuffing. Unused absentee ballots were fraudulently filled out with signatures forged, and actually filled-out absentee ballots cast for the “wrong” candidate were discarded. As the Brennan Center wryly observes, this activity was much closer to voter suppression than to the voter fraud alleged to justify voter suppression. And as Bump notes, the silence from Republicans about it all has been deafening…
Trump’s Election Integrity Commission needs to be revived by Democrats minus Kris Kobach!
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (PEIC or PACEI), also called the Voter Fraud Commission, was a Presidential Commission established by Donald Trump that ran from May 11, 2017
Harris’s son John Harris — an assistant US attorney — provided emotional testimony indicating he repeatedly warned his father that what McCrae Dowless was up to was illegal.
If you want to puke, read:
On Senate floor, @senatemajldr McConnell shamelessly blames Dems for Mark Harris' election fraud in North Carolina, because Dems haven't supported voter ID laws.
— Aaron Rupar✔@atrupar - Feb 26, 2019
Kentucky Sen. McConnell is The Enemy Within #RepublicanCrimeFamily
The fight for equal access to the ballot goes hand-in-hand with Black history. That’s why this Black History Month, we’re celebrating people and organizations changing the culture around voting.
Grownish actor Yara Shahidi started Eighteenx18 when she was just 18-years-old to get young people fired up to make their voices heard and vote.
"We’ve been systematically left out of the conversation ... about how decisions are made. You know, we are a generation who’s known so much about voter suppression and gerrymandering, and known so much about how people actively don’t want us to vote."
— Yara Shahidi
The executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections revealed Monday that state officials had uncovered a “coordinated” and “unlawful” effort to collect absentee ballots on behalf of a Republican congressional candidate in the November election.
Kim Strach, the board’s executive director, made the comments at a closely watched public evidentiary hearing in Raleigh on Monday following a monthslong investigation into election irregularities in the state’s 9th Congressional District. The state board declined to certify the race last November and could order a new election after the hearing. Republican Mark Harris currently leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes in the race.
In the first public comments outlining the results of the state’s probe, Strach said investigators had evidence that McCrae Dowless, a political operative working on behalf of the Harris campaign, filled out and mailed in incomplete or blank ballots from both his office and home. She said Dowless paid people in cash to collect requests for absentee ballots and the ballots themselves. The state board also has evidence, she said, that Dowless paid people to falsify signatures on absentee ballots indicating that they had witnessed those ballots being filled out (North Carolina requires two witnesses to someone filling out an absentee ballot).
It is not illegal to help someone request an absentee ballot in North Carolina, but it is illegal for anyone other than a close relative to take custody of the actual ballot.
Strach said Dowless took several steps to conceal the fraud. Those measures included using the same color ink as the voter who filled out other parts of the ballot, mailing the ballot from a post office close to the voter and placing the stamps on the envelopes in a certain way not to raise red flags.
Election Rigger Mark Harris must forfeit. Dan McCready must be declared the winner.
How many state and local elections won by Republicans would be found to be fraudulent if they were investigated?
👏👏👏 Sandusky, Ohio and Eric Wobser ☑️
One of the first bills House Democrats 🌊 introduced in January was to make Election Day a national holiday ☑️
The change will take effect this year.
“We are swapping them to prioritize Voting Day as a day off so that our employees can vote,” city manager Eric Wobser told the Register. “It’s also because Columbus Day has become controversial, and many cities have eliminated it as a holiday.”
In a post to the City of Sandusky’s Facebook page, the switch was characterized as a way to “celebrate the value of our employees and citizens” by “removing barriers for them to participate in the greatest of American innovations, our democracy.”
As The Hill points out, a number of cities across the country have already stopped observing Columbus Day, and have instead referred to the day as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” as a way to acknowledge the genocide carried out on indigenous people by Western explorers.
The House Democrats will soon pass a bill called the For the People Act of 2019. You could call it a modern day Voting Rights Act. It would create new rules for federal elections, including same-day registration and a mandated early-voting period. It would “strip the power to set congressional boundaries from state legislatures, 30 of which are controlled by Republicans, and hand it over to new independent commissions.” It would gut voter ID laws aimed at suppressing the vote by allowing people to give a sworn statement as to their identity.
Generally speaking, the Republicans oppose all of these measures because they would make it easier to vote, or would take away the disproportionate advantage they get in being able to draw districts. However, the one provision that really seems to irk Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is the proposal to make Election Day a national holiday. McConnell took to the Senate floor to call this proposal “a power grab” by the Democrats, and he sniffed dismissively, “Just what America needs: another paid holiday.”
I don’t know any people who dislike paid federal holidays. It doesn’t seem like a vote-getter to oppose giving people a day off work. But if we have too many holidays, maybe we should take one away and replace it with the day people are actually supposed to be doing their civic duty by participating in our representative democracy. I can’t see that proposal being unpopular.
Needless to say, the Republicans aren’t going to take the Democrats’ House bill up in the Senate. McConnell’s home state of Kentucky is currently disenfranchising black voters at the highest rate in the country, and that’s just how he likes it. He has no interest in making it easier for people to vote. He doesn’t want to eliminate work/school conflicts for people. He doesn’t want people to be able to register to vote at the voting booth. He doesn’t want people to be able to vote early or to have more options about where and how to vote. He doesn’t want people without photo ID to be able to swear under penalty of perjury that they are who they say they are. He doesn’t want to give up his party’s gerrymandering advantage.
Mitch McConnell needs authorization from Charles Koch and Russia’s Len Blavatnik.
GOP name preferences:
☑️ Make Election Day a federal holiday
Never support a party that relies on low voter turn out
FEC and DOJ, here’s what Brian Kemp and Republicans have done to suppress voters.
Belgium had the highest voter turnout at 87% while America only had 55% turnout in 2016. So having 40% of voters voting in the mid-terms is pretty pathetic.
Democrats have to start winning state elections in order to end Voter Suppression #Gerrymandering #ElectionRigging
If history is any indicator, only around 40 percent of eligible voters will vote in the midterm elections.
But it’s more likely that most Americans do want to vote, and one of the root causes of low turnout is this country’s framework of restrictive voting laws.
To explore the hurdles that voters face this election, we created five voter profiles:
State legislators and governors often control the redrawing of U.S. House maps.
In many states, the winners of 2018 races for governor and state legislative seats will wield considerable power: The once-per-decade responsibility to redraw congressional maps.
After the 2020 Census provides an updated account of where people live, it will be up to the states to adjust their districts to fit that new reality. Elections to the U.S. House will operate under the new maps starting in 2022 and for the following 10 years.
