#I already voted via postal vote

[covetyou]

good morning UK pals!

you may have already heard (shocker, I know), but there's a general election today!

if you're registered to vote, and haven't yet done so via a postal vote or set up a proxy vote, head out to your polling station - with photo ID! - to drop an X in a box before polling stations close at 10pm today!

if you have any issues, the best place to look is the UK government or Electoral Commission websites, however there's a little FAQ below to get you started.

how do I register to vote?

it's too late to register to vote in this election - the cut off was 18th June - but you can register at any time to be eligible for future elections and votes.

how do I vote by post?

the deadline for registering for a postal vote has also passed for this election, and postal votes will have had to be sent back by now to be counted - they need to arrive at your elections team of your local council before 10pm today to be counted. you can register for a postal vote, and find more info, in the UK government website.

how do I vote by proxy?

a proxy vote allows someone else to vote on your behalf. the deadline to apply for one for this election has passed, however you can still register for future votes.

there are still emergency proxy votes, for when unexpected circumstances arise and you can't get to your polling station. these can be applied for on the day, up to 5pm, by getting in touch with your local council electoral services team.

polling station? what's that? where's mine?

a polling station is the place you go to vote, and it'll be different for each person based on your post code - you can't go to just any polling station to vote!

if you're registered to vote, but don't know your polling station, you can check the electoral commission website to see where you need to go to cast your vote.

photo ID? since when?!

since May 2023, photo identification has been required to vote in most elections in the UK.

for most people, this simply means bringing their passport or driving licence with them to the polling station - and remember, out of date ID is valid in this case as long as it still looks like you!

if you don't have a passport or driving licence, there are other forms of ID you can bring to vote. if you don't have any of these you can also apply for a "Voter Authority Certificate", however the deadline to do this for this election has already passed.

how do I vote? what's the process?

when you arrive at your polling station - these are usually marked by big white signs that say POLLING STATION in bold letters - a member of the polling station staff will ask for your name and your ID.

once you're found on their many, many sheets of paper, they will hand you your polling paper and direct you to a booth. pencils are provided, so no need to bring your own.

simply put an X in the box if the candidate of your choice - just one! - fold your paper in half, and slip it into the ballot box before you leave.

if you have any other questions, polling station staff are a great first point of call. if you're unable to vote for any reason, contact your local authority electoral services team - contact details for these can be found on your local council website.

what times can I vote?

voting is open from 7am until 10pm at all polling stations. as long as you are in the queue to vote at 10pm, you will be allowed inside to cast your vote.

how do I tactical vote?

tactical voting this year aims to remove the Conservative party from as many constituencies as possible.

check stopthetories.vote for details of the best candidate to vote for in your area.

happy voting!

[russilton]

Super quick question about voting via post, do you still need some sort of photo ID to apply? I have photo ID, I’m just curious as to whether you need one. Thanks!

You will have needed to apply yesterday because that was the deadline for voter registration, but in future- I applied for my postal vote in 2020 (I was already registered in person and chose to switch over) and have maintained it ever since. I have never needed to provide voter ID for it because how would you, which is partially WHY I do so. My face changes a lot at the moment (thanks secondary puberty) and I hate visual ID’s.

I can’t tell you if the application process will ask for one first time around as they have to verify who you are, because I don’t know what it’s involved in the current process after they brought in voter ID laws. But everyone should apply for a postal vote, because *you can still hand your vote in in person if you don’t mail it in time*. So you get the best of both options

[narukorankofan]

I moved my tukhes to the polling station today (only about four or five minutes away from my place) for the first time, I always voted via postal vote before that.

Don't be like anon, fellow EU citizens, and move your tukhes to your polling station, if you didn't already vote by mail.

Stop posting about the European Elections. It is so annoying no one cares

if you are european and of voting age, please please please go out (or online if your country offers it!) and vote this weekend! it is ESSENTIAL that we all use our right to vote, and we should make it our duty to do so!

queer rights, women's rights, and immigrants' rights are SEVERELY threatened if a right-wing alliance would be formed within the EU parliament. we cannot and should not stand for this!

if you are of voting age, please go out and vote! bring your mum, your dad, your brother, your sister, your friends, your neighbour! carpool together, get a little treat afterwards!! do it scared, do it angry, do it sad, do it nervous. but by god PLEASE do it!

we are stronger together!

✨ VOTE VOTE VOTE ✨

[featherpantsd]

European elections are next week

Dear europeans. Don’t forget to vote!

[redgoldsparks]

instagram / patreon / portfolio / etsy / my book

Full text below the cut: 

The United States Postal Service has been in financial trouble for a while... why do we need to support it RIGHT NOW?    

The USPS is guaranteed by the Constitution, but Republicans have been trying to weaken for years. In 2006 they passed an Act requiring the USPS to pre-fund it's retirement health care costs for 75 years into the future, a burden placed on no other federal agency.  

Now, due to a projected $13 billion loss of revenue because of COVID-19, the Postmaster General warned the USPS will run out of money within a few months (possibly as early as June) without federal assistance.  

In early February 2020, the House passed the USPS Fairness Act (HR 2382), but it has not been taken up by the Senate. The CARES Act provided the USPS with $10 billion in additional borrowing authority, but it still needs direct aid and possibly debt forgiveness.

I live in California, one of the few states which already allows everyone to vote by mail. Voting by mail may be vitally necessary in the upcoming fall elections. Many Republicans oppose vote by mail which has been linked to higher voter turnout and Democratic victories.    

I am heavily reliant on the USPS as a freelance artist. In 2019, I shipped 250+ etsy orders and 200+ patreon backer rewards. I've spent almost $300 there in 2020 alone, and I pay annually for a PO box to use as my business address.    

The USPS employs around 650,000 people, more than 100,000 whom are veterans, and a huge amount of whom are unionized. It serves all of the US at the same low price. Sending a single regular envelope costs $0.55. Sending the same envelope to a rural area via FedEx can cost as much as $15.50.    

Please support the USPS! Text MAIL to 668366 and text USPS to 50409 to demand full Postal Service funding (both require you to give some personal info, including your name and zip code)  Or call your Senators directly to tell them you use and support the USPS. Ask them to support HR 2382, the USPS Fairness Act.        

I want the USPS to still exist as a federal service by the time of the 2020 election! Please help!

[merrikstryfe]

(THREAD) Today Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo unveiled the real nightmare scenario for the 2020 election—and the question of what Trump has legal authority to do has nothing to do with it. I hope you'll read on and retweet—as what I'm describing here is what America is heading for. 

1/ Autocracies aren't born in rule of law. They're not even primarily born in violence. Rather they arise *despite* rule of law—often on the strength of a benighted populism, in fact just the sort of populist movement Trump is building now over false fears of a "rigged" election. 

2/ The question isn't whether Trump has legal authority to move Election Day and thereby extend his presidency—he doesn't—but a different question: what happens if he just declares that he *does* have this power? And what if he can do so with a false *veneer* of legal legitimacy? 

3/ By October 31, Trump's decision not to combat COVID-19 (indeed to worsen the pandemic with every one of his words, actions, and decisions not to act), coupled with an incipient flu season, is likely to send America's COVID-19 data—infections, deaths—into its horrifying nadir. 

4/ Meanwhile, Trump has put a crony who's likely a witness in an ongoing federal criminal probe—a man who's a peer of perjurers (and worse) Michael Cohen, Elliott Broidy and Gordon Sondland—in charge of the United States Postal Service. Already, this crony is destroying the USPS. 

5/ If, on October 30, COVID-19 is cresting—as it likely will be—and the USPS is less able to deliver mail properly than at any point in recent history, as seems likely (and on Trump's end intentional), Trump's self-manufactured "case" for a national emergency will be at its apex. 

6/ Today, Mike Pompeo told us Trump lackey Barr—who has never refused the president anything, who appears to be a Trump co-conspirator in the Ukraine scandal, and who has already shown a penchant for violating the law—gets to decide if Trump can announce a change in Election Day.

7/ Note that each time I use the anodyne euphemism "change in Election Day," what I'm describing is in fact apocalyptic—an artificial extension of the Trump presidency corresponding with the end of American democracy and the beginning of Trump's reign as America's first autocrat. 

8/ Barr has already instructed OLC (the Office of Legal Counsel) to produce opinions that violate all existing law (for that matter, we saw that during the prior GOP administration, Bush's, as to torture). Barr can get the OLC to crush a CIA whistleblower—or change Election Day.

9/ I ask anyone reading this to simply play out the following hypothetical—the one I offer in the next tweet—which is "hypothetical" only inasmuch as it takes everything we know about Trump, Pompeo, Barr, COVID-19, and the USPS *right now* and projects it 90 days into the future:

10/ On October 30, Trump announces, with an OLC opinion "granting" him this power in hand, that he is moving the 2020 presidential election 120 days, after which time he will review the nation's ability to safely and securely conduct an election. He announces it via tweet and TV.

11/ Understand that this would be illegal—and wouldn't change election day. But that wouldn't be the point. The point would be to *convince Trump voters not to vote*. You may have to read the preceding sentence multiple times—it's counterintuitive unless you're a metamodernist.

12/ This thread isn't on metamodernism. All you need to know is that on the day in June 2015 Trump announced his candidacy, I published a HuffPost essay declaring that what made Trump dangerous was his ability to manipulate reality (in a way theorists connect to "metamodernism"). 

13/ The way to win an unwinnable election, using the sort of powerful reframing of events a certain way of thinking Trump instinctively (not intelligently or responsibly) employs, is not to turn out your voters... but *declare the election invalid once your voters don't show up*. 

14/ The purpose of the pre-election Trump announcement I am hypothesizing here would not be to help Trump *win* the 2020 election, but to convince so many Trump voters *not to vote* that the results of the election favor Biden by *so much* the election looks wholly illegitimate. 

15/ Imagine a scenario in which, with 3 branches of government—executive, judicial, legislative—you have the executive branch declaring the election was moved, the judicial branch (as yet) silent, and the legislative branch in chaos because no one in the GOP knows what to say/do.

16/ By convincing his voters to stay home—because he's "moved the election"—Trump will have caused every GOP member of Congress to *lose their reelection*, *forcing* them to back his play and say that the election was delayed and therefore Biden didn't actually win on November 3. 

17/ The result: an executive branch that says the election was invalid; half the legislative branch (the GOP half) saying the election was invalid; election results that *look* invalid (as Biden has won by 50+ points); and a judicial branch that hasn't—and can't—say anything yet.

18/ In that circumstance, what does "rule of law" even mean? You have a separation of powers issue—a conflict between branches of government—that the Supreme Court *must* hear, and because it's the most complex case ever heard by SCOTUS in US history, it's impossible to expedite.

19/ The mere fact that Trump would have enacted this constitutional crisis just 96 hours pre-election means SCOTUS *can't* speak on it pre-election, and the complexity of the case would throw into chaos *all* state election deadlines. Which is basically the point of Trump's plot. 

20/ All Trump needs in this scenario is (a) SCOTUS to move at its usual glacial pace, and (b) GOP-run states (states with GOP secretaries of state running their elections) to *refuse to certify election results* or *choose electors* until the Supreme Court has acted on the issue. 

21/ I'm not even sure *Trump* would be the plaintiff in this case—as he and his GOP allies in Congress (and GOP secretaries of state) would so adamantly declare the election results invalid they might wait to make the *Democrats* sue in federal court, making them look desperate. 

22/ And how magnanimous Trump will be! He and his GOP allies will offer to *negotiate* with Democrats in lieu of them filing a federal suit. Trump will say, "We have to wait until this invisible plague is under control. That's *all* anyone is asking here." It'll sound persuasive!

23/ Know what'll make it *more* persuasive? Election results so insane-looking—Biden 82%, Trump 15%—they'll make Egypt's el-Sisi blush. Biden will be half-inclined to *agree* with Trump on a do-over—knowing his term as an "illegitimate monarch" may be marked by historic violence. 

24/ Right now I need everyone in media; everyone on "legal Twitter"; everyone who's a professional political analyst to comment on this thread—or on your own feeds, it doesn't matter—explaining why this Trump plan wouldn't work. Why it isn't *exactly* what he's setting us up for.

25/ Understand that I didn't develop this thread out of some fever dream. All I did was take statements and actions by Trump, Barr, and Pompeo; the current status of COVID-19 and the USPS (and who controls each); and the way of thinking Trump has exhibited *since June 2015*. /end 

PS/ I understand—and empathize with, as a lawyer—those who reply, "Nah, he ceases to be POTUS on January 20th at noon." Again, that's the view that *law* determines if a coup is successful, not the brute force of populism and logistics—the logic undergirding Trump's actions now. 

PS2/ In the scenario I've described, yes, the law would suggest Biden—having won the election 82% to 15%; with less than 270 electoral votes; and with all GOP politicians and all GOP secretaries of state and most GOP voters saying he won a fake election—is the president. So what? 

PS3/ What would in mean—in that scenario—for someone to be "president"? And that's the question the five ultra-conservative justices of the Supreme Court would have to decide, probably on a timeline so glacial it couldn't be concluded effectively until early January 2021 at best. 

PS4/ More importantly, that's the question *Democrats* would have to decide—and would probably be deciding in the midst of historic Republican protests and threats of violence all across the country. Would *Democrats* consider it their best move to accept that election "victory"? 

PS5/ We learned in January '20 that impeachments are about politics, not law—though they're supposed to adhere to rule of law. In January '21 we may learn *elections* are *also* about politics, not law. What happens if Dems must allow a do-over to preserve the peace of our Union? 

NOTE/ This scenario works for Trump even if early voting depresses Biden's win to (say) 62% to 36%. It may even work without Barr aboard. It may work if the "don't vote" effort is homegrown, inspired and supported by Trump but not demanded by him. The premise itself is the thing. 

NOTE2/ The solution here is for America to publicly discuss this scenario *now*—and invalidate it. GOP politicians must agree to abide by the election results even if Trump convinces his voters not to show up. Barr must state clearly that Trump cannot legally "move" election day.

NOTE3/ Constitutional law experts must play out how SCOTUS would act. Election law experts must do scenario-planning on how misconduct by GOP secretaries of state could be thwarted. Dems must educate Republicans on who's POTUS on January 20 if SCOTUS is still working on a ruling. 

NOTE4/ Democrats must announce now that there'll be no "do-over" election—and anyone who opts not to vote is making a decision they must *live by*. Emergency assistance must be provided to USPS. Social media should deem Trump tweets on moving election day "election interference." 

NOTE5/ It's amazing to see responses saying "the military wouldn't allow it" or "Pelosi would be POTUS." Again, this sort of coup happens through *politics, rhetoric, and the reframing of reality with GOP pol/voter support*—it has nothing to do with law, violence or the military.

[amanda-agnes]

Social Media – It’s far more than just a political engagement platform.

Politics, politics, politics. What is the first thing that pops into your mind when someone mentions politics? For the older generation or political activists, they might say it’s a system whereby the ruling party evaluates or organizes a society. Some of which may also associate it with power, governance or sovereignty over a country or area (Politics 2019). And as for political engagement, it can exist in many forms. It could be in the form of voting, contributing money to a candidate or political group, volunteering for a campaign or even joining a protest and many more (Section 5: Political Engagement and Activism 2014).

The above are general illustrations of what politics and political engagement are. But let us add one more element into this discussion, which is social media and how it is being used by political parties or politicians as part of their campaigning and communicating. When social media is included in the picture, think about it. Who is the target audience? Who are the politicians engaging via this platform? The answer would be the younger generation because they are always on the Internet, be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest or many more social networking sites. These social media platforms have already become part and parcels of their lives and has established themselves as an inherent necessity. It is where they access news and information, communicate with one another and keep themselves entertained. Using this dependency of social media to their advantage, politicians can utilize social media to reach out and engage with the younger generation. In other words, the Internet is a powerful tool as it serves to engage the already engaged (Pérez 2019).

As mentioned above, the older generation or political activists are more engaged with politics around them. However, the younger generation of below 21 years of age or of 21 to 39 years of age may or may not perceive politics the same way. The following video is a young person’s guide to political participation. The video illustrates why the younger generation is not as involved in politics as the adults. They might feel that they can’t make a difference and that their vote is not going to make an impact on anything. Nonetheless, the video provides a comprehensive guide as to how they can play their part and be more politically involved.

Social Media - A platform that binds communities and amplifies their goal.

Drawing back to social media and how it can be used as an effective tool for political parties or politicians as part of their campaigning and communicating, I will be using the GE14 Postal Votes phenomenon as my example. I will be looking into the positive impact of social media in regards to political engagement. The 14th General Elections (GE14) was known as an election that brought Malaysians together (Devadason 2018), and I would say that social media played an important role in binding Malaysians and amplifying their goals.

Malaysia has been governed by Barisan Nasional (BN) ever since it gained its independence in 1957. Elections after elections for the past 60 years have always been won by the same political party, ie Barisan Nasional (BN), making the people think that it is impossible to overthrow the party (David 2018). It was no different for GE14, people were losing hope and questioned whether the government will change this time, but the results took a shocking turn. The opposition party, Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope), led by Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, emerged victory in GE14. This victory set Malaysia’s first-ever transfer of power in the country’s 60 years of history.  

I will not be talking about how Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad used social media for political engagement. Instead I will touch on how social media serves as a platform to connect voters and allowed for effective communication. When the postal votes arrived late for Malaysians living overseas, many thought that their chances of participating in the election were forfeited. However, a Facebook group called ‘GE14: Postal Voters Discussion’ was created by Alex Yap together with other prominent figures such as Koh Lay Chin and Toh Lee Ann. This group coordinated and linked people with each other to send their ballots packages to Malaysians who are flying back to the country to vote. They started The Amazing Race: GE14 Edition whereby Malaysians travelling from London, Melbourne, San Francisco, Adelaide and elsewhere brought back sealed ballots of their fellow people. Runners then volunteered to get ballots to their finish lines.

So how was this logistical feat achieved? I would say that it was social media that played a humongous role in connecting people miles and miles apart. It also allowed for effective communication and coordination between communities. It bound the communities together and amplified their common goal.

References:

Politics, 2019, In Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary. Retrieved from <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/politics>

Section 5: Political Engagement and Activism, 2014, Pew Research Center, viewed 7 April 2019, <https://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/section-5-political-engagement-and-activism/>

Pérez, FS, 2019, ‘The Internet and political engagement: Making a difference’, Academia, pp. 1-13, viewed 8 April 2019, <https://www.academia.edu/730532/The_Internet_and_political_engagement_Making_a_difference>  

Devadason, L 2018, GE14: The Election That Brought Us Together, Leaderomomics.com, viewed 8 April 2019, <https://leaderonomics.com/personal/ge-14-postal-voters-unite>

David, L 2018, I Lost All Hope After GE13. But Now, It’s A New Dawn For Malaysia, Says.com, viewed 8 April 2019, <https://says.com/my/imho/imho-here-s-to-a-new-malaysia-after-ge14>

[theliberaltony]

via FiveThirtyEight

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination is good news for liberal policy activists. And that’s whether she wins the nomination or not. The Massachusetts senator appears poised to serve as a progressive policy anchor in the 2020 Democratic field, pushing the field — and the eventual nominee — toward aggressively liberal policy stands.

How might Warren have such influence? Because the Massachusetts senator is planning to release detailed and decidedly liberal policy proposals on issue after issue. Her rivals, if past primary campaigns are any guide, will feel pressure to either “match” her on policy by coming up with their own proposals, say that they agree with Warren, or convince the party’s increasingly left-leaning electorate that Warren’s proposals are too liberal. And remember that presidential winners usually try to implement their promises — so an idea put out by Warren in March could be in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s platform in August and be signed into law by a President Gillibrand in 2021.

Here’s an example of how this works, from a past Democratic primary. Early in the 2008 campaign, John Edwards released a comprehensive plan to provide health care for millions of Americans. A few months later, then-Sen. Barack Obama, looking to compete with Edwards among liberal voters and activists, put out a similar proposal, which was the basic outline for the Affordable Care Act he signed into law as president.

In the 2020 Democratic nomination process, I expect that other candidates will also have lots of policy proposals. And Bernie Sanders in particular is likely to join Warren in pushing the Democratic primary debate to the left. But Warren is likely to be at the forefront of the “policy primary,”– the one-time Harvard professor is perhaps the wonkiest person in the field. And Warren knows how to push her ideas onto the national agenda quite well. Before she was elected to the Senate, Warren convinced congressional Democrats and President Obama to create the agency now known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren campaign aides told me that unveiling major policy proposals will be a big part of her candidacy, with the ideas intended to reinforce Warren’s broader message that the country needs “big, structural change,” not just incremental tweaks.

“I’ve been working on one central question for 30 years,” Warren told me in brief interview after a campaign event in Greenville, South Carolina, on Saturday, “‘what’s going wrong with working families across this country, why is America’s middle class getting hallowed out?’ I never thought I would come into politics, not in a million years, but that was my chance to fight bigger, back in 2012, when I went to the Senate.”1

“Getting into the presidential race means I can talk about the kinds of big, systemic changes we need to make,” she added.

“Warren is an unusually wonkish, policy-focused figure, not just attached to some concerns … but very specific and knowledgeable about them,” said David Karol, a University of Maryland political science professor and expert on the presidential nominations process, in an e-mail message.

Karol said that Warren’s potential effect on the 2020 race is analogous to four years ago, when Sanders seemed to push Hillary Clinton to take more leftward stances than she might have otherwise. If Clinton had been elected president, she would have felt pressure to implement some of those liberal campaign promises, which would have made Sanders’s 2016 run particularly important in shaping U.S. public policy. But Karol argued that Warren is somewhat distinct from Sanders, because in his estimation, she is more attuned to the finer details of legislation. So Warren might push the rest of the Democratic field to the left and force Sanders, who is already very liberal, to be more specific in explaining how his proposals will work.

“[Warren] has a deep mastery of policy, a staunchly progressive voting record,” said New York-based liberal political activist Sean McElwee, best known for advocating for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, in an e-mail message. “She’ll be a real contender and will force every other candidate to get smart on policy and push the boundaries of what it means to be a progressive.”

So what are Warren’s ideas? It’s worth separating them into two general categories: ones that she is one of the principal authors of and those where she has embraced someone else’s proposal. The latter is important too — Warren taking up an idea while running for president can bring attention to obscure proposals written by backbenchers on Capitol Hill.

Here are some major Warren-authored policies:

A 2 percent annual tax on household net worth between $50 million and $1 billion, and an additional 1 percent tax on household net worth above $1 billion.

Bans on members of Congress and other top officials in Washington from owning individual stocks while in office and doing any kind of lobbying after they leave office.

Postal banking, a requirement that all U.S. post offices offer checking and saving accounts to Americans who want to sign up for them.

Federal manufacturing of generic prescription drugs.

The removal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

A reduction in the overall Department of Defense budget.

Federal funds to help first-time homeowners make the down payment on homes if they buy in neighborhoods that suffered in the past from redlining.

A requirement that large corporations reserve 40 percent of the seats on their boards for board members selected by workers at the company.

A ban on the U.S. using nuclear weapons first in a military conflict with another country.

A $146 billion “Marshall Plan” for Puerto Rico.

Here are a couple of proposals written by others that Warren has embraced:

Medicare-for-all;

The “Green New Deal,” a proposal championed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey to limit fossil fuel use in the U.S. in order to address climate change..

There are two caveats to this analysis. First, Warren’s influence on policy rests on her remaining a viable candidate, appearing in the debates, regularly visiting the early primary states and not, say, dropping out in May of this year. Second, I think Warren will particularly affect candidates, like Sanders, who are competing with her for support among liberal Democratic primary voters and activists like McElwee who comprise the party’s left wing. So Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who appears to be targeting more moderate Democrats, may not feel that she has to match Warren policy-for-policy.

That said, even more centrist candidates are likely to feel Warren’s pull on the race. Journalists and activists are going to ask candidates like Klobuchar if they support single-payer or Medicare-for-all. That will create pressure on those candidates to address Warren’s proposals, even if in the end they call for a less liberal variant — some kind of Medicare option for people between ages 50 and 64 instead of Medicare-for-all, for example. And Warren is likely to come up with ideas on issues that disproportionately affect blacks, Latinos, and young voters, three other key electoral blocs in the party. More moderate candidates can’t concede those voting blocs, so Warren’s proposals on issues that affect those voting blocs will likely influence all of the candidates.

So watch for Warren’s ideas — in some ways separately from Warren. A week after Warren unveiled her wealth tax, Sanders put out a plan to vastly increase the estate tax. I’m not saying Sanders proposed that idea only because of Warren’s move, but he might have proposed it so early in the presidential race (even before he officially announced his candidacy) because he felt pressured to match Warren. I would assume many Democratic candidates will put out proposals to vastly increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans — even if they aren’t as aggressive as Warren’s proposals. And his opposition to Warren’s wealth tax seems to be one of the primary reasons ex-Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz, a one-time Democrat, is considering an independent presidential run.

So while Warren’s poll numbers put her behind some of her rivals right now, she’s already having an outsized influence on the race — and I would expect that to continue.

[cptcrooktail-blog]

#5: Show of Hands

((content warning for very brief second hand mentions in passing of: alcoholism, brawling, depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation)) "So to be sure we are all agreed, taking the previously discussed caveats into account- can we have a show of hands in favour of reinstatement?" Rahgna looked up from her case file to watch the table's occupants unanimously raise their hands. Her own don't move, for the moment. One hand visible on the table gripping her quill a little too tight, the other rested on her knee, toying with a lump of metal affixed with various buttons, twitches, toggles and clickers to give her nervousness a more discreet vent. They were working through her batch of patients, currently- all her battered, wounded, traumatized lambs were being scrutinized by a round table panel of Maelstrom chirugreons and externally drafted experts, of which she was one. Given the enormity of the war with Garlemald, it's far reaching impacts, and the particular reports that had come back from the front line regarding the *unthinkable* horrors the Alliance military had born witness to, it was a fair and reasonable judgement, to have multiple pairs of eyes and experienced minds from varied backgrounds double and triple checking each other's work. Given how exceptionally efficient some of the Maelstrom units were, the Oliphant in the room - that was , the reality of maintaining public and intramilitary safety should one of them go back to work early and snap- was politely not voiced, but understood implicitly by each member of the board. Dr Schreiber was pleased with the results, so far. They had been more or less completely unanimous on most recommendations she had made, and the doctors who had gone before her had equally sound judgements of their own, that the rest of the board had agreed with, barring some recommendations for particular recovery strategies. Some patients were recommended a longer time off to recouperate, some were sadly asked to transfer out of active combat and into something more accommodating, as the patients themselves had suggested might suit them- but the vast majority of the case files that passed around the circle were well on their way to their own personal recovery plans that would see them back at work when they were ready. All but one. "Right, so the last case from my batch is one Captain J'ahkelyn Doenstyrm, alias "Jack Crooktail", presently attached to First Squadron's Ninth Levy, following her deployment in Gyr-" "Erm- I'm sorry, Dr Schreiber, I don't mean to interrupt," said one of her co panelists, absolutely meaning to interrupt, "But- that file had already been evaluated." Rahgna turned to look at him owlishly through a pair of thin lenses. "...I beg your pardon? How is that possible-" "Did you- did you not get the memo?" Another therapist piped up from across the table. "The Director attached a sheet to the meeting briefs with the names of all the automatic dismissal cases, so we wouldn't waste time debating them here. I would remember that name anywhere- it was the top of the list." Schreiber put her face in her hands and tried to contain the shudder of annoyance that followed this news. "To put plainly, no, I did not- I assume via some bungling of the internal postal system, but- look, Kristin," She shakes again, her voice trembling in a mixture of anger and growing panic. "I'm- I don't intend to shoot the messenger, here, but-" She looks up again to notice the tense look on the faces of each member of the panel, seated around the table, their expressions somewhere between disapproval, boredom, resignation, and deepening fear. "I *specifically* stated that being dismissed from the Maelstrom would put this patient into a worst state than she's already in. She *needs* the structure, it's- this is just like Sergeant Bright Meadow's case, yes?" The table collectively shifted with unease. "But... The Sergeant's drinking habit is not nearly so all consuming, Rahgna, nor the violence-" "Yes, because she has a *support network* at home and at work," Rahgna tapped the table repeatedly. "I genuinely believe that my patient's mental health will improve with the ability to work a wage in the profession she is already skilled in, her entire sense of self worth and value has been tied to the Naval forces since her formative years, it's- it's *ridiculous* that someone of our profession in a supposedly senior profession would -" "Schreiber," barked the midlander who has more or less adopted the role of master of ceremonies for the sake of moving things along. The fact he was the Head of the Department of Mental Health's nephew had not escaped Rahgna's notice. Still, despite herself, she found herself quailling. "...regardless of what anyone here would recommend, the final say is in the hands of the Director, and if- for whatever reason- he deems someone too risky, he can veto any of our recommendations anyway. You're just making yourself upset." Rahgna was, if anything, now even more angry, but she firmly closed her jaw. "I'm sure we all value your insight with your patient, but it's out of our hands." "I cannot guarantee her safety, Doctor," Rahgna warned gravely. "She is *already* on the brink of suicide watch, I don't think informing her that she's unemployed is going to *help*." The Director's nephew made an appropriately neutral grimace, and spread his hands. "She will have support for the alloted six months post-dismissal time. I'm sure you will do your best for her, Doctor Schreiber." Rahgna's jaw hit the floor, as well as the bottom of her stomach as the cold wave of disgust and fear crashed through her. She had no chance to reply, as within the space it took her to process what had even been said, the panel moved on to the next therapist, with their batch of patients, all surely as equally deserving of a chance to keep themselves employed in the face of overwhelming trauma, upheaval and loss. After a few moments she excused herself to the privy to dry heave, and cry into her hands, and in the time she was gone, three more unanimous votes were cast- though, not by the hands in the room.

[lifestylelaguna]

Voter Registration at SM Extended until End of October

Comelec spokesperson James JimenezJ had insisted that the extension of voter registration was in response to public clamor, even though the Comelec had been firm on non-extension even when calls were already mounting in August.

With COMELEC registration centers now open in 67 SM Supermalls nationwide, here’s a quick guide:

Who are qualified to register? You are qualified if you meet the following reguirements:Filipino citizen At least 18 years old by the time of the Elections (May 2022) A Filipino resident for at least one (1) year, residing in the place in which you intend to register in for at least six (6) months

What do I need to bring before going to the registration site?Download and accomplish the CEF-1 application form via https://comelec.gov.ph/ or via https://irehistro.comelec.gov.ph/cef1 and the Coronavirus Self Declaration Form. You may need to download and accomplish other forms as necessary (i.e. PWD). A valid ID, which may be any of the following:a. Student ID (or School Library ID signed by school authority)g. Passportb. Employee’s ID (with signature of employer or authorized representative)h. SSS/GSIS IDc. Senior Citizen IDi. Integrated Bar of the Philippines IDd. PWD Discount IDj. PRC Licensee. Driver’s Licensek. Postal IDf. NBI Clearancel. NCIP Certificate of Confirmation (for members of ICCs or IPs) *Cedula and Police Clearance will not be honored Own ball pen, face mask, and face shield. It is recommended to also bring your own alcohol or hand sanitizer. Please be reminded to keep safe social distance at all times.

Is there an express lane? An express lane is reserved for Senior Citizens, PWDs, and heavily pregnant registrants.

What are the other services offered in the registration sites? a. Filing of changes or correction in the entries (typographical errors in personal details or changes by reason of marriage, annulment, or court order) b. Transfer of registration records c. Reactivation of registration records c. Updating of records for PWDs and senior citizens d. Inclusion of Records in the Book of Voters/Reinstatement of Name in the List of Voters For information on the requirements, visit: https://irehistro.comelec.gov.ph/cef1.

I have already registered in the past. Can I check status of my registration? Yes. You may verify your registration status by: a. Calling COMELEC’s IT Department at 8527-9365 or 8526-7769; b. Directly coordinating with the Office of the Election Officer in their district, city, or municipality c. Accomplishing the form via https://irehistro.comelec.gov.ph/cef1.

Can I register at any satellite office in SM? The registration in malls is limited to residents of the city or district of the COMELEC conducting mall satellite registration. Hence, if you live in Makati District 1, you can register in a Makati mall where COMELEC Makati District 1 is holding registration.

This aims to help ease and unburden voter registration traffic in barangays, providing the public a more convenient, faster and safer way to avail of your right to vote. Register now.

[americanconstitutionalpatriot]

This is written by the regional manager for the USPO area covering from Buffalo to Jamestown to Corning.

.

Reposted from friend TRUTH BE TOLD especially to Mark Parris Jr.

I come from a family of several career USPS employees, my wife being one of them. And like everything else the media gets their mitts on, the current news about the USPS and especially Trump's involvement with it are hyped and in some cases TOTAL B.S.!

There are many, many issues I could address. But I'll start with just these twelve:

#1 - Trump did NOT get rid of the former US Postmaster General! She retired!

#2 - Trump did NOT appoint the NEW US Postmaster General! He was VOTED IN by the board of USPS Governors!

#3 - Processing plants have been shutting down and consolidating for YEARS now! And yes, part of that process involves dismantling equipment, which is most often reassigned to ANOTHER processing facility and utilized there! Some machines are dismantled and are not reused because like everything else, they wear out and eventually aren't worth fixing!

#4 - Yes, mailboxes in some areas are being removed. Why? Because mail volume in some areas has gone down, whereas in other areas, (like the greater Seattle area), the mail volume has recently INCREASED! But this too has been going on for YEARS and as many as 14,000 mailboxes were removed during the Obama administration. Was there outcry then? NO! And like Trump has NOTHING to do with the removal of mailboxes now, Obama had nothing to do with the mailboxes removed then!

#5 - The media LIES! The USPS processing plant in Everett, WA handled all of the regional mail from the south border of Snohomish county to the US/Canadian border. It closed in 2013 as part of a planned consolidation. True it was not initially to be the first plant in WA to close, but that's how it turned out. The media had a field day with its closure and announced more than 300 employees would lose their jobs. How many employees ACTUALLY lost their jobs?: ZERO!

#6 - The USPS is not in debt - at least not in the sense that almost all other large US businesses are not also. Does the USPS have loans? Yes. Are they in default on those loans? NO!

#7 - Is and has the USPS been losing money for more than a decade now? Yes. But not for the reason most people think, and certainly not for the reasons the media reports! The truth is, the Postal Service is not losing money because of Amazon or any other tech company or technological advance is society. It’s losing money because in 2006, Congress passed a law forcing it to prepay its pensions AND HEALTH CARE BENEFITS for 75 years IN ADVANCE!!! NO OTHER corporation, whether in government or the private sector has to do this! The USPS has appealed this decision every year since during every administration and shift in Congress and it has never been repealed. This means the pensions and health care benefits for people who have yet to be hired or even BORN the USPS is required to pay and lock up every month - IN ADVANCE! Who bills them? Congress! And do they do so accurately? NO! Many times Congress has OVERCHARGED the USPS the monthly amount they are to pay. Has the USPS then EVER been REFUNDED the difference? NO! So, believe it or not, without this law, the Postal Service would be turning a PROFIT!!!

#8 - When the federal government allowed other businesses to handle the package business, (DHL, FEDEX, UPS) these companies took the most profitable business and left the USPS with the least profitable - delivery to EVERY household in the U.S. and all U.S. Territories, (yes, even Puerto Rico and GUAM!), regardless of the cost of delivery. Believe it or not, the Havasupai tribe that lives on the floor of the Grand Canyon receives first-class mail and packages delivered by MULES!!! NO private company wants this business… or any business for 55 cents to every door in America - no matter the distances between the customers!

#9 - Trump's treasury department DID loan the USPS 10 BILLION dollars at the end of July! Why do they need it? In addition to the reasons already mentioned above, the Corona Virus Pandemic has had a significant NEGATIVE effect!

# 10 - Trump has TWICE said he WOULD IMMEDIATELY sign a STAND ALONE bill to provide even MORE funding, but the Democrats in Congress will not present a bill that does not include other stipulations such as stimulus checks provided to illegal aliens, mandatory voting by mail nationwide and bailouts for the blue states with cities that have been damaged by rioting.

#11 - EVERY major private package delivery service utilizes the infrastructure of the USPS somehow, someway on a DAILY basis! The private carriers simply do NOT have the capability of handling ALL their deliveries from END-TO-END without having the USPS help them out at some point! But the USPS is LIMITED by CONGRESS concerning the amount the USPS is allowed to charge these private carriers - and they are getting one heck of a deal!

#12 - This is perhaps the most unknown of all. The USPS is SELF-FUNDING! Yes, that means it is NOT funded by U.S. Taxpayers! This has been true since the mid-1980s! The USPS REVENUE is EARNED just like any other business via sales of products and services! Any money given to the USPS by the Federal Government is in the form of LOANS that it must payback! Are they low-interest Federal Loans? Yes! But why shouldn't they be?!!!

Do I LIKE that Trump has been a long-time critic of the USPS? NO! Why? Because I believe he's not considering the SOURCE of their misery, which is CONGRESS! But do I believe the problems are Trump's fault? NO! Do I believe the current dismantling of SOME parts of the USPS have anything to do with Trump or the upcoming election? NO! What is the problem? CONGRESS and to some extent the MULTIPLE UNIONS within the USPS that FIGHT WITH EACHOTHER, but each time one wins a grievance over another it is the USPS that has to pay for it!

.

[dailynewswebsite]

How votes are counted in Pennsylvania: Changing numbers are a sign of transparency, not fraud, during an ongoing process

Election officers counting ballots on the Allegheny County elections warehouse Friday in Pittsburgh. Jeff Swensen/Getty Photos

Final week I used to be grading a web based examination for my college students. We’re working with a brand new studying administration system at my college and I didn’t understand my college students might really see their grades transferring up and down on-line as I used to be engaged on their checks.

It was a mistake. Not figuring out how the numbers had been altering, what judgments had been behind the modifications, and once they’d simply get to know the end result made them frantic.

And as election officers work by means of the ultimate vote tallies of the 2020 election, I think about People really feel equally.

Lots of transparency with little or no context is extra nerve-wracking than it’s useful. That is true for examination grades in addition to elections. My college students can drop by my workplace hours in the event that they wish to perceive how I graded their exams. And I hope this explainer will present the same context to the best way we depend votes in the US.

A Donald Trump supporter faces a crowd of Joe Biden supporters exterior the central poll counting location in Philadelphia on Thursday. Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto through Getty Photos

From grading exams to counting votes

When my college students had been watching me grade, they may have seen their rating rising very slowly. This could make them suppose they had been doing very poorly on the examination, as a result of they weren’t getting very many factors per query.

Nevertheless it may very well be that I used to be simply grading essentially the most troublesome questions first. Afterward, after I began grading simpler questions, their grades would go up quick.

Counting votes is like grading runs of simple or onerous questions. This 12 months, Democrats had been way more more likely to mail of their ballots. Pennsylvania counts in-person ballots first, and rural areas are sooner counters than city areas. So Trump voters obtained the scores on the simplest questions early. For those who had been a Republican watching the vote depend in Pennsylvania, early election returns made you are feeling such as you had been doing fairly effectively on the examination.

However as soon as the city mail-in vote began coming in, that modified. Philadelphia mail-in ballots had been like a future of robust questions. Trump’s rating began declining quick.

Importantly, although, this doesn’t imply the system is “rigged.” Truly, it means the system is clear to a fault. Often whenever you take a check, you don’t see the grading occur in actual time. You simply get the rating when the grading is finished.

The important thing takeaway is that it doesn’t matter which questions get graded first and it doesn’t matter which votes get counted first. The top outcome is identical. It’s simply that having to look at it occur can play along with your feelings.

Poll safety

Dishonest on an examination is much simpler than dishonest in voting. Let’s undergo the method to see the way it works.

Step 1 (elective): Mail in your poll

Many citizens had been skeptical of mailing their ballots this 12 months, however these fears had been possible principally unfounded. Put merely, it’s onerous to steal your mail-in poll. Election mail doesn’t get thrown in with grocery store coupons. Moderately, there’s a particular system only for mail-in ballots. And like most states, Pennsylvania makes use of the Clever Mail Barcode system for ballots, a system that works like a Postal Service monitoring quantity.

A Trump marketing campaign ballot watcher movies the counting of ballots on the Allegheny County elections warehouse Friday in Pittsburgh. Jeff Swensen/Getty Photos

Though voters themselves hardly ever see this monitoring system, it’s accessible to native canvassing boards, and the Postal Service is required to supply updates on the development of election mail by means of the system. In actual fact, it was this method that alerted curiosity teams to a set of 300,000 probably lacking ballots – ballots whose bar codes confirmed them arriving at a submit workplace, however not leaving one.

The Postal Service assured a decide that the ballots had been safely delivered. And voters in most states, as in Pennsylvania, might test on-line to make sure their poll was delivered and forged a provisional poll if it had not. Questionable ballots are held apart, and county boards of election have seven days to find out whether or not the vote ought to depend.

Step 2: Confirm eligibility

While you vote in particular person, you signal for a poll and presumably present some identification.

This 12 months, President Trump inspired his supporters to vote twice – one thing he stated later that he did as a joke. That is dangerous recommendation. It’s unlawful in all states and might usually get you jail time. Probably, you possibly can lose your proper to vote in future elections.

In actual fact, one of many causes the votes in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, took so lengthy to depend was to keep away from the potential for unintentional double-voting on account of an error there in poll printing.

Importantly, ballot observers – marketing campaign volunteers who’re looking for his or her candidate’s finest pursuits – are watching each vote because it’s processed. That is true even in Philadelphia, the place Trump marketing campaign officers sued as a result of they claimed they had been saved “in darkness” on the polling place. They outlined that “darkness” as 20, relatively than 6, ft away from the canvassers tasked with counting the ballots. Trump’s observers sued and gained their 14 additional ft, however at no time had been ballots being opened in secret.

Ballot watchers connected to the campaigns can name out issues with a poll. If signatures don’t match, for instance, a marketing campaign’s ballot watcher can problem the poll.

The poll will then endure further scrutiny. The canvassers then decide about whether or not or not they’ll settle for the poll in query, and clarify their resolution to the ballot watchers. At this level, if one of many ballot watchers disagrees with the ruling the canvasser makes, she or he can make a remark of the small print of the poll, together with the title of the voter and the explanation the vote could also be incorrectly counted.

Campaigns can use these lists when they’re drawing up lawsuits in the event that they suppose the canvassers had been counting ballots that should have been rejected, or rejecting ballots that should have been counted.

Step 3: Depend the ballots

This half is simple. However it will probably take a very long time as a result of secretaries of state need actual numbers. In 2016 we knew Trump gained Pennsylvania by round 44,300 votes. However the outcomes weren’t official till officers had been positive the precise quantity was 44,292.

Step 4 (elective): Depend the ballots once more

Most states have provisions for computerized recounts if the vote could be very shut. That margin is normally 1% or much less of complete turnout. In Pennsylvania, the brink is 0.05% of the vote. That’s actually shut, however on condition that turnout in Pennsylvania exceeded 6.6 million this 12 months, that may very well be greater than 33,000 votes. A recount normally isn’t more likely to discover sufficient votes to vary the end result.

All that is to say, watching votes get counted is like watching an examination get graded. It looks as if a course of that’s altering over time, however it’s not. The votes are already there. They are going to be counted. If there may be fraud, it will likely be discovered. That’s why there are lawsuits.

It simply might take some time, and it could be onerous in your nerves within the meantime. Perhaps it’s best to look away till they’ve completed the job.

[The Conversation’s Politics + Society editors pick need-to-know stories. Sign up for Politics Weekly.]

Kristin Kanthak doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that might profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/how-votes-are-counted-in-pennsylvania-changing-numbers-are-a-sign-of-transparency-not-fraud-during-an-ongoing-process/ via https://growthnews.in

[easyfoodnetwork]

Fighting Voter Suppression in Hog Country, North Carolina

A voter waits in line a polling place in Black Mountain, North Carolina | Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images

In an election like none before it, the residents of North Carolina’s hog- and poultry-intensive eastern counties are fighting to regain the power of their vote

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

Elsie Herring spends many days documenting and responding to complaints from her neighbors — about everything from the stench coming off of factory farms to the clearcutting of trees for timber to the emissions from nearby factories. But lately, when Herring, a community organizer for the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (EJN), gets a call, she’s also been making sure the person on the other end of the line has a plan in place to vote.

With almost two million swine within its borders, Herring’s native Duplin County in eastern North Carolina is the top hog-producing county in the United States. And because many residents have pre-existing health conditions, in part from living alongside the waste produced by so many animals, many are choosing to mail their ballots in this year rather than venture to the polls, where COVID-19 presents an additional threat.

But, in a part of the state home to many people of color, Herring worries about reports of minority ballot rejection rates. In North Carolina, the ballots of white voters are being rejected at a rate of .5 percent, while Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 1.8 percent rate and Native American voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 4 percent rate (eight times more than white voters’), according to October 21 data from the U.S. Elections Project.

Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other.

“They’re disproportionate, and right there, that tells me they’re trying to suppress the Black votes,” Herring says. “That has always been their focus, to suppress our vote and not allow us the right.”

And so, she carefully walks her neighbors through the mail-in voting process: “We’re telling them to be careful and aware of what they’re writing and not writing on their ballots. The witness name has to be printed, and you have to have their signature and address. If that’s not there, they kick it out.”

Herring’s fears about the suppression of minority votes are not ill-founded, given recent and long-term efforts in North Carolina. Over the last decade, the state’s General Assembly, which the Republican party has controlled since 2010, has gerrymandered voting district maps along racial lines and passed numerous laws aimed at making it harder for minorities to vote (though many of the measures have not held up in court and are no longer in place).

In the midst of these ongoing efforts, many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in the eastern part of the state say they’ve repeatedly watched as their elected officials promote the interests of hog and poultry companies over their safety and well-being — as evidenced by the number and density of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) permitted in their communities and the ineffectiveness of the facilities’ waste-disposal systems.

In addition to enabling the industry to concentrate around low-income communities of color, residents say state lawmakers have limited the tools those communities once had at their disposal to protest the resulting pollution.

Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other: Without people in office to protect their interests, polluting industries such as the state’s industrial hog and poultry operations proliferate and remain largely unchecked, Herring says. And when industries pollute with little consequence, damaging the health and quality of life of the people around them, people are less likely to prioritize getting to the polls, especially given the fact that many are already dealing with myriad other issues, including poverty, food and housing insecurity, and lack of quality education and access to healthcare.

“It’s particularly troubling that when someone who is harmed by all these cumulative impacts seeks to remedy that . . . they find [that] the legislature in recent years has taken very intentional steps to deprive them of long-available remedies,” says Will Hendrick, staff attorney and manager of the Waterkeeper Alliance’s North Carolina Pure Farms, Pure Waters campaign.

“The reaction is, ‘My vote won’t matter — corporations control everything, and that won’t change.’”

Sherri White-Williamson, who worked for years in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office for Environmental Justice before returning two years ago to her hometown in Sampson County, says she has tried to encourage young people in her town to vote. “The reaction is, ‘Why should I? My vote won’t matter — they [corporations] control everything, and that won’t change,’” says White-Williamson, who now works as the NC Conservation Network’s environmental justice policy director. “People who live in communities and get stuff dumped on them feel less empowered to be able to effect any change.”

As a swing state that voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Donald Trump in 2016, North Carolina will be pivotal in this election. The U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Thom Tillis and his Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham could affect which party controls Congress as well. And while there are many conservative parts of the state, the demographics are changing as metropolitan areas continue to grow and more Latinx and young people register to vote.

Despite the factors stacked against them — made worse by the pandemic — Herring says many people in eastern North Carolina are still determined to make their voices heard. This year, groups like the one she’s involved with are working to educate voters and ensure they have transportation to the polls. And while Herring’s biggest concern is that her community’s votes will be under attack, she asks: “What can we do to combat that? I don’t know, other than just showing up at the polls to bring about a change.”

Photo by Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

An employee of the Mecklenburg County Board of Election in Charlotte, North Carolina holds up instructions that are mailed with absentee ballots for the 2020 election.

Suppressing the vote

In 2011, Republicans gained control of both of North Carolina’s Congressional houses and redrew the legislative district maps in the once-a-decade redistricting process to favor their party. In 2017, a district court and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the maps were illegally racially gerrymandered, meant to dilute the voice of Black voters. Two years after lawmakers submitted new maps, federal judges struck down the voting districts again, this time as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, saying they had been drawn with “surgical precision” — and were among the most manipulated in the nation. Lawmakers were ordered a second time to redraw the maps, which will be redone yet again in 2021, based on the 2020 Census.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the state have made two other attempts at passing voter suppression laws. HB 589, one of the most dramatic voting rights rollbacks in the U.S., was overturned in federal court after it had been in effect for several years, and the voter ID requirement HB 1092 was blocked by a federal judge.

“There are a lot of different ways people are trying to cut back who is eligible to vote, whose votes count after they are cast, and who is going to feel comfortable voting,” says Kat Roblez, staff attorney with Forward Justice, a nonpartisan organization advancing racial, social, and economic justice in the South. In the Old North State — and nationwide — these tactics commonly include in-person voter intimidation at the polls, periodic purges of voter rolls, the spread of misinformation, voter ID requirements, and felony disenfranchisement laws, she says.

This year, the pandemic and the divisive nature of politics bring additional concerns. While in 2016, about 25 percent of total votes were cast by mail, this year that portion will be almost twice that, according to the Pew Research Center — and voting in a new way comes with its own complications. “It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion,” says Roblez. At the same time, many residents have concerns about the effectiveness of the postal service itself, prompted by budget cuts and policy changes put in place over the summer.

“It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion.”

The increased number of demonstrations by white supremacist and neo-Confederate groups is also worrisome, Roblez says. “What we’re most concerned about in some of the more rural areas is . . . Confederate parades coming to the polls,” she says, recalling how last February, demonstrators hung Confederate flags at a polling site in Alamance County, North Carolina.

Social distancing requirements will also necessitate larger polling places, which can put rural precincts, with less infrastructure available, at a disadvantage. “In an instance where a bigger polling location is needed, they might close two others that are smaller, but that [new] location may not be as accessible,” explains Joselle Torres of Democracy NC.

White-Williamson remembers seeing voter suppression growing up in Sampson County — a particular business owner showing up at the polls to confuse and discourage Black voters, for example — but she hasn’t been aware of polling-place suppression efforts in recent years.

Still, she could see it happening this year. George Floyd was originally from Clinton, the town where she lives, and after his murder at the hands of a white police officer in May, protestors pulled down the Confederate statue in front of the Sampson County courthouse, sparking heated public debates.

“There are a lot of things fresh on people’s minds,” she says. “As a Republican county, I see the potential for there to be efforts at polling places to discourage voting, like what we’re seeing around the country.”

Jeff Currie, a member of the Lumbee Tribe who works as a riverkeeper protecting the Lumber River watershed, believes the poor education system in low-income parts of the state also has a role to play in the area’s disenfranchisement.

“If the education system is not saying ‘vote,’ people don’t understand what voting is — they lack civics training and education and the cultural sense that that’s what you do,” he says.

As Election Day approaches, Democracy NC and Forward Justice are placing volunteer vote protectors at polling places across the state who “are ready and trained to sound the alarm” if they see signs of suppression, adds Torres.

Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

A pig at Silky Pork Farms in Duplin County, North Carolina

Corporations over constituents

While legislators have tried to limit voting, the hog and chicken industries in eastern North Carolina have grown exponentially in ways that damage their surroundings, residents say. In the 1970s, family farmers in North Carolina raised an average of 60 pigs per farm, and the animals were free to roam around outside. That began to change in the 1980s and ’90s, however, as state lawmakers like teacher and farmer Wendell Murphy sponsored and helped pass bills that shielded large-scale hog farms from local zoning regulations and gave the industry subsidies and tax exemptions.

Now, North Carolina ranks second in the country for the number of hogs it produces, and the state’s average hog farm houses more than 4,000 animals. The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties — the top two hog-producing counties in the country — produce 4 billion gallons of wet waste a year, making up 40 percent of the North Carolina’s total. The waste is stored in open-air pits and periodically sprayed on nearby fields.

The foul-smelling chemicals the facilities release — ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, in particular — have been associated with difficulty breathing, blood pressure spikes, increased stress and anxiety, and decreased quality of life. Additionally, a 2018 study found higher death rates of all studied diseases — including infant mortality, mortality due to anemia, kidney disease, tuberculosis, septicemia — among communities located near hog CAFOs.

The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties produce 4 billion gallons of waste a year. The waste is stored in open-air pits.

For years, residents have spoken out about their suffering. They’ve told their representatives that the odor from the facilities forces them indoors all the time; they can’t sit on their porches, play in their yards, open their windows, or hang their laundry on the line; they have to buy bottled water rather than drinking from their wells; and “dead boxes” containing pig carcasses line the roads, and buzzards, flies, gnats fill the air.

And yet, says Naeema Muhammad, organizing co-director of the NC EJN, the state legislators and regulatory agencies don’t listen — and repeatedly prioritize large corporations as they make decisions about the permitting and regulation of these facilities. Time after time, she says, “legislators pass bills unmistakably against their constituents, in favor of the industry.”

In 2013, 500 residents of eastern North Carolina filed nuisance suits against the Chinese-owned Smithfield subsidiary Murphy-Brown, LLC, which owns the majority of the hogs in the state, complaining of the health problems and unpleasant ills the company subjected them to. In a victory for the hog-farm neighbors, juries ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the first five of the more than 20 cases to be tried, awarding the 10 plaintiffs in the first lawsuit more than $50 million in damages. (This number was reduced to a total of $3.25 million due to the state’s punitive-damages cap.) The industry is currently appealing the ruling.

As these lawsuits worked their way through the justice system, though, Herring watched in horror as her county’s representative in the state legislature, Jimmy Dixon, sponsored a bill that tied the hands of disadvantaged people looking for protection from factory farm pollution. The bill, passed in 2017, limits the compensation plaintiffs can receive in civil suits like the Smithfield case to a sum related to the diminished value of their property, and prevents them from receiving damages related to health, quality of life, and lost income.

Dixon, who did not respond to a request for comment in this story, said the bill was designed to protect farmers from the “greedy” lawyers who would sue them. “This bill is designed to protect 50,000 hardworking North Carolina farmers who are feeding a hungry world,” Dixon wrote in a 2017 op-ed in The Raleigh News & Observer.

In 2018, Senator and farmer Brent Jackson sponsored a similar bill that practically eliminates the right of residents to sue industrial hog operations by declaring that agricultural operations cannot be considered nuisances if they employ practices generally accepted in the region (like spraying hog waste on fields, for example). “With Senate Bill 711 on the books, we don’t have a leg to stand on,” Herring says. “We have to take what they give us, and [we don’t] have an avenue for recourse.”

Though legislators say they have the interests of farmers and consumers in mind, Muhammad thinks it’s more about campaign contributions. “You have people in power that are owned by the corporations — they’ve taken so much money from them, even if they wanted to do better, the industries would go after them,” she says.

John Althouse/AFP via Getty Images

In 1999, floodwaters from Hurricane Floyd engulfed a Burgaw, North Carolina hog waste lagoon.

Disproportionately polluting poor and minority communities

Those most affected by CAFO pollution are people of color. Duplin and Sampson counties have the highest share of Latinx residents in the state, with 23 and almost 21 percent, respectively. The residents of these two counties are also about 25 and 26 percent Black, as compared with the statewide average of 22 percent.

In 2014, NC EJN, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help (REACH), and Waterkeeper Alliance filed a Title VI Civil Rights complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. EPA claiming the North Carolina environmental regulatory agency allowed industrial swine facilities in the state to operate “with grossly inadequate and outdated systems of controlling animal waste and little provision for government oversight” — and that they had an “unjustified disproportionate impact on the basis of race” against Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people.

In 2018, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) settled the complaint, and this year, they put measures in place including a program of air and water monitoring near hog operations and involving impacted community members in permitting decisions. “I believe there’s a group of people [at the DEQ] who are trying to do the right thing,” says Muhammad. “With more collaboration with communities, we’ve seen some change. But you have a body of people who want to hold onto those old ways.”

In the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color.

Another complicating factor is the fact that the state has cut the regulatory agency’s budget year after year. “If you don’t have the budget to hire the staff to do the inspections, that’s a problem,” White-Williamson says.

While the size of pork industry has stabilized since a moratorium on new facilities with the lagoon-and-sprayfield system went into effect in 1997, no such limit was put in place on chicken operations, and as a result, the size of the poultry industry has tripled since then.

According to a report released this summer by the Waterkeeper Alliance and Environmental Working Group, between 2012 and 2019, the estimated number of chickens and turkeys in Duplin, Sampson, and Robeson counties increased by 36 percent to 113 million, compared to only 17 percent in the rest of the state. The racial disparities continue as well: In Robeson County, 42 percent of residents identify as Native American — compared to 1.6 in the state as a whole, according to 2018 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The concentration of chicken CAFOs worries environmental advocates, because rather than being kept in pits, the drier chicken feces is stored in large, uncovered piles and runs off into waterways when it rains. North Carolina chickens produce three times more nitrogen and six times more phosphorous than its hogs, causing environmental damage like toxic algal blooms and fish kills.

Unlike with hogs, the chicken industry does not have to notify the government when it opens a new facility, even if it is in an area prone to floods. As a result, the state environmental regulation agency often does not even know where chicken CAFOs are located, and inspections occur only when a complaint arises.

Lumber Riverkeeper Jeff Currie, who can smell poultry CAFOs from his house, says in the two years that have passed since Hurricane Florence, he’s documented 17 new operations consisting of 320 new barns in the watersheds he watches over.

Currie points out that, in the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and a controversial wood pellet plant were both slated to be built in low-income communities of color in the area this year. While the pipeline was cancelled in July, the pellet plant is on its way to completion. If you don’t have the money to hire a private attorney and exert influence, Currie says, “you get dumped on.”

The effects of disenfranchisement

The environmental injustices piled onto low-income communities of color stem in part from their lack of political influence; disenfranchisement efforts on the part of politicians and parties who’d like to stay in power only make it worse.

Eastern North Carolina residents say that even without the state’s attempts to make voting difficult for them, the democratic process is frustrating, because when it comes to protecting them from agricultural pollution, there are no candidates who actually represent their interests.

“You get to the point where you’re like, what’s the point?” Currie says. “It’s not party-based — they all took the money. So who do you go to to try to get a bill introduced to end poultry operations in the 100-year floodplain?”

It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage.

White-Williamson believes even if solid state- and federal-level lawmakers were elected in 2020, it would take decades to recover from the damage that has resulted from the regulatory rollbacks, budgetary priorities, and culture of hatred that elected officials have promoted over the last few years. “It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage,” she says. “I feel like this is going to [take] almost a generation to straighten out.”

Muhammad is similarly concerned. “I’ve looked at everybody running from the federal level down to the local level, and I don’t hold out hope it’ll be a process that’ll bring about a lot of change,” she says.

And yet, despite the lack of strong local representation on CAFOs, many eastern North Carolina residents are still motivated by a desire to see change at the top, and they’re mobilizing to help each other get out the vote. Because, despite the roadblocks placed in their way and their lack of expectation for change, they have hope that things can get better — they offer as examples the victory in the Smithfield nuisance cases and the collapse of the oil pipeline project. Though the overall system is structured against them, they’ve seen small successes, and they plan to keep at it.

“If we have to continue to fight for the right to vote, so be it,” Herring says. “Whatever the issue is in our communities that is keeping us from living the best lives we can for our families and children, we have to organize, stay informed, hold meetings, make trips, write letters, make phone calls — do whatever we have to do to keep the issue on the forefront until we bring about change. We can’t give up.”

• Fighting Voter Suppression, Environmental Racism, and Corporate Agriculture in Hog Country [Civil Eats]

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A voter waits in line a polling place in Black Mountain, North Carolina | Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images

In an election like none before it, the residents of North Carolina’s hog- and poultry-intensive eastern counties are fighting to regain the power of their vote

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

Elsie Herring spends many days documenting and responding to complaints from her neighbors — about everything from the stench coming off of factory farms to the clearcutting of trees for timber to the emissions from nearby factories. But lately, when Herring, a community organizer for the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (EJN), gets a call, she’s also been making sure the person on the other end of the line has a plan in place to vote.

With almost two million swine within its borders, Herring’s native Duplin County in eastern North Carolina is the top hog-producing county in the United States. And because many residents have pre-existing health conditions, in part from living alongside the waste produced by so many animals, many are choosing to mail their ballots in this year rather than venture to the polls, where COVID-19 presents an additional threat.

But, in a part of the state home to many people of color, Herring worries about reports of minority ballot rejection rates. In North Carolina, the ballots of white voters are being rejected at a rate of .5 percent, while Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 1.8 percent rate and Native American voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 4 percent rate (eight times more than white voters’), according to October 21 data from the U.S. Elections Project.

Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other.

“They’re disproportionate, and right there, that tells me they’re trying to suppress the Black votes,” Herring says. “That has always been their focus, to suppress our vote and not allow us the right.”

And so, she carefully walks her neighbors through the mail-in voting process: “We’re telling them to be careful and aware of what they’re writing and not writing on their ballots. The witness name has to be printed, and you have to have their signature and address. If that’s not there, they kick it out.”

Herring’s fears about the suppression of minority votes are not ill-founded, given recent and long-term efforts in North Carolina. Over the last decade, the state’s General Assembly, which the Republican party has controlled since 2010, has gerrymandered voting district maps along racial lines and passed numerous laws aimed at making it harder for minorities to vote (though many of the measures have not held up in court and are no longer in place).

In the midst of these ongoing efforts, many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in the eastern part of the state say they’ve repeatedly watched as their elected officials promote the interests of hog and poultry companies over their safety and well-being — as evidenced by the number and density of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) permitted in their communities and the ineffectiveness of the facilities’ waste-disposal systems.

In addition to enabling the industry to concentrate around low-income communities of color, residents say state lawmakers have limited the tools those communities once had at their disposal to protest the resulting pollution.

Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other: Without people in office to protect their interests, polluting industries such as the state’s industrial hog and poultry operations proliferate and remain largely unchecked, Herring says. And when industries pollute with little consequence, damaging the health and quality of life of the people around them, people are less likely to prioritize getting to the polls, especially given the fact that many are already dealing with myriad other issues, including poverty, food and housing insecurity, and lack of quality education and access to healthcare.

“It’s particularly troubling that when someone who is harmed by all these cumulative impacts seeks to remedy that . . . they find [that] the legislature in recent years has taken very intentional steps to deprive them of long-available remedies,” says Will Hendrick, staff attorney and manager of the Waterkeeper Alliance’s North Carolina Pure Farms, Pure Waters campaign.

“The reaction is, ‘My vote won’t matter — corporations control everything, and that won’t change.’”

Sherri White-Williamson, who worked for years in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office for Environmental Justice before returning two years ago to her hometown in Sampson County, says she has tried to encourage young people in her town to vote. “The reaction is, ‘Why should I? My vote won’t matter — they [corporations] control everything, and that won’t change,’” says White-Williamson, who now works as the NC Conservation Network’s environmental justice policy director. “People who live in communities and get stuff dumped on them feel less empowered to be able to effect any change.”

As a swing state that voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Donald Trump in 2016, North Carolina will be pivotal in this election. The U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Thom Tillis and his Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham could affect which party controls Congress as well. And while there are many conservative parts of the state, the demographics are changing as metropolitan areas continue to grow and more Latinx and young people register to vote.

Despite the factors stacked against them — made worse by the pandemic — Herring says many people in eastern North Carolina are still determined to make their voices heard. This year, groups like the one she’s involved with are working to educate voters and ensure they have transportation to the polls. And while Herring’s biggest concern is that her community’s votes will be under attack, she asks: “What can we do to combat that? I don’t know, other than just showing up at the polls to bring about a change.”

Photo by Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

An employee of the Mecklenburg County Board of Election in Charlotte, North Carolina holds up instructions that are mailed with absentee ballots for the 2020 election.

Suppressing the vote

In 2011, Republicans gained control of both of North Carolina’s Congressional houses and redrew the legislative district maps in the once-a-decade redistricting process to favor their party. In 2017, a district court and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the maps were illegally racially gerrymandered, meant to dilute the voice of Black voters. Two years after lawmakers submitted new maps, federal judges struck down the voting districts again, this time as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, saying they had been drawn with “surgical precision” — and were among the most manipulated in the nation. Lawmakers were ordered a second time to redraw the maps, which will be redone yet again in 2021, based on the 2020 Census.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the state have made two other attempts at passing voter suppression laws. HB 589, one of the most dramatic voting rights rollbacks in the U.S., was overturned in federal court after it had been in effect for several years, and the voter ID requirement HB 1092 was blocked by a federal judge.

“There are a lot of different ways people are trying to cut back who is eligible to vote, whose votes count after they are cast, and who is going to feel comfortable voting,” says Kat Roblez, staff attorney with Forward Justice, a nonpartisan organization advancing racial, social, and economic justice in the South. In the Old North State — and nationwide — these tactics commonly include in-person voter intimidation at the polls, periodic purges of voter rolls, the spread of misinformation, voter ID requirements, and felony disenfranchisement laws, she says.

This year, the pandemic and the divisive nature of politics bring additional concerns. While in 2016, about 25 percent of total votes were cast by mail, this year that portion will be almost twice that, according to the Pew Research Center — and voting in a new way comes with its own complications. “It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion,” says Roblez. At the same time, many residents have concerns about the effectiveness of the postal service itself, prompted by budget cuts and policy changes put in place over the summer.

“It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion.”

The increased number of demonstrations by white supremacist and neo-Confederate groups is also worrisome, Roblez says. “What we’re most concerned about in some of the more rural areas is . . . Confederate parades coming to the polls,” she says, recalling how last February, demonstrators hung Confederate flags at a polling site in Alamance County, North Carolina.

Social distancing requirements will also necessitate larger polling places, which can put rural precincts, with less infrastructure available, at a disadvantage. “In an instance where a bigger polling location is needed, they might close two others that are smaller, but that [new] location may not be as accessible,” explains Joselle Torres of Democracy NC.

White-Williamson remembers seeing voter suppression growing up in Sampson County — a particular business owner showing up at the polls to confuse and discourage Black voters, for example — but she hasn’t been aware of polling-place suppression efforts in recent years.

Still, she could see it happening this year. George Floyd was originally from Clinton, the town where she lives, and after his murder at the hands of a white police officer in May, protestors pulled down the Confederate statue in front of the Sampson County courthouse, sparking heated public debates.

“There are a lot of things fresh on people’s minds,” she says. “As a Republican county, I see the potential for there to be efforts at polling places to discourage voting, like what we’re seeing around the country.”

Jeff Currie, a member of the Lumbee Tribe who works as a riverkeeper protecting the Lumber River watershed, believes the poor education system in low-income parts of the state also has a role to play in the area’s disenfranchisement.

“If the education system is not saying ‘vote,’ people don’t understand what voting is — they lack civics training and education and the cultural sense that that’s what you do,” he says.

As Election Day approaches, Democracy NC and Forward Justice are placing volunteer vote protectors at polling places across the state who “are ready and trained to sound the alarm” if they see signs of suppression, adds Torres.

Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

A pig at Silky Pork Farms in Duplin County, North Carolina

Corporations over constituents

While legislators have tried to limit voting, the hog and chicken industries in eastern North Carolina have grown exponentially in ways that damage their surroundings, residents say. In the 1970s, family farmers in North Carolina raised an average of 60 pigs per farm, and the animals were free to roam around outside. That began to change in the 1980s and ’90s, however, as state lawmakers like teacher and farmer Wendell Murphy sponsored and helped pass bills that shielded large-scale hog farms from local zoning regulations and gave the industry subsidies and tax exemptions.

Now, North Carolina ranks second in the country for the number of hogs it produces, and the state’s average hog farm houses more than 4,000 animals. The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties — the top two hog-producing counties in the country — produce 4 billion gallons of wet waste a year, making up 40 percent of the North Carolina’s total. The waste is stored in open-air pits and periodically sprayed on nearby fields.

The foul-smelling chemicals the facilities release — ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, in particular — have been associated with difficulty breathing, blood pressure spikes, increased stress and anxiety, and decreased quality of life. Additionally, a 2018 study found higher death rates of all studied diseases — including infant mortality, mortality due to anemia, kidney disease, tuberculosis, septicemia — among communities located near hog CAFOs.

The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties produce 4 billion gallons of waste a year. The waste is stored in open-air pits.

For years, residents have spoken out about their suffering. They’ve told their representatives that the odor from the facilities forces them indoors all the time; they can’t sit on their porches, play in their yards, open their windows, or hang their laundry on the line; they have to buy bottled water rather than drinking from their wells; and “dead boxes” containing pig carcasses line the roads, and buzzards, flies, gnats fill the air.

And yet, says Naeema Muhammad, organizing co-director of the NC EJN, the state legislators and regulatory agencies don’t listen — and repeatedly prioritize large corporations as they make decisions about the permitting and regulation of these facilities. Time after time, she says, “legislators pass bills unmistakably against their constituents, in favor of the industry.”

In 2013, 500 residents of eastern North Carolina filed nuisance suits against the Chinese-owned Smithfield subsidiary Murphy-Brown, LLC, which owns the majority of the hogs in the state, complaining of the health problems and unpleasant ills the company subjected them to. In a victory for the hog-farm neighbors, juries ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the first five of the more than 20 cases to be tried, awarding the 10 plaintiffs in the first lawsuit more than $50 million in damages. (This number was reduced to a total of $3.25 million due to the state’s punitive-damages cap.) The industry is currently appealing the ruling.

As these lawsuits worked their way through the justice system, though, Herring watched in horror as her county’s representative in the state legislature, Jimmy Dixon, sponsored a bill that tied the hands of disadvantaged people looking for protection from factory farm pollution. The bill, passed in 2017, limits the compensation plaintiffs can receive in civil suits like the Smithfield case to a sum related to the diminished value of their property, and prevents them from receiving damages related to health, quality of life, and lost income.

Dixon, who did not respond to a request for comment in this story, said the bill was designed to protect farmers from the “greedy” lawyers who would sue them. “This bill is designed to protect 50,000 hardworking North Carolina farmers who are feeding a hungry world,” Dixon wrote in a 2017 op-ed in The Raleigh News & Observer.

In 2018, Senator and farmer Brent Jackson sponsored a similar bill that practically eliminates the right of residents to sue industrial hog operations by declaring that agricultural operations cannot be considered nuisances if they employ practices generally accepted in the region (like spraying hog waste on fields, for example). “With Senate Bill 711 on the books, we don’t have a leg to stand on,” Herring says. “We have to take what they give us, and [we don’t] have an avenue for recourse.”

Though legislators say they have the interests of farmers and consumers in mind, Muhammad thinks it’s more about campaign contributions. “You have people in power that are owned by the corporations — they’ve taken so much money from them, even if they wanted to do better, the industries would go after them,” she says.

John Althouse/AFP via Getty Images

In 1999, floodwaters from Hurricane Floyd engulfed a Burgaw, North Carolina hog waste lagoon.

Disproportionately polluting poor and minority communities

Those most affected by CAFO pollution are people of color. Duplin and Sampson counties have the highest share of Latinx residents in the state, with 23 and almost 21 percent, respectively. The residents of these two counties are also about 25 and 26 percent Black, as compared with the statewide average of 22 percent.

In 2014, NC EJN, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help (REACH), and Waterkeeper Alliance filed a Title VI Civil Rights complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. EPA claiming the North Carolina environmental regulatory agency allowed industrial swine facilities in the state to operate “with grossly inadequate and outdated systems of controlling animal waste and little provision for government oversight” — and that they had an “unjustified disproportionate impact on the basis of race” against Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people.

In 2018, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) settled the complaint, and this year, they put measures in place including a program of air and water monitoring near hog operations and involving impacted community members in permitting decisions. “I believe there’s a group of people [at the DEQ] who are trying to do the right thing,” says Muhammad. “With more collaboration with communities, we’ve seen some change. But you have a body of people who want to hold onto those old ways.”

In the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color.

Another complicating factor is the fact that the state has cut the regulatory agency’s budget year after year. “If you don’t have the budget to hire the staff to do the inspections, that’s a problem,” White-Williamson says.

While the size of pork industry has stabilized since a moratorium on new facilities with the lagoon-and-sprayfield system went into effect in 1997, no such limit was put in place on chicken operations, and as a result, the size of the poultry industry has tripled since then.

According to a report released this summer by the Waterkeeper Alliance and Environmental Working Group, between 2012 and 2019, the estimated number of chickens and turkeys in Duplin, Sampson, and Robeson counties increased by 36 percent to 113 million, compared to only 17 percent in the rest of the state. The racial disparities continue as well: In Robeson County, 42 percent of residents identify as Native American — compared to 1.6 in the state as a whole, according to 2018 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The concentration of chicken CAFOs worries environmental advocates, because rather than being kept in pits, the drier chicken feces is stored in large, uncovered piles and runs off into waterways when it rains. North Carolina chickens produce three times more nitrogen and six times more phosphorous than its hogs, causing environmental damage like toxic algal blooms and fish kills.

Unlike with hogs, the chicken industry does not have to notify the government when it opens a new facility, even if it is in an area prone to floods. As a result, the state environmental regulation agency often does not even know where chicken CAFOs are located, and inspections occur only when a complaint arises.

Lumber Riverkeeper Jeff Currie, who can smell poultry CAFOs from his house, says in the two years that have passed since Hurricane Florence, he’s documented 17 new operations consisting of 320 new barns in the watersheds he watches over.

Currie points out that, in the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and a controversial wood pellet plant were both slated to be built in low-income communities of color in the area this year. While the pipeline was cancelled in July, the pellet plant is on its way to completion. If you don’t have the money to hire a private attorney and exert influence, Currie says, “you get dumped on.”

The effects of disenfranchisement

The environmental injustices piled onto low-income communities of color stem in part from their lack of political influence; disenfranchisement efforts on the part of politicians and parties who’d like to stay in power only make it worse.

Eastern North Carolina residents say that even without the state’s attempts to make voting difficult for them, the democratic process is frustrating, because when it comes to protecting them from agricultural pollution, there are no candidates who actually represent their interests.

“You get to the point where you’re like, what’s the point?” Currie says. “It’s not party-based — they all took the money. So who do you go to to try to get a bill introduced to end poultry operations in the 100-year floodplain?”

It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage.

White-Williamson believes even if solid state- and federal-level lawmakers were elected in 2020, it would take decades to recover from the damage that has resulted from the regulatory rollbacks, budgetary priorities, and culture of hatred that elected officials have promoted over the last few years. “It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage,” she says. “I feel like this is going to [take] almost a generation to straighten out.”

Muhammad is similarly concerned. “I’ve looked at everybody running from the federal level down to the local level, and I don’t hold out hope it’ll be a process that’ll bring about a lot of change,” she says.

And yet, despite the lack of strong local representation on CAFOs, many eastern North Carolina residents are still motivated by a desire to see change at the top, and they’re mobilizing to help each other get out the vote. Because, despite the roadblocks placed in their way and their lack of expectation for change, they have hope that things can get better — they offer as examples the victory in the Smithfield nuisance cases and the collapse of the oil pipeline project. Though the overall system is structured against them, they’ve seen small successes, and they plan to keep at it.

“If we have to continue to fight for the right to vote, so be it,” Herring says. “Whatever the issue is in our communities that is keeping us from living the best lives we can for our families and children, we have to organize, stay informed, hold meetings, make trips, write letters, make phone calls — do whatever we have to do to keep the issue on the forefront until we bring about change. We can’t give up.”

• Fighting Voter Suppression, Environmental Racism, and Corporate Agriculture in Hog Country [Civil Eats]

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[liberty1776]

US Postal Service

The truth about what's going on with USPS...Posted by Jenness Lynn Rogers:“I come from a family of several career USPS employees, my wife being one of them.  And like everything else the media gets their mitts on, the current news about the USPS and especially Trump's involvement with it are hyped and in some cases TOTAL HOGWASH!There are many, many issues I could address.  But I'll start with just these twelve:#1 - Trump did NOT get rid of the former US Postmaster General!  She retired!#2 - Trump did NOT appoint the NEW US Postmaster General!  He was VOTED IN by the board of USPS Governors!#3 - Processing plants have been shutting down and consolidating for YEARS now!  And yes, part of that process involves dismantling equipment, which is most often reassigned to ANOTHER processing facility and utilized there!  Some machines are dismantled and are not reused because like everything else, they wear out and eventually aren't worth fixing!#4 - Yes, mailboxes in some areas are being removed.  Why?  Because mail volume in some areas has gone down, whereas in other areas, (like the greater Seattle area), the mail volume has recently INCREASED!  But this too has been going on for YEARS and as many as 14,000 mailboxes were removed during the Obama administration.  Was there outcry then?  NO!  And like Trump has NOTHING to do with the removal of mailboxes now, Obama had nothing to do with the mailboxes removed then!#5 - The media LIES!  The USPS processing plant in Everett, WA handled all of the regional mail from the south border of Snohomish county to the US/Canadian border.  It closed in 2013 as part of a planned consolidation.  True it was not initially to be the first plant in WA to close, but that's how it turned out.  The media had a field day with its closure and announced more than 300 employees would lose their jobs.  How many employees ACTUALLY lost their jobs?:  ZERO!#6 - The USPS is not in debt - at least not in the sense that almost all other large US businesses are not also.  Does the USPS have loans? Yes.  Are they in default on those loans? NO!#7 - Is and has the USPS been losing money for more than a decade now?  Yes.  But not for the reason most people think, and certainly not for the reasons the media reports!  The truth is, the Postal Service is not losing money because of Amazon or any other tech company or technological advance is society. It’s losing money because in 2006, Congress passed a law forcing it to prepay its pensions AND HEALTH CARE BENEFITS for 75 years IN ADVANCE!!!  NO OTHER corporation, whether in government or the private sector has to do this!  The USPS has appealed this decision every year since during every administration and shift in Congress and it has never been repealed.  This means the pensions and health care benefits for people who have yet to be hired or even BORN the USPS is required to pay and lock up every month - IN ADVANCE!  Who bills them?  Congress!  And do they do so accurately?  NO!  Many times Congress has OVERCHARGED the USPS the monthly amount they are to pay.  Has the USPS then EVER been REFUNDED the difference?  NO!  So, believe it or not, without this law, the Postal Service would be turning a PROFIT!!!#8 - When the federal government allowed other businesses to handle the package business, (DHL, FEDEX, UPS) these companies took the most profitable business and left the USPS with the least profitable - delivery to EVERY household in the U.S. and all U.S. Territories, (yes, even Puerto Rico and GUAM!), regardless of the cost of delivery. Believe it or not, the Havasupai tribe that lives on the floor of the Grand Canyon receives first-class mail and packages delivered by MULES!!!  NO private company wants this business… or any business for 55 cents to every door in America - no matter the distances between the customers!#9 - Trump's treasury department DID loan the USPS 10 BILLION dollars at the end of July!  Why do they need it?  In addition to the reasons already mentioned above, the Corona Virus Pandemic has had a significant NEGATIVE effect!# 10 - Trump has TWICE said he WOULD IMMEDIATELY sign a STAND ALONE bill to provide even MORE funding, but the Democrats in Congress will not present a bill that does not include other stipulations such as stimulus checks provided to illegal aliens, mandatory voting by mail nationwide and bailouts for the blue states with cities that have been damaged by rioting.#11 - EVERY major private package delivery service utilizes the infrastructure of the USPS somehow, someway on a DAILY basis!  The private carriers simply do NOT have the capability of handling ALL their deliveries from END-TO-END without having the USPS help them out at some point!  But the USPS is LIMITED by CONGRESS concerning the amount the USPS is allowed to charge these private carriers - and they are getting one heck of a deal!#12 - This is perhaps the most unknown of all.  The USPS is SELF-FUNDING!  Yes, that means it is NOT funded by U.S. Taxpayers! This has been true since the mid-1980s!  The USPS REVENUE is EARNED just like any other business via sales of products and services!  Any money given to the USPS by the Federal Government is in the form of LOANS that it must payback!  Are they low-interest Federal Loans?  Yes!  But why shouldn't they be?!!!Do I LIKE that Trump has been a long-time critic of the USPS?  NO!  Why?  Because I believe he's not considering the SOURCE of their misery, which is CONGRESS!  But do I believe the problems are Trump's fault?  NO!  Do I believe the current dismantling of SOME parts of the USPS have anything to do with Trump or the upcoming election?  NO!  What is the problem?  CONGRESS and to some extent the MULTIPLE UNIONS within the USPS that FIGHT WITH EACHOTHER, but each time one wins a grievance over another it is the USPS that has to pay for it!”