#Voter Purge

[shy-raccoon]

If your voter registration gets purged for being a democrat reregister as no party preference or independent. Make sure you can vote in this election especially if you live in a swing state or red state.

[geezerwench]

Republicans want the courts to kick 225,000 voters off the North Carolina rolls by the end of next week.

The North Carolina Republican Party and the Republican National Committee said in a lawsuit filed Monday in Wake County that the State Board of Elections failed to act when resident Carol Snow complained about violations of a federal law called the Help America Vote Act. Snow said the state had used registration forms that failed to require a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number.

Republicans and far-right groups are seeking voter purges in states around the country, including the swing states of Arizona and Pennsylvania.

In an email, state Board of Elections spokesman Pat Gannon said the lawsuit asks the impossible. Federal law prohibits removing voters so close to the election, he said.

“Despite being aware of their alleged claims months ago, the plaintiffs have waited until two weeks before the start of voting to seek a court-ordered program to remove thousands of existing registered voters. Federal law itself prevents such removal programs if they take place after the 90th day before a federal election, which was August 7. So, the lawsuit is asking for a rapid-fire voter removal program that violates federal law.”

This is the second lawsuit Republicans have filed against the state Board of Elections in less than a week.

In a statement issued Tuesday morning, state House Democratic Leader Robert Reives blasted the lawsuit as part of an ongoing GOP strategy to use “intimidation, chaos and even outright disenfranchisement” to limit voting rights.

[qupritsuvwix]

https://thehill.com/homenews/4849711-texas-voter-roll-purge-million/

[wyrmfedgrave]

Governor Abbott says 1 million Texans have been removed from voter rolls since 2021 in effort to crackdown on illegal voting - ABC13 Houston

Texas has removed 1 million people from its voter rolls - supposedly to curb illegal voting.

The Republikkkans who did this 'audit' claim to be doing it only for the sake of election 'integrity.'

Knowing that ineligible voters will be prosecuted, Reps say, reinforces true 'confidence' in 'fair' voting practices.

However, the 'coincidence' of this voting purge being in such close proximity to the upcoming election is highly problematic...

Normal removals aren't unusual nor a new idea.

For example, in 2020, Texas removed some 1.25 million names from its list of voters.

Of these, around ½ of a million folks died, moved or didn't re-register to vote.

But, what of the rest?

Please, check your registration status every day.

With about 70 days before Election Day, Texans have until October 7th to re-register - if they've been illegally removed...

In some counties, your voting status can be removed - if a person hasn't re-registered in 2 consecutive federal elections.

Stay vigilant & check your registration daily.

(An earlier posting has a national website where you can check your voting status & re-register - all in one page...)

End?

[unofficial-project-2025]

Quick reminder for everyone

Please mmake sure to register to vote for this year, and tell everyone to do the same!

Yes, Kamala has become more popular in the polls, but we still need to vote for her to win!

So tell everyone to register, check your registration regularly to make sure it's not been suspended/purged, and reblog this post to spread the information!

[mcspocky]

IMPORTANT: Check your voter registrations ASAP! Vote.org

[niche-pastiche]

Let's talk about Ohio removing 160,000 voter registrations....

Search for yourself here: https://registrationreadiness.ohiosos.gov

Register to vote here: https://olvr.ohiosos.gov There’s not a lot of time to fix this. Check it now if you’re in Ohio. All that has to happen for this to have happened to you is that it’s been 4 years since you voted on something. Even if you think you’re safe from it, if you live in Ohio you should still check.

[aunti-christ-ine]

Just a suggestion:

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 3, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 04, 2024

The election of 2000 was back in the news this week, when Nate Cohn of the New York Times reminded readers of his newsletter, using a map by data strategist and consultant Matthew C. Isbell, that the unusual butterfly ballot design in Palm Beach County that year siphoned off at least 2,000 votes intended for Democratic candidate Al Gore to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan. 

Those 2,000 votes were enough to decide the election, “all things being equal,” Cohn wrote. But of course, they weren’t equal: in 1998 a purge of the Florida voter rolls had disproportionately disenfranchised Black voters, making them ten times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected.

That ballot and that purge gave Republican candidate George W. Bush the electoral votes from Florida, putting him into the White House although he had lost the popular vote by more than half a million votes.

Revisiting the 2000 election reminds us that manipulating the vote through voter suppression or the mechanics of an election in even small ways can undermine the will of the people.  

A poll out today from the Associated Press/NORC showed that the vast majority of Americans agree about the importance of the fundamental principles of our democracy. Ninety-eight percent of Americans think the right to vote is extremely important, very important, or somewhat important. Only 2% think it is “not too important.” The split was similar with regard to “the right of everyone to equal protection under the law”: 98% of those polled thought it was extremely, very, or somewhat important, while only 2% thought it was not too important. 

Recent election results suggest that voters don’t support the extremism of the current Republican Party. In local elections in the St. Louis, Missouri, area on Tuesday, voters rejected all 13 right-wing candidates for school boards, and in Enid, Oklahoma, voters recalled a city council member who participated in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and had ties to white supremacist groups. 

Seemingly aware of the growing backlash to their policies, MAGA Republicans are backing away from them, at least in public. Earlier this year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis called for making it harder to ban books after a few activists systematically challenged dozens of books in districts where they had no children in the schools—although he blamed teachers, administrators, and “the news media” for creating a “hoax.” 

Today, lawyers for the state of Texas told a federal appeals court that state legislators might have gone “too far” with their immigration law that made it a state crime to enter Texas illegally and allowed state judges to order immigrants to be deported. (Mexico had flatly refused to accept deported immigrants from other countries under this new law.) Nonetheless, Arizona legislators have passed a similar bill—that Democratic governor Katie Hobbs refuses to sign into law—and are considering another measure that would allow landowners to threaten or shoot people who cross their property to get into the U.S.

Indeed, the extremists who have taken over the Republican Party seem less inclined to moderate their stances than either to pollute popular opinion or to prevent their opponents from voting. 

While Trump is hedging about his stance on abortion—after bragging repeatedly that he was the person responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade—MAGA Republicans have made their unpopular abortion stance even stronger. 

Emily Cochrane of the New York Times reported today that the hospital at the center of the decision by the Alabama state supreme court that embryos used for in vitro fertilization have the same rights and protections as children has ended its IVF services. And on Monday, Florida’s supreme court, which Florida governor Ron DeSantis packed with extremists, upheld a ban on abortion after 15 weeks and allowed a new six-week abortion ban—before most women know they’re pregnant—to go into effect in 30 days. 

In the past, people seeking abortions had gravitated to Florida because its constitution upheld the right to privacy, which protected abortion. But now the Florida Supreme Court has decided the constitution does not protect the right to abortion. Caroline Kitchener explained in the Washington Post that in the past, more than 80,000 women a year accessed abortion services in Florida. This ban will make it nearly impossible to get an abortion in the American South. 

Anya Cook, who in 2022 nearly died after she was denied an abortion under Florida’s 15-week ban, gave Kitchener a message for Florida women experiencing pregnancy complications: “Run,” she said. “Run, because you have no help here.”

Extremist Republicans have managed to put their policies into place not by winning a majority and passing laws through Congress, but by creating cases that they then take to sympathetic judges. This system, known as “judge shopping,” has so perverted lawmaking that on March 12 the Judicial Conference, the body that makes policy for federal courts, announced a new rule that any lawsuit seeking to overturn statewide or national policies would be randomly assigned among a larger pool of judges. 

On March 29, the chief judge of the Northern District of Texas, where many such cases are filed, told Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would not adhere to the new rules. 

Rather than moderating their stances, extremist Republicans are doubling down on their attempt to create dirt on the president. With their impeachment effort against President Joe Biden in embarrassing ruins, House Republicans are casting around for another issue to hurt the Democrats before the 2024 election. 

Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported today that in the last month, House Republican Committee chairs have sent almost 50 oversight requests to a variety of departments and agencies. Haberkorn noted that there is “significant political pressure on the party to produce results after months of promising it would uncover evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors involving Biden.”

But it is Trump, not Biden, who is in the news for questionable behavior. In The Guardian today, Hugo Lowell reported that Trump’s social media company was kept afloat in 2022 “by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.”

There is more trouble for the social media company in the news today, as two of its investors pleaded guilty to being part of an insider-trading scheme involving the company’s stock. They admitted they had secret, inside information about the merger between Trump Media and Digital World Acquisition Corporation and had used that insider information to make profitable trades. 

Meanwhile, Trump is suing Truth Social’s founders to force them out of leadership and make them give up their shares in the company. His is a countersuit to their lawsuit accusing him of trying to dilute the company’s stock. 

Of more immediate concern for Trump, Judge Juan Merchan denied yet another attempt by Trump—his eighth, according to prosecutors—to delay his election interference trial. The trial is scheduled to begin April 15.

Finally, in an illustration of extremists aiming not to moderate their stances but to impose the will of the minority on the majority, Republicans are putting in place rules to make it easier for individuals to challenge voters, removing them from the voter rolls before the 2024 election.

Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted today that states and local governments have regular programs to keep voter registration accurate, while right-wing activists are operating on a different agenda. In one 70,000-person town in Michigan, a single activist challenged more than a thousand voters, Elias reported, and in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, right-wing activists have already challenged 16,000 voters and intend to challenge another 10,000.

One group boasted that their system “can and will change elections in America forever.” 

Rather like the election of 2000.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[odinsblog]

Back in 2001, Senate Bill 1 passed the Texas state legislature and banned Harris County - that's Houston - from keeping polls open late into the night, or overnight, so that shift workers could vote, while expanding early voting in rural counties. It lets the state throw away absentee ballots that don't come in with the voters drivers license number attached, without telling people that their vote hasn't been counted. It makes it a felony for any state employee to mail out an unsolicited absentee ballot. It requires election officials to do monthly purges of voting rolls, without notifying voters that they'll no longer be able to vote.

It provides new legal protections for so-called, non-partisan poll watchers.

They're actually recruiting Proud Boys down in Texas to be poll watchers, and it makes it a one year in prison offense if you try to stop them or confront them.

And it maintains the state's lack of convenient online voter registration, making it the most difficult state in the union to vote in. That was two years ago to set up Greg Abbott's election victory in the election of 2022.

Now they're coming back with a brand new piece of legislation that would allow the Republican Secretary of State to throw out all the votes in any county with over 2.7 million people, if the secretary of state believes there are any “irregularities” in the count. Now interestingly enough, the county that has Dallas has 2.6 million people and it votes Republican. The county that has Houston, which votes Democratic, has 2.7 million people. It has over 2.6 million, so in the law they made it only apply to any county with over 2.6 million people.

This is just one small piece of a much larger effort.

As the Texas Civil Rights Project noted, in just the first four years after five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Texas Republicans closed 1173 polling places in mostly Black and Hispanic counties that had previously been protected by the Voting Rights Act, but none of that was enough for them.

As the Houston Chronicle noted two days ago, the effort is now to be able to throw out election results in Houston, and then say, “now the state has to have a new election that has to be paid for by the county,” or “now the county has to have a new election that has to be paid for by the county.”

And of course they want to do this because they know that special elections have very low turnout, and low turnout always favors Republicans, because the people who can most easily vote are the people who are salaried, upper middle class — white people mostly, and people who are retired. You know the aging Republicans in Texas, and you know it's pretty straightforward stuff.

Out of the 254 counties in Texas, only Harris County, only Houston was selected for this. And this is, you know, a county now that is led by people of color, as the Harris County attorney pointed out.

And Republican Secretaries of State across the nation were vigorously purging people from the polls. Over 17 million, more than 10% of America's active voters were purged off voting rolls in just the two years leading up to the 2018 elections, according to NBC News.

In North Carolina, now this again after the Voting Rights Act was gutted by five Republicans on the Supreme Court, in North Carolina 158 polling places were permanently closed in the 40 counties with the largest African-American populations leading up. This was just before the 2016 election, the Donald Trump election. This led to a 16% decline in African-American early voting in that state.

An MIT study found that nationwide, Hispanic voters wait 150% longer than white people do in line.

Black voters wait 200% longer in line.

In Indiana when then Governor Mike Pence passed a rigorous new Voter ID law, it produced an 11.5% drop in African-American voting in Indiana. This is why we didn't get President Al Gore or President Hillary Clinton. We would have gotten both of them if it wasn't for voter suppression.

Down in Florida, Jeb Bush knocked 90,000 African-Americans off the voting rolls so that his brother could win by 537 votes. Or we would have had President Al Gore, if it had been illegal for Jeb Bush to throw those people off the voting rolls.

And the same thing in 2016: an 11.5% drop in African-American voting just in Indiana, because of a law that Mike Pence passed.

Well, it was happening all over the country. By 2016, the Republican Party had really fine-tuned this voter suppression machine.

The New York Times reports in 2017 that just in Wisconsin, this is in the 2016 election, about 17,000 registered votes were turned away from the polls because of a new Voter ID law from Scott Walker.

In 2018, Greg Palace sued a number of Republican Secretaries of State and got his hands on purge lists that included 90,000 people in largely Democratic parts of Nevada, and 769,000 people in Colorado.

Keep in mind this is when Colorado was run by Republicans. 340,000 people in Georgia, and 469,000 people purged in Indiana.

In the dissent, in the Huston v. Randolph case, this was the case in 2018, where five Republicans on the Supreme Court said, “Yeah, it's fine. You can keep purging people from voting rolls.”

This was the Ohio Secretary of State, Stephen Breyer pointed out in his dissent, and I quote, “the record shows that in 2012, Ohio identified 1.5 million registered voters, nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters as ineligible to remain on the voting rolls because they changed their residences,” and he points out that's 20% of the state's voters - who were kicked off for moving, when on any average year, about 4% of Americans move. How do these numbers come in while they just, you know, hey, Brown people, Black people, college towns, let's just purge them.

Calling the findings disturbing, the Brennan Center said, almost 4 million more names were purged in the rolls between 2014 and 2016. This led up to the Trump election.

Then between 2006 and 2008, this growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33%, far outstripping growth of both total registered voters, 18%, and total population 6%.

This has been their strategy for years and years and years, to throw people off the voting rolls. Now on top of that, they're waging their culture wars, but the culture wars are not all that popular among most Americans.

—Republicans cry “Voter Fraud!” while enacting massive Voter Suppression laws

[kp777]

[....]

Monday's complaint is the second lawsuit making election integrity-related claims that GOP leaders say call into question whether large numbers of immigrants are illegally voting in North Carolina — echoing false claims former President Donald Trump made in the 2016 and 2020 elections. State elections officials say the GOP's claims are based on a skewed version of the facts, and that the lawsuit's proposed solution is itself illegal.

Read more.

[geezerwench]

People of Oklahoma! Check your voter registration right now!

[vampiricgf]

so out of curiosity I checked my voter registration this morning and it looks like I was purged from the registered voter pool. not unusual, it happens to people quite a bit especially in red/swing states but uh yea if you plan on voting you should be checking in advance to make sure you were not purged from voter records