#Voter turnout

[whenweallvote]

Early-voting turnout in Texas is off to a hot start. 🔥 More than 840,000 people have cast their ballots in person statewide, almost 100,000 more than 2020!

On top of that, the number of registered voters in Texas grew more than 10% between 2020 and 2024.

What are you waiting for? 🤠 Make your plan to vote and go #VoteEarly at WeAll.Vote/voterhub.

📹 : eureka.dawn.lmti

[rosielindy]

🥰😂

[263adder]

Don't Lose Your Vote! UK Edition

Update: Tuesday 18th June 2024 is the deadline to register to vote for the general election.

A snap general election could be called any day. This will be the first general election that requires photo ID if you vote at the polls (postal votes 📫 are unaffected by the Election Act 2022).

If you don't have an approved form of identification (list here), you can apply for a FREE voter ID photo card. Find out more below or use these 5 minutes to register and get your ID sorted instead ❎ because, and this is important to know, the government really doesn't want young people to vote.

The Explanation

Rishi Sunak, UK Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party, may call a snap election in 2023. (A snap election is a vote brought in earlier ⏱ than the one that’s scheduled 🕐) The UK’s next general election (for MPs and the PM) is meant to happen between December 2024 and January 2025.

A snap election happens in as little as 25 days 😨 between the announcement (aka the PM asking the House of Commons’ to approve the dissolution of Parliament) and the vote 🏃‍♀️

You must be registered to vote - currently over 8 million people are not. Unlike other a democratic countries, the UK doesn’t automatically register all eligible voters. You have to do this yourself. Here’s a quick reminder of how to register:

Over the past 15 years, it has gotten harder for British citizens to vote:

Families can no longer register to vote as a household 🏡 so young voters must register themselves (Cameron Govt)

Colleges and universities are barred from registering students 👨‍🎓 (Cameron Govt)

The Elections Act requires photo ID 🤳 for anyone voting in person (Johnson Govt)

Local elections (for city and town governments) in 2023 were the first votes that required VOTER ID. According to the Electoral Commission, over 14,000 people were turned away from the polls because they had not heard about the change.

The House of Lords tried to amend the Elections Act before it passed, to include more common types of ID, such as bank statements, bills, student ID, library cards and much more. This amendment was struck down in the House of Commons. A lot of the IDs included in the approved list are more likely to be owned by older voters than younger ones. For example, a 60+ Oyster Card is acceptable ID but an 18+ Oyster Card is not.

Here’s the important thing to know: voters who don’t have a driving licence or passport or other approved forms of ID, can apply for a free voter ID photo card. Watch the video below to find out how!

And finally, please, for the love of our democracy, vote.

"Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles." Abbie Hoffman

[thashining]

Mind the cussing, but you’ve gotta hear this man. He is the greatest ‼️🤣🤣🤣 every word is f—ng #gold. From @connorfkennedy on Tiktok

[nostalgicbones]

do you like pressing buttons?

do you like stickers?

i’d like to play a game with you. if you haven’t already, go vote. once you’ve voted, come back here, and claim your digital sticker❣️ no lying!!! defeats the purpose of the exercise and will rain unspeakable curses upon you and your family. reblog after you get your sticker!

(PINK) (ORANGE) (YELLOW)

(BLUE) (PURPLE) (SUPPORT)

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ Vote!!!!! . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

[alwaysbewoke]

there was NOTHING (ABSOLUTELY NOTHING) kamala could have done to win this election. NOTHING.

[charliezeltzer]

70 Million People Have Cast A Ballot

As of 11/2 70 Million People have early voted either in person or via mail and their ballots have been received and verified.

For reference 73 million people voted for Trump in 2020. We are almost to the halfway point of the total number of ballots cast in 2020. Tomorrow is the last day to In Person Early Vote in New Jersey. Unless voting trickles down tomorrow or election day, this is proving to be the largest Election of our life times (and I'm old AF)

[thetransfemininereview]

No matter what happens over the next few days, we’re going to need all of the optimism and resilience we can get.

Keep your head up. Take care of each other. And for God’s sake, vote.

[davidaugust]

I know voter apathy is the explanation given, but it seems…off.

via @johnpavlovitz@mastodon.social

[thepopculturearchivist]

JUDGE, September 15, 1928

[jomiddlemarch]

Write letters to likely Democrats ABROAD! Mail date deadline is 10/1/24.

There are millions of U.S. citizens living abroad who have the right to vote in this year's general elections. Our letters will remind these voters about the importance of voting, and provide them with a step-by-step guide to returning their overseas ballot. Please note that these letters to overseas voters require international postage, which currently costs $1.65 per forever stamp.

[whenweallvote]

Early voting in Georgia started today, and the Peach State is already setting new records! 📈

More than 252,000 voters cast ballots on the first day of early voting, breaking the 2020 record of 136,000. Georgia, you’re crushing it! 🍑

Want to get like them and #VoteEarly? Make a plan to vote now at WeAll.Vote/voterhub.

📹: @NnamEgwuon✍🏾: @kaitlancollins

[rosielindy]

I am permanently stepping back from all delusional people (mostly extended family) in my life. I don’t want to debate with them, my energy is better spent elsewhere.

From this point forward I will counter anyone who makes a statement about this traitor’s great character, especially when it’s based on staged events any fool could see are for photo ops only. No way to polish this turd, nope not having it. 💩💩💩💩

OMG, I’m really disappointed with some of the folks, I never wanted to believe they were this stupid. I refuse to pretend it’s ok. Not a matter of politics at this point, it’s a chasm between polar opposite personal values and worldviews.

Time to unleash and amplify the energy from the dawning of the age of Aquarius. It’s real, y’all.

💗💗💗💗

[thashining]

Always Russia

"he said "that's why we also voted.." !?

"Kremlin agent well now that makes sense and if you stop thinking about anything else you’re going down the wrong sink path because this is what Trump is all about he is a Russian asset always has been"

"The Loudest Secret"

@rosierose061

[dicapiito]

Loving the early voting turnouts 🥳

While mainstream media wants to cream over Trump’s dumb Mickey D’s stint; the fact that early voting is going extremely well is amazing 💙🇺🇸🥂

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Bully Pulp stevebrodner.substack.com

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 12, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 13, 2024

Today, Trump backed out of another debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. He tried to spin his fear as a sign of strength, claiming that “Polls clearly show that I won the Debate,” and so there was no reason to debate again, but boy, is that going to be a hard sell. 

First of all, as journalist Ahmed Baba points out, “This man has never, in his life, denied a stage with millions of viewers…. Trump’s post-debate internal polls must be brutal.” Second, he hardly looks dominant as TikTok is overflowing with memes making fun of his “They’re eating the dogs” moment and as Vice President Harris made fun of his “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act to a packed 17,000-seat stadium in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Tim Miller of The Bulwark wrote: “Impotent Trump was too intimidated to even look Kamala’s direction at the debate and now he wusses out of the rematch. Cannot recall a more dramatic demonstration of beta weakness in a campaign setting.” Harris posted on social media that “we owe it to the voters to have another debate,” and reiterated that sentiment to her cheering supporters in Greensboro.

In a speech to about 550 people in Tucson, Arizona, Trump insisted he had scored a “monumental victory” in the debate, referred to Minnesota governor Tim Walz as the vice president, slurred his words, and appeared to be having trouble reading off the teleprompters. CNN tonight compared one of Trump’s 2016 debates with Hillary Clinton to his performance on Tuesday, and the difference was stark.

Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman wrote in The Atlantic today that Trump is showing signs of cognitive decline. His tangents and inability to get to a point suggest “a fundamental problem with an underlying cognitive process.” “If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” he wrote.

Trump continues to try to dominate the political debate by refusing to back off any of his assertions, doubling down on the lies about immigrants eating pets and teachers giving students sex change operations. He called Harris a “Marxist communist fascist socialist,” clearly just stringing words together.

Meanwhile, he is giving off vibes of desperation. This afternoon he announced he would launch his crypto platform “World Liberty Financial” on X Spaces on September 16, hardly the sign of a presidential candidate convinced he’s about to regain his position as the leader of the free world.  

It has been notable for a while that Trump’s wife, Melania, is nowhere to be seen, and Trump has begun to cling to provocateur Laura Loomer, who has vowed utter loyalty to Trump and is evidently quite happy to be seen with him. This is a problem for the Republican Party because of her history of conspiracy theories and open racism. As Joe Perticone and Marc Caputo of The Bulwark note, Loomer has referred to Vice President Harris as a “drug using prostitute,” for example, and suggested she has not given birth to children because “she’s had so many abortions that she damaged her uterus.”  

Loomer’s extremism has made other Trump supporters urge him to keep her at a distance, sparking an embarrassing public fight. Two of those trying to get Trump to isolate Loomer are Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Their chilliness prompted Loomer to fight back on social media, questioning Graham’s sexual identity and calling attention to Greene’s extramarital affair and comparing her to a “hooker.” 

The public fight between Loomer and Trump’s more restrained supporters—and who would have thought Greene would fall in the “more restrained” category?—illustrates something Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo today. 

Marshall noted that the Republicans are essentially running two campaigns for president in 2024. One is run by Trump himself, and it is based on Trump’s personal grievances and stories from his rallies that have little relationship to reality. In 2016, Trump blew up the American political scene with his idiosyncrasies, and his unique style led him to the White House. But 2024 is a different moment. The campaign is faltering as Trump appears increasingly unhinged, afraid to be on a stage with Harris, and seemingly unable to distinguish fact from fiction. 

The other campaign is being run by Trump’s campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who quietly recognize that Trump is in decline and are trying to run a much more traditional campaign. Like Lindsey Graham when he drew Loomer’s wrath, they keep urging Trump to talk about the economy and to dial back the craziness to avoid driving off voters interested in stability. While they are unable to contain Trump, they are trying to win the election by hammering away at swing state voters with ads attacking Harris and trying to make her look radical. 

If Trump were to win under these circumstances, it seems likely that he would not be the driving force in his own administration. The power of the office would then be wielded by Vice President J.D. Vance, a reality we should confront in the few weeks left before the election. Vance is a religious extremist, of course, whose recent willingness to smear Haitian immigrants with a lie so long as it might enhance the Republicans’ chance of winning was despicable.  

Aside from the Christian nationalism and the lies, Vance recently said he sees American history as “a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons, where whichever side the hillbillies are on, wins.” The Northern Yankees in the late nineteenth century stood for protecting the right of all men to equality before the law, while the Southern Bourbons—probably named originally for Bourbon County, Kentucky, before the name came to represent those who supported the idea of royalty—wanted to get rid of the Fourteenth Amendment that protected Black rights, and the Fifteenth Amendment that established the right of Black men to vote. 

Vance said today’s “Northern Yankees” are what he calls “hyper-woke, coastal elites”: the ones trying to protect equal rights. “The Southern Bourbons are sort of the same old-school Southern folks that have been around and influential in this country for 200 years,” Vance said. Or, as people understood it in the late nineteenth century, they were former Confederates who opposed Black rights. “And it’s like the hillbillies have really started to migrate towards the Southern Bourbons instead of the Northern woke people,” he concluded, in an evident hope that they would control the American future. 

Extremist Republicans used to hide that sentiment. Now the man who could become the acting president is openly embracing it. 

At the same time MAGA leaders are trying to turn out their base, they are also working to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Yesterday, the Republican-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court decided to permit Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to have his name taken off the ballot in that state, although, as Mark Joseph Stern reported in Slate, he did not ask to be removed until four days after he withdrew from the race, which was five days after the deadline for withdrawing. 

By the time he withdrew, county election boards were already printing ballots, and the court’s decision will require nearly three million ballots to be destroyed and new ones designed and printed. According to North Carolina’s state election director, this will take 18 to 23 days and will cut into early voting. North Carolina law requires state officials to mail ballots to Americans living abroad and to service members by September 6, the day that early voting was supposed to start.  

As Stern points out, Trump and Harris are effectively tied in North Carolina, and early voters there skew Democratic. 

Last night, musician Taylor Swift won seven awards at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, mostly for awards surrounding her song “Fortnight.” In her acceptance speech for “Video of the Year,” she said: “[T]he fact that this is a fan-voted award and you voted for this, I appreciate it so much. And if you are over 18, please register to vote for something else that’s very important coming up, the 2024 presidential election,” Swift said, although she could hardly be heard over the roar from the crowd at her call for them to vote.  

Pollster Tom Bonier has been following registration numbers and said that there has been a massive increase in voter registrations after Swift’s endorsement of Harris. “This intensity and enthusiasm is really unprecedented at this point. It’s even bigger than what we saw after the Dobbs decision in 2022.”

Today, Republicans in North Carolina sued to overturn the decision of the state election board that students and employees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill can use state-approved digital IDs as identification for voting. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON