#vote suppression

[tomorrowusa]

If anybody is trying to prevent you by intimidation, fraud, or trickery from casting your legal vote, that is a federal crime and should be reported to the proper authorities.

It's not just the FBI which handles such reports. You can contact the local United States Attorney or the Department of Justice Public Integrity Section.

I find that voting early and in person presents the fewest potential problems. If you have a minor problem with your signature, ID, or other information, it can usually be sorted on the spot. If you mess up your ballot, you can have it voided and get a new one. If you are still unable to cast a regular vote, they are obliged to issue you a provisional ballot and you can then make a case for yourself to the election authorities.

The only big downside to voting early in person is that early voting centers are fewer in number than neighborhood Election Day polling places; you'll usually have to travel further to cast your ballot. However such centers are open for several days and occasionally offer variations in voting hours.

Election Day in person voting is okay, but if something keeps you from voting that day (weather, personal emergency, health) then you've lost your chance to vote in that election.

Vote absentee if you have no other way. But anybody who has ever experienced something getting lost in the mail understands the problems with this. Unsupervised outdoor drop boxes are also a potential problem. There are plenty of bad things a vote suppressor can do to those. Though it is safe to personally deliver your completed absentee ballot to the local election board or county clerk's office.

[whatthehelloh]

[uboat53]

In light of Giuliani admitting that he used dirty tricks to suppress Hispanic votes in the early 90s, I'm sure you've heard a lot of people asking why all of a sudden there's so much talk about voter suppression, and they're absolutely right, the talk about it is new.

What's not new is that it's been happening. This kind of thing has been going on for decades, perhaps centuries. It's only recently that the groups that have been suppressed have gotten the kind of influence that they need to get the rest of us to talk about it.

[eowyn7023]

Last election, there were news stories about bags of mail with absentee ballots being dumped in ravines. I don't know if they were true, but be very cautious about getting your vote counted.

[tomorrowusa]

«Treating the GOP like an ordinary party -- and the 2024 election like a run-of-the-mill race -- allows the media to cling to false equivalencies and feigned neutrality. However, as long as the mainstream media practices business-as-usual journalism, millions of voters will remain oblivious to the dire state of American democracy. And worse, Trump and his party will benefit from the bizarre insistence on treating neo-fascists and their apologists like normal politicians.»

— Jennifer Rubin writing at the Washington Post.

After the 2016 election, most news outlets normalized the Trump Republican Party. The fact is, the Republican Party is no longer a normal US political party. The GOP is now a cult of personality for Donald Trump. It is now largely a willing accomplice to his attempts to undermine democracy in the United States.

The Trump Republican Party hates democracy. It pines for the days when only wealthy white males could vote – and in the South those wealthy males were usually slaveholders. Trump Republicans combine their nostalgia for the early 19th century with admiration of totalitarians of the last hundred years.

One strategy that Trump Republicans use to gain power is to restrict voting as much as possible. If only their shrinking base gets to vote without hindrance then that increases their chances of winning elections.

When vote suppression fails, they put up roadblocks like the attempt by the GOP Ohio legislature to make it harder for Ohio voters to enshrine reproductive freedom in the Ohio constitution.

In short, Republicans no longer believe in democracy and have embraced Trump's style of mafia-fascism.

The GOP Is Done with Democracy The party has one principle left: Power is only legitimate when it's wielded by Republicans.

No matter what barriers Republicans erect to voting, we need to vote relentlessly and not be shy about letting pro-democracy vote slackers know that they need to get their butts to the ballot box. When pro-democracy Americans are united and determined, they make a difference in close elections. Voting is no longer just a civic act, it has become a revolutionary one.

I Will Vote

[stephen-barry]

*opinion*

The billionaires' trick to keep people from voting

[merelygifted]

Only one party is trying to stop you from voting.

Oh look, it seems like there's a Republican-led movement to purge voter rolls in the lead-up to the election! It's almost as if your vote matters and they don't want you to vote! Anyway, I whipped up a quick map (based on this) that shows when the voter registration deadline is in each state. There are a few deadlines coming up in the next week or so.

If you live in a state that regularly purges voter rolls for infrequent voters (the orange ones in the first map), or if you moved recently, it's good to check if you're still registered to vote.

Vote.org makes it super easy to check your registration: https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

Just put in your address and DOB and they'll tell you whether you're registered. (And they give you a quick link to register online if it turns out that you're not! Only the 9 states in white on my map don't have online registration, and for those they provide instructions on how to do it via mail or in person.)

So yeah, give yourself peace of mind -- do a quick check. :)

[geezerwench]

People of Oklahoma! Check your voter registration right now!

[chargetheintruder]

EAS: Inversion in progress.

Or to put it more simply, the Next Big Lie is out in the open, from Trump and his:

To put it simply: Republicans know Trump is beatable on a legitimate, rational level. They know they have to cheat and cause an illegitimate election process to make a Trump win happen.

So they have a plan to attack the legitimacy of the 2024 Election wherever it doesn't go their way, and to subvert established Election Law whenever and wherever possible. They will accuse US of exactly what they're doing.

This is why I've become a "fuck the whole bunch" person as of late. It's not just Donald Trump--he and his toxic ass, knot of malformed personalities he calls a "family" are only a focal point. It's that Trump is enough of a blank slate and enough of an enabler, that any and all fascist freak-shows among conservatives feel they get a free pass to be their absolute worst. So confirmed racist Hulk Hogan shows up for pure nostalgia value at a convention where J.D. Vance's own wife is also targeted with sneers and racist slurs. Among lots of other craziness.

And yes, many among the One Percent, who own the Media and own the Press, will swear up and down that "they're just bored" and that "this is just entertainment" and that nobody should take this Asylum Rules Shit-Show seriously. And yet . . . they do take the freak-show seriously by funding it and by insisting that the Media and Snopes gives Trump all of the delicate softball questions in the fucking world.

And then you have Ketamine-Addled Apartheid Boy, a.k.a. Elon Musk over there, not even hiding whose side he's on and who he wants to see ruin America, the way he ruined Twitter.

Sorry for the slight tangent here, but it's been hardmode for me this week. I'm seriously sick and exhausted. And yet I'm filtering this bullshit as best I can to try to get people to not just vote, but to raise whatever hell on earth they can, to try to save this head-fucked, but reformable society, and to keep it from being replaced by an irredeemable dictatorship.

Point is: Trump and his have a plan to disrupt and subvert the 2024 Election entirely, before the votes are even counted. They want to suppress the whole damned thing, in essence, under color of perversion of State and Local Law. They want their people to go Sovereign Citizen on the whole damned thing, up to and including using Local Police as a Fifth Column.

So while a 3-month window seems ridiculously long for an Emergency Alert? The truth is, dear readers, you have no fucking idea how different real-life, lowercase democrats are from the Official, and especially Federal, Elected Democrats (tm) we're stuck voting for. The real-life, lowercase version isn't averse to actually doing shit when it's necessary. The Official, Federal Version, has had their heads so far up Gandhi's, JFK's, and Dr. King's buttocks for so long that 75 to 90 percent of their politics boils down to either defeatism or do-nothing-ism. You have to scream at these bastards for weeks to months to get a rise out of any of them.

And this is a problem when you consider that we have an Election, and its DEADLINES, coming right up.

[devoursjohnlock]

Con O’Neill, MCM Comic Con panel with Nathan Foad and Kristian Nairn, London May 27, 2023

Q: As someone who was a teenager for Section 28 Part 1, I just want to [...] say a massive thank you for speaking up about Section 28 Part 2. What's it been like at the moment, working on a show that has got such cool and interesting things to say about gender broadly and masculinity more specifically?

[wakewithgiggli]

"I feel like this would be a slippery slope towards making it illegal for people to choose to not vote."

It's hard not to reply to the slippery slope part here and particpate in the derailment of this discussion it caused. But I want to ask:

Why is instituting automatic registration a bad thing, especially in America where voter disenfranchisement is rife?

Even if required voting was a bad thing (a big if), how is that worse than the current vote suppression? Is the person who made this point in favour of vote suppression?

[atfisty]

Firstly, if you are an American citizen who will be 18+ by November of 2024 REGISTER TO VOTE! If you aren’t sure double check but please please please make sure you are eligible to vote this fall.

Second: YOUR VOTE MATTERS! I know you’ll be hearing everyday about how voting doesn’t matter or people (many of who are probably not actually democrats or liberals) saying they’d rather not vote.

The Republican Party did not spend millions of dollars after the 2020 election to try and throw out results in Arizona and Georgia because your vote “doesn’t matter”

Georgia, a notoriously red state, did not suddenly become a key battle ground state because your vote “doesn’t matter”

Republican law makers didn’t draft countless new voter laws after the election making it harder to vote because your vote “doesn’t matter”

Republicans aren’t going to be screaming about Biden’s state of mind trying to make it seem like voting for him is throwing away your vote because your vote “doesn’t matter”

YOUR VOTE MATTERS!!! Republicans know this and are terrified of this and will do everything to try and stop you from voting. Whether by laws or by telling you “your vote doesn’t matter. That’s called voter suppression babes. And yeah if you think that voting doesn’t matter even though republicans are doing everything to keep you from voting, then guess what? The Republican’s plans worked.

[q-kanbas]

If you are a voter in Georgia, please check your registration consistently as the election approaches.

The Secretary of State has launched a program that allows people to cancel registrations. Including other people's registrations. They can do so with only your name, date of birth, and county.

In Georgia, you have until 29 days before the election to register or re-register if you were purged.