#what do you mean purging voter rolls

[timmie-p]

hey guys what tf is wrong with usamerican voting

[witheredgardenparty]

I will never forgive a single one of you

[tanadrin]

I feel like a conspiracy theorist, but I'm convinced the GOP cheated by disenfranchising enough voters to win. Not just in swing states. The margins in every state are weird. A few thousand votes here and there across every county. The huge number of split ticket votes. The sudden loss of 12 million democratic voters despite record early voting turnout and voter registration?

It doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense.

So many people who had confirmation of their ballot being received and accepted are now finding out that they were unregistered or there was a "problem" with it.

They were saying for months that they didn't need anyone's vote. The betting market manipulation. The billionaire backers. Elon Musk's grubby hands all over the election.

They did steal the election. And we'll probably never find out how.

in the broad sense, yes, american elections should be fairer, and the franchise should be more universal. in the narrow sense--this is cope. purges of voter rolls happen in public. there's litigation on them all the time. a purge of 12 million voters from voter roles would not have gone unnoticed. to account for all these factors you would need an improbably large conspiracy. (stealing elections in the united states would be hard. each state administers its own elections! you'd have to steal 50 elections. and once again, this would be a case of someone rigging the presidential election and forgetting to rig any of the downballot races, which would be stupid.) including a conspiracy to rig most polling, given the outcome was within the margin of error of most polling averages for this election.

i get why it's the preferable scenario--people aren't dumb! my opponents are just evil! there's some optimism in that--but "i personally do not understand how this outcome could have occurred" does not mean it was a conspiracy.

So many people who had confirmation of their ballot being received and accepted are now finding out that they were unregistered or there was a "problem" with it.

this is normal and you typically have several days after the election to amend your ballot if there was a problem with it. if you do, it still counts. fun word problem time: if ~150 million people vote in an election, and 0.001% post on twitter about how they needed to amend their ballot (especially in non-swing states), how many twitter posts in a row do you have to see to convince yourself there is a ~conspiracy~ afoot?

fun second word problem: out of seven swing states, how many were governed by the opposing party or someone who had publicly opposed donald trump's election subversion attempts in 2020?

fun third word problem: do you know how elections in your state work? do you know which state official is in charge of administering them, and their party affiliation? do you know what the margins of downballot races like house and senate in your state were this election, and their relative swing from 2020? in short, do you know in detail how elections in the US work and what "typical" voting patterns look like, or are you just going off of vibes from a vaguely paranoid local bubble in social media?

[embracetheshipping]

IMPORTANT VOTING INFORMATION

Now more than ever, it is important to make sure that you are registered to vote and that you fully understand all the requirements for in-person, mail-in, and absentee voting. Double check your registration OFTEN to make sure nothing has changed. Don't give Republicans ANY reason to disqualify your vote.

The video below explains some concerning trends happening in swing states. And while her point about the Montana and Oklahoma issues may not be as nefarious as projected (there are articles online saying the issue in Montana was a glitch and the Oklahoma purge has been ongoing by independent auditors), the other ones are more credible as deliberate attempts to suppress voters.

Regardless, it is in your best interest to make sure you are fully informed of what is going on regarding voter registration and laws in your state.

Transcript:

So Trump is now saying he doesn’t want a second debate with VP Harris. And you could say that’s because he got shellacked in the first one and doesn’t want to embarrass himself again, but I think something more nefarious is going on.

Trump is not campaigning in swing states. He’s not trying to sway new voters. And he keeps going around saying he doesn’t even “need votes”, that they “have all the votes they need”. In fact, he just did an interview with Fox News where he said he “wouldn’t run in 2028 if he loses”, but then he said, “Let’s just hope we’re successful in this one.” Not, “Let’s hope we win this one,” “Let’s hope we’re successful.”

People should think it’s weird that Republicans don’t seem to care about how bad their candidate is. That they don’t seem to care that Project 2025 came out, and we can all read for ourselves how awful their plans for America are. And it’s weird that so many swing states are suddenly changing their election laws and purging voters, or making it harder to vote, or count the votes just weeks before the election.

Look at what’s going on around the country. The Secretary of State of Montana just “accidentally” left Kamala Harris’s name off the absentee ballot. They sent the ballots out to absentee voters without VP Harris’s name on it.

The Texas Tribune just announced that Texas officials have absolutely scrubbed their voter rolls, and people should go out and check it they’re still eligible to vote.

Oklahoma purged 450,000 people from the voter registration list last week. That is one-fifth of their state’s voters who have to re-register seven weeks before the election.

Georgia’s GOP Board of Elections just passed a whole slew of new rules, including the biggest one being that they have to hand count every ballot. But they already have a rule that says they can’t start counting ballots until Election Day. So counting 5.5 million votes is going to require a lot of time and a lot of staff that many local jurisdictions in Georgia simply don’t have. So when the votes can’t be counted on time, that’s going to give space for the MAGA lawyers to come in and claim the election is defaulted or fraudulent , and kick the entire election back to the state House, or subsequently, the whole state misses the deadline to certify the Electoral College votes, and they either don’t send electors from Georgia at all, or they potentially pick their own alternative slate.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court just said that all mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania have to have the “correct handwritten date on the outside of the envelope, or the vote inside won’t count.” I mean, sure, check to see if your envelope is dated correctly, but why would the handwritten date on the outside of the envelope disqualify the vote inside? Doesn’t it have to be postmarked and / or received by an official agency before even being opened?

Republicans even tried to change the rules in Nebraska for how electoral counts would be awarded less than 50 days before the election.

You have to ask yourself, “what are they doing?” And why do they keep accusing Democrats of trying to cheat? Talk about projection. This is the same party that was pushing for the SAFE Act in Congress and threatening to shut down the government if they didn’t get it. Their claim, which luckily, we have currently moved on from, is that they were just making sure every voter was an American citizen, which of course is important. But it has never been a real problem, no matter what Republican propaganda tells us. But they conveniently forget to mention that the SAFE Act also said, if you didn’t have a passport, something that fifty percent of the population doesn’t have, then your birth certificate had to match your ID. Which of course, would be impossible for say, any married woman who took her husband’s name. And there are lots of people who say, “So just use your marriage certificate to prove that you changed your name,” but the SAFE Act says absolutely nothing about your marriage certificate or license to count as ID, and it takes time to find that document and submit it and process it when we only have weeks before the election.

We need to be incredibly clear. The Republicans were looking to outright disenfranchise the women of America, Republican and Democratic women of all ages, I might add. And it’s not just women they’re looking to disenfranchise, because while the gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson’s scandals have been sucking up all the air in North Carolina, the RNC was quietly trying to block the UNC students from voting. But they recently lost that lawsuit.

If you have to keep changing the laws to get elected, you’re not winning elections. You’re sabotaging elections. The whole thing reminds me of that quote by the Russian communist leader Joseph Stalin, who said, “The people who cast the votes don’t decide the election, the people who count the votes do.”

So look around at what’s happening in America right now. The Republicans aren’t trying to win. They’re trying to make sure the Democrats can’t win. And while that should freak you out, I sincerely hope it also inspires you to get your friends and family out the polls and vote wholeheartedly against this kind of behavior.

[saingirl101]

Something for people online on any site to keep in mind as we get close to Nov and US elections is to be mindful of PSYOPs

Its been well documented for a long long time that several groups ranging from foreign governments to racist billionaires try to influence other countries elections particularly through social media.

Here are a few good rules of thumb as you peruse social media.

• Fact check sources. Often times if a claim seems outlandish, terrifying, or is designed to get you angry verify its legitimacy. This can be done through fact checking websites or independent media sources.

• Only register or verify your voter registration through your state governments election site. Some states may have differing laws but one scam we saw musk on twitter do was create a false registration site. To keep your information private from third parties only use your state government website. Also actively check your voter registration status as many states are either purging or threatening to purge voter rolls.

• Ignore polls. Its very easy for junk polls to be pushed in social media particularly by right-wing groups (we saw this in 2022) and they are actively attempting to demoralize you. Tune it out. Polls don't vote, people vote. And not a single vote has been cast yet.

• In a similar vein above avoid doomscrolling. Blocking is your friend. If you see a troll or bot, report, block, and move on. Don't actively look for upsetting news. First off seeing point 1 a lot of it isn't true and contributes to demoralization. It doesn't help to over-analyze something being pushed by a bot specifically to upset you.

• If you aren't certain about a candidate's position on something fact check or look for their policy page. A lot of stuff gets spread on social media smearing candidates on an issue they may have an opposite viewpoint on. Again partly a tactic to demoralize voters.

• Keep positive, calm, and vote. At the end of the day regardless of where you vote, your vote matters. Whether it is as a presidential level or any the local level you have a chance to influence the nation, state, or your community's direction and that matters. And no one has a say in what you do with your vote at the ballot box.

• Finally when you see friends, family, co-workers, followers, and etc. post biased or false social media reach out to them and help set things straight. Obviously some people will resist you but a lot of the time people are well meaning and repost/reblog something incorrect.

Reminder to check your states voter registration deadlines, vote early, and help GOTV in other ways. lets do this.

[thisismenow3]

More than half of top democrats don’t want to acknowledge (outside of attack ads) how much Republican and conservative has come to be interchangeable with anti democracy. It’s why fewer people voting in this election than 2020 doomed us. They were ever gonna fight tooth and nail which means the rank and file dems and state dems can’t do shit unless they want to end their careers with this election. So we needed a fuck ton of people to show up on the day of voting, we needed all those people who sat out this election to actually do something. And between 7-10 million said nah I do t understand harm reduction my vote is actually about being on a team I support rather than getting an enemy that is weak to demonstrations and organizing for what we want.

There was definitely stealing from republicans but the media and complacent old dems allowed this for too long and don’t want to seem BIASED!!!! Heavens forbid! So better to only contest if it’s more than voter roll purges, more than throwing out mail in ballots, more than gerrymandering rendering the desires of the few against the needs of the many. It would’ve taken the same kind of turn out as 2020 to get them the numbers to make the old heads go “wait, maybe I need to actually stand for something before I die in office!”

And we didn’t get that. And it makes sense we didn’t get that because most of everyone who ain’t vote Republican seems to think voting is all you do in a democracy to make change. And so the nitwits of the right have all the time they need to make unconstitutional laws allowing gerrymanders in their favor, voter roll purges, and to staff electoral boards with cronies who will throw out ballots from dem heavy precincts and contested districts. But just like the brooks brothers riot in 2000 and the capitulation of RBG, people did fuck all about this in their social circles and communities. And now the few of us who tried are stuck trying to get folks to brace for figuring out how to pull a civil rights movement level amount of change and then some against a Nixon but worse level full Republican control. And we only got civil rights movement legislation because there were weak adversaries and sympathetic (usually same thing) in majorities in court and congress and White House back then.

So there’s no real recourse to stopping this steal because the election 24 years ago cemented it; republicans have t needed a majority sincereagan because of electoral college, senate and gerrymanders and now right wing top courts. So if we work hard maybe we will get where we could’ve gotten next year by the 2080’s. Or things fall a part and the Susan serandans of this country get the civil war they’ve been craving as “the only way to fix things.”

Or we all make political work and understanding our job time wise and action wise and we get lucky with the republicans being unable to work together long enough to fully convert us to a Hungary/Russia type sham democracy. We can’t afford to not work hard though. Literally

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Machine learning's crumbling foundations

Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that’s unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that’s insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.

Even people who write secure code import insecure libraries, or plug it into insecure authorization systems or databases. Like asbestos in the walls, this cruft has been fragmenting, drifting into our air a crumb at a time.

We ignored these, treating them as containable, little breaches and now the walls are rupturing and choking clouds of toxic waste are everywhere.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

The infosec apocalypse was decades in the making. The machine learning apocalypse, on the other hand…

ML has serious, institutional problems, the kind of thing you’d expect in a nascent discipline, which you’d hope would be worked out before it went into wide deployment.

ML is rife with all forms of statistical malpractice — AND it’s being used for high-speed, high-stakes automated classification and decision-making, as if it was a proven science whose professional ethos had the sober gravitas you’d expect from, say, civil engineering.

Civil engineers spend a lot of time making sure the buildings and bridges they design don’t kill the people who use them. Machine learning?

Hundreds of ML teams built models to automate covid detection, and every single one was useless or worse.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/02/autoquack/#gigo

The ML models failed due to failure to observe basic statistical rigor. One common failure mode?

Treating data that was known to be of poor quality as if it was reliable because good data was not available.

Obtaining good data and/or cleaning up bad data is tedious, repetitive grunt-work. It’s unglamorous, time-consuming, and low-waged. Cleaning data is the equivalent of sterilizing surgical implements — vital, high-skilled, and invisible unless someone fails to do it.

It’s work performed by anonymous, low-waged adjuncts to the surgeon, who is the star of the show and who gets credit for the success of the operation.

The title of a Google Research team (Nithya Sambasivan et al) paper published in ACM CHI beautifully summarizes how this is playing out in ML: “Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work: Data Cascades in High-Stakes AI,”

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/0d556e45afc54afeb2eb6b51a9bc1827b9961ff4.pdf

The paper analyzes ML failures from a cross-section of high-stakes projects (health diagnostics, anti-poaching, etc) in East Africa, West Africa and India. They trace the failures of these projects to data-quality, and drill into the factors that caused the data problems.

The failures stem from a variety of causes. First, data-gathering and cleaning are low-waged, invisible, and thankless work. Front-line workers who produce the data — like medical professionals who have to do extra data-entry — are not compensated for extra work.

Often, no one even bothers to explain what the work is for. Some of the data-cleaning workers are atomized pieceworkers, such as those who work for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, who lack both the context in which the data was gathered and the context for how it will be used.

This data is passed to model-builders, who lack related domain expertise. The hastily labeled X-ray of a broken bone, annotated by an unregarded and overworked radiologist, is passed onto a data-scientist who knows nothing about broken bones and can’t assess the labels.

This is an age-old problem in automation, pre-dating computer science and even computers. The “scientific management” craze that started in the 1880s saw technicians observing skilled workers with stopwatches and clipboards, then restructuring the workers’ jobs by fiat.

Rather than engaging in the anthropological work that Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” the management “scientists” discarded workers’ qualitative experience, then treated their own assessments as quantitative and thus empirical.

http://hypergeertz.jku.at/GeertzTexts/Thick_Description.htm

How long a task takes is empirical, but what you call a “task” is subjective. Computer scientists take quantitative measurements, but decide what to measure on the basis of subjective judgment. This empiricism-washing sleight of hand is endemic to ML’s claims of neutrality.

In the early 2000s, there was a movement to produce tools and training that would let domain experts produce their own tools — rather than delivering “requirements” to a programmer, a bookstore clerk or nurse or librarian could just make their own tools using Visual Basic.

This was the radical humanist version of “learn to code” — a call to seize the means of computation and program, rather than being programmed. Over time, it was watered down, and today it lives on as a weak call for domain experts to be included in production.

The disdain for the qualitative expertise of domain experts who produce data is a well-understood guilty secret within ML circles, embodied in Frederick Jelinek’s ironic talk, “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up.”

But a thick understanding of context is vital to improving data-quality. Take the American “voting wars,” where GOP-affiliated vendors are brought in to purge voting rolls of duplicate entries — people who are registered to vote in more than one place.

These tools have a 99% false-positive rate.

Ninety. Nine. Percent.

To understand how they go so terribly wrong, you need a thick understanding of the context in which the data they analyze is produced.

https://5harad.com/papers/1p1v.pdf

The core assumption of these tools is that two people with the same name and date of birth are probably the same person.

But guess what month people named “June” are likely to be born in? Guess what birthday is shared by many people named “Noel” or “Carol”?

Many states represent unknown birthdays as “January 1,” or “January 1, 1901.” If you find someone on a voter roll whose birthday is represented as 1/1, you have no idea what their birthday is, and they almost certainly don’t share a birthday with other 1/1s.

But false positives aren’t evenly distributed. Ethnic groups whose surnames were assigned in recent history for tax-collection purposes (Ashkenazi Jews, Han Chinese, Koreans, etc) have a relatively small pool of surnames and a slightly larger pool of first names.

This is likewise true of the descendants of colonized and enslaved people, whose surnames were assigned to them for administrative purposes and see a high degree of overlap. When you see two voter rolls with a Juan Gomez born on Jan 1, you need to apply thick analysis.

Unless, of course, you don’t care about purging the people who are most likely to face structural impediments to voter registration (such as no local DMV office) and who are also likely to be racialized (for example, migrants whose names were changed at Ellis Island).

ML practitioners don’t merely use poor quality data when good quality data isn’t available — they also use the poor quality data to assess the resulting models. When you train an ML model, you hold back some of the training data for assessment purposes.

So maybe you start with 10,000 eye scans labeled for the presence of eye disease. You train your model with 9,000 scans and then ask the model to assess the remaining 1,000 scans to see whether it can make accurate classifications.

But if the data is no good, the assessment is also no good. As the paper’s authors put it, it’s important to “catch[] data errors using mechanisms specific to data validation, instead of using model performance as a proxy for data quality.”

ML practitioners studied for the paper — practitioners engaged in “high-stakes” model building reported that they had to gather their own data for their models through field partners, “a task which many admitted to being unprepared for.”

High-stakes ML work has inherited a host of sloppy practices from ad-tech, where ML saw its first boom. Ad-tech aims for “70–75% accuracy.”

That may be fine if you’re deciding whether to show someone an ad, but it’s a very different matter if you’re deciding whether someone needs treatment for an eye-disease that, untreated, will result in irreversible total blindness.

Even when models are useful at classifying input produced under present-day lab conditions, those conditions are subject to several kinds of “drift.”

For example, “hardware drift,” where models trained on images from pristine new cameras are asked to assess images produced by cameras from field clinics, where lenses are impossible to keep clean (see also “environmental drift” and “human drift”).

Bad data makes bad models. Bad models instruct people to make ineffective or harmful interventions. Those bad interventions produce more bad data, which is fed into more bad models — it’s a “data-cascade.”

GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out — was already a bedrock of statistical practice before the term was coined in 1957. Statistical analysis and inference cannot proceed from bad data.

Producing good data and validating data-sets are the kind of unsexy, undercompensated maintenance work that all infrastructure requires — and, as with other kinds of infrastructure, it is undervalued by journals, academic departments, funders, corporations and governments.

But all technological debts accrue punitive interest. The decision to operate on bad data because good data is in short supply isn’t like looking for your car-keys under the lamp-post — it’s like driving with untrustworthy brakes and a dirty windscreen.

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[bartfargo]

Remember the first time the Republicans decided to rig the system in their favor?

No? Let me tell/remind you: 

Florida has an interesting law: If you have the same name as a convicted felon, then the Florida Secretary of State can remove you from the voter rolls, until such time as you prove that you’re not the felon (”presumed guilty until proven innocent” is how that saying goes, right?). I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right: This law has been applied to white voters a whopping never times.

Well, during the 2000 election cycle, the Florida Secretary of State, a woman named Katherine Harris, decided to ramp up the enforcement of this law, and purge the rolls of people with the same first names as convicted felons. And no, she still didn’t do this against white people.

When George W. Bush heard about this (likely from the chair of his Florida campaign, a woman named Katherine Harris), he sent over a list of Texas felons who might have relocated to Florida (”might have,” in this case, means that there was no law keeping them from staying in Texas).

This purging led to the count being too close to call, necessitating a recount.

Once the recount began, a group of Florida Republicans showed up to disrupt the recount, insisting that the election simply be handed to Bush.

SCOTUS, including one justice whose wife worked on the Bush campaign, and another who declared that she wanted a Republican to choose her successor, imposed a deadline, The weekend before this deadline, Katherine Harris abruptly halted the recount. When she stopped the recount, Bush was ahead; if she had continued it, Gore would have won.

The reason you haven’t heard much about this is because the DNC decided that the real villains of the piece were the 5% of Democratic voters who voted for Ralph Nader (and not the 10% of Democrats who voted for Bush). They were more upset that some voters treated their votes as if they were theirs to give than they were at Republicans for having the election run by someone who wanted one candidate to win.

And the Republican Party took notes.

[odinsblog]

*sigh*

That was what woke me up, finally. My support of Barack Obama was unshakable - until I saw him pull that stunt in Flint where he pretended to drink a cup of filtered tap water from Flint, to convince Flint residents that their water was more or less “safe” to drink.

Not only that, but Michelle has it backwards - it’s politians who owe voters, not the other way around.

And how do you even fix your face to say you blame someone more than Trump voters??

Yeah, I am fully aware of that saying, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” but to place the blame for Trump’s win anywhere near the foot of BLACK voters?? GTFOH.

And also, yes, I understand that “mad at black voters” was not a direct quote, and that “our people” could mean black voters, or general Democratic voters - but come tf on. This is some Bill Cosby level finger wagging going on here.

And it is the very worst kind of revisionist history, because it’s coming from a Black person.

Does anybody remember all the White men and women who knowingly and eagerly voted for a racist? What about them?

Does anyone recall how the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act right before the 2016 election?

Does anyone remember how a record number of polling places were shut down before the election, or how millions of legally registered voters with black sounding surnames were purged from the voter rolls in Republican states, or how Republican states went ham on pumping out racist voter ID laws, and then closed down driver’s license offices that were near black communities so that voter ID would be even harder to get? Am I the only one who remembers all that shit??

And even in the face of all of those obstacles, Black voters still voted the hardest against Trump.

Somebody please help me out here: According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by +20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by +28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by +14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher, to Joe the Plumber, to Joe the Banker.

Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37).

He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19).

Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5).

In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. (source)

Literally, the most reliable, single best indicator of who someone was going to vote for in 2016 was one simple metric: were they a white person?

So given all of that, how do you fail to mention the most obvious of problems: white voters voting against their own self interests!??

I hope that one day—one day very soon—Democrats will learn that you cannot finger wag nor shame people into voting for someone, and that you have ceded any moral high ground when one of your strongest arguments is lesser evilism.

Being “the lesser evil” is a tacit admission of just how bad your GOP-lite candidate is.

I’m sorry, but Michelle Obama is engaging in the worst form of finger wagging + publicly shaming black people + respectability politics.

And I am not here for that shit.

[originalleftist]

Trump is literally planning to put millions of people in concentration camps if reelected.

This is what the Republican Party supports.

He's not even hiding it. If Trump is able to carry out another Holocaust, no one will be able to pretend that they "didn't know".

If you do not work to prevent Trump's reelection, then you will share added guilt for what follows. And yes, in most cases, that means voting for Democrats, not third party/independent candidates who will be lucky if they hit 5%. It also means that if you are in a rare race where a decent, non-fascist third party or independent candidate is more electable (as sometimes happens at the state or local level), then you vote for them. It means maximizing the number of non-fascists in office, at all levels. Check your voter registration early to make sure it's up to date, and check it regularly. Republican states in particular like to pull shit like purging voter rolls right before an election.

It also means doing more than just voting. It means volunteering and donating to support campaigns. It means getting others to turn out. And it means being prepared to engage in protest and civil disobedience, to strike, and to put yourself at risk to help protect and shelter refugees and members of marginalized groups should the worst still happen.

You should be doing all these things anyway (and I admit I need to do a lot more myself). But now more than ever. This fight has been going on for a long time, and it won't end in 2024, whatever happens. But 2024 will do a lot to determine how bad the next few years are, and how many of us make it through them.

Concentration camps.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

So, how many states do you think will stop holding elections in 2024?

States aren't constitutionally required to hold elections for the presidency, they're allowed to appoint electors however they see fit, it just so happens that all 50 states agree to award them based on statewide popular vote. From the Revolution until Reconstruction, South Carolina never held a single election, instead allowing the state legislature to appoint electors from whatever party they wanted. There's nothing stopping this from happening again today; Republicans in a swing state will change the state laws regarding elections so that the legislatures pick the electors. This would spit in the face of the very idea of a liberal democracy (liberal in this instance doesn't mean leftist, it means open, free, and fair), but the Republicans don't want that anyway. Republican voters would be more than willing to give up their own right to vote if they thought it would keep their party in power. They're willing to strip themselves of agency so long as it hurts the Democrats long term; it's a net gain for them, because the candidate they would have voted for gets to win anyway. The 6-3 conservative Supreme Court certainly won't stop the states from doing this because the right to vote guaranteed by the constitution only applies to the House and Senate (until 1913, it didn't even apply to the senate; before the 17th Amendment was ratified, senators were appointed by the state legislatures)

I expect at least one state to change its election laws going forward. Probably a state that would have voted red anyway, something like Wyoming or Idaho, where they can test the waters and see what they can get away with. Democrats begrudgingly accept that they don't always win elections because that's how democracy works, but Republicans would rather throw out democracy altogether to ensure they always win; the ends justify the means, they don't care about fairness or equality.

Maybe to keep up pretenses, instead of getting rid of elections altogether, the Republicans will recreate the Electoral College one level down. Instead of awarding electors based on a statewide popular vote, they'll award them based on whoever wins the most counties or Congressional districts, or they'll draw up entirely new boundaries just for presidential elections so they can gerrymander even more specifically. It's like how primary elections work; whichever candidate gets the most votes won't necessarily win the state. There's even precedent for that among the Democratic party; Bernie Sanders won both New Hampshire and Iowa in the 2020 primaries, but they awarded more delegates to Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden to knock him out of his spot a frontrunner. The establishment wanted Joe Biden, so they changed the rules to give it to him, setting the precedent for Republicans to do the same thing during general elections going forward.

And then we have to think about voter roll purges. What's stopping red counties from purging their rolls the day before the election? You register to vote well in advance, you check and recheck and check again to make sure, then they purge you at 11:59:59 on Monday, so when you go to vote on Tuesday you're not in the system anymore. What's stopping them from declaring a ton of minorities to be "delinquent" or "inactive" and disqualifying them? They already do this, they just have the "courtesy" of purging the rolls a few weeks in advance, which hypothetically gives the purged voters time to re-register. They don't need to give this grace period, hell, they could keep the purge timeline as is and simply change how long it takes to get registered; they could purge you on September 30th and say that it now takes 6 to 8 weeks for a registration to go through, meaning you wouldn't be eligible to vote until mid-to-late November.

I'm sure the reality will be worse and more blatant than anything I can think of, because I have morals and there are some lines even my imagination says are too far.

[robertreich]

Will He Get A Second Term?

Donald Trump has proven himself to be the most corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent president in American history. 

But despite all of the lies, abuses of power, and damage to the country -- I must warn you -- there’s a very real possibility he could be reelected. This doesn’t have to be the case. 

Let me explain.

Although Trump has been impeached and is one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history, he still has devoted support among his core base. Nearly 90 percent of Republicans still approve of the job he’s doing, a rate that’s held constant throughout his presidency. According to one survey, a third of Trump supporters said there was nothing he could do to lose their support.

Trump still maintains substantial support in key swing states as well. Recent polls show him neck and neck with leading Democratic candidates in the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina. Remember, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by 3 million votes but still lost the election because of the power of these states in the Electoral College.

Big money donors are also forking over record sums of money to keep Trump in office. In the last quarter of 2019 alone, he raked in a staggering $46 million, far outpacing any of his Democratic opponents. He now has more than $100 million in the bank, not to mention the millions raised by pro-Trump Super PACs. The GOP’s biggest donors -- some of whom didn’t support him in 2016, but received massive windfalls from Trump’s tax cut -- are now paying him back.  

At the same time, voter suppression is on the rise. To suppress turnout by likely Democratic voters, Republican officials have doubled down on their efforts to keep low-income and minority voters from the polls. They are intimidating immigrant voters, purging voter rolls, closing polling places, and making it harder to register in the first place. 

Florida went so far as to institute a modern-day poll tax, requiring people with past felony convictions to pay off any fines or fees before exercising their right to vote. In 2016, over 20 percent of black voting-age Floridians weren’t able to vote due to past felony convictions, and now, hundreds of thousands could still be prevented from going to the polls this November in this key state.

We are also at risk of foreign powers trying to interfere in the election, as they did in 2016. Experts warn that many states still lack the necessary safeguards to protect against interference. The FBI, Department of Justice and National Security Agency have also raised concerns that Russia, China, and Iran might attempt misinformation campaigns. I can’t believe I even have to say this, but foreign governments should not have a say in our elections.

So why am I telling you all of this? I don’t mean to scare you. And the last thing I want to do is cause you to be hopeless, and give up. To the contrary, I want you to be more determined than ever. Despite all these attacks on democracy, we have what it takes to make Trump a one-term president. But only if we remain focused and united.

It may seem daunting. We’re up against a full-fledged attack on our democratic institutions. But there is a way forward: 

We can defeat Trump and his enablers by building a multiracial, multi-class coalition. And we do that by supporting a true progressive with a bold vision for an economy and democracy that works for all Americans. That way enough voters will be inspired to show up to the polls and stop Trump’s authoritarian machine for good.

This isn’t a pipe dream. We already beat the liar-in-chief by 2.8 million votes in 2016. And the 2018 elections had the highest turnout of any midterm election since 1914 -- handing House Republicans their most resounding defeat in decades. People are outraged -- and we must keep fighting. If we come together, we will prevail.

[jennymanrique]

Fight to secure the freedom to vote heats up in Congress

Two key bills would set national standards for voting access and strengthen protections against racial discrimination at the ballot box in America.

While legislators in 47 states have introduced nearly 400 bills that seek to restrict voting rights, two key initiatives are being considered in Congress to strengthen access to the polls and protect against racial discrimination.

For the People Act, and the John L. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, are initiatives that seek to prevent foreign interference in elections, limit the influence of money on politics, and modernize infrastructure to increase electoral security. They also establish nonpartisan redistricting commissions, a 15-day early voting period for all federal elections, and expanded access to voting by mail and automatic voter registration, among other provisions.

“These bills are critical to stopping the scourge of vote suppression that is facing our country today, and to protecting the freedom to vote going forward,” said Wendy Weiser, Vice President of Democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, during a press briefing hosted by Ethnic Media Services.

“Voting rights in America are under attack as they haven’t been since the Jim Crow era, and the push to restrict access to voting in state legislatures is unprecedented,” she added.

The Brennan Center has been tracking more than 360 bills that have already been signed into law in states like Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa and Utah and are aggressively moving toward approval in others like Arizona, Texas, Michigan and New Hampshire.

These laws seek to tighten voter identification requirements, make voter registration more difficult, and expand voter list purges – all measures that particularly affect ethnic communities. In most cases, these local initiatives have been justified in “false narratives about supposed voter fraud, without a shred of evidence,” said Thomas Saenz, President and General Counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF).

“When (political) leaders seeking to retain power and knowing they do not have the support of the growing Latino community, they take steps to suppress the vote,” added Saenz. The growth of the Hispanic vote in places like Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado, was decisive for the Democratic triumph in those states in 2020.

Asian Americans, African Americans, and other minorities also saw an unprecedented rise in voter turnout.

In states like Texas, Latinos already make up 40% of the population. After the census results, the state won two more representatives in the House. If Hispanic turnout at the polls follows the numbers seen in past elections, their vote could contribute to another blue victory for those new seats.

“In parts of our country, primarily the South, but also including the State of Texas, we must anticipate that if there is a new community reaching critical mass to threaten the (local) powers, there is a need to have in place protections including pre clearance review requirements,” Saenz said.

The section V of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 established that states could not approve changes in voting rules without federal authorization. But that section was overthrown by a 2013 Supreme Court decision, which has allowed discriminatory practices against minorities, the elderly and youth.

Saenz argues that in the case of Latinos, the greatest threat is “intimidation” with measures such as demanding proof of citizenship for new voters and poll watchers who have permission to take cell phone video of voters who are receiving assistance at the polls.

In the case of the African American population, measures such as voter ID restrictions, moving of precincts without adequate notice and limitations to mail-in voting, are serious threats to this right.

According to Hilary Shelton, Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Policy for the National Association for the Advancement of People of Color (NAACP), “seemingly innocuous issues like having to have an official state photo ID means in some places that people that don’t own cars (without a driver’s license), now having to pay an additional expense… if you have to pay extra money to go to the polls and cast your vote, that is a poll tax.”

Shelton also stressed that the United States is one of the few countries that does not automatically register its citizens in the electoral rolls when they turn 18, “but it does register them for the draft.”

Another right to vote that the initiatives in Congress want to restore is that of Americans with criminal records. “If you’ve made the mistake of committing a felony offense, even after you’ve served the time, even after you’ve come out of jail, in most states today you can’t vote.”

No polling places

The situation is more dire for Native American voters. According to Jacqueline De León, Staff Attorney for the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), over the past four years her organization has challenged in court North Dakota’s voter ID law, Montana’s ballot collection ban, Alaska’s witness signature requirement to vote during the pandemic, and the refusal to open an in-person polling location on the Blackfeet reservation, that would have forced tribal members to travel up to 120 miles in order to vote.

“We have filed nearly 100 lawsuits, with a success rate of over 90%. These cases have been litigated in front of judges appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents, and the facts are so bad that we nearly always win,” De León said. “But litigation is a blunt and expensive instrument that could have been avoided if the laws that go to Congress had been in effect today.”

Many Native American reservations do not have polling places, and DMVs and post offices can be hundreds of miles away. “Due to ongoing discrimination and government neglect, many Native Americans live in overcrowded homes that do not have an address, do not receive mail, and are located on dirt roads, that can be impassable in wintery November,” De León said.

Another provision that the bills in Congress want to include is assistance at the polls for people with disabilities and access to ballots in different languages.

“Language barriers are one of the biggest impediments to the Asian-American vote with one-third of Asian-Americans being what is called limited English proficient,” said John C. Yang, President and Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC).

“In every election poll, monitors have observed missing Asian language signage and interpreters, which limits our access to the ballot. Ensuring effective language assistance is paramount to closing that consistent barrier in national and local elections,” he said.

The John L. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act will be presented shortly in the House of Representatives and the For the People Act has already passed in the House and will have a Senate hearing in the next two weeks. Several polls have shown that both bills have bipartisan support.

Originally published here

Want to read this piece in Spanish? Click here

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 21, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Lawmakers today are jockeying before tomorrow’s test vote in the Senate on S1, the For the People Act. This is a sweeping bill that protects the right to vote, ends partisan gerrymandering, limits the influence of money in politics, and establishes new ethics rules for presidents and other federal officeholders.

Passing election reform is a priority for Democrats, since Republican-dominated legislatures across the country have gerrymandered states to make it almost impossible for Democrats to win majorities and, since President Biden took office, have passed laws suppressing the vote and making it easier for Republican state officials to swing elections to their candidates no matter what voters want.

But it is not just Democrats who want our elections to be cleaner and fairer. S1 is so popular across the nation—among voters of both parties—that Republican operatives agreed in January that there was no point in trying to shift public opinion on it. Instead, they said, they would just kill it in Congress. This conversation, explored in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, happened just after it became clear that Democrats had won a Senate majority and thus Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had previously been Senate Majority Leader, would no longer be able to stop any legislation Republicans didn’t like.

Still, Republican senators can deploy the filibuster, which permits just 41 of the 50 Republican senators to stop the act from passing. It is possible for the Democrats to break a filibuster, but only if they are all willing. Until recently, it seemed they were not. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), a conservative Democrat in a Republican-dominated state, opposed some of the provisions in S1 and was adamant that he would not vote for an election reform bill on partisan lines. He wanted bipartisan support.

Last week, Manchin indicated which of the measures in the For the People Act—and in the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—he will support. In a mixture of the priorities of the leadership of each party, he called for expanding access to voting, an end to partisan gerrymandering, voter ID, automatic registration at motor vehicle offices, making Election Day a holiday, and making it easier for state officials to purge voters from the rolls.

Democrats across the ideological spectrum immediately lined up behind Manchin’s compromise. Republican leadership immediately opposed it, across the board. They know that fair voting practices will wreck them. Today, McConnell used martial language when he said he would give the measure “no quarter.”

Tomorrow, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will bring up for a vote not the measure itself, but whether to begin a debate on such a measure. “Tomorrow, the Senate will also take a crucial vote on whether to start debate on major voting rights legislation,” Schumer said today. “I want to say that again—tomorrow the Senate will take a vote on whether to start debate on legislation to protect Americans’ voting rights. It’s not a vote on any particular policy.”

Republicans can use the filibuster to stop a debate from going forward. Getting a debate underway will require 60 votes, and there is currently no reason to think any Republicans will agree. This will put them in the untenable spot of voting against talking about voting rights, even while Republicans at the state level are passing legislation restricting voting rights. So the vote to start a debate on the bill will fail but will highlight the hypocrisy of Republican lawmakers.

Perhaps more to the point in terms of passing legislation, it will test whether the work the Democrats did over the weekend incorporating Manchin’s requests to the measure have brought him on board.

If so, and if he gets frustrated with Republican refusal to compromise at all while the Democrats immediately accepted his watering down of their bill, it is possible he and Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who has also signaled support for the filibuster in its current form, will be willing to consider altering it. The Senate could, for example, turn it back into its traditional form—a talking filibuster—or carve out voting rights bills as they have carved out financial bills and judicial nominations.

There are signs that the Democrats are preparing for an epic battle over this bill. Today White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki indicated that the administration hopes the vote will show that all 50 Senate Democrats are now on board and that they will find a new way forward if the Republicans do not permit a debate.

More telling, perhaps, is an eye-popping op-ed published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal by Mike Solon, a former assistant to McConnell, and Bill Greene, a former outreach director for former House Speaker John Boehner; both men are now lobbyists. In order to defend the filibuster, they argue that the measure protects “political nobodies” from having to pay attention to politics. If legislation could pass by a simple majority, Americans would have to get involved. The system, they suggest, is best managed by a minority of senators.

“Eliminating the Senate filibuster would end the freedom of America’s political innocents,” they write. “The lives that political nobodies spend playing, praying, fishing, tailgating, reading, hunting, gardening, studying and caring for their children would be spent rallying, canvassing, picketing, lobbying, protesting, texting, posting, parading and, above all, shouting.”

The authors suggest misleadingly that the men who framed the Constitution instituted the filibuster: they did not. They set up a Senate in which a simple majority passed legislation. The filibuster, used to require 60 votes to pass any legislation, has been deployed regularly only since about 2008.

But that error is minor compared to the astonishing similarity between this op-ed and a speech by South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond in 1858, when he rose to explain to his colleagues that the American system was set up to make sure lawmakers could retain control no matter what a majority of Americans wanted. Hammond was one of the nation’s leading enslavers and was desperate to make sure his party’s policies could not be overridden by the majority.

Voting only enabled people to change the party in charge, he said. “It was not for the people to exercise political power in detail… it was not for them to be annoyed with the cares of government.”

Hammond explained that the world is made up of two classes: those who ”do the menial duties… perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill….. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government.” On them, he explained, rests “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.”

It was imperative, he said, to retain these distinctions in politics. The South had managed such a thing, while the North, he warned, had not. “Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries [sic] of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’... where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property, divided, not… with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

—-

Notes:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-the-koch-backed-effort-to-block-the-largest-election-reform-bill-in-half-a-century

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/manchin-proposes-compromise-voting-bills-n1271058

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/schumer-republican-debate-voting-bill-for-the-people

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-senate-elections-bills-election-2020-1a9b201f9234e2050496768be995ea2f

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-filibuster-helps-nobody-and-that-means-you-11624226249

James Henry Hammond, “Speech on the Admission of Kansas…,” in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of James H. Hammond (New York: John F. Trow & Co., 1866), 301-322, available at Google Books (for free).

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

the voting ends today but the fight almost certainly does not

Republicans are filing increasingly desperate and ridiculous lawsuits trying – emphasis on TRYING – to have votes thrown out because they’re big old losers who know they can’t win legitimately.

If you’re the kind of person who can get into the weeds of federal court filings on elections, you probably already have your hair on fire. If you’re not, I don’t recommend picking up the habit right now. It’s just going to make your head swim. These are so incoherent and meritless that even our corrupt federal judiciary and plenty of conservative state judges have frequently brushed them off. I get the sense that Trump’s lawyers are more hoping to win those cases than trying to win them. What they seem to be trying to do with these lawsuits is some mix of the following dishonest things:

depress turnout by making people feel like he can just have their votes thrown out so why bother;

set something, anything, up on track for the Supreme Court, which Trumpworld is (not unreasonably) confident they have sufficiently corrupted;

create a general sense that there’s some authority other than the voters who get to decide this election.

That is what makes me think Trump’s plan to barricade himself in the White House and tweet out a declaration of victory the first moment Fox News reports a good exit poll for him is only mostly about his pathetic need to self-soothe with an autocratic display. He’s also making one last go-for-broke play for the public narrative. He thinks – again, not unreasonably – that if he says he won, then he’ll get a bunch of “Trump Declares Victory” headlines and chyrons, which puts a thumb on the scale in terms of how people frame any resulting developments in their own minds. It’s not a good strategy, it’s more of a hail Mary, but it’s the only potentially helpful option he’s left for himself.

All of this has, once again, summoned the specter of the 2000 election.

We can’t look one day into the future. But we might be able to prepare ourselves for it if we look about twenty years into the past.

There’s kind of a fable that’s built up around the 2000 Florida recount that Republicans were just tougher and savvier and wanted it more, while Democrats clumsily Ned Starked everything up. It’s important to reject that premise as fundamentally abhorrent. In a functioning democracy, campaign strategy is irrelevant after Election Day, because voters are in charge. The Gore campaign, to its credit, was buying into the basic premise of democracy, and had therefore planned their campaign around trying to win an election fair and square. When you punish or condemn people for that, you are ceding ground to the fascists and agreeing to fight on their terms.

The Bush campaign was just fundamentally not operating from the premise of democracy, but from the premise that elections are merely a weak opening bid from the electorate. Before anyone even knew there would be a recount, they had already gamed out a scenario where they could win even if they lost. The contingency they’d planned for, that struck them as most likely, was actually that Gore would win the Electoral College but Bush would win the popular vote. They planned out a whole pressure campaign to create enough of an uproar to give some friendly Republican state legislatures somewhere just enough of an excuse to award electors to Bush even if their constituents had voted for Gore. That wasn’t the scenario they ended up facing, of course. But when you do those kind of war games, you have to think about what your opponent would do, which means the Bush team was ready to hit the ground running with a whole bunch of things they had been expecting Gore’s campaign to do. The core point of whatever they were going to do was always to create an excuse for the nuclear option of having Republican state legislators send Republican electors to install George W. Bush no matter what their voters wanted.

One major difference between then and now is that generation of Republicans knew what they were doing was abnormal and wrong, so they kept it under wraps. Now they’re so high on their own supply that they brag about it to The Atlantic, because they genuinely don’t realize that people will object and try to stop them if they give up the element of surprise.

In 2000, the nuclear option of state legislatures just ignoring their voters to install Bush was not something the Gore campaign could have reasonably foreseen, and even if they did have an in-house psychic to warn them about it, it’s not something they could have realistically stopped except by winning with the biggest margin possible, which they were already trying to do. In 2020, Republicans are basically trying to run the same play, but against Democrats who very much are as prepared as they could possibly be, and by “Democrats,” I mean Democrats at every level. Inside the campaign, Biden campaign senior adviser Ron Klain ran Gore’s recount effort in Florida, and is therefore the last person to have any illusions about the opposition. Their lawyers are fucking beasts. Outside the campaign, Democratic voters have already voted, dragged their friends out to vote, and are amped for whatever fight tomorrow brings.

And, unlike 2000, any formal government processes are going to have to go through House Speaker Nancy D’Alessandro Pelosi, and honey, she is not having it. Remember, Pelosi has already thwarted not one but two Trump regime connivances to steal elections. In 2018, she successfully deterred any attempt to undermine Democrats’ midterm victory. And with her crisp, digestible, precision strike impeachment strategy, she neutered the HUNTERGAZI plot that Trump had every intention of using to sabotage the election this year. (God only knows what other schemes she headed off by making an example out of the pressure campaign against Zelensky. Any foreign leader or official who might have been tempted to cave under similar pressure by Trump got put on notice that trying to appease him quietly was not going to make their lives any less complicated.) No wonder she felt emboldened to tell the Trumpist wing of the Supreme Court to sit their asses down if they know what’s good for them.

What Democrats – and other small-d democrats and progressives – can do, we’re doing. You need to take heart from that, and brace yourself for a couple of stressful weeks.

Unfortunately, we can’t control everything. We can’t control what Trump will do to seize the narrative, and we can’t do much about how the press responds. And again, I’d point back to 2000 as a cautionary tale. Did you know that most of the networks actually called the race right, and they did it pretty fast? It’s true! Early-ish that night, they called Florida for Gore. And, as a subsequent investigation showed, Gore got more votes in Florida! But the ballot count was tighter than it should have been – a lot of registered voters who were likely to have preferred Gore were kicked off the rolls in a racist purge – so they did a reasonable thing and retracted the initial analysis to say the state was too close to call.

I did say most of the networks. I’ll give you one guess which was the outlier. John Ellis – head of the decision desk (ie, the decision of when to call a race for one candidate or the other) at Fox News and first cousin of candidate George Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush – somehow knew something about the Florida vote count that the Associated Press didn’t. Late that night, as Gore’s numbers were actually ticking up, Ellis called Florida for Bush. (I might’ve been more circumspect making those implications five years ago, but these people have forcefully rejected the benefit of the doubt.) The other networks, embarrassed by the earlier retraction and exhausted after a long night, leapt after Ellis like lemmings in five minutes flat.

This created a narrative that seamlessly dovetailed with the Bush campaign’s evolving strategy: a Bush win was a fait accompli, so why was sore loser Gore insisting on this recount, wasn’t it taking way too long? Of course, the truth was that nobody actually wins an election before the votes are counted, so if Bush really wanted to get this over with, why was he so resistant to having so many votes counted even once?

Because, of course, while Bush’s top campaign people were out in front of the press loftily insisting that this recount was an irrelevant waste of the country’s time and attention, Republican lawyers were down in Florida doing everything they could to run out the clock. Deadline after deadline loomed and then passed with a bunch of Federalist Society hacks badgering and haggling over every single ballot. Said Federalist Society hacks included John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

So legal correspondents and voting rights advocates, unfortunately, aren’t crazy to have their hair on fire about the Supreme Court once again doing what happened next in 2000: the court ordered all the counts to stop until arguments that it scheduled for the day before an arbitrary deadline. Then they handed down a decision that even they knew was so incoherent and indefensible that they said it wasn’t supposed to be used as precedent in any other case, even though the Supreme Court’s job for over two hundred years had been to hand down rulings that lower courts could use as precedent.

(Seriously. Guys. If Doc Brown ever tosses you the keys to his DeLorean, your mission is to go back to 1999 and run Chief Justice Rehnquist over with it. Then – and this is important – back up and run over him again. Twice. Then you can go buy stock in Google or feed Trump to zombie vampire bats or hit up a Borders or whatever.)

If you’re not really familiar with this story, you’re saying “wait, what? Why did people stand for this bullshit?” FAIR QUESTION. There are a lot of reasons, though no excuses. One reason that’s been previously underrated, I guess, is that Bush hadn’t spent the week before the election running around telling everyone who would listen that “what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna make ourselves a huge pain in the ass while people are trying to count votes, and then we’re gonna whine about, ‘why is it taking so long to count all these votes?’ Heh heh heh.”

If he had … well, I’m pretty sure at least 538 Floridians would have been alarmed enough to make a better choice than they ultimately did.

I always want to be able to share an action item. This time, I can’t. (Unless you can vote but haven’t yet, in which case, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING ON TUMBLR, GET YOUR ASS IN LINE AND STAY THERE.) I don’t know what the world is going to look like six hours from now. It’s entirely possible that there’s a Biden blowout big enough that Trump just gives up and flees the country. But assume we’re not going to get to take the easy way out of this. Get organized and stay fired up. WE RIDE AT DAWN, unless Florida and/or Texas breaks our way by 10:30, in which case, WE DRINK AT 10:31.

[quakerjoe]

Enough Fuckery Already...

Please stop pretending that we live in a Democracy. We don't. We never have been. Locally, sure, we pick out mayors and governors, but beyond out own state borders, we're a Republic, NOT a democracy. In theory, we elect people to Congress etc. to go to DC and represent US.

How many of you pay attention to what these elected officials DO once they get there? Is your representative acting on behalf of "We the People", meaning ALL of us and not just the rich and powerful? Do you even KNOW their voting records? Are they taking the cash instead?

The majority of "We" might get jazzed up for the reality TV participation of an election but more often than not, they stop paying attention immediately after. They forget. They ignore. Meanwhile, politicians get tempted by money and corruption. Has YOURS? What do YOU know?

Too many members of Congress etc. talk you into giving them your vote. It's a signature move of the GOP and all too often the Dems today. To insure wins, the GOP (and some Dems) gerrymander and purge voter rolls so that Dems, minorities etc. don't get to vote.

GOP officials have closed already overburdened polling stations in minority neighborhoods that vote (D), making it impossible for them to vote. They keep Voting Day from being a holiday so that the majority of us can't afford the time off from work to vote.

So tell me... What has YOUR representative done for "We the People" lately? Who are their donors that they're answering to instead of YOU? While you're at it, perhaps take a look at all the Dems running and see who the "Wine Cave Candidates" are.

As far as I can see, Sanders is the only one turning away corporate cash. Even Warren won't pledge not to, especially once the primaries are over. Politicians answer to DONORS, not YOU. Pick your poison, but know this:

Sanders isn't the lethal dose too many of the pricks in media make him out to be when they even bother to cover him in the proper, REAL light of things honest and truthful. They're terrified of him. Know your candidate by who their enemies are. Do you KNOW who Sanders' are?

The GOP hates him. The Establishment Democrats who don't fight and take corporate cash are. The corporations, the ones who don't pay shit, loathe him. The NRA hates him. Billionaires hate him. Essentially, every person or organization siphoning wealth from YOU hate him.

Why would you? He's been on the SAME consistent mission his WHOLE political career. If you think him unqualified because he's "not a real Democrat" I would argue that's the FEATURE, not the bug. Learn some history. He's old school, die-hard Democrat at heart.

Spare me the outdated, Cold War era platitudes about Socialism. You clearly don't know what you're talking about. Socialism has MANY forms, and Sanders is a Democratic Socialist- it's about WE getting to decide where out taxes are spent. It's not like Stalinism of Communism.

Sanders wants us ALL to prosper. He wants our taxes spent on YOU, not wars, not corps, not tax breaks for the rich that have to be made up for by siphoning funds away from programs that help protect YOU like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, all "socialist" programs.

Stop being afraid. Stop being angry. Stop shitting over those less fortunate than you and grow up a bit. It's time to start putting our tax dollars where out mouths are instead of talking shit about what most of you don't understand.

This is NOT the nation of

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" 

as the New Collosus states on the Statue of Liberty.

You're either in favor of ALL Americans being the "We" in "We the People"

OR, and there's no way around this,

you're for the rich elite being the "We" and that they're your masters and you are their pawns and property.

Period. End of discussion.