The War on Voting

They’ll just mow them down and then go vote. Like they’ve been doing one way or another for the entirety of American history.

No less often than once every two years, all voters must affirm their registration in person at the Secretary of State’s office.

What, rural Texans don’t like having to show up in Austin? There’s a bus. We can even include bus fare in the legislation. What’s the problem?

Too many big states where that can backfire like NY and CA.

Or make the only registration times from like 7-9pm on a Sunday when all the olds are asleep.

Or, better yet, require the registration to be done via a mobile phone app and don’t provide any technical support.

2 Likes

If you put something like this outside the polling place and show Fox News and OAN, would they be able to pull themselves away from the TV for long enough to vote?

Oh man, mandatory online registration is a good one.

4 Likes

Sell it as a cost cutting strategy, too. Small government means register online!

1 Like

Dunno, I met a lot of younger people during the primary who also struggled with downloading and using an app. I expected the olds to struggle, but come on, you’re 22, you should know what the little three lines in the top corner is for!

I often wondered how many more doors we could have knocked on if we hadn’t needed to spend an hour every event explaining the app…

1 Like

Also could allow an option for thumbprint verification, to secure the vote!

That’s a good point, and they could probably get some wealthy dem to fund studies to evaluate the relative fall off between Dems and Republicans, but I’d bet there would be a major differential in favor of dem voters.

Maybe someone here can help.

Trying to get this woman I work with to vote. She went to register but it won’t let her put in her new address apparently even though she moved over a year ago. This is in NY any ideas?

There should be a number for your county registrar on their website somewhere. I suggest she call it and explain the issue. Normally I’d say go in person, but COVID prevents that.

If that doesn’t work, the NY Secretary of State is in charge of elections, so she could try that, as well.

1 Like

If that doesn’t work or is too slow, a last chance might be contacting your local congressional candidate. They will have access to voter rolls to at least check her status, and usually have someone on staff that deals with making sure people are registered who want to be. They should have an in with the county/state.

Georgia is VOTERSUPPRESSION#1, but they are at least making it easy to get an absentee ballot. SOS Office just launched a website where you can request one. I did it in all of 20 seconds. One downside is that it requires state ID or driver’s license.

SOS website also lets you track the status of your ballot.

1 Like

I’m always a week behind but that New Yorker article is sick:

The results of the 2008 election startled Republican leaders. Obama’s coalition, which included African-Americans, the college-educated, and the young, seemed built for the future. The G.O.P.’s older, whiter voters belonged to demographic sectors that seemed certain to shrink. Republicans across the country began an extended push to reduce voter turnout. “The Republicans realize that voting rules can be changed in a way to achieve a partisan end,” Marc Elias, a voting-rights lawyer for the Democratic Party, said. “Florida becomes a host of that virus—and an exporter.”

When Scott took office, he and the Republican-controlled legislature embarked on a series of initiatives that curtailed access to the polls. In previous elections, state rules had allowed fourteen days of early voting; the legislature eliminated six of those days, including the Sunday before elections, and restricted the hours of early-voting sites. It also sharply tightened the use of third-party groups, such as the League of Women Voters, to register voters, and imposed criminal penalties for such lapses as registering voters without a permit. Under one of the more exacting requirements, volunteers who registered people to vote were given exactly forty-eight hours to submit each form to the state. Those who missed the deadline were fined.

The next year, a federal judge, Robert Hinkle, scaled back the restrictions on voter registration, wryly dismissing the idea that they had been intended to prevent the system from being abused. “If the goal is to discourage voter-registration drives and thus also to make it harder for new voters to register, this may work,” he wrote. But Republican legislators portrayed the strictures as a victory for civic spirit. During one floor debate, the state senator Mike Bennett said, “Do you ever read the stories about the people in Africa—the people in the desert, who literally walk two and three hundred miles so they can have an opportunity to do what we do? And we want to make it more convenient? . . . Do we want to go to their house? Take the polling booth with us?” He went on, “I want them to fight for it. I want them to know what it’s like. I want them to go down there and have to walk across town to go over and vote.” Bennett later became the supervisor of elections in Manatee County. In the weeks before the 2014 midterm elections, he closed dozens of polling sites, forcing more than half the county’s Black population to find a new place to vote.

Yea when he says he wants to make it harder for them to vote, he didn’t mean white people.

They absolutely stole the GA governors election.

https://twitter.com/kevinmkruse/status/1302701037346750469?s=21

They stole Florida too. And it’s going to happen again.

This is just incredible. I did some googling but can’t find any data. I wonder how the US numbers for this kind of thing stack up to other countries.

It’s very hard to talk about other countries but here in the UK a friend of mine back in the 83 GE voted 4 times (using cards of friends who couldn’t be bothered to vote) against the Thatcherite candidate (and the shit still won of course).