True Left

OLD CONTENT contd.



More details:

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/texas-polling-sites-closures-voting

The solution requires the Second Amendment.

---



---

his takes the cake:

www.bet.com/news/national/2020/03/10/kansas-city-mayor-quinton-lucas-told-by-poll-worker-he-wasnt-in-.html

Moments after making a plea for people to get out and vote in the Missouri primary Tuesday, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas was turned away from the polls and told by a poll worker that he “wasn’t in the system” to cast his ballot.

Lucas showed up to vote at 7am in the same place he said he has voted since 2009. Soon after, he posted a message on Twitter saying he was not allowed to cast a ballot because a poll worker could not find his registration.

Still think voter purging targeting "non-white" voters is a conspiracy theory?

---

For Reds, the coronavirus pandemic is an opportunity for even more voter suppression:

www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-block-most-aid-to-help-states-plan-for-presidential-election-amid-coronavirus-pandemic-223136209.html

WASHINGTON — Voting reforms that would make it much easier to cast ballots by mail in the fall presidential election were left out of the $2 trillion rescue package that was unveiled Wednesday
...
“In times of crisis, the American people cannot be forced to choose between their health and exercising their right to vote,” Klobuchar and Wyden said in a statement. “We must enact election reforms across the country as well as secure more resources to guarantee safe and secure elections. We will continue to fight to pass the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020 to ensure every eligible American can safely and lawfully cast their ballot.”
...
The idea of broadening access to voting by mail has yet to be embraced by Republican politicians in Washington. No GOP members of Congress have backed the reforms, and some hard-line Republicans have railed against the idea.

Conservative think tankers said universal mail voting would “make it easier to manipulate election outcomes and commit fraud.”

---

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republican-party-voting-reform-coronavirus



---

www.vox.com/2020/4/6/21211378/supreme-court-coronavirus-voting-rights-disenfranchise-rnc-dnc

a dozen other states have chosen to postpone similar elections to protect the safety of voters. Democrats hoped to defend a lower court order that allowed absentee ballots to be counted so long as they arrived at the designated polling place by April 13, an extension granted by a judge to account for the brewing coronavirus-sparked chaos on Election Day, April 7. Republicans successfully asked the Court to require these ballots to be postmarked by April 7.
...
The April 7 election is shaping up to be a train wreck. Most poll workers have refused to work the election, out of fear of catching the coronavirus, which forced Gov. Tony Evers (D) to call up the National Guard in order to keep polls open. But even this measure appears woefully inadequate. In Milwaukee, election officials announced that the state only has enough election workers to open five poll locations — when the city would normally have 180 polling places.

Meanwhile, the state has received a crush of absentee ballot requests — about 1.2 million, when it typically receives fewer than 250,000 in a spring election. That’s left state officials scrambling to send ballots to voters in time for Tuesday’s election. And on top of all these complications, a state law required all ballots to be received by election officials by 8 pm on April 7, or else those ballots would not be counted.

Tens of thousands of voters are not expected to even receive their ballots until after Election Day, effectively disenfranchising them through no fault of their own.

In response to this brewing catastrophe, Judge William Conley, an Obama appointee to a federal court in Wisconsin, ordered the deadline for receiving ballots to be extended to 4 pm on April 13. In response to this order, the Republican Party asked the Supreme Court to modify Conley’s decision to require all ballots to be postmarked by April 7 or they will not be counted.
The Supreme Court’s Republican majority granted the GOP this very specific request.
...
It means that if voting rights advocates discover in the final days before an election that a new state law is disenfranchising African American voters — or a pandemic keeps away most voters — federal courts most likely would not intervene. It means that many problems that are unlikely to be discovered until Election Day itself will go unaddressed.
...
The Supreme Court’s decision in Republican is the capstone of a weeks-long effort by the Republican Party to make it difficult for voters to actually cast a ballot in Wisconsin. Last week, Gov. Evers called the state legislature into session and asked it to delay the election. But the Republican-controlled legislature ended that session just seconds after it was convened. After Evers acted on his own authority to delay the election, the state’s Supreme Court voted along partisan lines to rescind Evers’s order. Republicans also rejected Evers’s proposal to automatically mail ballots to every voter in the state.

The background is that Republicans hope to hold on to a seat on the state Supreme Court, which is up for grabs in Tuesday’s election. As law professor and election law expert Rick Hasen recently noted, “only 38% of voters who had requested an absentee ballot in heavily Democratic Milwaukee County had returned one, compared with over 56% of absentee voters in nearby Republican-leaning Waukesha County.” So there’s at least some evidence that if additional voters are unable to return their ballots, Republicans will be overrepresented in the ballots that are counted.

It’s also worth noting that if Wisconsin had free and fair elections to choose its state lawmakers, Evers would most likely have been able to work with a Democratic legislature to ensure that Tuesday’s election would be conducted fairly. In 2018, 54 percent of voters chose a Democratic candidate for the state Assembly. But Republicans have so completely gerrymandered the state that they prevailed in 63 of the state’s 99 Assembly races.

There is far more at stake in Wisconsin, moreover, than one state Supreme Court seat. Wisconsin could be the pivotal swing state that decides the 2020 presidential election. The question of whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden occupies the White House next year could easily be determined by which man receives Wisconsin’s electoral votes.

And the Court’s decision in Republican suggests that the Supreme Court will give the GOP broad leeway in how US elections should be conducted.

Which is why I said that application of the Second Amendment by civilians should have become involved in this long ago.

---

It doesn't get more serious than this:





---

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/23/coronavirus-fight-to-vote-us-voters

This early work is critical to campaigns trying to build a support base for election day. But this year, the Covid-19 pandemic has made it nearly impossible to register new voters.

Limited voter registration is most likely to affect young people, minority groups, and naturalized immigrants, groups projected to contribute to record-high turnout in November. Freezing them out is likely to benefit Republicans, who tend to see a more diverse and younger electorate as a threat.

In Kentucky, where Mitch McConnell faces a closely-watched Senate re-election battle in November, just 504 people registered in March as Covid-19 restrictions went in to effect. By comparison, more than 7,200 voters registered the month before.
...
It is almost impossible, for example, to register to vote in New Hampshire right now. The swing state is one of a handful that doesn’t let voters register online. The local election offices are closed. Last week, state officials said anyone fearful of the virus could register to vote by mail – but the process is complicated.

“When I called my city clerk’s office, she said, ‘Well, once Covid-19 is over, you can register to vote,’” said Olivia Zink, the executive director of Open Democracy, a civic action group. It could be several more months before offices fully reopen.

Many of the missing voters may be young people. Voters aged 18 to 23 are expected to be 10% of all eligible voters this year – a larger proportion than in 2016. But they may also be first-time voters, unfamiliar with how to register.

Activists say states like Texas, which like New Hampshire has no online registration, make it even harder for this group.

“Our state is living in an outdated political process. And that political process is strategically disenfranchising a new wave of voters,” said Antonio Arellano, the interim executive director of Jolt, a Texas advocacy group that targets young Latino voters. “Some of them may fall through the cracks.”

Texas is also projected to become majority Hispanic by 2022, and Republicans fear those changes will hurt their electoral chances, said Luke Warford, voter expansion director for the Texas Democratic party.
...
Newly naturalized immigrants, another important voting bloc, may also be disenfranchised this year. US Citizen and Immigration Services cancelled citizenship oath ceremonies and in-person interviews, which could leave about 441,000 nearly naturalized citizens unable to vote in November, according to NBC News.

Demographic Blueshift vs voter suppression; which will win? The stakes have never been higher.

www.texasdemocrats.org/are-you-registered-to-vote/

---





---

I like to see leftists planning for the worst:

us.yahoo.com/news/trump-sows-doubt-voting-keeps-163356143.html

WASHINGTON — In October, President Donald Trump declares a state of emergency in major cities in battleground states, like Milwaukee and Detroit, banning polling places from opening.

A week before the election, Attorney General William Barr announces a criminal investigation into the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden.

After Biden wins a narrow Electoral College victory, Trump refuses to accept the results, won’t leave the White House and declines to allow the Biden transition team customary access to agencies before the Jan. 20 inauguration.

Far-fetched conspiracy theories? Not to a group of worst-case scenario planners — mostly Democrats, but some anti-Trump Republicans as well — who have been gaming out various doomsday options for the 2020 presidential election. Outraged by Trump and fearful that he might try to disrupt the campaign before, during and after Election Day, they are engaged in a process that began in the realm of science fiction but has nudged closer to reality as Trump and his administration abandon long-standing political norms.

The anxiety has intensified in recent weeks as the president continues to attack the integrity of mail voting and insinuate that the election system is rigged, while his Republican allies ramp up efforts to control who can vote and how. Just last week, Trump threatened to withhold funding from states that defy his wishes on expanding mail voting, while also amplifying unfounded claims of voter fraud in battleground states.

“In the eight to 10 months I’ve been yapping at people about this stuff, the reactions have gone from, ‘Don’t be silly, that won’t happen,’ to an increasing sense of, ‘You know, that could happen,’” said Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor. Earlier this year, Brooks convened an informal group of Democrats and never-Trump Republicans to brainstorm about ways the Trump administration could disrupt the election and to think about ways to prevent it.

But the anxiety is hardly limited to outside groups.

Marc Elias, a Washington lawyer who leads the Democratic National Committee’s legal efforts to fight voter suppression measures, said not a day goes by when he doesn’t field a question from senior Democratic officials about whether Trump could postpone or cancel the election. Prodded by allies to explain why not, Elias wrote a column on the subject in late March for his website — and it drew more traffic than anything he’d ever published.

But changing the date of the election is not what worries Elias. The bigger threat in his mind is the possibility that the Trump administration could act in October to make it harder for people to vote in urban centers in battleground states — possibilities, he said, that include declaring a state of emergency, deploying the National Guard or forbidding gatherings of more than 10 people.

Such events could serve to depress or discourage turnout in pockets of the country that reliably vote for Democrats.
...
“We assume he may well resort to any kind of trick, ploy or scheme he can in order to hold onto his presidency. We have built a strong program to plan for and address every possibility to ensure that he does not succeed.”

Trump has said he expects the election to be held Nov. 3 as scheduled, and under federal law he does not have the power to unilaterally postpone it. But a recent comment by the president’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner about whether the election would be held as scheduled — “I’m not sure I can commit one way or another,” he said — renewed fears that Trump would try to move the election or discredit the balloting process if he thought he was going to lose.
...
The president attacked mail balloting again Sunday morning, with a baseless claim that it would lead to “the greatest Rigged Election in history.”
...
“We’re setting ourselves up for an election where neither side can concede defeat,” Foley said. “That suggests that the desire to dispute the outcome is going to be higher than ever.”

But do enough leftists understand what is required as a countermeasure?

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/firearms/

---