Hello friends,
Yesterday I received this note and I thought I’d bring it to your attention:
Naturally, this isn’t a story that the mainstream media seems to care about at all, but you can find references to it if you look. Here’s one.
The sad truth is that efforts to disqualify votes are going on all the time. It’s infuriating. While the Republicans fight tooth and nail to disenfranchise as many people as possible, there’s too little resistance.
The argument of “we don’t want to be like them” rears its ugly head.
We’re left shaking our heads sadly as we watch the country fall down in ruin. What the media and the general population needs to understand is that it doesn’t “make us like them” if we stand up and fight for the ballots that have already been cast! The difference isn’t the fight, it’s the cause.
The United States sadly lacks a political entity that fights to ensure the will of the people is recognized.
Folks, this is nothing new. At various times in our history large swaths of people have been excluded from participating in the decision making process. Remember this is a country that was founded on human slavery.
Part of the problem of teaching a disgustingly sanitized version of American history is that the general public is completely ignorant of the various complicated mechanisms of voter disenfranchisement that have been implemented in every single election.
Make no mistake… it’s every single election. By that I mean that in every single election there are forces that work to make sure your ballot isn’t counted. In the lead up to the 2024 Presidential election, there were stories like this one of massive numbers of voters being struck from voter lists.
In the lead up to the election, Robert Reich lamented that the Supreme Court decided to allow Virginia to continue purging voter rolls. The justification for this is that the names they purge are “somehow ineligible” but the reality is that few instances of false ballots are ever found.
Except, our country doesn’t track instances where people were denied their right to vote. Perhaps if we researched that, we’d see that the Republican party is guilty of disenfranchising people all the time.
Honestly, there have been so many strategies employed to deny people the right to vote that it’s sickening. There were things like a poll tax, there were impossible literacy tests, there were voting restrictions inherent to the Jim Crow laws…
Women got the right to vote in 1920, but in the lead up to the 2024 election some television personalities claimed it was tantamount to infidelity to vote differently than your husband.
Are you kidding me?
An infuriating aspect of this is that, on multiple occasions I suggested that polling places should ensure women are allowed to cast their vote in privacy. When you say something like that, the pearl clutchers show up and claim, “I’ve worked elections for a billion years, and I’ve never once seen a man influence his wife’s vote.”
To which I respond “BULL-SHITE!”
Any time you get a response like that “I’ve worked in X for Y number of years and I’ve never seen Z” you’re dealing with a Russian bot.
The general population of the United States of America doesn’t understand the inherent evil of a controlling patriarchal husband. Forcing their wives to vote the way they want is the least of the awful things they make those poor, tormented women do.
But let me get back to the subject of voter disenfranchisement:
* They strike names from voter rolls
* They strike names that are similar
* They threaten to arrest people for voting
* They gerrymander districts
* They don’t provide adequate facilities (so people have to wait in lines)
* Nebulous forces target Democratic districts and call in bomb threats
A big part of the problem is that Republican voters are scattered about in rural areas, while you know where Democratic voters are. This makes it easy for malicious forces to mess with the count. Plus, Democrats prefer to mail in their votes. This provides another convenient avenue for nefarious forces. “Let’s just disqualify all the mail-in votes,” they chortle.
When there are recounts, Republicans are tenacious. They challenge every little errant ink mark on the page and use it as grounds to disqualify a vote.
Democrats need to fight to defend the vote with the same energy Republicans use to deny it.
For the sake of morale, Democratic politcians need to get in the game and show that this whole process means something. We’re literally up to our neck in strategies to have our voice erased. Naturally the media says nothing because the media just doesn’t care, we know that already.
“Aw shucks, oh well… that’s just the way democracy works…”
Except, NO! Democracy works when EVERYBODY’S VOTE IS COUNTED!
Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias is fighting the effort in North Carolina to invalidate votes, and I’m thankful for that. The problem is that we need a million more people like him, and they need to make their voices heard on every platform.
Challenging votes is cheating.
It makes me think that there should be an effort to go back and look at the swing states and make sure every vote was counted correctly. Hey, if the election was fair and the count is right, fine! But I’d sleep better with a guarantee that the election result represents the will of the people.
All you have to do is look at American history and you’ll recognize that’s rarely been the case.
Thanks Pam!
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