999 replies to this topic

[baw1064]

AnBr, on 29 March 2021 - 08:47 PM, said:

Georgia Governor Declares Water a Gateway Drug That Leads to Voting

But if you give them Evian water, they're more likely to vote according to the whims of the plutocrats.

[HockeyDon]

Also, don't forget how much fear there is in the conservative voters' minds about billionaire George Soros buying elections. That particular piece of messaging was hammered into their brains too often and too completely.

[LFC]

Texas wants to legalize voter intimidation because of course they do.

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As the Black election judge in a majority white Texas County, Anita Phillips is used to tense situations at her polling place, an early voting site on the former campus of a historically Black college.

During the 2018 election, Phillips was escorted to her car by law enforcement every evening because of the harassment she received, including from, she says, the partisan poll watchers who showed up to observe her voting site. In 2020, she was forced to eject a poll watcher who repeatedly was caught rifling through election papers on her desk

“I felt like a babysitter inside of a daycare full of toddlers,” Phillips told TPM as she reflected her experiences as an election judge in Waco, the largest city in McLennan County.

“I was constantly having to say, ‘Ma’am you cannot stand that close where you can see the ballot marked’; ‘Ma’am you cannot sit here behind the election book where you can see the voters’ personal information’; ‘Ma’am you cannot go through the paperwork on the judges’ table.”

But Republican legislation working its way through the Texas statehouse could escalate things to a whole new level. The measures significantly loosen the rules for the partisan poll watchers chosen by political parties ostensibly to monitor that election rules are being followed. The new proposed poll watcher regime could usher in a whole new wave of intimidation of voters of color, critics of the bill say.

“Latinos are the historical targets of vigilante activity in and around polling places in Texas,” Nina Perales, the vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told TPM. “These measures that are being proposed right now are going to open the door to vigilante voter suppression activities in the polling place.”

They’re being pushed among a dizzying array of restrictive voting proposals in Texas, and at least one of the bills could get a vote on the Texas Senate floor in the days to come.

[LFC]

Texass again. The Republicans are looking at taking another swing at a bogus voter registration purge (paywalled). There are so many flaws to what they're pushing, mostly aimed directly at Hispanics, but then those are the features rather than bugs. They're nothing if not shameless little fascists.

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When at first your ham-handed voter purge gambit doesn’t succeed, try codifying it into the state code.

That appears to be the strategy Texas Republicans are taking in myriad elections bills introduced in the statehouse this month.

This morning, I published a story about how one major chunk of the proposed measures look to loosen the rules around partisan poll watching.

Another part of the legislative effort is focused on reviving a shoddy purge effort that brought heaps of national scrutiny and embarrassment when Texas officials tried it in 2019.

That January, the-then Texas Secretary of State David Whitley unveiled a list of nearly 100,000 people who he claimed were non-citizens illegally on the rolls. As soon as local clerks got a chance to vet the names, they found thousands of duplicates and false positives. An obvious problem with how state officials were going about assembling the purge list was that they used outdated records from Texas’s Department of Public Safety — which houses DMV records — to identify the supposed non-citizens. It was not uncommon for someone to have identified themselves as a noncitizen in a DMV interaction several years ago and then, in the interim years, become naturalized and registered to vote. In fact, voter registration opportunities are often offered at naturalization ceremonies.

Faced with a lawsuit, Texas was forced to back off the flawed methodology and signed a settlement significantly narrowing its purge protocols. Motivated by their rage over the fiasco, statehouse Democrats blocked Whitley from being permanently confirmed as Texas Secretary of State and he stepped down in mid-2019.

But rather than leaving well enough alone, several of the bills that have been introduced this year include provisions that seem to resurrect the failed purge effort.

A Senate bill known as SB 1340 requires the Department of Public Safety to send to the secretary of state the same kinds of drivers license records that resulted in the bevy of false positives in 2019. The bill also requires the secretary of state to run the voter rolls against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security immigrant database, even as the feds have warned against the use of their noncitizen records to clean state rolls.

Another section of the Texas bill deputizes the secretary of state to be the “chief voter registrar” — making him the final word on list maintenance, instead of the local clerks who helped stopped 2019’s bungled purge.

Nina Perales, the vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which brought the suit against the 2019 purge, said those provisions were “part of this effort to go around local registrars” who rightfully resisted Whitley’s purge commands in 2019.

The bill will also make the process of voter registration more burdensome for newly naturalized Americans. It would require state officials to back check voter registration applications against DPS records, including those records where the applicant might have been logged as a noncitizen before their naturalization. If there aren’t DPS records confirming the person is a citizen, or if a (potentially outdated) noncitizen flag came up, that applicant will be required to produce in person documents proving their citizenship before their registrations is accepted.

There is a second bill, SB 1235, that also essentially codifies the purge process that went so awry when it was tried in 2019. That legislation would require that the secretary of state once a month run the voter registration list against the DPS database and send the potentially bogus noncitizen matches to local registrars for investigation.

A third bill would put the onus of local registrars to undertake the flawed purge process. Under SB1114, they’d be required to send challenge letters to any registrant who indicates they’re not a citizen in a DMV or jury selection interaction. The registrants would then be required to provide their proof of citizenship. The bill’s language does not specify that those noncitizen indications must be from after when the person registered to vote, leaving open the possibility that the same outdated records that the 2019 purge attempted to use would again be referenced to remove recently naturalized citizens from the rolls.

It’s unclear if any of these bills will move forward on their own. Some voting rights advocates believe that the measures could just be added to another piece of legislation further along in the legislative process, like SB7 — the bill that contains the poll watcher provisions that I wrote about today.

The sponsor of that bill also sponsored SB 1235, leading some to believe that SB 1235 provisions were designed to “mesh” with parts of SB 7, as Perales put it.

SB7 includes provisions requiring that state officials monitor local registrars’ list maintenance efforts and allowing for the state to impose civil penalties on the local officials who aren’t purging aggressively enough. It also has a provision that would give the secretary of state the ability to send the challenge letters if the local registrars failed to send them.

“Basically the secretary of state would be conducting the purge instead of relying on registrars to follow the secretary of state’s command to do the voter purge,” Perales said.

[LFC]

Corporations with a big presence in Georgia have been relatively quiet about Republican voter disenfranchisement. The CEO of Delta decided to speak up after a pretty tepid early response. My guess is that they pull in a ton of talent from blue states and they want to present Georgia as a reasonable place to raise your family, not a Republican shithole that's going to work to take away the rights of anybody who doesn't support them.

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Delta CEO Ed Bastian issued a companywide memo on Wednesday criticizing the “unacceptable” new Georgia voting law, following mounting backlash over the executive’s statement last week saying that the bill had “improved considerably during the legislative process.”

In a letter sent to employees on Wednesday, Bastian said that although Delta and other major Atlanta corporations had “some success in eliminating the most suppressive tactics that some had proposed,” he needed to make his opposition to the law more direct.

“I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values,” Bastian said. “The right to vote is sacred. It is fundamental to our democracy and those rights not only need to be protected, but easily facilitated in a safe and secure manner.”

Bastian indicated that he reversed course from the company’s previous muted opposition after having time to fully consider the the provisions of the bill, which included engaging in conversations with leaders and employees in the Black community.

“It’s evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives,” Bastian said. “That is wrong.”

Bastian further took aim at Georgia’s new voting law by arguing that it was based on falsehoods of widespread voter fraud in the battleground state in the 2020 presidential election.

“This is simply not true,” Bastian said. “Unfortunately, that excuse is being used in states across the nation that are attempting to pass similar legislation to restrict voting rights.”

[LFC]

A group of black businessmen are calling out Georgia and other direct Republican attacks on voting rights. They frame the position as binary, as they should.

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A group of 72 Black business leaders are calling on companies to publicly oppose a series of bills being advanced by Republicans in at least 43 states that could dramatically curb access to the ballot box.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Black corporate executives are rallying around a letter that pushes back on a Georgia law that voting rights advocates have said will make it harder for Black people to vote.

“There is no middle ground here,” Kenneth Chenault, a former chief executive of American Express and one of the letter’s organizers told the Times. “You either are for more people voting, or you want to suppress the vote.”

[LFC]

The number of voter suppression bills is now up to 361. What a country we live in where we need over 30 dozen laws to combat a non-existent problem.

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A new report identifies Texas, Georgia and Arizona — all states where Democrats made significant inroads in 2020 — as the biggest producers of restrictive voter legislation.

The report, published by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, identified 49 such bills from Texas, 25 from Georgia and 23 from Arizona. In total, the number of restrictive bills has climbed to 361 bills in 47 states, over 100 more than the center’s last tally in late February.

“Bills are actively moving in the Texas and Arizona statehouses, and Georgia enacted an omnibus voter suppression bill last week,” the report read.

The Texas legislation includes measures that would loosen the rules around partisan poll watchers at voting sites, alarming critics about the possibility of increased voter intimidation, and would resurrect an attempted but ultimately botched voter purge from 2019.

In Arizona, the bills beef up the amount of information needed to vote absentee, and shorten the window for voters to return their ballots. Two of them, per the report, also prohibit automatic voter registration and Election Day registration (two measures the state doesn’t even have at present) in a seeming attempt to create a conflict if HR1, the federal voting rights package, is passed.

The Georgia omnibus law, signed last week, has garnered calls for boycotts, multiple lawsuits and prompted companies to disavow it after the fact.

Most of the bills, the report said, impose greater restrictions on absentee voting. That trend was encouraged by the Democratic skew of absentee voting amid the pandemic, when former President Donald Trump constantly said, falsely, that mail-in voting was rife with fraud and turned his supporters off of the voting method. It’s not yet clear that those restrictions won’t end up hurting Republican voters too when COVID-19 ceases to be a factor.

In light of the nationwide wave of restrictive bills, Democrats are rallying behind HR1 to expand and protect voting rights. While that package, if signed into law, would counteract some of the measures in the restrictive bills, the report said, some GOP legislatures are setting up contingency measures.

“Texas lawmakers have proposed setting up a parallel system with its own rules for state contests if the federal law is enacted,” it read.

[LFC]

This guy has a crystallized his career path within the Georgia GOP.

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Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan ® on Thursday criticized fellow Republicans in his state for finding themselves in hot water upon the passage of the state’s new voting overhaul law, which he said can be attributed to the failure to refute former President Trump’s election fraud falsehoods during the 2020 presidential election cycle.

In an op-ed published in USA Today on Thursday, Duncan, who refused to play along with Trump’s bogus fraud claims and decried the former president’s “divisive” influence on the GOP, argued that the new Georgia voting law was a direct result of the misinformation campaign led by Trump.

After noting that the restrictive provisions in the law are a “much-improved version” of previous drafts in the Georgia legislature — citing the removal of limitations on Sunday voting and the elimination of no-excuse absentee voting — Duncan took aim at Republicans for feeding into Trump’s election fraud falsehoods.

Duncan argued that if Republicans simply would have “unequivocally remove any and all doubt in the public” by refuting Trump’s bogus claims, then Republicans in politically safe districts would have the spine to “resist the temptation to superficially support knee-jerk reaction legislation.”

Duncan pointed to the law’s restrictive provisions such as the banning of distribution of water to voters and the removal of oversight responsibility from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — who become a punching back of Trump’s after he refused to play along with the President’s falsehoods.

Duncan accused Republican legislators of pushing the new law through for the purpose of “appeasing the extreme right corners of their districts” and avoiding potential primary challenges.

“Unfortunately, Republicans fell into the trap set by the left and allowed them to make the bill into something that it’s not,” Duncan said.

[LFC]

Apple's CEO is bashing Georgia's voter suppression laws now. Well, they earned this.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday joined mounting calls from corporate leaders against the new Georgia restrictive voting law and other voting restrictions around the country.

In a statement to Axios, Cook pointed to the Black community’s long history of fighting for the right to vote.

“American history is the story of expanding the right to vote to all citizens, and Black people, in particular, have had to march, struggle and even give their lives for more than a century to defend that right,” Cook said.

Cook said that Apple values the right for every eligible citizen to exercise their right to vote.

“We support efforts to ensure that our democracy’s future is more hopeful and inclusive than its past,” Cook said.

[golden_valley]

LFC, on 01 April 2021 - 03:26 PM, said:

This guy has a crystallized his career path within the Georgia GOP.

I was nodding in agreement with this until I hit this sentence

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“Unfortunately, Republicans fell into the trap set by the left and allowed them to make the bill into something that it’s not,” Duncan said.

Big needle scratch! He just can't get past his belief that the "left" is the root of all bad things.

[LFC]

golden_valley, on 01 April 2021 - 04:18 PM, said:

Big needle scratch! He just can't get past his belief that the "left" is the root of all bad things.

They're like domestic abusers. "Look at what you made me do! Do you think I WANTED to do that? It's your fault and I was forced to do it!" The concept of taking responsibility for their own actions is completely and totally foreign to them.

[LFC]

Arizona Republicans hired a company that peddled voter fraud lies to perform an audit on the big county they lost. These people are shameless. These people are fascists.

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The founder and president of the company leading yet another audit of the 2020 election results in Arizona’s largest county boosted an endless stream of nonsense about the 2020 election results on Twitter.

In a press release Wednesday, state Senate President Karen Fann said Senate leadership — in other words, Senate Republicans — had spent months interviewing various forensic auditors before selecting four firms for another audit of the election results in Maricopa County, where Joe Biden edged out Donald Trump.

The review will be led by the Florida-based company Cyber Ninjas, which Fann described as a “cyber security company with a focus on application security, working across financial services and government sectors.”

The Senate’s months-long search for auditors apparently didn’t consider what reporters dug up in a few minutes — a Twitter account seemingly belonging to Cyber Ninjas’ founder, Doug Logan, showing a steady track record of amplifying lies and misinformation about the 2020 election.

The Arizona Republic, AZ Mirror and others in the state quickly noted that Logan was also an expert witness in a lawsuit against Antrim County, Michigan — the scene of some intense Trumpworld bickering over a small human error by election staff.

Archived versions of the Twitter account seemingly belonging to Logan, which has been deleted, show a diet of junk food election theorizing.

[LFC]

More companies are speaking out about Georgia and voter suppression in general. Some are more forceful than others.

[LFC]

Georgia just lost the MLB all-star game. I'm sure they'll whine about cancel culture since that's their magic amulet of voter suppression invisibility right now but what do they expect when they create racially motivated obstacles to a fundamental democratic right?

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Major League Baseball announced Friday that it has yanked the 2021 All-Star Game and amateur draft from Georgia in protest of the state’s restrictive new voting law.

The league was aiming to relocate the events to another state that had yet to be determined.

“Over the last week, we have engaged in thoughtful conversations with Clubs, former and current players, the Players Association, and The Players Alliance, among others, to listen to their views,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred wrote in a statement on Friday. “I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft.”

The midseason game was set to take place at Truist Park in Atlanta.

“Major League Baseball,” he added, “fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box... Fair access to voting continues to have our game’s unwavering support.”

[golden_valley]

LFC, on 02 April 2021 - 03:26 PM, said:

Georgia just lost the MLB all-star game. I'm sure they'll whine about cancel culture since that's their magic amulet of voter suppression invisibility right now but what do they expect when they create racially motivated obstacles to a fundamental democratic right?

Has it finally sunk in that professional sports make money off the talent and skill of black and brown people? If the players all decide to strike, there will be no money made by anyone related to the sport.

[andydp]

Someone explain to me why this is not "cancel culture" or "woke".


After new law, McConnell warns CEOs: ‘Stay out of politics’


WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell says it’s a “big lie” to call the new voting law in Georgia racist and he warned big business to “stay out of politics” after major corporations and even Major League Baseball distanced themselves from the state amid vast public pressure.
McConnell particularly slammed President Joe Biden’s criticism that the Georgia bill was restrictive and a return to Jim Crow-era restrictions in the Southern states aimed limiting ballot access for Black Americans.

After new law, McConnell warns CEOs: 'Stay out of politics' (apnews.com)

I think I know !! GOP complaints - best thing since sliced bread. Democratic complaints: Satan's Commie Socialist spawn.

[AnBr]

*cough* A.L.E.C. *cough*

[HockeyDon]

Don't CEOs generally support and donate much more heavily to Republican politicians than Democratic ones?

I'm reminded of something about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

[golden_valley]

AnBr, on 06 April 2021 - 08:12 AM, said:

*cough* A.L.E.C. *cough*

And vast amounts of campaign cash.

[AnBr]

McConnell wants corporations to shut up (but keep sending money)

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McConnell didn't literally say, "Just write the checks and then look the other way while we pass voter-suppression bills," but it was the underlying point.