Today is National
Voter Registration Day. But if
you’re not yet concerned about voting rights, you should be. Here’s why.
According to The
Nation of June, 2017, writing about the administration’s planned attack on
voting rights, the Appropriations Assistance Commission voted to defund the
Election Assistance Commission, the DOJ instructed all states that it was
reviewing voter registration list maintenance in each state, demanding to know
how they were planning to remove voters from the rolls, the White House
commission on election integrity asked
all 50 states for detailed data including full first and last names, dates of
birth, last four of their socials, voting history, etc., and the administration
named a member of the Heritage Foundation as a member of the Commission.
From its inception, there have been repeated efforts to
combat cross check, an outsourced corporate system of arbitrarily striking alledgedly "fraudulent" voters off the rolls, which according to Greg Palast writing for The
Rolling Stone and Salon
scratched 7 million mostly minority voters off the rolls in 2016.
More recent news articles have pointed to endemic
gerrymandering of House districts; repeat patterns of unavailable, or scarce voting machines,
reiterations of hacked voting machines, all of them Republican-owned and using proprietary codes. There
is the recent Florida decision allowing felons to vote, only to
disenfranchise them yet again.
Now you see it, now you don’t
There are stories of eliminated precincts, particularly in
poorer districts, of hours-long waits on lines exposed to the vagaries of
weather: rain, excessive sun and heat, etc, in black and college student
precincts. Recently in Georgia, we saw the Republican Secretary of State, Brian
Kemp, oversee his own election. And in California, the Secretary of State is
about to certify BMDs, ballot-marking devices. These are Republican owned
electronic machines using proprietary code, which allow the voter to make
selections on a touchtone screen; these selections are visible under glass for
the voter to view, but the bar code at the top of the ballot is unreadable for
the voter to verify, and it’s that bar code that’s fed into the voting machine.
The subject of election integrity is a complex one. It
touches on voting machine vulnerabilities, hacked computers, it touches on
algorithmic voter manipulation (cf. Cambridge
Analytica), certification of systems, tabulation audits, digital image
scanners, hand marked paper ballots, outsourced elections, forensic
investigation, hand counts, election theft, votes deliberately not counted, verifiable
voting, election observers, and most especially on voting rights, and voter
suppression, especially in heavily black
districts and emblemized by the Supreme Court decision not to renew a key
provision of the Voting Rights Act, and by the Citizen's United decision.
The origins of problems adversely affecting election
integrity can be traced to mounting polarization between parties, and to America’s
long history of Jim Crow, a system based on implicit racism, and on the Republican
Party’s agenda of blocking voters who might be inclined to vote Democratic, namely
the poor, the non-White, and the imprisoned (keeping in mind the trend of the
prison system that disproportionately incarcerates poor people of color.) These
efforts are patently obvious in such maneuvers as “cross check,” gerrymandering,
and outsourcing to Republican business owners the manufacture, and proprietary
coding of voting machines. At issue here is the conflict of interest between
profit and election theft motivations, and the integrity of voting itself.
Proprietary ownership of voting apparatus is clearly in conflict with the very
principles of voting integrity at the heart of any Democracy. Kollibri
Sonnenblume addressing Democrats in Counterpunch
writes: “You’ve got to make sure your people can vote and that their votes are
counted….This is your mission….Your leadership is [not going] to do the right
thing. Go there and do it yourself….If Trump holds office after 2020, it won’t
be because he won. It will be because he stole it again.”
And yet, some Americans still
refer to their Democracy, whereas taken together, all these impediments
to transparent voting clearly place election integrity in a compromised light, at
best offering American voters a broken down, undependable system for exercising
their inalienable citizens’ right to make their voices heard. Especially in
districts that tend to vote Democratic.
These questions may keep you as perplexed and vexed as this
writer. But help is on the way. The voting rights task force announces its
third annual Election Integrity Conference, “The Coming 2020 Election Crisis:
in Paper We Trust.” The speaker line-up includes activists, researchers,
experts, and reporters from around the country— some of the heavy hitters who
have concerned themselves with this subject for 30 years or more, among them
Bob Fritrakis, Harvey Wasserman, and Emily Levy.
The conference takes place in Berkeley, scheduled for
Saturday and Sunday, October 5 and 6, from 10 AM to 6 PM to be held at the
South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis Street, (cross street Ashbury). Be
there.
For more information
go to: https://nvrtf.org/2019-nvrtf-conference/conference-speakers-for-the-coming-2020-election-crisis-in-paper-we-trust/,
and to reserve your early bird tickets go to: https://nvrtf.org/event/national-voting-rights-task-force-3rd-election-integrity-conference/
Sign in to Daily Kos’ campaign to volunteer to reach
not-yet- registered voters in key 2020 swing states to provide them with
everything they need to register to vote at:
https://votefwd.org/dailykos?link_id=0&can_id=655968a96e1bce05c463b2f640bf633c&source=email-firstname-default-friend-youre-invited-join-us-in-celebrating-national-voter-registration-day&email_referrer=email_625254___subject_812962&email_subject=national-voter-registration-day-help-historically-under-represented-citizens-vote-in-2020
Because the U.S. military accounts for 93% of yearly U.S.
fossil fuel consumption, oppose attacking Iran at:
Because the U.S. military accounts for 93% of yearly U.S.
fossil fuel consumption, add your name to the petition demanding border
troop deployment be investigated now. at:
Trees are the Earth’s lungs. Oppose clear cutting in Tongass National Forest at:
https://act.credoaction.com/sign/tongass-perdue?t=5&akid=34074%2E216994%2EG9McKw
End support for the war in Yemen, block any war with
iran and defund dangerous new nukes at:
Lots of luck with this one: Sign on to end the Electoral
College at
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Snitch McConnell agrees to pursue Ukraine’s whistleblower
complaint.
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D.C. Climate Strike shuts down D.C.
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New York Public Library cancels Saudi dictatorship
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House conducts hearing arguing for largely black D.C.
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Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance subpoenas 8 years of #45’s tax
returns.
Trump ordered by judge to testify in N.Y. Trump Hotel protest case.
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federal judge to block on going family separation at border.
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