Showing posts with label voter suppression. Show all posts

4.19.2022

ICYMI: 61 Voting Restriction 'Laws" From the Voting Rights Alliance - Time to Come Together! MIDTERM VOTES MATTER & BLACK MIDTERM VOTES MATTER EVEN MORE!!!

Hello All

By Gloria DULAN-Wilson

Greetings All!

This started out with me sharing the 61 indications of voter suppressions by Barbara Arnwine; but you know me - I can't just post something this important without making my own preliminary commentary.

So, Here it goes:

In case you've been on another planet, sequestered in an ashram, or just plain isolated from TV, Radio, Computers, Social Media, and all other forms of communication, we are in the middle of a new Pandemic called the perpetually, poisonous, prevaricating, perpetrating, propagandistic tirade of T-Rump, the megalomaniac - that is crisscrossing the US, spreading lies, deceit, and racist venom - otherwise known as his "campaign."

With him are the usual suspects of miscreants, menials, mendicants, and mobsters who are threatening to take the US back to the bad old days of deprivation, Jim Crowism, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism, greed, graft, and gore that have become the hallmark of the Repuglycon (aka republican) party.

The defeat of T-rump in 2018 (midterms) and 2020 (presidential election) has disrupted his goosestep into a fascist, NeoNazi regime that has so insensed his egotistical mentality, that he has done everything in his monetary and medacious power to try to bully Americans into reversing the count and proclaim him "emperor of the US - dictator for ever." Concomitant with that hissy fit that is his tirade, is his using racist invectives to agitate a base of ne-er do wells who have never had the opportunity to come out from the under belly of the rural backwoods which spawns them. Cleverly he's played to their lack of self-esteem, low level education, and poverty mentality, to become part of his motley crew of followers.

Add to that the greed, avarice, and borderline treason of the Repuglycons - especially the US Senate, an their blatant willingness to violate the Constitution of the US in their grab for power - coupled with the passing of predatory, punitive laws that deprive Black (and other) people of their constitutional right to vote freely in all elections in the United States, clearly shows that we are in perilous times; we are in crises, and we must stand up and stand firm, or put our hands up so they can put the chains back on again.

The laws that have been passed by nearly 30 states show that T-rump and the Repuglycons (Rethuglicans/republicans) are afraid of our power. They have studied how we won in 2020, and have tried to enact "laws" to prevent us from making it a THREE-PEAT!!

WE ARE NOW IN THE MIDST OF A STRUGGLE FOR OUR LIVES

LIKE DAVID DEFEATED GOLIATH, WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH A 21 CENTURY GOLIATH/LEVIATHAN/BEELZEBUB/AND ALL HIS (ITS) MENIALS!

We now have to make sure that NO WEAPON FORMED AGAINST US SHALL PROSPER!

While still in office, he told us from the beginning that he had no plan to step down,

he told us he was going to disrupt the mail, put bogus judges in seats, put babies in prisons, break up families, support the rich, deprive the poor, disrupt health, healing, homes and everything else he can put his greedly little pudgy hands on - and if we don't wake up and stay woke, active, and aligned he will snatch our victory and trample it. Some misguided individuals think it cool that this mendicant thumbs his nose at other people's rights, is unethical, and depraved. They find it exciting - until the tables are turned on them, and he grinds them into the dust, once they are no longer useful to his plan.

This is nothing new!! Authoritarian mendicants have been around for centuries. However, in the US, we don't allow them headlines and we certainly don't allow them to walk free after they have tried to overthrow the government, which is what happened on January 6, 2021!! We are in danger here in America - not just Black people - but all Americans!! In much the same way that Hitler fomented Kristallnacht nearly 80 years ago: book burnings, condemning teachers, disrupting education, incarcerating educators, aligning with powermad moguls like Putin and Kim Jung Un to disrupt our elections is beginning to happen here in the US in 2022!!

He enjoys instigating conflicts by hiring thugs to start fights, and set off chaos to make it look as though the victim was the perpetrator. He loves having people fight for him, while he sits back and watches. He has a perverse amusement in misdirecting attention to one issue, while he is sabotaging others. It's his stock in trade.

Having studied media, T-rump is adept in manipulating minds, and turning truths into lies via Paid Advertisements masquerading as the news (MBB)- check out how many minutes are spent discussing T-rump's alleged "slow moving coup," as opposed to the progress being made by President Biden, and you will that we are being brainwashed and lied to by the very media that is supposed to keep us informed and up to date. How is it that CBS has hired Mulvaney, T-rump's former chief of staff to be a co-anchor on their "news" shows? How is it that the only people who see through the trickery, lies and deceit are late night talk show hosts - while the ersatz news reports the same crap over and over in lock step with they are fed via his propaganda team.

The Repuglycons are afraid of us, they are afraid of our votes, they are afraid of our resilience, they are afraid of our unity, they are afraid of courage, they are afraid that if we unify, they will never again come to power. If we win in the 2022 MidTerms, they will never again be able to exert their fascism over the US.

Make a choice:

How comfortable are you with the fact that T-rump admires a warmongerer like Putin; and would most likely form an alliance with him and his regime, if he is allowed to return to any form of office?

How comfortable are you with the fact that the Repuglycon party is so racist they would rather see us starve and be deprived than to see this country thrive in unity?

How comfortable would you be if you saw all this happening and did nothing about it?

How comfortable would you be living under racists jim crow laws of the 50s and early 60s, where you sat in the back of the bus, where your children were groomed to become boot blacks, lackeys, maids, and hard labor. You got a glimpse of what mis-education looked like under Betsy DeVos when she took education out of the schools, cut the budgets, and replaced competent administrators with lowlifes -

How comfortable would you be if you sat there, argued about who slapped who; who slept with who; who disliked who; how many tattoos you got; or who's party you did or did not get to, while the country you live in is taken over and you become part of a concentration camp?

Think it can't happen here - in the US? Well look around you - the mendicant is gathering forces to do just that. And while the government, the congress, the president are doing what they can to follow "protocol," we had best be consolidating our power, intelligence, energy, strength to come together, vote like you never voted before; but also build community immunity so that we and our children have a future and a hope.

If I frightened you, I'm glad - I've done my job. T-rump is a wake up call that evil walks among us, and has no compunction about doing us harm.

To be forewarned is to be forearmed: We are not bumps on a log! We are men and women - our ancestors gave their lives for us - we have make sure their efforts are not in vain. Vote the T-rump regime down!

DEMAND THAT PRESIDENT BIDEN SIGN AN EXECUTIVE ORDER THAT REINSTATES OUR RIGHT TO VOTE, AND STRIKES DOWN ANY AND ALL LAWS THAT WOULD ABROGATE OUR RIGHTS IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, FORM OR FASHION.

PUT TOGETHER FUNDS ($5.00 TO $10 OR MORE) EACH AND SEND THEM TO SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL CANDIDATE, OR A NATIONAL ONE - IF NO ONE IS RUNNING IN YOUR DISTRICT. UNITE WITH OTHER ORGANIZATIONS AND GET "VOTERCADES(c) TOGETHER TO GO FROM COMMUNITY TO COMMUNITY TO REGISTER PEOPLE TO VOTE

BUILD VOTER SURVIVAL KITS IN CASE YOU ARE IN ONE OF THE MAJOR REDNECK STATES THAT HAVE TRIED TO DEPRIVE YOU OPENLY AND BLATENTLY OF YOUR RIGHTS AS CITIZENS OF THE US!

It's time to get into GOOD TROUBLE, and make sure you don't stop until you build a critical mass of voters who are not intimidated or thwarted by the threats, trickery lies and machinations of a racist regime out to sabotage your right to life, liberty, and the accomplishments of happiness that are our rights.

THE REPUBLYCONS ARE AFRAID OF BLACK VOTERS -

OR THEY WOULDN'T BE TRYING SO HARD TO SUPPRESS US. LET'S REALLY GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO BE AFRAID OF - OUR POWER AS A PEOPLE AND CHILDREN OF THE MOST HIGH GOD!

NOW THAT YOU KNOW

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

Join one of the many organizations that are helping people vote

or start one of your own!

Stay Blessed &

ECLECTICALLY BLACK

Gloria DULAN-Wilson

Note: I thought it might be helpful to see what some of these voting restrictions are that are being leveled against us in various states. I came across the one below that was compiled by Barbara Arnwine, Esq, in 2019.

Please share with family, friends, and others - we can never know too much when we are in the fight for our lives:

Below is a list of the 61 Voting Restriction 'Laws"

The Voting Rights Alliance

Click on link to get pdf:

https://www.votingrightsalliance.org/forms-of-voter-suppression

The Voting Rights Alliance

61 Forms of Voter Suppression

(to be Aware of & Report)!

Click here to download a printable .pdf version of the 61 Forms of Voter Suppression

Strict voter photo ID laws
Closing of DMV’s in strict voter ID law states
Failure to accept government-issued state university and college student ID’s
No early voting
Early voting cuts
No Sunday Souls to the Polls Early Voting
Harsh requirements/punishments for voter registration groups
Tough Deputy Registrar Requirements
Harsh voter registration compliance deadlines
Failure to timely process voter registrations
Cuts to Election Day (Same Day) registration
Polling place reductions or consolidations
Polling place relocations
Inadequate or poorly trained staffing at polls
Inadequate number of functioning machines, optical scanners, or electronic polling books
Running out of ballots at polling sites
No paper ballots
Failure to accept Native American tribal IDs.
Barring Native American voters through residential address requirements for Native American lands which have PO Boxes
Failure to place polling sites on Native American lands
Refusal to place polling sites on college campuses
Lack of available public transportation to polling sites
Excessive Voter purging
Disparate racial treatment at polling sites
Student voting restrictions
- Residency
Ex-felon disenfranchisement laws
Requiring Payment of Fines or Fees As Condition of Vote Restoration
Failure to Inform Formerly Incarcerated Persons of Their Voting Rights or Eligibility to Vote
Excessive Use of Inactive voter lists
No Public Outreach or Notification to Voters Placed on Inactive Lists
Language discrimination
• Failure to accommodate
Lack of language-accessible materials
Failure to accommodate voters with disabilities
No disability accessibility
No Curbside Voting
Not enough disability accessible voting equipment

37. Barriers to assistance by family members or others for voters

38. Deceptive practices

• Flyers

• Robocalls

39. Voter intimidation

• Impersonating law enforcement personnel or immigration officers

40. Police at polling places

41. Racial gerrymandering

42. Creating polling place confusion by splitting Black precincts

43. Partisan gerrymandering

44. Barriers for homeless voters to voter registration

45. Voter caging

• Use of One-Time Post cards/Mailers

46. Voter challengers at polls

47. Voter challenges to voter registration lists

48. Use of Suspense lists

49. Absentee Ballot Short Return Deadlines

50. Exact match requirements for signatures or other information

51. Complicated Absentee Ballot Requirements

52. Proof of Citizenship Laws

513 Out-of-precinct = no vote counted requirements

54. Failure to pre-register 17 year olds

55. Restrictions on straight-party voting

56. Interstate voter registration Crosscheck system

57. Jailed persons’ preconviction: denied right to register and/or vote

58. DOJ demanding voter records

59. Employers not providing time off or enough time

60. Failure to assist or accommodate voters displaced by natural disasters

61. Long lines

STAY BLESSED

4.17.2020

Guest Post: ICYMI - NY Times - Trump Reveals the Truth About Voter Suppression

By Gloria Dulan-Wilson

Hello All:

I don't need to say much - you know T-rump and the repuglycons are trying to keep us from registering and voting - this is a battle for our souls and control - and we have to win!!

Trump Reveals the Truth About Voter Suppression

The president is the latest in a long line of conservative politicians to see minority voters as a threat.

By David W. Blight

Dr. Blight is the author of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”

April 11, 2020

Credit...Joan Wong

On March 30, the Republican id burst forth when President Trump said that the latest congressional stimulus bill “had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Two days later, the Republican House speaker in Georgia, David Ralston, admitted that an expansion of absentee voting would be “extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”

And on April 6, the U.S. Supreme Court refused, in a 5-to-4 ruling, to allow additional days for absentee voting in the Wisconsin primary. For years, Wisconsin Republicans have demonstrated that they will do anything to gerrymander and restrict access to voting to stay in power, including now asking citizens to risk their health to vote. Someone should ask Mr. Ralston and the conservative legislators and judges in Wisconsin what they are conserving.

Petitions are now flying around the internet, calling for mail-in voting as has long been practiced in Oregon and other states. Democrats are using Mr. Trump’s stumble into truth-telling as a fund-raiser. Republicans are trying to avoid the subject entirely or repeating worn-out claims of voter “fraud.”

This eruption has immediate consequences: Americans are about to see how fragile our right to vote really is. Among our many fears is the widespread concern over whether we will have an open and legitimate general election in November. If we are still stuck at home, will we be able to vote? Or will we have to risk our lives by venturing to our local school gym?

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With customary ignorance, Mr. Trump has also stumbled unknowingly into history, our long tale of trickery, laws, Orwellian propaganda and violence as ways of keeping the mass of voters from casting ballots. Since the beginning of our Republic, and especially since Emancipation and the stirrings of black suffrage established in the 14th and 15th Amendments, restricting the franchise has been a frighteningly effective tool of conservatism and entrenched interests.

America has a long history of attempts to restrict the right to vote to people with property, with sufficient formal education and, too often, those privileged by gender or race. Political minorities — today’s Republican Party, antebellum slaveholders, Gilded Age oligarchs or rural states empowered disproportionately by the Electoral College — have always feared and suppressed the expansion of both the right and the access to the right to vote. There is no Republican majority in America, except on Election Days

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Mr. Trump’s rhetorical stumble into truth joins a litany of similar expressions in American history. The creation of black male suffrage was the most contested of all the problems of the early new state governments formed during Reconstruction. Most white Southerners were hellbent on trying to restore white supremacy, especially in voting. Appointed by President Andrew Johnson as South Carolina’s governor in 1865, Benjamin F. Perry believed that black suffrage would give political power over to “ignorant, stupid, demi-savage paupers.” In North Carolina, the politician William A. Graham believed enfranchising blacks would “roll back the tide of civilization two centuries at least.”

In Southern history, when the law wasn’t on the side of voter suppression, intimidation, fraud and murderous violence served as ready alternatives. As the historian Carol Anderson writes in her brilliant book “One Person, No Vote,” the techniques of voter suppression in the 19th century were conducted with “warped brilliance” and were “simultaneously mundane and pernicious,” whether by requiring voters to interpret bizarrely complex written passages to prove literacy, in fail-safe grandfather clauses or through allegedly race-neutral poll taxes. Today’s vote suppressors are no less pernicious, sporting earnest outrage at the fraud they cannot find.

As many Americans broadly came to embrace the defeat of Reconstruction in the South, viewing it as a futile, even unnatural, racial experiment, historians at the turn of the 20th century declared black suffrage the great demon of a “tragic era.” Writing in 1901 in The Atlantic, the historian William A. Dunning, whose work helped define a generation’s interpretation of the post-Civil War era, wrote of “The Undoing of Reconstruction.”

In Dunning’s polite brand of white supremacy, black voting during Reconstruction — which for a while brought political revolution and hundreds of black elected officials to the South — was a curse and a historical blunder. The “political equality of the negroes,” he maintained, went too far and necessitated a counterrevolution to roll it back.

Dunning never used our modern term, suppression. He called it “pressure applied by all these various methods” to reduce the black vote. Indeed, the “undoing” of Reconstruction could be measured, as Dunning celebrated, in the large reductions of black voter turnout in Southern states. Votes were not suppressed; they simply “disappeared,” he said, like bad weather.

In the 1884 presidential election compared with that of 1876, the black vote declined from 182,000 to 91,000 in South Carolina, 164,000 to 120,000 in Mississippi and 160,000 to 108,000 in Louisiana. As the Jim Crow system descended on Southern life, black voters became increasingly “extinct,” Dunning wrote. Dr. Anderson documents this “voter mortality rate” by the early 20th century: Between 1896 and 1904, registered black voters in Louisiana plummeted from 130,000 to 1,342, and in Alabama from 180,000 to 3,000. Today’s Republicans can only dream of such numbers, but they need only fractions of those counts to succeed. Their trickery matches their challenge. We should not mince words: Voter mortality is their goal.

Fueling Dunning’s confidence about Jim Crow’s control over voting was the coup and bloody massacre committed by white Democrats in Wilmington, N.C., in the election of 1898. The largest city in the state, Wilmington had forged a black majority and a successful black economic and political leadership. White Democrats found black rule and economic success unbearable. In a vicious white-supremacist campaign led by a Confederate veteran and congressman, Alfred Waddell, whites used lies, intimidation, cartoon journalism and racial terrorism to take back control first of the city and then of the entire state. Organized mobs, energized by grievance and racial hatred, violently overthrew the election.

In rousing speeches, Waddell made their “duty” clear to the mobs of Wilmington. “This city, county and state shall be rid of Negro domination, once and forever,” he shouted at an election-eve rally. “Go to the polls tomorrow and if you find a Negro voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill him! Shoot him down in his tracks!” The mob roared and raised their rifles in the air. On and after Election Day, 15 to 20 people were murdered in the immediate uprising, while hundreds of black women and children fled into nearby swamps. About 1,400 fled the city during the next 30 days.

Generations later, the right to vote never seemed so important and newly triumphant as on the day President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in the early spring, and the heroic march that it inspired; a brave and persistent civil rights movement; liberal Democrats joined by a key cadre of moderate Northern Republicans in Congress; and a converted, dedicated former segregationist in Johnson, who embraced his most important historic moment — all of this made the act possible. But it became law against the same resistance and rhetoric left over from the past.

W.B. Hicks, the leader of the white-supremacist Liberty Lobby, told Congress: “If the president’s law is passed, the South will disappear from the civilized world just as surely and certainly as Haiti did in 1804.” Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina trotted out numerous notorious segregationists to testify before his Senate Judiciary Committee. Leander Perez, the Democratic leader of a Louisiana parish, invoked the Dunning school vision of Reconstruction. The bill “was worse than the Thaddeus Stevens legislation during Reconstruction,” he said. “It is inconceivable that Americans would do that to Americans.” The new power of the Voting Rights Act empowered the Justice Department to scrutinize any changes to voting laws and practices (so-called preclearance) in seven states and other regions of the country with especially notorious records of denying the franchise.

As Ari Berman shows in his excellent book on the modern history of voter suppression, “Give Us the Ballot,” the Voting Rights Act has enjoyed many bipartisan renewals since the 1960s. Even the George W. Bush administration, in 2006, after long trying with its Justice Department to engineer new ways to restrict voting in the guise of protecting the “integrity” of the ballot and firing U.S. attorneys who would not pursue voter “fraud” cases that did not exist, buckled under huge public pressure and supported the renewal of the act.

But since Shelby v. Holder in 2013, in which the Supreme Court struck down the crucial preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act, and even before that in other court challenges, a new era of Republican schemes of voter suppression has emerged. The party, increasingly dominated by conservative whites, has demonstrated not only its id but also its deepest fear: the loss of power in the face of demographic change it cannot control.

Mr. Trump’s newfound opposition to mail-in voting (having voted by mail himself in the past), claiming it is an invitation to fraud, is just one more example of the latest turn in the Republican obfuscation of reality. An “epidemic of fraud” stalked the Texas election system, claimed its attorney general (now governor) Greg Abbott, in 2005. In 2011 and 2012 alone, before the Shelby decision, 180 new voter restrictions were created in 41 states, and 27 specific laws were enacted in 19 states, nearly all controlled by Republicans.

Mr. Berman called this process “Old Poison, New Bottles.” And he’s right: Conservative voter suppression has always emerged in perceived crises and necessitated new variations on old lies about the threats of blacks or other marginalized groups to “civilization” or social “order,” or the “liberty” of the powerful. After the 2008 election, the Republicans paid lip service to a new inclusivity; the Obama coalition scared them. But the Tea Party, financial conservatives and Trumpian white nationalism have driven them instead into a spiral of moral panic and voter suppression.

When Trump stumbled into this history, he linked the crisis of his profound failure to manage a pandemic with the recurring challenge of how to conduct fair elections with the ballot truly free. We have many diseases to conquer. Lies and cunning sustain voter suppression in its many forms. Only truth and fierce political action can reveal and defeat it.

David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale and the author, most recently, of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for history.

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