Vote NOW… By Hand… On Paper… Be a Poll Worker… And PROTECT THIS ELECTION!!!

-by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

The Armageddon Election of 2020 is officially underway.

Ballots are in the mail. Vote centers are opening.

Wherever you can, cast your ballot NOW.

Then become a poll worker and/or an  Election Protection volunteer. Do NOT wait until November 3rd, or even late October.

In many states (including California, Nevada and others) if you are a registered voter, you are entitled to get a ballot in the mail. If you don’t, check your registration (on line, or call the election board) and get one sent as soon as possible.

If your ballot does arrive in the mail, check all the boxes on the envelope, see that your signature matches your best ID, that your name and address are perfect, and that required documents are copied and included. Call the election board and/or an Election Protection group to go over the details, and to find out if you can walk in your ballot.

Many sports arenas will be used right up to and/or including election day. Go there if you can.

Wear your mask and social distance.

Bring your envelope and all your ID. Bring (or BE) an election protectionist. Some polling centers offer a choice between voting on paper or by machine. ALWAYS insist on paper. Avoid touchscreen machines at all costs. Also avoid provisional ballots if you can.

Some precincts will offer computerized marking devices. But mark your ballot by hand if you can.

Some may let you personally insert your finished ballot into the digital scanning device that will count them all. DO IT!

If you can’t go in personally, some states may let your ballot be walked in by a family member or an authorized citizen (be careful: requirements vary, and “vote harvesting” is illegal).

If you mail in your ballot, or drop it in a collection box (if there are any), do it NOW.  Make sure that collection box is an authorized receptacle, and not a fake right-wind trash can designed to divert and destroy your vote.

If your ballot gets in early enough, some election workers may actually call you to come in and “cure” errors you might have made on the envelope.

At least a million votes were not counted in 2018 because they came in late. Nearly all 2020 voting will be done on paper ballots and fed into digital scanners.

Even in big numbers, the digital images they create can be read almost immediately, once the last ballot is scanned (the ballots themselves stay for recounts).

Some supervisors will senselessly trash the images once they’re counted, and even these relatively simple machines can be hacked.

But if the scanners are used properly, and are NOT connected to the internet (there’s no reason to connect them), the 2020 threat of long vote-count delays and sinister electronic theft will be far less than with hackable touchscreens.

Meanwhile, Trump’s sabotage is already obvious at the postal service, and in key states like Texas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Trump could still send in troops to destroy ballots, scanners, and more. He will trash any outcome he dislikes.

In the tradition of Hitler’s Brown Shirts and the KKK supported by Trump’s father, armed militias are already preparing to intimidate voters and otherwise assault the democratic process. We must plan for that.

But we can’t let them distract us from FIRST demanding a fair election with a clear mandate.

If you marched for George Floyd, march NOW into your local voting center. Be a poll worker and/or poll monitor to protect and properly certify the votes-- and voters-- as they come to the precincts. The hours are long, but the pay can be good. (Ohio is offering lawyers CLE credit).

Spend at least a few late hours, in teams-- for as long as it takes-- to scan the ballots and/or memory cards that come in on Election Night.

Be there to help process and protect mailed-in and provisional ballots in the following days when Trump claims victory.

Election Protectionists must guarantee that the whole world is watching.

To keep current, join our Monday Grassroots Emergency Election Protection calls.

2020 is already bringing vastly expanded paper balloting, enhanced early and mail-in voting, and a generational shift in poll workers.

But saving our democracy and our ability to survive on this planet demands a protected election and a well-prepared aftermath.

That means ALL OF US!!

How Existential A Threat To Democracy Is Trump And What Do We Do About It?

I don't trust the voting machines... never did, never will. They're too easily hackable. And I've thought that Trump's hysteria over vote-by-mail was because he had it all down exactly how the election would be stolen via machine tampering. With the appointment of future federal penitentiary inhabitant Louis DeJoy as postmaster general, Trump may have handled the vote-by-mail threat to his November plans.

In an OpEd for The Hill, Al Hunt wrote that "The charge by Trump and his attorney general that mail voting risks massive fraud is a canard. Spencer Cox, the conservative Republican lieutenant governor of Utah, who oversees voting in one of five states that exclusively votes by mail, says it's a 'tremendous success' with little fraud. The stated reason for going after the Postal Service is red ink which totaled $8.8 billion last year. A little bit of context on Donald Trump worrying about deficits: As a businessman, he bragged about being 'the King of Debt,' and on his watch, the federal deficit has almost doubled to close to $1 trillion, before the pandemic.

The new postmaster general is a Trump loyalist. He has given $2 million to Republicans and Trump campaigns since 2016, the latest being a $210,000 contribution to the Trump Victory Fund in February. He was going to be finance chair of the Republicans’ Charlotte convention before it was curtailed; his wife has been nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Canada.

DeJoy told the Postal Board of Governors Friday that he's not making any changes that will impede voting by mail and declared: although he has a "a good relationship" with the president, any assertion he'd make decisions at the direction of Trump "is wholly off-base."

In response to an email from me, he wouldn't say whether he spoke with Trump about the job prior to his appointment or has communicated with him since taking over.

He has not assuaged Democrats.

Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA), chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations, told me: "Trump has appointed a donor and political crony to undermine the postal service for partisan gain."

In the first month and half under DeJoy, instructions have gone out to the more than 600,000 postal workers to curb any overtime and cut back services.

There's a more pressing need for overtime during this health crisis. Most postal workers are out every day, exposed to the virus. Three months ago-- the latest data-- some 2,400 postal employees had tested positive for the virus; 17,000 had been quarantined, and scores died. Those numbers undoubtedly have risen since then.

DeJoy is playing with political fire.

In a recent Hart Research-North Star Opinion Research national survey, 94 percent of Americans say the Postal Service is important to them, and there's widespread backing of federal support. A large number of the 31,000 post offices are in rural America, areas that are generally more dependent on mail delivery and that are represented by Republicans.

This morning I woke up to this ominous tweet by by friend Frank Schaeffer:

Jamelle Bouie's NY Times column, published at the same time, came to a similar conclusion: To keep a crooked authoritarian threat to democracy from claiming victory on Nov. 3, Americans patriots who can vote in person may well have to. This is gettin' serious, friends.

There’s no mystery about what President Trump intends to do if he holds a lead on election night in November. He’s practically broadcasting it.

First, he’ll claim victory. Then, having spent most of the year denouncing vote-by-mail as corrupt, fraudulent and prone to abuse, he’ll demand that authorities stop counting mail-in and absentee ballots. He’ll have teams of lawyers challenging counts and ballots across the country.

He also seems to be counting on having the advantage of mail slowdowns, engineered by the recently installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Fewer pickups and deliveries could mean more late-arriving ballots and a better shot at dismissing votes before they’re even opened, especially if the campaign has successfully sued to block states from extending deadlines. We might even see a Brooks Brothers riot or two, where well-heeled Republican operatives stage angry and voluble protests against ballot counts and recounts.

If Trump is leading on election night, in other words, there’s a good chance he’ll try to disrupt and delegitimize the counting process. That way, if Joe Biden pulls ahead in the days (or weeks) after voting ends-- if we experience a “blue shift” like the one in 2018, in which the Democratic majority in the House grew as votes came in-- the president will have given himself grounds to reject the outcome as “fake news.”

The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person. No, not everyone will be able to do that. But if you plan to vote against Trump and can take appropriate precautions, then some kind of hand delivery-- going to the polls or bringing your mail-in ballot to a “drop box”-- will be the best way to protect your vote from the president’s concerted attempt to undermine the election for his benefit.

...There are reforms that could keep the president from taking this tack. To account for postal delays, states can pledge to count ballots postmarked on or before Nov. 3, so that they’re included in the total even if they arrive late. To speed up the process, states could permit election officials to verify and count mail-in ballots even before Election Day. They could also decline to release results until all polls close and all votes are in. News organizations, similarly, could set expectations for viewers and bring as much transparency as possible to vote counts and other forms of election analysis.

Nonetheless, there is a chance that the president takes this path regardless of state officials and the media. And there’s every reason to think that some portion of the Republican Party will back him. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are already challenging mail-in voting laws and suing to keep states like Nevada and Pennsylvania from enlarging their scope. It is easy to imagine a replay of Florida 2000, except on a national scale.

The best defense for the president’s political opponents is, if possible, to vote in person. For some, this will mean going to the polls in November, in the middle of flu season, when the spread of Covid-19 may worsen. In most states, however, there are multiple ways to cast or hand in a ballot. Every state offers some form of early or absentee voting, and 33 states-- including swing states like Arizona and Wisconsin-- allow absentee voting without an excuse. Trump supports absentee voting-- it’s how his older supporters in Florida vote-- and his opponents should take advantage of the fact that those systems won’t be under the same kind of attack. Many vote-by-mail states also offer drop boxes so that voters can deliver ballots directly to the registrar. And if you must mail in your ballot, the best practice would be to post it as early as possible, to account for potential delays.

Earlier this year, a group of more than 100 people-- Republicans, Democrats, senior political operatives and members of the media-- gathered to role play the November election, using predetermined rules and procedures. “In each scenario other than a Biden landslide,” writes Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, who helped organize the exercise, “we ended up with a constitutional crisis that lasted until the inauguration, featuring violence in the streets and a severely disrupted administrative transition.”

There you have it. To head off the worst outcomes, Trump must go down in a decisive defeat. He’s on that path already. The task for his opponents is to sustain that momentum and work to make his defeat as obvious as possible, as early as possible. The pandemic makes that a risk, but it’s a risk many of us may have to take.

Christine Pellegrino is favored to replace a worthless Republican Trumpist on Long Island. This morning she mentioned to me that "Trump's popularity or lack there-of is absolutely going to drive people to the polls, or their mailboxes, to vote. But I'm not taking my foot off the gas. At the end of the day, voters care about common sense issues: good jobs, good schools, and healthcare. Talking to voters about the change Albany can create for all of us is empowering for the disaffected. The voters want a real representative. They’re tired of lazy, lifetime politicians and they’re demanding more than they just show up for photos. Down ballot candidates like me need to make sure that people mobilized by the 'Trump factor' fill out their entire ballots."

My old friend, Jerry Leichtling, came up with a brilliant idea-- that's what brilliant people like Jerry do... come up with brilliant ideas. Take look at this proposal he just sent me:

Inasmuch as E-Commerce companies have benefitted tremendously from the Covid-19 Pandemic, these same companies should be willing to do the people of the United States a massive public service. Given the Trump-ordered slowdown of the United States Postal Service there is no reason why federally-bonded companies like Amazon, Fedex and UPS should not, as a patriotic public service, pick up all voters' ballots and deliver them to Local Boards of Elections. These companies, and hundreds more, already do massive business with the Postal Service. They have literally millions of employees and are NOT slowing down. Please write to the CEO’s of Amazon-- Jeff Bezos (Jeff@Amazon.com); Fedex-- Fred Smith (Fredric.Smith@Fedex.Com) and UPS, Carol Tome (CTome@UPS.com) with the heading or hashtag Special Delivery Democracy. and send copies to your elected representatives as well. Let’s see if we can derail Trump’s express train to tyranny.

Counting Sheep by Nancy Ohanian

Death Is the Ultimate Voter Suppression

-by Dorothy Reik

While we are all wringing our hands over vote by mail and long lines at limited polling places, we are missing the big picture. COVID-19 is killing off Black and Brown voters in droves. The dead don’t vote-- except in Trump’s demented mind.

CNN reports that 23% of those dying of the virus are Black although they make up only 13% of our population. Black Americans’ death rates are the same as those of white people who are a decade older according to the Brookings Institute. They also report that among those aged 45-54, for example, Black and Hispanic/Latino death rates are at least SIX times higher than for whites.

In Alabama Blacks made up 40% of the COVID-19 deaths reported in April but they are only 25% of the population. CNN also reported in April that Black communities account for 60% of COVID deaths.

In May, CNN reported that in Iowa, Latinos accounted for 6% of the population but 20% of deaths from COVID-19. In Los Angeles the LA Times reports that the death rate from coronavirus is twice as high for Blacks as for whites and while they represent 8% of the population they represent 13% of corona-related deaths.

More recent reports show “Overall, Latinos were succumbing to the disease at rates of about two- to two-and-a-half times higher than the white population. And in the case of African-Americans, it’s still higher, about three and a half times higher” according to University of Texas professor Rogelio Saenz.

Black and Latino New Yorkers are dying at twice the rate of white New Yorkers.

As the headline of an Atlantic article by Adam Serwer says "The Coronavirus Was an Emergency, Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying." But why stop with Black and Brown voters-- teachers vote against Trump too so he is going after them next. He IS forcing schools to open so super spreader kiddies can kill them off. As a bonus, their Black and Brown parents, freed from child care and with no more unemployment insurance supplements, will head back to work and die too. Rich white kids will continue their Zoom classes-- their schools don’t need Federal funding-- and besides their private schools got PPP loans according to the just released SBA report. Meanwhile their parents will continue to work from home.

These reports don’t begin to touch what is going on now as the death rate passes 130,000 and the cases exceed 3 million. In Houston, victims are dying in their homes, just as they did in NYC during the worst of that city’s surge. Houston hasn’t counted the dead by color yet but with Texas in play my bet is that most of them are Black and Brown. Maybe that’s why Abbott was so eager to open the state. You could say the same about DeSantis in Florida, a state Trump has to win.

There’s nothing like a good pandemic to cut down the voting rolls. Who needs cross check! These voters are just checking out-- period.

No One Does Voter Suppression Like A Conservative-- A Guest Post By Jeff Rasley

You may think of Jeff Rasley as a travel writer and Himalayan trekking organizer. His last post for us-- over at our travel blog-- dealt with his cross-country drive through the American pandemic. Jeff describes himself as "an elderly white-male person, whose tongue is getting sore from pressing against his cheek (sort of)." But as a young attorney in a firm in Indianapolis, he was a supervisor of Mike Pence, when Pence was a summer legal intern with the firm. Rasley is the author of Polarized! The Case for Civility in the Time of Trump, and nine other books. His website is jeffreyrasley.com. 


Let’s Do Voter Suppression The Right Way!
-by Jeff Rasley

"As people do better, they start voting like Republicans...unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing." -Karl Rove

Republicans have routinely engaged in voter suppression efforts since the 2000 Bush v. Gore election. Rather than trying to attract black and brown people to vote Republican, the GOP has strategically reduced the political power of racial-minorities by reducing the number of eligible voters. Republicans have managed to swing several close elections their way. Rather than being outraged about the fundamental unfairness of their tactics and filing lawsuits, let’s turn the tables and suppress their votes. Let’s disenfranchise one of the pillars of the Trump base, elderly white people.

During Jim Crow, southern segregationist-Democrats used literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African-Americans. In the 21st Century, Republicans employ more sophisticated strategies to deny just enough votes of black and brown voters to tip certain elections in favor of Republican candidates. Gerrymandering, burdensome registration and ID requirements, throwing out votes by Republican Secretaries of State, and voter intimidation at polling places are the techniques employed by Republicans.

The most recent ploy was the April 7, 2020 Wisconsin election. Governor Dan Evers ordered the election postponed out of concern for health risks to voters during the corona-virus pandemic. The Republican-dominated legislature and state Supreme Court over-turned the Governor’s order. But-- ha ha!-- it backfired. Democrats won most of the contested elections.

The Democratic win in Wisconsin was, however, an anomaly. Despite the health risks, voter turnout was high; probably due to fury over Trump’s bungled response to the pandemic.

Republican vote tampering in Florida (remember “hanging chads”) gave us W instead of Al Gore in 2000. Think how different the world would be, if Gore, not W, had been President. How many fewer Iraqis, Afghanis, and U.S. soldiers would have died? Would the Great Recession of 2008 been as bad?

One of the most egregious examples since then was the Maryland gubernatorial election in 2010. Republican candidate Bob Ehrlich's campaign manager, Paul Schurick, was convicted of fraud and other charges. Republicans placed thousands of Election Day robo-calls to black Democratic voters telling them that the Democratic candidate had won, so they didn’t need to vote. The calls reached 112,000 voters in majority-African American areas.

Former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach was repeatedly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for trying to restrict voting rights in Kansas. In July 2016 the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down North Carolina’s photo ID requirement, finding that the law targeted African Americans "with almost surgical precision." In 2018, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp was also running as the Republican candidate for Governor. As Secretary of State, Kemp suspended the applications of 53,000 voters, most of whom were African Americans. Kemp also upheld strict voter registration deadlines, which prevented 87,000 Georgians from voting, because they missed the deadline.

Those are just a few of the many times Republicans have suppressed minority-voter turnout in the last 20 years. (For a more complete list, check out Wikipedia’s entry on “Voter suppression in the United States.”) They will be up to their usual hijinks this fall to try to keep the Orange Clown in office. So, if you can’t beat them, join them.

What I propose is a straight-forward approach to voter suppression. It is a return to what Democrats used in the segregated South during Jim Crow. It’s a voter intelligence test in the form of a three-part questionnaire.

1. Were you unable to discern that Richard Nixon was a crook, and you voted for him in 1968 and again in 1972?

2. When George W. Bush ran for a second term as President, did you still fail to realize he was incompetent to be President and you voted for him a second time?

3. Did you vote for Donald Trump in 2016 because he appealed to you for any of the following reasons? a) He is a successful businessman and we need a brilliant business mind like his to run the country. b) He will drain the swamp and blow up the Washington political establishment. c) He will restore America’s greatness and regain the respect we lost under Obama’s weak leadership. d) No woman should ever be President. e) He was chosen by God to turn the country back to its divinely ordained Christian values.

Under my proposed “voter discernment law,” anyone who answers affirmatively to the first question will be denied the right to vote, unless redeemed by negative answers to the second and third questions. Correcting that initial mistake would prove that “an old dog did learn a new trick.” But unredeemed Nixon voters would be scrubbed from the polls due to their stupidity. That would rid us of a large swath of elderly white people, which would likely guarantee that Trump will not be reelected.

But to make sure of that result, anyone who voted for W a second time must be purged on the basis of a clear inability to discern incompetence. Younger or older voters, who voted for Trump in 2016 for any of the listed reasons-- maybe any reason-- should also be struck from voter rolls. Thus, anyone inclined to vote for future candidates, like crooked Nixons, incompetent Ws, or narcissic-fascistic-crooked-incompetent Trumps will be spared the trouble of casting a vote.

The law will allow those failing the voter-intelligence test to vote in local elections. We’ll let these partially disenfranchised voters to screw up the communities where they live, and then have to live with the consequences. But they should never again be allowed to fuck up an entire state, let alone the whole country with their uncanny ability to make the worst choice on Election Day.

Although voter suppression has a foul and dirty history, consider a brighter future in which the proposed voter-intelligence test will save the world from the disastrous consequences of electing the likes of the three afore-mentioned U.S. Presidents. At the very least, by culling these foolish voters the Republican Party might be goaded into nominating candidates worthy to serve as President of the United States.

Now, if this voter-intelligence test offends your democratic principles, the author admonishes the reader (with tongue partly in cheek) to consider that: 1. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it; and the voting history of those who voted for all three of those historically bad presidents proves they lack capacity in discerning who is unworthy to become leader of the free world. 2. Whether it is insanity or stupidity, making the same mistake repeatedly is a really bad thing to do. Shouldn’t there be consequences?

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

In keeping with the president's intense psychopathology, the Trump owned and operated "Supreme" Court chose illness and death over the Constitutional right to vote for untold numbers of Wisconsin citizens earlier this week when they decreed from on high that there would be no extension of voting time, due to the pandemic, for citizens to get, fill out, and send in absentee ballots. Many voters who had asked for the absentee ballots literally didn't receive their ballots in time due to pandemic-caused postal delays. The result of all of this will be, of course, ballots being tossed in the garbage by state election officials and voters waiting in line as huddled masses, some infectious, some not, and all soon to be if they risked their health by voting. This is not unlike Trump urging Americans to pack their churches of Easter. The more sickness and death the merrier, no matter what your party affiliation. Make your judges and your president happy; get sick and die.

In short, Republicans, for whatever reasons, always seem to have an advantage that goes up as the number of actual voters goes down. It's the turnout wars and this decision to not extend the absentee ballot deadline will be a template for increased voter suppression across the country this year. It's a particularly brazen addition to the Republican Party's smorgasbord of voter suppression. It's taking advantage. It's evil. It's cynical. It's who they are. In this case, the scheming particularly affects urban African-Americans and Latinos who have suffered a deliberate decrease in polling locations in order to discourage voters with extra long lines at the locations which remain. The scheme also targets elderly voters in Wisconsin who, like African-Americans and Latinos, tend to vote for Democratic Party candidates. In addition, of course, the elderly are particularly more susceptible to the ravages of the coronavirus as are African-Americans and Latinos who live in densely packed urban neighborhoods. It's all part of the Republican Party grand strategy, and don't think for a second that dirtbags like "Justice" John Roberts (special thanks to Chucky Schumer) and Donald Trump haven't rubbed their hands in glee about it.

Who Votes Against The Voting Rights Act? Racists And Only Racists

On Friday, the House passed another crucial piece of legislation, H.R.4-- the Voting Rights Advancement Act-- 4 that MoscowMitch intends to bury in his fetid Senate crypt. In the end, every Democrat (+ one Republican, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania) voted for it and every Republican but Fitzpatrick voted against it.) The bill is meant to restore and modernize the Voting Rights Act to guarantee local bigots can't prevent groups from exercising their right to vote, creating a new coverage formula that hinges on a finding of repeated voting rights violations in the preceding 25 years. Pramila Jayapal was up on the floor of the House before the vote yesterday, telling her colleagues that "When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it was a recognition that systemic discrimination based on race continued to deny people the right to vote. As an organizer, I understand the VRA as a victory hard fought by Black activists like Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and of course our esteemed colleague, Representative John Lewis, who devoted their lives to fighting for the right to vote; by a movement that recognized that this right to vote is absolutely fundamental to our concept of and our actualization of democracy. But unfortunately, we have not followed with the same courage. Instead, since 2013, states have enacted laws that are suppressing voting rights across the country. And today, half the country faces stricter voting rights as a result. If we want a true democracy, we must protect the right to vote for all. This is bill is critical to getting there."

Before it passed, however, the Republicans tried pulling a little fast one to kill it with a motion to recommit. That failed, but by only 15 votes. Why so close? Can you say "Blue Dogs and their fellow travelers are racists?" 11 conservative Democrats crossed the aisle and voted with the KKK to kill H.R. 4. And here they are, hoping no one noticed when their hoods slipped off:

• Cindy Axne (New Dem-IA)
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)
• Abby Finkenauer (IA)
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)
• Elisa Slotkin (New Dem-MI)
• Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA)
• Xochitl Torres Small (Blue Dog-NM)
• Jefferson Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ)

After passage, Derrick Johnson, President and CEO of the NAACP remarked that "This crucial piece of legislation modernizes the Voting Rights Act, protecting voters from the types of voting changes most likely to discriminate against people of color. Passage of this bill in the House today is an important first step to ensuring equal participation for all in our democracy. We call upon the Senate to immediately take up this legislation. The NAACP will keep fighting until this bill is signed into law."

Liam O'Mara is the progressive Democrat taking on corrupt Riverside County Trumpist, Ken Calvert, a notorious racist who voted against the Voting Rights Act yesterday "Let's not mince words," said O'Mara, "The Republicans just voted to back voter-suppression on the basis of race and class. They will call it a principled defence of states rights, and conveniently leave out that the right they're defending is to systemic racism and classism. Courts have repeatedly shown that GOP gerrymandering is done with partisan and racist intent, but since a Republican-dominated SCOTUS thinks that's a-okay, it falls to Congress to defend the very foundation of democracy: the franchise. It seems our incumbent, and all but one Republican House member, think that it's perfectly okay for states flagrantly to deny voting rights to lawful citizens. The House bill impacts only states with many proven instances of voting-rights violations, but as that's a problem almost unique to red states, we know where the GOP's priorities lie. Big hint: it's not defending the Constitution or the rights of the people."

Kathy Ellis and Kara Eastman are both progressives running for Congress Republican-held districts-- and both of their opponents, respectively Jason Smith (R-MO) and Donald Bacon (R-NE), voted against the Voting Rights Act. After the vote yesterday Ellis told us that "The right to vote is the most fundamental right of our Democracy. All Americans, regardless of Party, should do whatever they can to protect this right. Representative Smith should be ashamed of himself. It’s clear that it’s time for new leadership in Missouri’s 8th." Eastman was also disturbed that Bacon voted against H.R.4. "The fact is," she told us, "Republicans like Don Bacon benefit when fewer people vote. HR 4 would turn the tide back to a full and fair democracy, so it’s no surprise he voted no."

Republicans Double Down On Stealing Elections-- Normalizing Foreign Interference And Disenfranchising College Students

Yesterday, after Matt Gaetz had finished eating his pizza pies and wrapped up the GOP temper tantrum du jour, the House voted on H.R. 4617, the SHIELD Act (Stopping Harmful Interference in Elections for a Lasting Democracy) to protect American elections from foreign interference. It passed 227 to 181. Not even one Republican was willing to step up to protect the integrity of American elections from the Russians, Saudis and other bad players. It's worth noting that one Blue Dog voted with the Republicans, fake-dei Colin Peterson (MN). Earlier, when the Republicans had tried to kill the bill with a motion to recommit, Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ), Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ) and Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY) voted with the Republicans, as they usually do.

Trump announced he will veto the bill if it passes the Senate, which is unlikely since Moscow Mitch will not allow a debate or vote on the bill. After all, the bill would require candidates for federal office to notify the FBI and the FEC if any foreign government or their lobbyists agents offer to assist their campaign. The bill also imposes new rules on political ads placed on social media similar to those currently governing radio and TV ads. Neither Moscow Mitch nor Trump could win reelection without illegal foreign assistance.

The excuse the White House and congressional Republicans made for opposing the bill is that the reporting requirements would overly burden campaigns without furthering securing U.S. elections, calling the act "redundant, overly broad, ambiguous, and unenforceable ... [and] would produce harmful unintended consequences without achieving that goal." On the Senate floor, Moscow Mitch called it "a transparent attack on the First Amendment that has united an unlikely band of opponents across the political spectrum."

I asked a couple of Blue America-endorsed progressives about this today. J.D. Scholten, who's running against extremest loon Steve King said that "This shouldn't even be a partisan issue. The American people-- not a foreign country-- should elect our leaders. Yet, after King's publicity stunt of storming into a secure hearing room and undermining our national security, he continued this trend by voting against the SHIELD Act, opening the door for foreign manipulation and tampering of our elections. These days, this is par for the course. The Republican party's voter suppression tactics across the country, especially against college students, are un-American. Our country created a government that is of, by, and for the American people, and we should be actively working to lower voting barriers and expand access to the ballot box."

Jon Hoadley is the Democratic candidate in southwest Michigan taking on Trump enabler Fred Upton, who-- like King, voted against the SHIELD Act. "Free and fair elections, Rep. Hoadley, said, "are the basis of our democracy, and that's why I've been a champion of voting rights and election protection in the state legislature. We know that foreign governments sought to influence our elections in 2016, and our Nation's intelligence community has made it clear that they are trying to do it again. Congressman Upton is once again putting his loyalty to his political party ahead of his obligation to represent the people of Southwest Michigan. Upton's vote against the SHIELD Act and aginst protecting the integrity of our elections and democracy is wrong."

Dana Balter the progressive candidate in the Syracuse area (NY-24) pounded out a powerful tweet this morning that helps expose Trump enabler John Katko (R) for his role in all this garbage. This is the video she included:





Since the Republicans know they can't win an election fairly, they do whatever they can to cheat. And involving foreign players isn't all they do. Earlier today, Michael Wines reported fro the NY Times that the GOP is working to make it so hard for college students to vote that they just give up. Take Texas; college students overwhelmingly favor Democrats-- so the state legislature "outlawed polling places that did not stay open for the entire 12-day early-voting period. When the state’s elections take place in three weeks, those nine sites [in Austin]-- which logged many of the nearly 14,000 ballots that full-time students cast last year-- will be shuttered. So will six campus polling places at colleges in Fort Worth, two in Brownsville, on the Mexico border, and other polling places at schools statewide."

“It was a beautiful thing, a lot of people out there in those long lines,” said Grant Loveless, a 20-year-old majoring in psychology and political science who voted last November at a campus in central Austin. “It would hurt a lot of students if you take those polling places away.”

The story at Austin Community College is but one example of a political drama playing out nationwide: After decades of treating elections as an afterthought, college students have begun voting in force.

Their turnout in the 2018 midterms-- 40.3 percent of 10 million students tracked by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education-- was more than double the rate in the 2014 midterms, easily exceeding an already robust increase in national turnout. Energized by issues like climate change and the Trump presidency, students have suddenly emerged as a potentially crucial voting bloc in the 2020 general election.

And almost as suddenly, Republican politicians around the country are throwing up roadblocks between students and voting booths.

Not coincidentally, the barriers are rising fastest in political battlegrounds and places like Texas where one-party control is eroding. Students overwhelmingly lean Democratic, with three in four supportive of impeaching President Trump, according to an Axios/College Reaction poll released this month.

Some states have wrestled with voting eligibility for out-of-state students in the past. And the politicians enacting the roadblocks often say they are raising barriers to election fraud, not ballots. “The threat to election integrity in Texas is real, and the need to provide additional safeguards is increasing,” the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, said last year in announcing one of his office’s periodic crackdowns on illegal voting. But evidence of widespread fraud is nonexistent, and the restrictions fit an increasingly unabashed pattern of Republican politicians’ efforts to discourage voters likely to oppose them.

“Efforts to deprive any American of a convenient way to vote will have a chilling effect on voting,” Nancy Thomas, the director of the Tufts institute, said. “And efforts to chill college students’ voting are despicable-- and very frustrating.”

The headline example is in New Hampshire. There, a Republican-backed law took effect this fall requiring newly registered voters who drive to establish “domicile” in the state by securing New Hampshire driver’s licenses and auto registrations, which can cost hundreds of dollars annually.

The dots are not hard to connect: According to the Tufts study, six in 10 New Hampshire college students come from outside the state, a rate among the nation’s highest. As early as 2011, the state’s Republican House speaker at the time, William O’Brien, promised to clamp down on unrestricted voting by students, calling them “kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.”

Florida’s Republican secretary of state outlawed early-voting sites at state universities in 2014, only to see 60,000 voters cast on-campus ballots in 2018 after a federal court overturned the ban. This year, the State Legislature effectively reinstated it, slipping a clause into a new elections law that requires all early-voting sites to offer “sufficient non-permitted parking”-- an amenity in short supply on densely packed campuses.

North Carolina Republicans enacted a voter ID law last year that recognized student identification cards as valid-- but its requirements proved so cumbersome that major state universities were unable to comply. A later revision relaxed the rules, but much confusion remains, and fewer than half the state’s 180-plus accredited schools have sought to certify their IDs for voting.

Wisconsin Republicans also have imposed tough restrictions on using student IDs for voting purposes. The state requires poll workers to check signatures only on student IDs, although some schools issuing modern IDs that serve as debit cards and dorm room keys have removed signatures, which they consider a security risk.

The law also requires that IDs used for voting expire within two years, while most college ID cards have four-year expiration dates. And even students with acceptable IDs must show proof of enrollment before being allowed to vote.

...While legislators call the rules anti-fraud measures, Wisconsin has not recorded a case of intentional student voter fraud in memory, Mr. Burden said. But a healthy turnout of legitimate student voters could easily tip the political balance in many closely divided states.

Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, a Democrat, won election in 2016 by 1,017 votes over her Republican rival, Kelly Ayotte. Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat, won that year by about 10,000 votes in a state with nearly 500,000 undergraduates. And Donald J. Trump carried Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes; the University of Wisconsin system alone enrolls more than 170,000 students.

...Repeated studies have shown that making voting convenient improves turnout. And while it is difficult to say with certainty what causes turnout to decline, anecdotal evidence suggests that barriers to student voting have done just that. Nationwide, student turnout in the 2016 presidential election exceeded that of the 2012 presidential vote-- but according to the Tufts institute, it fell sharply in Wisconsin, where the state’s voter ID law first applied to students that year.

Hurdles to student voting are hardly limited to politically competitive states. Most notably, the voter ID law in deeply Republican Tennessee does not recognize student ID cards as valid for voting, and legislators have removed out-of-state driver’s licenses from the list of valid identifications.

A Tennessee law requiring election officials to help register high school students is commonly skirted via a loophole, said Lisa Quigley, the top aide to Representative Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat and voting rights advocate. And cities like Nashville and Knoxville, with large concentrations of college students, have no campus polling places, she said.

Tennessee ranks 50th in voter turnout among the states and the District of Columbia. “We’re terrible at voting,” Ms. Quigley said. “And it’s intentional.”

Only Texas’ turnout is worse. And as in Tennessee, voting is particularly difficult for the young.

Texas law requires educators to distribute voter registration forms to high school students, but the requirement appears to be ignored by most of the state’s 3,700 secondary schools. And while many states allow students to preregister at 16 or 17, and even vote in primaries if they turn 18 by Election Day in November, Texas bars students from registering until two months before their 18th birthday, the nation’s most restrictive rule.

The state’s voter ID law-- among the most onerous, though softened by court rulings-- still excludes college and university ID cards and out-of-state driver’s licenses that many students commonly carry.

Some Texas schools have sought for years to lower those barriers. At the University of Texas at Austin, a group called TX Votes has greatly increased turnout by rallying students against voting restrictions and enlisting scores of campus groups in voting and registration campaigns.

Austin Community College, whose 39,000 full-time and 33,000 part-time students sprawl over campuses in four Texas counties, pursues a similar strategy. The system’s student body is drawn largely from working-class and minority families.

In addition to sponsoring the campus voting, it gives its employees two hours off during every election to cast ballots.

It is not the only Texas college to set up campus voting. North of Austin, Southwestern University collected ballots from more than half of its 1,500 students last November in a one-day visit by a mobile polling place. Tarrant County, whose largest city is Fort Worth, racked up 11,000 votes at mobile campus sites; Cameron County, in southern Texas, opened three campus sites and reaped nearly 2,800 votes.

Dollar for dollar, mobile voting sites were “the most effective program we had,” Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk and chief elections official, said.

State legislators took a dimmer view. Last spring, State Representative Greg Bonnen, a Republican from suburban Houston, filed legislation to require that all polling places remain open during the whole early-voting period, eliminating pop-up polls. He argued that local politicians were using the sites to attract supportive voters for pet projects like school bond issues.

The Texas Association of Election Administrators opposed the change, and Democratic legislators proposed to exclude college campuses, nursing homes and other sites from the requirement. But Republicans rejected the changes and passed the bill on largely party-line votes.

There are efforts to push back at the restrictions on student voting. The elections administrator in Dallas County, Toni Pippins-Poole, decided after the Legislature outlawed temporary polls to spend the money needed to make pop-up voting sites on eight college campuses permanent.

In New Hampshire, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is suing to undo the State Legislature’s domicile law. The League of Women Voters and the Andrew Goodman Foundation, a Mahwah, N.J., nonprofit group focused on protecting voting rights for young people, are contesting Florida’s parking requirements for polls in federal court.

Purdue University said last month that it would not charge out-of-state students a fee for ID cards, which are valid for voting in Indiana. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., Purdue’s president and the state’s Republican governor from 2005 to 2013, said he wanted to encourage civic literacy among students.

Advocates for student voters argue that those are the exceptions.

“Everyone 18 years and older has a right, if not a duty, to participate in our electoral system,” said Maxim Thorne, the managing director of the Goodman Foundation. “We should be having conversations about how to make it easier, how to make it more welcoming, how to make it worthy of our time and effort. And what we’re seeing is the reverse.”

Protecting voting rights for students and minorities has been an integral part of Mike Siegel's career and campaign. He's running against a typical right-wing Republican incumbent in a gerrymandered Texas district that stretches from north Austin all the way to the Houston exurbs. This morning he told me that "The Republican attack on mobile voting in Texas is voter suppression at its most insidious. The two groups that will suffer most are youth and seniors. For example, I've visited a senior home in Austin with hundreds of voters, where folks relied on a mobile voting location to vote in numerous recent elections. Now many folks will have to venture out to voting locations further away, presenting logistical challenges and safety concerns. Whereas rural seniors consistently vote by mail, urban seniors often prefer to vote in person. The ban on mobile voting locations seems precision-guided to target likely Democratic senior voters."

And in terms of the youth vote, numerous high schools and community colleges across the Texas 10th have enough voters to utilize a mobile voting location, but not enough to justify "permanent" voting locations. By taking away the mobile voting option, Republicans will suppress thousands of student votes statewide, unless we can win a court injunction.

I am in touch with national voting rights experts to explore emergency legal action. The 26th Amendment of the United States Constitution provides, "The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age." The ban on mobile voting locations singles out students and seniors, taking away a highly effective way to vote. I hope we can build a legal team and plaintiffs who will stop this law before it inflicts any damage on voter participation.

Republican Criminal Behavior-- From North Carolina To Kansas

Have you been wondering how much Mark Harris paid professional Republican Party vote thief Leslie McCrae Dowless to steal the 2018 election for him? It was over half a million dollars, probably a lot over half a million dollars. How slimy is Harris? Watch the sickening video above that he released yesterday through Twitter.

He refers to his scheme to steal the Republican primary from Mark Pittenger and then the general from Blue Dog Dan McCready as "alleged irregularities." He wants to let everyone know that he and his campaign "are cooperating fully with the state Board of Elections investigation." Is he really? What's the alternative? Seeking asylum in Paraguay, which still has a sentimental soft-spot for fascists? And it got sleazier: "I trust the process that's underway, just as I've always trusted the decisions of the voters." That's why he paid Dowless to collect absentee ballots and destroy them?

Here are my favorite lines, which I hope are played for a jury one day very soon:

I trust that this investigation will be full and complete, examining any alleged irregularities that could have benefited either party in this election or in past election cycles. The integrity of our electoral process is the heart of our democracy. And we must protect it.

Though I was absolutely unaware of any wrong-doing that will not prevent me from cooperating with this investigation. I'm hopeful that this process will ultimately result in the certification of my election to Congress before the next House session begins. However, if this investigation finds proof of illegal activity on either side, to such a level that it could have changed the outcome of the election then I would wholeheartedly support a new election to insure all voters have confidence in the results.

Two things I want to say about this. First is that he used "either side" twice when no one is accusing McCready or Pittenger of anything other than being victims of Harris' criminal conspiracy. And, second that it doesn't matter if Harris' crooked employees told ten votes ten thousand votes, he should be banned from participating in any elections and should be tried for a n extremely serious crime and, hopefully, spend the rest of his life in prison.

This is all part of what we've been talking about-- the undermining of democracy by the Republican Party, whether that means state legislators in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina trying to invalidate their losses in lame duck sessions, Trump and his repulsive family working with the Russians to steal the 2016 presidential election, or characters like Harris hiring a known felon-- Dowless-- to steal ballots from minority voters.

Funny, just as I was finishing up on this post, a McClatchy report popped up on my screen about more GOP criminal behavior, this time by Kanas Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins. She's retiring but hasn’t left Congress yet, and has "already launched a new lobbying firm," which is absolutely illegal.

Jenkins’ term in the U.S. House doesn’t officially end until the first week of January and she still faces major votes on the farm bill, homeland security budget and other legislation. But her new business, LJ Strategies, LLC, has already registered with the state of Kansas.

Ethics watchdogs say the situation makes a mockery of the rules restricting lawmakers from working as lobbyists until they’ve been out of office for at least one year.


“This is an egregious abuse of the revolving door,” said Craig Holman, the lobbyist for Public Citizen, a group which advocates for stricter ethics rules.


“I suspect she’s being coached as to how to dance around the law, but it certainly violates the spirit of the revolving door law itself,” he said.

And, Holman warned, “She’s opened herself up to being bought.”

Jenkins and her firm should be banned from lobbying Congress in perpetuity and she should be banned from entering the Capitol from the moment next month that her term expires. Conservative lawmakers seem to believe that laws are written for "the little people," not for them.

You know what that Harris video reminded me of? That great clip 60 Minutes clip that shows John Boehner's reaction when he was caught red-handed giving out tobacco industry checks on the floor of the House. Like Harris Boehner seemed offended by his own behavior. "it's a practice," he told 60 Minutes, "that's gone on here for a long time that we're trying to stop... It's a bad practice," he said indignantly [about his own behavior]. "We ought to stop this. This is just not something that ought to happen." Watch:

New Election After Republicans Were Caught Trying To Steal A House Seat In North Carolina?

2 GOP crooks-- Mark Harris and Trumpanzee

By the end of last month, it was already obvious that North Carolina Trumpist, Mark Harris, had stolen both the GOP primary that ousted Robert Pittenger and then the general election in which he-- against all odds-- beat Blue Dog Dan McCready. The final 538.com forecast omg November 6, showed Harris with just a 12.1% chance to win (1 in 8).

Harris has been in DC pretending that he's the legitimately-elected congressman from North Carolina's 9th district, the state's southern tier, from Charlotte through Monroe, Wadesboro and Lumberton and up to Fayetteville. Everyone knows he tampered with the ballots and wasn't really elected. According to the election tallies that no one believes to be legitimate, Harris beat McCready 138,338 (49.4%) to 136,478 (48.8%). There are 8 counties in the district. McCready won 6, including the biggest (Mecklenburg). But it appears that the absentee ballot scheme that Harris almost pulled off, gave him wins in Bladen and Union counties. Congress-- meaning the Democratic majority-- will decide whether or not to seat Harris. I don't see Speaker Pelosi swearing him in. In all but Bladen County, McCready won among mail-in absentee ballot voters by at least 16 points. In Bladen County, he lost by 24. A Harris capo, notorious crook Leslie McCrae Dowless, Jr., led a crew of thugs who went door-to-door in Bladen County collecting blank or partially-completed absentee ballots, promising to finish and submit the ballots on the voters' behalf. This is an old Republican trick that they do all over the country. Harris was paying Dowless in untraceable cash-- and Dowless passed the cash on to his team for, in effect, buying the absentee ballots.

Yesterday, the district's biggest newspaper, the Charlotte Observer, urged the state to hold a new election from scratch, although it makes no sense to allow Harris to participate in one.

In the week since the state Board of Elections declined to certify the results of North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District election, journalists and others have begun to fill in the details of a troubling case of apparent ballot fraud. In Bladen County-- and perhaps other counties-- individuals have interfered with the voting process by gaining access to others’ absentee ballots, according to witnesses and records. Investigators also are looking into the burgeoning scandal.

There may be no way, however, to know how widespread the fraud was, or whether it involved enough ballots to potentially change the outcome of the election-- a 905-vote victory for Republican Mark Harris over Democrat Dan McCready. But we do know enough. Unless new evidence somehow clears the clouds hanging over this election, the Board of Elections should toss out the 9th District results.

Calling for a new election would be an enormously significant decision for the board. It should be done with the support of N.C. statutes and without a whiff of partisan politics. Republicans from Raleigh to Washington would surely howl; already, they’ve noted that the number of absentee ballots cast in Bladen County falls short of the overall margin of victory in the 9th.

This is true. But witnesses have said that their ballots, which were collected by individuals apparently working for ringleader McCrae Dowless, were never submitted to the county or state. There’s little certainty about how many ballots were wrongly tossed or destroyed in Bladen County (there were more than 1,500 that were requested but unreturned) or how much Dowless and his workers may have done the same in neighboring Robeson County, as reports suggest. It might have been enough to change the outcome of the race. It might not have been.


That possibility, however, triggers a statutory threshold for holding a new election. North Carolina General Statute 163A-1180 authorizes the Board of Elections to intervene and “take any other action necessary to assure that an election is determined without taint of fraud or corruption and without irregularities that may have changed the result of an election.” The board should call for a new NC-09 general election. The U.S. House can and should order a new primary, given that results show Harris winning a startling 96 percent of the Bladen absentee vote in his narrow 2018 primary victory over then incumbent Robert Pittenger.

Questions remain about how much Harris knew about the work being done on his behalf. Both he and his chief consultant, Andy Yates, contend they weren’t aware of any election fraud in the 9th District, but Dowless was well-known as a dicey figure in N.C. political circles. He’s a convicted felon who had been investigated for similar fraud in 2016, and he even was featured nationally in a This American Life episode. Harris, at the least, should have seen the smoke.

Voters in the 9th District deserve the confidence that their election was free from fraud. North Carolina statute supports it. The evidence already demands it. The Board of Elections should start the election over.

Yesterday, Gerry Connolly (D-VA), who will be second in command on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in a few weeks, wants the committee to call an emergency hearing immediately to look into Republican vote tampering in NC-09, calling it "real election fraud... Votes have been stolen by preying on senior and minority voters, and now a cloud of doubt and suspicion hangs over this election result. It is incumbent on Chairman Gowdy to hold an emergency hearing before the end of this congressional session so that we can shed light and understand what happened in this race."

The Hill reported last night that "Over a thousand absentee ballots from likely Democratic voters may have been destroyed... as allegations of fraud on behalf of the Republican candidate mount. 'You’re looking at several thousand, possibly 2,000 absentee ballot requests from this most recent election. About 40 percent of those, it appears, at this point may not have been returned,' Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman told CNN... Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the next House majority leader, said Tuesday that Democrats will not seat Harris until the allegations are resolved."

What's at stake? I mean really at stake? Believe me, it's way more than just another North Carolina House seat. Here's Bernie talking about chutzpah to the Real News Network at Berniepalooza last week:




UPDATE: McCready Just Withdrew His Concession

In an exclusive interview, McCready told Joe Bruno that he thinks Harris not only knew what McCrae Dowless was doing but that he was bankrolling "criminal activity."

CNN interviewed Bruno (below). Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, was also on CNN where he hinted that the state party might support a new election if allegations of fraud are proven true and if it impacted the outcome of the race. If allegations of fraud are proven true, the perps shouldn't be allowed to participate in a new election unless it's from a prison cell. Woodhouse: "This has shaken us to the core. We are not ready to call for a new election yet. I think we have to let the board of elections come show their hand if they can show that this conceivably could have flipped the race in that neighborhood, we will absolutely support a new election."