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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp; ===</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>trump campaign targeted 3.5 million Black voters for suppression: report</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">White House</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement September 28, 2020</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Trump campaign focused its digital efforts on 3.5 million Black American voters in 2016, targeting them in an effort to deter them from voting.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A new report from the UK's Channel 4, which also helped expose how Cambridge Analytica precisely targeted voters for the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, makes the stunning revelation.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Pointing to "a vast cache of data used by Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign on almost 200 million American voters," Channel 4 reports it has obtained the data, which "reveals that 3.5 million Black Americans were categorized by Donald Trump's campaign as 'Deterrence' – voters they wanted to stay home on election day."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"In 16 key battleground states, millions of Americans were separated by an algorithm into one of eight categories, also described as 'audiences', so they could then be targeted with tailored ads on Facebook and other platforms," Channel 4 reports.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">One of the categories was named 'Deterrence', which was later described publicly by Trump's chief data scientist as containing people that the campaign "hope don't show up to vote</span>".Analysis by Channel 4 News shows Black Americans – historically a community targeted with voter suppression tactics – were disproportionately marked&nbsp;<b>'Deterrence' by the 2016 campaig</b>n.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Here's a promotional video from Channel 4, tweeted by the UK investigative journalist who exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Here's video showing Channel 4 actually visiting voters in Wisconsin, and showing them what information the Trump campaign had on them.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Trump campaign had data on voters' home address, date of birth, jobs, income, and housing status, and matched that to individual people to target them, Channel 4 revealed.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The plan worked."Overall turnout" in one Milwaukie, Wisconsin precinct, "fell from 75% in 2012, to just 56% in 2016."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In another, turnout fell from 81% to 55%.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Trump won the 2016 Electoral College by just 77,000 votes across three states. no lnx twt vid</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-campaign-targeted-3-5-million-black-voters-for-suppression-report/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-campaign-targeted-3-5-million-black-voters-for-suppression-report/</a></font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-republicans-have-a-coordinated-attack-to-assure-an-electoral-victory-in-2020"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-republicans-have-a-coordinated-attack-to-assure-an-electoral-victory-in-2020</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>How Republicans have a coordinated attack to assure an electoral victory in 2020</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Terry Schwadron /&nbsp;<b>Raw Story, DC Report December 31, 2019</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Set aside the would-be political boomerang effects of impeachment or even of having a presidential reelection candidate who seems to draw sustenance from public insults and personal boasts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If you’re the Republican Party, apparently it is not enough to use the power of incumbency for reelection, or the argument that you cut taxes or that Donald Trump has been “keeping promises”—at least in a sort-of manner.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Republicans have tagged a coordinated attack on the voter rolls to try to assure electoral victory. Rather than celebrate the fact that more voters may want to join the 40% of us who troop loyally to the polls on all sides, Republicans repeatedly seems to be targeting those who might vote against them.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In Wisconsin,&nbsp;</b>a judge appointed by a Republican governor recently used an extreme and malicious interpretation of a Wisconsin state voting law to throw about 234,000 voters off state rolls. The decision on a case brought by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law &Liberty, to force the state elections commission to keep voting rolls up to date and drop voters within 30 days of not answering a letter of confirmation from the elections panel.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In Georgia, it was the Republican Gov. Brian Kemp himself, the former secretary of state who had overseen voter operations and elections, who summarily disqualified 300,000 voters, overwhelmingly black and rural, from being able to vote.</b>&nbsp;It was Kemp who used similar voter suppression techniques to defeat Stacey Adams, the former black Speaker of the House for governor. Adams has struck back with state and nationwide campaigns to foster voter registration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In Washington, Republicans stuck together to form enough opposition to kill what is called HR 4, a bill to reinstate various portions of the defunct Voters Rights Act to ensure balance in voter registration.</b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The background here is that a decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court had held the Voters Rights Act of 1965 no longer needed because it was adjudged by a majority of the court that states had stopped much of its history of voter suppression by race.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>There are other cases as well, in Ohio and Texas, for example, but the trend is clear.&nbsp;</b>The insurance policy Republicans seek is to limit the numbers of people who might vote, particularly in a situation where the thought is that new voters, like college students at a particular campus, or immigrants, might lean Democratic in registration and voting.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans seek to limit the numbers of people who might vote, particularly in a situation where the thought is that new voters, like college students at a particular campus, or immigrants, might lean Democratic.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Meanwhile, Democratic efforts on voter registration are organized around finding new voters using guns, same-sex issues, and family economics as lures. The new Democratic governor in Kentucky, Andy Bashear, has added 140,000 to voter rolls by re-enabling felons who completed their sentences, something tried and squashed in Florida. Local campaigns have focused on campuses around the country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Add to this the idea of the growing number of court challenges to partisan, gerrymandered districts, including those in North Carolina this year, and you have the outlines of a coordinated campaign. Each of the actions is local, but the overall impact will be felt in national elections.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A National Public Radio has noted, since the 2010 elections, 24 states have implemented new restrictions on voting. Alabama now requires a photo ID to cast a ballot. Other states such as Ohio and Georgia have enacted “use it or lose it” laws, which strike voters from registration rolls if they have not participated in an election within a prescribed period of time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman, author of “Give Us the Ballot,</b>&nbsp;”has said that many of the restrictions are part of a broad, continuing Republican strategy to tighten access to the ballot — an effort that was bolstered in 2013 by the Supreme Court’s ruling.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>In Georgia,&nbsp;</b>the state moved to block would-be voters if their voter registration application names on the voter registration did not exactly match other state databases, these voters were sent a letter telling them that their applications were pending and they needed to provide more information to election officials. Previously, these voters could show up and vote at the polls with the correct ID, but not vote by mail. If you got a letter in the mail that said there was a problem with your registration, you probably would think that you weren’t eligible to vote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Associated Press reported that&nbsp;<b>Justice Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to Trump’s reelection campaign, was caught discussing 2020 voter suppression efforts while at a Wisconsin chapter meeting of the Republican National Lawyers Association,&nbsp;</b>though Clark denies it and says he was discussing “false accusations” that the GOP engages in voter suppression.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Clark can be heard on tape at the event saying, “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.</span>”With all the talk about Russian attempts to influence the election, perhaps we should be looking closer to home for who’s trying their best to rig election results.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Personally, I wish we could all get behind the idea fundamental to the nation’s values – that everyone should be voting, and that each vote should count.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Let’s Make America Fair Again.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-war-on-american-voters/">https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-war-on-american-voters/</a></div><div>
</div><div><section style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="mce-content-body" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear;"><div class="layout-constrain--narrow" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 47.2222em; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em; line-height: 1.5;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; font-weight: 700;">aNYONE WHO IMAGINED</span>, after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, that the Republican right had maxxed out the possibilities for suppressing the votes of people unlikely to vote for its candidates was sorely mistaken. Although Democrats rallied in the midterms and off-year elections, winning back the U.S. House and flipping 10 state legislative chambers, a series of voting restrictions enacted by right-wing legislators in key states helped ward off a genuine blue wave, particularly in the gubernatorial elections in two large Southern states.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">“Let’s say this loud and clear—without voter suppression, Stacey Abrams would be the governor of Georgia, and Andrew Gillum is the governor of Florida,” U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, told an NAACP gathering in Detroit on May 5. Harris’ remarks addressed two 2018 races lost to Republicans by narrow margins; the Georgia race was overseen by Brian Kemp, who was then Georgia’s secretary of state—and Abrams’ opponent in the gubernatorial race.</font></p><div class="pull-quote--left" wp-content="wp-content" themes="themes" rightwingwatch="rightwingwatch" images="images" quote.png="quote.png" em="em" no-repeat="no-repeat" line-height="line-height" margin="margin" padding="padding" px="px" position="position" relative="relative" float="float" left="left" width="width" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background: url("><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Let’s say this loud and clear—without voter suppression, Stacey Abrams would be the governor of Georgia, and Andrew Gillum is the governor of Florida.</font><div class="pull-quotecitation" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 10px 0px 0px; line-height: 1; font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">SEN. KAMALA HARRIS</font></p></div></div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Voter-suppression measures have been spreading like viruses from state to state throughout the decade since Barack Obama became the first African-American president. The means and methods range from voter ID laws to purges of voter registrations and worse. A recent&nbsp;<a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/voter-purge-rates-remain-high-analysis-finds" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">report from the Brennan Center for Justice</a>&nbsp;found that between 2016 to 2018, 17 million voter registrations had been purged from the rolls. And that’s just one method of voter suppression currently in use. In Tennessee, an African-American voter registration effort was effectively criminalized by legislative action. In Florida, a voter referendum restoring rights for formerly incarcerated citizens was undercut by Republican lawmakers who limited its scope—while also passing a law designed to cut down on student voting. In Texas in 2018, a precinct at Prairie View, a historically black university where students have long struggled to exercise their franchise, had its early-voting hours cut back to fewer than half of others in the area. “Here we go again,” student Jayla Allen later recalled thinking when she heard the news.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">The GOP push to restrict the franchise began in earnest after the backlash mid-term elections of 2010, when Tea Party landslides gave the party control of state legislatures across the South and industrial North. While Republicans set to work perfecting the age-old art of gerrymandering, creating artificial advantages in congressional and state legislative elections by rigging districts in their favor for the duration of the decade, they were also busy concocting new barriers to voting for the likeliest Democratic voters: African Americans, Latinos, and young people.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">The purpose of these efforts was made clear decades ago, when Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) addressed a major gathering of religious fundamentalists and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">said</a>, “I don’t want everybody to vote,” adding, “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” In 2016, Jim DeMint, then president of Heritage, was just as frank, telling a St. Louis radio host, “in the states where they do law voter ID laws you’ve seen, actually, elections begin to change toward more conservative candidates.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Republican lawmakers in 19 states have passed new measures to suppress votes since 2017. And with so much at stake in 2020—not just the presidency and control of Congress, but the balance of power in state legislatures that get to draw new district lines for a new decade after the U.S. census—they’re not done yet, especially in the presidential battlegrounds. In 2016, voters in 13 Republican-run states had new rules to navigate when they went to the polls. Several, not surprisingly, were presidential battlegrounds like Wisconsin and Ohio. But most were states like Indiana, Mississippi, or Texas, where Republicans held statewide power, but where urban areas were becoming progressive strongholds with clashing priorities. With so much hinging on the outcome of 2020 elections—not just the presidency and perhaps democracy itself, but control of Congress, state governments, and redistricting for a decade—the pace of the efforts to suppress the vote, and the desperation to defend it, will only accelerate in 2020.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">[&nbsp;<span style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear;">Interactive illustration from the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/voter-purge-rates-remain-high-analysis-finds" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Brennan Center for Justice</a></span>. Click on a county to view the numbers.]graf map]</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; font-weight: 700;">NOBODY PAID MUCH ATTENTION</span>&nbsp;last summer when an upstart group called the Tennessee Black Voter Project began dispatching canvassers across Memphis, Nashville, and countless small towns to register voters for the midterm elections. After all, few states are as deep-red as Tennessee, a one-time Democratic bastion in the South where Donald Trump bested Hillary Clinton by a margin of more than 25 percent in 2016. A decade’s worth of voter-suppression tactics, including mass purges of mostly black voters from the rolls and a Voter ID law that made it impossible for many college students to vote, has seemingly convinced many Tennesseans to the left of Trump that voting is no longer worth the bother. The state ranked 50th in turnout in 2016, and a sad 45th in voter registration. A band of millennial African Americans with clipboards and pens would surely be powerless to change that state of affairs.</font></p><figure id="attachment_510190" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-510190" class="wp-caption alignleft" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 1em 1em -150px; max-width: 100%; float: left; font-weight: 700; width: 300px;"><figcaption id="caption-attachment-510190" class="wp-caption-text" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.2; float: left; width: 150px;">
</figcaption></figure><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">But organizers like Tequila Johnson, co-founder of the civil rights group The Equity Alliance and manager of the Black Voter Project, saw “both a need and an opportunity,” she told me. They’d seen what happened when black voters had been fully engaged in Alabama the previous December, boosting Democrat Doug Jones to a shocking win in a U.S. Senate special election, and they knew that Stacey Abrams’s New Georgia Project was registering hundreds of thousands and threatening to upend the politics of one of Tennessee’s near neighbors. They also knew that even though people weren’t voting, they certainly weren’t happy and content; as Republicans accrued near-absolute power over the last decade, they’d moved one of the South’s traditionally moderate states further and further to the right, even gutting the state’s popular and progressive health-care program, TennCare.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">“People look at Tennessee and say, ‘It’s red and it’ll never change,’” Johnson says. “The state actually hasn’t been red for all that long, but people increasingly thought, ‘my vote doesn’t matter,’ and our Democratic Party has not done a good job of outreach. But people are suffering from these right-wing policies. And millennials like me, including in rural parts of the state, are more open to change and accepting differences than the generations before us.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">So the Black Voter Project got to work. Canvassers set up shop outside church services, jails, and courthouses; they snagged grocery-shoppers and signed up club-goers; they went to housing projects and “100-percent immigrant communities,” as Johnson says. By October, they’d submitted more than 90,000 registration forms to stunned election officials, mainly in Shelby County (Memphis) and Davidson County (Nashville). The new voters weren’t enough to tilt the balance of power statewide, but black turnout soared—from 31 percent in 2014 to 45 percent in 2018—and helped Democrats recapture a majority on the Shelby County Commission while ousting a Republican county mayor and sheriff. In Nashville, where turnout nearly doubled from four years earlier, new voters helped pass a ballot initiative to create a community oversight board for police.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Johnson knew what to expect next. “We weren’t naive enough to think that our voter-participation numbers had happened by mistake,” she says. Tennessee had recently reduced early-voting periods and required proof of citizenship at the polls. “We knew it was by design. For us to be radical enough to say, ‘We’re gonna register people,’ for us to be bold enough to call ourselves the Tennessee Black Voter Project—we knew there would be a push-back.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Sure enough, when Republican lawmakers convened in Nashville this winter, they were determined to snuff out this “radical” voter-registration effort in its infancy. Citing inflated figures of erroneous forms submitted, implying that mass voter fraud was underway, and echoing complaints by overwhelmed county election officials, Republican lawmakers like Rep. Mike Carter called the Black Voter Project a “debacle,” claiming that it had somehow prevented “honest voters” from being able to cast their ballots.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">In April, Tennessee’s GOP majority passed a sledgehammer of a bill, making it a crime for groups with paid canvassers (as opposed to volunteers) to submit incomplete or inaccurate registration forms: Up to $2,000 in fines will be assessed for each county where an organization submits more than 100 deficient forms, and up to $10,000 if the number exceeds 500. Organizers also face criminal sanctions if they don’t attend training sessions run by local officials, or if they fail to mail in voter-registration forms within 10 days—a short window by most states’ standards. (A lawsuit against the measure, which has kept it from being enforced thus far, continues to<a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/tennessee-lawsuit-can-go-forward" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">&nbsp;move through the courts</a>.)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">While other states have imposed regulations on voter-registration drives, there’s never been anything like this law. For Black Voter Project co-founder Charlane Oliver, the upshot was plain to see: “They don’t want black people to vote.”</font></p><div class="2le66D_cFAbkq67CrgZcmE" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="wide-content-host" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="B1IVVpQay0rPzznhParFr KcNy0Xfd9-is-CEp3QOI" tabindex="-1" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="3U2q6dcdZCrTrR_42Nxby JWNdg1hee9_Rz6bIGvG1c allowTextSelection" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div lang="en-US" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="pull-quote--right" wp-content="wp-content" themes="themes" rightwingwatch="rightwingwatch" images="images" quote.png="quote.png" em="em" no-repeat="no-repeat" line-height="line-height" margin="margin" padding="padding" px="px" position="position" relative="relative" float="float" right="right" width="width" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background: url("><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">They don’t want black people to vote.</font><div class="pull-quotecitation" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 10px 0px 0px; line-height: 1; font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">CHARLANE OLIVER, BLACK VOTER PROJECT</font></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which works to engage African Americans in the South and assisted the Tennessee project in its start-up phase, says the Republicans’ aim was to keep voter-registration drives small and localized. “They know it’s very hard to do large-scale voter operations without paying canvassers. You can’t make a dent in a state like Tennessee with some mom-and-pop organization that relies on volunteers. The people who wrote this legislation don’t mind ad-hoc efforts. But they don’t want to see 90,000 people registered in one cycle.” The legislation, he says, will make it harder for groups to sign up paid canvassers going forward. “People will be reluctant to take that chance,” he says. “It’s intimidation, period.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Voting-rights advocates fear that the Tennessee law will—if it survives court challenges—likely spread to other Republican-controlled states, perhaps in time to put the clamps on voter-registration efforts in presidential battlegrounds heading into the 2020 elections. “Republicans are using the state as a testing ground,” Johnson says. “Let’s test this out in Tennessee, see if it flies—and if it’s found constitutional, watch it spread to 15 or 20 more states.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">&nbsp;</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; font-weight: 700;">IN 2013, THE U.S. SUPREME COURT</span>&nbsp;swung open the voter-suppression floodgates by invalidating a key section of the Voting Rights Act in&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear;"><a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/shelby-county-v-holder/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Shelby</a><a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/shelby-county-v-holder/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">&nbsp;County</a></em><a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/shelby-county-v-holder/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear;">&nbsp;v. Holder</em></a>. Since 1965, states and municipalities with histories of discriminatory voting laws had been required to run any changes in their elections by the Department of Justice before enacting them; after&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear;">Shelby</em>, they had free rein. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg predicted in a scorching dissent that the ruling would result in a resurgence of Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws, and she’s been proven sadly prophetic. In short order, 25 states turned back the historical clock—after decades in which voting laws had become steadily more liberal—by passing restrictive voter-ID laws, cutting back on early voting (which voters of color tend to use more than whites), and closing polling places in minority neighborhoods.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Voter suppression paid spectacular dividends in 2016. Multiple studies have shown that Donald Trump would not have won the presidency without racially biased election laws that sprang up post-<em style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear;">Shelby</em>, particularly in the six big states that went from voting for Obama in 2008 to backing Trump—Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The tilt was most dramatic in the last of those states: After a strict voter-ID law passed the GOP-controlled Wisconsin legislature, turnout in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of black Wisconsonites live, plummeted from 74 percent in 2012 to 55 percent in 2016, while statewide, Latino and Asian voting went down 6 percent. That was enough to give Trump a nail-biting and decisive victory. Nationwide, only 59 percent of eligible African Americans voted in 2016, after 66 percent had turned out in 2012—a number that couldn’t simply be explained away by problems with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.The justification offered was always the same: Right-wing groups claim they simply want to combat widespread “voter fraud” and return “integrity” to American elections. President Trump’s claim of “millions” of illegal voters in the 2016 election—supposedly denying him a popular-vote victory—has been echoed repeatedly by right-wing groups like Judicial Watch. In 2017, the group’s president,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeN6QwKNH0E" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Tom Fitton, told a gathering</a>&nbsp;of the anti-immigrant Remembrance Project that “we had about one-and-a-half million illegal votes in the last election,” and that “about 80 percent vote for Democrats,” meaning that “one point one million voted for Hillary Clinton.” In “Rigged,” a documentary about voter suppression, Michael Hyers of the right-wing Voter Integrity Project in North Carolina, which has used a Jim Crow-era law to challenge the eligibility of thousands of voters of color in the state, captured the spirit of the movement all too colorfully: “It’s about time we turn on the lights and start cleaning the cockroaches out of here.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Republicans have come to depend on voter suppression to hold back Democrats in both the Rust Belt and the South, where demographic changes are eroding the white GOP’s decades-long dominance. But voting-rights advocates have started to fight back, with measures to expand voting rights in new ways—and counter the right’s continuing push to curtail them.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Last November, even as Trump acolyte Ron DeSantis was edging out Democrat Andrew Gillum in the race for governor of Florida, voters in the ultimate battleground overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the state constitution that looked like a death blow to Trump’s chances of carrying the state a second time. Nearly 65 percent voted for a ballot initiative that would restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies who’d served their time. Florida had become an outlier in recent decades, one of just four remaining states (along with Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia) that still barred people convicted of felonies from voting, even after they returned to society. The law had been on the books since 1868, when Florida lawmakers—forced by the federal government to allow African Americans to vote—had devised it as a way to prevent them from gaining power, in tandem with post-Civil War laws that made black men easy to incarcerate.</font></p><figure id="attachment_513257" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-513257" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; font-weight: 700; width: 700px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">
</font><figcaption id="caption-attachment-513257" class="wp-caption-text" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.2;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">[Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter says that right-wing Republicans have created “a fog of confusion” around the rules of voting. (Photo: Rogelio Solis/AP/Shutterstock)]</font></figcaption></figure><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Now that this vestige of Jim Crow had been erased by popular demand, the number of newly eligible voters would be staggering: Estimates ranged from 1.4 to 1.6 million, including one-fifth of the state’s voting-age African Americans. When this legion of formerly disenfranchised Floridians began registering to vote in January, the state’s newspapers and newscasts featured heartwarming stories about folks like Delmus Calloway, who’d served six years on drug-possession charges and then, upon his release in 2007, turned his life around, becoming director of public works for the small city of Gretna. “This right here makes me feel like I am part of society,” Calloway told the Tallahassee Democrat. “Today is a great day for me. It’s an honor.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">But the prospect of all these new voters did not warm the hearts of Republican lawmakers. At DeSantis’ urging, they attached strings to the amendment—big, knotty strings. After months of raucous debate, they voted to allow only those who’d paid off all the fees, fines and surcharges attached to their sentences to become eligible to vote. Considering that Florida is a national leader in racking up those financial penalties, this meant that only a fraction of those who had completed their sentences would likely ever be able to exercise their franchise. The state assesses more than 115 different fines against defendants—and unpaid court charges after 90 days are handed over to private debt collectors, who can add a surcharge of up to 40 percent to the fines and fees incurred by the those so convicted.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">“What this bill does is reestablish a poll tax,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. “It is not constitutional, it is not legal, and it is not right to deny people the right to vote because you can’t pay.”</font></p><div class="2le66D_cFAbkq67CrgZcmE" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="wide-content-host" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="B1IVVpQay0rPzznhParFr KcNy0Xfd9-is-CEp3QOI" tabindex="-1" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="3U2q6dcdZCrTrR_42Nxby JWNdg1hee9_Rz6bIGvG1c allowTextSelection" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div lang="en-US" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="pull-quote--left" wp-content="wp-content" themes="themes" rightwingwatch="rightwingwatch" images="images" quote.png="quote.png" em="em" no-repeat="no-repeat" line-height="line-height" margin="margin" padding="padding" px="px" position="position" relative="relative" float="float" left="left" width="width" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background: url("><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">What this bill does is reestablish a poll tax.</font><div class="pull-quotecitation" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 10px 0px 0px; line-height: 1; font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">MICAH KUBIC, ACLU OF FLORIDA</font></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">As soon as DeSantis signed the bill on the final Friday in June, two lawsuits were filed to overturn what Gillum called a “nullification” of the vote last November. “We were unambiguous as voters,” he said. “We were going to be a state that didn’t judge people forever for their worst day.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">What the courts decide could well determine who wins Florida in 2020. The state already has a history of intolerably long urban voting lines, purges of eligible voters “accidentally” swept up in the maintenance process, worse-than-useless voting machines, and crackdowns on voter-registration groups. And if Florida’s new poll tax is upheld, it will be mighty tempting for Republican lawmakers in other states to follow suit, stripping voting rights from ex-felons who’ve already regained them.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">&nbsp;</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; font-weight: 700;">COMPARED TO THE IMPACT</span>&nbsp;of Florida’s re-disenfranchisement of so many formerly incarcerated people, some of the other voter-suppression measures passed over the last year by swing-state Republicans look like small potatoes. But they could turn out to be decisive. “Elections are increasingly so close,” notes Marcia Johnson-Blanco of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. “You don’t have to restrict very many people from voting to change the outcome.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Ever since students shared some of the blame for electing Barack Obama in 2008, they’ve become particular targets for right-wing suppression efforts—particularly in states that are likely to be 2020 battlegrounds. In North Carolina, a voter-ID referendum passed last November with ambiguous wording; when Republican lawmakers filled in the details this winter, they invalidated the use of most college students’ IDs at the polls. In New Hampshire, as well, most students will also be ineligible to cast ballots;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.concordmonitor.com/Voter-Residency-bill-26624987" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">a law passed last year requires</a>&nbsp;drivers who want to vote to get a state driver’s license, and those who own cars that they drive in New Hampshire to get an in-state car registration—yet another new poll tax, according to many an outraged undergraduate (not to mention older Democrats).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Student voting has long been a bone of contention in Florida. Last year, the state was forced by the courts to allow early voting on several college campuses, thwarting the plans of Republican election officials. Nearly 60,000 students took advantage. Heading into 2020, GOP lawmakers were determined not to let that happen again: At the same time they restricted ex-felons’ voting rights, they passed a measure requiring early-voting sites to have “sufficient nonpermitted parking to accommodate the anticipated amount of voters.” Civil-rights groups said this mouthful of legal verbiage was aimed directly at colleges campuses, which typically require parking permits for their limited number of spots.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">“This is not about parking,” said state League of Women Voters President Patricia Brigham, whose group has filed suit to overturn the law. Instead, she said, the measure takes aim at less-fortunate kids. “Those students with cars, they can hop in their car and go to a voting site off campus. This is about students living on campus who don’t have a car and want to vote early.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">In the emerging Southwest battleground states of Texas and Arizona, Republicans spent much of this winter and spring trying to slice away potential Democratic votes in different ways. Texas lawmakers outlawed mobile polling places, which some urban (read: Democratic) counties had been using to give voters easier access to polls. Arizona, where Democrats won a U.S. Senate seat and several statewide offices in 2018, has a rich history of voter suppression; because of its history of disenfranchising Native Americans, it was one of nine states required to “preclear” changes to elections prior to the Supreme Court’s&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear;">Shelby</em>&nbsp;decision. More recently, though, the state has made voting easier by, among other things, allowing voters to cast “emergency votes” on the last weekend before an election, if they found they couldn’t vote on Election Day. And during the state’s generous 26-day early voting period, voters weren’t required to show photo ID. Republicans shot down both of those progressive laws this spring. “This is their strategy,” said Democratic state Rep. Athena Salman. “This year, we’re going to chip away at this part of your right. Next year …”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Republicans still have another year to chip away at voting rights before the presidential election—a fact that gives civil-rights advocates migraines. “I’m just not as creative as the people who are trying to suppress the vote,” Johnson-Blanco says, laughing gamely. “We’re trying to play catch-up all the time.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">The pace is already picking up as November 2020 approaches. In many states, election officials will conduct purges of the voting rolls; the Supreme Court has allowed them to kick off voters who’ve skipped two consecutive federal elections, and most Republican-controlled states make use of them, sometimes failing to provide the notice (and opportunity to re-register) that the law requires.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">&nbsp;</font></p><figure id="attachment_510286" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-510286" class="wp-caption alignleft" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 1em 1em -150px; max-width: 100%; float: left; font-weight: 700; width: 555px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">
</font><figcaption id="caption-attachment-510286" class="wp-caption-text" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.2; float: left; width: 150px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">As did his friend, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia (second from right), Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (left) will oversee the administration of his own statewide race. Kemp served as Georgia’s secretary of state, overseeing the gubernatorial election in which he ran against Stacey Abrams. Merrill, one of the nation’s most prolific voter-roll purgers, is running for a U.S. Senate seat. (Photo from Merrill’s Facebook page.)</font></figcaption></figure><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">One of the most prolific purgers, Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State John Merrill, is overseeing his own 2020 campaign for U.S. Senate, currently one candidate in a field of Republicans vying for the nomination to run against Democrat Doug Jones. Merrill has made no secret of his desire to create barriers to Alabamians who want to vote: “As long as I’m secretary of state of Alabama, you’re going to have to show some initiative to become a registered voter in this state,” he told documentary filmmaker Brian Jenkins in 2016. Asked why he opposed automatic registration for eligible citizens over 18, Merrill said, “If you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear and go register to vote, or to register electronically, and then to vote, then you don’t deserve that privilege.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Post-<em style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear;">Shelby</em>, states are free to shorten their early voting periods, and to close down more polling places where Democrats live. New laws, some inspired by the latest methods cooked up in states like Tennessee and Florida, will be passed—and most will land in the courts. With Democrats’ attempts to restore the full powers of the Voting Rights Act stymied by Mitch McConnell and the Republican U.S. Senate majority, it will be another election year marked by chaos and uncertainty for voters and local election officials alike. In some states, as in 2016, voters won’t know what kind of ID is required until a court rules in the fall. Some won’t know that they’ve been purged from the voting rolls until they arrive to vote. Some won’t know where to vote; one recent report found that 1,688 polling places have been closed since 2012. Texas alone had 760. African Americans and Latinos know they will have to wait in longer lines. Others will be reading stories about disputes, in states like Georgia, over whether votes will be counted by machine, or by paper ballots that can be recounted and audited.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">This uncertainty creates what Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter calls a “fog of confusion” around voting—an indirect form of voter suppression that might be more powerful than all the others. “Voter suppression is not just one incident, one policy at a time,” says Renitta Shannon, a Democratic state representative in Georgia. “It’s a collection of actions chipping away at voting rights. If you aren’t directly preventing people from voting, you’re sending a message that it’s going to be a hassle, or that their votes won’t count. Some people are bound to end up saying, OK, why bother?”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">But voting-rights advocates, who had no way of preparing for the voting-rights backlash that followed Obama’s first victory, have begun to counter it by working to broaden voting at the same time that they’re fighting off new forms of suppression. Groups like Move Texas helped triple youth turnout in that state in 2018. In Florida, Gillum has founded an ambitious nonprofit aimed at expanding the vote dramatically, while Abrams has expanded her Georgia operation, now called Fair Fight Action, to 20 states for 2020. And though the courts continued to deliver rulings favorable to voter-suppressors—like October’s&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear;">Rucho vs. Cunningham</em>&nbsp;decision, in which five conservative Supreme Court justices barred federal courts from hearing partisan gerrymandering claims (as opposed to racial gerrymandering lawsuits)—the key cases aren’t all setbacks.</font></p><div class="2le66D_cFAbkq67CrgZcmE" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="wide-content-host" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="B1IVVpQay0rPzznhParFr KcNy0Xfd9-is-CEp3QOI" tabindex="-1" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="3U2q6dcdZCrTrR_42Nxby JWNdg1hee9_Rz6bIGvG1c allowTextSelection" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div lang="en-US" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="pull-quote--right" wp-content="wp-content" themes="themes" rightwingwatch="rightwingwatch" images="images" quote.png="quote.png" em="em" no-repeat="no-repeat" line-height="line-height" margin="margin" padding="padding" px="px" position="position" relative="relative" float="float" right="right" width="width" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background: url("><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">They have created in me a fire they intended to dim.</font><div class="pull-quotecitation" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 10px 0px 0px; line-height: 1; font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">TEQUILA JOHNSTON, THE EQUITY ALLIANCE</font></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Shortly after that ruling, judges in North Carolina went the opposite way, prohibiting the state from using Republican maps in 2020. Meanwhile, in other states, Democrats and voting-rights groups are suing to restore lost early-voting days, including crucial weekend hours before election days. In Texas, Democrats are contesting a new law that prevents campuses from having early-voting sites. And in Tennessee, while the crackdown on voter registration groups awaits its legal fate, Black Voter Project stalwarts like Tequila Johnson continue their work to counter, if not overcome, the effects of voter suppression.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">“I’m going to do it anyway,” she says, despite the potential legal jeopardy. “What would have happened if Dr. King had said, ‘I’m not going to march across that bridge in Selma because there’s a law against it’? I find it almost an obligation to pick up that torch, to push forward, regardless of what the consequences are.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Johnson keeps 25 registration forms in her car, with a goal of having them all gone by the end of each week. “On Juneteenth, I turned in 165 registration forms that I’d gathered during the month. As I was in the grocery store, gas station, picking my child up from camp, whenever I had a conversation, I’d be like—are you registered to vote?” She laughs, then turns serious and says, “They have created in me a fire they intended to dim.”</font></p><div class="at-below-post addthis_tool" data-url="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-war-on-american-voters/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="layout-constrain--narrow" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 47.2222em; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em;"><div class="tags" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; border-top: 5px solid rgb(239, 243, 243); margin-bottom: 2em; padding-top: 1em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; font-weight: 700;">Tags:</span>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/andrew-gillum/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Andrew Gillum</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/brian-kemp/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Brian Kemp</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/charlane-oliver/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Charlane Oliver</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/cliff-albright/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Cliff Albright</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/delmus-calloway/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Delmus Calloway</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/donald-j-trump/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Donald J. Trump</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/hillary-clinton/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Hillary Clinton</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/jim-demint/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Jim DeMint</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/john-merrill/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">John Merrill</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/kamala-harris/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Kamala Harris</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/micah-kubic/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Micah Kubic</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/michael-hyers/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Michael Hyers</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/mitch-mcconnell/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Mitch McConnell</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/patricia-brigham/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Patricia Brigham</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/paul-weyrich/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Paul Weyrich</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/rep-athena-salman/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Rep. Athena Salman</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/rep-mike-carter/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Rep. Mike Carter</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/ron-desantis/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Ron DeSantis</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/ruth-bader-ginsburg/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Ruth Bader Ginsburg</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/stacey-abrams/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Stacey Abrams</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/tequila-johnson/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Tequila Johnson</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/tom-fitton/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Tom Fitton</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/voter-intimidation/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">voter intimidation</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/voter-suppression/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">voter suppression</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/aclu-of-florida/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">ACLU of Florida</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/alec/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">ALEC</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/american-legislative-exchange-council/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">American Legislative Exchange Council</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/black-voter-project/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Black Voter Project</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/black-voters-matter/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Black Voters Matter</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/brennan-center-for-justice/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Brennan Center for Justice</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/heritage-foundation/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Heritage Foundation</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/judicial-watch/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Judicial Watch</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/lawyers-committee-on-civil-rights/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Lawyers' Committee on Civil Rights</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/league-of-women-voters/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">League of Women Voters</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/move-texas/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Move Texas</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/new-georgia-project/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">New Georgia Project</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/the-equity-alliance/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">The Equity Alliance</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/the-new-georgia-project/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">The New Georgia Project</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/voter-integrity-project/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Voter Integrity Project</a></font></p></div></div></div></div></div></section></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">not sure this fits here</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div><b>Just one Republican breaks ranks to join the Democrats in passing new Voting Rights Advancement Act</b></div><div>
</div><div>Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams December 6, 2019</div><div>
</div><div><b>Just one Republican—Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania—joined a united House Democratic caucus on Friday to pass what rights groups hailed as “historic” legislation to restore and expand voter protections that were gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013.</b></div><div>
</div><div>Lisa Gilbert, vice president of legislative affairs for Public Citizen, said passage of the Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 4) is a “critical step” in combating Republican voter suppression efforts that have proliferated in the six years since the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in<b>&nbsp;Shelby County v. Holder.</b></div><div>
</div><div>“Numerous state legislatures have undertaken targeted and deliberate steps to limit or impede the right to vote for communities of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities,” said Gilbert. “Americans who are eligible to vote but are denied that right due to fabricated or illegal barriers are being deprived of the full privilege of our democracy.”</div><div>
</div><div>BREAKING: The House just passed #HR4, one of the most important bills to emerge during this Congress. As voter suppression continues to spread across the US, this bill would breathe life back into the Voting Rights Act. A win for the people & a win for democracy! #RestoreTheVote pic.twitter.com/TR14b3ltxQ</div><div>
</div><div>— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) December 6, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>BREAKING: @RepBrianFitz is the one and only House Republican that believes in voting rights. https://t.co/37aqHMYIMO</div><div>
</div><div>— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) December 6, 2019</div><div>
</div><div><b>“If we want a true democracy, we must protect the right to vote for all,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.</b>), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “The Voting Rights Advancement Act is critical to getting there.”</div><div>
</div><div>The legislation now heads to the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has refused to allow a vote on Democrats’ For the People Act (H.R. 1), to which the Voting Rights Advancement Act was previously attached.</div><div>
</div><div>As Ari Berman of Mother Jones reported,&nbsp;<b>H.R. 4—sponsored by Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.)</b>—would “initially cover 11 states: nine in the South, plus California and New York, which have more recently been found to discriminate against Latinos and Asian Americans.”</div><div>
</div><div>“The bill would also require all states to get federal approval for election changes that are known to disproportionately affect voters of color, such as strict voter ID laws, tighter voter registration requirements, and polling place closures in areas with large numbers of minority voters,” Berman noted.</div><div>
</div><div>Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, applauded the House for passing H.R. 4 and demanded that McConnell bring the bill up for a vote in the Senate as soon as possible.</div><div>
</div><div>“The passage of H.R. 4 in the House of Representatives today brings us one step closer to restoring the Voting Rights Act and undoing the tremendous damage of Shelby,” Gupta said in a statement. “The VRAA is too important—and the right to vote is too fundamental—to end up buried in the McConnell legislative graveyard.”</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx few&nbsp;</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-war-on-american-voters/">https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-war-on-american-voters/</a></div><div>
</div><div>...</div><div><b>Voter-suppression measures have been spreading like viruses from state to state throughout the decade since Barack Obama became the first African-American president.</b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The means and methods range from voter ID laws to purges of voter registrations and worse. A recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that between 2016 to 2018, 17 million voter registrations had been purged from the rolls. And that’s just one method of voter suppression currently in use</span>.<b>&nbsp;In Tennessee, an African-American voter registration effort was effectively criminalized by legislative action. In Florida, a voter referendum restoring rights for formerly incarcerated citizens was undercut by Republican lawmakers who limited its scope</b>—while also passing a law designed to cut down on student voting<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. In Texas in 2018, a precinct at Prairie View, a historically black university where students have long struggled to exercise their franchise, had its early-voting hours cut back to fewer than half of others in the area. “Here we go again</span>,” student Jayla Allen later recalled thinking when she heard the news.</div><div>
</div><div><b>The GOP push to restrict the franchise began in earnest after the backlash mid-term elections of 2010, when Tea Party landslides gave the party control of state legislatures across the South and industrial North.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">While Republicans set to work perfecting the age-old art of gerrymandering, creating artificial advantages in congressional and state legislative elections by rigging districts in their favor for the duration of the decade, they were also busy concocting new barriers to voting for the likeliest Democratic voters: African Americans, Latinos, and young people.</span></div><div>
</div><div>The purpose of these efforts was made clear decades ago, when Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) addressed a major gathering of religious fundamentalists and said, “I don’t want everybody to vote,” adding, “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” In 2016, Jim DeMint, then president of Heritage, was just as frank, telling a St. Louis radio host, “in the states where they do law voter ID laws you’ve seen, actually, elections begin to change toward more conservative candidates.”</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Republican lawmakers in 19 states have passed new measures to suppress votes since 2017.</b>&nbsp;And with so much at stake in 2020—not just the presidency and control of Congress, but the balance of power in state legislatures that get to draw new district lines for a new decade after the U.S. census—they’re not done yet, especially in the presidential battlegrounds. In 2016, voters in 13 Republican-run states had new rules to navigate when they went to the polls. Several, not surprisingly, were presidential battlegrounds like Wisconsin and Ohio. But most were states like Indiana, Mississippi, or Texas, where Republicans held statewide power, but where urban areas were becoming progressive strongholds with clashing priorities. With so much hinging on the outcome of 2020 elections—not just the presidency and perhaps democracy itself, but control of Congress, state governments, and redistricting for a decade—the pace of the efforts to suppress the vote, and the desperation to defend it, will only accelerate in 2020.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;Interactive illustration from the Brennan Center for Justice. Click on a county to view the numbers.</div><div>
</div><div>NOBODY PAID MUCH ATTENTION last summer when an upstart group called the Tennessee Black Voter Project began dispatching canvassers across Memphis, Nashville, and countless small towns to register voters for the midterm elections. After all, few states are as deep-red as Tennessee, a one-time Democratic bastion in the South where Donald Trump bested Hillary Clinton by a margin of more than 25 percent in 2016. A decade’s worth of voter-suppression tactics, including mass purges of mostly black voters from the rolls and a Voter ID law that made it impossible for many college students to vote, has seemingly convinced many Tennesseans to the left of Trump that voting is no longer worth the bother. The state ranked 50th in turnout in 2016, and a sad 45th in voter registration. A band of millennial African Americans with clipboards and pens would surely be powerless to change that state of affairs.</div><div>
</div><div>Tequila Johnson, co-founder of The Equity Alliance and a manager in last year’s elections for the Tennessee Black Voter Project, speaks to reporters, Tuesday, April 2, 2019, at the Cordell Hull legislative building in Nashville, Tenn., after a news conference in opposition to a bill that would stiffen penalties if voter registration groups violate new restrictions. (AP Photo/Jonathan Mattise)]</div><div>
</div><div>But organizers like Tequila Johnson, co-founder of the civil rights group The Equity Alliance and manager of the Black Voter Project, saw “both a need and an opportunity,” she told me. They’d seen what happened when black voters had been fully engaged in Alabama the previous December, boosting Democrat Doug Jones to a shocking win in a U.S. Senate special election, and they knew that Stacey Abrams’s New Georgia Project was registering hundreds of thousands and threatening to upend the politics of one of Tennessee’s near neighbors. They also knew that even though people weren’t voting, they certainly weren’t happy and content; as Republicans accrued near-absolute power over the last decade, they’d moved one of the South’s traditionally moderate states further and further to the right, even gutting the state’s popular and progressive health-care program, TennCare.</div><div>
</div><div><b>“People look at Tennessee and say, ‘It’s red and it’ll never change,’” Johnson says. “The state actually hasn’t been red for all that long, but people increasingly thought, ‘my vote doesn’t matter,’ and our Democratic Party has not done a good job of outreach.&nbsp;</b>But people are suffering from these right-wing policies. And millennials like me, including in rural parts of the state, are more open to change and accepting differences than the generations before us.”</div><div>
</div><div>So the Black Voter Project got to work. Canvassers set up shop outside church services, jails, and courthouses; they snagged grocery-shoppers and signed up club-goers; they went to housing projects and “100-percent immigrant communities,” as Johnson says. By October, they’d submitted more than 90,000 registration forms to stunned election officials, mainly in Shelby County (Memphis) and Davidson County (Nashville). The new voters weren’t enough to tilt the balance of power statewide, but black turnout soared—from 31 percent in 2014 to 45 percent in 2018—and helped Democrats recapture a majority on the Shelby County Commission while ousting a Republican county mayor and sheriff. In Nashville, where turnout nearly doubled from four years earlier, new voters helped pass a ballot initiative to create a community oversight board for police.</div><div>
</div><div>Johnson knew what to expect next. “We weren’t naive enough to think that our voter-participation numbers had happened by mistake,” she says. Tennessee had recently reduced early-voting periods and required proof of citizenship at the polls. “We knew it was by design. For us to be radical enough to say, ‘We’re gonna register people,’ for us to be bold enough to call ourselves the Tennessee Black Voter Project—we knew there would be a push-back.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>Sure enough, when Republican lawmakers convened in Nashville this winter, they were determined to snuff out this “radical” voter-registration effort in its infancy.</b>&nbsp;Citing inflated figures of erroneous forms submitted, implying that mass voter fraud was underway, and echoing complaints by overwhelmed county election officials, Republican lawmakers like Rep. Mike Carter called the Black Voter Project a “debacle,” claiming that it had somehow prevented “honest voters” from being able to cast their ballots.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In April, Tennessee’s GOP majority passed a sledgehammer of a bill, making it a crime for groups with paid canvassers (as opposed to volunteers) to submit incomplete or inaccurate registration forms:</span>&nbsp;Up to $2,000 in fines will be assessed for each county where an organization submits more than 100 deficient forms, and up to $10,000 if the number exceeds 500. Organizers also face criminal sanctions if they don’t attend training sessions run by local officials, or if they fail to mail in voter-registration forms within 10 days—a short window by most states’ standards. (A lawsuit against the measure, which has kept it from being enforced thus far, continues to move through the courts.)</div><div>
</div><div>While other states have imposed regulations on voter-registration drives, there’s never been anything like this law. For Black Voter Project co-founder Charlane Oliver, the upshot was plain to see: “They don’t want black people to vote.”</div><div>
</div><div>They don’t want black people to vote.</div><div>CHARLANE OLIVER, BLACK VOTER PROJECT]</div><div>
</div><div>Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which works to engage African Americans in the South and assisted the Tennessee project in its start-up phase, says the Republicans’ aim was to keep voter-registration drives small and localized. “They know it’s very hard to do large-scale voter operations without paying canvassers. You can’t make a dent in a state like Tennessee with some mom-and-pop organization that relies on volunteers. The people who wrote this legislation don’t mind ad-hoc efforts. But they don’t want to see 90,000 people registered in one cycle.” The legislation, he says, will make it harder for groups to sign up paid canvassers going forward. “People will be reluctant to take that chance,” he says. “It’s intimidation, period.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>Voting-rights advocates fear that the Tennessee law will—if it survives court challenges—likely spread to other Republican-controlled states,&nbsp;</b>perhaps in time to put the clamps on voter-registration efforts in presidential battlegrounds heading into the 2020 elections. “Republicans are using the state as a testing ground,” Johnson says. “Let’s test this out in Tennessee, see if it flies—and if it’s found constitutional, watch it spread to 15 or 20 more states.”</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>IN 2013, THE U.S. SUPREME COURT swung open the voter-suppression floodgates by invalidating a key section of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder.</b>&nbsp;Since 1965, states and municipalities with histories of discriminatory voting laws had been required to run any changes in their elections by the Department of Justice before enacting them; after Shelby, they had free rein. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg predicted in a scorching dissent that the ruling would result in a resurgence of Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws, and she’s been proven sadly prophetic. In short order, 25 states turned back the historical clock—after decades in which voting laws had become steadily more liberal—by passing restrictive voter-ID laws, cutting back on early voting (which voters of color tend to use more than whites), and closing polling places in minority neighborhoods.</div><div>
</div><div>Well-funded right-wing groups such as Judicial Watch are leading efforts to purge voter rolls. Here is JW President Tom Fitton in one of his frequent appearances on Fox Business Channel’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” (Screenshot: Fox Business Channel)]</div><div>
</div><div><b>The justification offered was always the same: Right-wing groups claim they simply want to combat widespread “voter fraud” and return “integrity” to American elections. President Trump’s claim of “millions” of illegal voters in the 2016 election</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">—supposedly denying him a popular-vote victory—has been echoed repeatedly by right-wing groups like Judicial Watch. In 2017, the group’s president, Tom Fitton, told a gathering of the anti-immigrant Remembrance Project that “we had about one-and-a-half million illegal votes in the last election,” and that “about 80 percent vote for Democrats,” meaning that “one point one million voted for Hillary Clinton.” In “Rigged,” a documentary about voter suppression, Michael Hyers of the right-wing Voter Integrity Project in North Carolina, which has used a Jim Crow-era law to challenge the eligibility of thousands of voters of color in the state, captured the spirit of the movement all too colorfully: “It’s about time we turn on the lights and start cleaning the cockroaches out of here.”</span></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Voter suppression paid spectacular dividends in 2016.</b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Multiple studies have shown that Donald Trump would not have won the presidency without racially biased election laws that sprang up post-Shelby, particularly in the six big states that went from voting for Obama in 2008 to backing Trump—Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.</span>&nbsp;The tilt was most dramatic in the last of those states: After a strict voter-ID law passed the GOP-controlled Wisconsin legislature, turnout in<b>&nbsp;Milwaukee, where 70 percent of black Wisconsonites live, plummeted from 74 percent in 2012 to 55 percent in 2016,&nbsp;</b>while statewide, Latino and Asian voting went down 6 percent. That was enough to give Trump a nail-biting and decisive victory. Nationwide, only 59 percent of eligible African Americans voted in 2016, after 66 percent had turned out in 2012—a number that couldn’t simply be explained away by problems with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans have come to depend on voter suppression to hold back Democrats in both the Rust Belt and the South, where demographic changes are eroding the white GOP’s decades-long dominance. But voting-rights advocates have started to fight back, with measures to expand voting rights in new ways—and counter the right’s continuing push to curtail them.</div><div>
</div><div>Last November, even as Trump acolyte Ron DeSantis was edging out Democrat Andrew Gillum in the race for governor of Florida, voters in the ultimate battleground overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the state constitution that looked like a death blow to Trump’s chances of carrying the state a second time. Nearly 65 percent voted for a ballot initiative that would restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies who’d served their time. Florida had become an outlier in recent decades, one of just four remaining states (along with Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia) that still barred people convicted of felonies from voting, even after they returned to society. The law had been on the books since 1868, when Florida lawmakers—forced by the federal government to allow African Americans to vote—had devised it as a way to prevent them from gaining power, in tandem with post-Civil War laws that made black men easy to incarcerate.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter says that right-wing Republicans have created “a fog of confusion” around the rules of voting. (Photo: Rogelio Solis/AP/Shutterstock)]</div><div>
</div><div>Now that this vestige of Jim Crow had been erased by popular demand, the number of newly eligible voters would be staggering: Estimates ranged from 1.4 to 1.6 million, including one-fifth of the state’s voting-age African Americans. When this legion of formerly disenfranchised Floridians began registering to vote in January, the state’s newspapers and newscasts featured heartwarming stories about folks like Delmus Calloway, who’d served six years on drug-possession charges and then, upon his release in 2007, turned his life around, becoming director of public works for the small city of Gretna. “This right here makes me feel like I am part of society,” Calloway told the Tallahassee Democrat. “Today is a great day for me. It’s an honor.”</div><div>
</div><div>But the prospect of all these new voters did not warm the hearts of Republican lawmakers. At DeSantis’ urging, they attached strings to the amendment—big, knotty strings. After months of raucous debate, they voted to allow only those who’d paid off all the fees, fines and surcharges attached to their sentences to become eligible to vote. Considering that Florida is a national leader in racking up those financial penalties, this meant that only a fraction of those who had completed their sentences would likely ever be able to exercise their franchise. The state assesses more than 115 different fines against defendants—and unpaid court charges after 90 days are handed over to private debt collectors, who can add a surcharge of up to 40 percent to the fines and fees incurred by the those so convicted.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>“What this bill does is reestablish a poll tax,”</b>&nbsp;said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. “It is not constitutional, it is not legal, and it is not right to deny people the right to vote because you can’t pay.”</div><div>
</div><div>What this bill does is reestablish a poll tax.</div><div>MICAH KUBIC, ACLU OF FLORIDA]</div><div>
</div><div>As soon as DeSantis signed the bill on the final Friday in June, two lawsuits were filed to overturn what Gillum called a “nullification” of the vote last November. “We were unambiguous as voters,” he said. “We were going to be a state that didn’t judge people forever for their worst day.”</div><div>
</div><div>What the courts decide could well determine who wins Florida in 2020. The state already has a history of intolerably long urban voting lines, purges of eligible voters “accidentally” swept up in the maintenance process, worse-than-useless voting machines, and crackdowns on voter-registration groups. And if Florida’s new poll tax is upheld, it will be mighty tempting for Republican lawmakers in other states to follow suit, stripping voting rights from ex-felons who’ve already regained them.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div><b>COMPARED TO THE IMPACT of Florida’s re-disenfranchisement of so many formerly incarcerated people</b>, some of the other voter-suppression measures passed over the last year by swing-state Republicans look like small potatoes. But they could turn out to be decisive. “Elections are increasingly so close,” notes Marcia Johnson-Blanco of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. “You don’t have to restrict very many people from voting to change the outcome.”</div><div>
</div><div>Ever since students shared some of the blame for electing Barack Obama in 2008, they’ve become particular targets for right-wing suppression efforts—particularly in states that are likely to be 2020 battlegrounds. In North Carolina, a voter-ID referendum passed last November with ambiguous wording; when Republican lawmakers filled in the details this winter, they invalidated the use of most college students’ IDs at the polls. In New Hampshire, as well, most students will also be ineligible to cast ballots; a law passed last year requires drivers who want to vote to get a state driver’s license, and those who own cars that they drive in New Hampshire to get an in-state car registration—yet another new poll tax, according to many an outraged undergraduate (not to mention older Democrats).</div><div>
</div><div>You don’t have to restrict very many people from voting to change the outcome.</div><div>MARCIA JOHNSON-BLANCO, LAWYERS’ COMMITTEE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS]</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Student voting has long been a bone of contention in Florida</b>. Last year, the state was forced by the courts to allow early voting on several college campuses, thwarting the plans of Republican election officials. Nearly 60,000 students took advantage. Heading into 2020, GOP lawmakers were determined not to let that happen again: At the same time they restricted ex-felons’ voting rights, they passed a measure requiring early-voting sites to have “sufficient nonpermitted parking to accommodate the anticipated amount of voters.” Civil-rights groups said this mouthful of legal verbiage was aimed directly at colleges campuses, which typically require parking permits for their limited number of spots.</div><div>
</div><div>“This is not about parking,” said state League of Women Voters President Patricia Brigham, whose group has filed suit to overturn the law. Instead, she said, the measure takes aim at less-fortunate kids. “Those students with cars, they can hop in their car and go to a voting site off campus. This is about students living on campus who don’t have a car and want to vote early.”</div><div>
</div><div>In the emerging Southwest battleground states of Texas and Arizona, Republicans spent much of this winter and spring trying to slice away potential Democratic votes in different ways. Texas lawmakers outlawed mobile polling places, which some urban (read: Democratic) counties had been using to give voters easier access to polls. Arizona, where Democrats won a U.S. Senate seat and several statewide offices in 2018, has a rich history of voter suppression; because of its history of disenfranchising Native Americans, it was one of nine states required to “preclear” changes to elections prior to the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision. More recently, though, the state has made voting easier by, among other things, allowing voters to cast “emergency votes” on the last weekend before an election, if they found they couldn’t vote on Election Day. And during the state’s generous 26-day early voting period, voters weren’t required to show photo ID. Republicans shot down both of those progressive laws this spring. “This is their strategy,” said Democratic state Rep. Athena Salman. “This year, we’re going to chip away at this part of your right. Next year …”</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans still have another year to chip away at voting rights before the presidential election—a fact that gives civil-rights advocates migraines. “I’m just not as creative as the people who are trying to suppress the vote,” Johnson-Blanco says, laughing gamely. “We’re trying to play catch-up all the time.”</div><div>
</div><div>The pace is already picking up as November 2020 approaches. In many states, election officials will conduct purges of the voting rolls; the Supreme Court has allowed them to kick off voters who’ve skipped two consecutive federal elections, and most Republican-controlled states make use of them, sometimes failing to provide the notice (and opportunity to re-register) that the law requires.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div><b>As did his friend, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia (second from right), Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (left) will oversee the administration of his own statewide race</b>. Kemp served as Georgia’s secretary of state, overseeing the gubernatorial election in which he ran against Stacey Abrams. Merrill, one of the nation’s most prolific voter-roll purgers, is running for a U.S. Senate seat. (Photo from Merrill’s Facebook page.)]</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of the most prolific purgers, Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State John Merrill, is overseeing his own 2020 campaign for U.S. Senate, currently one candidate in a field of Republicans vying for the nomination to run against Democrat Doug Jones</span>. Merrill has made no secret of his desire to create barriers to Alabamians who want to vote: “As long as I’m secretary of state of Alabama, you’re going to have to show some initiative to become a registered voter in this state,” he told documentary filmmaker Brian Jenkins in 2016. Asked why he opposed automatic registration for eligible citizens over 18, Merrill said, “If you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear and go register to vote, or to register electronically, and then to vote, then you don’t deserve that privilege.”</div><div>
</div><div>Post-Shelby, states are free to shorten their early voting periods, and to close down more polling places where Democrats live. New laws, some inspired by the latest methods cooked up in states like Tennessee and Florida, will be passed—and most will land in the courts. With Democrats’ attempts to restore the full powers of the Voting Rights Act stymied by Mitch McConnell and the Republican U.S. Senate majority, it will be another election year marked by chaos and uncertainty for voters and local election officials alike. In some states, as in 2016, voters won’t know what kind of ID is required until a court rules in the fall. Some won’t know that they’ve been purged from the voting rolls until they arrive to vote. Some won’t know where to vote; one recent report found that 1,688 polling places have been closed since 2012. Texas alone had 760. African Americans and Latinos know they will have to wait in longer lines. Others will be reading stories about disputes, in states like Georgia, over whether votes will be counted by machine, or by paper ballots that can be recounted and audited.</div><div>
</div><div>This uncertainty creates what Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter calls a “fog of confusion” around voting—an indirect form of voter suppression that might be more powerful than all the others. “Voter suppression is not just one incident, one policy at a time,” says Renitta Shannon, a Democratic state representative in Georgia. “It’s a collection of actions chipping away at voting rights. If you aren’t directly preventing people from voting, you’re sending a message that it’s going to be a hassle, or that their votes won’t count. Some people are bound to end up saying, OK, why bother?”</div><div>
</div><div>But voting-rights advocates, who had no way of preparing for the voting-rights backlash that followed Obama’s first victory, have begun to counter it by working to broaden voting at the same time that they’re fighting off new forms of suppression. Groups like Move Texas helped triple youth turnout in that state in 2018. In Florida, Gillum has founded an ambitious nonprofit aimed at expanding the vote dramatically, while Abrams has expanded her Georgia operation, now called Fair Fight Action, to 20 states for 2020. And though the courts continued to deliver rulings favorable to voter-suppressors—like October’s Rucho vs. Cunningham decision, in which five conservative Supreme Court justices barred federal courts from hearing partisan gerrymandering claims (as opposed to racial gerrymandering lawsuits)—the key cases aren’t all setbacks.</div><div>
</div><div>They have created in me a fire they intended to dim.</div><div>TEQUILA JOHNSTON, THE EQUITY ALLIANCE]</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Shortly after that ruling, judges in North Carolina went the opposite way, prohibiting the state from using Republican maps in 2020. Meanwhile, in other states, Democrats and voting-rights groups are suing to restore lost early-voting days, including crucial weekend hours before election days. In Texas, Democrats are contesting a new law that prevents campuses from having early-voting sites. And in Tennessee, while the crackdown on voter registration groups awaits its legal fate, Black Voter Project stalwarts like Tequila Johnson continue their work to counter, if not overcome, the effects of voter suppression.</span></div><div>
</div><div>“I’m going to do it anyway,” she says, despite the potential legal jeopardy. “What would have happened if Dr. King had said, ‘I’m not going to march across that bridge in Selma because there’s a law against it’? I find it almost an obligation to pick up that torch, to push forward, regardless of what the consequences are.”</div><div>
</div><div>Johnson keeps 25 registration forms in her car, with a goal of having them all gone by the end of each week. “On Juneteenth, I turned in 165 registration forms that I’d gathered during the month. As I was in the grocery store, gas station, picking my child up from camp, whenever I had a conversation, I’d be like—are you registered to vote?” She laughs, then turns serious and says, “They have created in me a fire they intended to dim.”</div><div>
</div><div>Tags: Andrew GillumBrian KempCharlane OliverCliff AlbrightDelmus CallowayDonald J. TrumpHillary ClintonJim DeMintJohn MerrillKamala HarrisMicah KubicMichael HyersMitch McConnellPatricia BrighamPaul WeyrichRep. Athena SalmanRep. Mike CarterRon DeSantisRuth Bader GinsburgStacey AbramsTequila JohnsonTom Fittonvoter intimidationvoter suppressionACLU of FloridaALECAmerican Legislative Exchange CouncilBlack Voter ProjectBlack Voters MatterBrennan Center for JusticeHeritage FoundationJudicial WatchLawyers' Committee on Civil RightsLeague of Women VotersMove TexasNew Georgia ProjectThe Equity AllianceThe New Georgia ProjectVoter Integrity Project</div><div>
</div><div>rww 1119</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/robert-reich-the-myth-of-voter-fraud-and-the-truth-about-whats-really-threatening-our-elections/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/robert-reich-the-myth-of-voter-fraud-and-the-truth-about-whats-really-threatening-our-elections/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/students-could-be-a-major-force-in-2020-but-not-if-republicans-can-help-it/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/students-could-be-a-major-force-in-2020-but-not-if-republicans-can-help-it/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Students could be a major force in 2020 — but not if Republicans can help it</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Laura Clawson / Daily Kos October 25, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Republicans are always looking for ways to find people likely to vote for Democrats and keep them from voting, and that’s putting a big voter-suppression target on college campuses, where one poll has found<b>&nbsp;45% of students to be Democrats and just 24% Republicans.&nbsp;</b>This is where Republican creativity truly flowers—not in the arts or music, but in finding ways to keep students from voting.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Voter ID laws are always fruitful, with state after state passing laws making it anywhere from confusing to completely impossible to use a college ID to vote. That’s the case in Wisconsin and North Carolina and Texas and Tennessee</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. In New Hampshire, legislators jumped over that and required out-of-state college students to get New Hampshire drivers licenses and auto registrations, effectively a poll tax.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;This stuff can make a big difference, reports The New York Times:&nbsp;</span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“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.”&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Donald Trump prevailed in Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes, and there are more than 170,000 students in just the University of Wisconsin system</span></b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>In Texas, in case a punitive voter ID law wasn’t enough,&nbsp;</b>Republicans passed a law against polling places that are only open for part of the state’s 12-day early-voting period. That affects a significant number of college campus polling places. Florida Republicans, too, took aim at early-voting places on college campuses, and when their first effort was struck down by the courts, they found a backdoor way to revive it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Students can also run into trouble knowing at what address to register to vote, with some campuses spread across multiple precincts and elections officials not always sympathetic to helping them figure it out.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wouldn’t it be nice if Tom Steyer was investing the tens of millions of dollars he’s currently spending on ads for his own presidential campaign in helping make sure students are able to vote?</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">----</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/civil-rights-group-challenges-rejection-of-george-mason-student-voter-registrations/2019/10/24/10e27f60-f66e-11e9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html">https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/civil-rights-group-challenges-rejection-of-george-mason-student-voter-registrations/2019/10/24/10e27f60-f66e-11e9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Politics</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Civil rights group challenges rejection of George Mason student voter registrations</font></div></div></div><div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">F<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/federal-court-blocks-florida-republicans-modern-day-poll-tax/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4; display: inline !important;">ederal court blocks Florida Republicans’ modern-day poll tax</a>&nbsp;1019&nbsp;<a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/stephen-wolf/" title="Posts by Stephen Wolf" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; text-align: right; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Stephen Wolf</a><span style="text-align: right;">&nbsp;</span><span style="text-align: right;">/</span><span style="text-align: right;">&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/daily-kos/" title="Posts by Daily Kos" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; text-align: right; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Daily Ko</a>s</font></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">palast fresno talk 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-october-16-2019/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-october-16-2019/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">hired by stacey abrams effort</font></div><div><h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading" lang="en"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-weight: normal;"><span dir="auto">=</span></font></h1><h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading" lang="en"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-weight: normal;">&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">new short film “Suppressed: The Fight to Vote,” Brave New Films exposes rampant voter suppression that affected the outcome of the 2018 midterm election in Georgia and the threat it poses to our elections all across the nation in 2020. The issues Georgians faced included polling place closures, voter purges, missing absentee ballots, extreme wait times and a host of voter ID issues—all of which disproportionately prevented people of color from casting their ballots.</span></font></h1><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Watch “Suppressed” to discover the insidious tactics politicians use across the country to suppress the vote and stay in power. Host a screening and stay informed at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bravenewfilms.org/suppressed" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">FightToVote.org</a></font></p></div><div><span id="docs-internal-guid-fd4413e3-7fff-d7e9-b693-2f7401f7c801"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">=</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">LaRose Ohio SoS&nbsp; purge voter rolls, SCOTUS ok’d june? swing state? voterID before?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">=</span></p><div><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">
</span></div></span></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/ohio-to-purge-more-than-200000-voters-using-list-flagged-with-numerous-errors/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/ohio-to-purge-more-than-200000-voters-using-list-flagged-with-numerous-errors/</font></a></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Ohio to purge more than 200,000 voters using list flagged with numerous errors</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Igor Derysh / Salon September 9, 2019</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ohio is set to purge nearly a quarter-million people from its voter rolls Friday despite journalists and voting rights groups finding repeated mistakes on the state’s list.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose published a list in August targeting 235,000 voters the state says are inactive, meaning voters who have not voted for the past six years that the state was unable to contact.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The list of voters was fraught with errors. The secretary of state’s office announced hundreds of changes to the list almost immediately. Two weeks later, voting rights groups discovered that 4,000 people had been erroneously added to the list, the Columbus Dispatch reported.&nbsp;<b>The paper reported days later that another 1,600 people had been incorrectly added to the list because of an error by a software vendor.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The list also included thousands of people who were apparently unaware they had been targeted for removal, even though the state is required to attempt to contact them. More than 11,800 people included on the list have updated their voter registrations so they won’t be canceled, HuffPost reported.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Ohio removes people from the rolls if the state suspects they have moved or died. The list includes people who have not responded to an address confirmation mailing and people who have not voted or participated in any board of elections activity for six years. But voting rights groups say the purge lists are filled with errors that could disenfranchise thousands of legitimate voters. Ohio has already purged 265,000 voter registrations this year, and&nbsp;<b>at least 17 million people have been purged from voter rolls around the country since the 2016 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Ohio Democratic Party sued to try to stop the state from carrying out the purge, citing the repeated errors on the list. LaRose’s office argued that the errors had been fixed and that the office was taking additional steps to contact people on the list. A federal judge on Tuesday rejected the Democrats’ lawsuit seeking to halt the purge, despite acknowledging problems with past purges. The Supreme Court last year ruled that Ohio’s “supplemental process” that targets voters it suspects have moved or died was legal despite putting eligible voters at risk.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“As we prepare to finalize this process, we’re confident that there has never been a more intensive review of Ohio’s voting rolls, and we’re satisfied that the proper safeguards are in place to ensure any eligible voter will have the opportunity to have their voice heard,” LaRose spokeswoman Maggie Sheehan said in a statement to HuffPost.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But Democrats say that the dubious process all but guarantees that eligible voters will be removed.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Someone asked me on a call today, ‘Well, what’s the margin of error that’s acceptable in this purging?’ And I said, this isn’t a poll. This is voting. You should not ever be limiting people from the rolls by government error,” Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper told WOSU.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The party’s executive director, Greg Beswick, told Cleveland.com that it was “disturbing” that LaRose planned to go forward with the purge despite admitting to “errors that resulted in thousands of Ohio voters being improperly … and unlawfully flagged to be removed from the rolls.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The specter that any active voters are purged due to government error, and no fault of their own, is unacceptable,” he added.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>With no legal recourse left, voting rights groups like All Voting is Local are scrambling to contact as many people as possible to encourage them to update their registrations.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Thousands of voters at risk of being purged have already alerted the state that they are still very much alive and wish to vote,” Mick Brickner, the group’s Ohio state director, said in a statement. “This shows how deeply broken the purge process is and the need for voter registration modernization now.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/probe-of-missing-georgia-votes-finds-extreme-irregularities-in-black-districts/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/probe-of-missing-georgia-votes-finds-extreme-irregularities-in-black-districts/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</b></div><div><b>Probe of missing Georgia votes finds ‘extreme’ irregularities in black districts</b></div><div>
</div><div>Written by Andrew O'Hehir / Raw Story<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>August 30, 2019</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A trove of documents turned over in a congressional probe of missing votes in Georgia’s lieutenant governor race — along with other voting issues — revealed serious irregularities.</span></div><div>
</div><div>The House Oversight and Reform Committee is investigating whether&nbsp;<b>voting machine errors&nbsp;</b>caused a large drop-off in votes in the lieutenant governor race between Democrat Sarah Riggs Amico and Republican Geoff Duncan, who won the election by about 123,000 votes. The probe is looking at why so many fewer votes were recorded in the race compared to other statewide races, as well as the voter suppression issues that plagued the 2018 state elections.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">There were 159,000 fewer votes cast in the lieutenant governor race than in the gubernatorial race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp. While it is common for down-ballot races to see fewer votes, the lieutenant governor race had twice as much drop-off as other statewide races, even though it was the second race on the ballot, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.</span></div><div>
</div><div>There were 80,000 fewer votes cast for lieutenant governor than in other down-ballot races, which represents a 4 percent drop-off from the gubernatorial race, compared to a 2 percent drop-off among even less charismatic down-ballot races. For various reasons, this appears illogical. Historically, the lieutenant governor race has had a much lower drop-off rate than other statewide races in previous elections.</div><div>
</div><div>More than 15,500 pages of documents turned over the to Oversight Committee and obtained by the Journal-Constitution shows that the election was plagued by widespread irregularities.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In one case, a voting machine in Kemp’s home precinct recorded that Republicans won every race, while the other six machines in that same precinct showed that Democrats won every race. The machine showed Republicans winning by roughly the same margin by which Democrats won on the other machines. A statistician’s analysis cited in court documents said “odds of an anomaly that large are less than 1 in 1 million,” the Journal-Constitution reported.</span></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>But the problems were far more widespread. The documents show a decline in votes on electronic voting machines in 101 of the state’s 159 counties, even though paper absentee ballots in the same districts did not show a significant decline.</b></div><div>
</div><div>An analysis by the Democratic data-tracking firm TargetSmart found that the drop-off “grew even more extreme in precincts with large African American populations,” according to the report.</div><div>
</div><div>“I’ve never seen a drop-off pattern like this, ever,” TargetSmart data analyst Chris Brill told the Journal-Constitution.</div><div>
</div><div>The Georgia election as a whole was marred by Republican voter suppression efforts and aging, vulnerable voting machines. The Coalition for Good Governance, an election security group that sued to contest the lieutenant governor race, issued a report alleging that the extreme drop-off in black districts suggests the undervote could not be explained by voters simply skipping that race on their ballots.</div><div>
</div><div>“The rates of touchscreen machine–reported undervotes in such precincts in the Lt. Governor contest are far greater than the undervote rates in non–African American neighborhoods regardless of whether those neighborhoods lean Democratic or Republican,” the report said. “The undervote problem did not happen at the same exaggerated levels in many primarily White neighborhoods that overwhelmingly voted for Stacey Abrams and other Democrats, rebutting the argument that the difference can be explained by party-driven voter behavior.”</div><div>
</div><div>The group’s analysis found that the drop-off rate in some African-American areas was as high as 13 percent, much higher than the 4 percent statewide figure, The Root reported.</div><div>
</div><div>Brill told The Root that TargetSmart’s analysis showed that “as the percentage of the African-American vote would get higher, the undervote would also get higher.”</div><div>
</div><div>Brill said in an affidavit filed in court that the results are “extremely suspect and irregular and cast a serious doubt over the accuracy of the final vote and the certified outcome of the lieutenant governor’s contest,” adding that he “finds no reasonable, plausible explanation other than machine malfunction.”</div><div>
</div><div>Phillip Stark, a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a court filing that the undervote rate “strongly suggests that malfunction, misconfiguration, bugs, hacking, or other error or malfeasance caused some DREs [direct recording electronic voting machines] not to record votes in the lieutenant governor’s contest.”</div><div>
</div><div>Georgia is one of five states that exclusively uses electronic machines, with no paper backup. Most of the machines in the state are outdated touchscreen devices that are considered vulnerable to hacking. In a ruling earlier this month, federal Judge Amy Totenberg called the state’s machines “unsecure, unreliable and grossly outdated.” Totenberg ordered the state to start using machines with paper backups by next year.</div><div>
</div><div>Although there is no clear explanation for what happened to the votes in the lieutenant governor’s race, the Georgia Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit filed to challenge Duncan’s election.</div><div>
</div><div>Republican state officials, meanwhile, have been opposed to any sort of review. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has refused to open an investigation into the matter and state officials claimed that the undervote may have been caused by “low interest,” the Journal-Constitution reported, even though other races did not see anywhere near the same drop-off. The secretary of state’s office previously denied Amico’s request for a recount, arguing that it was common for voters to skip down-ballot races without addressing the much higher vote total in other races nor the racial disparity.</div><div>
</div><div>Eddie Perez of the Open Source Election Technology Institute, which has pushed for Georgia to adopt hand-marked paper ballots, questioned why officials were so resistant to investigating an election with an inexplicable vote total.</div><div>
</div><div>“I don’t know why the state of Georgia appears to be resisting an examination,” Perez told the Journal-Constitution. “They’re not getting any closer to the truth. This really is unusual, and it begs explanation.”</div><div>
</div><div>The Coalition for Good Governance is asking the Georgia Supreme Court to consider their lawsuit challenging Duncan’s election after a county judge dismissed the case, even while conceding that there were issues with the entire voting system.</div><div>
</div><div>“There is a real wall up and real obstacles to prevent sunshine from coming in and having any kind of election transparency,” Marilyn Marks, the executive director for the Coalition for Good Governance, told the Journal-Constitution. “Let’s find some facts. It’s crazy to think that the paper-ballot voters felt one way about the candidates and the machine voters felt another way.”</div><div>
</div><div>Stark, the Berkeley statistician, said in a court filing in the lawsuit that the irregularities are too large to ignore.</div><div>
</div><div>“Based on my analysis, described above, and my knowledge of Georgia’s DRE voting system used in the November 6, 2018 election,” he said in an affidavit, “it is my opinion that the certified results of the lieutenant governor’s race are in substantial doubt.”</div><div>
</div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-voting-wars-come-to-campus/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-voting-wars-come-to-campus/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The voting wars come to campus</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Daniel Block / Washington Monthly<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>August 27, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Texas: home of corn dogs, Matthew McConaughey, and some of America’s most restrictive voting laws. To register yourself, you have to print out a form and deliver it to the county clerk, because unlike most states,&nbsp;<b>Texas&nbsp;</b>has no online voter registration. To help register others, you must be certified as a “volunteer deputy registrar,” a process that requires either taking an exam or attending an often long and awkwardly timed training session. Your certificate is only valid in the county where it is obtained.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The state has also made it harder to cast a ballot. Between 2013 and 2016, Texas eliminated more than 400 polling locations, the largest drop in any state during that time. In 2013, after years of litigation, it implemented a strict voter ID law. The law, which lists seven kinds of acceptable IDs, became infamous for its brazenly partisan implications—<b>handgun licenses are okay, for example, while student IDs are not.&nbsp;</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All of which makes the following statistic so surprising: at the University of Texas at Austin, the state’s flagship university, undergraduate turnout increased from almost 39 percent to 53 percent between 2012 and 2016. Over that same time period, national youth turnout stayed roughly constant. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University, which calculates campus voting rates, has not yet released numbers for last year’s midterms. But at UT Austin’s on-campus polling locations, the number of early ballots cast was more than three times higher than it was in 2014. (Travis County only provides polling site specific data for early voting.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The state of Texas is not alone in seeming to apply tougher voting rules to college students, who as a group are more left leaning than the overall electorate. In New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and Arizona—all presidential battlegrounds—Republican-controlled legislatures have created particular obstacles for college voters.</b>&nbsp;And yet, in the midst of this clampdown, there are clear signs that students and schools are surmounting voting barriers and countering their impact—and not just in Texas. At Arizona State University in Tempe, for example, despite a restrictive voter ID law and new limits on mail-in ballot collection, student voting rates went up by double digits between 2012 and 2016.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">That’s because at institutions like UT Austin and ASU Tempe, students and staff work to make registering and voting as easy as possible, even as Texas and Arizona have made it harder.</span>&nbsp;They find new, creative ways of registering students. They explain complex voting requirements. They work with local officials to increase polling access on campus. In doing so, they are supported by a growing network of national organizations that provide funding, share information, and help schools develop plans to simplify getting out the vote. (The Washington Monthly incorporates data from these organizations in its college rankings. Both UT Austin and ASU Tempe received perfect scores.)&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These efforts appear to be making a difference. Nationwide, college voting rates increased by more than three percentage points between 2012 and 2016, more than the overall turnout increase. Between 2014 and 2018, youth turnout rose by nearly a third.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an era of high partisanship and close contests, student voting can make a tremendous impact. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won her U.S. Senate seat by 55,900 votes, roughly the size of ASU Tempe’s student population. In Texas, youth turnout tripled between 2014 and 2018, and Democrat Beto O’Rourke overperformed in counties with a high percentage of young voters. That means that UT Austin was at the vanguard of a trend that helped bring O’Rourke surprisingly close to unseating Ted Cruz from the U.S. Senate.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The increase in student voting is counterintuitive, but it fits a broader pattern. Even as franchise restrictions target certain communities, political scientists have found that they do not usually result in lower proportional turnout. There is little evidence that voter ID laws have led to markedly less voting among racial minorities, even though minorities are far less likely than white people to possess the kinds of identification these laws require. Researchers aren’t quite sure why. But several have suggested that the reason is counter-mobilization: the harder a state works to suppress turnout, the harder people fight back.</font></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">... KOS</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...in&nbsp;</font></div><ul open="Open" sans="Sans" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">n&nbsp;<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Louisiana</strong>, Republicans are trying to win a supermajority in the legislature so that even if the state’s Democratic governor is re-elected this fall, he won’t be able to veto future GOP gerrymanders.</font></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Mississippi</strong>, they want to maintain the state’s lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of any of a long list of felonies, even those who’ve completed their sentences—a relic of Jim Crow that makes the state one of just a few to do so.</span></font></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And in&nbsp;<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Kentucky</strong>, they’re eager to flip the office of secretary of state—currently held by a Democrat—so that they’ll have complete control over how elections are run when Mitch McConnell seeks an eighth term next year</font></li></ul><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/analysis-17-million-americans-purged-from-voter-rolls-between-2016-and-2018/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/analysis-17-million-americans-purged-from-voter-rolls-between-2016-and-2018/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Analysis: 17 million Americans purged from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Common Dreams<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>August 3,&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">2019</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Millions of Americans are still suffering the consequences of the 2013 Supreme Court decision that loosened restrictions of the Voting Rights Act, giving states with long histories of voter discrimination free reign to purge voters from their rolls without federal oversight.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Brennan Center for Justice released a study Thursday showing that 17 million Americans were dropped from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018—almost four million more than the number purged between 2006 and 2008.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The problem was most pronounced in counties and election precincts with a history of racial oppression and voter suppression. In such areas voters were kicked off rolls at a rate 40 percent higher than places which have protected voting rights more consistently.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Following the Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, counties with histories of discrimination no longer have to obtain “pre-clearance,” or approval from the Department of Justice (DOJ), before they make changes to voting procedures—allowing them to slash their voter rolls liberally, often resulting in voter suppression of eligible voters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to the Brennan Center, Shelby County single-handedly pushed two million people off voter rolls across the country over four years after the case was decided.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The effect of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision has not abated,” researcher Kevin Morris wrote Friday.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Brennan Center said that while there are legitimate reasons for removing names from a state’s voter database, such as a relocation to another state or a death, many voters’ names—especially those of minority voters—are purged even though they meet the state’s requirements for casting a ballot.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In big states like California and Texas, multiple individuals can have the same name and date of birth, making it hard to be sure that the right voter is being purged when perfect data are unavailable,” wrote Morris. “Troublingly, minority voters are more likely to share names than white voters, potentially exposing them to a greater risk of being purged.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“Voters often do not realize they have been purged until they try to cast a ballot on Election Day—after it’s already too late,” Morris added.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In its report, the Brennan Center included a map showing the counties where the most voters were dropped from the rolls.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">17 million Americans were purged from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018.17 million Americans were purged from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Indiana purged close to a quarter of voters from its rolls between 2016 and 2018, while Wisconsin and Virginia dropped about 14 percent of voters. More than 10 percent of voters in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Maine were purged from voter databases.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">High rates of voter purging in some states have made headlines in recent months. Georgia’s Republican Gov. Mark Kemp came under fire during his election campaign last year for overseeing, as secretary of state, the purging of more than 100,000 voters from the state rolls, including many people of color.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Ohio, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown was among those protesting this week against an impending purge of as many as 235,000 voters from the state’s rolls.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Across the country, the Brennan Center said Friday, election officials must embrace efforts to make voting easier, not harder, and ensure eligible voters don’t show up to the polls in upcoming elections only to find out that their name has been purged.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Election administrators must be transparent about how they are deciding what names to remove from the rolls,” said the organization. “They must be diligent in their efforts to avoid erroneously purging voters. And they should push for reforms like automatic voter registration and election day registration, which keep voters’ registration records up to date.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Election Day is often too late to discover that a person has been wrongfully purged,” the group added.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><table width="550" helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" margin="margin" auto="auto"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="410"><p class="yiv8089647698headline3" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" margin="margin" padding="padding"><a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click1.e.alternet.org/bzzbqszvztdydqmmyjfzzyzmmjymvgcnbtzdfpsbclf_yvslsvcvnskgscsgbkk.html?a=&b=466&c=21989&d=2"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Florida’s GOP governor approves repugnant new law that could ban up to 1 million from voting</font></a></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-style="font-style" italic="italic" color="color" rgb="rgb" margin="margin" padding="padding"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></p><p style="margin: 10px 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Floridians voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to&nbsp;restore voting…</font></p></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/john-roberts-will-wreck-democracy-if-trump-gets-out-of-his-way/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/john-roberts-will-wreck-democracy-if-trump-gets-out-of-his-way/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>&nbsp;John Roberts will wreck democracy — if Trump gets out of his way&nbsp;</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon June 28, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A pair of rulings handed down by the Supreme Court on the last day of its current session shows just how much<b>&nbsp;Chief Justice John Roberts has overseen the slow destruction of the democratic process in this country over the last decade.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Since assuming the center seat on the nation’s highest court in 2005, Roberts has ruled in favor of unlimited corporate spending in political elections and against enforcement of the&nbsp;<b>Voting Rights Act</b>. This week he added allowing partisan gerrymandering to continue and at least a potential citizenship question on the census, an obvious attempt to intimidate non-citizens and immigrants out of participating.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Yes, technically Roberts joined with the court’s four “liberal” justices in a complex 5-4 decision on whether the Trump administration can ask all recipients a citizenship question on the 2020 census for the first time since 1950. But his ruling isn’t anything to get excited about. Quite the contrary.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The question, which critics say would further reduce the already low Hispanic participation rate, had been blocked by numerous federal courts. The Trump administration had claimed it was necessary to better comply with federal voting rights law.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“There’s no evidence in this record that the secretary [of Commerce] would have asked this question had the Department of Justice not requested it,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued in court.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But there was plenty of evidence to suggest that this question was fed to the Trump campaign team around the time of the election by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a notorious advocate of voter suppression tactics. It likely came through former Trump campaign CEO and White House adviser Steve Bannon, before landing in the lap of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the census. The administration simply lied about all that.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., asked Ross during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing last year, “Has the president or anyone in the White House discussed with you or anyone on your team about adding the citizenship question?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ross replied: “I am not aware of any such.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">His lawyers later admitted, however,&nbsp; that “Secretary Ross recalls that [Steve] Bannon called Secretary Ross in the Spring of 2017 to ask Secretary Ross if he would be willing to speak to then-Kansas Secretary of State&nbsp;<b>Kris Kobach&nbsp;</b>about Secretary Kobach’s ideas about a possible citizenship question on the decennial census,” despite initial claims that Ross could not “confirm that the Secretary spoke to Steve Bannon regarding the Citizenship Question.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a July 2017 email to Ross, Kobach proposed wording for a citizenship question. He complained that “aliens who do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States are still counted” in the census numbers used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. This is ludicrous on its face: You do not have to be a citizen of a given country to “reside” within it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The evidence is damning and difficult to ignore — but if the Trump administration had not blatantly lied to Roberts’ face, they probably would have gotten away with it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The sole stated reason” for the citizenship question, Roberts wrote in his opinion, “seems to have been contrived. We are presented, in other words, with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The decision remands the case to lower courts to be reconsidered. The census wasn’t saved by the Supreme Court, but by Trump’s incompetence. Roberts essentially stated that the citizenship question was legitimate — but that the government had to come up with a better excuse for it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The U.S. census has never been about how many people are citizens or eligible voters in a given area. It’s about a much simpler question: How many people live there.</b>&nbsp;Adding the citizenship question, in light of the evidence that it would depress response rates, only serves as a direct contradiction of the census’ principal purpose. Congress has directed the Census Bureau to spend no more on the 2020 Census than it did in 2010 when, according to the government’s reports, Latinos were undercounted by 1.5 percent and African-Americans by nearly 2 percent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump administration argued in court that there was not enough evidence that the question would decrease the response rate to block the question. (Research from the Census Bureau itself strongly suggests otherwise.) The administration also previously told the court that the questionnaire needed to be printed by the end of June — which you will notice is upon us. No doubt the government will now concede that the real deadline is October, as the challengers to the question have long argued. Roberts is merely inviting the administration to come back with a better lie.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under Roberts’ tenure, the court’s conservative justices have previously provided free legal advice to favor certain outcomes. For instances, they asked the Trump administration come back several times with modifications to its so-called travel ban, so that the court could pretend it was something other than a “Muslim ban.” In the infamous Citizens United case, the Roberts court had the plaintiff reframe demands in order for the conservatives to rule on the case they wanted, rather than the one actually in front of them.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unfortunately for the Trump administration, even with a second bite of the apple on the census question, this case is likely to face even more scrutiny.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a federal trial judge in Maryland ruled earlier this month, new evidence presented after oral arguments had been heard by the Supreme Court had raised “a substantial issue.” The recently revealed evidence shows just how racist the basis for this entire question actually was.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The late GOP redistricting strategist Thomas Hofeller played a substantial role in adding the citizenship question, according to documents uncovered after his death. Hofeller argued that adding a citizenship question would depress Hispanic response rates, thereby allowing states to redraw districts that boosted “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites” to an unfair electoral advantage for years to come.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Supreme Court did not initially consider the Hofeller evidence, which did not emerge until the case had been argued, but the evidence of racial bias will indisputably be part of the record the second time around. In a blatant attempt to stop congressional oversight on this front, the Justice Department on recently threatened to invoke presidential powers to withhold the documents on its efforts to add the citizenship question, unless House Democrats backed off their threats to hold Ross in contempt of Congress. So far, Democrats haven’t blink.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In light of an earlier ruling by Roberts, the census case is merely a temporary failure and another example of a rookie mistake by Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before handing down his surprise decision in the census case, Roberts ruled alongside the other four justices appointed by Republicans to allow partisan gerrymandering to go unchallenged in federal court. This essentially guarantees that the political party that controls a statehouse can draw voting districts however it wishes, without intervention.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent. “Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ramifications of this decision will be felt for decades to come all over the country. There’s ample evidence that Republicans in office have pursued gerrymandered maps to shut out people of color or other groups likely to vote Democratic — either by carving them up and dispersing them, or by concentrating them into as few districts as possible.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John Roberts, who gave Republicans a green light to install legislative majorities against the will of the people — and may yet allow them yet another tool to keep power through the census — seeks to convey a sense of consensus, as biographer Joan Biskupic notes. Supreme Court justices “do not sit on opposite sides of an aisle, we do not caucus in separate rooms, and we do not serve one party or one interest. We serve one nation,” Roberts insisted last October.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But as Nse Ufot, the executive director of&nbsp; New Georgia Project,&nbsp; the nonprofit voter engagement group founded by Stacey Abrams, notes: “Justice Roberts is hiding behind the concept of federalism. They’re using the separation of powers and branches of government as a pretext for attacking civil rights. They have a sacred duty to uphold the Constitution. [The 2013 decision to overturn parts of the Voting Rights Act] told us everything we needed to know about the Roberts Court and their hostility toward civil rights and voting rights.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Roberts wrote both of Thursday’s majority opinions. This is his project, and it’s not over.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">also scotus on gerrymander</font></p><p><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/supreme-court-sends-census-citizenship-case-back-to-lower-court-after-bombshell-evidence-reveals-gops-true-motives/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/supreme-court-sends-census-citizenship-case-back-to-lower-court-after-bombshell-evidence-reveals-gops-true-motives/</font></a></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Supreme Court sends census citizenship case back to lower court after bombshell evidence reveals GOP’s true motives</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">STEPHEN WOLF / DAILY KOS</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">27 JUN 2019 AT 15:30 ET</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In a surprise decision that will help preserve fair political representation, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from adding a question to the 2020 census asking U.S. residents about their citizenship status, instead sending the case back to lower court for it to explore explosive new evidence behind the GOP’s motives for including the question.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The addition of this citizenship question would have likely had a chilling effect, intimidating millions of people in immigrant communities into not participating in the census. That in turn would have<b>&nbsp;turbocharged a new wave of hyperpartisan Republican gerrymandering nationwide, since census data is the bedrock of redistricting.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This impact was in fact the entire rationale behind this question: In a recent bombshell report, based on newly unearthed documents from a deceased GOP political consultant,&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Thomas Hofeller,&nbsp;</span>Republicans admitted that rigging the census would eviscerate the political power of Democrats and voters of color.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Constitution mandates that every person in the U.S. be counted in the decennial census, without regard to their legal status. A question on citizenship hasn’t been included in the census since 1950, and even when it has appeared, it has never been asked of every single participant, as the Trump administration intended it to be in 2020. Furthermore, multiple lower courts had ruled that Trump’s attempt to add the question violated both federal law and the Constitution.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those courts uniformly dismissed the Trump administration’s claim that the Justice Department needed data on citizenship to enforce the Voting Rights Act as a bogus pretext that masked their true motives. Hofeller’s document trove revealed the GOP’s racist and partisan intent: allowing mapmakers to use citizenship statistics result in “a disadvantage to the Democrats” and to be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although the Census Bureau had planned to print millions of census forms in July, plaintiffs argued that it could delay printing until October to give the courts time to resolve the case. Now, the case will go back to the federal district court in New York that originally heard the matter. That will allow the judge to conduct an in-depth review of the new evidence and craft a ruling that addresses the Trump administration’s racial and partisan animus. In the likely event that the lower court once again blocks the question, the Supreme Court may let such a ruling stand following its latest decision.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Given the blatant display of partisan and racial bigotry behind the GOP’s plans, this ruling averted a major blow to democracy that would have rivaled the harms of both 2000’s Bush v. Gore decision and the 2013 ruling that crippled the Voting Rights Act. Although the Supreme Court’s Republican majority has advanced an increasingly partisan agenda that undermines the rule of law, Trump’s malicious effort to weaponize the census simply proved to be too extreme for the court to accept.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">619 an</font></p><p><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/as-he-blocks-election-security-bills-mitch-mcconnell-takes-checks-from-voting-machine-lobbyists/" open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-weight="font-weight" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As he blocks election security bills, Mitch McConnell takes checks from voting machine lobbyists</font></a></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><div><p class="date" style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">January 9th, 2019</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today Representatives&nbsp;<b>Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) and A. Donald McEachin (D-VA) reintroduced the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Election Day Holiday Act</em>, legislation that will make Election Day a federal holiday.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The right to vote is fundamental in our democracy, yet U.S. voter turnout is consistently among the lowest of all established democracies around the world. A 2014 study found that among those who didn’t vote, 35 percent didn’t have time to do so because of work or school. The&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Election Holiday Act&nbsp;</em>makes Election Day a federal holiday so more Americans have the time they need to vote and participate in our democracy.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“People should not be forced to choose between their job or family and exercising their right to vote.”&nbsp;<strong style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Rep. Eshoo said</strong>. “At a time when our democracy needs to be strengthened, and when many states are restricting access to the ballot box, it’s more important than ever for Congress to reaffirm our commitment to the most fundamental aspect of democracy, the right to vote. Strong voter turnout is essential to a healthy democracy, and this legislation ensures more voices are heard in the political process.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I am proud to introduce the Election Day Holiday Act again this Congress with Congresswoman Eshoo to require that our country treats Election Day as a holiday. We must do all we can to remove barriers to the ballot box. I fought for voters’ rights by introducing similar legislation during my time as a member of Virginia’s General Assembly,”&nbsp;<strong style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">said Congressman Donald McEachin</strong>. “The right to vote is sacred and should be protected.&nbsp;Our democracy depends on this fundamental principle.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reps. Eshoo and McEachin first introduced the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Election Day Holiday Act</em>&nbsp;in the 115<span style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">th</span>&nbsp;Congress with 30 cosponsors<b>. The&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Election Day Holiday Act</em>&nbsp;is also included in H.R. 1, the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">For the People Act</em>,&nbsp;</b>the sweeping&nbsp; reform and anti-corruption package introduced by House Democrats to restore our democracy and return political power to the American people</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/texas-republicans-double-down-on-voter-suppression-push-as-session-ends"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">2019/</span>05/texas-republicans-double-down-on-voter-suppression-push-as-session-ends</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Te<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">xas Republicans are pushing two new bills that critics say are aimed at suppressing voter turnout after a similar bill died days before the end of their legislative session.</span></b></font></div><div class="p1_12" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Sunday, a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/05/08/texas-gop-votes-to-make-voter-registration-mistakes-a-felony-in-new-suppression-push/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">State Senate bill</a>&nbsp;that was passed with only Republican support, which would have increased criminal penalties for voter registration-related crimes and made it harder for volunteers to help elderly and disabled voters get to the polls, effectively died after it missed a legislative deadline in the House,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.texasobserver.org/in-the-texas-legislatures-final-days-republicans-find-new-ways-to-attack-voting-rights/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">The Texas Observer</a>&nbsp;reported.</font></p></div>