Stealing The Mid-Terms… Staying Focused

Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Georgia Stacey Abrams and her Republican opponent Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

Over the last couple of days some news outlets have been focused on the despicable person or people, who have sent out pipe bombs to highly visible and aggressive detractors of President Trump. Others are focusing on the immigrant caravan coming to the southern border of the United States. These broadcast will continue non-stop right up to election day. Although these events are newsworthy and require America’s attention, they also provide cover. While everyone is focused on these events, our scrutiny has been drawn away from the fact that there is concerted and very effective effort being given to voter suppression. Whether these broadcast are by design or accident, only time will tell. Our politicians, security apparatus and law enforcement services are very much up to the task of handling bomb threats and border security. “The greatest trick the Devil  ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. – Keyser Söze”

As the mid-terms draws near African American, Latino and other minority voters have been excluded from the democratic process in massive numbers. Voter-ID laws, polling-place changes, gerrymandering and even outright fraud such as a report from New York, which has a candidate mailing out fliers telling minority communities to send in their absentee ballots after the deadline so they will not be counted. In Georgia candidate Stacy Abrams is taking her opponent to court. Brian Kemp, who is also the Secretary of State and is running neck in neck with Abrams for the office of the Governor, has been accused of holding up more than 50,000 voter registrations. These held up registrations mostly affect black Georgians and are allegedly being held because of improprieties. According to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, the number of voters “purged” skyrocketed under Kemp, who took office in 2010. Between the 2012 and 2016 elections, more than 1.5 million voters were purged, nearly twice as many as the between the 2008 and 2012 elections. Last year, Kemp settled a lawsuit with civil rights organisations over voting rights. The suit included allegations that the voter registration system was discriminatory, citing the cancellation of around 34,000 people’s registration status between 2010 and 2013. Just last week, a federal district court judge ruled that the state’s elections officials must stop rejecting absentee ballots and absentee ballot applications due to a mismatched signature without telling the voter.

In North Dakota they don’t give a damn what anyone thinks, they took their racist policy straight to the Supreme Court… and won. The voter ID law was introduced just months after Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, eked out a narrow upset victory in 2012, winning by less than 3,000 votes. Republican lawmakers responded by passing restrictive voter ID legislation that all but guaranteed that large numbers of Native Americans  who tend to vote Democratic  wouldn’t be able to participate in the political process. Specifically, the law requires voters to bring to the polls an ID that displays a “current residential street address” or other supplemental documentation that provides proof of such an address. But guess what? Thousands of Native Americans live on reservations in rural areas and don’t have street addresses. Since the U.S. Postal Service doesn’t provide residential mail delivery in remote areas, many members of North Dakota’s Native American tribes list their mailing addresses, as P.O. boxes on their IDs. Now, because the Supreme Court refused to block the law, people who show up at their polling station with a P.O. box on their ID will be turned away. Heitkamp was the lone Republican senator that voted against the Kavanaugh supreme court nomination.

These two stories are just the tip of the iceberg. By undermine the Constitution everyone’s liberty is at stake. Decades of social, environment and economic progress are in peril if we do not take as many federal and state legislatures as possible. Just the tip of the iceberg… click this link for a complete picture of the effort being put behind voter suppression. Click on the states to view their complicity in what is one of the greatest assaults on democracy since 911. Remember if there is a problem at the polls when you go vote, ask for a provisional ballot. Provisional ballots are not a catchall. Try to get things in order before you go to the polls. This article in Hill1news has information that may help you. This link is to give you more information on provisional ballot law for your state. Some state’s don’t allow provisional balloting. At the end of the day, after they have caught the bomber, decided what to do about the caravan or any other distraction that comes up….  at the end of the day we got to go to them polls and vote. Stay focused.

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