“If the purges [of potential voters], challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.”
"[…] Democracy can win* despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.
And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK."
I knew that this was going to happen as soon as they started purging voter rolls and passing draconian voter suppression laws after Trump lost. Biden just barely beat Trump in 2020, so all they had to do was give Trump a little bump - a few thousand votes nullified here or there would win him a whole state. The media focus in 2020 was on the “historic turnout”, but how many of those were covid mail-in ballots that red states didn’t allow this time? How many people showed up on election day ready to vote for Kamala only to get turned away because they weren’t on the registry even though they voted in 2020?
Republicans cheated in more than one way this time, and we got screwed because we failed to stop it early.
One lesson 2020 should have taught everyone and that’s vote by mail WORKS.
Lifting the restrictions on vote by mail for Covid won the election for Biden, and replacing those restrictions in 2024 lost it for Harris.
We should have 100% vote by mail in all states.
vote by mail WORKS.
Which is why red states didn’t want to use it. Can’t stay in power if you don’t suppress votes.
One lesson 2020 should have taught everyone and that’s vote by mail WORKS.
It was a lesson national administrators learned. That’s why it was heavily clawed back. 2020 was a big year for Popular Socialist Candidates. Neither party enjoyed a wave year that included The Squad and put a guy like Bernie Sanders in arm’s reach of Biden after Super Tuesday.
We should have 100% vote by mail in all states.
Republicans have been outspoken in opposition to mail-in voting, particularly for younger college-aged voters. But even Dems are lackluster in their support for full enfranchisement, on the grounds that higher participation tends to make controlling primaries more difficult and expensive (the NY-14 upset by AOC being a classic example).
This is why Kamala accepting the outcome “No matter what”, to prove she’s better than Trump…
Was the dumbest thing she could have done because it was just playing into the GOP’s hand.
The Republican game is “You go high, we go low, because low gets us elected and furthers our agenda.”
I thought their game was “Low, no matter what.”
I think the game is “there’s always more barrel to scrape.”
No one actually ever considered kamala might win. As soon as Biden dropped out, anyone that actually knew something knew Democrats had thrown in the towel.
Guess I don’t know shit then
Guess not
That’s absolutely not true. They had the best campaign since Obama and they did amazing job in that 3 weeks or so, and contrasting disaster of a shitshow that Trump put on made it even clearer.
In the end Americans turned out to be way worse people than predicted, but that was absolutely not obvious.
Dem pols are always too afraid to exercise the power they have when they win. Always. When Biden won, DC and Puerto Rican statehood should have been the first things on the agenda.
The GOP is never afraid to exercise as much power as they can get away with.
Biden never had enough control of the whole government to get those things done without Republican buy-in.
A Republican controlled house won’t send a bill like that to the Senate. A Republican controlled Senate won’t send it to the President.
You can be upset at Biden, but we’ve rarely ever given a Democratic president a Democratic Congress to help him get anything done.
Uh, no. He had a Democratic congress the first half of his term. Part of why he lost them is Dems are so tepid with exercising the power the voters give them.
Nothing the Dems do, or even try to do, gin the base up into excitement. The base never feels inspired that the Dems are striving for the goals they claim to represent and want.
This, 100%.
I remember when Democrats had a filibuster proof majority under Obama.
And they still failed to pass single payer healthcare, because of former VP candidate Joe Lieberman. Like, talk about lack of party discipline.
Republican politicians at least deliver what they say they will deliver.
They didn’t actually have a filibuster proof majority for much of that time. Franken’s win in Minnesota was contested, and he wasn’t sworn in until 9 months after the election.
I wouldn’t really say Republicans deliver what they say they’ll deliver. A week before election Trump was saying he’d have grocery prices lower on day one, and then as soon as he was elected he suddenly became aware that was complicated and the wouldn’t be anything he could do about it. Part of his campaign the first time around, too, was that he would provide a brilliant replacement for Obamacare, but after four years he’d done absolutely nothing on that front, and four years after that he still insisted he was going to do that, but admitted that he only had “concepts of a plan.”
They carry out a lot of the culture war aspects of their promises. And they carry out the promises they make to their billionaire megadonors. Everything else they hope gets forgotten about.
Biden never had the power. But Obama did. He squandered it imo but you’re welcome to disagree.
FTA:
The crucial statistic is that not everyone’s ballot gets disqualified. One study done for the United States Civil Rights Commission found that a Black person, such as Maj. Turner, will be 900% more likely to have their mail-in or in-person ballot disqualified than a white voter.
Okay, I went into this expecting cope, and it’s an actually good article, worth a read or at least a skim. So, let’s do something about it.
Ok, what do you suggest?
That we all stop moping about November and start networking with people on the ground. I’m not looking to the DNC for solutions, they’ve already got top level staff talking about working with Trump however they can. The best place to start doing that, imo, is to start showing up to governing body meetings- city councils, county government, whatever you can do, and start meeting other local activists. A lot of times, you’ll find some that are already part of larger, national networks for action, or they’ll be part of local mutual aid groups, which means that you’re talking with an entry point to a pretty big group. Share your concerns about election suppression and share this article with the people that you meet, talk about what you can do locally together to make a difference (remember, a lot of these are state laws and decisions).
This is 100% actionable, I’m going to a community activism meeting later this month and I plan on sharing this information, though I’m not in one of the affected states. I met this group by going to city council meetings and making public comments about the need to improve our housing stock.
Thank you, this is great information. I agree local politics is the best place to start.
The time to have done something about it was in November. But feel free to try.
I really don’t see another choice. I don’t blame you for leaving, we thought about it too, but it’s not realistic for some of us.
I realize that, and I’m sorry. Like I said, feel free to try. I just don’t hold out hope for success any time soon.
Oh please. We had the same shit in 2020 and we had a record turn out.
Don’t put the blame on voter suppression when it’s American stupidity and apathy that’s the cause.
Did you read the article and everything the author listed out that happened additionally over the past 4 years? The changes to vote by mail alone were drastic.
It is in the end stupidly and apathy. But, you can’t deny that voter suppression is also a big thing and it should be addressed.
But it can be both. Voter suppression just making it way harder for Democrats to win. And ultimately impossible.
Once again, Trump said (during his first term, I believe) on Fox News Republicans would never win another election if minorities vote. They know this. They consistently make it harder and harder for people to vote, while targeting minorities.
Once again, Trump said (during his first term, I believe) on Fox News Republicans would never win another election if minorities vote.
He was wrong. A big part of the '24 GOP wave came from young male latino and black voters who were entranced by the get-rich-quick promises of Trump/Vance. Online hustler culture on social media has been a huge driving force behind conservative voter expansion.
How 5 key demographic groups voted in 2024: AP VoteCast
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Trump’s share of Black voters rose slightly, driven largely by younger men
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Slightly more Hispanic voters supported Trump in 2020
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Narrow gains with (white) women benefitted Trump
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Trump saw a modest increase with men
Republicans have been leveraging their “business friendly” credentials to win over poorer POC voters for a while. And as Democrats adopt the same strategy, we’re running into the same problem as in 2000 and 1988 - voters aren’t able to distinguish between candidates on economic issues.
For POC women voters, the divisions are more stark. But for men of any shade, Dem decay in social media (their active war on left-leaning TikTok being a huge unforced error in an environment that’s trended hard-right since the Obama admin) and their refusal to deliver on college debt relief, cheap housing, cheap mass transit, or public health care is leaving Republicans with a huge discontented block of younger voters to poach.
-
We all know. Nothing was or will be done. Now they can rig it from the inside. Was a fun run!
Democrats had the opportunity to fix this when they were in office. They chose to protect the filibuster instead.
Did they or did Manchin and Sinema, who go figure are no longer Democrats, stop them?
Hang on…WTF!
Re post text: For context, Washington state is mail-only voting, so that number would (I assume) be for all votes, not just specifically requested mail-ins. I didn’t see it in the article, but I wonder if that is predominantly “centralized” or “distributed” in nature; i.e. are technically-valid ballots from all voters being incorrectly rejected by the county elections facilities office at different rates across racial lines, or are there other factors like targeted disinformation, education, local infrastructure, or socioeconomics that disproportionately affect Black (or other types of minority) voters that would make them more likely to produce a technically-invalid ballot?
Those might get the same statistic, but would seem to indicate very different sorts of problems and approaches.
You can vote in-person in Washington if you want to, if you lost your ballot, etc. Also, I think most people here use the drop boxes rather than their mailbox. If not most, still quite a lot.
I work in elections in Washington, there is only mail in voting plus county drop boxes. Yes you can say you lost your ballot or didn’t get it and come in for a replacement, but we give you the same mail in packet you world receive at home.
Yes you can drop it in the drop box in our office or you can take it home and mail it. But any voter can drop their mail in ballot off in our office as well. We don’t have polling places or voting machines, or a way to separate out and assign race to a ballot so we could somehow treat those differently. They all come in as a big stack for processing.
Why do ballots get rejected? Mismatched signatures is the biggest reason. If your signature doesn’t match what we have on file we mail you a form to fix it, we also text and email you. Maybe from demographic groups are less likely to respond? The other one is people who forget to sign, which follows the same procedure.
What I can say is that is there is some sort of disparity, it isn’t happening in the ballot processing room.
Your average citizen would consider dropping it into the dropbox at the location where they just got their ballot to count as in-person voting.
Maybe so, but in that case doing it at home with your own mailbox meets that same criteria.
My point is that there isn’t a different “in person” process. There’s only one process; you get a mail ballot packet, you fill it out, and you drop off in a mailbox or county drop box.
But there isn’t only one process. You can get a ballot and/or vote in-person if you choose to or need to.
Yeah, no.
Even if you choose to pick up your mail in ballot in our office, and even if you drop off in the drop box in our office, you still got a mail in ballot and dropped it in a county drop box. Everyone can do that, you weren’t special or different, just needy.
I’m not arguing that you still get a ballot sent to you. But you are wrong in saying that there is only one method. I had to vote in person once because they sent me an incorrect ballot.
Sometimes you’re not right and it’s okay to accept that and move on.
Edit: and the election site points out where you can go to vote in person. Also, I didn’t go to an office because it was a whole arena dedicated to voting in-person.
Maybe that was back when they still had in person voting in Washington, but it’s just one type of ballot packet and mail or drop boxes now.
Maybe they held your hand and called it in person to make you feel better, but there’s no different process in Washington State that’s different than the mail in process.
Didn’t Trump win partially by the black vote going for him? How do we know most of those weren’t for Trump?
No. Black people overwhelmingly still voted against Trump and for Kamala.
Trump won with double digit gains in the Hispanic vote, which is only getting bigger as a demographic. If Republicans continue to gain support here they could control the federal government for a generation or more.
Oh look election denialism
Oh look, voter suppression denialism.
We can accept the outcome while still acknowledging the bullshit that occurred. Still, It’s in everyone’s best interest to be rid of the douche. I’ll be in support of anything that furthers just that.
Anything. Glad you’re honest
yeah. ANYTHING MF. wanna find out what that means?
By “restrictive voting laws” do you mean voters having to show ID? Like every other country on the planet?
No, this article is talking about things like rejecting registration based on minor clerical errors like ink color, rejecting provisional ballots arbitrarily, and restricting the availability of ballot boxes. That sort of thing.
On the voter id question, by the way, the argument isn’t about whether or not you should have ID to vote, it’s about whether you can get ID in the first place.
Most countries in the world either issue IDs to everyone or allow you to prove your identity with things like bank statements and utility bills, or just somebody else who can vouch for you. The problem with US voter ID laws is that they only give you a few options for acceptable documents, and then make it hard to get those documents.
or allow you to prove your identity with things like bank statements and utility bills, or just somebody else who can vouch for you.
My state’s voter ID allows all of those things and more (including the voter registration card given to you for free when you register and whenever you update your registration as well as SNAP and TANF cards), although here the “somebody else who can vouch for you” has to have ID themselves and has to sign a sworn statement on penalty of perjury that you are who you say you are and that they have known you for at least 6 months.
Yeah, that seems like a reasonable approach.
By comparison, North Carolina attempted to implement a voter ID law in 2016 that was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court because it deliberately targeted black voters.
It’s not as difficult to get ID in many other countries
It’s not difficult in the US
It’s harder than it should be
Harder than going to the place that gives them out and asking for one? I’m not going to hold your hand
If only it were that easy!
It is, I’ve done it many times
I am very happy it has been easy for you. From what I have read that is not the case for many
Are you white? Are you not living in poverty?
Why don’t you ever try and actually meet the other side in good faith?
Opponents of voter ID have a very simple line of argumentation, and very clear issues that would need to be solved. Why do you think proponents of voter ID never attempt to solve these issues?
Why do proponents always insist that voter ID has to be implemented in a way that happens to hurt minority voters disproportionately?
Look at Spain. We have been using our IDs for decades and it’s a great way to solve that problem. You just go to the voting table, show your ID (DNI) and vote. That’s it. And it works for everything related to anything official.
But because of the voting system we don’t have gerrymandering (or at least not that much).
That works great for Spain (and most other countries) because it has a compulsory national ID. This doesn’t exist in the US, so introducing such laws shouldn’t be done before easy access to such an ID exists for everyone.
In the US case it should be a federal ID. With a 6 or 7 letters ID should be more than enough. And compulsory at 13 y.o. You can drive, you have an ID.
Yep, that would be a good solution. Yet conservatives never advocate for this.
Why don’t you ever try and actually meet the other side in good faith?
You first
Opponents of voter ID have a very simple line of argumentation, and very clear issues that would need to be solved.
Like?
Why do you think proponents of voter ID never attempt to solve these issues?
You don’t name them or they’re aren’t an actual issue
Why do proponents always insist that voter ID has to be implemented in a way that happens to hurt minority voters disproportionately?
They don’t
You first
No, I won’t allow you to disadvantage minorities, no matter how often you ask.
Like?
You’ve literally never listened to anyone opposing your view? Or why are you asking me?
You don’t name them or they’re aren’t an actual issue
No, I think you’re a bad faith troll and won’t invest more time than strictly necessary. If you’re not a bad faith troll, it’s literally one search away!
They don’t
You literally started your comment doing exactly this
No, I won’t allow you to disadvantage minorities, no matter how often you ask.
I won’t allow you to stereotype minorities as people incapable of doing things, especially something as easy as getting an ID.
You’ve literally never listened to anyone opposing your view? Or why are you asking me?
I do it everyday, you just don’t have an answer
it’s literally one search away!
Should be easy for you to name them then
You literally started your comment doing exactly this
I literally never said anything about that. Literally
I won’t allow you to stereotype minorities as people incapable of doing things, especially something as easy as getting an ID.
Strawman racist bullshit, disguised as uplifting affirmation of equality. Tell us you don’t see color while you’re at it.
I did the same thing they did. Why don’t you tell us how you *acknowledge your white privilege *
I try to acknowledge my white privilege by voting for politicians and laws that attempt to mitigate that privilege, by extending it as widely as possible, to as many people as possible.
Your unexamined privilege is demonstrated in claiming things like satisfying voter ID laws is easy when it is not for many, for a variety of profound and serious reasons.
Oh, it’s a bad faith troll, what a surprise, who could have seen it coming, oh no
I just responded the same way you did
If you really think that, I’ll give you one last chance. I’ll explain why your response to my serious points was wrong. You can explain properly why you disagree, without resorting to strawmans or insults or anything. Deal?
My position is: minorities will be disproportionately affected by voter ID laws, since it’s on average objectively harder for a poor person to get an ID (due to transportation, scheduling due to possibly multiple jobs etc.), and minorities are disproportionately poor. You could mitigate this disproportionate effect by first ensuring easy and equal access to ID for all citizens. Even if you disagree on any of these points, you should at least be able to accept that you can get what you want if you give me what I want, and giving me what I want doesn’t hurt you in any way.
So, why do you still ask me to make the first move? Why can’t you see that you’re blocking yourself from getting what you want here?
Like?
You don’t name them or they’re aren’t an actual issue
The biggest and most obvious is that ID isn’t available to literally everyone who can legally vote without cost to the end user of any kind, and as a consequence requiring such an ID is tantamount to a poll tax. Federal ID that’s fully subsidized would be the easiest solution, and if done right you could even optionally fold most state ID systems into a federal one with things like being licensed to drive being an endorsement on the federal ID.
Notably, the same people who demand photo ID to vote also tend to be the people terrified of a federal ID as a concept.
I SENTENCE THIS USER TO ONE HOUR ON THE CHAIR OF CHEER
I sentence you to a lifetime
https://today.umd.edu/umd-analysis-millions-of-americans-dont-have-id-required-to-vote
And “just get one” is not a solution when you live in poverty and don’t even have the transportation to go to the nearest license branch, which could be miles away. If you still have the proper documents, which sometimes are ridiculous in terms of what is needed.
And then, if you’re black and were born in the South during (and even sometimes after) Jim Crow, it’s entirely possible that there is no official record of your birth because no hospital would admit your mother.
Most countries that require this also give their citizens free IDs.
Yeah trump lost, that’s why he is the president of the united states of America
Guys, ease up with the fickle double think
Next thing you’ll say that Kamala won and she is the one in actual charge of the nation lmao 🤣
Is winning by cheating winning?
So then what makes the presidency?
In the US?
Do you have actual proof? Did you denounce it to the authorities? Hell, have you taken this proof to the press? I’m sure everyone would love to hear and see about it!
What is funny is this is everything Aotus did when Biden won. Guess what? We didn’t love to hear about the massive voter fraud he claimed and was unable to prove. Strange that when he won suddenly no problems with voting.
You would have to live under a rock to come up with these double standards. I would like to see someone take proof of gerrymandering to Faux News to see what they do about it. Oh yeah, absolutely nothing.
So no proof?
Proof of gerrymandering and voter suppression?
Gerrymandering is not really up for debate. It happens a lot.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house
Voter suppression is nothing new either. The Fascists have been passing laws for decades now under the guise of securing our already secure elections. Here are some in 2024.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-september-2024
Oh okay so no proof then. Where are the fake ballots with like 50 million votes? Where is the cheating man?
Come on, you are sitting in a gold mine if you have all that.
Weird that the Dems haven’t done anything about it last 4 years. Or before that when they had the chance
You were literally given proof. You refusing to read the links is not someone else’s fault.
They know. They are complicit! Gerry mandering, voter suppression getting rid of polling locations in black neighborhoods. Making it illegal to give water to those waiting to vote. Trump saying something about elon knowing these machine very well. Removing people from voter registration. I’m sure there is more. If you are unaware of these things you are living under a rock.
So, no proof then?
If you want to ignore the proof provided then yes.
Lol where is the proof of cheating the election?
https://lemmy.world/comment/14726844
Here
One better
https://lemmy.world/comment/14729078
There is proof, just because you don’t accept it as such, doesn’t mean it isn’t. Sounds like the arguments flat earthers make.
The perma stun proceeds at pace
