Tag: Voting Rights

Mississippi Makes The News (Again)

I live in the state of Mississippi and from time to time we make the news….usually it is some disaster like a hurricane or tornado but we seldom make the news when it comes to voting because the state is so red it feels like a smothering heat.

But recently we had an election for governor and our new touch screen machines made your choice for the voter….

Facebook user in Mississippi has posted a video showing touch-screen voting machines changing votes during Tuesday’s Republican primary runoff election for the governor’s race. The video shows a voter trying to cast their ballot for Bill Walker Jr., only for the machine to change the vote to Tate Reeves.

Some citizens, however, are having trouble making their vote. Voting machines in at least three precincts have rejected votes for Waller, selecting Reeves instead. The error does not appear to have affected all of the machines.

According to the Clarion Ledger, a machine at the Burgess precinct in Oxford — the machine in the above video — refused to register a vote for Waller. Before the error was detected, 19 votes had been cast on that particular machine.

https://www.newsweek.com/touch-screen-voting-devices-are-automatically-changing-votes-mississippi-1456445

Not to worry it was only a “glitch”….but how many “glitches” does it take to swing an election?

The more I see stories like this the more I feel that the US voting is becoming more and more like some third world dictatorship…

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Who got the right to vote when?

If you are reading this then I am still out….I programed it to be published if I had not returned by noon…..

There has been lots of jaw flapping this election about voting rights….that right that many of us take for granted but do you really know how hard it was to get the right?

That’s right election day and another one of my historic perspectives….take a stroll through American history and see about your right to vote……

A history of voting rights in America.

Source: Who got the right to vote when?

sad that a publication knows more about American voting rights than most Americans…..go figure!

Go Ahead, Throw Your Vote Away – Reason.com

Tomorrow you will go and cast your vote, if you have not already, and most will do it for either Trump or Clinton…..very few of us will brave the backlash and vote a third party…..what the Hell…I never was a herd animal…….

I do not buy the standard cop out that my vote will be a vote for the “other” guy and will assure this candidate or that the win.

A math lesson for critics of third-party voters

This is a post by a Libertarian leaning site but the points may work for any third party vote…..

My correspondent fired back: “Opportunity cost is Trump gets elected.”

I stand by my recklessness.

Here’s where the curious nature of the American Electoral College comes in handy. Even where my vote—or the votes of my 100 closest, most easily influenced “inner circle”—might swing an election, there is simply no real chance that pushing either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton over the top in South Carolina, where I live, will determine the outcome of the presidential race. If Hillary wobbles to victory in my current state of residence, she would have already demolished The Donald in the Electoral College. Similarly, in Maryland (where our family lived until 2014), a squeaker for Mr. Trump would indicate that Ms. Clinton had been vanquished in a yuuuuuge landslide elsewhere.

Source: Go Ahead, Throw Your Vote Away – Reason.com

Know your candidate and to Hell with the backlash.

On another note….there are those people that show their grit and do what their conscience tells them….I have a new HERO……

A Democratic presidential elector in Washington state says he will not vote for Hillary Clinton.

Former Bernie Sanders delegate Robert Satiacum told ABC News Friday night that the Democratic presidential candidate‘s stance on the environment clashed with his Native American heritage. “I will not vote for Hillary Clinton,” he told ABC News. “I will not write her name. I will not. I will not.”

The member of the Puyallup Tribe in the Evergreen State says he believes Clinton lied about using a private email server, calling it a “heinous act of stupidity.”

“She has done nothing remarkable as Secretary of State or as the senator of New York,” he continued. “She’s bought and paid for … I just can’t get behind her. There’s no character there.”

He added, “Maybe I’ll vote Mickey Mouse. In all seriousness, maybe I should vote for Bozo the Clown.”

Satiacum’s defection would matter only if Clinton landed at exactly 270 electoral votes on election night — and Satiacum still went rogue in the face of immense pressure and weeks of unprecedented litigation.

(wtvq.com)

We need more people that are willing to vote their conscience and not for some celeb with a big mouth or some war mongering witch……

Free To Choose

DAMN!  The news has been as boring as boring can get…..

We are approaching the next “big” election and I will repeat what I am always saying…..there is NO difference between the two parties…they are just different sides of the same coin….

No matter who you vote for….the country will be worse off!

I saw this cartoon on Twitter and thought it was the perfect example of how this political system works…..

 

Enough said?

Most Americans Don’t Vote in Elections | Al Jazeera America

Surprise!  2016 election is quickly coming into focus…..the very first GOP debate is only about a week away and then we will be off with a bang…..and with all the interest in the election most Americans will not vote….well at least 40% of them…..why is that?

The biggest problem in American society is that the citizens do not vote.  I have seen many attempts to explain this phenom but so far few have made sense.

In a country that its people dearly love democracy but fail to exercise their duty and voting in the elections is a paradox with little explanation.

Each election the people vote with their feet and stay away from the polls…..and that is giving morons and thieves a free ride into Washington…..but will that ever change?

This is a good piece on the phenom of the lack of voting by Americans…….

 

Most Americans Don’t Vote in Elections | Al Jazeera America.

Congressional Democrats Introduce an Ambitious New Bill to Restore the Voting Rights Act | The Nation

I apologize for the number of press articles….I am re-doing my War Room, as my daughter has called the den, and it is more daunting than I had anticipated…..I promise to be back soon with more original stuff……please bear with me……

After the landslide win the GOP had in 2010 they set about trying to re-write the act of voting….and for the most part have been very successful…….they hid the attack on voting rights under the guise of Voter IDs and went in through the back door once they got that approval from an uneducated electorate…….

And then SCOTUS help the GOP with iots gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 2 years ago……

Noe the Dems have found a backbone and is trying to overturn what the Court has done……

But will they be successful?  thoughts?

 

Congressional Democrats Introduce an Ambitious New Bill to Restore the Voting Rights Act | The Nation.

Voting Rights: Something Must be Done

Since the GOP landslide in 2010 there has been a massive attack on the voting rights of some states…..mostly those controlled by the GOP……..it began with the proper ID and went to Hell from there……. limiting voting location and hours and early voting…….since those days the Supreme Court has made sure that any attempts to try and limit the people voting has been covered by the law…….

Of course the Dems went into a frenzy attacking all these so-called programs and incidents…..but with little success……hard to win an argument when you are out numbered in the state legislatures…..

Predictably the Dems will use this issue in their run to the election in 2016…..and that includes Hillary…….

Hillary Clinton says she wants to make voting easier and Republicans—especially Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, Chris Christie, and Scott Walker—have been doing their best to make it harder. In a speech in Houston yesterday, she called for sweeping moves to expand voting access, including 20 days of early voting and automatic registration when eligible voters turn 18, the Hill reports. She accused the GOP of “fear-mongering about a phantom epidemic of election fraud” as part of a systematic campaign to prevent millions of people—especially minority, young, and low-income voters—from going to the polls and asked Republicans why they were “so scared of letting citizens have their say.”

Automatic voter registration happens in most major democracies, but a quarter of eligible Americans aren’t registered—and since many of them are from Democratic-leaning groups, there has been little bipartisan support for bringing in automatic registration, the LA Times reports. In her speech yesterday, Clinton slammed the 2013 Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act and said she had been defending voting rights for decades, pointing to her work registering voters in Texas for George McGovern’s campaign in 1972, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Sounds like a plan, right?

More like idle campaign promises……people have got to understand that all this is just pandering…….she will do little…..the fate of voting rights is in the hands of the states and as long as the GOP controls the legislature there will be NO change……..

Yes, something must be done…..but talking is NOT the answer!

Do not believe it until you see it!

Who Should Vote?

It is president’s day and I thought I would look at the idea of voting…..most of us know that voting has been a point of contention since the very beginning…..first only free white guys could vote and then it was only white guys and 3/5s for the Afro-Americans…..women were still left out of the process and then slowly the light came on and women were eventually granted the right to vote in 1920……that left one group that were left out of the process, the Native Americans and after much to do they were granted the right in 1924…now the stage was set for a fair and equitable vote, right?  Not so much the Afro-Americans and Native Americans were still bound by state law that could prevent them from voting a various assorted ways……and then came the Civil Rights Act and finally it was a more equitable process.  (A very simplistic history of the voting rights……if further data is wanted then put your Google finger to work)…….

Everything progressed rather smoothly until there was allegations of rampant voter fraud (a made up issue, btw) and this gave rise to many state laws that could be used to limit the vote…all in the name of stamping out voter fraud……to this day I still do not have a good reason that limited polling stations or hours or early registration will control voter fraud (I guess I will just have to accept their doings….not really)……

Then of course there was the SCOTUS ruling that gave billionaires unlimited access to the election process,  Citizens United……in essence they could buy candidates and elections (not something the Founders would have wanted)…….while I was doing a little research on this matter I ran across a piece written by Jason Easley in Politicususa……

These are the thoughts of venture capitalist Tom Perkins…….

Perkins is terrified that rich may have to pay more taxes, “The fear is wealth tax, higher taxes, higher death taxes — just more taxes until there is no more 1%. And that that will creep down to the 5% and then the 10%.”

The idea that millionaires should get one million votes is already something that is being put into practice by wealthy conservatives. Citizens United has given wealthy billionaires the opportunity to buy votes through anonymous super PACs, but the plan has met with mixed results. Super PACs have been very effective at the state, and in some cases, local level. They have also been effective in congressional districts. However, they have had poor results in Senate races, and were an absolute failure during the 2012 presidential election.

Perkins’ comments echo the mentality that the American people are up against. Super rich Republican supporters think that they are entitled to more democracy than the rest of us. They believe that democracy is a commodity that they can buy. The right wing billionaires really do believe the job creator stuff.

They think their money makes them better people than the rest of us. Their hatred of President Obama, and the “unwashed masses” who have elected him twice is real. The Koch brothers, Perkins, and others consider themselves to be at war for the country.

Tom Perkins laid it all on the table. The super rich right thinks that government should be theirs, and they are doing everything in their power to steal democracy away from we the people.

I do not understand all the concern for the loss of democracy (imagined or actual) and then in the same breath look for ways to keep people from voting (for whatever imaged reason)……

If you want a strong republic should not the answer be a stronger move to get more people involved in the voting process?

Any retort?