Voting Rights

[Typical Lax Dad]

Hello... earth to TLD... come in please. I am not talking about issues with absentee ballots. I am focused on one aspect of voting... people that are registered to vote, have a polling place and go out to vote on election day. I don't disagree that there are issues with absentee ballots. There are a lot of soldiers that vote from overseas that have had their votes thrown out for whatever reason. If my understanding is correct how these absentee ballots are handled is up to local election officials... both democrat and republican. Most counties do quite well, other counties year after year can't ever seem to get it right. IMO we are talking about 2 different issues here. I have found no one that has come forth and claim that as a legally registered voter they were denied the right to vote when they arrived at their polling place to do so. I have heard of no person that has come forth and claim they were intimidated or harassed in any manner to prevent them from voting. That is how I define voter suppression. The issue with absentee ballots, that is another issue. What I don't understand is the abject sloppiness in some counties in how they go about securing , counting and reporting absentee ballots. If you call that voter suppression then so be it. That is not how I see it.

Earth the C&S, the potential crime being investigated is for absentee ballots .....what is "news worthy' at the moment is the investigation in North Carolina. Post me the link about irregularities in NYS and I will be happy to read it. Good thing laws in this country are based on how YOU define voter suppression.....

[cradleandshoot]

Earth to TLD... voting is one of the few things that NYS gets right. Of course there are probably dozens of disgruntled losers that think they got jobbed out of their election. I hope that the folks in charge in North Carolina hold everybody accountable for any wrong doing. I also hope that all of those paratroopers at Ft Bragg that voted via absentee ballot also had their votes counted and not flushed down the toilet. I am guessing soldiers have the right not to have their voting rights suppressed either. What I have learned today is that some folks a very broad definition of what I think of as voter suppression.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Earth to TLD... voting is one of the few things that NYS gets right. Of course there are probably dozens of disgruntled losers that think they got jobbed out of their election. I hope that the folks in charge in North Carolina hold everybody accountable for any wrong doing. I also hope that all of those paratroopers at Ft Bragg that voted via absentee ballot also had their votes counted and not flushed down the toilet. I am guessing soldiers have the right not to have their voting rights suppressed either. What I have learned today is that some folks a very broad definition of what I think of as voter suppression.

You may think being able to drive after drinking 5 or 6 beers is not drunk driving.

[cradleandshoot]

Earth to TLD... voting is one of the few things that NYS gets right. Of course there are probably dozens of disgruntled losers that think they got jobbed out of their election. I hope that the folks in charge in North Carolina hold everybody accountable for any wrong doing. I also hope that all of those paratroopers at Ft Bragg that voted via absentee ballot also had their votes counted and not flushed down the toilet. I am guessing soldiers have the right not to have their voting rights suppressed either. What I have learned today is that some folks a very broad definition of what I think of as voter suppression.

You may think being able to drive after drinking 5 or 6 beers is not drunk driving.

I suggest then that you pull off the road and take a nap you lush...

[cradleandshoot]

What is wrong with some of you folks? I feel I am in the middle of a battle of wits with a group of unarmed opponents. You all need to step up your game.

[dislaxxic]

Sounds like things aren't all THAT easy in NYS...well, who'da thunk it reading our hulking green friend's words...?

New York Election Workers, Party Leaders Charged With Forging Signatures

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[Typical Lax Dad]

Sounds like things aren't all THAT easy in NYS...well, who'da thunk it reading our hulking green friend's words...?

New York Election Workers, Party Leaders Charged With Forging Signatures

..

Before I read the article, I guessed it would be the GOP. Remarkable.

[Typical Lax Dad]

This is how voter suppression works

[cradleandshoot]

Sounds like things aren't all THAT easy in NYS...well, who'da thunk it reading our hulking green friend's words...?

New York Election Workers, Party Leaders Charged With Forging Signatures

..

Yet these folks still lost. It's NYC a child molester would have a better chance of winning than any Republican ever would. If you are going to eff with an election you should take notes on how it is done in Browsed County.

[seacoaster]

More on GOP operatives deep-sixing absentee votes in North Carolina:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... bf696acfd0

From the article:

"Dallas Woodhouse, executive chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, spoke with great concern about the issue of election fraud.

It was 2016, and he was talking to a reporter from “This American Life,” the weekly public radio show, about questions being raised regarding signatures on some absentee ballots in Bladen County on the state’s southern border.

A group funded by Democrats in the state had been working on get-out-the-vote efforts in the area, and McCrae Dowless, a Republican soil and water supervisor with a checkered past, had filed a complaint, despite winning reelection.

Attention on the supposed absentee-ballot issues in the county was high; the campaign of Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, hammered on it during a tense month-long stretch when he declined to concede the race to the Democrat who had garnered more votes than he did.

Woodhouse didn’t mince words about the need to investigate and punish the supposed fraud.

“Should the election board find that these are absentee ballot mills, with the purpose of fraudulent voting, those people should go to jail,” he told the radio show. “They should spend the first term of the Trump administration behind bars.”

He later added: “If somebody is going out there and helping hundreds of people, they are harvesting ballots.”

Fast-forward two years ...

... to an election-related scandal that shares similar contours, emerging from where else but Bladen County and connected to — who else? — McCrae Dowless. The state election board declined last week to certify a close congressional race in the area that Dowless worked on, and news reports with evidence and witnesses have been helping illuminate a potentially illegal ballot-harvesting operation aimed at voters in at least one county. Investigators are looking into what happened with absentee ballots that were gathered from the county and why it seems as if so many were never turned in."

Yet for the past week, Woodhouse has repeatedly questioned and downplayed the inquiry — at one point going so far as to complain, without evidence, that it was part of a Democratic conspiracy to steal the election — and regularly threatening legal action over the official inquiry into the integrity of the race.

One of the differences this time around? Mark Harris, the candidate whose slim lead in the race is now in jeopardy, is a Republican.

“We think they have abused their discretion and violated the statute,” Woodhouse said of the bipartisan election board on Nov. 27, the day it declined to certify Harris as the victor. “This will inevitably end up in court. The fact of the matter is Mark Harris won the race. He got more votes.”

On Twitter, he pointed to a culprit: “The democrats decided not to certify the results," he wrote, “and everyone know[s] it.”

Woodhouse was also part of a group of Republicans that pressured the election board’s chairman, Andy Penry, a Democrat, to resign, because of partisan statements he had made in the past on Twitter. But Woodhouse also framed the push for the chairman’s ouster because of the way the inquiry into the 9th Congressional District race was unfolding."

Republicans don't like democracy.

[HooDat]

Republicans don't like democracy.

"Politicians don't like democracy"

... I fixed it for you....

[njbill]

Just a process crime, the voting process. Nothing to see here.

[holmes435]

Regarding Republicans' cries of voter fraud:

The lady doth protest too much, methinks

[dislaxxic]

There’s Finally a Persuasive Case of Election Fraud, and Republicans Don’t Care

But Dis...the headline says "ELECTION FRAUD"...not Voter Fraud....DUH!

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[ggait]

C&S -- honest question for you.

What do you think of the Voting Rights Act? A good idea? Successful? Still needed or no longer needed?

Just asking because much of the stuff we're talking about really caught on (and only became possible) after the 2013 Shelby County SCOTUS case.

The pre-clearance procedures of the VRA had been in place for 50 years, having been authorized and re-authorized many times by near unanimous Congressional every time. Last time was in 2006, when W was the fourth president to extend the VRA; the 2006 amendments passed 390-33 in the house, and 98-0 in senate.

Do you think Congress should put those back in place? Which Congress is totally free to do. But which will not happen so long as the GOP holds any of the house, senate or WH.

Thoughts?

[seacoaster]

Just a process crime, the voting process. Nothing to see here.

Exactly; well-played, as usual sir.

[seacoaster]

Republicans don't like democracy.

"Politicians don't like democracy"

... I fixed it for you....

No, respectfully, I think I had it right. I see that you dislike all of the politicians, generally speaking. But there can't be any doubt: the GOP has so lost its way, its principles and philosophical moorings as to defy any packaging of the two parties together. Up through Ike, Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43, I couldn't and wouldn't have said this. But the last two years have turned a corner.

[Typical Lax Dad]

One of these included Ginger Eason, who was interviewed by local television station WSOC. She admitted on camera that she was paid to collect ballots from people who weren't her near-relative or whom she doesn't have legal guardianship over (which is illegal under state law). Further, Eason admitted that she didn't actually send the ballots she collected to the state. Rather, she handed them to a paid contractor to Harris' campaign, Leslie McCrae Dowless, who paid her for her efforts. What Dowless did with those ballots is unclear.

[dislaxxic]

No, respectfully, I think I had it right. I see that you dislike all of the politicians, generally speaking. But there can't be any doubt: the GOP has so lost its way, its principles and philosophical moorings as to defy any packaging of the two parties together. Up through Ike, Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43, I couldn't and wouldn't have said this. But the last two years have turned a corner.

I agree. The "they all do it" refrain is, IMO, an intellectual cop out increasingly used by conservatives these days to excuse the ultra-partisan behaviors coming out of todays Trumpian GOP. It's what is making the curiosity about what may arise out of the ashes the party finds itself in after the Disgrace flames out. If he manages to survive his first term, i personally find it pretty impossible that he will cobble together the flimsy coalition that put him in the White House the first time.

Course, i was also a guy who thought there was NO WAY that Shrub would win a second term...so who knows? Here's one writer's theory about this sort of cognitive dissonance...

Arrogance and ignorance: Will the Trump family escape criminal charges because they seem too dumb?

"That could add up to is a reluctant acceptance that Trump can't be held responsible for any of the things he's suspected of doing. His voters will say that he was actually being "smart" (as he famously claimed was the reason he didn't pay taxes), further degrading whatever standards we had for honesty and intelligence in public life. Everyone else will be stuck trying to refute the defense that he was an "outsider businessman" who didn't know that his actions were unethical or illegal. Sure, we can all scream that that doesn't or shouldn't matter and that he must be held accountable regardless. But we'll also probably have to acknowledge on some level that he was too simpleminded to understand the ramifications of his actions. He probably was.

Trump's breathtaking arrogance in these matters might just allow him to barrel through. Take, for instance, his insistence that he has not obstructed justice but is simply "fighting back." Surely criminals all think that they are just fighting back when they try to cover up their crimes, threaten witnesses or offer bribes. In their minds it's self-defense. But Trump doesn't know that he sounds like a criminal when he makes this excuse, therefore making himself look even guiltier. He thinks it's a smart defense. Most of his followers take his word at face value and see him as heroically fighting the "deep state" on their behalf. The ones who know better see him as clever for twisting reality to frustrate his opponents, who become exasperated by his obtuse inability to understand reality."

..

[HooDat]

todays Trumpian GOP. It's what is making the curiosity about what may arise out of the ashes the party finds itself in after the Disgrace flames out

If Trump manages to win a second term, I do not think the Republican party remains intact.

THAT is the real drama I see playing out.

8 years of Trumpism will create such a schism in the parties that new alliances will form.

We could even see the emergence of a middle of the road party as the moderate republicans who can no longer stand the party of Trump team up with the moderate democrats who can't figure out how in the world the country elected Trump TWICE and decide to jettison their fringe members. It probably takes the shape of a new moderate Democrat Party that makes the extreme leftists feel unwelcome.

That new party most likely ends up being for all intents and purposes the "Establishment Party" and begins to model itself after the EU, and will ultimately be working for the globalist corporations.

What comes out of the ashes to run against this new (frankly quite intimidating) political alignment? It will be one of two things: two ineffectual fringe parties - one that is the Trump party and ends up full of right-wing nut-jobs; the other - full of left-wing nut-jobs that looks a lot like the Green party. The "Trump GOP" will not survive beyond him - it will be too much about him and eventually taken over by more people just as nasty as he is ... even white trash will eventually get tired of that. The far left party will never get traction - they'd be too busy protesting themselves......

Can someone else put themselves forward as the party of the working class that is tired of getting rear-ended by the elites and the 1% and refuses to be defined by race or other identity lines randomly drawn by the parties? I doubt it, but if anyone could it might look a lot like The Bernie Party....