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biggest-gaudiest-patronuses · 2 years

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This election day, I'm thinking of my Nana.

I'm thinking of how as a young woman, she fled political violence in her native Colombia to build a new home in a more stable country. I'm thinking about how she lived a long life, but not long enough to see her home country elect its first ever progressive president (just a few months ago!).

Coincidentally, I was living in Colombia at that time (in the very city she grew up in), and I was able to witness what felt like a miracle. A very conservative country, suffering from the violent inheritance of colonization and catholic invasion and the war on drugs, against a backdrop of the dangerous global rise of the far right--this unlikely country managed to elect one of the most progressive heads of state in the world, in 2022. That's a pretty big deal.

And I'm thinking about this, this election day, because that election was won by a very thin margin. I'm thinking about how it almost didn't happen. I'm thinking about how it was only possible thanks to the highest voter turnout in 20 year. And I am thinking about the countless number of voters who chose to vote for the first time. I am thinking of the poorest and most disenfranchised citizens who showed up at the polls. I am thinking of the indigenous women who rode 12 hours on public buses to vote at the 'nearest' polling stations. I am thinking of all the money and corruption that went into preventing minority citizens from voting, and I'm thinking about how they showed up in the millions and voted anyway.

I am thinking that I would like to see a miracle like that in my own home country.

So if you're on the fence about waiting in line today to cast your vote, I hope that you will think--about the country you want to live in, the future you hope will unfold, and about all of the people it takes to make a miracle.

Because history may deem us nameless and faceless, but when we show up en masse, we are the ones who make history happen.

And yes, maybe also spare a thought for my Nana. Who was in fact a very angry and judgemental woman who supported the republican party for 50+ years, and who would be turning in her grave right now (if the family hadn't had her cremated). Think about the mean angry ghost of my Colombian grandmother, who very much wants you to not show up at the polls to support abortion and other sinful progressive values. Think about her. Do it for her. Do it for Nana.

#Do it! for her #not a shitpost #serious post #politics #ask to tag #I love you Nana but i disagree SO vehemently with almost all of your personal political and religious values #also you should have treated my mom SO MUCH BETTER when she was a kid. all of your kids really #i see you very much as a victim of religious trauma & childhood poverty #followed by the cultural isolation of being a first generation immigrant with no local hispanic community to provide support #plus the failure of late 20th century mental health care almost certainly compounded by medical sexism #recognize sympathize and am indignant on your behalf for all of those reasons and more #but that truth can also coexist alongside the truth that #hot DAMN Nana you and Papa very much failed to provide your children with an emotionally safe and stable environment in which to grow #and me and my sibs are still dealing with the generational trauma #and who knows how many of my cousins. I HAVE TWENTY-ONE COUSINS AND I DON'T TALK TO ANY OF THEM #that is too many cousins to not be in contact with any of them #(and fyi that's on *one* side of the family. on the other side are a dozen half-aunts-and-cousins I've never met #because Other Grandpa was a Certified Piece of Shit)#Anyway. ANYWAY...#apparently i really needed to overshare today. know what? no judgement. judgement free zone #i have no judgement thoughts or opinions i am finally FREE #........gosh that sounds so relaxing #ANYway #yeah. break the cycle of abuse or your descendants will grow up and critique your parenting choices on third-tier social media platforms #when people say 'they will always be remembered' at a funeral--that is a THREAT #what they actually mean is 'OH HONEYBUN YOU DONE FUCKED UP'#.........i want that in my eulogy actually

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uristmcdorf · 1 year

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UK Residents Now Need Photo ID To Vote

Reminder to everyone living in the UK that we are now required to provide photo ID in order to vote. Which is a bullshit move under the excuse of a near-nonexistent fraud claim that is almost transparently designed to disenfranchise people less likely to vote Tory - young people and those from marginalised backgrounds. If you do not have a passport or driving license, you need an alternate option. Photo oyster cards are only valid for voting for over 60s - younger oyster card owners cannot use theirs at polling booths. Reminder that there is a FREE voter registration certificate you can get online here https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-photo-id-voter-authority-certificate

Do I agree with the need for one? No. But it's more important to me that every single one of you have the means to vote.

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porterdavis · 9 months

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Defending the indefensible

I almost feel sorry for the GQP candidates who have to stand up and defend their party's principles (I use that word loosely). It is truly difficult to dance around the fact that on the major issues they are on the wrong side of morality, history, and the will of the people.

Abortion: Their position ranges from punitive to draconian. The state has no business regulating a woman's personal decisions. If forced pregnancies for women are allowed, the men responsible must be held to equal consequences. Full co-responsibility until the child is an adult. No questions.

Contraception: This is the next battleground for conservative fanatics. If one is truly pro-life then abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. The government should provide free birth control to any woman on demand.

Gun control: The current level of carnage due to unfettered access to assault weapons is unconscionable and largely preventable. Ban them and add the use of any firearm in a crime punishable by an additional 5 years of incarceration, no exceptions.

Immigration: If you're not Black or Red, you are descendant from immigrants. You can't pull up the ladder to prevent future generations of immigrants from following the same path. Immigrants built the country and will be needed in the future. Make it safe and legal for them to come in a regulated, orderly process.

LGBTQ+: Love is love. The government has no business in the bedrooms of its citizens. Full stop.

Climate change: Man has hastened the progression of global warming (and cooling in other areas). The US Navy, hardly a hair-on-fire environmentalist organization, is making plans for where to position its ships when current ports are underwater. Look out the window. Enough said.

I think it's fair to say the GQP's positions on these and many other issues are diametrically opposed. They can count, and know that they cannot win by running on these issues so they have a three-pronged response: change the conversation by starting culture wars. Transgenders! Baby-blood drinking zombies! Stolen elections!

Secondly they want to disenfranchise those who would vote against them. Purge the voter rolls of young voters or people of colour. Make it difficult to vote (criminalize providing water to people in line!!).

Third is to attack democracy by taking over local elections -- school boards, state legislatures, and enacting draconian policies in the dark of night. People who burn books are never on the winning side of history.

The future is at stake. Fascism must be stamped out root and stem.

There's one thing I agree with Barry Goldwater on -- the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

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foreverlogical · 9 months

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● AK Ballot: Alaska voters made history in 2020 when they made their state the first in the nation to adopt a top-four primary with a ranked-choice general election, but conservatives tell the Alaska Beacon's James Brooks that they're close to qualifying a measure to repeal the system that would go before voters next year.

The campaign has until the start of the January legislative session to turn in about 27,000 valid signatures, a figure that represents 10% of the total number of votes that were cast in the most recent general election, and it must also hit certain targets in three-quarters of Alaska's 40 state House districts. One leader says that organizers have already gathered 30,000 petitions so far but will analyze them later to see if more are needed.

Under the current top-four system, all the candidates run on one primary ballot, and the four contenders with the most votes—regardless of party—advance to an instant-runoff general election. This method was first used last year in the special election to succeed the late GOP Rep. Don Young as Alaska's lone House member, a contest that ultimately saw Democrat Mary Peltola defeat former Republican Gov. Sarah Palin 51-49.

Conservatives both in Alaska and across the country were furious because Palin and another Republican, Nick Begich, outpaced Peltola by a combined 59-40 in the first round of tabulations. They blamed their surprise loss on instant-runoff voting rather than Palin's many failings or the Democrat's strengths.

"60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican," griped Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, "but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion—which disenfranchises voters—a Democrat 'won.'" But even without ranked-choice voting, Peltola still would have come in first, as she beat Palin 40-31. And since Begich took third with 28%, he may well still have lost a traditional primary to Palin had one been used.

Furthermore, a poll conducted right after the special by supporters of ranked-choice voting showed that Alaskans saw their new voting system as anything but "convoluted." Instead, 85% of respondents found it to be "simple," while 62% said they supported the new method.

Hard-right groups, though, soon had even more reasons to hate the new status quo. Thanks to the top-four system, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a rare Republican who's crossed party lines on high-profile votes, would no longer face what would almost certainly have been a tough GOP primary against Donald Trump's preferred candidate, former state cabinet official Kelly Tshibaka. (Murkowski famously lost her 2010 primary to a far-right foe but won the general through a write-in effort.)

Instead, Murkowski and Tshibaka easily advanced to the general election with Democrat Pat Chesbro and a little-known third Republican. Murkowski led Tshibaka 43.4-42.6 in the first round of general election tabulations, but the 10% of voters who supported Chesbro overwhelmingly broke for the incumbent and helped lift her to a 54-46 victory. Peltola also won her rematch with Palin 55-45 after initially leading her 49-26; unsurprisingly, both Palin and Tshibaka ardently back the effort to end the top-four system.

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saltypiss · 6 months

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"But if biden lose then dump win!"

"But if biden lose then worse will come!"

"But Biden"

My man he came out and admitted he was a zionist, the dude has done nothing but give unwaivering support for genocide. He has not done shit to deescalate, he has gone out of his way to be Pro-Genocide/Israel.

"Don't withhold your vote in protest!"

P-protest? You, you think I'm not voting for the genocider...as a protest?

I'm not "withholding my vote" nor am I protesting.

I'm never consciously going to choose someone that's THIS blatantly Pro Genocide. I cannot understand how that's hard to grasp. I do not know what propaganda you're seeing, but the real footage, stories, and pictures of Gaza from this year alone should be enough to be anti-biden for being pro-genocide.

You're splitting the vote, disenfranchising youth voters (they already don't fucking vote) and giving a plethora of reasons to wait for a revolution instead of playing pretend in an absurdly rigged system. Understand you cannot fear monger votes in a free democracy.

The DNC can swap out the "popular" candidate whenever they want as they have in the past. They got a year to decide, and just about anyone who's anti-genocide has my vote.

Yes. The "single issue" is Genocide. Hope this helps!

Seriously. I hope you understand at some point that a democracy that demands a genocide is not a free one worth living in. To frame it as "genocide there or here" to a youth voter means "wait for the revolution, nothing matters anyway" because unlike your absurdist pro-genocider ass, young people see harm to others as equal to themselves. For someone like that, how is your fear mongering going to work? Pro-genocider... Oh unfortunately that's not an insult for ya, okay, mass baby murderer.

You can fear monger, piss and shit your pants, cry tears of blood, sacrifice a newborn, bring back kissinger to kill him again, just for me, I will not vote for a genocider and I think exponentially less of you for daring to vote for and try to scare me into voting for a pro-genocider.

Understand that someone like that has no empathy, has no humanity, and is not remotely interested in You. You're Next, if not by him, then someone else, probably a democrat as literally all but 10 have shown, even voting Dem protects no one.

Honestly Biden supporters are worse than Dump supporters. Hardline support for someone who's genuinely done below the bare minimum. We cannot keep voting with centrists who have no morality.

Please, understand, get this through your childish fear riddled brain: I am not overly emotionally involved in such a stance, I'm reasonably assured of my own stance, and that stance can be written on paper and understood by anyone with empathy:

Genocide Bad.

#pro genocide biden #genocide biden #palestine #israel #bro biden supporters disenfranchising the youth vote?#by golly!#who'da thought!?

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ivygorgon · 2 months

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AN OPEN LETTER to THE PRESIDENT & U.S. CONGRESS; STATE GOVERNORS & LEGISLATURES

Stand Against Voter Disenfranchisement: Keep Voting Age Fair!

1 so far! Help us get to 5 signers!

I am writing to express my strong opposition to any efforts to increase the voting age to 21 or older. Recent proposals by some Republicans to raise the voting age are deeply concerning and would unjustly infringe upon the civic duties of legal adults.

It is important to remember that many of our nation's founding fathers, including James Monroe at 18, Aaron Burr at 20, Alexander Hamilton at 21, James Madison at 25, and more, were all young adults when they played pivotal roles in shaping our country. Denying young adults their right to participate in our democracy would contradict the very principles upon which our nation was founded. Would you have prevented these American legends knowing they were capable of greatness?

The notion that if someone is "old enough to fight, they are old enough to vote" holds true today. Young adults contribute to society in meaningful ways and deserve to have a say in the decisions that impact their lives and their futures. If 18-year-olds are fighting and dying for you, you must listen to their voices!

Furthermore, restricting voting rights disproportionately affects already disadvantaged minority voters. We should be working to include and strengthen our populace, including BIPOC Americans, reformed citizens seeking reintegration into society, and our extremely motivated youth. We must work to strengthen voting access for all American citizens, not limit it.

In the words of our American colonials who fought against their British rulers, "Taxation without representation is tyranny." Denying young adult Americans their right to vote would undermine the core principles of our democracy that we have held since day one.

I urge you to oppose any measures that seek to raise the voting age and instead support efforts to protect and expand voting rights for all eligible citizens.

Thank you for considering my perspective on this critical issue.

📱 Text SIGN PVTGSX to 50409

🤯 Liked it? Text FOLLOW IVYPETITIONS to 50409

💘 Q'u lach' shughu deshni da. 🏹 "What I say is true" in Dena'ina Qenaga

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eaglesnick · 1 year

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The Continued Erosion of British Democracy

In May 2021 it was reported that:

“More than 2m voters may lack photo ID required under new UK bill” (Guardian: 11/04/21)

Although there was no evidence that our electoral process was in anyway flawed, being abused or interfered with, the right-wing Tory Party decided to introduce voter ID. US civil rights groups, who know something about Republican interference with the democratic voting process, have called what the Tory Party is doing “voter suppression".

In other words, the Tory government has introduced a legally binding voter requirement that has the effect of potentially denying millions of the electorate their right to vote The fact that this group of voters – the young, the poor, the homeless, - are demographically more likely to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat is not a coincidence. This is a blatant attempt at ballot rigging.

Am I exaggerating? Possibly, but it is very odd, that older voters, who demographically tend to be vote Conservative, can use their bus passes as proof of identity, whilst students, who demographically tend to vote for more left-wing parties, are not allowed to use their student cards as proof of ID.

On top of the 2 million people estimated to have no photo identity at all, you can add those who do not know they need a valid form of photo ID to vote. Research shows that 25% of those born after 1995 do not realise they now need photo ID to be able to vote.

All of these figures and statistics are guess work at the moment, derived from various polls looking into the problem. Come voting day, and post electoral analysis, we should know exactly how many people will have been disenfranchised by these new rules. Well, that is what you would expect but this isn’t so. Sunak has no intension of calculating how many voters don't have a "valid" photo ID.

Tory minister refuses to say if number of voters without photo ID will be fully recorded (Guardian: 27/04/23)

Even the Daily Telegraph, usually a staunch supporter of Conservative Party policies, is disgusted with this anti-democratic interference with the right to vote.

“The new rules on voter ID are a democratic scandal. This expensive new system is a solution to a non-existent problem – the government should be making voting easier, not harder."

I couldn’t agree more.

#uk politics #voter suppression #uk elections #photo ID #Sunak #right-wing #electoral #interference #polling day #vote rigging

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hoyatype · 3 days

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hello! I’m not trying to argue or anything, I genuinely want to understand your point of view: do you think not voting for Biden would make things better? I am not American, but USA politics determine how the entire world works, so I’ve been following, plus we have a similar situation in my country, so I relate to the frustration. I agree with you Biden hasn’t been a good president, but how could reelecting Trump make things better? sadly, I think neither of them would do anything to stop the genocide. do you think there’s another way? what are your thoughts on this?

i meant to reply to this ages ago, even wrote out some paragraphs on my phone, and then the tumblr app crashed and i never got around to it! please know that ignoring it wasn't intentional, i was just throwing a fit about technological unreliability and how it often eviscerates my enthusiasm for POLITICAL DISCOURSE with a glitch

this ask was in response to a post i made 2 months ago where i said

the us really is a genocidal gerontocracy…and yet the democrats are blowing up my phone nonstop begging me to vote for biden…

and so to address your ask very specifically, here's what i'd say

being totally exhausted and disillusioned by how the democratic party is marketing joe biden to me is not the same as not voting for biden

if i were in a district where my vote might have a meaningful impact on who became president, i would absolutely vote for biden (feeling extremely unhappy the entire time)

however, due to how american politics works, that is not the case. my vote for president is completely irrelevant and of purely symbolic value. and thus i will not be voting for biden

you may or may not be familiar with the american electoral college system—i will briefly explain if not—basically the president is not decided by popular vote, but by an indirect system that originates from an elitist, slave plantation owner era that works like this:

every state gets some number of individuals known as electors, who each have 1 electoral vote. how many electors? it is semi-arbitrary and not directly correlated with current population numbers, which means some states have MANY more electors than voters, proportionally speaking, and some have fewer.

during an election, the popular vote for each state is added up. then whoever wins the popular vote for each state gets ALL the electors for the state (with 2 exceptions, maine and nebraska, who assign electors proportionally. note that those 2 states, per the 2020 american census, represent just under 1% of the american population).

someone becomes president if they get a majority of the ELECTORAL votes, not the popular votes. also, in theory the electors can change their vote; in practice i don't believe anyone has done so, the convention is that you follow the popular vote. but you can see how this system, with its 2 layers of indirection btwn the popular vote and the actual electoral vote that determines who becomes president, gives people very limited say—in some cases basically no say—in who becomes president. and by "people" i mean american citizens who have not been stripped of the right to vote. in many jurisdictions, felons are not capable of voting—this is a good paper ('to be young, black, and powerless: disenfranchisement in the new jim crow era') that discusses how this disproportionately strips black americans from voting due to racially biased policing, sentencing, etc etc etc)…

but basically, this system means that i, as someone who lives in an extremely democratic state, don't really "need" to vote for biden. whether he wins my state by 51% or 70% or 90% doesn't really matter.

but now that i've established that, i want to elaborate on the sentiment expressed in my original comment, which is that i am SO COMPLETELY SICK OF BEING A YOUNG LEFTIST CONSTANTLY BERATED BY THE LIBERAL MEDIA AND PRESS INTO VOTING FOR CANDIDATES THAT HAVE DONE ALMOST NOTHING MEANINGFUL FOR THE CAUSES I CARE DEEPLY ABOUT, AND HAVE THE TEMERITY TO DEMAND UNFAILING LOYALTY FROM ME WHILE DOING NOTHING WITH IT!!!!!!!!!!

there seems to be this idea that it's the overly ideologically rigid leftists who will be the cause of biden's downfall. this narrative is repeatedly issued forth from liberal writers and thinkers. it's a narrative that i—as someone who could vote for obama, and did so, and saw how disappointing he was in many ways…as someone who was then harangued about voting for hillary clinton over bernie sanders bc of the spectre of misogynist "bernie bros" (as if the most important political issue of my existence is the gender of my country's political leader and not the policies of said political leader)…as someone who saw her favourite candidate for office, maybe the only political candidate in america i have a real admiration for (i am speaking obviously of sanders) get TOTALLY shut out by the democratic machine, while being pressured repeatedly to vote for biden, a boring and banal and institutionally sanctioned and completely toothless presidential candidate…

—it's just a narrative i am exhausted by. this is the 3rd election i have been told that not voting against trump means voting for DEATH TO WOMEN, DEATH TO MINORITIES, THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. and it has become clear to me that the democratic party will keep this grift going as long as possible in order to pull as many genuinely ideologically principled voters as possible into alignment, and shame them for expecting better out of their politicians than status quo american exceptionalism and warmongering.

there's a labor journalist (by which i mean: american journalist writing about labor issues from a leftist perspective, not a journalist writing about uk labour party politics) i quite like, hamilton nolan, who just put up a really good piece on his substack about this: "the left is not joe biden's problem. joe biden is"

Biden’s policies are better than Trump’s and if Biden loses and Trump wins politics would get worse. Do progressive activists, who are as a group deeply engaged in the issues, need thousands of words to understand this? To put a finer point on it: Who is this for?…where exactly is this enormous group of left wing activists who are unable to understand that Trump is worse than Biden? For one thing, I am on the left and I know a lot of people on the left who go out in the streets and protest Israel, and in November, most of those people who are politically engaged will vote for Biden, because he is not as bad as Trump. Some portion of them will refuse to vote for Biden out of sheer disgust at the direct role he has played in the murder of thousands of civilians…[and] any electoral damage is 100% the fault of the Biden administration itself. Look in the mirror. …What Biden needs to worry about is not highly engaged activists making some considered calculation not to vote for him, but instead millions of regular ass people who will not vote for him because they don’t feel excited about him…Obama excited people. So they turned out to vote. In 2020, people hated Trump so much that they were excited to turn out to vote. Now, Biden is the incumbent and he owns what the government is doing and he has achieved the nifty trick of actively supporting a crime against humanity and isolating himself on the world stage and thereby causing deep moral revulsion within the left wing of his party at the exact same time that he needs them to rally to support him during election season. This is not a problem of miscalculation of leverage; it is a problem of doing something horrible and turning off his political allies right when he is supposed to be pulling them into his coalition.

i find biden's politics absolutely repellant and i also find the 10 texts/day from the democratic party urging me to vote for the man anyway, otherwise democracy lies in ruins, to be profoundly annoying. the truth is that the democratic party made 2 enormous tactical errors…first with with clinton's candidacy and how the party treated sanders (who had the rare and remarkable ability to energise millions of young voters into greater political engagement and interest—something the democratic party absolutely needs in the future but seems to have no interest in cultivating seriously as a skill, if cultivating the skill requires sacrificing the party's existing operating strategy)…

…and second with biden, who—as the quoted passage above argues (and i agree with) is hampered by being fundamentally unexciting to the avg voter, who is not the impassioned young leftist on a college campus advocating for palestinians and gazans. i do think that young leftist will vote for biden if it "matters". but also, that young leftist is learning an important lesson atm about how power works in this country, which is that the energy that the 2-party system puts into electoral politics is a shell game and in many ways often a distraction from the real work of pushing politics in the direction you want it to go. if the goal is to stop american involvement in genocide, doing anything to really help biden, beyond placing a swing state vote (where your state might reasonably go either way in the election), is a waste of energy.

and i basically think it is useful for the democratic party establishment to be scared. to not feel like they can depend on the votes of the young and of racial minorities as if they don't need to do anything to deserve those votes.

Movements exist before and after and beyond elections.…In the case of almost every familiar movement— civil rights, labor rights, gender equality, gay rights, anti-war movements, and on and on—the left was on the morally correct but politically unpopular side. How did they win anything, then? By forming national and international social and political movements made up of thousands and millions of people engaged in protest and direct action and education and community building and labor organizing and other actions outside of electoral politics that, over time, change society of itself and thereby cause politicians to follow that change. To focus only on the politicians and the elections is to miss the underlying fact that those officials ultimately do not cause change themselves—they are the end products of change… The useful thing about this vision is that it allows you, a person who cares about things, to focus on just working to accomplish the things you care about, rather than trying to game everything out secondhand through the blurry and unreliable lens of elections…What all of those outraged activists on the left who inspire so much political nail-biting are engaged in is the act of trying to get Biden to change his actions in order to save human lives.

#politics #us politics

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 10 months

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In yesterday’s newsletter, I noted the murder of Emmett Till as an event whose significance took decades to fully understand. When I wrote that sentence, I hesitated and considered adding a reference to the murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner. The bodies of all three civil rights workers were discovered in a field in Mississippi on August 4, 1964—fifty-nine years ago today.

To keep my introduction to yesterday’s newsletter short, I omitted the reference to Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. On Thursday, Andrew Goodman’s brother David reached out to remind me of the 59th anniversary of the deaths of three brave young men who traveled south to help register Black voters disenfranchised by Jim Crow laws. Their fearless dedication to democracy ended in their brutal murders at the hands of the local KKK chapter in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Their martyrdom touched a nerve in America. The illustrator Norman Rockwell sought to capture the brutality of their murders in one of his most important works, “Murders in Mississippi,” aka “Southern Justice.” My wife and I recently visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where I took the photo included below.

The oil painting has a complicated history that is relevant to the struggle for civil rights in America. Norman Rockwell spent his career as an illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post, but left in 1963 because of the Post’s rule that limited Rockwell to painting Black people “only in subservient positions.” At Look Magazine, Rockwell began to explore the issue of civil rights. He painted “Murders in Mississippi / Southern Justice” to accompany an article about the murders of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney that inspired a generation of young people to take up the cause of civil rights.

In the end, Look Magazine published an early pencil sketch that was more impressionistic and less visceral than the final oil painting. The oil painting hangs in the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. It is easy to see why the final version may have been too realistic for the readers of Look Magazine in 1964.

Many Americans may not be able to recall the names Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, but they know their story. They know that young Americans of all colors and creeds risked their lives to take a stand for equality and liberty. They know that the bravery of those early “freedom marchers” resulted in tremendous progress in civil rights for all Americans.

Each of us follows in the footsteps of people like Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner, John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Hosea Williams, Coretta Scott King, and others too numerous to name. When we write letters, send postcards, make calls, march in solidarity, knock on doors, and show up at the polls, we are following the example of the faithful servants of democracy who preceded us.

While few of us are called to make sacrifices similar to Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner, King, and Lewis, some are willing to take on work that is uncomfortable and possibly confrontational as we strive to “get out the vote.” I was reminded of this fact by reader Lori E. from Indianapolis, who sent the following note about her experiences phone banking to get out the vote in Ohio:

Hello Robert: I want to thank you for sending the link for phone banks with Ohio Progressive Action Leaders. I phone banked with them the last 2 nights, and my last call of the night last night was over the moon for me, and I have phone banked my guts out for the last several years. I thought this woman was wanting to lead me into an argument about Issue 1, but she really didn't know what it was about, and I explained to her in detail why it is bad for everyone - especially the 88-county requirement, which is considerably more horrifying than the 60% requirement. She wanted to know why Issue 1 was brought before Ohio voters, and I told her the truth. Her big concern was term limits, and I told her that is something everyone wants to see on each side of the aisle, and that - as well as so many other citizen-led initiatives - were almost certain to never make it to a ballot if Issue 1 passes. One conversation like that is exactly what makes an entire phone bank worthwhile for me. She is also concerned about her children and what kind of country they will live in, and I told her that she simply must vote no then. It was one of those moments when I'm pretty certain I reached a person that I convinced to vote. At the end of the conversation, she thanked me and said, “I know you probably don't hear this enough, but I'm so grateful you called and explained this to me.” I thanked her for making my entire evening phenomenal. It truly was a magical moment.

Lori E.—like each of us—is honoring the sacrifices of the civil rights workers who faced danger, hatred, and violence to carry us to this point. Being able to reach voters by phonebanks, texts, and postcards is a privilege that we exercise because of those who came before us.

We can beat Trump, take control of Congress, and recapture state legislatures and statehouses in 2024. It will be hard. It will require sacrifice. But our sacrifice is a small repayment of the greater sacrifice of those who secured our freedom with their lives.

Andrew Goodman’s legacy lives on in the good work of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which supports youth leadership development, voting accessibility, and social justice initiatives on campuses across the country.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

#Robert B. Hubbell #Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter #Andrew Goodman #leadership #voting accessibility #social justice #Rule of Law #Justice #murder of Emmett Till

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literallybyronic · 1 year

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oh good, the "voting doesn't do enough so why even bother with it" posts have begun.

reminder that after 2016 these accounts were found overwhelmingly to be russian psyops attempting to influence young people not to vote. like, tumblr themselves fucking announced it to the userbase.

doing more than voting is great, grassroots mobilization is great. this is not saying that every post that says voting is not the end all be all of activism is bad.

however, posts discouraging you from voting or encouraging you to "be gay do crime" flippantly like the consequences of a conviction don't matter (guess who can't vote?) are almost certainly more of the same shit. same with posts mocking/deriding/belittling the people who do vote or are encouraging you to vote. i guarantee you these accounts and/or those like them will be back in full force.

so, dear followers, I'll put it like this- Everybody Gets One. If I see you reblog one of these, I will comment to remind you of the source of this type of posting. If I see another, you're blocked. end of. i'm old and I don't have time for this shit.

I know some people weren't around during previous election cycles so might not realize how prevalent this shit was. you WILL see them. they won't be obvious psyop accounts. they will post memes and shitposts. they will not look like a porn bot or anything that looks amiss from a real tumblr user. some of them will be frankly hilarious. this does not, sadly, matter. do not let them convince you not to vote. it's one fucking thing you do, one day out of the year. it's the easiest possible thing you CAN do politically. there's very few reasons not to do it, and p much all of them are either due to personal disability or direct voter disenfranchisement. if someone says "you need to do x y and z instead of voting because voting doesn't work" and you buy in? guess what, you just got psyopped. you can do x y and z AND vote. if you're doing ANYthing activism-related, voting should be the first thing.

So, yeah. Vote, and block Russian psyops, because they 100% will be back.

#us politics #us election #psyops

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ladymazzy · 1 year

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Watch "Jacob Rees-Mogg accidentally tells the truth about voter ID gerrymandering | The News Agents" on YouTube

youtube

Oh nothing, just Rees-Mogg casually admitting that the tory voter ID legislation was an attempt to gerrymander

(that also backfired because as well as being chronically evil, parliamentary tories are fundamentally disconnected from their core voter base. Somehow it didn't occur to them that in attempting to disenfranchise the poor, the young & ethnic minorities, they would also disenfranchise jingoistic parochial nimbys who never leave their shire because cities are too full of 'foreigners')

#uk politics #never tory #normal island #what a fucking shitshow this conference is #all the fascists gathering together trying to convince themselves that they're all perfectly reasonable #Youtube

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galadriel1010 · 1 year

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Reminder if you're in the UK that the May local elections are going to be the first to require photo ID across England. Make sure you're registered to vote, check that you have valid ID, apply for a free Voter Authority Certificate or postal vote if you don't have them, and then make sure you vote the bastards out on May 5th.

The rules are super discriminatory (OAP bus passes are acceptable proof of ID, but young persons' bus passes aren't, for example) so make sure you don't get caught out.

It would be such a shame if their utterly cynical attempt to disenfranchise young voters resulted in record youth turnout at local elections.

#politics #uk pol #local elections #voter ID

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 years

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After Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin in Alaska's special election Wednesday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., discredited the voting system used by Alaska voters that they chose to implement in their state.

Cotton tweeted that Alaska's new ranked choice voting system "is a scam to rig elections," casting doubt on the outcome of the process to fill the seat of late GOP Rep. Don Young.

"60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion — which disenfranchises voters — a Democrat 'won,'" Cotton said in a separate tweet.

This is the first time Alaskans used the ranked choice voting system after voting to adopt it in 2020.

Voters pick their member of Congress by ranking the candidates, and a write-in candidate if they choose to do so, in order of preference. If a candidate wins a majority of votes on the first round, he or she wins the race. But if no candidate receives a majority of the vote, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated, and his or her supporters’ second-choice votes will go to the remaining candidates. The rounds continue until two candidates are left, and the candidate with the most votes wins.

As of Thursday morning, with 93% of votes counted in the ranked choice results, Peltola defeated Palin 51.5% to 48.5%.

Palin also criticized the system after losing, saying in a statement that it was a "mistake" that was originally "sold as the way to make elections better reflect the will of the people." But now, she said, Alaska and the rest of America see "the exact opposite is true."

"The people of Alaska do not want the destructive democrat agenda to rule our land and our lives, but that’s what resulted from someone’s experiment with this new crazy, convoluted, confusing ranked-choice voting system," she said. "It’s effectively disenfranchised 60% of Alaska voters."

In response to Cotton, retiring Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., tweeted, "Ranked choice voting gives all Americans a voice and not the extremes of a party. So youd be outta luck. No wonder you don’t like it."

Former Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, who left the Republican Party to become a Libertarian in 2020 before retiring from Congress, tweeted, "The problem for the Republican Party in Alaska wasn’t ranked-choice voting; it was their candidates. Requiring a candidate to get more than 50% to be elected isn’t a scam; it’s sensible. Let’s get ranked-choice voting everywhere."

Michael Steele, who served as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2009 to 2011, tweeted, "Wrong. Again, Tom. Would love to see your tweet if Palin had won. And exactly how does #RCV ‘rig elections’, again? Typical BS claptrap and no facts. Defeat. It’s a real thing, Tom."

According to the Alaska Division of Elections, the system benefits voters. "By ranking multiple candidates, you can still have a voice in who gets elected even if your top choice does not win," its website says. "Ranking multiple candidates ensures your vote will go toward your second, third, fourth, or fifth choice if your top choice is eliminated, giving you more voice in who wins."

Palin, the GOP's vice presidential nominee in 2008, will have another chance at a political comeback. She will run against Peltola and Republican Nick Begich again in November, which will determine who will serve a full two-year term in the House. A fourth candidate, Republican Tara Sweeney, will also be on that ballot.

For her part, Peltola served in the state Legislature for 10 years and will be the first Alaska Native in Congress. Until her election, she had been working as the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.

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