Today on The BradCast, voters are fighting to cast their vote, as voting machines, election officials and GOP suppression efforts continue to work against them. [Audio link to show is posted below.]
The RNC may now be facing another 8 years of court-ordered restrictions against targeting minority voters, as the DNC files to have a federal Consent Decree from the early 80s extended, charging that the RNC and Trump campaign have colluded to unlawfully suppress the vote through so-called “ballot security” schemes and other intimidation tactics.
In the meantime, confidence in accurate election results is plummetting nationally and voter suppression seems to be working against voters in North Carolina, where early voting has been shortened in many counties and some voters — including a 100-year old African-American woman — are finding themselves threatened with being purged from the rolls after being challenged by Republican “caging lists”.
In Wisconsin, Democratic lawmakers are begging the U.S. Dept. of Justice to send poll monitors after the state’s GOP Photo ID voting restrictions are said to be resulting in havoc, confusion and disenfranchisement.
In Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Illinois (so far) 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, touch-screen style) voting systems are reportedly flipping votes from R to D and from D to R and, once again, election officials are blaming voters, rather than themselves.
Also today: Militarized troops in North Dakota clear out Dakota Access Pipeline protesters near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation and the owners of the pipeline are revealed to be big Trump funders while the GOP nominee is revealed to have large stock holdings in the companies that own it; The Yale Record does “not” endorse Hillary Clinton and neither does Libertarian Party Veep nominee Gov. William Weld (wink); and Desi Doyen joins us to “blame the cows”, among other things, in our the latest Green News Report…
CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!…
[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_GOPConsentDecree_BlamingVoters_102716.mp3]
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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I’ve lived in WI since 2013. When I vote, I have to reregister because my name is NOT on the list of voters. This is not an accident, it’s happened four out of five times (the one exception was a school board election, three months later my name was gone when I tried to vote in the general election).
Mark –
Please report this, if you haven’t already, to 866-OUR-VOTE, as well as to your county (or town) clerk and the WI Government Accountability Board(or whatever they now call themselves, since the GOP legislature gutted the G.A.B.) If you can also let folks know at the Journal-Sentinel and/or other local papers, it wouldn’t hurt either!
I reported this to WI’s Govt Accountability folks, and nothing happened. Contacted the Democratic SOS, got a run around.
The first time, it was a Republican clerk who, after I registered, took it upon herself to call me. The phone was to the house I was living in but I had no phone of my own and when she got someone else’s answering machine, she removed me from the rolls as a non-resident.
To the absolute best of my knowledge she was never disciplined for this, and is still removing people from the voter rolls. Apparently, in WI if you move in with someone else, you must change at least one utility bill so it is in your name or you don’t really live there. I am serious about that. I couldn’t get a driver’s license until I talked my insurance company into double addressing a bill with my street address (no mail delivery) AND my PO Box (not valid for voter registration or drivers license).
It’s a deliberate Catch-22 designed to disenfranchise anyone who joins a household with established utilities. Obviously, this impacts women more than men.
The DNC could end this in a heartbeat with some lawsuits, but they like things this way. This is a blue state held hostage by Republican thugs, and the national party simply does not care.
When I moved to a nearby town, I could not re-register to vote until I had a utility bill with my name on it. It had to be a bill, not a confirmation of service. Essentially I could not register for a month after moving within the same CD.
After properly registering at City Hall, I tried to vote a few months later. My name was not on the voting rolls. I same-day registered, but next election, I was again not on the rolls and had to again re-register.
The default position of WI Republican clerks is to obstruct registration of newcomers, the thinking being that if you moved, you must be a Democrat (this is statistically valid so far as I can tell). The first time I was taken off the rolls, the voter registrar told me over 150 voters had registered to vote that day at that precinct, and most complained that they were already registered but not on the rolls. The GAB could find no problem with that.