Among the many stories covered on today’s BradCast, with vigor and no small amount of occasional vitriol. [Audio link to show follows below.]…
- The catastrophic and climate change-fueled Hurricane Michael made landfall in Florida on Wednesday as a deadly and unprecedented Category 4, the strongest ever to strike the Panhandle since record keeping began in 1851;
- In not unrelated news, another major coal company, one of the nation’s oldest, declares bankruptcy. It’s the fourth to do so in the past three years;
- ExxonMobil gets some great publicity from Bloomberg by spending just $1 million (which they generated every two minutes in 2017) in pretending to support a carbon tax scheme (that would benefit them anyway);
- The U.S. Supreme Court allows a lower court’s voter ID ruling to stand in North Dakota, despite the fact that the rule is a change from voting laws used during the April primary and is now likely to result in the disenfranchisement of thousands of Native Americans in a state where Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp faces re-election after winning by just 3,000 votes in 2012. (Here’s the ridiculous effort that thousands of Native Americans without a residential address, as now required by ND law to vote, must now go through to get one registered somehow before November 6th.);
- A state court in Missouri blocks part of their new voter ID law for being “contradictory and misleading” and “impermissibly infring[ing] on a citizen’s right to vote” in the state where Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill is in a very close re-election battle. Her opponent, Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley is defending the law and is likely to seek an appeal from a higher state court;
- After Georgia’s Republican Sec. of State Brian Kemp was found to have purged hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls over the past several years, AP finds that some 53,000 voter registrations are currently in a suspended state due to GA’s “exact match” rule, which allows election officials to block registrants whose names aren’t listed identically to the way they are on found on file at either the state’s Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. A missing hyphen or a typo by officials entering a name into one of the databases is enough to result in a suspension which, the AP finds, is disproportionately keeping black voters off the rolls. 70% of those blocked are African-Americans, even though GA’s population is just 32% black. Kemp is currently running for Governor against Stacey Abrams who, if successful on November 6th, would become the nation’s first African-American female Governor;
- Some listener mail on a recent show regarding West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin, who voted in favor of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court last weekend, as the coal state Democrat faces re-election after WV voted for Trump by 42 points in 2016;
- And, finally, a viral musical ditty to close us out today on the “very scary time for young men,” as Donald Trump appallingly described it, following the multiple credible allegations of sexual assault by now-Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh…
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[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_Michael_CoalOilCarbonTax_VoteReg-ND-MO-GA_ScaryTime_101018.mp3]
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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Hi Brad and Desi – Let me tell you and your readers about my recent absentee voting experience:
This year I moved from Seattle to a little town in Georgia. Washington State is an all mail-in ballot state and they don’t boot you off the rolls unless you ask them to.
I had heard all the stories about how poor the election integrity is here in Georgia and how the guy in control of the touch-screen-100%-unverifiable-no-paper-trail machines (Sec Kemp) was also running for Governor against that awesome progressive black woman, Stacy Abrams.
I went into voter shock! I didn’t want my vote to be on a non-verifiable touch screen with no paper backup, where Kemp could just flip it around, so I put in for an absentee ballot, which arrived last week. I want to make it harder for him to cheat.
I filled it out and hand carried it to the county registrar personally since my little-bitty town is actually the county seat. I wanted to see where it went, of course. What happened next was very strange indeed.
The website had said the county registrar’s office was open 9 to 5. I was there around 10:30. There was a sign out front stuck in the lawn with an arrow pointing to the door that said “voter registration”. But the door was locked and right in front of it, on the inside, a golf cart was parked, completely blocking it. WTF? I mean, why was it closed when it was almost the last day to register? And what was up with the golf cart? Another car pulled up with a black woman in it and she stayed in her car, I think she must have been waiting to see if it was open or closed. I wondered if she was planning to register.
Anyway, I was standing there wondering what to do when a man squeezed around the cart and unlocked the door and opened it a crack. I recognized him as the registrar that had taken my hand-carried application for an absentee ballot a while back, so I asked him what to do with my ballot. And he said, “Oh, I’ll take it!” I didn’t think to ask him what he was going to do with it. I had expected a sealed dropbox or something… like they have all over Seattle. It all happened fast and before I could say anything he’d started to turn away and the women from the other car was approaching up the walk. I turned and left so as not to intrude, and got in my car.
As I was backing out, the last I saw of the registrar, he was fanning himself with my ballot as he was talking to the lady through the crack in the door. I don’t know if he let the woman in or what he did with my ballot. Did he throw it away? Keep it for a fan? Put it in a ballot box somewhere?
This is the way they vote here, I guess…..
Susan at #1,
That Registrar was one of the members of the despotic minority (How To Identify The Despotic Minority – 4).
Susan @1:
Thanks for sharing this. I’m on the road for the next coupla days, so can’t do too much with it for the moment (may share on Monday’s show). But, in the meantime, PLEASE let 866-OUR-VOTE know about what happened, as well as local journalists and, yes, even the Sec. of State.
I don’t know for sure (because it’s GA!), but you and/or they SHOULD be able to check to see if your ballot made it into the system with a bit of checking.
Beyond that, I think the local journalists would like to know about how the doors were locked near end of registration period, etc.
Thanks for sharing this, and sorry I can’t (for now) do much with it. Feel free to send me email with details on the County, etc!
The DSA got infiltrated. This website is disgusting and without honor.