Voting Law Proposals and Voting Rights Efforts (2 Viewers)

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    MT15

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    This is, IMO, going to be a big topic in the coming year. Republicans have stated their aim to make voting more restrictive in just about every state where they have the means to do so. Democrats would like to pass the Voting Rights Bill named after John Lewis. I’m going to go look up the map of all the states which have pending legislation to restrict voting. Now that we have the election in the rear view, I thought we could try to make this a general discussion thread, where people who have concerns about voting abuses can post as well and we can discuss it from both sides. Please keep memes out of this thread and put them in the boards where we go to talk about the other side, lol.
     
    AColorado election official believes that the threats of violence that have bubbled up in the weeks leading up to the midterms has given him no other choice but to don a bulletproof vest.

    “I wear one pretty much every single day,” said Josh Zygielbaum, the County Clerk and Recorder in Adams County, Colorado, in an interview with Terry Moran which aired on ABC News on Sunday night.

    The Colorado election worker, who is on the ballot for his own re-election as County Clerk, explained during the Sunday night episode of The Week how he’d been taking precautionary measures to proof the office for weeks. Panic buttons, for instance, are now installed under each desk in the County Clerk’s office.

    “Really trying to harden the office as a target as much as we could,” the Democratic County Clerk explained to the ABC journalist, while providing a tour of the facilities and the security measures that have been put in place to protect him and his poll workers.

    Mr Zygielbaum acknowledged that part of what prompted these security measures were incidents in the past that have made him feel unsafe.

    “I have had some incidents in the past where people have followed me back to my neighbourhood,” he said. After flagging these concerns to the local sheriff, he “recommended that I wear a ballistic vest whenever I feel necessary.”

    Now, that amounts to just about every day, Mr Zygielbaum admitted...........



     
    On Monday, POLITICO reported that a new investigation reveals people on far-right social networks, including Gab, Gettr and Donald Trump's own platform Truth Social, are boasting that they plan to work as official poll workers in their precincts tomorrow.

    "The report from Advance Democracy Inc. found examples of users on sites Truth Social — the social media site owned by former President Donald Trump — and pro-Trump online forums who follow QAnon conspiracy theories," reported Heidi Przybyla and Zach Montellaro.

    "In posts compiled between March and late October of this year, several discuss their intent to identify voter fraud, including by installing their own software into elections computers. They also discussed bringing cameras to polling places and falsely claiming to be Democrats on their election worker applications."

    "Many of the posters in the ADI report publicly detailed plans to disregard election rules, including bringing hidden cameras into polling sites," said the report. One user on Gettr claiming to be a poll worker said, “I’m going to try to get a hidden camera with a large memory card to record all day in the Las Vegas area. Really looking forward to seeing what happens.”

    Another said they worked polls in August in Palm Beach, Florida, and said the “process is relatively smooth,” but also alleged there were ways to cheat.

    This comes after Michigan Republicans were caught on camera telling election observer recruits to bring cell phones and pens to polling places, even though it is against the law.

    It also comes after multiple elections clerks have been accused of breaching voting equipment to try to prove baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, with Mesa County, Colorado clerk Tina Peters facing charges for election tampering and misconduct..........

     
    I worked the election. Of course there are always a way to cheat. It is 100% impossible to stop the chance of cheating.
    We had over 500 people vote at the preceinct i was working at. I can tell you no one held up anyones ID and matched faces to them to be sure that was it wasn't just someone who looked like them. Heck one woman even said "i thought you wold make a comment on how much different i looked in my picture" because she had lost 120lbs in the last 3 years.
    But that is one reason why they try to put people who live in that preceinct working at that specefic preceinct. I was a fill in so i wasn't at my regular one. But the other 3 were, and they personally knew over half of the people who came in, between knowing them from their personal lives to just knowing them from seeing them many times while voting.. Also, just about everyone who signed the book, always looked to see if their family memebers had voted yet.. "oh i see my mom and dad came in already", etc...
    And everyone thinks you can't vote without an ID, but that is 100% false. But you do have to provide your birthday, address and Mothers maiden name and fill ot an affidavd and sign it. We had 2.
    But if anyone thinks ANY process is fool proff, they are an idiot.
     
    more voter fraud
    ==============

    According to a report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a Georgia conservative talk show host has been accused by the state of voting illegally nine times while he was still serving out a felony conviction for forgery and theft in Pennsylvania.

    Brian K. Pritchard, a prominent conservative voice in North Georgia, is currently running for an open seat in the state legislature where he hopes to face the widow of former Speaker David Ralston who died last month.

    However, his campaign is now faced by accusations from the Georgia attorney general's office stating Pritchard broke state law each time he voted before his sentence was completed.

    According to the report, Pritchard who has used his platform to complain about election fraud, "allegedly voted illegally nine times while serving a felony sentence in a $33,000 forgery and theft

    "Pritchard pleaded guilty in 1996 to three felonies, including two counts of forgery and one count of theft by failure to make a required disposition of funds, according to court records from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania," the AJC is reporting before adding, "After Pritchard registered to vote in Georgia in 2008, he voted in nine elections before his felony probation sentence ended in 2011, according to the attorney general's office.".............

     
    Texas Republicans are laying the groundwork to move quickly on a number of new changes to the state’s voting laws, including a proposal to create an election police force like the one Florida enacted before the 2022 midterms.

    As of Friday, GOP legislators had already prefiled 20 bills in the Texas House and Senate. When the legislative session begins in January, they’re likely to consider many of them seriously.

    Most of the bills fall into three categories: legislation that would impose harsher penalties for infractions; expand the state attorney general’s authority to prosecute election and voting crimes; and create a new law enforcement unit dedicated exclusively to enforcing and prosecuting election and voting crimes.

    The proposals have alarmed voting rights activists and state Democrats, who tried and failed last year to block a GOP-backed overhaul of election laws — a priority of Gov. Greg Abbott — in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s false claims that widespread fraud cost him a second term. Trump and his allies could not prove their claims in court, while officials in Texas, which overwhelmingly voted for Trump, spent 22,000 hours looking for voter fraud and uncovered only 16 cases of false addresses on registration forms, according to The Houston Chronicle.

    The new bills “all kind of generally fit under the bucket of criminalizing voters and voting behavior, and just generally turn elections into crime scenes, where there is this presumption that there is some kind of widespread illegal conduct or activity, despite the fact that there is no evidence that’s the case,” said Liz Avore, a senior policy adviser at Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that tracks voting and state election bills.

    Texas Democrats have also been busy, prefiling 42 bills already, all of which, in various ways, aim to ease existing restrictions on voting and voter registration. Advocates note, however, that most aren’t likely to advance in the state, where Republicans hold both chambers of the Legislature as well as the governorship.

    Because the Texas Legislature convenes every other year, state lawmakers are often uniquely aggressive when it comes to prefiling — an expedited process of preparing and introducing legislation — before their lawmaking session actually convenes.

    The 62 voting rights-related bills Texas lawmakers have already prefiled represent nearly all prefiled voting rights legislation across the country, according to a review of prefiled bills by Voting Rights Lab and NBC News. As of Friday, state legislators had prefiled voting rights legislation in only a handful of other states: Virginia (three bills), Missouri (two bills) and Nevada (one bill).............


     
    Ohio GOP is special just not in the good way.
     
    The Republican party filed a record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022, a sign it is shifting the battle over voting access and election administration to courtrooms as well as state legislatures.

    Last year, Republican party groups filed 23 democracy-related lawsuits, according to a new report by Democracy Docket, a progressive media platform that tracks voting litigation. The lawsuits included efforts to challenge election results, attacks on mail-in voting and attempts to undermine the administration of elections. The Democratic party, the report found, filed only six voting lawsuits in 2022 and all sought to protect or expand the right to vote.

    The almost two dozen lawsuits filed by the GOP is an increase from 20 in 2020, the year of the presidential election in which Donald Trump’s loss was contested in courts for months. There were no new lawsuits by the Republican party in 2021, when there was no major election.

    “Evidently, the GOP establishment is becoming more litigious than ever and is turning to courts to achieve its anti-voting and anti-democracy ends,” the report says.

    A total of 175 voting lawsuits were filed in 2022, according to the report, up from 150 in 2020. Of the 175 lawsuits, 93 were characterized as anti-voting, and the Republican party (which the report said it defined as the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, or state or county Republican parties) was responsible for nearly 25% of them.

    In addition to the lawsuits filed by the party itself, 25 lawsuits were filed by GOP candidates without the official backing of their party. Many of these candidates were election deniers, like Mark Finchem in Arizona who challenged the results of the secretary of state race he lost in November…….


     
    I was wondering the same thing. Seems like a weird thing to go after.
    The military didn’t help them with their coup attempt. In fact they actively resisted helping.
     
    Heavily armed Florida police officers descended on the homes of two men accused of illegally voting and arrested one of them at gunpoint as part of Governor Ron DeSantis’s crackdown on voter fraud, new body-camera footage obtained by the Guardian can reveal.

    Both men were in their underwear, unarmed, and placed in handcuffs as police arrested them in front of their Miami-Dade county homes on 18 August.

    “Let me put on my pants,” Ronald Miller, 58, said shortly before noon, when he opened the door to find police officers surrounding his home, their guns pointed at him. “What happened?” he asked as officers instructed him to come outside, their guns still trained on him……

    Voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States, but Republican lawmakers in several states, like Florida, have beefed up units charged with investigating it. Several voting experts said they could not recall seeing another case in which someone accused of voter fraud was arrested at gunpoint.

    “We’ve seen a lot of arrests in recent months for voting issues here in the state, but I have not seen guns drawn in that manner,” said Neil Volz, the deputy director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which works with people with felony convictions to help them get their voting rights back. The videos, he said, were “alarming and heartbreaking”……..




     
    Heavily armed Florida police officers descended on the homes of two men accused of illegally voting and arrested one of them at gunpoint as part of Governor Ron DeSantis’s crackdown on voter fraud, new body-camera footage obtained by the Guardian can reveal.

    Both men were in their underwear, unarmed, and placed in handcuffs as police arrested them in front of their Miami-Dade county homes on 18 August.

    “Let me put on my pants,” Ronald Miller, 58, said shortly before noon, when he opened the door to find police officers surrounding his home, their guns pointed at him. “What happened?” he asked as officers instructed him to come outside, their guns still trained on him……

    Voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States, but Republican lawmakers in several states, like Florida, have beefed up units charged with investigating it. Several voting experts said they could not recall seeing another case in which someone accused of voter fraud was arrested at gunpoint.

    “We’ve seen a lot of arrests in recent months for voting issues here in the state, but I have not seen guns drawn in that manner,” said Neil Volz, the deputy director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which works with people with felony convictions to help them get their voting rights back. The videos, he said, were “alarming and heartbreaking”……..





    Can't wait to see similar footage from where they arrested those reprehensible monsters from The Village.
     

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