New Voting Law Proposals and Voting Rights Efforts (1 Viewer)

[MT15]

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.

 

[MT15]

Trump evidently still has an iron grip on these idiots.

 

[Optimus Prime]

PHOENIX — As activists staked out a suburban ballot drop box last year, some toting guns and dressed in tactical gear, law enforcement officers found themselves also playing the role of front-line election workers.

In interacting with these observers, local sheriff’s deputies explained and enforced complicated — and sometimes vague — election laws, weighing whether observers’ face coverings, guns and video cameras hindered people’s ability to vote, according to body-camera footage obtained by The Washington Post. The deputies handed out tips for following the law, calmly de-escalated tension, leveraged humor to gather information and measured observers’ distance from a drop box to ensure they were within the law.

The 45 minutes of footage offers a rare window into the new role law enforcement is playing in Arizona’s elections, where bands of self-styled civilian watchdogs mistrustful of voting systems and government took it upon themselves during the midterm election’s early-voting period to gather evidence of improprieties they believed could happen. The scenes played out in Maricopa County, home to most of the state’s voters and an epicenter of the election denialism movement that fueled efforts to reverse the 2020 election results.

During encounters with three groups of observers last October, deputies tried to minimize the threat and disruption to voters but could not infringe on the observers’ rights to freedom of speech and to carry weapons under Arizona law. The deputies employed tactics learned in an election-focused training months earlier, and Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone (D) recalls warning them their interactions with observers would be closely watched and judged.

“Although it may not be a fundamental task that we ever expected to participate in, it is absolutely an obligation if we expect our nation to remain stable,” he said. “I just never expected to dedicate this volume of resources for that cause.”

The office spent $665,000 on law enforcement activities surrounding the 2022 midterm election, including for personnel overtime, temporary fencing that surrounded the county’s vote-counting center to control access, and responding to reports of observers at the county’s two outdoor drop boxes, Penzone said. He expects this sort of work to only increase with the presidential election next year..........

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/09/video-arizona-ballot-drop-box-observers/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3956f9d%2F640a1d49d8b4d1607547c79b%2F5a0cb1ffade4e230f7038273%2F27%2F72%2F640a1d49d8b4d1607547c79b&wp_cu=104d64de80476c1556d5d0790213672b%7CC0D737332B174969E0430100007FF0C5