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.
Voting Law Proposals and Voting Rights Efforts (2 Viewers)
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GrandAdmiral
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Looking for problems where there are none. DumbassRepublican Gov. Jeff Landry signed an executive order on Monday requiring all Louisiana government agencies that hand out voter registration forms to include a written declaration that non-citizens are prohibited from registering to vote or voting in elections.
“The right to vote in United States elections is a privilege that’s reserved for American citizens,” Landry said during the Monday press conference. “In Louisiana, election integrity is a top priority.”
Louisiana is just the most recent state to implement measures to ensure that individuals who are not American citizens are not voting in U.S. elections, even though there is simply no evidence to suggest that non-citizen voting is a real problem.
It is, of course, already illegal for non-citizens to vote in state, federal or even most local elections, and states themselves have measures in place to protect their elections from non-citizen voting, including severe penalties for doing so, like the risk of deportation.
“It is not something that anyone has an incentive to do given the severe penalties and the fact that we’re talking about casting a single vote,” Alice Clapman, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, previously told TPM. “It is feeding the disinformation that this is a problem, which obviously has become a talking point of the Trump campaign and frankly other political campaigns.”
In the rare instances where a non-citizen is found on the rolls, there is often a reasonable explanation, experts told TPM. For example, in states with automatic voter registration, there’s always a chance that non-citizens might accidentally get registered when completing other types of legal paperwork, even though they never attempted to vote.
Republicans’ new obsession with supposedly curbing alleged non-citizens voting is an extension of the rhetorical efforts by Donald Trump and his MAGA allies to stoke fears about election fraud in case the former president loses his third bid for the White House. It’s reminiscent of his efforts before and after the 2020 election to manufacture hysteria around mail-in voting and other pandemic mitigation measures, and in a way, it’s an extension of the Big Lie.
In May, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other House MAGA Republicans introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would make it illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, an act that is already illegal. That passed the House in July but, predictably, was not picked up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.............
Louisiana Becomes Latest Red State To Solve Non-Existent Problem That Trump Claims Exists
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed an executive order on Monday requiring all Louisiana government agencies that hand out voter registration forms to include a written declaration that non-citizens…talkingpointsmemo.com
Bigdaddysaints
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yea. he wants to make it sound like if you fill out a voter registration form, you will be registered to vote, no questions asked. it doesn't work like that.. he is just trying to make a headline...smh....
Optimus Prime
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Esternita Watkins, 42, became an American citizen nearly two years ago, wearing a green dress and a big smile at her naturalization ceremony in Montgomery, Alabama.
She’d been living in the U.S. since 2015, when she arrived from the Philippines on a fiancée visa to marry Christopher Watkins, 54, now her husband, whom she’d met on Facebook. Soon after she earned citizenship, she registered to vote and was looking forward to casting her first ballot in this year’s presidential election. But she got a letter this month saying state Secretary of State Wes Allen had flagged her for having a noncitizen identification number and deactivated her voter registration.
To prove her citizenship and vote in November, the letter said, she would need fill out the voter registration form again.
“I was mad, because I worked so hard to be a U.S. citizen so I can vote,” Watkins said, adding that the naturalization process had been expensive.
She was uncomfortable with the letter — it felt like something political was going on, she said — and she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to register again.
With Republican officials around the country like Allen putting a fresh focus on preventing noncitizens from voting — which is already illegal and rare — it’s naturalized Americans like Esternita Watkins who will be most affected by such voter roll purges, voting rights advocates and attorneys say.
"Maybe the first time an election official tried doing this, you could say, OK, they didn't really think it through," said Danielle Lang, senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, a voting rights group in Washington, D.C.
"But they keep doing the same thing, even though they know that every single time what happens is that thousands and thousands of naturalized citizens are targeted and accused of being fraudulent noncitizens voting, being accused of committing felonies, having their citizenship status placed into question."
Allen announced he had put 3,251 voter registrations on track for removal in mid-August as part of a new process that flags anyone on the state voter rolls with a noncitizen identification number. Allen shared the list with the attorney general for "further investigation and possible criminal prosecution," his office said in a release.
“Every single naturalized citizen in Alabama has an immigration number, every single one,” Lang said.
According to the latest data available from the Department of Homeland Security, 3,998 people were naturalized in Alabama in 2022. The year before, 1,614 people became U.S. citizens in Alabama.............
www.nbcnews.com
She’d been living in the U.S. since 2015, when she arrived from the Philippines on a fiancée visa to marry Christopher Watkins, 54, now her husband, whom she’d met on Facebook. Soon after she earned citizenship, she registered to vote and was looking forward to casting her first ballot in this year’s presidential election. But she got a letter this month saying state Secretary of State Wes Allen had flagged her for having a noncitizen identification number and deactivated her voter registration.
To prove her citizenship and vote in November, the letter said, she would need fill out the voter registration form again.
“I was mad, because I worked so hard to be a U.S. citizen so I can vote,” Watkins said, adding that the naturalization process had been expensive.
She was uncomfortable with the letter — it felt like something political was going on, she said — and she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to register again.
With Republican officials around the country like Allen putting a fresh focus on preventing noncitizens from voting — which is already illegal and rare — it’s naturalized Americans like Esternita Watkins who will be most affected by such voter roll purges, voting rights advocates and attorneys say.
"Maybe the first time an election official tried doing this, you could say, OK, they didn't really think it through," said Danielle Lang, senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, a voting rights group in Washington, D.C.
"But they keep doing the same thing, even though they know that every single time what happens is that thousands and thousands of naturalized citizens are targeted and accused of being fraudulent noncitizens voting, being accused of committing felonies, having their citizenship status placed into question."
Allen announced he had put 3,251 voter registrations on track for removal in mid-August as part of a new process that flags anyone on the state voter rolls with a noncitizen identification number. Allen shared the list with the attorney general for "further investigation and possible criminal prosecution," his office said in a release.
“Every single naturalized citizen in Alabama has an immigration number, every single one,” Lang said.
According to the latest data available from the Department of Homeland Security, 3,998 people were naturalized in Alabama in 2022. The year before, 1,614 people became U.S. citizens in Alabama.............
GOP crackdowns on noncitizen voting ensnare newly naturalized Americans
Voting rights advocates are raising concerns about the effects of Republican-led measures designed to prevent noncitizens from voting, which is illegal and rare.
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Optimus Prime
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HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WAFF) - James Stroop lives in Union Grove and has lived in the U.S. his whole life. He’s voted in every election he could and even applied to be a poll worker this November. When he got a letter from his local registrar he thought it was to tell him his application was approved. That’s not the news he received.
“I’m like ‘Hey the election is coming up, I’d like to vote it’s my right.’ People make mistakes, things happen,” Stroop said. “It would be kind of funny if it was just a mistake but I feel that some people just seem to jump on things.”
Due to an error on a form James Stroop filled out in 2022, the Alabama Department of Labor briefly identified him as a non-citizen. It was an issue he corrected two years ago.
When the Department of Labor sent its list of non-citizens to the Secretary of State, there was a problem. Stroop was still on the list.
“The Secretary of Labor reached out to me, he called me directly and he apologized for the mistake,” Stroop said.” He said that so far he had 15 errors that they knew of, and that’s just what they knew of.”
When WAFF 48 News talked to the Secretary of State, Wes Allen earlier this month he said the federal government did not issue the list of non-citizens when he asked. So he turned to state databases.
“We had just been running into brick wall after brick wall after brick wall and we took a little different route and were able to ascertain a little over 3,200 individuals,” Allen said.
Stroop is now left to wait.
“It may be tomorrow it may be two weeks, just hopefully it’s before the election,” Stroop said.............
www.waff.com
“I’m like ‘Hey the election is coming up, I’d like to vote it’s my right.’ People make mistakes, things happen,” Stroop said. “It would be kind of funny if it was just a mistake but I feel that some people just seem to jump on things.”
Due to an error on a form James Stroop filled out in 2022, the Alabama Department of Labor briefly identified him as a non-citizen. It was an issue he corrected two years ago.
When the Department of Labor sent its list of non-citizens to the Secretary of State, there was a problem. Stroop was still on the list.
“The Secretary of Labor reached out to me, he called me directly and he apologized for the mistake,” Stroop said.” He said that so far he had 15 errors that they knew of, and that’s just what they knew of.”
When WAFF 48 News talked to the Secretary of State, Wes Allen earlier this month he said the federal government did not issue the list of non-citizens when he asked. So he turned to state databases.
“We had just been running into brick wall after brick wall after brick wall and we took a little different route and were able to ascertain a little over 3,200 individuals,” Allen said.
Stroop is now left to wait.
“It may be tomorrow it may be two weeks, just hopefully it’s before the election,” Stroop said.............
U.S. Citizen removed from voting, placed on inactive list
Due to an error on a form Stroop filled out in 2022, the Alabama Department of Labor identified him as a non-citizen.
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MT15
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WSJ has a piece saying the GOP plan to try to throw the election to the House isn’t likely to work.
“Trump supporters may hope that by tying up some vote counts until Jan. 6—the deadline for announcing an Electoral College winner—they can deny either candidate an Electoral College majority, triggering what some call a “contingent election” under the Constitution’s 12th amendment, with each state’s House delegation casting a single vote. Because Republicans are likely to control more state delegations than Democrats even if Democrats retake the House (the new Congress takes office before the count), this overriding of the Electoral College would likely favor Trump.
But it is unlikely that frivolous attempts to delay certification would prevent a state from submitting its Electoral College votes to Congress in time. State legislatures set certification deadlines, which should override administrative foot-dragging even if sanctioned by state election boards. State courts and federal courts would likely intervene to make election officials do their jobs and prevent disenfranchising a state’s voters from participating in the presidential election.
In addition, under the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act that Congress passed in response to the 2020 election shenanigans, if a state doesn’t certify its count, Congress must remove that state’s Electoral College votes from the tally of what counts as a majority. So a delay should not trigger a special election in the House to choose the next president.”
apple.news
“Trump supporters may hope that by tying up some vote counts until Jan. 6—the deadline for announcing an Electoral College winner—they can deny either candidate an Electoral College majority, triggering what some call a “contingent election” under the Constitution’s 12th amendment, with each state’s House delegation casting a single vote. Because Republicans are likely to control more state delegations than Democrats even if Democrats retake the House (the new Congress takes office before the count), this overriding of the Electoral College would likely favor Trump.
But it is unlikely that frivolous attempts to delay certification would prevent a state from submitting its Electoral College votes to Congress in time. State legislatures set certification deadlines, which should override administrative foot-dragging even if sanctioned by state election boards. State courts and federal courts would likely intervene to make election officials do their jobs and prevent disenfranchising a state’s voters from participating in the presidential election.
In addition, under the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act that Congress passed in response to the 2020 election shenanigans, if a state doesn’t certify its count, Congress must remove that state’s Electoral College votes from the tally of what counts as a majority. So a delay should not trigger a special election in the House to choose the next president.”
Why It Will Be Harder for Trump to Challenge This Year’s Election — The Wall Street Journal
New laws and court rulings have created a range of guardrails against efforts to delay or interfere with the electoral process.
LA - L.A.
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I give this article a "fingers crossed" reaction icon.WSJ has a piece saying the GOP plan to try to throw the election to the House isn’t likely to work.
“Trump supporters may hope that by tying up some vote counts until Jan. 6—the deadline for announcing an Electoral College winner—they can deny either candidate an Electoral College majority, triggering what some call a “contingent election” under the Constitution’s 12th amendment, with each state’s House delegation casting a single vote. Because Republicans are likely to control more state delegations than Democrats even if Democrats retake the House (the new Congress takes office before the count), this overriding of the Electoral College would likely favor Trump.
But it is unlikely that frivolous attempts to delay certification would prevent a state from submitting its Electoral College votes to Congress in time. State legislatures set certification deadlines, which should override administrative foot-dragging even if sanctioned by state election boards. State courts and federal courts would likely intervene to make election officials do their jobs and prevent disenfranchising a state’s voters from participating in the presidential election.
In addition, under the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act that Congress passed in response to the 2020 election shenanigans, if a state doesn’t certify its count, Congress must remove that state’s Electoral College votes from the tally of what counts as a majority. So a delay should not trigger a special election in the House to choose the next president.”
Why It Will Be Harder for Trump to Challenge This Year’s Election — The Wall Street Journal
New laws and court rulings have created a range of guardrails against efforts to delay or interfere with the electoral process.
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Optimus Prime
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…….Voting rights groups are concerned these announcements are misleading, and that the efforts to purge are putting naturalized citizens – eligible voters – at risk for being removed.
There is also concern that these efforts are running afoul of a federal law that prohibits systematic removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.
Looking closer at the Texas announcement, there were other questions. The vast majority of people removed had been cancelled for routine reasons – they had either died or moved. The number of voters cancelled for these reasons is similar to totals from past years, according to a New York Times analysis.
“Releasing these numbers without context is a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate voters of color and naturalized citizens from exercising their rights to vote, which is particularly concerning given the upcoming election,” said Savannah Kumar, a voting rights attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“With the state having invented the fabricated issue of widespread illegal voting as a tactic to intimidate people of color from exercising their right to vote, we’re seeing now that the state has to resort to spinning otherwise ordinary data to make it look like it’s addressing this invented problem.”
In Tennessee, state election officials sent out notices to more than 14,000 suspected non-citizens on the eve of early voting in June, warning them of the criminal penalty they could face for voting illegally.
The effort immediately drew scrutiny because Tennessee was looking to see whether someone reported being a non-citizen at the DMV to flag them as a non-citizen.
That kind of comparison has been shown to be unreliable in the past, because people may get a driver’s license and become naturalized citizens before they have to renew it.
The state sent out 14,375 notices, and at least 3,200 people – around 22% – responded saying they were in fact citizens. Election officials eventually admitted that those who didn’t respond would not be removed from the rolls, even if they didn’t respond.
In Alabama, the state’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, announced that his office had identified 3,251 people on the voter rolls who had received a non-citizen identification number at one point from the Department of Homeland Security.
While he acknowledged that some of those people may have since become naturalized citizens and eligible voters, he nonetheless designated all of them inactive voters and requested that they prove their citizenship.
All 3,251 were also referred to the Alabama attorney general’s office for further investigation.
A coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter to Allen on 19 August warning him that his actions violated the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 federal law that sets guardrails on how states can remove people from the voter rolls.
Among other things it says that any systematic efforts to remove people must be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory”. The state also can’t complete any mass removal program within 90 days.……
www.theguardian.com
There is also concern that these efforts are running afoul of a federal law that prohibits systematic removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.
Looking closer at the Texas announcement, there were other questions. The vast majority of people removed had been cancelled for routine reasons – they had either died or moved. The number of voters cancelled for these reasons is similar to totals from past years, according to a New York Times analysis.
“Releasing these numbers without context is a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate voters of color and naturalized citizens from exercising their rights to vote, which is particularly concerning given the upcoming election,” said Savannah Kumar, a voting rights attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“With the state having invented the fabricated issue of widespread illegal voting as a tactic to intimidate people of color from exercising their right to vote, we’re seeing now that the state has to resort to spinning otherwise ordinary data to make it look like it’s addressing this invented problem.”
In Tennessee, state election officials sent out notices to more than 14,000 suspected non-citizens on the eve of early voting in June, warning them of the criminal penalty they could face for voting illegally.
The effort immediately drew scrutiny because Tennessee was looking to see whether someone reported being a non-citizen at the DMV to flag them as a non-citizen.
That kind of comparison has been shown to be unreliable in the past, because people may get a driver’s license and become naturalized citizens before they have to renew it.
The state sent out 14,375 notices, and at least 3,200 people – around 22% – responded saying they were in fact citizens. Election officials eventually admitted that those who didn’t respond would not be removed from the rolls, even if they didn’t respond.
In Alabama, the state’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, announced that his office had identified 3,251 people on the voter rolls who had received a non-citizen identification number at one point from the Department of Homeland Security.
While he acknowledged that some of those people may have since become naturalized citizens and eligible voters, he nonetheless designated all of them inactive voters and requested that they prove their citizenship.
All 3,251 were also referred to the Alabama attorney general’s office for further investigation.
A coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter to Allen on 19 August warning him that his actions violated the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 federal law that sets guardrails on how states can remove people from the voter rolls.
Among other things it says that any systematic efforts to remove people must be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory”. The state also can’t complete any mass removal program within 90 days.……
‘The chilling effect’: behind GOP-led states’ efforts to purge some voters from the rolls
Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Ohio want to scare off voters of color and naturalized citizens, activists say
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cuddlemonkey
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LA - L.A.
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When it comes to the women coming, they never do.
Bigdaddysaints
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ouch...lol
DaveXA
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