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The post GOP voter registrations surge in key battleground state appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>In the four years since Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election, the GOP has registered nearly seven times more voters than Democrats in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
BIDEN RETAINS EDGE OVER TRUMP IN BATTLEGROUND PENNSYLVANIA: POLL
Keystone State Republicans have added almost 198,000 registered voters to the books since 2016, while Democrats have gained an additional 29,000, Politico reported Thursday.
Democrats still outnumber Republicans by about 750,000 voters in the state, but the percentage of those registered is down two points from September 2016. The percentage of Republicans has risen from 38% to 39%.
People register to vote during a GOP event in Brownsville, Pa., on Sept. 5, 2020. Less than two months before the Nov. 3 presidential election, the contrast between Republicans and Democrats is striking in Washington County, in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
Many party officials credit President Trump with narrowing the divide.
An uptick in registrations in three critical areas across Pennsylvania — including Erie, Luzerne, and Northampton counties — helped Trump to flip the state in 2016, according to Politico; Hillary Clinton lost to him there by less than one percentage point.
Republicans have made the biggest net gains in western Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland, Luzerne and Washington counties, Politico said, while Democrats have gained ground in the suburbs around Philadelphia including Montgomery, Chester, Delaware and Bucks counties.
While Democrats in the state said that they were not particularly concerned about the increase, Republicans said they have benefitted from the Trump campaign’s in-person canvassing.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s team has largely opted for a virtual approach amid the COVID-19 pandemic, although local Democratic groups have held some socially distanced events focused on signing up voters, Politico reported.
Democratic analysis firm TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier pinned Republican strides to lagging data, telling reporters in a newsletter that Democrats have signed up almost 415,000 new voters since 2016 and Republicans had comparatively only signed up about 282,000.
The leader of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, Lawrence Tabas, told Politico that Democrats are making excuses.
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“If I were them, I would say that I think voter registration is some sort of a lagging issue. You would, too,” he remarked. “Having this additional edge of newly registered Republicans from the Democratic base, these are people who are going to vote in November. These people are committed.”
November’s upcoming election is going to be different for many voters due to a shortage of polling workers, a deadly health crisis, a widespread economic recession and recommendations to vote by mail to lower COVID-19 infection risk.
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]]>The post Topless voter shocks New Hampshire poll workers in dispute over political clothing rule appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>A New Hampshire woman walked into a polling station Tuesday with a political T-shirt – but pulled it off in a flash of defiance and voted topless when officials told her campaign clothing was banned, according to local reports.
The unidentified female entered an Exeter gymnasium with a shirt depicting President Trump and the late Sen. John McCain.
Town moderator Paul Scafidi told her she had to either take it off or cover it up — so she slipped out of it and grabbed her ballot, the Union Leader recounted. She was not wearing anything underneath.
TRUMP-BACKED CANDIDATES VICTORIOUS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY
“Boom! The shirt’s off,” Scafidi told the outlet. “And she’s standing there saying, ‘How’s this?’”
He said there were about 15 voters at the poll, and he didn’t notice any children. But the voting booths had their curtains removed due to the coronavirus.
Andrea Shine, who witnessed the incident, said she laughed, according to the report.
“I think we all kind of needed it,” she said. “With everything going on in the world, it’s like, who cares?”
Still, it was unexpected for election officials.
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“She could’ve just gone into the hallway and turned it inside-out,” Scafidi told Seacoast Online, adding that he could have had her lawfully removed but preferred not to escalate the situation.
“If she felt it was her right, more power to her,” he said. “We all laughed about it as things were winding down, so I don’t know if it was a set-up, but I’ve never experienced anything like that.”
The T-shirt’s imagery mocked the president and praised McCain, reading, “McCain Hero, Trump Zero,” the outlet reported.
Lovey Roundtree Oliff, a member of the Exeter Board of Selectman, similar to a town board or council, said it happened so quickly, there was no time for anyone to complain, she told the Union Leader.
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]]>The post State bars GOP voter statement, says it was 29 seconds late appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>SALEM, Ore. (AP) – The Oregon Republican Party’s statement for the state voters’ pamphlet arrived 29 seconds too late and won’t appear in the guide mailed to voters for the November election, officials say.
Laura Fosmire, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Bev Clarno, said deadlines apply equally to everyone.
“Anyone wishing to submit information to the Voters’ Pamphlet has several weeks to do so and we recommend avoiding waiting until the last minute for this reason,” she said in a statement.
But Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that Kevin Hoar, the communications director for the state GOP, insists the party did get its statement into an online filing system by 4:59 p.m. on Aug. 25, the final day for filing.
He said the party filed a lawsuit in Marion County demanding that the statement be included in the voters’ guide before it goes to print later this month.
“We can’t quite explain the interpretation and decision here” by state elections officials, Hoar said.
State Republican Chairman Bill Currier said the failure to include his party’s statement from the voting guide “reeks of partisan discrimination.”
He added, “If a bureaucrat in some decision-making role simply didn’t like what our statement said, this doesn’t give them the right to silence us.”
Clarno, the secretary of state, is the only Oregon Republican in statewide office. A former Oregon House speaker from Deschutes County, she was appointed to the job by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown to serve the rest of the term after Secretary of State Dennis Richardson died in 2019.
The statement submitted by the Republican Party was headlined “Had enough? Vote Republican!” It attacked Democratic leadership in Oregon on issues ranging from “Unrestrained rioting” in Portland to mismanagement of the pandemic resulting in “catastrophic small business losses.”
Hoar also said that Currier was locked out of the online filing system for several hours, delaying the party’s ability to file its statement.
Fosmire said there were “no problems or glitches” with the online reporting system. “(W)e simply received the statement after the filing deadline,” she said.
The Democratic Party of Oregon and six other political parties are included in the voters’ pamphlet for the Nov. 3 election.
Copyright © 2020 The Washington Times, LLC.
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]]>The post Polls: Voter concern over climate change sinking as coronavirus steals thunder appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Even as Democrats place climate change at the forefront of their election strategy, polls show the novel coronavirus pandemic is taking the wind out of the climate issue’s sails.
A Harris Poll survey conducted for Fortune found that climate change has dropped since December from first to second-to-last on a list of a dozen issues facing society, according to Harris CEO Will Johnson, who added he was “personally surprised and discouraged to discover that our devotion to the world around us is flagging.”
“Among Gen X men, in fact, more than third dismiss climate change as unimportant,” said Mr. Johnson in a Monday post. “COVID-19 and the recession have, of course, reordered priorities around the world. Still, the coronavirus didn’t elbow aside other issues as muscularly as it did climate change.”
In an article for @FortuneMagazine, our CEO, Will Johnson, pointed out that Americans said climate change was the top issue facing society last December. Today, it comes in second to last on a list of a dozen options. Read the full article here: https://t.co/t7VNERKiSG
— The Harris Poll® (@HarrisPoll) August 10, 2020
The post was headlined: “Amid COVID-19, Americans don’t care about climate change anymore.”
Meanwhile, a Gallup poll taken July 1-23 found climate change ranked last on a list of 16 non-economic issues, with “coronavirus/diseases” ranking first and “the government/poor leadership” coming in second, while crime and the judicial system rose in importance.
Only 1% of 1,007 U.S. adults surveyed ranked “climate change/environment/pollution” as “the most important problem facing this country today,” down from 2% in the May 28-June 4 poll, according to the Gallup results released Aug. 5.
The surveys come as Democrats for trillion-dollar investments in wind and solar energy as part of a national strategy to combat the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The Biden campaign’s climate plan would spend $2 trillion to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
Previous surveys have shown that Americans are concerned about climate change but not concerned enough to open their wallets. An AP-NORC poll released last year found that 68% were unwilling to foot even a $10 increase in their monthly electricity bill to combat global warming.
“Was there any amount Americans were willing to pay to combat climate change? Yes, $1 dollar,” said the Cato Institute analysis. “Fifty‐seven percent (57%) of Americans would be willing to pay a $1 a month fee in their electric bills to combat climate change.”
Given a list of nine policy initiatives that could “fight global warming or help the environment generally,” the Harris Poll found that only one drew majority support: 51% supported “tax credits or rebates for greater energy efficiency in buildings.”
“Moreover, 13% of all respondents say the government should do nothing to improve the environment, a stance that rises to nearly one in five of all survey takers in the South,” said Mr. Johnson.
He noted that the pandemic has resulted in reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Airline travel has plummeted, and car travel has also decreased as many Americans work from home under shelter-in-place orders.
When the pandemic ends or comes under control, however, “American adults say they’ll behave in ways that would increase their carbon footprint,” Mr. Johnson said.
“According to our survey, we’ll drive as much as we did before, take public transportation less, bicycle or walk less, buy more clothes, and have more stuff packaged up and shipped to our homes,” he said. “And most of us plan to jack up the home AC and heat even more than we already have.”
The poll of 1,083 representative respondents also found that a plurality, or 39%, saw the pandemic as good for the environment in the short run, but damaging in the long term.
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]]>The post Why Democrat voter registration is shrinking in battleground states appeared first on Virus Reports.
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The post Why Democrat voter registration is shrinking in battleground states appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post Dead cat gets voter registration application in mail appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>ATLANTA (AP) – In a presidential election year, there’s always a push to get people registered to vote.
For one Atlanta family, that push got a little interesting.
Ron Tims said he checked his mail Wednesday and found a voter registration application addressed to Cody Tims – his cat, who died 12 years ago.
“A great cat, indoor and outdoor, loved his family, loved his neighborhood. He was 18 and a half when he passed away,” Carol Tims told WAGA-TV.
The Tims were surprised, and a bit amused when they saw what Cody received in the mail.
“There’s a huge push but if they’re trying to register cats, I’m not sure who else they’re trying to register. I’m not sure if they’re trying to register dogs, mice, snakes,” Carol Tims said.
The Secretary of State’s Office said the application did not come from its office and that third-party groups often use mailing lists to get names and addresses.
“Third-party groups all over the country are targeting Georgia to help register qualified individuals,” the Secretary of State’s Office said in a statement. “This group makes you wonder what these out-of-town activists are really doing. Make no mistake about it, this office is dedicated to investigating all types of fraud.”
The Secretary of State’s Office said it’s quite sure that even if Cody were still alive and showed up at the polls, he wouldn’t be allowed to vote since he does not have a license or state ID.
If you’re wondering how Cody would have voted if he could go to the polls. His owner said he was a DemoCAT.
Copyright © 2020 The Washington Times, LLC.
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]]>The post Eric Trump: Voter fraud, Twitter censorship are real threats to conservatives appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Voter fraud and Twitter censorship pose real threats to conservatives, Eric Trump said Saturday night.
“Voter fraud is real and it is absolutely happening every single day. And the Democrats don’t care,” the president’s son told host Jesse Watters during an appearance on Fox News’ “Watters’ World.” “And the media wants to ignore it.”
Trump, an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, slammed Democrats for trying to push the narrative that voter fraud involving mail-in ballots doesn’t exist.
BIDEN SAYS TRUMP WILL ATTEMPT TO ‘STEAL’ PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
President Trump tweeted last Sunday that due to the “process” voters must go through to obtain an absentee ballot, such voting is safer than general mail-in balloting — and he pointed to a voter-fraud scandal in New Jersey in May as evidence that universal mail-in voting would cause widespread problems.
Watters then asked Trump about Twitter, alleging the microblogging site was pushing a narrative in favor of mail-in voting, something Trump said was “dangerous.”
“You and I and every other conservative out there we’ve known what has been happening the whole time,” Trump said. “I mean, every single kind of outspoken conservative has been shadow-banned behind the, behind the scenes. There’s just no question.”
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Trump also said any Twitter censorship against conservatives would backfire on Democrats because of Americans’ love for free speech.
“It’s going to cost them the election because the one thing that Republicans, the one thing that Americans don’t want to have happen to them is to have their free speech silenced, right?” Trump said. “We have the First Amendment protection for a reason. Americans fundamentally — it’s ingrained in their DNA, believe in having free speech.
“And I’m telling you, it’s gonna backfire on them. Do not take that ability away from Americans. And there is no better way, there is no more surefire way to get Americans out to the polls to vote for Donald Trump to stifle their free speech.”
Fox News’ Tyler Olson contributed to this report.
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]]>The post 2020 election voter suppression, fraud with mail-in ballots threatens confidence in results appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Voter suppression remains largely in the eye of the beholder in America. It’s everywhere and it’s nowhere, and its ghostly presence promises to haunt the November elections.
Isabel Calderon is a prime example.
The former volunteer with the League of United Latin American Citizens committed voter fraud, made an honest mistake, or is a victim of voter suppression. It depends on whom you ask.
Texas authorities discovered that Ms. Calderon, 46, voted twice in the state’s March 3 primary, first during in-person early voting and again on election day.
She confessed to a Texas Ranger that she double-dipped at the polls, according to election officials. But her former colleagues at LULAC, a Hispanic civic and voting rights group, said she was a victim of voter suppression.
“LULAC condemns voter fraud by anyone. But we also know we’re dealing with racist terrorist organizations like the Texas Rangers, who have a history of police brutality and voter suppression in Texas,” said Domingo Garcia, national president of LULAC.
Voting rights experts of all political stripes use “voter suppression” as watchwords to frame the debate about election integrity and sometimes to challenge election results.
The political left says voter suppression is real, is happening everywhere and will get worse — and that Republicans are behind it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, saw long lines at Georgia’s primary elections this month and said it was part of a “pattern” of voter suppression by Republicans.
“It is also a prelude to what could happen in November,” Mrs. Pelosi said. “[It’s] all part of the Republican playbook … because they’re afraid of the voters, they’re afraid of the vote.”
Liberal groups have a long list of what they say are voter suppression methods, including voter ID laws, lack of early voting and same-day voter registration, restrictions on registration drives, ballot shortages at the polls and felon disenfranchisement.
Conservatives say voter suppression is a myth and propaganda and that voter fraud will get worse without measures to safeguard the polls.
“I do not think there has been intentional voter suppression. I think if you’re going to have additional mail ballots that ballot harvesting should be outlawed,” Sen. John Kennedy, Louisiana Republican, told The Washington Times. “A lot of the efforts in terms of mail ballots have gone into making sure everybody knows it is available. But you have to be ready to count them. And I think that’s also a challenge.”
Either way, charges of rigged elections seem unavoidable. Unequivocal incidents of voter suppression in recent elections are harder to find.
The Justice Department hasn’t taken major action to intervene in state elections, at least not since the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down provisions of the Voting Rights Act that required preclearance of new election laws.
Several research organizations have dived deep into the Justice Department’s win-loss record in voting rights cases.
President George W. Bush directed the department to bring more voter fraud cases, but only 26 people were convicted or pleaded guilty to illegal registration or voting through the initiative, according to a study by Cornell University.
Meanwhile, 2,068 alleged election fraud cases were brought from 2000 to 2012 out of the millions of ballots cast, according to a study by News21, the student reporting project with headquarters at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism.
The Justice Department ultimately monitored for possible violations of the Voting Rights Act in 35 counties across the country in the 2018 midterm elections, down from 67 in 2016. The number of states monitored for compliance in 2018 was 19, compared with 28 in 2016.
Most of the monitoring was in pivotal battleground states with tight races for the House and Senate.
The jury is still out on whether long lines at the polls amount to voter suppression.
Sophia Lin Lakin, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said voter suppression could be made worse by consequences of the coronavirus and civil unrest nationwide.
She said long lines at polling places are a “very good indication” that votes are being suppressed and voters need to be vigilant in November.
“The lines are just a very visceral visual of many of the other types of implications that the structural inequalities for our country on voting specifically,” she said.
Recent primaries in the District of Columbia, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin also had long lines and other problems. Some were linked to social distancing measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
A study by the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice found that long waits at polling places disenfranchise voters and harm communities of color and demographically changing communities the most.
Voter suppression skeptics say long lines are not evidence of systemic racism or malicious election administrators but more likely evidence of government incompetence and unpreparedness.
Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation, said voter suppression is a “propaganda term” and has no real definition beyond whatever political operatives pick to help their side win on Election Day. Voters should not fret lines at polling places in November.
“You just need to expect that if you’re going to be voting in person, and a lot of people are this year, that things might take a little bit longer, but that’s not anything nefarious. That’s just the world we’re living in right now,” he said. “If anything, if you want to blame long lines on anyone in 2020, blame the Chinese.”
People who think voter suppression is real and those who think it is imaginary agree that the November elections pose new challenges that could undermine Americans’ confidence in the results.
The League of Women Voters has entered into 21 lawsuits since March to protect voting rights and diminish the impact of the coronavirus on suppressing the vote nationwide, according to the group.
The league reached agreements with New Jersey and Minnesota last week to change the way those states handle mail-in votes for upcoming primaries.
If judges in both states accept the terms of the agreements, the league says, then voters in New Jersey will be able to fix any issues with their signature-match process to have those ballots counted and Minnesota will suspend a witness requirement for absentee voters.
Conservatives share concerns about undue influence on voters casting ballots at the mailbox instead of the ballot box.
The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky said electioneering laws that guide acceptable conduct at a polling place do not apply to a voter’s home and the threat of intimidation while filling out a ballot this fall is real.
“My biggest concern this year in the 2020 election is the same concern that the president shares, which is this push for all-mail elections because of the vulnerability of absentee and mail-in ballots to everything from being lost in the mail to being stolen, forged, altered, to one of the things you often see in these cases, which is intimidation, pressure on voters in their homes to vote a particular way,” Mr. Spakovsky said.
State officials, not the federal government, determine how elections are conducted. State officials make decisions about polling locations, the number of poll workers, the number of election machines and ballots on hand at polling locations based on projections of voter turnout. If the coronavirus’ disparate impact on communities turns the projections into guesswork, then states will need emergency plans to accommodate anyone wishing to vote and voters can’t necessarily expect results on Election Day.
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]]>The post Don Winslow sees Voter Suppression Georgia Primaries Prelude To November appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Editor’s Note: Don Winslow is the author of bestsellers including The Power of the Dog, The Winter of Frankie Machine, The Force and most recently the novella collection Broken. He writes occasional columns for Deadline, including a recent week’s worth on his experiences in Hollywood. Today, he expresses his outrage over the ineptitude of yesterday’s Georgia primaries that left voters waiting hours to cast their ballots. Winslow sees this as no accident; he believes it was a deliberate attempt to suppress the vote and sees it as a warning shot on what might happen in November. He is upset enough that he will stipulate to any studios or networks that option his work that shooting cannot take place in Georgia until it reforms its polling process.
***
Voting is an American citizen’s most basic and inalienable right, the absolute foundation of our republic.
It’s simple – no fair election, no democracy.
That’s just what this administration and its cohorts in too many states want – to kill our democracy by suppressing the vote.
Sadly, one of those states is Georgia.
Yesterday’s election was a disgraceful travesty.
Impossibly long lines, inoperable machines, understaffed voting sites, unavailable absentee ballots and a myriad of other problems caused a chaotic, uncertain, and unfair election. To the surprise of no one, these problems were most acute for African-American voters.
Whether it’s the deliberate culling of the voter rolls, as Governor Kemp did to steal the 2018 gubernatorial election from Stacey Abrams, or the blazing – and I think, deliberate – incompetence that was on brutal display in yesterday’s election, the intent is the same. The entrenched powers-that-be know that they will be defeated if all eligible voters get to cast their ballots.
This is true in Georgia, it is true nation-wide.
Kemp knows that, Barr knows that, and Trump knows that.
They know they can’t win fairly, so they cheat.
Let’s don’t be naïve – while there were problems voting in both traditionally Republican and Democratic precincts in Georgia, the worst problems were in areas where the majority of eligible voters were African-American. Voting in white precincts generally took minutes, in black districts it generally took hours.
The people in charge– the Governor and Secretary of State – will say that this wasn’t deliberate.
Well, at a certain point, incompetence is deliberate.
Neglect is deliberate.
Underfunding and understaffing are deliberate.
Even assuming no conscious malfeasance on the part of the state government – and that’s a highly generous assumption given their record -those officials are still responsible, by law, for holding free and fair elections. If you have a broken machine and you don’t do anything to fix it, year after year, decade after decade, then that neglect approaches a criminal level.
If machines and equipment aren’t ready when the polls open, if there aren’t adequate scanners, printer or paper, if voting sites are understaffed, voting rolls incomplete, if people who have to go to jobs are kept waiting for five, six, seven hours to cast their votes, if absentee voters can’t vote at all, that is, cumulatively, voter suppression. That is a failure – willing or no – of elected officials to do the job that the law mandates them to do.
Collectively, these flaws are an intentional and ongoing effort to suppress the rights of African-Americans. And let’s be honest, they haven’t been made to wait hours for full citizenship, they’ve been made to wait centuries.
The upcoming election of 2020 is the most important election since 1860.
Either we will restore our democracy or we will watch ourselves slip into the shabby Fascism that Trump and his Banana Republican sycophants are already busy trying to establish.
They will stop at nothing.
There is not a bar they will not slither under to maintain their positions.
Don’t be fooled – the attempts to steal the 2020 elections are already underway.
Even before he took office, Trump was promulgating lies about voter fraud to dismiss his loss of the popular vote. It is only one of the literally thousands of lies he has told, a canard that his dreary series of mindless mouthpieces have robotically repeated, but it is an especially virulent fraud because it attacks the very basis of our representative government and lays track for the organized voter suppression that Trump and his party have engaged in from day one.
Witness their efforts to oppose mail-in ballots, again, citing fraud without the least bit of evidence. They know that the easier, simpler and more honest that voting becomes, the more likely those votes will throw them out of office. (Although I’m not sure that Dugout Don has fully appreciated the mail-in vote – that he could cast his ballot without ever leaving the safety of his bunker.)
Witness Trump’s creation of the of the ‘Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity’ which he established with great fanfare to back up his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, and which was quietly disbanded in January of 2018 because states wisely refused to provide information, mostly because there was no information to supply.
Witness his threat to hold up relief funds to Michigan over the issue of what he called ‘illegal’ absentee ballots, which were perfectly legal.
What we saw in Georgia yesterday was part and parcel of that effort.
It cannot be allowed to continue.
It has to stop.
What can we do? Talking is not enough, writing opinion columns is not sufficient. We must take action.
We each must do what we can.
Here’s where I’m at:
I’m a novelist by trade – I write mostly crime fiction.
Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to sell a number of my books to networks and studios for television and film adaptation. I will unequivocally state now that I will allow no film or television show based on one of my works to be shot in the state of Georgia until its government takes immediate, real and concrete steps to ensure free and fair elections and to end voter suppression.
If that means that the project is scrapped, so be it.
I urge my colleagues to join me in this stance. It might hurt, it might lighten our pockets. But it will also lighten our consciences. We cannot stand on the sidelines and simply comment, as well-intentioned as those comments might be.
I truly hate to take this step. Boycotts are tricky things, double-edged swords that can sometimes injure the very people that they are trying to empower. I have nothing against the people of Georgia. I have always been treated beautifully and enjoyed any time that I’ve spent there.
But something must be done.
The people of Georgia – all the people of Georgia – must be allowed to participate fully in the political life of their state. They must be allowed to vote in free and fair elections. That is their right as Georgians, it is their right as Americans.
And as Americans, we must stand up for the legitimacy of our elections.
We have five months until the general election to get this right and we must do so. The price of getting it wrong is too high – the end of democracy as we know it. I know that sounds alarmist fine – I’m sounding the alarm bell. Things that we never imagined would happen have already happened in the three years of this, the most corrupt, dishonest, incompetent administration in this country’s history. What is happening in Georgia is the canary in the coal mine. If we allow voter suppression to continue – in Georgia or anywhere else- we are willfully committing societal suicide.
Let’s join together.
Let’s say in a strong, meaningful voice that our votes – and the votes of all our fellow citizens – must not and will not be suppressed.
Thank you.
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]]>The post Voter fraud truthers President Trump and Kayleigh McEnany may have voted illegally by mail: report appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Though they repeat the false claim that voting by mail invites rampant fraud, President Donald Trump and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany may have both cast illegal mail-in ballots in Florida.
The president and his top spokesperson have both listed residential addresses on their Florida voter registration cards which were not their legal residences, HuffPost recently reported. Punishable by up to five years in prison, it is a felony in Florida to use false information on voter registration forms.
McEnany cast votes in 2018 from her parents’ address in Tampa, Fla., according to the report. The Republican owned a home less than two miles away, and she also lived in Washington at the time. The same year, McEnany’s car registration and driver’s license were linked to an address in Edgewater, N.J. The state only grants those documents to people who prove residency.
Trump’s press secretary has voted by mail in every Florida election in which she has participated — 11 times in the last decade.
Trump, who views Florida as a critical swing state, announced last November that he would change his official residential address to Mar-a-Lago, citing “tax purposes.” He cast his ballot under that address in the state’s March presidential primary, voting by mail even though he reportedly drove by a polling place in person at least six times that month.
“It’s illegal,” Reginald Stambaugh, a Palm Beach County lawyer currently involved in a dispute with Trump over a dock the president recently tried to build at Mar-a-Lago, told HuffPost.
According to the report, Trump tried to vote last fall as a Floridian while claiming 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as his residence. Palm Beach County elections officials rejected his registration, because the White House is outside of the county.
Trump subsequently filed a new registration listing his residence at Mar-a-Lago, affirming with a signature that it was true. (“I live in Manhattan,” Trump told governors in a conference call last week.)
However, Trump and the town of Palm Beach reached an agreement in 1993 allowing him to turn his Mar-a-Lago estate into a club in return for his promise to never live there, as the Washington Post reported last month.
Florida law does not allow residents to register to vote from a place of business. It states that registered voters must be “Florida residents,” and one of the documents that can be provided as proof is a state driver’s license.
Though she worked in Washington, McEnany told a Tampa radio station last summer that she traveled back to Tampa “pretty much every weekend.” She changed her legal residence to her own address in 2019.
The press secretary has nonetheless sided with Trump’s false claims that proposals to expand mail-in voting will “substantially” increase voter fraud and result in a “rigged election.” Those false claims led Twitter to flag the president’s tweets with a fact-check label for the first time.
“Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed,” Trump wrote in one of the flagged tweets.
McEnany vilified mail-in ballots in tweets of her own one week prior.
“Will the media, and @Twitter, acknowledge these real concerns with mass mail-in voting?” she asked, claiming in one tweet that the practice necessarily leads to “ballot harvesting.”
She kept up her attacks on the practice even after reports revealed she had cast mail-in ballots for a decade. “They are subject to fraud, and that is extremely troubling,” she said at a White House press briefing last week.
McEnany defended her personal choice as necessary.
“Absentee voting has the word absent in it for a reason: It means you’re absent from the jurisdiction or unable to vote in person,” she told the Tampa Bay Times last month, after the outlet broke news of her mail-in voting record.
She defended the president’s choice the same way, claiming that “the president is, after all, the president, which means he’s here in Washington. He’s unable to cast his vote down in Florida, his state of residence.”
(Trump, of course, was in his Florida voter precinct when polls were open.)
However, Florida does not have “absentee voting.” Any registered voter can cast a mail-in ballot without having to provide a reason.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway appeared to come to McEnany’s defense by comparing voting on Election Day to waiting in line at Georgetown Cupcake. Conway cast her New Jersey 2018 midterm ballot by mail.
Salon recently reported that RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who claimed in April that mail-in votes “vastly expand opportunities for fraud,” repeatedly voted by mail before suing California for expanding that very practice.
An extensive voter fraud investigation in Florida ended in May with zero prosecutions.
The post Voter fraud truthers President Trump and Kayleigh McEnany may have voted illegally by mail: report appeared first on Virus Reports.
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