Voter Suppression

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,515]

On 2/25/2022 at 2:11 PM, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

 

Texas Dems need to find a solution besides just whining about it. Win more state govt elections and you can change the laws. Until then, find a way to physically get your voters to the polls.

Many Dems or liberals think that the GOP will feel shameful about their anti-voting laws and change them. Spoiler alert: they're happy with the results and laughing at the whining.

Edited March 3, 2022 by Nice Guy Eddie

[wildcat09 29,355]

Dan Patrick can get fucked.

[Captainant 27,680]

Just now, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Texas Dems need to find a solution besides just whining about it. Win more state govt elections and you can change the laws. Until then, find a way to physically get your voters to the polls.

Many Dems or liberals think that the GOP will feel shameful about their anti-voting laws and change them. Spoiler alert: they're happy with the results and laughing at the whining.

Yeah, folks like @Johnny Sack and @slorch couldn't be more happy to see all of these votes getting thrown out. It's what they've been praying for

[tx 3 putt 76,988]

31 minutes ago, Lobo said:

Are there any states in America that run state-controlled elections?  I thought every single state did it at the county/parish level.  

I would think anything that resembles a statewide takeover of elections would be shot down in federal court.  

Which of course means Dan Patrick is gonna try it anyway.

 

they don't need a state wide take over, only the 10 biggest Texas counties 

[pyrohornIII 4,815]

This doesn't help Harris Co look competent.  Though what I am hearing from a lot of election offices is they are super frustrated and exhausted from trying to comply with all the new restrictions which seem to have new or additional interpretations daily.  But you wait, coming out of this will come even more restrictive laws and procedures, which will make it almost impossible for a county to not make any mistakes.   That will green light them to invalidate the larger county votes and throw out all the votes in those counties.  This proposal is coming.  It's the next in line.

 

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/06/ballots-harris-county-democratic-primary/

Uncounted mail-in ballots discovered in Harris County add uncertainty to two Democratic races

The 6,000 Democratic primary votes could be enough to impact the results in the races for attorney general and one state House seat.

[Biff Tannen 45,691]

2 hours ago, pyrohornIII said:

This doesn't help Harris Co look competent.  Though what I am hearing from a lot of election offices is they are super frustrated and exhausted from trying to comply with all the new restrictions which seem to have new or additional interpretations daily.  But you wait, coming out of this will come even more restrictive laws and procedures, which will make it almost impossible for a county to not make any mistakes.   That will green light them to invalidate the larger county votes and throw out all the votes in those counties.  This proposal is coming.  It's the next in line.

 

 

I mean, if they want to see millions in protest, that's a surefire way to do it.

[CooterBrown 18,014]

Are there any states in America that run state-controlled elections?  I thought every single state did it at the county/parish level.  
I would think anything that resembles a statewide takeover of elections would be shot down in federal court.  
Which of course means Dan Patrick is gonna try it anyway.

Don’t worry, the Supreme Court will stop it.

[tx 3 putt 76,988]

The next battle, early voting and drop boxes. I'm sure Texas Republicans are keeping a close eye on this one, getting rid of both of these would help them tremendously in the large Texas cities/counties (dem leaning). Zero fucks would be given

 

Arizona Republican Party seeks end to early voting in state

 

https://tucson.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/arizona-republican-party-seeks-end-to-early-voting-in-state/article_1950d05e-98ae-11ec-84b8-abddaf9d895b.html

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,515]

On 3/7/2022 at 3:28 PM, pyrohornIII said:

This doesn't help Harris Co look competent.  Though what I am hearing from a lot of election offices is they are super frustrated and exhausted from trying to comply with all the new restrictions which seem to have new or additional interpretations daily.  But you wait, coming out of this will come even more restrictive laws and procedures, which will make it almost impossible for a county to not make any mistakes.   That will green light them to invalidate the larger county votes and throw out all the votes in those counties.  This proposal is coming.  It's the next in line.

 

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/06/ballots-harris-county-democratic-primary/

Uncounted mail-in ballots discovered in Harris County add uncertainty to two Democratic races

The 6,000 Democratic primary votes could be enough to impact the results in the races for attorney general and one state House seat.

I hated the spin wheel machines in Harris county but the new paper version is nuts. Just to satisfy people that don’t trust machines. 

you basically vote on a touch screen, which is ok.  Then it prints your ballot out. Starting to lose me. Then you take the paper ballot to be scanned? Fully lost me.

Why not just drop the printed ballot into a box for random audits and recounts.

From what I can tell, the new voting process isn’t about ballot integrity, it’s about slowing down the voting. Add that mail-in voting is limited, Election Day in 2024 will take a voter several hours if not half a day. The democrat party needs to be find a federal judge to stop this madness.

[StassneyHorn 6,612]

This isn’t difficult 

[Guest Lobo]

4 minutes ago, StassneyHorn said:

This isn’t difficult 

But it is Texas.

[tx 3 putt 76,988]

Small turn out favors one party 

[tx 3 putt 76,988]

3 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I hated the spin wheel machines in Harris county but the new paper version is nuts. Just to satisfy people that don’t trust machines. 

you basically vote on a touch screen, which is ok.  Then it prints your ballot out. Starting to lose me. Then you take the paper ballot to be scanned? Fully lost me.

Why not just drop the printed ballot into a box for random audits and recounts.

From what I can tell, the new voting process isn’t about ballot integrity, it’s about slowing down the voting. Add that mail-in voting is limited, Election Day in 2024 will take a voter several hours if not half a day. The democrat party needs to be find a federal judge to stop this madness.

it bypasses hanging chad issues for sure. As long as they don’t fuck with early voting, I’m cool with it. It took me 5 mins to vote in the primary 

 

but I agree, it’s dumb. You must remember we’re dealing with the logic of the Texas Republican Party, not the sharpest tools in the shed 

Edited March 14, 2022 by tx 3 putt

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,515]

6 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

it bypasses hanging chad issues for sure. As long as they don’t fuck with early voting, I’m cool with it. It took me 5 mins to vote in the primary 

 

but I agree, it’s dumb. You must remember we’re dealing with the logic of the Texas Republican Party, not the sharpest tools in the shed 

Hanging chads were not an issue for Houston given that we didn't have paper ballots.

I assume that the new process records both the voting machine and scanned ballot and looks for discrepancies. But maybe I'm wrong and it only records the scanned ballot.  Primary voting wasn't difficult for me too, but we all know General elections especially for President are another beast altogether. 

Texas early voting or voting logistics have changed to some extent.

• Houston has to drop the 24-hour voting locations.
• You can't vote from your car.  It's odd that you're required to physically stand or be in a wheelchair to vote. Why can't you vote from your car? I thought this was a pretty convenient method for people especially those with mobility issues. 
• Hurdles have been added to anyone assisting someone in voting.

 

[tx 3 putt 76,988]

THe handicapped can vote from their car. They banned drive thru voting 

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,515]

55 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

THe handicapped can vote from their car. They banned drive thru voting 

What is the logic of banning drive-thru voting? Other than they don't like it.

Also are they requiring the handicapped to declare their handicap in order to vote from their car? That wouldn't seem legal. Or do you need a handicap placard which would seem like some type of poll tax.

[tx 3 putt 76,988]

21 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

What is the logic of banning drive-thru voting? Other than they don't like it.

Also are they requiring the handicapped to declare their handicap in order to vote from their car? That wouldn't seem legal. Or do you need a handicap placard which would seem like some type of poll tax.

I pulled  up for early voting (primary) and a person was parked in the handicapped spot, voting from her car. Forgot to look, but I’ll guess she has the plates too

the purpose of limiting drive thru voting was to limit the amount of people voting 

[Francisco 2.0 32,395]

Long.  Infuriating.  Sad.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/14/georgia-elections-fraud-purge/

 

Quote

ROME, Ga. — The interim election supervisor took a seat all the way to one side of the meeting room, her back against the wood-paneled wall, a position near the police officers and a few steps from an exit. Knowing what was about to happen, Vanessa Waddell raised her cellphone and began recording.

 

 

Quote

She zoomed in on the county commissioners who were about to name a new election board, sweeping away a system based on civic-minded volunteers and mutual trust and replacing it with one controlled by people claiming that fraud had corrupted the 2020 presidential election. She panned around the room and here were the people who’d been pushing to oust the old system, believing that the corruption had seeped all the way down to their very own election office, casting Waddell as a pawn in a conspiracy stretching to China. And now she noticed someone new, a young man in grease-stained boots, and she wondered whether he might be the one who’d sent her an email that had read in part: “We’ll make the Boston bombings look like child’s play at the poll sites in this county. … You’ve been warned. We will end you all.”

 

 

Quote

The meeting was called to order.

“Will you please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance?” said one of the commissioners, and as they got down to approving each of the new members of the Floyd County Board of Elections, one more incremental revolution was underway in America, revealing how the norms and machinery of democracy are being upended more than a year after Donald Trump tried to overturn the results of the presidential election.

 

Spoiler

In this case, the setting was a swath of northwest Georgia that was mostly White, mostly Republican and known for its love of guns, church and sending to Congress one of the most radicalized U.S. politicians in recent memory, Marjorie Taylor Greene. It was a place that until recently might have been dismissed as representing only the extremes of what politics could be in America. But now the extreme was becoming the norm, and the norm was what was happening under a patched-up rotunda in the wishfully named county seat of Rome.

Waddell, a 64-year-old Black woman who’d been working in elections for 27 years and whose norm had become fearing for her own safety, continued recording. She watched as the final board member was approved, and people cheered, and now she was shaking her head, imagining what could be coming next.

***

The election office where she’d worked since 1994 was one of more than 10,000 throughout the country, places that have often been forgotten except for on voting days and that are now being targeted for takeover by a Republican Party in thrall to false claims that the 2020 presidential race was stolen.

In Georgia, the effort is playing out through statewide legislation and, more surgically, through a patchwork of new county-specific laws. The measures are targeting rural counties that have long been majority-White, GOP strongholds where the people running elections have often come from Democratic and Black communities, a legacy of the civil rights struggle in the rural South. This status quo is being dismantled, with the common goal being tighter Republican control.

Since the 2020 election, the state’s GOP legislators have introduced 14 bills reorganizing county election boards that oversee election offices. So far, eight bills have been signed into law, resulting in a purge of longtime election board members, an exodus of election staffers and the installation of Republicans who have proposed measures to reduce poll locations and cancel Sunday voting.

In the case of Floyd County, the result was the abrupt dissolution of the nonpartisan election board that had been in place for decades. The county is in the geographic middle of northwest Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, an area long dominated by the Republican Party, written off by national Democrats and stretching from the Appalachian foothills along the Tennessee line to the outermost fringes of Atlanta’s exurban sprawl. In between are two-lane roads, farms and passed-down family compounds. Decayed mill towns and the world hub of carpet manufacturing. Billboards for accident attorneys and eternal salvation. Gun stores and gun clubs and, all over these days, flags flying — not just old, faded Trump flags but fresh ones hoisted from porches and pickups, creases still visible. Bright red signs for Greene, who is up for reelection, are again lining roadsides, along with those of other candidates who speak in her same alarmist tones about domestic enemies of America.

Within that landscape, Rome has always stood somewhat apart, with a Republican majority that has traditionally been more country club than gun club. It is home to the area’s largest concentration of Democrats, as well as old-money families, bankers, lawyers and doctors, including the brain surgeon who ran against Greene in the 2020 GOP primary and lost everywhere except Rome and surrounding Floyd County. Trump won the county twice with roughly 70 percent of the vote, and in the final days of his 2020 campaign, he had flown to Rome for one of his last rallies, drawing some 30,000 people to the municipal airport.

At the time, Waddell was not yet the interim election supervisor. She worked in voter registration, one of five employees in an office that was in the basement of the same old yellow brick building where the commissioners held public meetings on the top floor. It was down a dim stairwell with crumbling walls, at the end of a long hallway and behind a plexiglass reception window.

The office had always been thinly staffed and cramped, with plastic trays of voter registration cards piled on top of overfilled filing cabinets. It was overseen by an election board comprising citizens who’d answered a county ad for volunteers, filled out a form and might have been assigned to parks but got elections instead.

The operation was known for being slow on election nights and at times disorganized, problems that had been a matter of eye-rolling until 2020, when Trump began predicting a rigged election and his followers began seeing every mishap as suspicious.

Then came Election Day, and the statewide recount that followed, when Floyd County made national news for failing to tally roughly 2,600 votes. State election officials described the incident as “an amazing blunder,” the result of failing to upload a memory card, and called on the election supervisor to resign. Meanwhile, Trump capitalized on the mistake, tweeting out a video of workers carrying cardboard boxes and the words “FLOYD COUNTY, GEORGIA!” that was viewed more than 7 million times.

By December, the election supervisor was gone, and the nonpartisan board, still in power at that point, named Waddell to the job on an interim basis, with the immediate task of getting the county ready for a special election for U.S. Senate being held Jan. 5 amid a degenerating atmosphere.

There were fights between Republican and Democratic volunteers that got so bad that police had to escort ballots from drop boxes back to the office. The election staff had to field roughly 200 voter-eligibility challenges — none of which turned out to be valid — part of more than 364,000 filed across the state by an organization seeking to disqualify voters. There were harassing phone calls to the staff. The low point was the email Waddell received referring to the Boston bombings.

“This country was founded on righteous war, and if this is what is required of us to defend our very democracy, we will step forward,” it had continued. “… ANYONE at these poll sites is worthy of our wrath. Detonations will occur at every polling site set up in this county.”

Waddell had notified the police and carried on. On Election Day, the results were delivered on time, with no discrepancies.

The next day, she watched on her computer as thousands of people stormed the U.S. Capitol, including some from her part of Georgia, and she wondered what they might do once they were back. But a few months later, when the election board offered to make her interim title permanent, she figured the worst was over.

“I was excited,” she said. “I was glad to accept the position.”

She remembered feeling confident as she headed upstairs to the meeting room, expecting the county commissioners would keep tradition and approve her.

“That’s what I thought would happen,” she said.

***

Now it was seven months later, January 2022, and Waddell was in the basement office, still the interim supervisor, still not approved, beginning another day in the unsettling limbo that her life had become.

Piled on her desk were hundreds of requests for records that had been pouring into the office for months, handwritten ones from locals and formal ones from well-funded national groups such as True the Vote that sought to prove fraud. “Pursuant to Georgia Open Records Act, I would like to obtain …” they all began, each one seeming to Waddell more obsessive than the last.

“Numbered List of Voters voting in each precinct.” “All videotaping of all ballot drop boxes.” “All oaths from 2015 to current date for ALL election board members, chairs, chiefs and superintendents in previous or current positions.” “Prior approval of SOS modifications of scanners.”

Waddell opened another email.

“What now?” she said, recognizing the name of a frequent requester.

“They’re wanting copies of those tabulation tapes,” said her colleague Shirley Mosley, who’d worked in the office for four years.

“Tabulation tapes?” said Patricia Spurlin, who’d been there for two.

“And our poll books,” Waddell said. “For every precinct.”

Any thought they’d had that the atmosphere might calm down was gone. What amounted to a grass-roots uprising had gained momentum, become more organized and started coming after the election office.

New people had been showing up for the county commission meetings — not the old-guard Floyd County Republicans but the Greene wing that had all but taken over the party. They accused the election board of being corrupt and controlled by Democrats. They unearthed a private photo of the election board chairwoman holding a Trump mug in one hand and raising a middle finger in the other, blew it up poster-size and displayed it at a meeting as evidence that she was biased. They demanded a state review of the election office, and when nothing happened, one of them contacted the owner of a bus plastered with photos of Trump and the words, “Ready for Round 3 2021,” who drove it to Rome, parking outside the yellow brick building in a show of force. Increasingly, they zeroed in on Waddell.

“Any background checks done on Vanessa Waddell,” read an open-records request.

“Any and all available job applications for Vanessa Waddell,” read another.

She listened as a man claimed she had committed more than 150 violations related to the Jan. 5 Senate election. She sat there as others questioned whether her high school diploma was fake and whether her college degree was legitimate. A man said that he was “disgusted” by her handling of the election. A woman complained that she had been “staring” at her during meetings. “I began to be concerned about her intent,” the woman told the commissioners. “I asked two individuals to keep an eye on the situation.”

Then one morning, three people who’d been among the most vocal at the meetings showed up at the plexiglass window of the election office.

One of them began taking a cellphone video. The two others went down the hallway to a small room where the voting equipment was stored, wedged open the door, and took more videos as Spurlin, terrified, told them they had to leave. Waddell alerted county officials, who called the police, who showed up after the three were gone, took a report and told her there was nothing else they could do.

After that, the office in the basement had felt like a bunker. Spurlin began carrying pepper spray. Mosley bought a stun gun and began checking the hands of people who showed up in the plexiglass window. Waddell considered bringing her gun to work.

When she went upstairs for the meetings, she began sitting against the wall for security, thinking that she’d eventually hear some sort of reassurance from the county commissioners. But on a Tuesday in November, what she heard was that the governor had signed a bill remaking election administration in Floyd County. Instead of a three- member nonpartisan board, she would now have to answer to a new five-member board that was explicitly partisan — two Democrats and three Republicans, including one she recognized as a leading critic of her office and two others she worried held the same views.

By the end of the month, the old election board was dissolved. Two weeks after that, the county commission unanimously approved the new board. And after that, county officials told Waddell with little explanation that she would be reverting to her old job in voter registration. It was unclear whether anyone in the election office would have jobs once the new board was sworn in, because they’d all have to reapply. The word they kept hearing was “gutted.”

“That’s what somebody upstairs said,” Mosley was saying. “This whole office needs to be gutted.”

She was packing up “Vote Here” signs and old coffeepots because, on top of everything else, they’d been told they were moving to a new office in a corner of the county health department on the edge of town, a space that as far as they could tell was smaller than where they were now.

“You can stack those over here,” Spurlin said.

Waddell hunched over her desk, glasses on her nose, trying to focus on preparing for the upcoming primaries, even though that wasn’t really her job anymore. Someone needed to order paper for the ballots. Someone needed to sort through the redistricting changes. She started writing out a list of affected addresses.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said to herself, and soon the hour got late, and it was around this time that a woman showed up in a small parking lot behind the building, at the end of which stood a stained dumpster.

The woman climbed inside. In the darkness of a cold night, she gathered armfuls of shredded paper into a garbage bag, then climbed out, explaining later that she had heard the election office was destroying documents and that she was determined to piece them all together again.

Inside the building, Waddell got a new email. It was from one of the people who’d barged into the office, a man who had filed more open-records requests than anyone else and whose persistence had worried her so much that she had tried unsuccessfully to get a restraining order against him.

“There are no images on Scanner 530 and 550,” his latest email read.

“What the hell is he talking about?” she said. “My God.”

***

He was Mark Swanson, 55, a bank consultant, an evangelical Christian, a member of the Optimist Club and a low-key Trump supporter until the night of the 2020 election, when he watched a Fox News announcer call Arizona for Joe Biden relatively early.

“That was the first thing that made me think, ‘Hmmm,’” he said, describing himself as someone who was “always interested in what’s going on in the world, who loves to learn, loves to read,” but who was not an activist until that moment. Sitting at his kitchen table one afternoon, he began describing how it all snowballed from there.

How his Facebook feed began filling with stories of alleged fraud from Arizona to Georgia and, one day, his hometown election office. How he’d come to see not human error but what he called “strategic incompetence.” How he’d learned how to file open-records requests and had obtained hundreds of documents that he was posting to his Facebook page with red underlines and stars and headings such as “The Recruiter” and “The End Run.” How he’d come to see Democrats and Republicans as partners in a global network of corruption that was intertwined with China and whose end game was world domination. How he had recently come up with a name for those involved.

“STABs,” he said. “Subversive, tyrannical, authoritarian bureaucrats.”

Former vice president Mike Pence was a probably a STAB, he said. The governor: STAB. The secretary of state: STAB. The county commissioners: STABs. Waddell: “I don’t know that she’s a STAB — I think she’s a pawn, definitely,” said Swanson, who saw himself as part of “a revolution of ordinary people.”

“I believe God put me on Earth to do this,” he said. “Every time I want to give up, God shines a light on one more piece of information.”

He had been showing up to the county commission meetings, becoming a leading critic of the election office. He met with the county commissioners. He met with state legislators. And now his closest ally — whom he referred to as his “investigative partner” — was on the new election board.

This was Pam Peters, a retired music teacher who shared Swanson’s conviction that “there was cheating at many levels, at several places,” during the election and that “you’ve got to get off the couch and do something.”

She had led the local Republican Party’s effort to recruit and train dozens of new poll watchers for the 2020 election and helped Swanson in his efforts to expose corruption after that. When the party’s executive committee asked her to be on the election board, she decided, “I am called to do this,” and accepted. What she wanted to do now, she said, was “a review” of the election office. She wanted to “go through files and clean house,” she said. She wanted a new election supervisor, who could hire new staffers.

“There’s so much to do, it’s overwhelming,” she said.

The second new Republican on the board was Gary Stamper, a mechanical engineer who carried a fresh notebook with questions he wanted answered about the 2020 vote. He wanted to know whether it was true that there had been mail-in ballots that were never folded, which was supposedly a sign of fraud. He wanted to know whether voting equipment could be rigged to deliver a predetermined result.

“That is part of why I’m here,” he said. “For my little quiet corner of northwest Georgia, can we put together a process that is beyond reproach?”

Completing the Republican majority was the chairman, Jerry Lee, a retired banker who said that although Biden won, he had concerns about fraud and even bigger concerns that Republicans were losing confidence in elections at the very moment he believed the country was sliding toward “government control over every aspect of our lives.”

“My focus is on the future — we want to make sure we give the public a greater level of confidence and hope,” he said. “We’re in a fight for the soul of America.”

Meanwhile, a few days after the new board was appointed, one of its two Democrats made his way down into basement of the county building, where the packing was continuing.

“Hi,” said Ralph Davis, introducing himself to Spurlin and Mosley.

Waddell came out of her office. The two other longtime office employees, Cliff Cabell and Lindsey Mims, walked over, and as they all stood there, Davis realized that he was one of the few county officials to come down there in months.

He asked Waddell about a measure the school district wanted to put on the ballot.

“Somebody in this office is going to have to be the go-between on that,” she began, explaining that she’d been told she was reverting to her old job. “See, they really don’t have a supervisor in this office anymore.”

“Oh,” Davis said.

“Somebody’s got to get all this up and running. We’ve got redistricting coming up. We’ve got primaries coming up. We’ve got moving coming up,” she continued, explaining all the actual work that was falling behind because of the time spent on fraud allegations — and deciding to say nothing about the constant psychological pressure that was taking a toll on all of them.

“When is the move supposed to happen?” Davis said, sensing the frustration.

“Nobody’s told us yet,” Waddell said.

“There’s no communication,” said Cabell. “It’s a bad scene, sir.”

“They want to get rid of all of us,” Spurlin said.

“They want to gut the whole system,” said Cabell.

“They’re saying we’re a bunch of crooks,” said Mosley.

“We are concerned about the gutting part,” Spurlin said again. “Then you’ve got people giving Vanessa such a hard time.”

“Well, let me go. I have to be in this thing without emotion,” Davis said. “If I get too emotional, I’ll say something I shouldn’t say.”

After he left, Spurlin and Mosley went back to updating voter registrations, and when 5 p.m. came, Cabell said to Spurlin, “You ready?” and walked her to her car as he had been doing for the past year. Mosley took off her county ID, as she had been doing since a document with her name on it appeared on someone’s Facebook page. Alone now, Waddell locked the doors.

She checked an email account used by election supervisors and staffer across the state, where almost every day there was an announcement about some employee leaving.

She checked the county’s website and saw that the supervisor job had been posted. She noticed that the position was now being categorized as “at will,” meaning whoever took the job could be more easily fired. She thought about whether she should apply or join the exodus.

***

She drove home, past the Trump flags and the Greene signs and the fresh “Let’s go Brandon” flag on the way to her house on the edge of Rome, a modest split-level that was the reward for a life of working for the county.

She tried to shore up her mind, which she did these days by imagining what she’d say to the people criticizing her if she weren’t so cautious.

To Swanson: “Why are you so obsessed with me? What is wrong with you?” Or the woman who accused her of staring at her during the meetings: “I am not a slave. Every time you look at me, I’m not supposed to look down.” Or the people who questioned her education: “I worked my butt off day and night to do my schooling. It was one of my goals to have a degree before I was 50, and lo and behold I did it. I was proud to do it.” Or the county commissioners and anyone else wondering how it had felt to have to sit there and listen to what was being said about her week after week: “It felt like a public lynching,” she imagined telling them.

She got home, where she kept her gun nearby wherever she was, moving it from room to room as she went about her evenings. Her best friend came over for a while, the kind of friend who said what Waddell would not about why she thought all of this was happening: “It’s blatant racism. They can say whatever they want.”

They talked about a recent incident at a local high school, in which a group of White students paraded a Confederate flag on campus. A group of Black, Latino and White students had planned a protest in response, but the principal forbade the students from passing out fliers and called police to the school to block it.

“It was always there, but it wasn’t out in the open like it is now,” Waddell said, thinking about the hang-up calls to her office, the email threatening detonations at the polls, the angry and escalating rhetoric. “I keep going back and thinking about years ago when that young man went into that church and had Bible study with those people and then killed them,” she said, referring to the White man who killed nine Black parishioners in 2015 at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. “That’s not rational. And these people are up there berating me, telling lies about me, challenging my integrity, and they don’t even know me? That’s not rational. And you don’t know what people might do when they’re not rational.”

At work the next day, she headed upstairs for the first meeting of the new Floyd County Board of Elections. They took their seats along the wooden platform under the patched-up rotunda, and instead of sitting against the wall, she sat alongside them as a staff representative, a dog-eared copy of the Georgia Election Code on the desk in front of her. She scanned the faces in the audience.

The woman who’d climbed into the dumpster was there. So was the young man in the grease-stained boots, holding in his lap a stack of papers, including one with rows of tiny numbers that were allegedly the IP addresses of voting machines that had been hacked, along with the precise number of votes supposedly flipped from Trump to Biden. Swanson took his seat, and as he settled in, his new ally on the board texted him. “We’ve got A LOT to do and we didn’t caucus,” Pam Peters wrote, and Swanson, already convinced the new board was being controlled by STABs, wrote back, “And so it begins again.” The head of the Floyd County Republican Party was there as well, and so were a couple of Democrats, one of whom whispered “This is a disaster” as the meeting was called to order.

“All right. We will move at a steady pace,” said the chairman, and soon the county manager was giving a report on the new office, noting that it was going to have $60,000 worth of new surveillance cameras.

“If you’re in the election areas, you’re going to be on camera, recorded,” he said. “Any issues taking place, they will be caught on a recording. We are taking it very seriously. There will be windows in every single room, secure, but totally visible to what’s going on.”

“So that the public can see,” the chairman said, then moving on to the next item, the search for the new election supervisor, not saying a word about Waddell, who kept her eyes down, taking notes.

***

That was what things had become, but Waddell could remember how all of it used to be, all the way back to the first Election Day she’d ever worked, a November Tuesday in Rome. She recalled that it was not cold but cool. She remembered how she woke before dawn, dressed comfortably for the long day ahead and hustled to the office before 6 a.m. It was in the county courthouse then, and she arrived to the smell of fresh coffee and the sight of poll workers buzzing around, picking up supplies and dropping off muffins for the staff. She remembered the supervisor, a woman who dressed in a suit and heels and told them, “I don’t care what you do outside this office, but when you’re here, you’re nonpartisan.” She remembered settling into her desk and the phone starting to ring as soon as the polls opened. Someone needed more pencils. Someone needed a form. Someone had forgotten their precinct. Every detail felt so important, so momentous, an urgency rising into the evening as the polls closed and the precinct captains returned to the office with rubber-banded stacks of ballots in zip-tied bags.

It was Waddell who helped receive them. She remembered carrying the bags with ceremony into the gathering crowd in an adjacent room where all the candidates and supporters were milling around and how they followed her over to the tallying machine. She remembered pulling the rubber bands off the stacks. She remembered the distinct weight of a ballot. She remembered feeding each one into the humming machine, and the people watching, and then cheering as the results were delivered, and that was how it was year after year, even as the ritual moved into the county commission building. It had always been the same: Months of unseen preparation followed by the thrill of dawn on another Election Day. And what became Waddell’s favorite part — the rush of walking into the crowd gathered under the rotunda.

“It was something,” she recalled. “It was exciting. People clapping and hollering. Everybody in there just felt like they belonged, regardless of what party. It was just a group of people. It was, ‘This is us,’ you know? It was a proud time.”

Twenty-seven years later, the day arrived for her interview with the new election board. She got to work early. It was quiet in the office, and just before 9 a.m., she logged on to her computer for a video interview, prepared to make the case for why she should be the election supervisor. She told herself to keep her answers to the point. She clicked into the meeting, and the five faces of the new board members filled her screen.

“Can you hear me?” Waddell said, and soon they began.

The chairman, Jerry Lee, asked why she wanted the job.

“Elections is what I do,” she said. “This is not just a hobby for me. This is my livelihood. I feel like this is what I was born to do.”

He asked her to describe her experience training large numbers of people, and Waddell told him about training 175 poll workers at a time, thousands over the years.

He asked her about handling “complex laws,” and she said she relied on the secretary of state for that. He asked about time management. He asked about computer skills.

“I’m up to date on all my computer skills,” she said, and after seven questions and 15 minutes, the chairman asked whether the board had anything else.

“I do have one question,” said Ralph Davis. “Vanessa, what has been your biggest challenge since you’ve been here?”

“Well, I think one of my biggest challenges was this 2020 election,” she said, pausing for a moment before deciding to go on.

“All of the issues and stuff that came up through that, and trying to work through a pandemic,” she said, stopping herself again, then deciding to continue.

“Working through, after all of that, all of the ORRs following that,” she said, referring to the hundreds of open-records requests. “And all of the allegations about this office during that time frame.” Her voice was beginning to break. “That can really take a toll on a person, but through it all, knowing who’s got your back, knowing God’s got your back no matter —”

She paused. “Whew,” she said. “Excuse me.”

“Sorry,” Davis said. “I didn’t mean to —”

“Trials and tribulations that you have to go through,” she said over him, her voice shaking. “Knowing no matter what, you can still stand tall in spite of it all. That’s my biggest challenge.”

“Thank you, Vanessa,” Davis said.

“Thank you,” said the chairman. “Any other questions? Anyone?”

There was nothing else.

In a few days, the board would meet and decide not to offer Waddell the job. Instead, it would announce its choice was a 58-year-old White man from a neighboring county, a city manager whose background was in accounting, was not certified in elections and had never worked as an election supervisor. For now, though, the chairman thanked Waddell again.

“I hope this thing works,” he said, and Waddell was not certain what he meant by that, whether he was referring to her getting hired, or the new election board, or the next election, or democracy itself, but she was certain of her answer.

“Me too,” she said.

 

 

[Satchel 6,938]

21 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Long.  Infuriating.  Sad.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/14/georgia-elections-fraud-purge/

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

In this case, the setting was a swath of northwest Georgia that was mostly White, mostly Republican and known for its love of guns, church and sending to Congress one of the most radicalized U.S. politicians in recent memory, Marjorie Taylor Greene. It was a place that until recently might have been dismissed as representing only the extremes of what politics could be in America. But now the extreme was becoming the norm, and the norm was what was happening under a patched-up rotunda in the wishfully named county seat of Rome.

Waddell, a 64-year-old Black woman who’d been working in elections for 27 years and whose norm had become fearing for her own safety, continued recording. She watched as the final board member was approved, and people cheered, and now she was shaking her head, imagining what could be coming next.

***

The election office where she’d worked since 1994 was one of more than 10,000 throughout the country, places that have often been forgotten except for on voting days and that are now being targeted for takeover by a Republican Party in thrall to false claims that the 2020 presidential race was stolen.

In Georgia, the effort is playing out through statewide legislation and, more surgically, through a patchwork of new county-specific laws. The measures are targeting rural counties that have long been majority-White, GOP strongholds where the people running elections have often come from Democratic and Black communities, a legacy of the civil rights struggle in the rural South. This status quo is being dismantled, with the common goal being tighter Republican control.

Since the 2020 election, the state’s GOP legislators have introduced 14 bills reorganizing county election boards that oversee election offices. So far, eight bills have been signed into law, resulting in a purge of longtime election board members, an exodus of election staffers and the installation of Republicans who have proposed measures to reduce poll locations and cancel Sunday voting.

In the case of Floyd County, the result was the abrupt dissolution of the nonpartisan election board that had been in place for decades. The county is in the geographic middle of northwest Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, an area long dominated by the Republican Party, written off by national Democrats and stretching from the Appalachian foothills along the Tennessee line to the outermost fringes of Atlanta’s exurban sprawl. In between are two-lane roads, farms and passed-down family compounds. Decayed mill towns and the world hub of carpet manufacturing. Billboards for accident attorneys and eternal salvation. Gun stores and gun clubs and, all over these days, flags flying — not just old, faded Trump flags but fresh ones hoisted from porches and pickups, creases still visible. Bright red signs for Greene, who is up for reelection, are again lining roadsides, along with those of other candidates who speak in her same alarmist tones about domestic enemies of America.

Within that landscape, Rome has always stood somewhat apart, with a Republican majority that has traditionally been more country club than gun club. It is home to the area’s largest concentration of Democrats, as well as old-money families, bankers, lawyers and doctors, including the brain surgeon who ran against Greene in the 2020 GOP primary and lost everywhere except Rome and surrounding Floyd County. Trump won the county twice with roughly 70 percent of the vote, and in the final days of his 2020 campaign, he had flown to Rome for one of his last rallies, drawing some 30,000 people to the municipal airport.

At the time, Waddell was not yet the interim election supervisor. She worked in voter registration, one of five employees in an office that was in the basement of the same old yellow brick building where the commissioners held public meetings on the top floor. It was down a dim stairwell with crumbling walls, at the end of a long hallway and behind a plexiglass reception window.

The office had always been thinly staffed and cramped, with plastic trays of voter registration cards piled on top of overfilled filing cabinets. It was overseen by an election board comprising citizens who’d answered a county ad for volunteers, filled out a form and might have been assigned to parks but got elections instead.

The operation was known for being slow on election nights and at times disorganized, problems that had been a matter of eye-rolling until 2020, when Trump began predicting a rigged election and his followers began seeing every mishap as suspicious.

Then came Election Day, and the statewide recount that followed, when Floyd County made national news for failing to tally roughly 2,600 votes. State election officials described the incident as “an amazing blunder,” the result of failing to upload a memory card, and called on the election supervisor to resign. Meanwhile, Trump capitalized on the mistake, tweeting out a video of workers carrying cardboard boxes and the words “FLOYD COUNTY, GEORGIA!” that was viewed more than 7 million times.

By December, the election supervisor was gone, and the nonpartisan board, still in power at that point, named Waddell to the job on an interim basis, with the immediate task of getting the county ready for a special election for U.S. Senate being held Jan. 5 amid a degenerating atmosphere.

There were fights between Republican and Democratic volunteers that got so bad that police had to escort ballots from drop boxes back to the office. The election staff had to field roughly 200 voter-eligibility challenges — none of which turned out to be valid — part of more than 364,000 filed across the state by an organization seeking to disqualify voters. There were harassing phone calls to the staff. The low point was the email Waddell received referring to the Boston bombings.

“This country was founded on righteous war, and if this is what is required of us to defend our very democracy, we will step forward,” it had continued. “… ANYONE at these poll sites is worthy of our wrath. Detonations will occur at every polling site set up in this county.”

Waddell had notified the police and carried on. On Election Day, the results were delivered on time, with no discrepancies.

The next day, she watched on her computer as thousands of people stormed the U.S. Capitol, including some from her part of Georgia, and she wondered what they might do once they were back. But a few months later, when the election board offered to make her interim title permanent, she figured the worst was over.

“I was excited,” she said. “I was glad to accept the position.”

She remembered feeling confident as she headed upstairs to the meeting room, expecting the county commissioners would keep tradition and approve her.

“That’s what I thought would happen,” she said.

***

Now it was seven months later, January 2022, and Waddell was in the basement office, still the interim supervisor, still not approved, beginning another day in the unsettling limbo that her life had become.

Piled on her desk were hundreds of requests for records that had been pouring into the office for months, handwritten ones from locals and formal ones from well-funded national groups such as True the Vote that sought to prove fraud. “Pursuant to Georgia Open Records Act, I would like to obtain …” they all began, each one seeming to Waddell more obsessive than the last.

“Numbered List of Voters voting in each precinct.” “All videotaping of all ballot drop boxes.” “All oaths from 2015 to current date for ALL election board members, chairs, chiefs and superintendents in previous or current positions.” “Prior approval of SOS modifications of scanners.”

Waddell opened another email.

“What now?” she said, recognizing the name of a frequent requester.

“They’re wanting copies of those tabulation tapes,” said her colleague Shirley Mosley, who’d worked in the office for four years.

“Tabulation tapes?” said Patricia Spurlin, who’d been there for two.

“And our poll books,” Waddell said. “For every precinct.”

Any thought they’d had that the atmosphere might calm down was gone. What amounted to a grass-roots uprising had gained momentum, become more organized and started coming after the election office.

New people had been showing up for the county commission meetings — not the old-guard Floyd County Republicans but the Greene wing that had all but taken over the party. They accused the election board of being corrupt and controlled by Democrats. They unearthed a private photo of the election board chairwoman holding a Trump mug in one hand and raising a middle finger in the other, blew it up poster-size and displayed it at a meeting as evidence that she was biased. They demanded a state review of the election office, and when nothing happened, one of them contacted the owner of a bus plastered with photos of Trump and the words, “Ready for Round 3 2021,” who drove it to Rome, parking outside the yellow brick building in a show of force. Increasingly, they zeroed in on Waddell.

“Any background checks done on Vanessa Waddell,” read an open-records request.

“Any and all available job applications for Vanessa Waddell,” read another.

She listened as a man claimed she had committed more than 150 violations related to the Jan. 5 Senate election. She sat there as others questioned whether her high school diploma was fake and whether her college degree was legitimate. A man said that he was “disgusted” by her handling of the election. A woman complained that she had been “staring” at her during meetings. “I began to be concerned about her intent,” the woman told the commissioners. “I asked two individuals to keep an eye on the situation.”

Then one morning, three people who’d been among the most vocal at the meetings showed up at the plexiglass window of the election office.

One of them began taking a cellphone video. The two others went down the hallway to a small room where the voting equipment was stored, wedged open the door, and took more videos as Spurlin, terrified, told them they had to leave. Waddell alerted county officials, who called the police, who showed up after the three were gone, took a report and told her there was nothing else they could do.

After that, the office in the basement had felt like a bunker. Spurlin began carrying pepper spray. Mosley bought a stun gun and began checking the hands of people who showed up in the plexiglass window. Waddell considered bringing her gun to work.

When she went upstairs for the meetings, she began sitting against the wall for security, thinking that she’d eventually hear some sort of reassurance from the county commissioners. But on a Tuesday in November, what she heard was that the governor had signed a bill remaking election administration in Floyd County. Instead of a three- member nonpartisan board, she would now have to answer to a new five-member board that was explicitly partisan — two Democrats and three Republicans, including one she recognized as a leading critic of her office and two others she worried held the same views.

By the end of the month, the old election board was dissolved. Two weeks after that, the county commission unanimously approved the new board. And after that, county officials told Waddell with little explanation that she would be reverting to her old job in voter registration. It was unclear whether anyone in the election office would have jobs once the new board was sworn in, because they’d all have to reapply. The word they kept hearing was “gutted.”

“That’s what somebody upstairs said,” Mosley was saying. “This whole office needs to be gutted.”

She was packing up “Vote Here” signs and old coffeepots because, on top of everything else, they’d been told they were moving to a new office in a corner of the county health department on the edge of town, a space that as far as they could tell was smaller than where they were now.

“You can stack those over here,” Spurlin said.

Waddell hunched over her desk, glasses on her nose, trying to focus on preparing for the upcoming primaries, even though that wasn’t really her job anymore. Someone needed to order paper for the ballots. Someone needed to sort through the redistricting changes. She started writing out a list of affected addresses.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said to herself, and soon the hour got late, and it was around this time that a woman showed up in a small parking lot behind the building, at the end of which stood a stained dumpster.

The woman climbed inside. In the darkness of a cold night, she gathered armfuls of shredded paper into a garbage bag, then climbed out, explaining later that she had heard the election office was destroying documents and that she was determined to piece them all together again.

Inside the building, Waddell got a new email. It was from one of the people who’d barged into the office, a man who had filed more open-records requests than anyone else and whose persistence had worried her so much that she had tried unsuccessfully to get a restraining order against him.

“There are no images on Scanner 530 and 550,” his latest email read.

“What the hell is he talking about?” she said. “My God.”

***

He was Mark Swanson, 55, a bank consultant, an evangelical Christian, a member of the Optimist Club and a low-key Trump supporter until the night of the 2020 election, when he watched a Fox News announcer call Arizona for Joe Biden relatively early.

“That was the first thing that made me think, ‘Hmmm,’” he said, describing himself as someone who was “always interested in what’s going on in the world, who loves to learn, loves to read,” but who was not an activist until that moment. Sitting at his kitchen table one afternoon, he began describing how it all snowballed from there.

How his Facebook feed began filling with stories of alleged fraud from Arizona to Georgia and, one day, his hometown election office. How he’d come to see not human error but what he called “strategic incompetence.” How he’d learned how to file open-records requests and had obtained hundreds of documents that he was posting to his Facebook page with red underlines and stars and headings such as “The Recruiter” and “The End Run.” How he’d come to see Democrats and Republicans as partners in a global network of corruption that was intertwined with China and whose end game was world domination. How he had recently come up with a name for those involved.

“STABs,” he said. “Subversive, tyrannical, authoritarian bureaucrats.”

Former vice president Mike Pence was a probably a STAB, he said. The governor: STAB. The secretary of state: STAB. The county commissioners: STABs. Waddell: “I don’t know that she’s a STAB — I think she’s a pawn, definitely,” said Swanson, who saw himself as part of “a revolution of ordinary people.”

“I believe God put me on Earth to do this,” he said. “Every time I want to give up, God shines a light on one more piece of information.”

He had been showing up to the county commission meetings, becoming a leading critic of the election office. He met with the county commissioners. He met with state legislators. And now his closest ally — whom he referred to as his “investigative partner” — was on the new election board.

This was Pam Peters, a retired music teacher who shared Swanson’s conviction that “there was cheating at many levels, at several places,” during the election and that “you’ve got to get off the couch and do something.”

She had led the local Republican Party’s effort to recruit and train dozens of new poll watchers for the 2020 election and helped Swanson in his efforts to expose corruption after that. When the party’s executive committee asked her to be on the election board, she decided, “I am called to do this,” and accepted. What she wanted to do now, she said, was “a review” of the election office. She wanted to “go through files and clean house,” she said. She wanted a new election supervisor, who could hire new staffers.

“There’s so much to do, it’s overwhelming,” she said.

The second new Republican on the board was Gary Stamper, a mechanical engineer who carried a fresh notebook with questions he wanted answered about the 2020 vote. He wanted to know whether it was true that there had been mail-in ballots that were never folded, which was supposedly a sign of fraud. He wanted to know whether voting equipment could be rigged to deliver a predetermined result.

“That is part of why I’m here,” he said. “For my little quiet corner of northwest Georgia, can we put together a process that is beyond reproach?”

Completing the Republican majority was the chairman, Jerry Lee, a retired banker who said that although Biden won, he had concerns about fraud and even bigger concerns that Republicans were losing confidence in elections at the very moment he believed the country was sliding toward “government control over every aspect of our lives.”

“My focus is on the future — we want to make sure we give the public a greater level of confidence and hope,” he said. “We’re in a fight for the soul of America.”

Meanwhile, a few days after the new board was appointed, one of its two Democrats made his way down into basement of the county building, where the packing was continuing.

“Hi,” said Ralph Davis, introducing himself to Spurlin and Mosley.

Waddell came out of her office. The two other longtime office employees, Cliff Cabell and Lindsey Mims, walked over, and as they all stood there, Davis realized that he was one of the few county officials to come down there in months.

He asked Waddell about a measure the school district wanted to put on the ballot.

“Somebody in this office is going to have to be the go-between on that,” she began, explaining that she’d been told she was reverting to her old job. “See, they really don’t have a supervisor in this office anymore.”

“Oh,” Davis said.

“Somebody’s got to get all this up and running. We’ve got redistricting coming up. We’ve got primaries coming up. We’ve got moving coming up,” she continued, explaining all the actual work that was falling behind because of the time spent on fraud allegations — and deciding to say nothing about the constant psychological pressure that was taking a toll on all of them.

“When is the move supposed to happen?” Davis said, sensing the frustration.

“Nobody’s told us yet,” Waddell said.

“There’s no communication,” said Cabell. “It’s a bad scene, sir.”

“They want to get rid of all of us,” Spurlin said.

“They want to gut the whole system,” said Cabell.

“They’re saying we’re a bunch of crooks,” said Mosley.

“We are concerned about the gutting part,” Spurlin said again. “Then you’ve got people giving Vanessa such a hard time.”

“Well, let me go. I have to be in this thing without emotion,” Davis said. “If I get too emotional, I’ll say something I shouldn’t say.”

After he left, Spurlin and Mosley went back to updating voter registrations, and when 5 p.m. came, Cabell said to Spurlin, “You ready?” and walked her to her car as he had been doing for the past year. Mosley took off her county ID, as she had been doing since a document with her name on it appeared on someone’s Facebook page. Alone now, Waddell locked the doors.

She checked an email account used by election supervisors and staffer across the state, where almost every day there was an announcement about some employee leaving.

She checked the county’s website and saw that the supervisor job had been posted. She noticed that the position was now being categorized as “at will,” meaning whoever took the job could be more easily fired. She thought about whether she should apply or join the exodus.

***

She drove home, past the Trump flags and the Greene signs and the fresh “Let’s go Brandon” flag on the way to her house on the edge of Rome, a modest split-level that was the reward for a life of working for the county.

She tried to shore up her mind, which she did these days by imagining what she’d say to the people criticizing her if she weren’t so cautious.

To Swanson: “Why are you so obsessed with me? What is wrong with you?” Or the woman who accused her of staring at her during the meetings: “I am not a slave. Every time you look at me, I’m not supposed to look down.” Or the people who questioned her education: “I worked my butt off day and night to do my schooling. It was one of my goals to have a degree before I was 50, and lo and behold I did it. I was proud to do it.” Or the county commissioners and anyone else wondering how it had felt to have to sit there and listen to what was being said about her week after week: “It felt like a public lynching,” she imagined telling them.

She got home, where she kept her gun nearby wherever she was, moving it from room to room as she went about her evenings. Her best friend came over for a while, the kind of friend who said what Waddell would not about why she thought all of this was happening: “It’s blatant racism. They can say whatever they want.”

They talked about a recent incident at a local high school, in which a group of White students paraded a Confederate flag on campus. A group of Black, Latino and White students had planned a protest in response, but the principal forbade the students from passing out fliers and called police to the school to block it.

“It was always there, but it wasn’t out in the open like it is now,” Waddell said, thinking about the hang-up calls to her office, the email threatening detonations at the polls, the angry and escalating rhetoric. “I keep going back and thinking about years ago when that young man went into that church and had Bible study with those people and then killed them,” she said, referring to the White man who killed nine Black parishioners in 2015 at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. “That’s not rational. And these people are up there berating me, telling lies about me, challenging my integrity, and they don’t even know me? That’s not rational. And you don’t know what people might do when they’re not rational.”

At work the next day, she headed upstairs for the first meeting of the new Floyd County Board of Elections. They took their seats along the wooden platform under the patched-up rotunda, and instead of sitting against the wall, she sat alongside them as a staff representative, a dog-eared copy of the Georgia Election Code on the desk in front of her. She scanned the faces in the audience.

The woman who’d climbed into the dumpster was there. So was the young man in the grease-stained boots, holding in his lap a stack of papers, including one with rows of tiny numbers that were allegedly the IP addresses of voting machines that had been hacked, along with the precise number of votes supposedly flipped from Trump to Biden. Swanson took his seat, and as he settled in, his new ally on the board texted him. “We’ve got A LOT to do and we didn’t caucus,” Pam Peters wrote, and Swanson, already convinced the new board was being controlled by STABs, wrote back, “And so it begins again.” The head of the Floyd County Republican Party was there as well, and so were a couple of Democrats, one of whom whispered “This is a disaster” as the meeting was called to order.

“All right. We will move at a steady pace,” said the chairman, and soon the county manager was giving a report on the new office, noting that it was going to have $60,000 worth of new surveillance cameras.

“If you’re in the election areas, you’re going to be on camera, recorded,” he said. “Any issues taking place, they will be caught on a recording. We are taking it very seriously. There will be windows in every single room, secure, but totally visible to what’s going on.”

“So that the public can see,” the chairman said, then moving on to the next item, the search for the new election supervisor, not saying a word about Waddell, who kept her eyes down, taking notes.

***

That was what things had become, but Waddell could remember how all of it used to be, all the way back to the first Election Day she’d ever worked, a November Tuesday in Rome. She recalled that it was not cold but cool. She remembered how she woke before dawn, dressed comfortably for the long day ahead and hustled to the office before 6 a.m. It was in the county courthouse then, and she arrived to the smell of fresh coffee and the sight of poll workers buzzing around, picking up supplies and dropping off muffins for the staff. She remembered the supervisor, a woman who dressed in a suit and heels and told them, “I don’t care what you do outside this office, but when you’re here, you’re nonpartisan.” She remembered settling into her desk and the phone starting to ring as soon as the polls opened. Someone needed more pencils. Someone needed a form. Someone had forgotten their precinct. Every detail felt so important, so momentous, an urgency rising into the evening as the polls closed and the precinct captains returned to the office with rubber-banded stacks of ballots in zip-tied bags.

It was Waddell who helped receive them. She remembered carrying the bags with ceremony into the gathering crowd in an adjacent room where all the candidates and supporters were milling around and how they followed her over to the tallying machine. She remembered pulling the rubber bands off the stacks. She remembered the distinct weight of a ballot. She remembered feeding each one into the humming machine, and the people watching, and then cheering as the results were delivered, and that was how it was year after year, even as the ritual moved into the county commission building. It had always been the same: Months of unseen preparation followed by the thrill of dawn on another Election Day. And what became Waddell’s favorite part — the rush of walking into the crowd gathered under the rotunda.

“It was something,” she recalled. “It was exciting. People clapping and hollering. Everybody in there just felt like they belonged, regardless of what party. It was just a group of people. It was, ‘This is us,’ you know? It was a proud time.”

Twenty-seven years later, the day arrived for her interview with the new election board. She got to work early. It was quiet in the office, and just before 9 a.m., she logged on to her computer for a video interview, prepared to make the case for why she should be the election supervisor. She told herself to keep her answers to the point. She clicked into the meeting, and the five faces of the new board members filled her screen.

“Can you hear me?” Waddell said, and soon they began.

The chairman, Jerry Lee, asked why she wanted the job.

“Elections is what I do,” she said. “This is not just a hobby for me. This is my livelihood. I feel like this is what I was born to do.”

He asked her to describe her experience training large numbers of people, and Waddell told him about training 175 poll workers at a time, thousands over the years.

He asked her about handling “complex laws,” and she said she relied on the secretary of state for that. He asked about time management. He asked about computer skills.

“I’m up to date on all my computer skills,” she said, and after seven questions and 15 minutes, the chairman asked whether the board had anything else.

“I do have one question,” said Ralph Davis. “Vanessa, what has been your biggest challenge since you’ve been here?”

“Well, I think one of my biggest challenges was this 2020 election,” she said, pausing for a moment before deciding to go on.

“All of the issues and stuff that came up through that, and trying to work through a pandemic,” she said, stopping herself again, then deciding to continue.

“Working through, after all of that, all of the ORRs following that,” she said, referring to the hundreds of open-records requests. “And all of the allegations about this office during that time frame.” Her voice was beginning to break. “That can really take a toll on a person, but through it all, knowing who’s got your back, knowing God’s got your back no matter —”

She paused. “Whew,” she said. “Excuse me.”

“Sorry,” Davis said. “I didn’t mean to —”

“Trials and tribulations that you have to go through,” she said over him, her voice shaking. “Knowing no matter what, you can still stand tall in spite of it all. That’s my biggest challenge.”

“Thank you, Vanessa,” Davis said.

“Thank you,” said the chairman. “Any other questions? Anyone?”

There was nothing else.

In a few days, the board would meet and decide not to offer Waddell the job. Instead, it would announce its choice was a 58-year-old White man from a neighboring county, a city manager whose background was in accounting, was not certified in elections and had never worked as an election supervisor. For now, though, the chairman thanked Waddell again.

“I hope this thing works,” he said, and Waddell was not certain what he meant by that, whether he was referring to her getting hired, or the new election board, or the next election, or democracy itself, but she was certain of her answer.

“Me too,” she said.

 

 

Just as Hitler did, you have to make all this despicable shit legal.

[Guest Lobo]

You can vote from your car still.  You just have to roll in, pull your Oakley's up to the top of your head and say, "I'm 'Murican!"  

[Guest]

Anyone going after Early Voting should be shot, or at a minimum, eliminated from the political process.

It is a good thing and helpful to the voter.  Two weeks is a good, fair allocation of days for casting your ballot, especially if you know ahead of time.

I am very busy for work and am on the road/ out of town quite a bit.  I haven't voted on election day in a long ass time, but haven't missed an election in probably 20 years at a minimum.  Early voting provides that flexibility.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,515]

13 minutes ago, slorch said:

Anyone going after Early Voting should be shot, or at a minimum, eliminated from the political process.

It is a good thing and helpful to the voter.  Two weeks is a good, fair allocation of days for casting your ballot, especially if you know ahead of time.

I am very busy for work and am on the road/ out of town quite a bit.  I haven't voted on election day in a long ass time, but haven't missed an election in probably 20 years at a minimum.  Early voting provides that flexibility.

I believe Harris county only had 12% of their voting on Election Day in 2020. The remaining 88 was early or mail-in.  However 2020 early voting was extended 6 days due to Covid so we may see Election Day become a larger % in 2024.

at this point, we should just connect early voting to the Election Day. I believe early stops on a Friday and of course Election Day is Tuesday. Why not just leave early voting up 3 more days, and then we just have 2-3 week voting cycle.

but changes like that require a govt that wants citizens to vote. Ours doesn’t. 

[pyrohornIII 4,815]

23 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

it bypasses hanging chad issues for sure. As long as they don’t fuck with early voting, I’m cool with it. It took me 5 mins to vote in the primary 

 

but I agree, it’s dumb. You must remember we’re dealing with the logic of the Texas Republican Party, not the sharpest tools in the shed 

23 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Hanging chads were not an issue for Houston given that we didn't have paper ballots.

I assume that the new process records both the voting machine and scanned ballot and looks for discrepancies. But maybe I'm wrong and it only records the scanned ballot.  Primary voting wasn't difficult for me too, but we all know General elections especially for President are another beast altogether. 

Texas early voting or voting logistics have changed to some extent.

• Houston has to drop the 24-hour voting locations.
• You can't vote from your car.  It's odd that you're required to physically stand or be in a wheelchair to vote. Why can't you vote from your car? I thought this was a pretty convenient method for people especially those with mobility issues. 
• Hurdles have been added to anyone assisting someone in voting.

 

The law that says every individual who wishes to vote by mail must make application to do so every year is ludicrous.  Like getting your DL re-issued each year.  To offset that Harris and other large counties would annually send out applications to those who had voted by mail in the previous elections.  And we suspect them doing this led to the provisions in SB1 making it illegal for those counties to continue to send out unrequested applications.  

So the question is how well did that work?  How many people didn't vote because the rules changed and they weren't aware of that?  While there were a lot of ballots rejected, I would bet for every one rejected there were at least 5, maybe 10, that were never cast because they simply didn't understand what they needed to do.    Fortunately they still have time to get in applications for the rest of this year's elections.  

I still think this is all intended to make voting so complicated it will lead to more mistakes like the 10,000 votes not included in Harris Co.  The Republicans have no problem in losing good to excellent election administrators so in the near future there is even more turmoil.  And the more turmoil and screw ups, the more argument they will have to say no elections can be trusted.  Then what happens?  I guess they will propose community committees which will determine our representatives, instead of elections.  I really don't know.  But I do know they are destroying our current system by undermining its credibility.  I just don't know what they plan to do once it's laid low.  

While our Republicans in Austin might not be the brightest, they certainly are good at conniving. 

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,515]

53 minutes ago, pyrohornIII said:

The law that says every individual who wishes to vote by mail must make application to do so every year is ludicrous.  Like getting your DL re-issued each year.  To offset that Harris and other large counties would annually send out applications to those who had voted by mail in the previous elections.  And we suspect them doing this led to the provisions in SB1 making it illegal for those counties to continue to send out unrequested applications.  

So the question is how well did that work?  How many people didn't vote because the rules changed and they weren't aware of that?  While there were a lot of ballots rejected, I would bet for every one rejected there were at least 5, maybe 10, that were never cast because they simply didn't understand what they needed to do.    Fortunately they still have time to get in applications for the rest of this year's elections.  

I still think this is all intended to make voting so complicated it will lead to more mistakes like the 10,000 votes not included in Harris Co.  The Republicans have no problem in losing good to excellent election administrators so in the near future there is even more turmoil.  And the more turmoil and screw ups, the more argument they will have to say no elections can be trusted.  Then what happens?  I guess they will propose community committees which will determine our representatives, instead of elections.  I really don't know.  But I do know they are destroying our current system by undermining its credibility.  I just don't know what they plan to do once it's laid low.  

While our Republicans in Austin might not be the brightest, they certainly are good at conniving. 

This is why the federal govt had to step into local and state elections in the 40s-60s to ensure that laws and policies were applied equally and fairly. Yes it was 100% white conservative Democrats behind the bad behavior and they all became white conservative republicans within a couple of decades.

 

[UTGrad98 2,280]

For our Texas primary, 15% of Texas democrat County mail in ballots rejected vs 9% from Republican counties. I may actually go protest something in my life now. Normally 2% are rejected. 

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/16/texas-mail-ballot-rejections-soar-under-new-restrictions.html

[Biff Tannen 45,691]

1 hour ago, UTGrad98 said:

For our Texas primary, 15% of Texas democrat County mail in ballots rejected vs 9% from Republican counties. I may actually go protest something in my life now. Normally 2% are rejected. 

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/16/texas-mail-ballot-rejections-soar-under-new-restrictions.html

Yep, working as designed. Unamerican. 

[elfenix 34,295]

On 3/15/2022 at 12:40 PM, pyrohornIII said:

the 10,000 votes not included in Harris Co

the votes were counted.  the system worked like it was supposed to with multiple checks and fail safes.  that's not good enough if you're a conspiracy minded asshat seeking to eliminate democracy because most people don't agree with you.

[ChuckNorrisActionJeans 2,678]

1 hour ago, UTGrad98 said:

For our Texas primary, 15% of Texas democrat County mail in ballots rejected vs 9% from Republican counties. I may actually go protest something in my life now. Normally 2% are rejected. 

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/16/texas-mail-ballot-rejections-soar-under-new-restrictions.html

what's the problem since all of those ballot casters were attempting to do a FRAUD 

[pyrohornIII 4,815]

2 hours ago, elfenix said:

the votes were counted.  the system worked like it was supposed to with multiple checks and fail safes.  that's not good enough if you're a conspiracy minded asshat seeking to eliminate democracy because most people don't agree with you.

You are right.  For the sake of brevity I didn't go into it as deeply as I should have.  The system of checks and balances did work, but that hasn't been the headline.  It's only been about the original oversight.  

[StassneyHorn 6,612]

On 1/29/2022 at 5:34 PM, StassneyHorn said:

Former Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins is probably running for mayor of Houston. Teased an announcement on Twitter. If he goes, he’ll be going against the oldest dinosaur in Texas D politics, John Whitmire. 
 

For the “Where’s the bench?” crowd crying out for more Dems this should be your guy. Whitmire probably thought he was just gonna waltz in after 63749371525 years in the lege. And I like Whitmire, just bad timing if this comes to fruition.

And now Amanda Edwards. Great bio and background. Got my original vote in 2020 Senate primary which is a big deal. Really wish I could vote fraud in Houston for her

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/23/amanda-edwards-houston-mayor/amp/

[pyrohornIII 4,815]

Following is an article on a young woman living her best life, in my opinion.   It's an interesting read from several standpoints.  It gets into the new lifestyle of those who choose to live and work on the road; it gets into real life examples of voter problems caused by SB1, and it talks about her own journey of family discovery as a young black woman in Texas.  

(Hopefully i got it all in the long cat quote.  I couldn't edit it out of rich text without it screwing up the formatting)

Tayhlor Coleman Didn’t Know How Hard Texas Made It to Vote—Until She Started Living the #Vanlife

The seventh-generation Texan is roaming the state to register voters—and digging into her family's history in the long struggle for voting rights.

Quote

 

Tayhlor Coleman and her van, Barb, in New Braunfels.Photograph by Montinique Monroe

Tayhlor Coleman is behind the wheel of “Barb” heading west on U.S. 290, in the pretty farm and ranch country between Houston and Brenham. “Barb” is the name she’s given her home on wheels, a white 2021 Sprinter Ram ProMaster van that’s as Texas as they come. On the dash: Coleman’s cowboy hat. In the passenger-side door: a copy of Lonesome Dove. On the stereo: Kacey Musgraves. “I love Texas so much,” she says. “Being from Texas is a personality for folks. That bug is definitely strong for me.”

Just a few months into the pandemic, Coleman had moved from her lonely apartment in Washington, D.C., back home to her parents’ house in Houston’s Third Ward. Like a lot of folks, the 33-year-old political strategist found herself falling down an “Instagram rabbit hole” during the pandemic, obsessively looking at #vanlife posts and dreaming of escape from #pandemiclife. An itinerant lifestyle appealed to Coleman; she had spent years as a Democratic campaign worker, so she was used to living on the road. 

“Barb”—named after pioneering congresswoman and civil rights leader Barbara Jordan—is a custom job. Tahylor did some of the work herself, including the wiring and the flooring. “I had no clue what I was doing,” she says. With the help of YouTube, she figured things out. Then, she found a van-build shop in Austin that was willing to do the rest as part of Van Go, a Magnolia Channel show on customizing vans. The pros installed an outdoor shower, a reclaimed-wood counter, and bluebonnet-covered accent panels on the inside of the rear doors. 

 

Coleman uses social media to document what she sees as a new crackdown on voting rights, while also working a day job for a Democratic media firm.Photograph by Montinique Monroe

 

The reclaimed-wood counter in Coleman’s van.Photograph by Montinique Monroe

As bespoke as Barb is, she’s still a tiny home on wheels. Coleman is six feet tall; her braids almost brush the ceiling when she’s standing up. Keeping clutter in check is a constant challenge. As the van makes a quick lane change on busy U.S. 290, light rain splattering the windshield, the stuff of her daily life clangs around in the back. “Instagram is such bullshit,” Coleman says. “You can see the reality: the van doesn’t look spotless, curated twenty-four-seven.”

Nonetheless, Coleman has embraced #vanlife. Since she got the van back from the Van Go guys in October, it’s taken her to parts of Texas she’s never seen—Palo Duro Canyon, for example—and she’s enthusiastic about documenting her travels on Instagram. (Her bio: “Into #vibes, #vanlife, & #voting rights. Cowgirl up.”) “It’s pretty sweet, I’m not gonna lie,” she says. As her travel plans coalesced, however, Coleman began adding a more serious mission to her goals of saving on rent and posting FOMO-inducing pics. She plans to spend most, if not all, of 2022 traveling the state from stem to stern to register voters in as many counties as possible. Coleman is also using social media to document what she sees as a new crackdown on voting rights—all while working a day job as a senior account executive for a Democratic media firm, AL Media Strategy.

Her Instagram savvy has yielded a mixture of glam content (Coleman posing at a Hill Country swimming hole; a Big Bend vista from the perspective of Barb’s couch) and more didactic material (a three-minute IG reel of Coleman explaining the nuts and bolts of how to fill out voter-registration forms as a volunteer registrar). Her media savvy has landed her several spots on MSNBC and in the Houston Chronicle. Along the way, she is engaged in a project of self-education. A seventh-generation Black Texan, Coleman is digging into her family’s history as actors in the long struggle for voting rights, and she’s learning firsthand how onerous and arbitrary many Texas voter registration laws are. 

Tayhlor Coleman in her van in New Braunfels on March 17, 2022.Photograph by Montinique Monroe

---

In mid-February, I catch up with Coleman in Cypress, an exurb on the northwest edge of Houston’s sprawl. She’s coming from her parents’ home in the Third Ward, the rapidly gentrifying historically Black neighborhood in Houston’s downtown where she grew up. We ride together to Washington County, a bucolic patch of Texas with rich soils and gently rolling hills. Coleman’s family has deep roots in the area. According to family genealogy, her dad’s ancestors were brought as slaves to Washington County in the 1840s to work the region’s bustling cotton plantations. Her relatives still own land in the county, and Coleman fondly remembers summer trail rides at a family ranch near Chappell Hill. Her parents taught her at an early age about Jim Crow, and her grandmother told her about an uncle who had been lynched. But it wasn’t until a lull in campaign work about six years ago that she began researching her family’s history in the area.

She discovered that her ancestors had been involved in a profound chapter in American history. During Reconstruction, Washington County’s formerly enslaved people enjoyed a flourishing of freedom. They started schools, built a cotton gin, and worshipped in newly formed churches. They also began exercising political power. In her van, Coleman keeps a framed copy of a voting roll from 1867, the first year Black men in Texas could register to vote. Two of her ancestors’ names—Cujo Kinlaw and Cato Felder—are on the list. “It’s hard to describe the rooted feeling from knowing such deep history,” she says. “It’s grounding, especially in a time when it feels like you don’t know the country you grew up in anymore.” 

In the 1870s and 1880s, African Americans from Washington County took advantage of their hard-earned political power. They were elected to local offices and to the Texas Legislature, served on juries, and were deeply involved in building the Republican party, which thrived for a time on an alliance between Black voters and their white allies, mostly Germans who supported the Union in the Civil War. But, as Coleman learned from reading scholarly articles and the archives of the Brenham Banner, Black political power provoked a violent white backlash. In the 1886 election, gun-toting masked men stole ballot boxes in three of Washington County’s heavily Republican precincts. At one of the polling sites, a Black poll worker fought back, shooting and killing one of the intruders, who happened to be the son of a white Democratic candidate for county commissioner. In retaliation, a white mob broke into the jail at Brenham, kidnapped three Black men who had been arrested, and lynched them about a mile outside town. The U.S. Senate held hearings on the Texas “election outrage,” as the violence in Washington County came to be known, and devised legislation, the Federal Elections Bill of 1890, to protect the rights of Black voters in the South. It was defeated by a filibuster in the Senate—and Jim Crow settled into his 75-year reign. 

Coleman can’t help but see a through line between then and now. “I don’t at all try to compare the things that even my own grandmother lived through to some of the things that we’re seeing today,” she says. “But I do think nothing under the sun is new. And the very same motivation that motivated a lot of the violence and the attempt to hold on to power by any means necessary in 1886, I absolutely believe we are seeing a lot of that today. The parallels are, for me, frankly alarming.”

 

Coleman keeps a framed photo of Sally Draper, her great-great-great-grandmother, in the van.Photograph by Montinique Monroe

 

A stack of reading material for the road.Photograph by Montinique Monroe

---

Coleman pulls Barb up to the curb outside the Washington County courthouse in Brenham. Her goal is to get certified to register voters—this will be her fifth county—but first she has to find the elections administrator, Carol Jackson. We’re turned away at Jackson’s office in the courthouse; she’s across the street, overseeing early voting for the March primary. “This is van life,” Coleman chuckles. “Figure it out as you go.” At the polling place, Jackson is friendly but not exactly thrilled to see us. “This is not a good time because we have an election going on,” Jackson says. 

As the Legislature has piled up new rules and restrictions around voting over the past decade—from requiring photo ID to vote to limiting the hours that polls can be open—it’s fallen to local elections officials to manage all the mandates. And they often seem overwhelmed, Coleman says. Elections administrators have also been besieged by angry partisans, conspiracy-minded activists, and crusading state-level politicians. The sweeping elections bill passed by the Legislature last year threatens administrators with a felony, and two years in jail, if they send mail-in ballot applications to voters who haven’t asked for one, among other new or enhanced criminal offenses. Coleman feels bad about bothering Jackson, but she doesn’t know when she’ll be able to stop by in Brenham again. After a short wait, Jackson takes us back to her office at the courthouse, where the tension eases. Coleman fills out a state-required form and then leaves as a legal deputy registrar in Washington County—one of just three Jackson had minted so far in 2022. 

At first, last fall, Coleman thought she would visit all 254 counties in Texas, but she quickly ran into logistical problems. First, the state is huge, and as any politician who has embarked on a 254-county tour will tell you, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to spend a day chasing votes, or unregistered voters, in Loving County (population 64). Also, Texas makes it hard to register to vote; ours is one of only eight states not to offer online registration. As a result, signing up voters is largely a paperwork exercise that falls to volunteers called deputy voter registrars. The analog nature of this process was underscored in January, when the Texas secretary of state’s office announced that it was running low on voter-registration forms because of supply-chain issues.

Complicating things further, there is no way to become a statewide deputy voter registrar. State law stipulates that a volunteer—only Texas residents are eligible—must be certified in each county where he or she wants to register voters. And most counties do not allow online certification. That means Coleman generally must show up in person, during business hours on a weekday, and find an often-busy clerk to give her the necessary paperwork. Deputy registrars also aren’t allowed to register voters who reside in a different county—a lesson Coleman learned in February, when she helped two students in Tyler fill out forms, only to realize later that they lived in adjacent counties. The forms were junk. She had to call the students to tell them about the snafu. Completed registration forms have to be returned to the elections administrator within five days—failing to do so is a criminal offense, a penalty that a Bexar County administrator recently warned Coleman about. If you’re confused or bored by this recitation of rules and regulations: well, that might be the point. Texas probably has the most burdensome voter registration laws in the country—a massive impediment to statewide registration drives.

Almost none of this is new. The voter deputy registrar system was created in 1986, and made stricter by the Legislature in 2011. But critical attention has shifted to other aspects of the voting system in Texas, most recently the sweeping legislation passed in 2021 to restrict voting, including a requirement that voters must provide ID in order to receive a mail-in ballot—a provision that contributed to the rejection of at least 23,000 ballots during the March primary, a 13 percent toss-out rate, up from 1 percent in 2020. 

“Every barrier, every obstacle, every new procedure, every new requirement adds a cost to voters,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit that opposed the 2021 legislation. “For the most part, a change will be made and you could say, ‘Well, come on. Is this the one change that’s going to make this not a free and fair election?’ Probably not. But when you add all of them together, it’s like voters have to run an obstacle course to get from wanting to vote to being able to cast a ballot.”

Coleman turns in a voter registration form at the Bexar County Elections and Purchasing Building in San Antonio.

 

After we wrap up in Brenham, Barb gets back on U.S. 290. Destination: Austin. Later today, Coleman is meeting up with Black Voters Matter, a national voter-registration nonprofit that tours the country in a bus plastered with the mug shots of Freedom Riders, but first she wants to get certified in Travis County. At the bustling county building, she quickly hits a snag. The elections office is doing certifications online only, because of the coronavirus pandemic, but Coleman first needs to talk to the official in charge. And she’s at lunch. So that’s what we do—go to lunch, and wait for the official to call. “I’m shocked,” Coleman says. “This is why we shouldn’t have to do all this in order to just register voters. It’s insane.”

After lunch, Coleman gets a call: she can fill out the paperwork online and meanwhile is free to register voters in Austin. Coleman finishes her day registering voters at Huston-Tillotson University, an HBCU in East Austin, and then drives to Dallas that night to catch up with the Black Voters Matter bus. A few days later, the crew is in East Texas to register voters. She’s glad she took the time to get certified in Smith County; on a couple of stops, she is the only voter deputy registrar. She personally signs up about fifteen voters. 

In Tyler, during the fifth day of early voting ahead of the March 1 primary, Coleman is waiting in line to get certified in Smith County when she overhears—and records—a conversation between an elderly Black man and a county official. The man wants to turn in an application for a mail-in ballot on behalf of his mother—it’s the last day to do so for the primary—but the official politely informs him that his mom has to be present in order to show ID. “Well, she’s ninety years old,” the man says, before leaving. Coleman later posts the video on Instagram and then, wearing purple sunglasses and sitting in Barb, addresses her followers. “Yes, there are really people being disenfranchised over this bill.” While that’s certainly true in general, it’s not quite right in this instance. The clerk is correct, mostly—long-standing state law stipulates that a voter must turn in her own mail-in ballot application, though there’s nothing that says she must present an ID. If a voting rights activist and an elections clerk can’t keep things straight, it’s no wonder that many voters can’t either.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/tayhlor-coleman-voter-registration-vanlife/

[Biff Tannen 45,691]

Get a real job!  - every conservative on this site probably

[Satchel 6,938]

Then there’s this:

Mark Meadows has been removed from North Carolina's voter rolls, a move made as the State Bureau of Investigation continues a probe into allegations the former White House Chief of Staff committed election fraud.

Macon County Board of Elections Director Melanie Thibault confirmed April 12 that she had removed Meadows the prior day from the county's active voter list.

Thibault said she consulted N.C. Board of Elections staff in Raleigh after finding records that Meadows was registered both in Virginia and North Carolina. 

"What I found was that he was also registered in the state of Virginia. And he voted in a 2021 election. The last election he voted in Macon County was in 2020," she said.

[bolverk 29,684]

10 minutes ago, Satchel said:

Then there’s this:

Mark Meadows has been removed from North Carolina's voter rolls, a move made as the State Bureau of Investigation continues a probe into allegations the former White House Chief of Staff committed election fraud.

Macon County Board of Elections Director Melanie Thibault confirmed April 12 that she had removed Meadows the prior day from the county's active voter list.

Thibault said she consulted N.C. Board of Elections staff in Raleigh after finding records that Meadows was registered both in Virginia and North Carolina. 

"What I found was that he was also registered in the state of Virginia. And he voted in a 2021 election. The last election he voted in Macon County was in 2020," she said.

In Texas, we put a Black woman away for five years after mistakenly voting while on parole. I'd be curious to see what North Carolina will do with a white asshole who pulled this shit on purpose, but I'd be kidding myself.

[Burt 4,085]

Well, we know what Florida will do if you're white and have money.  They'll order you to attend a civics class and earn a grade of at least a "C".

 

https://www.villages-news.com/2022/04/13/villagers-heading-back-to-civics-class-after-cutting-deal-in-voter-fraud-cases/

Quote

Jay Richard Ketcik, 63, who lives at 5564 Henry Loop in the Village of Monarch Grove, was charged with voter fraud in connection with the 2020 presidential election. The Manistique, Mich. native cast a ballot in Florida by mail on Oct. 13, 2020. He also cast a second ballot in Michigan via absentee ballot, according to an arrest report. He is a registered Republican.

Ketcik has cut a deal to enter into a pre-trial intervention program which requires him to attend an adult civics class and earn a grade of C or better. The “We the People; the Citizen and the Constitution Class,” will meet for two hours per week for 12 weeks. He must pay for the cost of enrolling in the class. He was also ordered to pay $400 in court and prosecution costs.

 

Charles Franklin Barnes, 64, who lives in the Callahan Villas in the Village of Osceola Hills, will be signing up for the same civics class. He has obtained a carbon copy of the pre-trial intervention deal as Ketcik.

Barnes’ primary address is in Milford, Conn. He has also been accused of casting more than one ballot in the 2020 election. He was registered with No Party Affiliation.

If both men successfully complete the class, the criminal charges will be dropped.

 

[BehoId, The Underminer! 11,669]

i'm all in favor of that being the punishment.  if we can somehow instill some actual american history and political knowledge in Rs, they might not end up with the fucked up beliefs they parade about.

[Burt 4,085]

1 minute ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

i'm all in favor of that being the punishment.  if we can somehow instill some actual american history and political knowledge in Rs, they might not end up with the fucked up beliefs they parade about.

Yeah, but it's likely to be conducted by the state of Florida so it wont be an actual civics course.

[Captainant 27,680]

36 minutes ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

i'm all in favor of that being the punishment.  if we can somehow instill some actual american history and political knowledge in Rs, they might not end up with the fucked up beliefs they parade about.

compared to: a black woman getting sentenced to SIX YEARS over an administrative error

[WhatTheBuck 28,788]

1 hour ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

i'm all in favor of that being the punishment.  if we can somehow instill some actual american history and political knowledge in Rs, they might not end up with the fucked up beliefs they parade about.

Lulz. Good one. 

[Longhornlove 4,831]

I guess those voter suppression laws in GA didn't work. Weird.

https://sos.ga.gov/news/record-early-voting-turnout-continues-4

 

[tx 3 putt 76,988]

On 5/19/2022 at 9:26 PM, Longhornlove said:

I guess those voter suppression laws in GA didn't work. Weird.

https://sos.ga.gov/news/record-early-voting-turnout-continues-4

 

a 189% increase from the same point in the early voting period in the 2018 primary election and a 153% increase in the same point in the early voting period in the 2020 primary election

[StassneyHorn 6,612]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-wont-shield-texas-legislators-testifying-redistricting-l-rcna30197
 

Supreme Court won’t shield Texas legislators from testifying in redistricting lawsuit

The Justice Department is seeking the testimony of three GOP legislators in a suit alleging discrimination against minorities in the state's new congressional and legislative maps.

Ryan Guillen, Brooks Landgraf and John Lujan

Edited June 1, 2022 by StassneyHorn

[StassneyHorn 6,612]

Same day voter registration was utilized by more Republicans than Democrats in New Mexico. 

https://sourcenm.com/briefs/same-day-voter-registration-proving-popular-in-2022-nm-primaries/

 

New Mexicans could register and vote on the same day for the first time ever in a Primary Election — and that’s exactly what many did.

Over 8,000 New Mexicans took the opportunity at the polls so far today.

As of Tuesday, June 7, at 5 p.m.

8,187 voters used same-day registration, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

Eligible New Mexico voters could also update their existing registration and still vote in today’s primaries at their County Clerk’s Office or any polling location.

Republicans led same-day registration voter numbers with 4,223, although the initiative was primarily pushed by Democrats. Democrats stood at 3,716 voters registered as of 5 p.m., while 239 voters registered Libertarian today and voted in the primary.

[elfenix 34,295]

just gonna leave this here:

Quote

“No citizen should have to wait more than 30 minutes to vote,” declared a 2014 federal report on how to conduct elections. That report was responding to the long lines in the 2012 presidential election, when more than 5 million Americans were forced to wait longer than an hour to cast their ballots.

https://today.tamu.edu/2020/07/09/it-takes-a-long-time-to-vote/

[Patricio Swayze 17,058]

just gonna leave this here:

“No citizen should have to wait more than 30 minutes to vote,” declared a 2014 federal report on how to conduct elections. That report was responding to the long lines in the 2012 presidential election, when more than 5 million Americans were forced to wait longer than an hour to cast their ballots.

https://today.tamu.edu/2020/07/09/it-takes-a-long-time-to-vote/

Someone’s tenure just got revoked.

[ChuckNorrisActionJeans 2,678]

10 hours ago, StassneyHorn said:

Same day voter registration was utilized by more Republicans than Democrats in New Mexico. 

https://sourcenm.com/briefs/same-day-voter-registration-proving-popular-in-2022-nm-primaries/

 

New Mexicans could register and vote on the same day for the first time ever in a Primary Election — and that’s exactly what many did.

Over 8,000 New Mexicans took the opportunity at the polls so far today.

 

[Homer] there are NEW Mexicans??

[Longhorn_Fan68 33,874]

 

[tx 3 putt 76,988]

new mexico county QoP showing the rest of the Qcountry how to win 2024, just refuse to certify the votes.

 

zero evidence of fraud / fake votes, but who gives a fuck. this is the test run for 2024. they're hoping the Supreme Qourt will back them is my guess. 

[Satchel 6,938]

4 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

new mexico county QoP showing the rest of the Qcountry how to win 2024, just refuse to certify the votes.

 

zero evidence of fraud / fake votes, but who gives a fuck. this is the test run for 2024. they're hoping the Supreme Qourt will back them is my guess. 

The state Supreme Court has compelled the rubes to certify the vote. Doesn’t appear they plan on complying. This is a GOP dry run for ‘22 and ‘24. People need to pay attention.

[tx 3 putt 76,988]

1000000000% it's a dry run