“If the purges [of potential voters], challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.”
"[…] Democracy can win* despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.
And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK."
Didn’t Trump win partially by the black vote going for him? How do we know most of those weren’t for Trump?
No. Black people overwhelmingly still voted against Trump and for Kamala.
Hang on…WTF!
Oh please. We had the same shit in 2020 and we had a record turn out.
Don’t put the blame on voter suppression when it’s American stupidity and apathy that’s the cause.
But it can be both. Voter suppression just making it way harder for Democrats to win. And ultimately impossible.
It is in the end stupidly and apathy. But, you can’t deny that voter suppression is also a big thing and it should be addressed.
This is why Kamala accepting the outcome “No matter what”, to prove she’s better than Trump…
Was the dumbest thing she could have done because it was just playing into the GOP’s hand.
The Republican game is “You go high, we go low, because low gets us elected and furthers our agenda.”
No one actually ever considered kamala might win. As soon as Biden dropped out, anyone that actually knew something knew Democrats had thrown in the towel.
That’s absolutely not true. They had the best campaign since Obama and they did amazing job in that 3 weeks or so, and contrasting disaster of a shitshow that Trump put on made it even clearer.
In the end Americans turned out to be way worse people than predicted, but that was absolutely not obvious.
I thought their game was “Low, no matter what.”
I think the game is “there’s always more barrel to scrape.”
Dem pols are always too afraid to exercise the power they have when they win. Always. When Biden won, DC and Puerto Rican statehood should have been the first things on the agenda.
The GOP is never afraid to exercise as much power as they can get away with.
Biden never had enough control of the whole government to get those things done without Republican buy-in.
A Republican controlled house won’t send a bill like that to the Senate. A Republican controlled Senate won’t send it to the President.
You can be upset at Biden, but we’ve rarely ever given a Democratic president a Democratic Congress to help him get anything done.
Uh, no. He had a Democratic congress the first half of his term. Part of why he lost them is Dems are so tepid with exercising the power the voters give them.
Nothing the Dems do, or even try to do, gin the base up into excitement. The base never feels inspired that the Dems are striving for the goals they claim to represent and want.
This, 100%.
I remember when Democrats had a filibuster proof majority under Obama.
And they still failed to pass single payer healthcare, because of former VP candidate Joe Lieberman. Like, talk about lack of party discipline.
Republican politicians at least deliver what they say they will deliver.
Oh look election denialism
We can accept the outcome while still acknowledging the bullshit that occurred. Still, It’s in everyone’s best interest to be rid of the douche. I’ll be in support of anything that furthers just that.
Anything. Glad you’re honest
Oh look, voter suppression denialism.
By “restrictive voting laws” do you mean voters having to show ID? Like every other country on the planet?
https://today.umd.edu/umd-analysis-millions-of-americans-dont-have-id-required-to-vote
And “just get one” is not a solution when you live in poverty and don’t even have the transportation to go to the nearest license branch, which could be miles away. If you still have the proper documents, which sometimes are ridiculous in terms of what is needed.
And then, if you’re black and were born in the South during (and even sometimes after) Jim Crow, it’s entirely possible that there is no official record of your birth because no hospital would admit your mother.
Why don’t you ever try and actually meet the other side in good faith?
Opponents of voter ID have a very simple line of argumentation, and very clear issues that would need to be solved. Why do you think proponents of voter ID never attempt to solve these issues?
Why do proponents always insist that voter ID has to be implemented in a way that happens to hurt minority voters disproportionately?
Look at Spain. We have been using our IDs for decades and it’s a great way to solve that problem. You just go to the voting table, show your ID (DNI) and vote. That’s it. And it works for everything related to anything official.
But because of the voting system we don’t have gerrymandering (or at least not that much).
That works great for Spain (and most other countries) because it has a compulsory national ID. This doesn’t exist in the US, so introducing such laws shouldn’t be done before easy access to such an ID exists for everyone.
Why don’t you ever try and actually meet the other side in good faith?
You first
Opponents of voter ID have a very simple line of argumentation, and very clear issues that would need to be solved.
Like?
Why do you think proponents of voter ID never attempt to solve these issues?
You don’t name them or they’re aren’t an actual issue
Why do proponents always insist that voter ID has to be implemented in a way that happens to hurt minority voters disproportionately?
They don’t
I SENTENCE THIS USER TO ONE HOUR ON THE CHAIR OF CHEER
Like?
You don’t name them or they’re aren’t an actual issue
The biggest and most obvious is that ID isn’t available to literally everyone who can legally vote without cost to the end user of any kind, and as a consequence requiring such an ID is tantamount to a poll tax. Federal ID that’s fully subsidized would be the easiest solution, and if done right you could even optionally fold most state ID systems into a federal one with things like being licensed to drive being an endorsement on the federal ID.
Notably, the same people who demand photo ID to vote also tend to be the people terrified of a federal ID as a concept.
You first
No, I won’t allow you to disadvantage minorities, no matter how often you ask.
Like?
You’ve literally never listened to anyone opposing your view? Or why are you asking me?
You don’t name them or they’re aren’t an actual issue
No, I think you’re a bad faith troll and won’t invest more time than strictly necessary. If you’re not a bad faith troll, it’s literally one search away!
They don’t
You literally started your comment doing exactly this
No, I won’t allow you to disadvantage minorities, no matter how often you ask.
I won’t allow you to stereotype minorities as people incapable of doing things, especially something as easy as getting an ID.
You’ve literally never listened to anyone opposing your view? Or why are you asking me?
I do it everyday, you just don’t have an answer
it’s literally one search away!
Should be easy for you to name them then
You literally started your comment doing exactly this
I literally never said anything about that. Literally
I won’t allow you to stereotype minorities as people incapable of doing things, especially something as easy as getting an ID.
Strawman racist bullshit, disguised as uplifting affirmation of equality. Tell us you don’t see color while you’re at it.
I did the same thing they did. Why don’t you tell us how you *acknowledge your white privilege *
I try to acknowledge my white privilege by voting for politicians and laws that attempt to mitigate that privilege, by extending it as widely as possible, to as many people as possible.
Your unexamined privilege is demonstrated in claiming things like satisfying voter ID laws is easy when it is not for many, for a variety of profound and serious reasons.
Oh, it’s a bad faith troll, what a surprise, who could have seen it coming, oh no
I just responded the same way you did
If you really think that, I’ll give you one last chance. I’ll explain why your response to my serious points was wrong. You can explain properly why you disagree, without resorting to strawmans or insults or anything. Deal?
My position is: minorities will be disproportionately affected by voter ID laws, since it’s on average objectively harder for a poor person to get an ID (due to transportation, scheduling due to possibly multiple jobs etc.), and minorities are disproportionately poor. You could mitigate this disproportionate effect by first ensuring easy and equal access to ID for all citizens. Even if you disagree on any of these points, you should at least be able to accept that you can get what you want if you give me what I want, and giving me what I want doesn’t hurt you in any way.
So, why do you still ask me to make the first move? Why can’t you see that you’re blocking yourself from getting what you want here?
It’s not as difficult to get ID in many other countries
It’s not difficult in the US
It’s harder than it should be
Harder than going to the place that gives them out and asking for one? I’m not going to hold your hand
If only it were that easy!
It is, I’ve done it many times
Are you white? Are you not living in poverty?
I am very happy it has been easy for you. From what I have read that is not the case for many
No, this article is talking about things like rejecting registration based on minor clerical errors like ink color, rejecting provisional ballots arbitrarily, and restricting the availability of ballot boxes. That sort of thing.
On the voter id question, by the way, the argument isn’t about whether or not you should have ID to vote, it’s about whether you can get ID in the first place.
Most countries in the world either issue IDs to everyone or allow you to prove your identity with things like bank statements and utility bills, or just somebody else who can vouch for you. The problem with US voter ID laws is that they only give you a few options for acceptable documents, and then make it hard to get those documents.
or allow you to prove your identity with things like bank statements and utility bills, or just somebody else who can vouch for you.
My state’s voter ID allows all of those things and more (including the voter registration card given to you for free when you register and whenever you update your registration as well as SNAP and TANF cards), although here the “somebody else who can vouch for you” has to have ID themselves and has to sign a sworn statement on penalty of perjury that you are who you say you are and that they have known you for at least 6 months.
Yeah, that seems like a reasonable approach.
By comparison, North Carolina attempted to implement a voter ID law in 2016 that was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court because it deliberately targeted black voters.
Yeah trump lost, that’s why he is the president of the united states of America
Guys, ease up with the fickle double think
Next thing you’ll say that Kamala won and she is the one in actual charge of the nation lmao 🤣
Is winning by cheating winning?
Do you have actual proof? Did you denounce it to the authorities? Hell, have you taken this proof to the press? I’m sure everyone would love to hear and see about it!
What is funny is this is everything Aotus did when Biden won. Guess what? We didn’t love to hear about the massive voter fraud he claimed and was unable to prove. Strange that when he won suddenly no problems with voting.
You would have to live under a rock to come up with these double standards. I would like to see someone take proof of gerrymandering to Faux News to see what they do about it. Oh yeah, absolutely nothing.
So no proof?
Proof of gerrymandering and voter suppression?
Gerrymandering is not really up for debate. It happens a lot.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house
Voter suppression is nothing new either. The Fascists have been passing laws for decades now under the guise of securing our already secure elections. Here are some in 2024.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-september-2024
Oh okay so no proof then. Where are the fake ballots with like 50 million votes? Where is the cheating man?
Come on, you are sitting in a gold mine if you have all that.
Weird that the Dems haven’t done anything about it last 4 years. Or before that when they had the chance
You were literally given proof. You refusing to read the links is not someone else’s fault.
They know. They are complicit! Gerry mandering, voter suppression getting rid of polling locations in black neighborhoods. Making it illegal to give water to those waiting to vote. Trump saying something about elon knowing these machine very well. Removing people from voter registration. I’m sure there is more. If you are unaware of these things you are living under a rock.
So, no proof then?
If you want to ignore the proof provided then yes.
Lol where is the proof of cheating the election?
https://lemmy.world/comment/14726844
Here
One better
https://lemmy.world/comment/14729078
There is proof, just because you don’t accept it as such, doesn’t mean it isn’t. Sounds like the arguments flat earthers make.
So then what makes the presidency?
We all know. Nothing was or will be done. Now they can rig it from the inside. Was a fun run!
Democrats had the opportunity to fix this when they were in office. They chose to protect the filibuster instead.
Did they or did Manchin and Sinema, who go figure are no longer Democrats, stop them?
I knew that this was going to happen as soon as they started purging voter rolls and passing draconian voter suppression laws after Trump lost. Biden just barely beat Trump in 2020, so all they had to do was give Trump a little bump - a few thousand votes nullified here or there would win him a whole state. The media focus in 2020 was on the “historic turnout”, but how many of those were covid mail-in ballots that red states didn’t allow this time? How many people showed up on election day ready to vote for Kamala only to get turned away because they weren’t on the registry even though they voted in 2020?
Republicans cheated in more than one way this time, and we got screwed because we failed to stop it early.
Re post text: For context, Washington state is mail-only voting, so that number would (I assume) be for all votes, not just specifically requested mail-ins. I didn’t see it in the article, but I wonder if that is predominantly “centralized” or “distributed” in nature; i.e. are technically-valid ballots from all voters being incorrectly rejected by the county elections facilities office at different rates across racial lines, or are there other factors like targeted disinformation, education, local infrastructure, or socioeconomics that disproportionately affect Black (or other types of minority) voters that would make them more likely to produce a technically-invalid ballot?
Those might get the same statistic, but would seem to indicate very different sorts of problems and approaches.
I work in elections in Washington, there is only mail in voting plus county drop boxes. Yes you can say you lost your ballot or didn’t get it and come in for a replacement, but we give you the same mail in packet you world receive at home.
Yes you can drop it in the drop box in our office or you can take it home and mail it. But any voter can drop their mail in ballot off in our office as well. We don’t have polling places or voting machines, or a way to separate out and assign race to a ballot so we could somehow treat those differently. They all come in as a big stack for processing.
Why do ballots get rejected? Mismatched signatures is the biggest reason. If your signature doesn’t match what we have on file we mail you a form to fix it, we also text and email you. Maybe from demographic groups are less likely to respond? The other one is people who forget to sign, which follows the same procedure.
What I can say is that is there is some sort of disparity, it isn’t happening in the ballot processing room.
You can vote in-person in Washington if you want to, if you lost your ballot, etc. Also, I think most people here use the drop boxes rather than their mailbox. If not most, still quite a lot.
FTA:
The crucial statistic is that not everyone’s ballot gets disqualified. One study done for the United States Civil Rights Commission found that a Black person, such as Maj. Turner, will be 900% more likely to have their mail-in or in-person ballot disqualified than a white voter.
Okay, I went into this expecting cope, and it’s an actually good article, worth a read or at least a skim. So, let’s do something about it.
Ok, what do you suggest?
That we all stop moping about November and start networking with people on the ground. I’m not looking to the DNC for solutions, they’ve already got top level staff talking about working with Trump however they can. The best place to start doing that, imo, is to start showing up to governing body meetings- city councils, county government, whatever you can do, and start meeting other local activists. A lot of times, you’ll find some that are already part of larger, national networks for action, or they’ll be part of local mutual aid groups, which means that you’re talking with an entry point to a pretty big group. Share your concerns about election suppression and share this article with the people that you meet, talk about what you can do locally together to make a difference (remember, a lot of these are state laws and decisions).
This is 100% actionable, I’m going to a community activism meeting later this month and I plan on sharing this information, though I’m not in one of the affected states. I met this group by going to city council meetings and making public comments about the need to improve our housing stock.
The time to have done something about it was in November. But feel free to try.
I really don’t see another choice. I don’t blame you for leaving, we thought about it too, but it’s not realistic for some of us.
I realize that, and I’m sorry. Like I said, feel free to try. I just don’t hold out hope for success any time soon.
It’s always “funny” when people act like systemic racism is some reformable problem rather than a major foundation of the entire system.
So do nothing?
What would you suggest people do about this now that America is a fascist dictatorship?
This conversation is so frustrating to witness. Particularly because I remember you were such a strong proponent of Harris though the election cycle, which suggest you have political sense enough to care and know things are bad, but now that the cards are different your plan is to disconnect and feel hopeless? If you truly believe that America is a fascist dictatorship, and realize that we have the largest military in the world, don’t you feel moral imperative to at least try? If the solution you were striving for didn’t work, why is your next move give up rather than look to something like black radical thought, which has for much longer being explaining how the solutions to these problems don’t come with ballots.
I literally asked what is suggested people do.
Am I supposed to come up with the answer myself? Because I’m extremely stupid, so that isn’t going to happen. I wish people would realize that.
I literally asked what is suggested people do.
I feel like this is an obtuse description. There are better ways to ask what should be done that do not read as defeatist if you’re genuine.
No one is expecting you to come up with solutions, that’s why I recommended black radical thought, as these are folks that have been on the front line of fighting and experiencing America’s decent into fascism.
Well I’m sorry I didn’t ask what should be done the right way, but I still have no idea what to be done.
Please tell me how I am supposed to ask what people suggest other than asking them what they suggest.
For fuck’s sake, all I want is an answer. You sure as hell aren’t giving me one.
I can see you’re upset, but genuinely, I think it leads to a better community on lemmy in general to approach with good faith. The point overall being, if you are asking in earnest, and are hoping for answers about what possible way forward we have, I would hope that you recognize that there are better ways to communicate that. I’m sorry it’s upsetting that certain langue is interpreted differently, even if the core is the same, but it’s the reality.
Given that reality, being upfront about your worries and feelings of helplessness is valid and helps to connect rather than dismiss. With that, expressing the lack of knowledge as a personal aspect, rather than framing the exhausting of options you’re aware of as the end of all options, would help show that you are looking for whatever is next.
As for ‘an answer’, it’s not something I can easily give because these are complex issues. The reality is it can’t be distilled down to “Get out and vote” because the problems extend beyond that, and any real answer that match that simplicity would along the lines of “organize” but I assume like me, you’d find that sort of broad advice hollow.
I can’t say what you should do because it depends on your local politics, what you’re able to commit, where your politics sit, and ultimately what you think your place would be in whatever is done. With that I recommend black radical thought because I find it best encompasses the tools needed to learn for the reasons I mentioned. Along side learning, I think reaching out to local political groups for work that can be done would be a great way to see what options and opportunists marginalized folks are making for themselves.
In short, if you fear for the well-being of, black/brown, indigenous, immigrant, queer, or everyone else that will suffer under the coming wave of fascism, do as Mr Rogers says and look for the helpers, and if you can, help them.
The system of humanity.
It is not natural to be racist.
Very natural to be afraid of things you don’t know/can’t control
Racism is a product of people exploiting that
It’s actually very natural to form in/out groups. The issue is getting the species as a whole to overcome it.
In/out groups are natural, but the establishment of those groups on ‘racial’ lines is totally constructed. The concept of race itself doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, it’s a fixation on specific phenotypic traits.
Notice how racial bias is fixated on skin color while other phenotypic differences are largely ignored; people with different colored eyes or hair, different nose shapes, different hair textures, etc. 400 years ago skin tone was similarly trivial, but that changed with the rise of chattel slavery.
This is what I was trying to say but didn’t have the foresight to elaborate and that seems to have earned me some downvotes lol
The core tenet of tribalism is “They aren’t like us.” That might be based on skin color, hair type, clothing, smell (from different diets), behavior. Modern racism (from the last couple hundred years) likely has some elements of more traditional tribalism with relaxed standards so the people a few hundred miles away can start to wrap their heads around the idea that Irish, for instance, are more or less the same as British.
I do hope people can get to the idea that anyone from a given point on this planet (so far) is just a person and not an outsider, but it looks like we have a way to go.
The core tenet of tribalism is “They aren’t like us.” That might be based on skin color, hair type, clothing, smell (from different diets), behavior.
That’s just not accurate. Its historically been cultural, not phenotypes.
Prisoners of war, which were different skin colors, tended to be accepted into the group once they adapted the captor’s customs.
For the last 200 years, a significant amount of slavery has been limited to certain phenotypes. I agree that prior to that, it was less prevalent. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a historical model of slavery based on phenotype, it’s just more recent history.
On the other hand, the Irish were enslaved by the British centuries before any Africans were. And it’s not because they had no contact. Everyone in Europe who had any power and influence was aware of Mansa Musa, and there were plenty of Sub-Saharan Africans in Iberia and other parts of the Caliphate in Europe.
Being black was just not the liability it eventually became. Being nearby but in a different country was a much bigger one.
In-group out-group bias is very unfortunately ingrained into our brains.
That’s some thorough analysis, holy cow…
One lesson 2020 should have taught everyone and that’s vote by mail WORKS.
Lifting the restrictions on vote by mail for Covid won the election for Biden, and replacing those restrictions in 2024 lost it for Harris.
We should have 100% vote by mail in all states.
One lesson 2020 should have taught everyone and that’s vote by mail WORKS.
It was a lesson national administrators learned. That’s why it was heavily clawed back. 2020 was a big year for Popular Socialist Candidates. Neither party enjoyed a wave year that included The Squad and put a guy like Bernie Sanders in arm’s reach of Biden after Super Tuesday.
We should have 100% vote by mail in all states.
Republicans have been outspoken in opposition to mail-in voting, particularly for younger college-aged voters. But even Dems are lackluster in their support for full enfranchisement, on the grounds that higher participation tends to make controlling primaries more difficult and expensive (the NY-14 upset by AOC being a classic example).
vote by mail WORKS.
Which is why red states didn’t want to use it. Can’t stay in power if you don’t suppress votes.
