Sometimes voting is a privilege...

missgingerlee:

Trigger warning for domestic violence/domestic violence situations.

emmawearscombatboots:

I cannot vote because I am a survivor of domestic violence.

I have to keep my address confidential. You have to register with a residential address and voting records are PUBLIC.

If I were to register to vote, that would mean putting my address out there and putting my self in danger. My abusive…

Y’all, read this. THIS is a very, very good explanation of why it is dangerous for me to vote. 

(Actually, if you just change out ‘ex-boyfriend’ to ‘former friend’, you’ve got a pretty good peek into my daily life & thought process. Simple shit becomes risky. It’s exhausting, dealing with it every single day.)

Just gonna post this again.

(via sarahlee310)

Source: emmawearscombatboots

Three-fifths of Milwaukee's black voters have vanished without a trace.

robot-heart-politics:

steviemcfly:

The voter purges have resulted in roughly 60% of black voters in that city no longer being registered. That’s 41% of the city’s total votes in 2008. Some perspective on it from reddit user BiscuitCrisps:

You know, back when I lived in a majority-black voter ward, I got purged from the voter rollsevery single year. And every year, I had to trudge back to the registrar of voters, and show them a driver’s license and two months of utility bills to prove that I still lived where I was registered. It’s why I didn’t vote from 1999-2001. I just got sick of re-proving my residence over and over.

My first reaction was: “Fucking incompetent bureaucratic machine”

Then, I moved to a majority-white voter ward … I registeredonce. I haven’t been purged once in the past seven years.

I used to say: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”.

I’m now inclined to chalk the purging up to malice.

This whole thing is fucked.

If you can’t beat ‘em, purge ‘em.

Anyone else struck by the “3/5s” of it all?  

(via sarahlee310)

Source: steviemcfly

Ohio's Secretary of State Jon Husted must appear in federal court to explain delay in restoring early voting | cleveland.com

A federal judge ordered Secretary of State Jon Husted on Wednesday to personally appear next week at a hearing about his reluctance to restore early voting the weekend before the Nov. 6 election.

Judge Peter Economus, whose ruling Husted has resisted, scheduled the hearing on Sept. 13 in the U.S. District Court in Columbus.

Economus set the hearing after President Barack Obama’s re-election team filed a motion Wednesday requesting the court to enforce its order to restore in-person early voting during the final three days before the presidential election.

Ohio suspends election board members who pushed for extra voting hours | The Raw Story

On her show Monday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow talked with two Democratic election board members in Ohio who were suspended after they pushed to get extra voting hours on the weekends. Dennis Lieberman and Tom Ritchie faced an administrative hearing Monday for refusing to comply with an order from Secretary of State Jon Husted. They told Maddow that having voting hours on the weekends was crucial in their county, noting approximately one-third of those who voted early in the last election voted on a weekend.

How the GOP Is Resegregating the South

And it’s not just happening in North Carolina. In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats.

“What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.”

The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.

(via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)

Source: azspot

Hispanics Are The New Negro

tranzient:

generalbriefing:

Stephen Colbert: You have said that Hispanics are the new negro.

Scott Douglas: Yes, based on treatment, because it’s just like the Jim Crow laws. Where arbitrary laws, capricious in their application gives anybody the power over you, to abuse you, to hurt you, to harm you.

Last night on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert interviewed Scott Douglas III, executive director of the Greater Birmingham Ministries. Douglas is a plaintiff in the ACLU and a coalition of civil rights groups’ lawsuit challenging H.B. 56, Alabama’s draconian anti-immigrant law.

i wasn’t aware there was an “old negro”. here i was thinking it was continuous throughout history.

*sips tea*

Exactly. I appreciate the argument being made, but it could certainly be made without trotting out the tired idea of “the new black”.  

Source: goodreasonnews