Election Issues

What if the AI bots figure that out? I can imagine R2D2 and Amazon warehouse robo-pickers trundling across the Pettus Bridge in Selma, chanting, “No vote, no work!”  

If the robots go on strike, we can survive the loss of same-day delivery of pantyhose and air-fryers – or maybe not. But after two weeks, humans will begin to starve. Worse, millions will go crazy with the lack of entertainment options and unfilled orders of anti-depressants.

Now the truth is, I would vote for a robot over JD Vance. And let’s face it, humans haven’t done such a good job of picking our presidents.  

And we also have to consider the possibility that they are already taking over electoral politics. Is there any indication at all that Gavin Newsom is a human being? Ask Siri and she barely stifles a giggle.

Democracy, after all, granting the vote to every dickwad, MAGA-naut, crypto-Nazi and cryptocurrency grifter, is a terrible method for choosing our leaders.

Maybe it’s time to turn over these choices to G.O.D., that is the GenerativeAI Overseer of Democracy.

We need your help to Stop Senate Bill 153, an attack on Ohio voters' rights and our democratic process.

This March, we commemorated the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when voting rights leader John Lewis of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was beaten nearly to death by cops and Klansmen on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.  

The youngest marcher, Lynda Blackmon Lowery, was beaten so badly she was put in a hearse to take to the morgue.

But when the unconscious Lynda woke up in the hearse, she jumped up, ran out, and ran straight across the bridge into the teargas and Klansmen.

This is a press release from Smart Elections, published on Substack and elsewhere- editor.

Carry Smith wrote her PhD thesis on the Voting Rights Act and challenges to the right to vote in Georgia.

Now dig this: Smith, the expert on challenges to voting rights, lost her vote because a Republican vigilante challenged her registration—along with 900 other Savannah voters—until she was forced to make an appearance proving her right to vote at a meeting of the Chatham County (Savannah) elections board. 

Half of the others challenged still lost their vote in this do-or-die battleground.

Adrian Consonery Jr. was also challenged, in this case, by officials in Cobb County, Georgia. The elections officers claimed that the signature on his drivers license “didn’t match” the signature on his ballot. Were these local pols forgery specialists?  No, they were Republicans. No problem, they told Consonery, a student in the middle of his finals; all he had to do was drive to their offices, eight hours away, and re-sign his ballot.

This Sunday night, Donald Trump intends to recreate one of the ugliest nights in the history of New York City. 

On February 20, 1939, right-wing American Christian Nationalists rented Madison Square Garden to hold a massive pro-Fascist, white supremacy rally. It was a sold-out crowd of 20,000 patriotic Americans, complete with flags, our National Anthem, and a 50-foot portrait of George Washington hanging from the rafters. World War II would start in 6 months, but the crowd ate up the racism, the attacks on the press and the hatred toward the Jews. Applause! Laughter! God Bless America!

Early voting’s underway. My voting site is the Willye White Park fieldhouse, a mile north of where I live — a place I have enormous affection for, even though I only ever go there for one reason, every two years or so: to vote.

It feels like a sacred ritual — a feeling that goes back to the late ’60s. As I recently wrote: “The first election in which I was old enough to vote (the voting age was then 21) was Nixon vs. Humphrey. I was a fervid anti-Vietnam war zealot and chose to skip the election, thinking there was no real difference between the candidates. But I quickly began regretting that decision as the Nixon presidency claimed hold of the country; I vowed never to skip another election . . .”

Think you’re registered? Think again, Chuck-o. I was at a polling station in Atlanta, filming one Black person after another getting the heave-ho from the poll, told they couldn’t vote, including Christine Jordan, 92-years old in a walker. They literally kicked her out into a storm. Her granddaughter was distraught, trying to speak through her tears.

A Florida resident named Isaac Menasche received a home visit this September from a police officer asking whether he’d signed a petition for a ballot measure.

The petition, which Menasche had indeed signed, was for a November initiative overturning a strict abortion ban that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed last year. Now the governor is attempting to discredit those signatures using state-funded cops. According to the Tampa Bay Times, state law enforcement officers have visited the homes of other signers as well.