Free Press Election Reporting

ne thing – and only one thing – can save our democracy and our Earth: a unified grassroots progressive movement.

It must be hugely diverse in terms of age, race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation and more.

It must draw our national and global activist community out of its silos and into the streets and suites.

So on Monday (August 30, 1-5 p.m. Eastern Time), we are co-convening the first zoomed National Justice Roundtable, opened by the great Dolores Huerta, a monumental networking moment meant to join together activists and campaigners on a wide range of vital issues, including DC Statehood, Election Protection/Voter Engagement, environmental protection/Solartopian conversion, and Social Justice/Ending Poverty & Homelessness.

The Roundtable will host activists, campaigners, and organizers from everywhere explaining who they are, what they do, what victory will look like, and how we can get there together.

The effort by former President Donald Trump and his ardent supporters to delegitimize Arizona’s 2020 presidential election was supposed to reach a turning point during the third week of August. But as has been typical with this hyperpartisan effort, the pro-Trump contractors empowered by the state Senate’s Republicans faced another delay, ducking an anticipated reckoning with facts and critics.

For our 61st Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition zoom we note the American flight from Kabul, replicating the one from Saigon on April 30, 1975.

Has there been no learning curve?

We ask the same of REBECCA LANDAU and RAY MCCLENDON as we confront the unlikely Georgia Senatorial campaign of former NFL bust & Trump devotee Herschel Walker. 

Rebecca and Ray discuss the major post card campaign and other grassroots tactics meant to keep hold on Georgia’s US Senate seat in 2002.

With TATANKA BRICCA and others we examine the California recall; with JULIE WIENER we face the new Governor in NY.

With JOEL SEGAL we go deep into the major national summit upcoming August 30, 1-5pm eastern, to gather top national leaders & grassroots organizations around Voting Rights/Election Protection; a Green Planet;  DC Statehood; and Justice, Homelessness & Poverty.

The hand count of 2.1 million paper ballots from 2020’s presidential election in Arizona’s most populous county has reached a turning point. Inside Phoenix’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the last boxes of ballots—said by observers to hold the final votes that lifted Joe Biden to a 2020 victory in Maricopa County and statewide—have been manually tallied.

Now the process moves to assessing and working with the data from 70,000-plus hand count tally sheets; from verifying it was accurately entered into spreadsheets on computers in the arena, to the most consequential question. Are the reported results credible? If so, why? If not, why not?

The GOP Trump Cult has lost the American public.

So now it’s denying citizens of youth and color the right to vote.

That war now rages in the US Congress and in states gerrymandered for White Supremacy.

It’ll soon light up the US Supreme Court.

Whoever wins will run America for a long time to come.

It goes like this:

Yesterday (Wednesday, March 3rd) the Democrat-controlled House passed (220-210) the most sweeping omnibus voting rights bill in US history.

HR-1 codifies and protects many of the key procedures by which Americans voted in 2018 and 2020, and in the Georgia US Senate runoffs of 2021.

Those elections were swung by huge turnouts among voters of youth and color. They could cast ballots – and have them counted – thanks to protections prompted by the pandemic and by America’s powerful grassroots Election Protection movement, which has exploded since the stolen vote of Florida 2000.

Waiting in the wings is HR-4, inspired by the recently deceased Rep. John Lewis.

he Republican Party’s post 2020 state-by-state assault on voting rights has begun with the demand that all mailed-in paper ballots include photo ID.

The Jim Crow racism is beyond obvious. Instead of having to guess, mailed-in photo ID lets election officials quickly identify which ballots came from citizens of color … and then pitch them on the spot. By banning student IDs, they can also eliminate ballots coming from college campuses.

Thus the Nixon-Trump/Atwater-Rove-Bannon Republicans have picked up the KKK burning cross straight from hands of the Jim Crow Democrats.

They’re flooding at least 28 state legislatures with more than a hundred laws meant to undermine American democracy. 2020 taught them that, in Trump’s own words, if people of youth and color could cast ballots and have them reliably counted, “you’d never have another Republican elected again.”

Lawyers galore have fled the prospect of representing Donald Trump at his upcoming Impeachment Trial (the sequel).

So his pardoned consigliere Steve Bannon (who knows his Nazi history) wants The Donald to testify in person. It’s a serious Hitlerian scenario.

In 1923, Adolf tried to overthrow Bavaria’s state government. His violent rant at a Munich beerhall sparked an armed conflict that killed eight (Adolf dislocated his shoulder, then hid at a friend’s house).

His high-profile trial jump-started Hitler’s quest for fascist power.

Trump’s own “beerhall putsch” left five dead, plus two police suicides. He pledged to “be there with you” but hid like Hitler.

Trump’s paramilitary Death Squad meant to murder the likes of Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Bernie Sanders. They crushed the skull of one cop and gleefully assaulted others. Many were professionally trained and heavily armed.

Trump is currently hiding in a Floridian Elba, barely seen or heard.

For his neo-Nazi cult, Trump’s return to the global spotlight would likely trigger waves of armed assault.

Hours after President Biden declared that “democracy has prevailed” during his inaugural address, longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove urged Republicans to pressure GOP election officials and legislators to create “a model election code” to reconsider the laws surrounding 2020’s two voting options that lead to the presidential election’s record turnout.

“Republicans should also encourage GOP secretaries of state and state lawmakers to develop a model election code,” Rove wrote in a January 20 commentary for the Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Republican Future Starts Now.”

“The job of proposing electoral reforms shouldn’t be based on the unsupported claims of widespread fraud peddled by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell,” Rove continued. “Instead, the goal should be to suggest measures that restore public confidence in our democracy. How do states with extensive mail-in and early voting like Florida and Texas get it right?”

Our shredded nation slowly breathes again as the unelected orange menace leaves us at last. If you somehow feel your mood lightening and your state of mind improving, here’s why:

This twice-impeached viral dung heap who needlessly killed 400k-plus Americans, along with 13 federal prisoners he outright murdered at the last minute, is actually on his way out.

And we are all exhausted!!!

Donald Trump was NOT our worst president (that was Woodrow Wilson).

But Trump’s lethal legacy includes: