Free Press Election Reporting
The mass marches against racism and police brutality have changed us all.
But they’re not enough.
All these gatherings need voter registration tables with detailed information on how to save the election currently scheduled for November 3.
Too many uprisings have shaken the nation, then faded away.
We all must vote. But this year, there’s much more to do.
Stripped voter rolls, a sabotaged vote by mail system, a flipped vote count … these chokeholds can kill American democracy. Come November 3, unless we act, we can’t breathe.
Millions of election protection activists must work every precinct, county, and state election center. Grassroots networks must protect how this election will be conducted. Our very survival depends on making sure there’s a national vote this fall that truly reflects the will of the American people.
That means dealing with 2020’s “election protection trinity”:
Registration rolls
Sixteen million Americans have been stripped from our voter rolls. We need to get them re-registered.
The mass marches against racism and police brutality have changed us all.
But they’re not enough.
All these gatherings need voter registration tables with detailed information on how to save the election currently scheduled for November 3.
Too many uprisings have shaken the nation, then faded away.
We all must vote. But this year, there’s much more to do.
Stripped voter rolls, a sabotaged vote by mail system, a flipped vote count … these chokeholds can kill American democracy. Come November 3, unless we act, we can’t breathe.
Millions of election protection activists must work every precinct, county, and state election center. Grassroots networks must protect how this election will be conducted. Our very survival depends on making sure there’s a national vote this fall that truly reflects the will of the American people.
That means dealing with 2020’s “election protection trinity”:
Registration rolls
Sixteen million Americans have been stripped from our voter rolls. We need to get them re-registered.
Vote by Mail will decide the 2020 election. Trump and 50,000 of his armed backers will try to say otherwise.
But VBM could turn us forever from hackable touch screens to paper ballots. To make that happen, election protection activists must overcome Vote by Mail’s many vulnerabilities to make mail-in paper ballots an instrument of real democracy.
The odds are long, but the chances are real.
To follow an ongoing compendium of stories on this election as they unfold, go to the Election Protection portal at the Free Press website. You can also join our national COVID-19 Emergency Zoom call on election protection this Tuesday 5:00-6:30 p.m. Eastern Time (2:00-3:30 Pacific Time) by writing to me for the link.
In the Big Picture, Trump loudly hates VBM. But his followers LOVE it in states they control.
The 2020 TrumpVirus pandemic that is killing so many of us today has deep roots in World War I and the Woodrow Wilson Influenza that killed 50,000,000 back then.
Along with mass death, both viruses have brought fascism to America. To avoid a full-on replay, we need to know how.
Like today’s TrumpVirus catastrophe, the global pandemic of 102 years ago was almost entirely avoidable. It was not an innocent accident or Act of Nature. It spread from the fascist decisions of one man: Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson was elected president in 1912 as a liberal democrat. He sold himself as a man of peace. But he was (like Donald Trump) a KKK-supporting White Supremacist. In 1915, for no good reason, he sent US troops crashing into Mexico City to “teach a lesson” to “our little brown brothers.”
The 12-18 states that will decide the presidency this fall are already being primed for voter suppression and election theft by the Trump GOP. Our ability to overcome will decide the fate of the Earth.
Donald Trump is in the White House because in 2016 the vote count was stolen in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania (plus, most likely, North Carolina and Florida). Hillary Clinton won the election nationwide by 2.8 million votes. But she and her corporate Democrats did and said nothing about the theft of the Electoral College in those key states.
At great personal expense the Green Party’s Jill Stein did go into WI, MI and PA with Bob Fitrakis and other activist/attorneys to demand recounts. All three states showed massive fraud on Trump’s behalf. Clinton was almost certainly the rightful winner of their Electoral votes—-and thus the presidency. But she killed the recounts, then attacked Stein and the Greens.
This week’s astonishing people’s victory in Wisconsin has shattered the myth of an unbeatable Trump dictatorship.
A gerrymandered legislature and the Trumpite US Supreme Court failed to steal an election they were heavily favored to win.
The big upset victory put liberal challenger Jill Korofsky on to the Wisconsin’s supreme court. It has upended all the assumptions about November 2020.
It means people power can beat dirty tricks even when perpetrated by a gerrymandered legislature and a corrupt US Supreme Court.
Let’s count the ways:
X In 2016 Wisconsin’s vicious labor-hating Gov. Scott Walker used a wide range of dirty tricks to turn Wisconsin for Donald Trump. Green attorney Robert Fitrakis found questionable voting machine software and other problems that made the official vote count highly dubious. (Bob was told by a ranking Trump insider that Walker stole at least five elections).
X But as in Michigan and Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton—-who won nationwide by nearly three million popular votes—- refused to support legal challenges that might’ve kept Trump out of the White House.
We’re all now party to the most critical election protection debate in U.S. history, one that has entered the proposed Senate coronavirus stimulus package to the tune of $400 million, which may be just a fraction of what’s really needed.
The fight is over how the 2020 election could be conducted if the coronavirus pandemic still rages on November 3. And if Donald Trump will try to cancel it altogether.
The Constitution says nothing about the possibility of a president canceling a national election. It’s never happened, not even in 1864, in the middle of our Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln beat George McClellan. (McClellan was Lincoln’s first Union Army commander, and ran as a Democrat against the war. Had Lincoln lost at Gettysburg, he would’ve lost the election.)
Section 1: On Friday, October 1, every registered voter in America will be mailed a paper ballot, as coordinated by the individual state and local election boards.
Section 2: Monday, October 12, every state will open geographically diverse certified voting centers throughout the state in order to ensure a safe, easy, and transparent election process.
Section 3: The addresses of the voting centers will be widely published on the internet and in local newspapers, magazines, and other print, television, radio and social media.
Section 4: The voting centers will be large, and located in safe, well-known, well-lit, easily accessible locations, with ample parking and certified handicapped access.
The federal government, upon enactment of this Act, will work with all 50 states to ensure safe, fair, and transparent elections; and appropriate all federal funds necessary to the states for an expedited and effective implementation of a safe and easy voting process herein:
Section 1: On Friday, October 1, every registered voter in America will be mailed a paper ballot, as coordinated by the individual state and local election boards.
Section 2: Monday, October 12, every state will open geographically diverse certified voting centers throughout the state in order to ensure a safe, easy, and transparent election process.
Section 3: The addresses of the voting centers will be widely published on the internet and in local newspapers, magazines, and other print, television, radio and social media.
Section 4: The voting centers will be large, and located in safe, well-known, well-lit, easily accessible locations, with ample parking and certified handicapped access.
Yes We Can is to be congratulated for taking on the Franklin County Democratic Party machine again, though the Party machine under the control of Boss Ginther and his sidekick Shannon Hardin, fight any new voices and ideas with all their might. Yes We Can exists because the Republican Party has clearly given up contesting elections in Ohio’s capital city. Or maybe they determined they don’t need to oppose the Franklin County Dems, whose Republican-lite policies are so pro-elite and the “unelected, but appointed” Columbus City Council members are all owned and operated by wealthy developers. Next mayoral election, Yes We Can should run a mayoral candidate to oppose the anointed one and bring out some new voters.
Plenty of new ideas are needed locally as the city has 22 percent of African American families living in poverty, Ohio is one of the top five states in human trafficking cases, and the state is ranked third in the nation for reports of hate crimes.