The Right to Vote, if you can get around the minefields of Right to Vote Chickanery.

This is part of what I'm up to:  I'm getting rid of things, and one of them is Political angst.  We have a rotten mind set that is winning and not enough power remains in the hands of the people to do much about it.  I just want to knit and look at pretty pictures, and get rid of junk.  I might keep this blog but who knows.  I'm just pretty damn angry right now, and that's never pretty.

If I were God, there would be a lot of people out in the fields eating grass like Nebuchadnezzar.

I am quoting from an article posted by Greg Palast. A cartoon is missing but you don't need it.
I got one of these cards and I don't even LIVE in either Georgia and Wisconsin. 

But, I'm in California, and when I got a new driver's license, I was asked what political party (in a check box and not entirely legal if you ask me.)  I belonged to and I refused to pick one.  This resulted in a little manila card being mailed to me some months later, that said I wasn't registered to vote, and I could NOT vote in the next election if I didn't declare.  I told the nice person that I talked to, at the number they provided, that I didn't think it was any business of the Department of Motor Vehicles WHAT political Party I was voting for.  But, I was told that I HAD TO register for a party if I wanted to vote.

What the HELL is this??????  Moscow?                                    

Back in the 1700's we had the landed gentry insert an insulting little bit of chicanery into the Constitution.  They thought they wouldn't be able to throw their weight far enough to control the ragged masses of ex-soldiers who were also given the right to vote.   Yes, it's that simple, when you view the fundamentals!

So, now we have a stacked supreme court, as well as more local lower courts, a far right white house occupant, or maybe he is really only in it to suck the treasury dry with golf RESTS (from his onerous job of chief of state?) at his own resorts... and we also have an Ossified Congress.

Aren't we the lucky ones in the world?  The UPSHOT IS.. If this can happen In California, you should make sure your state isn't doing this, sub rosa, to you.  It's hard enough to get someone decent elected here without this sort of creepy stuff going on!
The Article:

"Hunting Season on Voters Opens with Georgia & Wisconsin Purges

Mass Registration Cancellations ordered by Courts
By Greg Palast and Zach D. Roberts for the Palast Investigative Fund

Two new court decisions have blessed mass purges of voters in two swing states, Georgia and Wisconsin. This could be the launch of a new system for purging masses of voters of color and young voters that is expected to spread to 20 or more states before the Presidential election.

In Atlanta on Friday, Federal Judge Steve Jones ruled against Stacey Abrams' organization Fair Fight in its suit to immediately restore nearly 100,000 Georgians to the voter rolls. It turns out that Abrams' attorneys were not in a fair fight against this federal judge who refused to even consider if the purge would cause "irreparable harm."

Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Ratffensperger, was using a method of vote suppression, "Purge by Postcard," created by the Trump's "vote fraud" advisor, Kris Kobach of Kansas.   Under the guise of "voter list maintenance," Georgia sent out postcards, designed by Kobach, that look like cheap junk mail. When a voter fails to return the card, they lose their vote.

Yes, the cancelled voter can re-register. But, as we have uncovered in our film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, most people won't know they were pulled from the list until it's too late.

Judge Jones made the decision not to restore the Georgians to the voter rolls, calling on Fair Fight to bring its case in state court where GOP appointed judges predominate. Judge Jones did, however, express concern that the state take "additional diligent and reasonable efforts (through notices on the Secretary of State's website and press releases) to inform the general public." 

It's ludicrous for the judge to say the problem is solved by sticking this attack on voting rights on a website; as if every Georgian daily checks the website of the Secretary of State.

The Court also ruled that Fair Fight did not do enough to prove that the postcard purge was unconstitutional and unfair. However, Judge Stevens did not give Fair Fight a chance to present testimony from Palast Fund experts that the purge list was almost entirely erroneous and biased against low-income and younger voters.

The Palast Investigative Fund has given Abrams' Fair Fight the files from our six-year investigation of racist voter purges in Georgia including a list of 340,134 Georgians whom the prior Secretary of State, now-Governor Brian Kemp, wrongly removed from the voter rolls.  Abrams' non-partisan voting rights group has retained the Palast team experts to update the list—and have discovered tens of thousands more wrongly purged.  But the judge refused to take the evidence.

In an ominous note, Judge Jones cited Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion in Crawford v. Marion Cty. Election Bd., in which the Court allowed Indiana to force voters to obtain photo voter ID if they did not have a current drivers' license.

The now-deceased Justice ruled that "Ordinary and widespread burdens, such as those requiring nominal effort of everyone, are not severe." Lawyers representing the low-income plaintiffs complained that the average county office where the ID could be obtained was 17 miles from the typical resident, a major burden for the poor. But Scalia ruled that, "Seventeen miles is seventeen miles for the rich and the poor."

Maybe 17 miles was no burden for Scalia. The Judge, we discovered, drove a BMW in which he (or his chauffeur) could cover 17 miles in a few air-conditioned minutes. However, the plaintiffs noted that those seeking the voter ID did not have drivers licenses, which is why they needed non-driver ID. For non-drivers—Black, poor, students—the average trip required three busses in each direction and a full day off from work or school."

 And that, friends, is the long and the short of it.  Don't wait until the day of the election,  to find out that you are ineligible, because there are forces at work to make sure you can't vote if you are poor, young, or likely  to not want the status quo.  You'll have one hell of a fight to get them out of office.

 Ossification.... it's how we got here....