Category: Politics

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Step 1: Refuse to confirm a SCOTUS judge for a year.
Step 2: Install a judge you prefer.
Step 3: Get a SCOTUS ruling upholding a voter purge law that disproportionately impacts people who are more likely to vote for your opponents.

Voter purges aren’t about getting rid of invalid registrations. They’re about suppressing votes. The US, unfortunately, has a long history of finding ways to disenfranchise a group without explicitly identifying them. Look up where “grandfather clause” came from.

The modern version is subtler, but it works like this:

You want more people from group A to be able to vote than group B. Find some classification that applies to more members of group B than group A. Target that classification, and you change the balance of the electorate.

What Ohio did was notice that members of one major party tend to vote in every election, while members of the other tend to skip elections where they don’t feel they have a good choice.

Technically they targeted occasional voters.
Effectively they targeted a political party.

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A family member was incorrectly removed from the voting rolls. She hasn’t moved in about 7 years, hasn’t done anything to lose eligibility, and has been active in every election during that time. Even the local ones.

She cast a provisional ballot and is trying to sort out what the hell happened to her registration.

Lessons learned:

  1. Just because you HAVE registered to vote doesn’t mean the state or county hasn’t lost your info since then through a screw-up (or malice).
  2. California has a process for this on election day, but it’s better to check first.

What happened?

It’s not clear what caused her case, but she was far from the only one with similar problems in this election.

Santa Clara county dropped voters from the rolls through a broken de-duplication effort. And in Los Angeles County, over 100,000 registered voters are missing from the rosters due to a “printing glitch.”

I don’t like to be paranoid, but one of the two major political parties in the US loves suppressing voter participation in areas and demographics that lean toward the other party.

And San Jose and Los Angeles do lean toward that other party.

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Imagine a dangerous road curve. Do you blame the drivers and call it a day? After all, not everyone crashes over the edge or into oncoming traffic.

Or do you bank the turn, calculate a safe speed limit and add a railing?

It won’t stop all crashes, but it’ll reduce them.

Re-engineering the road doesn’t ignore the driver’s decisions, but it acknowledges that they don’t happen in isolation. Change the circumstances, and you change how many drivers crash and burn.

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Net Neutrality ensures your cable company can’t pick winners and losers from the sites you visit and services you use online. It was a guiding principle of the net until ISPs tried to violate it. After a long effort, the FCC stepped in and made the principle a legal requirement in the US.

The new FCC is rolling it all back, which helps no one except Comcast, AT&T, etc. Congress can stop it. The big ISPs are trying to present it as big government vs. business in order to make it partisan.

It’s not government vs. business. It’s everyone vs. your cable company.

Net Neutrality helps you, your business, your friends, your political organization, the people who make your favorite shows, games and books, literally everyone except the big ISPs. (And possibly entrenched players with deep pockets who would cheerfully let ISPs stifle any start-ups that might threaten them with *gasp* competition.)

The Senate is voting soon on a resolution to undo the FCC’s rollback and keep net neutrality alive. But those big ISPs have convinced most of the GOP senators that they’re the only side that matters. We need to convince them otherwise. Right now we need one more vote in the Senate to pass the CRA, and then we can move on to the House.

Contact your lawmakers today at Battle for the Net!

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It’s odd how some people will sling insults, threats and violence day in, day out (or support those who do), but the moment someone offers even a fraction of it in return, they call foul.

Sadly, a lot of people have convinced themselves that freedom consists mainly in the “freedom” to treat others like crap without fear of retaliation or consequence.

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Whenever I call more than one senator/representative/etc. office as part of a call-in campaign, it’s interesting to see what the staffers want in order to log the call.

  • Some want my name & full address.
  • Some want my name & zip code.
  • Some just want my zip code.
  • Some don’t ask for anything further.
  • Some interrupt me five words in to say “The senator already supports that bill.”

(You can tell when they’ve gotten a lot of calls on an issue.)

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