Even though we’ve had to adapt to a socially distanced DNC National Convention, the DNC has developed a virtual experience that will make it easier for more of us to participate.
Here’s a link to the 2020 Democratic National Convention Watch Kit:
A MONMOUTH University poll released Wednesday found that only 16 percent of voters cast ballots by mail in recent elections, yet 51 percent say it is at least somewhat likely that they will do so in November. As the covid-19 pandemic continues, more people will conclude absentee voting is the safest option. And they will be right.
But much of the country is not ready for a surge of absentee voters. Federal leaders must help immediately — or explain why they instead prefer an unsafe and chaotic November election.
Ill-preparedness could produce electoral calamity. Sixteen states require absentee voters to have a valid excuse. All of these states should declare that coronavirus fears qualify as one. But that’s just a first step. Serving millions of new absentee voters will be a massive logistical challenge for most states. Continue reading.
Trump loves to spread conspiracy theories about nonexistent voter fraud — but he’s shutting up about evidence of actual voter fraud in North Carolina that may have helped a Republican candidate.
Evidence is mounting that voter fraud may have benefitted a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina.
Yet despite Trump’s obsession with voter fraud, he is suddenly silent now that his own party — and a candidate he personally endorsed — might be in trouble for it.
Mark Harris declared victory after vote tallies showed him leading Democrat Dan McCready by a narrow 905-vote margin in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District.
People in line outside a polling station located at Trump Place, November 8, 2016 in New York. Credit: Bryan R. Smith, AFP, Getty Images
A Comprehensive Survey of Voter Suppression and Other Election Day Problems
Introduction and summary
During the 2018 midterm elections, voter participation was more than 10 percentage points higher than it was in the 2014 midterm elections, demonstrating Americans’ demand for change and increased enthusiasm for exercising their civic duty to vote.1 That said, nearly 120 million eligible Americans did not participate in the November elections.2
Widespread voter suppression—particularly against historically marginalized groups—is a reoccurring problem in the United States. Each election cycle, untold numbers of eligible Americans are prevented from voting due to barriers in the voter registration process, restrictions on casting ballots, and discriminatory and partisan-rigged district maps. Voter suppression measures can differ by state and even by individual county. And while some voter suppression measures actively seek to discriminate against certain groups, others result from innocent administrative errors and glitches. Regardless of its form or intent, however, voter suppression is relentlessly effective in preventing voting-eligible Americans from contributing to the electoral process.
This year—perhaps uncoincidentally—severe voter suppression occurred in states with highly competitive political races, including Georgia, Texas, Florida, and North Dakota. Policies and practices that limit participation by even a few thousand votes can mean the difference between victory and defeat in competitive elections. When voters cast a ballot, they expect their votes to matter in choosing representatives who are responsive to, reflective of, and accountable to the communities they represent. Yet when voter suppression occurs, election results may be less reflective of constituents’ actual will.
This is a scandal for anyone who cares about free and fair elections in America.
Democrats dominated the midterm elections this year and took back the most House seats they have since Watergate.
But the news was also full of reports about Americans facing long lines and broken voting machines — or even being unable to cast a ballot at all because of Republican-passed laws that make it harder to vote, especially in minority communities.
And a new post-election poll includes a shocking indication of just how bad this problem was: At least 10 percent of people who didn’t vote say that either voter suppression tactics or voter ID laws got in the way when they tried to vote.
President Trump is seething, publicly and privately, almost two weeks after midterm elections in which he at first believed he had scored a moral victory.
Democrats have run up the score in the House of Representatives, and the political world has turned its focus to ominous signs for the president’s reelection hopes. In response, Trump has hit out on Twitter, in impromptu comments to reporters and in a Sunday TV interview.
Trump is making up wild conspiracy theories after GOP’s massive midterm defeat.
Trump is now ranting incoherently about mythical fake voters in a desperate attempt to blame anyone but himself for massive Republican losses on Election Day.
Without any evidence whatsoever, Trump declared in an Oval Office interview that Republicans lost because some voters put on disguises to vote more than once.
“Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again,” Trump told the Daily Caller, a far-right outlet with ties to white nationalists.
The migrant caravan now consists of nearly five thousand people, about a third of whom are under the age of eighteen. Credit: Adriana Zehbrauskas, The New Yorker
Since last week’s midterm elections, Donald Trump has spoken less frequently about the migrant caravan, but the subject is still plainly on his mind. On Friday, he signed a Presidential proclamation (“Addressing Mass Migration Through the Southern Border of the United States”), which suspended the possibility of asylum for anyone entering the country between officially designated ports of entry. By U.S. and international law, migrants are allowed to seek asylum “whether or not” they do so at an official checkpoint along the border; Trump’s measure, which was immediately challenged by advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, aims to override explicit provisions of an existing federal statute in order to thwart the entry of tens of thousands of Central American migrants. As Lee Gelernt, the A.C.L.U.’s lead litigator in the case, told me, “It would mean the President could literally sit down with a copy of the immigration act that Congress wrote and cross out any provision he didn’t like.”
The night before the President issued his proclamation, members of the caravan gathered in Mexico City, where they’d paused for a week of rest, to vote on a final destination for the group. Of the big border cities in northern Mexico, Tijuana was considered the safest—the route skirts territory controlled by violent cartels—but it was also the farthest away. The caravan now consists of nearly five thousand people, about a third of whom are under the age of eighteen. An estimated three hundred of them are younger than five. Because of the punishing physical toll of the trip, the group has tried, with mixed success, to arrange van and truck transportation the rest of the way. Hundreds of them have either turned back or have been deported by Mexican authorities, while some twenty-six hundred others, according to the Mexican government, have received temporary legal status to remain in Mexico.
The relative success of the group, coupled with the continued desperation of residents in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, has prompted a string of smaller caravans, consisting of several hundred people each, to travel in its wake. In recent years, under pressure from President Barack Obama, Mexico has redoubled its efforts to intercept Central Americans heading north, earning its own reputation for aggressive immigration enforcement. At the same time, the U.S. has invested about seven hundred million dollars in an aid package, called the Alliance for Prosperity, to try to address the corruption and rampant crime that are seen as the root causes of emigration from the region. “The caravans are not the problem,” Tonatiuh Guillén López, the incoming head of Mexico’s National Migration Institute, said this week. “The issue is the movements we do not see, those who are not in the caravan, that is the big issue.”
Florida is holding recounts in the state’s tight races for Florida’s governor, U.S. senator and agriculture commissioner, as President Trump attacked the move. (Reuters)
FORT LAUDERDALE, FL — Republicans are sowing skepticism about the electoral process in states with votes that are too close to call, echoing President Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and suggesting that election officials should jettison the common practice of completing vote counts after Election Day.
Nowhere is the effort more aggressive than in Florida, where Gov. Rick Scott is tapping the powers of his administration to defend his slender lead in the U.S. Senate race and accusing Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of “trying to steal an election.” Without evidence, Trump on Twitter claimed ballots were “massively infected” in Florida and said the recount should halt — though it is mandated by state law and overseas military ballots aren’t due until Friday.
What appears to be a coordinated Republican strategy to undercut post-election vote counting is also evident in New Mexico, where Rep. Yvette Herrell (R) is refusing to concede her race to Democrat Xochitl Torres Small after absentee ballots changed her status from winner to loser, and in Arizona, where the National Republican Senatorial Committee contended a county election official had been “using his position to cook the books” for Democrat Kyrsten Sinema.
A MONMOUTH University 
