I said in a recent post that the U.S. government needs to be getting off their collective asses and making sure that mail-in voting is available to every voter in every state. I questioned what, if anything, was being done toward that goal. Well guess what? You won’t be surprised to know that the Idiot-in-Chief has spoken out against this very thing!
“Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”
BULLSHIT.
The reason it ‘doesn’t work out well for republicans’ is that the only reason they win at the polls is because minority and poor voters are kept away from the polls by such disenfranchising measures as early poll closings, closing of polls in poor and minority neighborhoods, restrictive voter ID laws and other tricks of the trade. If every eligible voter is allowed to cast a vote on November 3rd, Trump will go down in flames, as he should.
Listen to what he said at his Tuesday circus act …
“Mail ballots, they cheat, people cheat. Mail ballots are very dangerous thing for this country because they’re cheaters. They go and collect them. They’re fraudulent in many cases. The mail ballots are corrupt, in my opinion. You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room signing ballots all over the place.”
If this jackass is allowed to have his way, we are doomed. Another four years of Donald Trump will relegate this nation to being called a “once democratic-republic turned autocracy”. If you don’t vote in November, my guess is that you will never get the chance to vote again.
Let’s take a look at some facts, instead of listening to an un-educated moron, shall we?
Multiple studies over the years have confirmed that there is no widespread voter fraud in this country. Additionally, Democratic and Republican state officials routinely oversee elections where millions of people vote-by-mail without systematic problems. An expansive study in 2017 from the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning think tank, found that the rate of voter fraud in the United States was somewhere between 0.00004% and 0.0009%.
Voting-by-mail has become increasingly popular in US federal elections, and nearly a quarter of all voters cast mail ballots in 2016, according to the Election Assistance Commission. This year, the solid Republican state of Utah will conduct all-mail elections, which undercuts Trump’s claims.
In fact, the most recent example of absentee ballot fraud involved republican operatives in North Carolina who rigged an election for the House of Representatives in 2018. And … Trump cast an absentee ballot last month in the Florida Republican primary, per local reports. Asked about this contradiction, Trump said it was okay “because I’m allowed to” vote by mail. Say WHAT??? So, if he’s allowed to, why not the rest of us???
In Wisconsin yesterday, thousands of voters were not able to vote because of republican game-playing. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers had tried to postpone the states primaries and a large number of local elections, as most other states have done, but the state legislature, then the state Supreme Court, and finally the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the action. Worse yet, mail-in ballots were not sent to voters in time, and the U.S. Supreme Court blocked an action that would have allowed voters who had not yet received their mail-in ballots extra time. Only 5 polling places were open instead of the usual 180, and the people who did risk their lives to do their civic duty waited for hours in long lines. 
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned that their ruling …
“… will result in massive disenfranchisement. Either they will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others’ safety, or they will lose their right to vote, through no fault of their own.”
How many people in Wisconsin were kept from voting by republicans afraid of losing an election? Thousands at least. Is this what we want to see happen on a national scale in November? It may well be what the republicans want, but it damn sure is not what the majority of people in this nation desire. It is not what the Founding Fathers intended in 1787 when they wrote that document called the U.S. Constitution, which has largely been shredded, trampled and burned over the last three years.
Folks, there are just under 7 months, exactly 209 days left until we are to go to the polls to elect a new president. We must elect a new president, for the current one belongs on the ash heap in the annals of history. And yet … if our elected representatives don’t get off their collective patooties and ensure that every eligible voter in every state has the ability to cast a vote by mail … we are doomed. Time for phone calls, emails, letters to the editor in your local paper. I know, you’re tired of it all and so am I, but this is too important to ignore. The futures of your children and grandchildren depend on this.
Voting is a privilege that not everybody in the world has. Appreciate it, please, don’t throw it away.
I had hoped that former White House counsel Don McGahn had conjones. I hoped he was a man of honour and integrity. All indications were that he cared about the letter of the law, for he resigned his position rather than do Trump’s bidding which would have meant breaking the law. A sign of an honourable man. But I was wrong. McGahn is just as afraid of Trump as are the rest of his minions.
You remember Kris Kobach, right? Well, perhaps I’ll just briefly refresh your memory, for he has been out of the news for a while now. Kris Kobach is the former Secretary of State of Kansas who was named the vice chairman of Trump’s short-lived, ignominious ‘Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity’ which was a rather draconian committee attempting to prove that there had been massive voter fraud in the 2016 elections. The truth was that the only election irregularities were on the part of Trump and his ‘people’, including his Russian buddies. Kobach demanded that the states turn over all information on all voters, including private information such as address and social security numbers. Most states flat-out refused, there was no evidence of voter fraud, and the commission simply fell apart.
The census is about more than simply counting how many people are in the country. It is also the source for the demographics that are used by the government to make policy decisions. And, it determines such things as how many electoral votes each state gets, how may representatives each state will have in Congress, and where district lines will be drawn. Therefore, it is pretty important to have accuracy in the census. Though it is impossible to ever have complete accuracy, the Census Bureau strives for the highest possible degree of accuracy … we hope.
Trump has already paved the way for curtailment of voter’s rights with his false, unsubstantiated claims of massive voter fraud in the 2016 elections. He is also said to be considering an executive order to add a question to the census form about immigration/citizenship status, which would reduce the number of responses from minorities, fearing what the government might do with the information. At the same time, his budget calls for an inadequate 7% increase for the Census Bureau at a time when they bureau must hire tens of thousands of people and open dozens of field offices nationwide. And we cannot forget his ‘Advisory Commission on Election Integrity’ which has been the source of much controversy and is currently facing a number of lawsuits after attempting to collect the private information, including Social Security numbers and criminal conviction data of registered voters.
The photo on the left, of course, is the iconic Empire State Building in New York City, and the crude sketch on the right was done in 1995 by none other than … {drumroll 🥁 } … Donald J. Trump. The sketch is 12” by 9”, and he originally created it for a charity auction in Florida when he opened his Mar-a-Lago estate as a private club. The sketch sold for less than $100.
Now, when it was discovered that Kushner had failed to make note of many foreign contacts on his security clearance form, he immediately said it was an error of omission by his staff. I wonder how he will spin this one, for I hardly think he can blame it on his staff. Perhaps on the day he registered to vote, he was having one of those days where he was “in touch with his feminine side”?
Thus far, Trump has not proposed such a move, but if he gets wind that half of his party would support it, I would not be surprised to see him begin thinking along those lines.
“We the People” have the constitutional right to be able to vote without undue obstacles, put in our way, to block some of us from exercising this precious right. It appears that republican lawmakers and their allies have been specifically designing strategies to do just that.
President Trump gestures to Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, as he speaks to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office 
Filosofa's Word 