Calling Out to the Florida Groups That Get Amendments On Ballot: I Got Ideas.

Okay, so I wanna get three amendments on the ballot for 2016 here in Florida.

• First, if we can get an amendment that requires any Florida election for local, state, and federal offices to remain open for balloting until at least 55 to 60 percent of registered voters can submit their ballots.  Voter turnout sucks otherwise.
• Second, if we can get an amendment that puts a None Of The Above option on each local and state elected office, and require that if the NOTA gets the most votes that a special run-off for that office be held with brand new candidates (and that NOTA remains on the ballot even for the do-overs just in case the parties decide to try to nominate someone worse).
• Third, if we can get an amendment that guarantees every legal resident of Florida has a right to vote unimpeded by these -ssholes running around screaming 'voter fraud' when there's no f-cking voter fraud.  Okay, so the wording on this one needs to get cleaned up a bit...

It's doable under the Initiative Petition system.  The state allows an outside group - an established non-profit that can hold petition drives - to gather a certain number of signatures across the state (has to be state-wide, not all from one area) within a set time period (deadlines are a b-tch) for submission and approval by the state's State dept. (with approval/oversight by the courts to ensure the wording is easy-to-read and fits within legal parameters).

Thing is, I'm looking for the groups who are most capable and active in getting these initiative petitions going.  I think I find them on the websites but when I try to contact or send email, there's no reply back.

I tried FIVOrg but haven't heard back... if they emailed me I hope it didn't get filtered to the Spam folder, lemme go check...  And for that "None of the Above" option there was a Floridians for Political Choice group from more than a decade ago, but that's CLOSED probably defunct...

I might not be looking in the right places.

So if any of these petition groups are surfing the Intertubes and they come across this blog entry, can I just say DUDES AND DUDETTES CALL ME I GOTZ IDEAS.

If not, I'm gonna need to see if any of the kids I knew from high school that became lawyers can help out set up a PAC...

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Update on the Gerrymander Court Decision, and How It Affects Voting for Florida

The judge in that gerrymandering case is ordering the state legislature to convene a Special Session to redraw the illegal districts into something legal by August 15th.  I thought he'd wait but apparently he didn't: worse, it took him a month to make up his mind to order this done.

Because what this does is throw the entire voting calender into chaos:

...The practical effect is that lawmakers must convene a special session in the next two weeks to meet the map-fixing deadline. Lewis would then decide when and if special elections would be held for the districts whose boundaries have been modified.

Candidates would then have to qualify again, election officials would have to modify precinct maps, and the costs of the elections could rise...

While I'm all for making the Florida Legislature's collective life miserable for making these illegal gerrymanders in the first place, I dunno if this is the way to go. What's going to happen is that the election cycle - the primary at the end of this month, and the general election in November - is going to get thrown off-track. By messing with the dates we can have these elections, we're risking the likelihood most residents won't know when to really vote.

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Voter turnout has been, continues to be, the great unspoken scandal of our age.  It's not voter ID fraud that's the problem, it's the 39 percent turnout of the extremists.  We've got this high population count in Florida - 18 million give or take 450,000 illegals - and 11 million registered voters making it 61 percent of the residents able to vote... and then just 5 million or so actually showing up to vote, with 6 million sitting at home for some reason or another.

Why that 6 million no-shows?  Partly due to apathy, partly due to disgust with the ballot being filled with unwanted choices, a good amount due to people just unable to get in line at their precinct to vote because of work or family or other conflicts of time.

A lot of our poor turnout is due to confusion over where and when to vote.  Our system of using precincts as polling places spreads out across the counties to where people are uncertain which is theirs to use.  One street can get assigned to a polling spot five miles away, yet those homes could be five blocks away from another polling spot for a neighboring precinct.  And our rules make it so that you HAVE to vote at that precinct, due to how districts at all levels are drawn out.  The most frustrating thing for voters is to show up at a precinct only to be told they got to keep moving up-road to ANOTHER place they might not be able to find...

The "when to vote" is the other sticking point: people still can't get used to the idea that elections can be held on a Tuesday, in the middle of the week.  There may have been reasons to doing that back in the 1800s, but in this day and age there's little reason to keep doing that.  It doesn't help that primaries are held inconsistently over election cycles: while the general elections tend to be the first Tuesday of November, primaries are sometimes held in March... or August... nowadays January for the Presidential primary... maybe May... sometimes Y.

Forcing a delay on this year's primaries and general election, at least for the congressional offices, is going to make it harder to get the voters fully informed on when they'll need to get their votes in.  It'll make it harder in terms of knowing or learning who's on the ballot anymore.  It also depends on how disruptive the redesigning of the gerrymandered districts will get: It will clearly affect all of the connected congressional districts - about 7 or 8 of them - and could conceivably cascade across the entire state anyway.

While normally that might be a good thing - fix ALL the districts to be fairly based on population density and not partisan protection - this might not be the time to do it.  It may be better to wait after this election is done, and then get the districts redrawn so that by 2016's election cycle they'll be in place and the county elections offices are prepped and ready.

Of course, we voters can make this all academic by keeping alert, checking our county elections office websites for updated information, and especially by GETTING THE VOTE OUT AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE so that we don't have to worry about wrong precincts or getting lost or not showing up on time.

That said, here's the current Early Voting directory by county.  I know where to go for Polk County now... and I'm still miffed at Pinellas County only having three (THREE?!) early voting polling spots, none of them in North Pinellas.  Dudes.  DUDES!  You got how many people in Tarpon Springs, Palm Harbor, Ozona, Crystal Beach, East Lake, Oldsmar, Dunedin that have to drive down to Clearwater?!  Just find a spot in Tarpon or Palm Harbor or Oldsmar to host and GET IT DONE.  Sheesh.  I swear, growing up in North Pinellas felt like being in Siberia cut off from the rest of the county... and we're one of the smallest geographic counties in the state (with the most population!).  Mutter grumble getting old grumble etc.

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Meanwhile in Florida, Another Gripe About Gerrymanders

(update: hello to the readers visiting via Crooks and Liars.)
I mentioned on my last post I had several things worth blogging, and this was one: a follow-up of sorts from the Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano about the gerrymander trial and a realization he made about how screwed up our electioneering is:

...Nearly one-third of the candidates for 140 Senate and House seats are running unopposed. You think that sounds bad? Pffft, that just scratches the surface.

Dozens of other races offer only the appearance of competition with write-in, third-party and no-party affiliated candidates on board. No disrespect intended to those folks, but it has been decades since anyone booked passage to Tallahassee via that route.

All of which brings us to the bottom line:

There are a grand total of 57 races out of 140 that include both a Republican and a Democrat. Fifty-stinking-seven!

That means nearly 60 percent of the legislative races in November are slam dunks. And only a handful of the other 40 percent will actually turn out to be competitive.

In other words, your American Idol vote will probably carry more weight...

This is what gerrymandering does in the pursuit of creating "safe" districts. Enough of these districts are so skewed to favor one party that the opposing major party doesn't even want to waste the resources to challenge the incumbent that's usually sitting in said district.

More from Romano:

The maps are drawn to have predetermined outcomes in elections. Republicans have given themselves enough safe districts to ensure they will remain in power, and they have given Democrats just enough safe districts to keep them from complaining.

So who loses?

You.

Instead of getting multiple choices of candidates who have a legitimate chance to win, you are stuck with take-it-or-leave-it elections.

The bigger problem is you have already made it clear you were tired of this sham. Florida voters overwhelmingly approved constitutional amendments that forbid the Legislature from just this kind of district stacking when maps were redrawn for 2012.

And yet the problem is only getting worse.

In 2010, the last election under the old maps, 51.7 percent of the races failed to field both a Republican and a Democrat. In 2012, the first year of new maps, that percentage rose to 54.3. Right now, barring anyone dropping out, it's 59.2 percent.

So that means the legislative leaders who were specifically instructed to redraw maps to make them more competitive may have actually made them more lopsided.

Which is easy to believe if you listened to the testimony of deleted emails, consultants being invited to the table and a phantom map falsely submitted under a student's name...

Just on those points alone, the judge overseeing this case ought to dump the GOP's redistricting maps (and for good measure hold each of the con artists responsible for it for contempt).

Romano notes how the general electorate has grown disgusted by the gerrymandering, about how state amendments forcing better redistricting were passed in popular referendum, but that's not the only emotion these gerrymandered maps create.

These maps also create disillusionment and disinterest.  When voters tend to get confronted with elections that have no consequences or value, when voters are pretty much told they have no choices for them to make, they tune out and refuse to show up.  Voter turnout for these mid-term elections - where nothing is at stake in 60 percent of the districts - is hideous, barely topping out over 39 percent and sometimes barely getting over a quarter of all registered voters (when real competitive races take place like the Presidential ones, voter turnout at least breaks over the 55-60 percent mark).

At best 39 percent turnout, people.  That's not a majority of registered voters.  That's not enough residents in this state electing people to office who have the power to dictate business regulations, quality of schools, quality of the local roads and bridges, our environment, any kind of local or national jobs bills that could stimulate the local/national economy... and so on.

We're not ruled by majority vote, we're ruled by the extremists who are the only ones who care enough to vote no matter what.  And those extremists - especially the ones on the Republican side - don't care if government works or not, they just want their special interests protected at all hazards...

This is what gerrymandering creates: lack of honest-to-God representation of the majority's best interests.  It creates disgust in the entire political process.

Gerrymandering has to go if we have any hope of making government at the local, state, and federal levels work again.

That judge better rule against these maps and make certain honest, competitive maps get installed right quick.

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Is This The Time For a Constitutional Convention?

For any of the readers who've been following my political blogging since Day One, you might remember I started off with the idea of blogging over a specific issue: the need to reform our federal government through any number of amendments that would fix things.  I even had the address as reformamendment.blogspot.com...

Of course, that all changed: I ended up ranting about current politics and election woes (GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT) more often, so I re-named the blog (see the banner) and re-created a new address (that old reformamendment one no longer takes you anywhere).

But the interest in reforming/fixing our federal system of governance is still here, which is why I perked up when I saw an Atlantic article asking "Is it time for a Constitutional Convention?":

In January, Gallup found that Americans from across the political spectrum picked the failure of “government” as the top problem facing America today. The vast majority link that failure to the influence of money in politics. Yet more than 90 percent of us don’t see how that influence could be reduced. Washington won’t fix itself, so who else could fix it?

It turns out the framers of our Constitution thought about this problem precisely. Two days before the Constitution was complete, they noticed a bug. In the version they were considering, only Congress could propose amendments to the Constitution. That led Virginia’s George Mason to ask, what if Congress itself was the problem?...

Which lead to the alternative solution: allowing a 2/3rds number of states to call for a convention to submit amendments for consideration.  Which is the point the article writer - Lawrence Lessig, one of the major constitutional scholars out there - is getting at.  He's openly musing over the possibility of enough states getting together for the express purpose of fixing Congress through the amendment process.

I've seen other calls over the years - Larry Sabato has been relatively consistent on the matter - for amendments, and I've joined in on the cry every so often, but I've been reluctant more often than not about pushing amendments as a solution because of one thing: a lot of the proposed amendments are f-cking disasters waiting to explode.

Lessig's article links to another article in Slate, highlighting the movement going on within conservative-led states to get this convention idea off the ground.  One of the primary amendments being pursued is that damned monster known as the Balanced Budget Amendment.  You know, the amendment Republicans conveniently ignore when they're in control of all three branches of government (between 2001 to 2007) but then trumpet and proclaim as our salvation whenever there's a Democrat in the Oval Office (especially now with Obama as President).

I've railed against that damnable balanced budget amendment before: the damn thing is rigged the wrong way.  Every conservative suggestion for a balanced budget involves making it impossible to ever raise tax rates or even create new taxes to, you know, actually pay for sh-t government needs to spend on to make this nation work.  They require a supermajority to raise a tax, yet require a simple majority to cut a tax: they make it too hard to do one thing and too easy to do the opposite, essentially ensuring that the easy thing ALWAYS gets done while the hard (yet sometimes NEEDED) choice never even gets considered.  This doesn't balance anything: all it does is force the government to take different actions, such as massive spending cuts to achieve that "balance" in a false and painful way.

And that's not the only one: that Article V Convention movement - named after the provision allowing it to happen - is also focused on passing amendments allowing Congress to override Supreme Court decisions (and preventing the President from overriding that override with a veto), essentially killing off a checks-and-balance system between the three branches of the federal government; an amendment abolishing the 17th Amendment that provided direct election of U.S. Senators, essentially taking away an individual voter's right and something fully ignoring the corrupt history of state-nominated Senators; an amendment allowing up to 34 states to override any federal laws or regulations deemed "exceeding an economic burden of $100 million," effectively destroying the Commerce Clause under Article I and pretty much giving those states license to kill off FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Civil Rights and Medicare laws, and everything ever born from those two eras.

These aren't exactly the amendments we need: we need genuine reform in federal government such as putting an end to corrupt campaign finance laws that have basically given the uber-rich direct access and control of our elected officials; we need to set tighter limits on a President's power to wage unlimited war and waste trillions of dollars without oversight or accountability; we need an amendment granting us all better voting rights and protection from intimidation and refusal, especially making voting a universal given for all citizens and making it easier to vote period.

Lessig's argument that a state-pushed Constitutional Convention is weak tea: he's arguing for a movement that is not working in the best interests of the American people.  He may have an honest intent - any potential for reform that Congress is unable to even consider is an honest one - but he's backing the wrong damn horse, and he's siding with the wrong team here.  The team he's arguing for is looking to UNDO every genuine reform our nation's had since 1900.

There's an even better solution than this, Mr. Lessig: it's called voter turnout geared towards removing every obstructionist vote in Congress in both the House and Senate.  It's called throwing the damn Far Right Wingnuts OUT of Congress, period.  Every failure of government the last 10-15 years can be laid at the Republicans' doorstep: the refusal to balance their own damn budgets from 2001 until 2007, creating the massive deficits we live with today; the refusal to work with Obama, deciding on obstructing every effort he makes to force history to label Obama "a failure" forever; the failure to maintain ANY oversight of the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to massive human rights abuses along with literally billions of dollars vanishing into thin air by 2005.  With no-one from that tenure ever being held accountable for the fraud, theft, lies, murder...

We need to vote out a Republican leadership in Congress that DOES NOT lead.  That will go a long way to breaking the damn logjam giving us a broken Congress in the first place, where we won't need a constitutional convention to fix any of that.

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A Victory, But the Fight For Voting Rights Is NOT Over

In other news of Florida schadenfreude directed at Rick "MEDICARE FRAUD" Scott, his latest effort to purge the voter rolls yet again has been cancelled:

Once again, Ken Dentzer, Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) handpicked Secretary of State, has unsuccessfully attempted to mount a massive purge of Florida’s voter rolls. And once again, he has been forced to abandon this effort due to his lack of an accurate list of who is and is not eligible to vote.

In a memo, Dentzer told the state’s local election supervisors that the purge would be postponed until 2015. He plans to utilize a new federal database which he believes will be up and running by then and will provide more accurate data on who is and is not a U.S. citizen...

It's terrifying how constant the Republicans have been the last 20 years or so chasing after "voter fraud" by doing their damnedest to go after legitimate voters (who mostly tend to be minority, young, and/or Democrat).  This is me commenting in 2013... this is me in 2012, openly figuring Scott and his ilk were breaking the law doing what they did... And this push against "voter fraud" was something I argued could be solved by making voting more universal (easier to obtain) as far back as 2008.

I didn't blog about it then (didn't start until 2006), but Jeb Bush's tenure as governor was replete with voter purges: the 2000 election suffered it, and by 2002 the effort was documented and debunked.  While then-Republican Charlie Crist reformed the electoral process during his governorship (making it easier to vote) and improved efforts to let ex-felons re-apply for voting rights, he still took a hard stance on voter IDs matching to photo IDs or Social Security numbers that still put a crimp on state residents trying to vote.

It disgusts me that something as sacred as a right to vote could be so eagerly denied by one political party... but I'm not all too surprised considering the Republicans are losing membership strength by sheer demographics, and they've got no other recourse left but to cheat and skew the rules to make it harder for Democratic-likely citizens to vote at all.  Like I said before:

As the demographics turn against them, as their open hostility to women's rights and minorities worsen, as the party is starting to lose more of their base to old age, the Republicans are pretty much stuck with "cheating" as their primary method...
For a Party that's obsessed with the idea that their platform of God, Guns, and Tax Cuts is "beloved by all true Americans", the Republicans do a shitty job of selling that platform to all actual Americans when the time comes and rely more on mudslinging and false advertising to win elections. And now, denying hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans their civic right to vote.

And while this fight may seem to be over for now here in Florida, I guarantee Scott and his ilk are trying to figure out something else that wouldn't involve outraged county elections officials blocking their efforts.  And Florida's not the only state suffering this: Wisconsin's GOP hardliner governor Walker just signed in laws making it harder to vote in that state as well... and those damned laws are spreading everywhere else where the Republicans fear the future.

Just a reminder, the last sentence from that ThinkProgress article I linked to at the beginning of this blog:

Scott is up for re-election this November. Should he lose, his replacement would likely be able to appoint a new Secretary of State before any 2015 purge.

GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT and VOTE RICK SCOTT OUT!
/rage

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Anniversary: I Have a Dream And What It Means Today

Today is the 50th anniversary of the March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom that took place back in 1963 (seven years before I was born).  One of the largest protests formed in American history - with roughly 200,000 to 300,000 in attendance - it was a combination of two major issues: civil rights and economic rights.  .

When Reverend Martin Luther King Jr spoke, it wasn't immediately recognized in the papers even though the television coverage gave it a lot of attention.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today! 

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. 

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning: 

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, From every mountainside, let freedom ring! 

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true...

And so where are we 50 years later?

In terms of social equality across the board, we're not there yet.

In terms of economic equality, given the Great Recession we're in, we as a whole nation - white, black, Hispanic, Asian, native, man, woman - are royally screwed if we're not in the upper 1 Percent bracket.

In terms of electoral equality, we as a nation and blacks and Hispanics and the college-age and a lot of women are well and truly screwed.  The Supreme Court just defanged the Voting Rights Act and a good number of states - North Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina and even Pennsylvania now for God's sake - where the social conservatives (aka Far Right Republicans) hold all the power are going out of their way to make it harder for people to vote using arguments about voting fraud that have no evidence.

In terms of day-to-day, the crime of Walking While Black has led to Fourth Amendment violations and in some cases open hunting season.

In terms of America becoming the great nation it keeps telling itself it can be, we're still stuck where we were 50 years ago.  Electing a black man to the Presidency seems like another country now, doesn't it.

We can be better than this if we as a nation can give up the hate and fear that's driving a lot of the wingnut bullsh-t.  We're living a dream that's all wrong, more nightmare than hope.  We as a nation have got to wake up from that.  It doesn't have to be a dream: it has to be just freaking common sense and decency.

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Posted With Comment: Rick "F-ck The State" Scott Is Gonna Try To Purge Voters AGAIN

When the Supreme Court killed off the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, I kinda knew this was coming:

Florida Gov. Rick Scott will resume the state’s purge of suspected non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls, now that a Supreme Court decision striking down a key part of the Voting Rights Act has cleared the way...

From Reuters:

...Advocacy groups called the review of non-citizens a thinly veiled attempt to disqualify Hispanic and African-American voters, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates. A disproportionately large number of those identified in 2012 were either Hispanic or black, the groups said.

Last year, Florida officials said they had drawn up an initial list of 182,000 potential non-citizens. But that number was reduced to fewer than 200 after election officials acknowledged errors on the original list. (Personal NOTE: they still can't prove there was any large-scale wave of non-citizens actually voting.  I think they caught one Canadian trying to vote, that was it.  Not exactly an army of illegals from Mexico, is it).

In identifying potential non-citizens, Florida officials sent their information to county election supervisors who then mailed letters to voters requesting proof they were U.S. citizens. If no response was received, the voter was dropped from the rolls.The effort, which angered some county election supervisors (NOTE: I'm pretty sure some of them are still pissed), was the subject of lawsuits from five voter protection groups and at least two individual plaintiffs.

Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he expected many county election supervisors to press the state to offer precise documentation that a voter may not be a U.S. citizen in any forthcoming review.

"If it will be a fairer process this time, it will be because the County Supervisors of Elections got burned last time and are more skeptical now," he said.

I've written about the need to make voting easier in our state (hell, our nation), above all by making sure EVERYONE gets the right to vote.  These voter purges do the exact opposite: they make it harder for people, especially the poor who can't afford photo IDs and tend to move often, making prolonged residency to establish a voting precinct an issue.  But then again, that's pretty much the only way Republicans have left themselves to be certain they can win any more elections.  As the demographics turn against them, as their open hostility to women's rights and minorities worsen, as the party is starting to lose more of their base to old age, the Republicans are pretty much stuck with "cheating" as their primary method.

For a Party that's obsessed with the idea that their platform of God, Guns, and Tax Cuts is "beloved by all true Americans", the Republicans do a shitty job of selling that platform to all actual Americans when the time comes and rely more on mudslinging and false advertising to win elections.  And now, denying hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans their civic right to vote.

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The March of History Isn't Supposed to Go Backwards

I was born in 1970.  Five years before, the nation passed a Voters Rights Act that ended a century of Jim Crow discrimination denying a sizable portion of our population from the God-given self-evident right to vote.

I didn't read up on history that much until high school, about 1984-85, around the 20-year anniversary.  They had it in the high school textbooks, which basically makes it ancient history to high schoolers.  For all I've known, the right to vote was meant to be as universal as possible regardless of race or gender (age being the only limiter with the 26th Amendment).

From all that I've studied on history - the slow, sometimes messy, march of ideas and ideologies towards an enlightened liberty and freedom of expression - I've rarely seen any situation where rights, once given, were later taken away.  The only times from what I saw was the Jim Crow era that took away the Black Man's right to vote for 100 years... and even then the VRA did away with that.  The rights came back, and it's been like that my whole life.

And now, I'm dreading that the rights are getting taken away again.  Something that shouldn't be happening.

The conservatives on the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder that a key provision of the VRA - Section 4, which provided metrics on what parts of the nation (Deep South states and key counties) had to get federal pre-clearance on any drastic changes to voting laws - was unconstitutional.  It basically neuters Section 5 (the authority of the Justice Department to act) until Congress ever decides to draw up a replacement metrics system that would pass Court's approval.  And considering the wingnut-controlled House and filibuster-stalled Senate, that will not happen.

My online friends among the Horde are mostly up in arms.  I'm upset as well.  Having witnessed just recently the Republican-controlled Florida government doing their damnedest in 2012 to deny people the right to vote - taking away early voting days, shutting down precincts, trying to pass a strict voter-photo ID bill, forcing county supervisors to purge voter rolls - I am well aware of how close we are to having one of our key rights - the right to vote, as sacred a right as free speech and right to assemble - taken away.  And not just the minorities like Blacks and Hispanics getting denied the right to vote through some complicated redistricting gerrymandering designed to hit ethnics, but poor people of every ethnicity (and a lot of women to boot) denied because they can't afford a photo ID, or college students denied because they tend to relocate often without a primary residence from which to vote.

For all the bad times I've seen our nation go through in my lifetime, I have never seen a moment where the march of history stepped backwards.  We're back to 1950 now, fighting the same damn fight to get people their self-evident right of equality before the law, their self-evident right to speak up and choose their representation, their self-evident right to be Americans.  And if it keeps going like this we'll be back to 1850 and what that all entails.

I hope to God this has the adverse reaction the goddamn Far Right Wingnuts expect: I hope to God this brings out the moderate voters in droves this midterms - the ones who usually don't show up when there's no President to choose - to vote the goddamn Republicans out of office and vote in people who will actually make government work and vote a new VRA into place.

That still hasn't been taken away: getting out the vote.  Not yet.  So there's work to be done.  Getting people registered right now no matter what.  GET IT DONE, PEOPLE.  Get EVERYONE registered right fucking now.  And get the goddamn vote out against the goddamn wingnuts.  Pardon my Swedish.

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What Is Needed To Fix Florida's (and the Nation's) Voting Woes

The finger-pointing and arguing over the debacle that was the 2012 elections process - hundreds of thousands discouraged from voting due to long lines, those long lines due to ballots being 4-12 pages long (!) - has begun in earnest, but instead of finger-pointing we need to - as a state and as a nation - make these very important reforms to ease voter access and improve voter rights.

1) We need to get ALL eligible people who can vote registered to vote.
2) We need to make it easier for people to vote, period.  That means giving them the ability to vote wherever they can on election day or during pre-election early voting days.  People get confused by being required to vote by precinct or specific location which sometimes are miles away while a perfectly good precinct is right down the block, and some people have moved since their last registered address and trying to vote from a new address.  Same-Day voter registration updating the voter's proper address to allow them to vote right away.  Creating a uniform balloting system that identifies the voter's district needs and prints (or electronically displays) the proper ballot - something elections offices here in Florida can do during Early Voting polling - can reduce the need to vote at a specific (and oft-times overwhelmed) precinct: just think of all those voting lines in Dade County that could have been eased by sending voters to nearby polling places that weren't overwhelmed.
3) We need to drop the ban on ex-felons denied the right to vote, and forcing them to re-register to get their right to vote restored.  This should be an automatic thing: they've legally paid their debt to society, once out of prison the ex-felon should have the right to act like a citizen again as part of their probationary/ rehabilitative process.  Having the ex-felons jump through years' worth of bureaucratic hoops is insulting.
4) We need to drop gerrymandering.  Gerrymandering literally wastes people's votes.
5) A Photo ID for voting actually does make sense, alongside the signature requirement when showing up to vote.  But the states need to issue such photo IDs at no cost: voting needs to be free in every way possible.
6) We need to have more Early Voting days, not fewer.
7) We need to move Election Day from a Tuesday - the middle of a workweek - to a weekend day like Friday or Saturday or Sunday.  AND make the Election Day a national holiday.  Back in the old days when voting was done at the county seat and people had to travel by horse or foot, it may have made sense to have elections on a workday when people would be at the county seat on other business.  But not anymore.  We need to make sure people can get to vote, and making the Big Election a banking/school holiday nearest to the weekend frees up a ton of people to give them all day to get out the vote.
8) We need to include a None Of The Above option for every candidate.  It will get messy but if all candidates for an elected office are just disgusting human beings, the voters should have the right to say No to the offal the parties are shoving at them.  It should make the parties' more responsive (maybe).

Any other suggestions?

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The Saturnalia Wish List of 2012 That Even Mayans Would Like

Heya!  Once again, every reader from Japan, Russia and elsewhere linking to this site for the "funny Iran military" pictures on that Iran Day Six article, as part of our effort in the WAR ON BILL O'REILLY'S CHRISTMAS we here at this blog celebrate the life-affirming pagan holiday known as Saturnalia! The day where fully expect the Mayans to show up even though their calendar ends on 12/21.  Okay Mayans, you're bringing the homemade brew and you know it!

Anywho. As part of tradition, I'm posting my wishlist to The Roman Lord of Time (hi there!) in the mad hopes that the pagan gods will once again after thousands of years notice us tiny insignificant lifeforms, and smite our enemies and grant us boons.

So here's the wish list!

1) A freaking full-time job.

2) No, seriously, a full-time job.  It's been 4 years since I lost my job as a librarian, I've been looking for anything related to my skill sets, only just recently getting a part-time on-call job working desktop support, but it's been hard as hell to find anything thanks to a Congress that refuses to do any kind of Jobs Stimulus package to encourage more hiring and boosting of the economy.  It's not the deficits or the debt that's the problem, you Beltway morans, it's the LACK OF JOBS!  THE LACK OF WAGES TO PAY FOR SH-T LIKE COLLEGE LOANS AND MORTGAGES AND KIDS' SCHOOLING AND HEALTH CARE!  /rage

3) 50,000 people buying my ebooks!  If I can't have a job, at least a boost of income from ebook sales...

4) Grover Norquist forced to watch as dreaded TAXES GO UP, and the universe failing to implode, demonstrating once and for all THAT HE'S AN IDIOT.

5) A nice stocking stuffer would be this GravityLight thingee someone's trying to market.  For $5 a pop, you get a light source off of an LED light (the wave of the future) by using simple mechanics (pulley/gears) to charge up the light.  No batteries, no outlets, no burning of carbon fuels like oil or coal, just human energy lifting the weight up and viola!  We live in amazing times.

6) Yo, Obama!  If you need a reference librarian to shelve books in the West Wing, CALL ME...

7) That the civil war ends in Syria as soon as possible with as little loss of life than has already been lost; that Egyptian democracy endures on the streets as peaceful protests end the threat of dictatorship and Islamist extremism; that Iranian politics give way to moderate leadership more keen on economic and social well-being for their citizenry than on aggressive nuclear baiting against the U.S.,

8) That the traffic I got on this blog during October and November (2000 to 3000 views!) keeps up and I get some honest-to-Mithras comments for a change...

9) That voter suppression efforts that the GOP tried to inflict on people this election cycle get blocked, banned, and richly denied in order to ensure ALL voters have their rights protected for all time,

10) That the upcoming series of movies in 2013 - Star Trek Into Darkness, Man of Steel, Iron Man 3 - not suck.  Please o PLEASE SATURN LORD OF TIME, LET THESE MOVIES ROCK N ROLL...

There.  Oh, and again, make sure you forward any bills for your annual sacrificial bull get sent to Mr. O'Reilly care of Fox Not-News.  BWHAHAHAHAHA.

Enjoy the season!  ...and the countdown to the Mayan calendar continues...

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Whither the Electoral Scenarios?

My previous post may have been about the results - what to expect should Romney win, what to expect when Obama wins (pleaseGodpleaseGodPLEASEGOD) - but as I fell asleep a thought came into my head "Well, you didn't point to how they could actually get to the win via the Electoral College."

So here's this little side-post...

For those of you who slept through ninth grade Civics & Government class, the Electoral College was the system the Founders put into place for electing the President and Vice President: using electors from states equivalent to the number of Senators and Congressmen per state rather than a direct popular vote.

This was for several reasons: the Founders didn't trust the mass of voters (which even back then wasn't EVERY American); and they feared the possibility that Presidents would come to represent the largest population states and ignore the smaller ones.  The Electoral College was set up to reduce the large population counts per state to a more manageable system and make it so that candidates had to woo the states and not the large mobs.  The Founders also wanted to set up the Electoral College so that no one really won it and the results sent to the House of Representatives to have Congress choose their President (sadly, the times that DID happen - 1800, 1828, 1876, almost 2000 - the system didn't work).

Anyway, the race to the White House today is the race to get to 270 Electoral votes.  Out of 50 states, that means getting a couple of large Electoral States - California and New York have been solids for Democrats, Texas for Republicans (Ohio usually, but the dynamics of voter interests in the 21st Century are making Ohio a toss-up) - as well as getting enough of the mid-sized swing states (Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Colorado... with large state Florida a major swing state because of major internal voter differences) to tally up to 270.  While the small states obviously suffer more today as the Electoral numbers create a massive difference between large (California is 55 Electoral) and small (Wyoming smallest is 3), small states tend to be static for prolonged periods and are counted on by either party to not switch much (except New Hampshire, the Florida of New England).

For Obama (much like any incumbent) the solution should be simple: get all the states he already won the first time in 2008 (image map from Wikipedia).  Some states he did win that had normally voted Republican over the past 20 years - Florida especially, North Carolina and Virginia, Ohio (major loss for the GOP), some of the other Midwest/Great Lakes states - are toss-ups again this election cycle.  The good news for Obama is that he could lose one or even two of those states (Florida and North Carolina in particular) and still clear the 270 bar with room to spare.  But if he loses Virginia, Ohio, maybe Pennsylvania or Colorado along with FL and NC then he loses the election.  So he really can't relax on ANY of those states (DAMMIT FLORIDA, you voters are already on my Sh-t List for voting Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott as Governor, hasn't his screw-ups waken you up to the fact you SHOULD NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN?!  Stop buying the GOP Snake Oil!  Redeem yourselves, VOTE OBAMA!  Sheesh...).

Romney has the tougher path: He has to win back the toss-up states the Republicans lost in 2008.  While most of the Red States will be counted on to stay Red (Texas, most of the Deep South states, Missouri, rancher states from Idaho to the Dakotas), he's not likely to flip any existing solid Blue states his way (even his home state of Massachusetts: for a candidate to lose his state is harsh under any circumstances win or lose).  So Romney HAS TO WIN Ohio... AND Florida... AND Virginia... AND North Carolina... AND Colorado...

This is why this election is such a nail-biter.  Florida and Colorado keep switching colors on the maps every two weeks (although it's looking like Florida has settled for Romney DAMMIT FLORIDA WAKE UP VOTE OBAMA).  Virginia is hovering just over the Leans Obama line.  Ohio may look like it's Leaning Obama but you can't take that for granted.

Making it wackier is that we're facing an election result where the popular vote and the Electoral vote might not match: Obama winning popular/Romney winning Electoral, or Obama winning Electoral/Romney winning popular (how THIS happens I've no idea: Romney is the LEAST LIKED candidate in modern history).  The resulting civil war should probably last a few years... /facepalm

There's been calls to eliminate the Electoral College over the decades, especially after 2000 when its flaws became oh so apparent.  Problem is, the Electoral system has one virtue: it forces candidates to campaign in more states than they would have under a Popular Vote system.  With just a Popular Vote, all the campaigning will be in California and Texas, maybe New York and Florida, as the candidates go after the largest states only.

The Electoral College doesn't have to die: it just needs to be tweaked to more reflect the popular vote within each state already.  Getting rid of the Winner Takes All per state is the way to go.  Nebraska has it so that their Electors are divided up by their districts and by state (for the Senate seats).  Of course, they've gerrymandered the congressional districts so it's kind of broken still, but the basic idea has merit.

A revised Electoral College would have the overall winner of a state garner the two Electoral votes reflecting the Senate.  The remaining Electoral votes (for the congressional seats) will be divided up by percentage of popular votes (different from Nebraska, which still forces the results by gerrymandered district).  If there's two congressional districts and Candidate A gets over 60 percent of the popular vote in that state, Candidate A gets those two Electorals: if Candidate A wins but is below 60 percent, Candidate A gets one Electoral and Candidate B gets the second.  In a state like California with a ton of Electoral votes, the percentage division suddenly gives Candidate B more to smile about.

What this would do is give the candidates more incentive to campaign through more states to win over more voters in each state.  Rather than rely on the base to keep that one state to their one party, the candidates will need to reach into those states to keep their group of voters intent and driven to get the vote out.  Even the smaller states will come into play as getting even one or two Electorals out of those states can go towards building up your count to 270: Especially since a Democratic candidate can no longer count on ALL of California's Electoral votes and a Republican candidate can no longer count on ALL of Texas.

This makes the system more responsive to the actual voters.  Voters will come to see that their vote DOES count as it could help their candidate win enough Electoral votes to matter, even though their residing state may go overall for the other candidate.

Today, however, we've got the nail-biter.  With any luck, the Electoral College and popular vote will reflect each other, the vote counts will work, the election will run smooth as possible.  With any luck... /stresses out

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Convention Is Over. Now Get Out There And REGISTER TO VOTE

GET TO WORK PEOPLE!  There's 330 million Americans out there and we need to get EVERY SINGLE U.S. CITIZEN who is over the age of 18 and not a convicted felon REGISTERED TO VOTE!

WE NEED EVERY AMERICAN VOTING!  You know why?  BECAUSE WE'RE AMERICANS GODDAMMIT THIS IS OUR COUNTRY AND OUR VOTE IS OUR POWER!

Let's GET THE VOTE OUT PEOPLE! November is only X number of days away!

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My Vote My Power

Following up from the last post about Rick Scott and his underlings breaking voter rights' laws, the papers are saying the voter purge is all but over because the county elections supervisors - the ones who have to do the heavy lifting - are united in saying the lists are flawed and illegal:

The 67 county elections supervisors — who have final say over voter purges — are not moving forward with the purge for now because nearly all of them don't trust the accuracy of a list of nearly 2,700 potential noncitizens identified by the state's elections office.
"We're just not going to do this," said Leon County's election supervisor, Ion Sancho, one of the most outspoken of his peers. "I've talked to many of the other supervisors and they agree. The list is bad. And this is illegal."
So far, more than 500 have been identified as citizens and lawful voters on the voter rolls. About 40 people statewide have been identified as noncitizens. At least four might have voted and could be guilty of a third-degree felony.
The eligibility of about 2,000 have not been identified one way or the other..

Just take a look at the numbers: so far 500 that were kicked off the polls didn't deserve to be kicked.  Only 40 were identified as non-citizens.  At least four (!) out of the 2,700 on the original list may have broken the law.

Only 4 possible violators.  Compared to 500 citizens who didn't break the law who still suffered.  And compared to the 11 MILLION registered voters out of 18 MILLION state residents.

If Rick Scott and his buddies think they are fighting some massive criminal conspiracy... THEY ARE CLEARLY NOT.  Four out of 18 Million is... do the math people... my Windows calculator says 2.2222E-007, thanks Rick Scott you BROKE MY CALCULATOR TOO.  (seriously, it's less than a percentage of a percentage of 1 percent!)  This is not worth denying the honest-to-God rights of 500 honest citizens (and even more if those 2000 voters ever check their mailboxes).  If this is crime-fighting, it's akin to stopping drunk drivers by blowing up all the roads!

And despite the optimism of the Tampa Bay Times reporting, I guarantee you Rick Scott and his Sec. of State Ken Detzner are going to figure out a way to press on with their purge.  They have an ideological belief that "voter fraud" is real (it's not: most evidence points to such fraud as basic record errors!  And it's miniscule: less than a percent of a percent of a percent for God's sake!), and that belief cannot be stopped or denied.  They've already tried flipping the argument about by accusing the Dept. of Justice of failing to help them access federal databases - especially Homeland Security's illegal immigrant databases - they need to use to push their purge further.  This is even though the original Sec. of State Browning discovered the purge list is hugely flawed and resigned rather than implement it.  This is even with Attorney General Holder stating publicly that Scott is breaking the law by pushing this voter purge.

Scott and Detzner and the Republican Party as a whole will keep pushing this non-scandal until and unless the handcuffs are clapped on their wrists and they get dragged off for violating voters' rights under both state (Florida Statutes 104, specifically 104.0515 and 104.0616) and federal laws (1965 Voting Rights Act and 2003 Voter Registration Act).

Those 500 Florida residents who got booted off the rolls and had to press to get their rights back - rights that SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN TAKEN IN THE FIRST PLACE - have a legitimate legal grievance against Rick Scott.  Charge him.  Even just one of you has a case against this bastard.  Protect your rights, people.  MY VOTE is MY POWER.  It's yours too.

Now Available

UPDATE: I realize that trying to figure out the numbers - 4 divided by 18 million - for determining the percentage of people committing actual voter fraud is a bit tricky since every calculator I've tried using can't reduce the decimal count that low.  So I decided on the opposite route: figure out the percentages of people who are honestly voting out of the 11 million registered in Florida.  So basically 11 million minus 4 is 10,999,996 honest voters.  Now THAT I can divide by the total voter count of 11,000,000 and that gives me .99999963 roughly speaking.  Converting that to percentage and that is 99.999963 percent of honest voters out there.  Meaning the amount of fraud is .000037 percent, give or take.  It's nowhere near even a percent of 1 percent (which would be .001 percent).  Basically, it means actual voter fraud is close to ZERO when compared to honest voting.  So why the obsession with voter fraud?  There are ten thousand more serious crimes taking place in Florida and/or the nation on any given day: why voter fraud, when there's practically NO FRAUD taking place?

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I Think Rick Scott Is Breaking The Law

UPDATE: see below.
Specifically, I think he's violating people's civil liberties by pushing a purge of eligible voters off the election rolls (copied from ThinkProgress):

Initially, the state created a list of over 180,000 purported “non-citizens” by comparing their list of registered voters to the state motor vehicle database. The state forwarded about 2700 names from that list to local officials to remove from the rolls. Yesterday, in the face of mounting problems with the limited effort, Scott administration officials made it clear they were just getting started:

Chris Cate, a spokesman for the state Division of Elections, defended the state’s actions. “It’s very important we make sure ineligible voters can’t cast a ballot,” he said in an email to the Herald on Tuesday.
He said the state continues to identify ineligible voters, saying the state Division of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has agreed to update information using a federal database that the elections division couldn’t access directly.
“We won’t be sending any new names to supervisors until the information we have is updated, because we always want to make sure we are using the best information available,” Cate wrote. “I don’t have a timetable on when the next list of names will be sent to supervisors, but there will be more names.”

It’s unclear how the new procedures alluded to by Cate will solve the systemic problems with the voter purge list. There have been several individuals targeted by the list that have been citizens their entire lives. Therefore, there seems to be a major problems beyond outdated citizenship information.
Moreover, the entire process of database matching to remove voters is problematic. The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.”
The first list was also created with information accessible to the state motor vehicle administration, which the former Secretary of State Kurt Browning considered so unreliable he refused to release. Browning resigned in February.

Why do I think Scott and his underlings are breaking the law here?

For starters, denying a citizen's right to vote without any kind of judicial review or right of defense is a major problem.  It violates federal constitutional standards in the Fourteenth Amendment, First Section:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Bold highlights mine.  This "voter purge" is depriving eligible honest-to-God citizens their life and liberty, expressly their right to vote that is a key and necessary right.  The right to vote is SERIOUS BUSINESS.  Anyone working in legal guardianship/power of attorney stuff will tell you that determining a person to be "incapacitated" requires a full review by licensed doctors and presided over by judges.  And one of the rights at stake in issuing guardianships is the Right To Vote, alongside the Right To Marry, Right to Form Contracts, etc.  When you lose that Right To Vote, it's viewed as a major loss of self-determination.

Let's be clear: voter fraud may happen, but it is not happening on the scale that the Far Right is screaming about.  Most cases are just regular people failing to update their residency status, or else felons who failed to re-instate their voting rights, or immigrants going through a naturalization process jumping the gun too early.  It's not thousands of zombie "voters" through whom political bosses are faking to stuff ballot boxes.  Out of the MILLIONS who are registered to vote, only tens of cases - not even hundreds of cases - are there any evidence of outright fraud taking place.  This voter purge is over an over-hyped "scandal".  This ain't ACORN, people.  And even ACORN was overblown nonsense.

And the ones getting purged seem to be the minorities and poor people.  Which reeks of the Jim Crow "deny the votes" attitude that harms this nation's reputation as a home of liberty and justice for all.  What's really going on is that the Republicans are going after the voting groups that will tend to vote Democrat, in an effort to reduce the risks of a big turnout this election cycle of angry Democrats pissed off about what's been happening here in Florida (and other states pushing this purge crap) since 2010.

To anyone getting purged by Rick "HaHa I Was Never Convicted" Scott, I think you have a serious case of filing a civil rights charge against him.  I'll leave it to the actual legal experts if there are any reading this blog to suggest which actual statute is being violated: I think it's a federal jurisdiction in terms of the civil right being violated, and I think it's 42 USC s 1983 that is the relevant law, unless there are more specific laws in the US Code.

UPDATE EDIT: This night the Talking Points Memo site is reporting that the Department of Justice has sent a letter to the Florida Secretary of State (the one in direct charge of overseeing elections) demanding that the state stop the voter purge:

DOJ also said that Florida’s voter roll purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, which stipulates that voter roll maintenance should have ceased 90 days before an election, which given Florida’s August 14 primary, meant May 16.

Five of Florida’s counties are subject to the Voting Rights Act, but the state never sought permission from either the Justice Department or a federal court to implement its voter roll maintenance program. Florida officials said they were trying to remove non-citizens from the voting rolls, but a flawed process led to several U.S. citizens being asked to prove their citizenship status or be kicked off the rolls...

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