Register As A Voter Quotes

Chapter Four : The things that go bump in the night...are probably registered voters in Cook County

Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-week vacation--all expenses paid--wherever he wanted to go. Any place in the world: Mongolia, Easter Island, the Turkish Riviera . . . but his choice was Salt Lake City, and that's where he went. Is this man a registered voter? Has he come to grips with the issues? Has he bathed in the blood of the lamb?

A March 2010 Fox News poll would find that more than half of U.S. registered voters donated to Haiti’s relief.

Using the targeted power of the criminal justice system as a tool of voter suppression meant that five times as many registered Democrats as Republicans were disfranchised. And for that, the nation paid dearly.

If the case isn't plea bargained, dismissed or placed on the inactive docket for an indefinite period of time, if by some perverse twist of fate it becomes a trial by jury, you will then have the opportunity of sitting on the witness stand and reciting under oath the facts of the case-a brief moment in the sun that clouds over with the appearance of the aforementioned defense attorney who, at worst, will accuse you of perjuring yourself in a gross injustice or, at best, accuse you of conducting an investigation so incredibly slipshod that the real killer has been allowed to roam free. Once both sides have argued the facts of the case, a jury of twelve men and women picked from computer lists of registered voters in one of America's most undereducated cities will go to a room and begin shouting. If these happy people manage to overcome the natural impulse to avoid any act of collective judgement, they just may find one human being guilty of murdering another. Then you can go to Cher's Pub at Lexington and Guilford, where that selfsame assistant state's attorney, if possessed of any human qualities at all, will buy you a bottle of domestic beer. And you drink it. Because in a police department of about three thousand sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your paycheck may come from fiscal services but, goddammit, after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself that you work for the Lord himself. If you are not as good as you should be, you'll be gone within a year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If you are good enough, you will never do anything else as a cop that matters this much. Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don't think The Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective. And it will always be that way, because the homicide unit of any urban police force has for generations been the natural habitat of that rarefied species, the thinking cop.

The Colorado secretary of state testified before Congress in 2011 that a check of voter registration rolls against state [Division of Motor Vehicles] records indicated that more than 11,000 Colorado registered voters may not be U.S. citizens—and more than 5,000 of them voted.”54

There were four white cops in the polling place where I went to vote. Right in the middle of Harlem, four white cops. Everybody else there were colored, voters all colored, officials all colored registering the books, only the cops white--to remind me of which color is the law. I went inside that voting booth and shut the door and stood there all by myself and put the biggest black mark I could make in front of every black name on the ballot. At least up North I can vote black. If enough of us votes black in Harlem, maybe someday we can change the color of the law.

Voting rights activists who had been trying to register voters for years stepped up their efforts. In Selma, Alabama, Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived there, but the city’s voting rolls were 99 percent white. White law enforcement officers regularly harassed and arrested activists.

not just Dr. King but John Lewis and Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash. In their heroic efforts—going door-to-door to register voters, sitting down at lunch counters, and marching to freedom songs—I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother had taught me; how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up.

. . . I bet I'm beginning to make some parents nervous - here I am, bragging of being a dropout, and unemployable, and about to make a pitch for you to follow your creative dreams, when what parents want is for their children to do well in their field, to make them look good, and maybe also to assemble a tasteful fortune . . . But that is not your problem. Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to live it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it, and find out the truth about who you are . . . I do know you are not what you look like, or how much you weigh, or how you did in school, or whether you start a job next Monday or not. Spirit isn't what you do, it's . . . well, again, I don't actually know. They probably taught this junior year at Goucher; I should've stuck around. But I know that you feel best when you're not doing much - when you're in nature, when you're very quiet or, paradoxically, listening to music . . . We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it's a really busy person, like you, taking care of the needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you. In fact, that's often when we see Spirit most brightly . . . In my twenties I devised a school of relaxation that has unfortunately fallen out of favor in the ensuing years - it was called Prone Yoga. You just lay around as much as possible. You could read, listen to music, you could space out or sleep. But you had to be lying down. Maintaining the prone. You've graduated. You have nothing left to prove, and besides, it's a fool's game. If you agree to play, you've already lost. It's Charlie Brown and Lucy, with the football. If you keep getting back on the field, they win. There are so many great things to do right now. Write. Sing. Rest. Eat cherries. Register voters. And - oh my God - I nearly forgot the most important thing: refuse to wear uncomfortable pants, even if they make you look really thin. Promise me you'll never wear pants that bind or tug or hurt, pants that have an opinion about how much you've just eaten. The pants may be lying! There is way too much lying and scolding going on politically right now without having your pants get in on the act, too. So bless you. You've done an amazing thing. And you are loved; you're capable of lives of great joy and meaning. It's what you are made of. And it's what you're here for. Take care of yourselves; take care of one another. And give thanks, like this: Thank you.

a tragic roster of activists and innocents had died for the crime of being black or supporting blacks in their state. There was Willie Edwards Jr., the truck driver forced off a bridge to his death by four Klansmen in Montgomery. There was William Lewis Moore, the man from Baltimore shot and killed in Attalla while trying to walk a letter denouncing segregation 385 miles to the governor of Mississippi. There were four young girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There was thirteen-year-old Virgil Lamar Ware, shot to death on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle in the same city. There was Jimmie Lee Jackson, beaten and shot by state troopers in Marion while he tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a protest. There was the Reverend James Reeb, the Unitarian minister beaten to death in Selma. There was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, shot by Klansmen while trying to ferry marchers between Selma and Montgomery. There was Willie Brewster, shot to death while walking home in Anniston. There was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a seminarian registering black voters who was arrested for participating in a protest and then shot by a deputy sheriff in Hayneville. There was Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., murdered by a gas station owner after arguing about segregated restrooms.

Unfettered by the Supreme Court, Jim Crow became the law of the South. When the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was announced, there were 130,334 registered Black voters in Louisiana. Eight years later, there were only 1,342.65 “Between the two dates the literacy, property, and poll tax qualifications were adopted,” wrote historian C. Vann Woodward in his 1955 book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. “In 1896, Negro registrants were in a majority in twenty-six parishes—by 1900, in none.”66

Most of all I was inspired by the young leaders of the civil rights movement—not just Dr. King but John Lewis and Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash. In their heroic efforts—going door-to-door to register voters, sitting down at lunch counters, and marching to freedom songs—I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother had taught me; how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up. This was true democracy at work—democracy not as a gift from on high, or a division of spoils between interest groups, but rather democracy that was earned, the work of everybody.

Optimistic, because even though the year of Obama's birth Herbert Lee, a black farmer with nine children, was shot in the head for trying to register black voters, it was also the year the Freedom Rides rocked the South and established a generation of youth leaders. Optimistic, because even though the year of my birth the Klan bombed four little black girls in a Birmingham church and Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were gunned down, it was also the year that established our road map for today - America's dispossessed marching on Washington in unprecedented numbers to demand freedom and articulate our dream.

In reality, though, almost all voters now had their minds made up. You didn’t need to persuade them of whom to vote for — indeed, you couldn’t persuade them of whom to vote for. What you needed to do was excite the group of them who, if they were going to vote, were going to vote for you. Those people had to register, they had to remember where their polling place was, they had to take time out of their day to go cast a ballot. America isn’t like Australia, where voting is compulsory. We make it both optional and, in many places, difficult, so a winning campaign needs not just supporters but motivated supporters.

Achieving an all-white jury, or nearly all-white jury, is easy in most jurisdictions, because relatively few racial minorities are included in the jury pool. Potential jurors are typically called for service based on the list of registered voters or Department of Motor Vehicle lists—sources that contain disproportionately fewer people of color, because people of color are significantly less likely to own cars or register to vote. Making matters worse, thirty-one states and the federal government subscribe to the practice of lifetime felon exclusion from juries. As a result, about 30 percent of black men are automatically banned from jury service for life.

The Motor-Voter bill eliminated many controls on voter fraud, making it easy to register but difficult to determine the validity of new registrations. Under the new law, states were required to provide opportunities for voter registration to any person who showed up at a government office to renew a driver’s license or apply for welfare or unemployment benefits. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” notes Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund in his book, Stealing Elections. “States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election

In America, straightforward talk about class inequality is all but impossible, indeed taboo. Political appeals to the economic self-interest of ordinary voters, as distinct from their wealthy compatriots, court instant branding and disfigurement in the press as divisive “economic populism” or even “class warfare.”39 On the other hand, divisive political appeals composed in a different register, sometimes called “cultural populism,” enlist voters’ self-concept in place of their self-interest; appealing, in other words, to who they are and are not, rather than to what they require and why. Thus, the policies of the 1980s radically redistributed income upward. Then, with “economic populism” shooed from the public arena, “cultural populism” fielded something akin to a marching band. It had a simple melody about the need to enrich the “investing” classes (said to “create jobs”), and an encoded percussion: “culture wars”; “welfare mothers”; “underclass”; “race-and-IQ”; “black-on-black crime”; “criminal gene”; on and on.40 Halfway through the decade, as the band played on, a huge economic revolution from above had got well under way. The poorest 40 percent of American families were sharing 15.5 percent of household income, while the share of the richest 20 percent of families had risen to a record 43.7 percent, and the trend appeared to be (and has turned out to be) more and more of the same.41 The

In typical cases, that a are no official policies authorizing race drposcrimination is obvious yet unstated, and the systematic exclusion of black jurors continues largely unabated through the use of the peremptory strike, Peremptory strikes have long been controversial. . . .In practice, however, peremptory challenges are notoriously discriminatory. Lawyers typically have little information about potential jurors, so their decisions to strike individual jurors tend to be based on nothing more than stereotypes, prejudices,and hunches. . . . Potential jurors are typically called for service based on the list of registered voters or Department of Motor Vehicle lists--spurces that contain dispropinately fewer people of color, because people of color are significantly less likely to own cars or to register to vote. Making matters worse, thirty-one States and the federal government subscribe to the practice of lifetime felon exclusion from juries. As a result, about 30 percent of black me are automatically banned from jury service for life. . . .[T]jemonly thing that has changed is that prosecutors must come up with a race-neutral excuse for the strikes--an exceeding easy task.

Moi, moreover, made full use of his control of government machinery to obtain funds, harass the opposition and manipulate the results. The delimitation of constituencies was skewed heavily to favour Kanu strongholds in the North Eastern, Rift Valley and Coast provinces. The number of voters needed to return a single seat in opposition strongholds in some cases was four times higher than in Kanu strongholds. Whereas the North Eastern province, with 1.79 per cent of the electorate, had ten seats, Nairobi province with 8.53 per cent had only eight seats; whereas Coast province with 8.37 per cent of the electorate had twenty seats, Central province with 15.51 per cent had only twenty-five seats. The average size of a secure Kanu constituency was only 28,350 voters, while seats in opposition areas were on average 84 per cent larger with 52,169 voters. The registration process was also manipulated. The government cut short the period allowed for voter registration and delayed the issuing of identity cards needed by young potential voters, effectively disenfranchising at least 1 million people. Opposition areas were under-registered. The highest figures for registration were in the Rift Valley. The independence of the Electoral Commission was also suspect. The man Moi appointed to head it was a former judge who had been declared bankrupt two years previously and removed from the bench for improper conduct.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I’m struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I’m surprised because the transcript doesn’t register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn’t have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who’d done Big Oil’s bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they’d be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster,

Southern politics since World War II has not been normal. The key political institutions of the South were swept away with the end of de jure segregation. The essential rationale for the peculiar politics of the solid South had been to disfranchise and disempower black voters, and institutions created to limit black participation did so with remarkable effectiveness. As late as March 1965, only 7% of eligible black voters in Mississippi were registered.

Willie Rainach, the state senator with a Confederate flag on his tie [...], as chairman of a joint committee of the State Legislature on segregation, had made a spectacle of himself, and an enemy of Long, by prancing through the state purging "irregularly registered" colored voters from the rolls. In Iberville Parish, for example, the committee struck out the names of Negroes who, in the space marked "Color," had written "Negro" instead of "Black.

In 1920, Mary McLeod Bethune, an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil-rights activist traveled through her home state of Florida to encourage women to vote, facing tremendous obstacles at every step along the route. The night before Election Day in November 1920, white-robed Klansmen marched into Bethune’s girls’ school to intimidate the women who had gathered there to get ready to vote, aiming to prevent them from voting even though they had managed to get their names on the voter rolls. Newspapers in Wilmington, Delaware, reported that the numbers of Black women who wanted to register to vote were “unusually large,” but they were turned away for their alleged failure to “comply with Constitutional tests” without any specification of what these tests were. The Birmingham Black newspaper Voice of the People noted that only half a dozen Black women had been registered to vote because the state had applied the same restrictive rules for voting to colored women that they applied to colored men.

Journalists in the South predicted rapid and sweeping political and cultural change. Black people would register to vote in huge numbers. Staunch segregationists would be shoved out of office. In cities and counties where Black voters outnumbered white, Black politicians would win office and wield power. Black citizens would get a fair share of government services, including new schools and paved streets. As schools integrated, achievement levels and income levels would rise until Black and white Americans, eventually, achieved parity. Neighborhoods and workplaces would integrate, voluntarily. Police and judges would deliver equal justice. It might take a few generations, but the political and cultural changes would begin, and life would improve for all. “The

The first thing to do is recognise that the rise of charlatans is a symptom of people being left behind. Charlatans are a symptom of the ills in our society more than they are a cause. And we need to be as angry about the ills that are making some voters seek out an alternative as they themselves are. Charlatans have been successful because they have effectively sold false remedies to the people who feel that the existing political structure hasn't worked for them. Just as the original charlatans could only ply their wares because a lot of people were very ill, so the modern-day charlatans are selling false remedies to legitimate grievances. Charlatans have employed two of the most powerful emotive forces to further their aims: anger and fear. Even if voters are sceptical about the alleged solutions of the charlatans, the fact that the populists are seemingly angry on their behalf has registered with them in a positive way. (pp. 98-99)

It turns out that people often support, or at least accept, rulers not for what they do but simply because of the offices they inhabit or titles they hold. ‘Popularity’ in Russia is a consequence not a cause of the power one wields. Instead of representing people’s interests, elections register the willingness of voters to submit to incumbents who are able to sideline any and all challengers to their power.

As one staffer remarked, “McGovern’s preoccupation with the youth cult led him to accept unquestioningly Fred Dutton’s opinion that the new 18-year-old vote would control this election and that we would win simply by registering millions of new voters.... He so jealously guarded his position on the left that he never noticed no one else was there—except his staff.” Campaign strategist Frank Mankiewicz later admitted that the basic mistake of the campaign was that “We were always subject to this pressure from the cause people. We reacted to every threat from women, or militants, or college groups.

On August 19, 1934, the great majority of Germany’s registered voters went to the polls and handed Hitler 38 million votes, thereby demonstrating overwhelming approval. With this strong mandate, Adolf Hitler claimed that he was the undisputed Führer of the German people. It was in this way that the German Worker’s Party, GPW, started by Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart in 1919, in the beer gardens of Munich, came to power. The next day, on August 20, 1934, mandatory oaths swearing loyalty to Adolph Hitler were introduced throughout the Reich.... Soldiers of the Armed Forces, including the German Officers’ Corps, swore the following oath of loyalty: “I swear by God this sacred oath: I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time in the fulfillment of this oath.” The following is the Oath of loyalty for Public Officials: “I swear: I shall be loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, respect the laws, and fulfill my official duties conscientiously, so help me God.” It is interesting to note that these oaths were pledged to Hitler himself, and not to the Constitution or the German state. Oaths were very seriously taken by members of the German armed forces and were considered to be part of their own code of honor. This put the entire military in a position of servitude, making them the personal instrument of Hitler. In September 1934, at the annual Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies, Hitler proclaimed that the German way of life would continue on for the next thousand years.

California is having an election Tuesday, but it might as well be a secret to many of the state’s voters. After a June primary in which a record low 25 percent of registered voters cast ballots, political analysts are predicting that Tuesday’s turnout could be the worst ever for a general election.

percent of registered voters cast ballots, political analysts are predicting that Tuesday’s turnout could be the worst ever for a general election. The rock-bottom record was set in 2002, when

King not only encouraged church members to become registered voters and NAACP leaders but also to see the Southern Jim Crow system as part of a passing global order of colonialism and imperialism.

In Alabama, for instance, in 1900 fourteen Black Belt counties had 79,311 voters on the rolls; by June 1, 1903, after the new constitution was passed, registration had dropped to just 1,081. Statewide Alabama in 1900 had 181,315 blacks eligible to vote. By 1903 only 2,980 were registered, although at least 74,000 were literate. From 1900 to 1903, white registered voters fell by more than 40,000, although their population grew in overall number. By 1941, more poor whites than blacks had been disfranchised in Alabama, mostly due to effects of the cumulative poll tax. Estimates were that 600,000 whites and 500,000 blacks had been disfranchised.

The revelation that the White House had jiggered official unemployment statistics by not counting ‘people no longer looking for work’, led many Americans to be suspicious that the same people who lied about the number of Americans out of work, would likewise falsify election returns. Honest election workers in various cities revealed that tens of thousands of registered voters were dead, but still registered to vote. A majority of the honest workers were subsequently fired, triggering even more voter anger.

Florida sought to remove what was estimated to be over one hundred thousand improper registrations by illegal residents, but was sued by the Department of Justice to prevent the State’s correction of fraud in its own voting records. The Attorney General accused several States seeking to void improper registrations with “voter suppression”. With the discovery of yet more pre-election voter fraud, with increasing numbers of registered undocumented immigrants, street riots broke out in increasing numbers of urban areas, with election offices burned and pillaged across the country.

Every so often the authorities registered voters in order to find out who was missing and why. I had turned eighteen and was old enough to vote in North Korea’s ‘elections’, which always returned Kim Jong-il, with a hundred per cent approval.

In case you’re inclined to dismiss such obstacles as a vanished feature of the remote past, in the state of Florida in the year 2000 about 100,000 potential voters, the vast majority of them Democrats, were pruned off the list of registered voters. That pruning had an enormous effect on tipping the Florida 2000 presidential vote, hence the U.S. presidency,

The former Sabbath school leader among slaves seized upon his liberty and his new calling like a miner finding gold. At least by 1840, and perhaps as early as 1839, he registered to vote by paying his $1.50 poll tax. In Massachusetts in the late 1830s, men, including blacks, registered to vote by paying this small annual tax. In the sweep of America’s racist and discriminatory history with voting rights, it is remarkable that the most famous black man of the nineteenth century, shortly after escaping from slavery, while living with a new, assumed name, with no other identification and certainly no proof of birth in the United States, and while still “illegal” as a fugitive from Southern justice and the property rights of his owner, could instantly become a voter by paying $1.50 and having his name placed on the tax rolls.14 Approximately

It is pointless and stupid to protest, if you don’t vote. The only way you can fight corruption, unemployment, equal and human rights . Making sure that you have a good future and good service delivery is through the poll. Make sure you register to vote and make sure that you vote. For a change to happen, it starts by you.

The most important feature of the law eliminated literacy tests and other disenfranchising devices in states where less than 50 percent of eligible voters had registered or cast ballots in the 1964 presidential election, which covered Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and thirty-four counties in North Carolina, along with Alaska; Apache County, Arizona; Elmore County, Idaho; and Aroostook County, Maine. This formula, though imperfect, captured the key southern states where the bulk of black voters were disenfranchised. “We

And boy do we feel threatened. By politics? Sure. More than half of Americans felt at least somewhat anxious about “the impact of politics on my daily life” in 2018, and a month before the 2020 election, nine out of ten registered voters, from both parties, thought a win by the other side would do “lasting harm” to our country.

By the time the IRA campaign was fully revealed, years later, Putin’s trolls had reached 126 million Facebook users and received 288 million Twitter impressions—a staggering number, given that there are only 200 million registered voters in the United States, and only 139 million voted in 2016.

Despite segregationists’ strength in Democratic circles, a majority of African Americans switched parties in the 1930s. Black voters had remained loyal to “the party of Lincoln,” even through Hoover’s reelection campaign, but once they benefited from FDR’s New Deal, many voted accordingly.7 The switch here was abrupt. In 1932 Roosevelt received only 23 percent of the Black vote; in 1936 he received 71 percent. Regardless of their votes for a Democratic president, many still formally remained Republicans. In 1936, 44 percent of Black voters registered as Democrats and 37 percent as Republicans. In 1940 and 1944, Black registrations were evenly split.8

Mook, always attentive to cash flow, knew that it was much more costly to try to persuade undecided voters to back Hillary than it was to register her supporters or to make sure they went to the polls. The analytics team could also conduct less expensive surveys than the pollsters to get a snapshot of the horse race in a given state. Separate from the three scores, the analytics experts would do quick surveys with a small universe of voters and then extrapolate how many other voters with similar demographic profiles were likely to vote and for whom they would cast their ballots. The same methods had been used in the primaries, when adjustments could be made based on the outcome of a string of contests. The general election was different, in part, because there was only one Election Day. The analytics were also thought to be more precise at predicting general-election outcomes in each state than primary outcomes because the exact shape of the electorate could be harder to project in lower-turnout contests. But in both cases, Mook relied heavily on the data to figure out where the campaign could get the most bang for its buck. Like a baseball executive in the Moneyball era, Mook looked at the data as the means for taking the least costly route to victory.

Victims included U.S. state and local entities, such as state boards of elections (SBOEs), secretaries of state, and county governments, as well as individuals who worked for those entities.186 The GRU also targeted private technology firms responsible for manufacturing and administering election-related software and hardware, such as voter registration software and electronic polling stations.187 The GRU continued to target these victims through the elections in November 2016. While the investigation identified evidence that the GRU targeted these individuals and entities, the Office did not investigate further. The Office did not, for instance, obtain or examine servers or other relevant items belonging to these victims. The Office understands that the FBI, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the states have separately investigated that activity. By at least the summer of 2016, GRU officers sought access to state and local computer networks by exploiting known software vulnerabilities on websites of state and local governmental entities. GRU officers, for example, targeted state and local databases of registered voters using a technique known as "SQL injection," by which malicious code was sent to the state or local website in order to run commands (such as exfiltrating the database contents).188 In one instance in approximately June 2016, the GRU compromised the computer network of the Illinois State Board of Elections by exploiting a vulnerability in the SBOE's website. The GRU then gained access to a database containing information on millions of registered Illinois voters,189 and extracted data related to thousands of U.S. voters before the malicious activity was identified.190 GRU officers [REDACTED: Investigative Technique] scanned state and local websites for vulnerabilities. For example, over a two-day period in July 2016, GRU officers [REDACTED: Investigative Technique] for vulnerabilities on websites of more than two dozen states.

In their heroic efforts—going door-to-door to register voters, sitting down at lunch counters, and marching to freedom songs—I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother had taught me; how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up. This was true democracy at work—democracy not as a gift from on high, or a division of spoils between interest groups, but rather democracy that was earned, the work of everybody.

As the 2012 election approached, it emerged that the foundation Einhorn runs with his wife paid for dozens of anonymous billboards around Milwaukee and two Ohio cities, mainly in minority areas, that screamed “Voter Fraud Is a Felony!” with penalties of up to three and a half years in prison and fines of $10,000. The Einhorns put out a statement through a PR firm that the billboards were a “public service” message aimed at Democrats and Republicans alike. “By reminding people of the possible consequences of illegal voting, we hope to help the upcoming election be decided by legally registered voters.” The director of a progressive group in Wisconsin, meanwhile, has this to say: “Perhaps their Chicago public relations firm could answer why the Einhorns only felt it was necessary to target legal voters in minority communities, and why they didn’t feel the need to do this ‘public service’ throughout communities across Wisconsin where a majority of the residents are white.

Four years later, voter registration workers in the South encountered scores of people with criminal records who were reluctant to register to vote, even if they were technically eligible, because they were scared to have any contact with governmental authorities. Many on welfare were worried that any little thing they did to bring attention to themselves might put their food stamps at risk. Others had been told by parole and probation officers that they could not vote, and although it was not true, they believed it, and the news spread like wildfire.

In their heroic efforts-going door to door to register voters, sitting down at lunch counters, and marching to freedom songs-I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother taught me; how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up. This was true democracy at work-democracy not as a gift from on high, or a division of spoils between interest groups, but rather democracy that was earned, the work of everybody. The result was not just a change in material conditions, but a sense of dignity for people and communities, a bond between those who had once seemed far apart.

By at least the summer of 2016, GRU officers sought access to state and local computer networks by exploiting known software vulnerabilities on websites of state and local governmental entities. GRU officers, for example, targeted state and local databases of registered voters using a technique known as "SQL injection," by which malicious code was sent to the state or local website in order to run commands (such as exfiltrating the database contents).188 In one instance in approximately June 2016, the GRU compromised the computer network of the Illinois State Board of Elections by exploiting a vulnerability in the SBOE's website. The GRU then gained access to a database containing information on millions of registered Illinois voters,189 and extracted data related to thousands of U.S. voters before the malicious activity was identified.190

When it comes to voter fraud, here are the facts: It’s exceedingly rare. It happens between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent of the time. Out of one billion votes cast from 2000 to 2014, research revealed a paltry thirty-one instances of voters casting fraudulent votes in person. It almost never happens. Most problems with improper voting stem from clerical and computer errors. According to scholars affiliated with Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Yale University, during the 2012 election cycle, the possibility that a registered voter would commit fraud by voting twice was under 0.02 percent.12 Fraud is more likely to be committed by campaigns engaging in fraudulent voter registrations or fraudulent absentee ballot applications or submissions.13

The Stanford research also showed that had unlisted voters participated at the comparable rates to their registered peers, these voters would have handed the 2000 and 2004 elections to the Democratic presidential nominees. Not to mention the outcome in 2016. Democrats do themselves and the progressive cause a major disservice by trading efficacy for efficiency—by skipping over entire troves of potential voters, we unilaterally block ourselves from victories. Republicans are losing the demographic game, so instead they are rigging the system. But Democrats are forfeiting elections by refusing to reach out to all of the voters who could even the score or tip the balance.

The tools of Jim Crow disfranchisement worked all too well. In 1867, the percentage of African American adults registered to vote in Mississippi was 66.9 percent; by 1955, it was 4.3 percent.

Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.

Why is it we don’t intervene in the bureaucracy?” asks Chris Bobel, the gender studies scholar, who has noted that many young activists prefer “DIY activism” – making art, changing their own consumer habits, making their own products rather than buying corporate ones. They tell her, “We don’t want to be in bed with the enemy,” she says. “That’s not where change happens. That’s old-school activism. We’re all about DIY’”. Bobel sighs. “A lot of these activists weren’t even registered voters.

Achieving an all-white jury, or nearly all-white jury, is easy in most jurisdictions, because relatively few racial minorities are included in the jury pool. Potential jurors are typically called for service based on the list of registered voters or Department of Motor Vehicle lists—sources that contain disproportionately fewer people of color, because people of color are significantly less likely to own cars or register to vote. Making matters worse, thirty-one states and the federal government subscribe to the practice of lifetime felon exclusion from juries. As a result, about 30 percent of black men are automatically banned from jury service for life.76

The violence of Jim Crow has given way to craftier present-day methods of disenfranchising marginalized communities, according to this stirring history of American voting rights. Thomas begins by recapping laws that historically prevented Black people in segregated Southern states from voting, including exorbitant poll taxes and absurdly complicated “literacy” tests required of Black would-be voters but not white voters. More brutal methods were also used, the author notes; Black Southerners who tried to register to vote were often fired, evicted, arrested, beaten, or even killed. Thomas goes on to explore today’s subtler means of voter suppression. These include voter ID laws that disproportionately disqualify minorities who lack official documents; laws that reduce the numbers of polling locations or make absentee voting harder; purges of voter lists; and restrictions on who can vote. Thomas weaves in detailed narratives of voting-rights milestones, like the 1965 voter registration drive and marches in Selma, Alabama, that led to police violence and galvanized the passage of the Voting Rights Act; he also explores later Supreme Court decisions that weakened the VRA and contemporary efforts to restore it. Throughout, the author spotlights voting-rights heroes from Bob Moses, who was beaten while leading a 1961 Mississippi registration drive, to Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia who founded Fair Fight Action, which registered thousands of voters and helped deliver Georgia to Joe Biden in 2020. Thomas combines deep dives into voting law with vivid, dramatic retellings of epic civil rights battles; his prose is lucid and perceptive, with occasional elegant perorations on the sacredness of the franchise. (“When people lose the power to vote, they lose the ability to choose their defenders. They lose representatives who understand, care about, and work to protect their rights. As a result, the US as a whole loses its voice.”) The result is a captivating history that shows how relevant the defense of voting rights remains. An erudite and engrossing look at the perennial struggle to safeguard the cornerstone of democracy.