20 Days to Go

The wingnut faction in the Republican Party uses noisome tactics.  They make every effort to suppress the vote of those who oppose them

Georgia's Secretary of State,  Brian Kemp, is running against Democrat Stacy Abrams in the race for Governor.  As Secretary of State, Kemp has the responsibility to manage elections.  He apparently sees that responsibility as managing those contests to his own benefit.  Recently, Kemp discarded hundreds of thousands of applications to register to vote; the majority of those done away with were from African-Americans.  Stacy Abrams is a member of that community.

In Texas, 80% or more of the students at Prarie View A&M University near Houston are black.  They (and to be fair, all other students) were denied voter IDs.  Thankfully, this past Friday the Secretary of State in Texas backed down from the previously punitive position he'd taken regarding students' ability and eligibility to vote.  But the state legislature continues to be dominated by Republicans, and concern remains about the effect of that control on voting rights.

Many from North Dakota's Native American population have been denied the right to vote because their tribal IDs do not include a street address, but rather a P O Box number.  Think about the nature of Native American Reservations and the paucity of streets on them.  Then try to convince yourself that the Republican-controlled state legislature in North Dakota made an innocent mistake by instituting this policy, which they have not to this point corrected.  Thankfully regarding the latter, though, the Standing Rock Sioux are issuing new IDs that contain addresses of a format the state legislature accepts.

At one time, there was objection in (Republican-dominated) Arizona to the practice of printing ballots in four languages - not only English and Spanish, but also Hopi and Navajo.  Representatives of those tribes,and of Alaska's native population, presented their grievances to a group of Senators in Washington DC in July.  As the Navajo representative in DC, said Our folks who speak Navajo, but are still taxpayers in the system, should be able to vote,

Neither of Bodhi's babushkas spoke more than a few words of English, but like the Navajo, Hopi, Sioux, and others, were taxpayers in the system, and voted religiously ...