drthunder

One of our congresspeople (iirc) bragged about it suppressing enough votes to give the state to Trump in 2016 too.

I'm confused that polling seems to be neck and neck when the liberal candidate won by 11 percentage points last time around, her opponent sucked but an 11-point swing is wild here.

It's been a rough fifteen years for us. At least we're two elections away from being like Florida instead of one, like we were for a while.

The guys who killed Tyre Nichols wouldn't have been arrested if people hadn't rioted after George Floyd was killed.

City and state subs tend to be really bad, I guess because if you're looking to influence people it's an obvious place to start. I swore off my city subreddit after a barrage of "this is it, I'm done with the Democrats" after the local George Floyd riots knocked over some statues that were about equality. It was probably astroturfing but beyond frustrating either way.

100% agreed

Here's my general summary of why this is an issue: the US has been denying people the right to vote since day 1. You had to own land to vote in 1788. Half the country seceded and started a civil war that killed more of our citizens than any war since, over the right to own people. The 15th amendment was passed in 1870 to make it so you can't deny Black people the right to vote, but places made it happen anyway. They made it so you had to pass a "literacy test" with intentionally ambiguous instructions, or pay a poll tax, or one of your grandparents had to have the ability to vote (afaik, the origin of the phrase "grandfathered in").

These were all legal until the 1960s. Lots of people here have parents who were alive before legislation was passed to end Jim Crow. Without that, the racists that be turned to the War on Drugs, because lots of places take away your right to vote if you've been convicted of a felony. They started passing voter ID laws and closing down DMVs in areas with lots of black people and reducing their hours. A politician in Wisconsin bragged after the 2016 election that these laws here threw the state to Trump. They've also started banning giving food and water to people in line to vote and throwing out mail-in votes that show up after election day.

This isn't about election security and it never has been; voter fraud has never changed an election in the country's history. The real election fraud is in suppressing people's votes and fucking with voting machines (2004) and having allies in positions of power to throw the election your way (2000). There's more than that too, but it's a tangent.

Pretty much, yeah

A couple years ago I didn't have a job or health insurance and the flu shot cost $37.

Trump claimed "they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs" live on national TV and it didn't make a difference, he could run an ad about Democrats being void monsters from beyond the abyss and the average person would go with it.

They are trying to abolish voting, see voter suppression laws and pretty much every voting rights case the Supreme Court has seen during Roberts's tenure.