5d ago

Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.

www.gregpalast.com Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.

Here are the numbers...

"If the purges [of potential voters], challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast."

"[...] Democracy can win* despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.

And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK."

274 comments

I knew that this was going to happen as soon as they started purging voter rolls and passing draconian voter suppression laws after Trump lost. Biden just barely beat Trump in 2020, so all they had to do was give Trump a little bump - a few thousand votes nullified here or there would win him a whole state. The media focus in 2020 was on the "historic turnout", but how many of those were covid mail-in ballots that red states didn't allow this time? How many people showed up on election day ready to vote for Kamala only to get turned away because they weren't on the registry even though they voted in 2020?
Republicans cheated in more than one way this time, and we got screwed because we failed to stop it early.

One lesson 2020 should have taught everyone and that's vote by mail WORKS.
Lifting the restrictions on vote by mail for Covid won the election for Biden, and replacing those restrictions in 2024 lost it for Harris.
We should have 100% vote by mail in all states.
- vote by mail WORKS.
  Which is why red states didn't want to use it. Can't stay in power if you don't suppress votes.
- One lesson 2020 should have taught everyone and that’s vote by mail WORKS.
  It was a lesson national administrators learned. That's why it was heavily clawed back. 2020 was a big year for Popular Socialist Candidates. Neither party enjoyed a wave year that included The Squad and put a guy like Bernie Sanders in arm's reach of Biden after Super Tuesday.
  We should have 100% vote by mail in all states.
  Republicans have been outspoken in opposition to mail-in voting, particularly for younger college-aged voters. But even Dems are lackluster in their support for full enfranchisement, on the grounds that higher participation tends to make controlling primaries more difficult and expensive (the NY-14 upset by AOC being a classic example).
  Incidentally How Voting Laws Have Changed in Battleground States Since 2020: Most have made it harder to vote, but others have expanded access.

This is why Kamala accepting the outcome "No matter what", to prove she's better than Trump...
Was the dumbest thing she could have done because it was just playing into the GOP's hand.
The Republican game is "You go high, we go low, because low gets us elected and furthers our agenda."
- I thought their game was "Low, no matter what."
  
  I think the game is "there's always more barrel to scrape."
- No one actually ever considered kamala might win. As soon as Biden dropped out, anyone that actually knew something knew Democrats had thrown in the towel.
  
  Guess I don't know shit then
  
  That's absolutely not true. They had the best campaign since Obama and they did amazing job in that 3 weeks or so, and contrasting disaster of a shitshow that Trump put on made it even clearer.
  In the end Americans turned out to be way worse people than predicted, but that was absolutely not obvious.

Dem pols are always too afraid to exercise the power they have when they win. Always. When Biden won, DC and Puerto Rican statehood should have been the first things on the agenda.
The GOP is never afraid to exercise as much power as they can get away with.
- Biden never had enough control of the whole government to get those things done without Republican buy-in.
  A Republican controlled house won't send a bill like that to the Senate. A Republican controlled Senate won't send it to the President.
  You can be upset at Biden, but we've rarely ever given a Democratic president a Democratic Congress to help him get anything done.
  
  Uh, no. He had a Democratic congress the first half of his term. Part of why he lost them is Dems are so tepid with exercising the power the voters give them.
  Nothing the Dems do, or even try to do, gin the base up into excitement. The base never feels inspired that the Dems are striving for the goals they claim to represent and want.
  
  Biden never had the power. But Obama did. He squandered it imo but you're welcome to disagree.

Oh please. We had the same shit in 2020 and we had a record turn out.
Don't put the blame on voter suppression when it's American stupidity and apathy that's the cause.
- It is in the end stupidly and apathy. But, you can't deny that voter suppression is also a big thing and it should be addressed.
- But it can be both. Voter suppression just making it way harder for Democrats to win. And ultimately impossible.

FTA:
The crucial statistic is that not everyone’s ballot gets disqualified. One study done for the United States Civil Rights Commission found that a Black person, such as Maj. Turner, will be 900% more likely to have their mail-in or in-person ballot disqualified than a white voter.
Okay, I went into this expecting cope, and it's an actually good article, worth a read or at least a skim. So, let's do something about it.
- Ok, what do you suggest?
  
  That we all stop moping about November and start networking with people on the ground. I'm not looking to the DNC for solutions, they've already got top level staff talking about working with Trump however they can. The best place to start doing that, imo, is to start showing up to governing body meetings- city councils, county government, whatever you can do, and start meeting other local activists. A lot of times, you'll find some that are already part of larger, national networks for action, or they'll be part of local mutual aid groups, which means that you're talking with an entry point to a pretty big group. Share your concerns about election suppression and share this article with the people that you meet, talk about what you can do locally together to make a difference (remember, a lot of these are state laws and decisions).
  This is 100% actionable, I'm going to a community activism meeting later this month and I plan on sharing this information, though I'm not in one of the affected states. I met this group by going to city council meetings and making public comments about the need to improve our housing stock.
- The time to have done something about it was in November. But feel free to try.
  
  I really don't see another choice. I don't blame you for leaving, we thought about it too, but it's not realistic for some of us.

Once again, Trump said (during his first term, I believe) on Fox News Republicans would never win another election if minorities vote. They know this. They consistently make it harder and harder for people to vote, while targeting minorities.
- Once again, Trump said (during his first term, I believe) on Fox News Republicans would never win another election if minorities vote.
  He was wrong. A big part of the '24 GOP wave came from young male latino and black voters who were entranced by the get-rich-quick promises of Trump/Vance. Online hustler culture on social media has been a huge driving force behind conservative voter expansion.
  How 5 key demographic groups voted in 2024: AP VoteCast
  Trump’s share of Black voters rose slightly, driven largely by younger men
  Slightly more Hispanic voters supported Trump in 2020
  Narrow gains with (white) women benefitted Trump
  Trump saw a modest increase with men
  Republicans have been leveraging their "business friendly" credentials to win over poorer POC voters for a while. And as Democrats adopt the same strategy, we're running into the same problem as in 2000 and 1988 - voters aren't able to distinguish between candidates on economic issues.
  For POC women voters, the divisions are more stark. But for men of any shade, Dem decay in social media (their active war on left-leaning TikTok being a huge unforced error in an environment that's trended hard-right since the Obama admin) and their refusal to deliver on college debt relief, cheap housing, cheap mass transit, or public health care is leaving Republicans with a huge discontented block of younger voters to poach.

So the new campaign is that the DNC did nothing wrong, they were just thwarted by voter suppression?
Couldn't be they completely fucked up by campaigning to a center that doesn't exist any more. The DLC's triangulation bullshit is dead and needs to stay dead. Every Dem from the Clinton era needs to get that through their damn heads, they should have retired a decade ago anyway.
- It's a combination of everything, DNC has been spineless and bought out by corps, voter suppression techniques from Republicans skewed votes in their favor, white rural voters came out in droves to vote for trump, the Harris campaign failure to meaningfully address the genocide or get enough messaging out to address people's financial troubles.
  
  The genocide voters are idiots. Harris spent too much time trying to court “moderate” republicans.
  
  The voter suppression problem is a symptom of the spineless and bought out DNC problem. Dems should be talking about nationwide voting laws and how red states aren't democratic and don't have legitimate rule of law constantly, but that would be too radical and unpredictable for the corps to feel comfortable with, so instead they focus their legislative efforts on just cutting checks to all the state governments for this infrastructure initiative or that climate bill or whatever, which helps assholes like Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp run the systems of patronage and oppression that keep them in power (also, those checks are eventually ending up in the corps' accounts, so they're happy too).
- I'm never gonna stop sharing this
  
  There's this, and then there's Sideshow Bob's lines on the matter:
  
  This has been in my head since 2016. I firmly believe that there really are people out there that find this kind of authoritarian rule comforting.
- I really hate that this is the top comment. Two things can be true at the same time. Dems messed up in the previous election and narrowly lost against the worst candidate to ever run for president,AND voter suppression is real and will become a much larger problem going forward. Under Trump, nothing is stopping Republicans from enacting voter suppression laws the likes of which you have never seen before. Trump won’t need to steal the election for his third term (yes he will run if he’s still alive!), because the states will do it for him by suppressing the votes.
  Now you may think that you are protected from a third term by the constitution. You may think you are protected against things like poll taxes, tests etc. But do you honestly believe the SC is on your side?
  The Dems messed up this election. Voter suppression will ensure that there will no longer be fair elections in the future.
  
  You're still worried about fair elections? The concept of elections is on the line right now. Setting up the fights on Panama, Greenland, and Canada, is about making sure the US won't stand against Russia/China, and no one else is capable. At that point, there won't be any more elections by the people. Just the oligarchs that agree with dear leader.
  My only protection is that prevailing winds tend to put me upwind of likely nuclear targets for most of the year.
- The Democrats have plenty of problems, but none of that compares to Republicans who are worse in every conceivable way. Propaganda, foreign interference, and domestic voter suppression won this for Trump and his goons.
  
  I get the argument, but at this point, nobody is contemplating whether to vote Democrat or Republican. It's between Democrat and apathy.
  Comments like these sound as if during WWII the French were saying "well, the French army has plenty of problems, but Nazi German occupation is worse in every conceivable way, so there is no point criticising the French army".
  Everyone knows the Reps are Nazis. The problem with the Dems is not that they are not less bad than the literal Nazi party, but that they are unable to effectively fight the Nazi party. The problem is that Democrats fail to demonstrate that voting for them is better than not voting at all to a large part of the electorate.
- They didn't campaign to the center, they campaigned to the right. It was incredible obtuse and stupid.
  
  Biden barely squeaked into office on promises it became clear he was never going to even try to keep, and then Democrats proceeded to alienate a bunch of groups that voted for him. Groups that only voted for him reluctantly the last time.
- I beg of the Dems to please stop the cope and start making moves.
- My hypothesis is that voter suppression had a lot to do with it. Harris was no more of a crap candidate than Biden was in 2020. It'd be nice to see some solid research one way or the other.
  I'm also with you on getting rid of triangulation, since the lack of principles it requires is almost as corrosive as fascism, and you end up with a party 1 mm to the left of whoever the fascist-du-jour might be. It's a morally bankrout strategy that delivers next to nothing.
  
  Harris was no more of a crap candidate than Biden was in 2020.
  Biden was able to get away with it in 2020 coming off Trump's first term and the shitshow that was COVID's handling under his leadership. Harris didn't have this benefit, being second in command in the incumbent regime, was unable to capitalize on any of the points the Biden administration could claim as wins, while stubbornly refusing to put any distance between him and herself on his unpopular stances. Add in that this was occurring while popular sentiment was clamoring for an inspiring campaign that wasn't the usual DNC paint-by-numbers, march to the right campaign of, "Well, actually, while I can appreciate Hitler's passion for the arts, animal welfare and the health risks of smoking, you'll find that we, uh... disagree about the best way to deal with the Jewish question. Thank you, you're seen and heard, even you Jews out there. Vote for me, 'cause the other guy's Hitler, and I'm not entirely Hitler."
  The entire Democrat effort (or lack thereof) was a massive unforced error on their part. Instead, they keep sidelining any candidate who seems to actually excite people and inspire them with hope for the sort of systemic change they want, unless they find they can eventually drag them into their usual shenanigans.
  Personally, I think they'd also do best to drop their tokenism with candidates that trot out the same means-tested policy drivel. Rather than go harder on the adjectives next time and hope people show up to vote for, "The candidate who would be the country's first female, Chinese, Navajo, amputee, Leprauchan president in history," have policies that don't include the means-testing and would broadly lift up the working class and poor voters, while also addressing historic inequalities for the many groups that have been disadvantaged and/or excluded from US society for its history. You can tick all the diversity boxes you want with the candidates, but it's patronizing to think people will blindly fall in line for such a candidate assuming they'll represent them, when we've seen that it's mere lip-service paid to very real issues impacting the lives of millions of Americans, which will be promptly forgotten upon taking office, if it lasts that long.

We all know. Nothing was or will be done. Now they can rig it from the inside. Was a fun run!
- Democrats had the opportunity to fix this when they were in office. They chose to protect the filibuster instead.
  
  Did they or did Manchin and Sinema, who go figure are no longer Democrats, stop them?

It's always "funny" when people act like systemic racism is some reformable problem rather than a major foundation of the entire system.
- So do nothing?
  
  What would you suggest people do about this now that America is a fascist dictatorship?
- The system of humanity.
  
  It is not natural to be racist.

This article is in desperate need of citations and a public revelation of the calculations involved. It also has problems. I can't speak to other states but where it does mention Pennsylvania, where I live, it omits critical information.
In Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), the Poison Postcards wiped out 360,132 voters, three times Trump’s victory margin.
These don't get sent out for fun. This is how the ordinary voter roll maintenance works. The cards are sent out after you fail to vote two consecutive federal elections, or when the department of state gets notified you moved or died through some other means, not for 'targeting' voters. You only actually get purged from the roll if you fail to respond to the card AND fail to vote for at least five consecutive years (This isn't specified as far as I know, but a product of the timings involved). If you show up and vote in every presidential election, you do not get removed from the rolls even if you throw out the postcard. So if this:
According to the EAC data, before the 2024 election, 4,776,706 registrants were removed nationwide simply because they failed to return the postcard.
Includes Pennsylvania, it is simply false. You can read the actual law yourself, they are all online. It's PA Title 25. Chapter 19 lays out the rules for removal.
Details on Pennsylvania specific mail-in ballots being cancelled, which is a real issue, are woefully absent. According to the Governor's office only about 1% of the 2 million returned (about 20,000) mail in ballots were rejected.
https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dos/newsroom/shapiro-administration-announces-57--decrease-in-mail-ballots-re.html
Of the roughly 1% of mail ballots rejected in the 2024 general election, the most common reasons for rejection were:
receipt after the 8 p.m. deadline on Election Day (33%), incorrect or missing date (23%), lack of a signature (17%), and lack of a secrecy envelope (15%).
Harris lost by ~120,000 ish votes in PA. 'Clerical errors' are not even close to closing that gap.
It also mentions Secretaries of State being partisan hacks, but some odd reason fails to mention Pennsylvania's Secretary of State was appointed by our Democratic governor who was not only a Democrat, obviously, but short listed for consideration as a running mate for Harris. Nevertheless, it is implied we should concerned about his Secretary of State targeting voters from her own party for removal in an election that could have had handed the governor his own path to the White House. Forgive me for my skepticism.
Voter suppression is a big deal, I'm sure there are elections it will swing at times. Heck, there is a fair chance it swung the senate race in PA since that one was only decided by ~15,000 votes, but based on what I already know, this article isn't credible enough to be taken seriously in its current state.
- I keep seeing a lot of arguments along the lines of "they can't have done that, that's against the law."
  **Republicans do not care about the rule of law. ** They loudly and repeatedly flaunt this at every opportunity. The entire reason we keep having to talk about this is because of how loudly and repeatedly they prove they are willing to break any law in order to win. The law does not matter, it is toilet paper, it does not stop them. That's the whole REASON we are all up in arms about this in the FIRST place.
  Your argument is a nonsensical one. You've illustrated the way the Poison Postcard is supposed to work, absolutely. But did it actually follow those rules? In some places like Texas and Georgia, that answer is a booming, resounding, FUCK NO they didn't. So what about elsewhere then?
  
  In some places like Texas and Georgia, that answer is a booming, resounding, FUCK NO they didn’t.
  I can’t speak to other states but where it does mention Pennsylvania, where I live, it omits critical information.
  I'm supposed to believe that hundreds of thousands of Democratic Pennsylvania voters were illegally unregistered and denied their right to vote while democratic county election officials, county attorneys, the governor's office, the state attorney general's office, the department of state and many civic/legal orgs all just sat on their hands because of an article whose demonstration of fact taps out at "Trust me bro, I did the math."
  But my argument that we need to see the sources and math is "nonsensical"?
  Fuck off.
- An award winng investigative journalist who has spent at least the last 25 years looking into this type of behaviour isn't credible?
  
  this article isn’t credible enough to be taken seriously in its current state.
- Upvoting before mods delete this for going against their zeitgeist

Hang on...WTF!

https://electiontruthalliance.org/2024-us-election-analysis
- That's some thorough analysis, holy cow...

While voter suppression exists, voter suppression didn't make safe blue states go down 2 digits of percentage.
Its the propaganda that did it. Money won. Unlimited money to throw at the propaganda manifacturing, won (thanks to citizens united)
- Voter suppression includes manipulating people into not voting, such as "both sides are the same" and "your one vote doesn't matter". I'd probably include pushing people to vote for non-serious third parties, although it may not technically be "voter suppression".
  
  Imagine not doing your work as a president for 4 years in order to manipulate to not vote for you LMAO 🤣

Re post text: For context, Washington state is mail-only voting, so that number would (I assume) be for all votes, not just specifically requested mail-ins. I didn't see it in the article, but I wonder if that is predominantly "centralized" or "distributed" in nature; i.e. are technically-valid ballots from all voters being incorrectly rejected by the county elections facilities office at different rates across racial lines, or are there other factors like targeted disinformation, education, local infrastructure, or socioeconomics that disproportionately affect Black (or other types of minority) voters that would make them more likely to produce a technically-invalid ballot?
Those might get the same statistic, but would seem to indicate very different sorts of problems and approaches.
- You can vote in-person in Washington if you want to, if you lost your ballot, etc. Also, I think most people here use the drop boxes rather than their mailbox. If not most, still quite a lot.
- I work in elections in Washington, there is only mail in voting plus county drop boxes. Yes you can say you lost your ballot or didn't get it and come in for a replacement, but we give you the same mail in packet you world receive at home.
  Yes you can drop it in the drop box in our office or you can take it home and mail it. But any voter can drop their mail in ballot off in our office as well. We don't have polling places or voting machines, or a way to separate out and assign race to a ballot so we could somehow treat those differently. They all come in as a big stack for processing.
  Why do ballots get rejected? Mismatched signatures is the biggest reason. If your signature doesn't match what we have on file we mail you a form to fix it, we also text and email you. Maybe from demographic groups are less likely to respond? The other one is people who forget to sign, which follows the same procedure.
  What I can say is that is there is some sort of disparity, it isn't happening in the ballot processing room.
  
  Your average citizen would consider dropping it into the dropbox at the location where they just got their ballot to count as in-person voting.

Didn't Trump win partially by the black vote going for him? How do we know most of those weren't for Trump?
- No. Black people overwhelmingly still voted against Trump and for Kamala.
- Trump won with double digit gains in the Hispanic vote, which is only getting bigger as a demographic. If Republicans continue to gain support here they could control the federal government for a generation or more.

Hard to trust any site that uses AI slop in their images.
If they are willing to use AI images, why wouldn't they be willing to use AI in their writing or in how they interpret the data for their writing?
This whole article could be based on logic or data that AI just hallucinated.
- Greg Palaat has been reporting on issues like this for over 25 years.
  His book "Best democracy money can buy" is an awesome read, but it's fucken infuriating corruption he exposes never gets punished.
  
  Okay, sure. Still is a valid question, though.
  Also, that doesn't exactly provide concrete and evidence that he didn't use AI for this. Only that he has experience in writing without it and provides a character reference.
  Plus, he should be aware AI is a bad look and makes it seem like it's possible AI was used elsewhere, like in his writing, even if untrue. If you don't know about his credentials and history, like myself, then it's the simplest next step of logic that they could have used AI elsewhere and we can't know where without him stating where AI is used.
  Additionally, in that case, he should be understanding that using AI for his images helps further diminish a field that his own is similarly being diminished by the same tool and using that tool in that way legitimizes that type of use. Basically, if you make money off of what you're publishing, then just pay an artist. It's not difficult. Then you can easily avoid people reasonably questioning whether or not you used AI in the creation of the article.

Oh look election denialism
- Oh look, voter suppression denialism.
- We can accept the outcome while still acknowledging the bullshit that occurred. Still, It's in everyone's best interest to be rid of the douche. I'll be in support of anything that furthers just that.
  
  Anything. Glad you're honest

By “restrictive voting laws” do you mean voters having to show ID? Like every other country on the planet?
- No, this article is talking about things like rejecting registration based on minor clerical errors like ink color, rejecting provisional ballots arbitrarily, and restricting the availability of ballot boxes. That sort of thing.
  On the voter id question, by the way, the argument isn’t about whether or not you should have ID to vote, it’s about whether you can get ID in the first place.
  Most countries in the world either issue IDs to everyone or allow you to prove your identity with things like bank statements and utility bills, or just somebody else who can vouch for you. The problem with US voter ID laws is that they only give you a few options for acceptable documents, and then make it hard to get those documents.
  
  or allow you to prove your identity with things like bank statements and utility bills, or just somebody else who can vouch for you.
  My state's voter ID allows all of those things and more (including the voter registration card given to you for free when you register and whenever you update your registration as well as SNAP and TANF cards), although here the "somebody else who can vouch for you" has to have ID themselves and has to sign a sworn statement on penalty of perjury that you are who you say you are and that they have known you for at least 6 months.
- It's not as difficult to get ID in many other countries
  
  It's not difficult in the US
- Why don't you ever try and actually meet the other side in good faith?
  Opponents of voter ID have a very simple line of argumentation, and very clear issues that would need to be solved. Why do you think proponents of voter ID never attempt to solve these issues?
  Why do proponents always insist that voter ID has to be implemented in a way that happens to hurt minority voters disproportionately?
  
  Look at Spain. We have been using our IDs for decades and it's a great way to solve that problem. You just go to the voting table, show your ID (DNI) and vote. That's it. And it works for everything related to anything official.
  But because of the voting system we don't have gerrymandering (or at least not that much).
  
  Why don't you ever try and actually meet the other side in good faith?
  You first
  Opponents of voter ID have a very simple line of argumentation, and very clear issues that would need to be solved.
  Like?
  Why do you think proponents of voter ID never attempt to solve these issues?
  You don't name them or they're aren't an actual issue
  Why do proponents always insist that voter ID has to be implemented in a way that happens to hurt minority voters disproportionately?
  They don't
- https://today.umd.edu/umd-analysis-millions-of-americans-dont-have-id-required-to-vote
  And "just get one" is not a solution when you live in poverty and don't even have the transportation to go to the nearest license branch, which could be miles away. If you still have the proper documents, which sometimes are ridiculous in terms of what is needed.
  And then, if you're black and were born in the South during (and even sometimes after) Jim Crow, it's entirely possible that there is no official record of your birth because no hospital would admit your mother.
- Most countries that require this also give their citizens free IDs.

Yeah trump lost, that's why he is the president of the united states of America
Guys, ease up with the fickle double think
Next thing you'll say that Kamala won and she is the one in actual charge of the nation lmao 🤣
- Is winning by cheating winning?
  
  So then what makes the presidency?
  
  Do you have actual proof? Did you denounce it to the authorities? Hell, have you taken this proof to the press? I'm sure everyone would love to hear and see about it!

The perma stun proceeds at pace

well, leftists/squad progressives did tell all the young democrats not to vote for Joe/Kamala, so they didn't vote. with litteraly everything at stake, having already lost things like federally protected safe abortion access. you know who did turn out, young people, arab americans, and latino americans who voted for trump, think that made up ~ 2.3% and the differece between the young people who didn't vote democrat and the "new republicans" tilted the balance in the swing states? nah, probably not, right. do they call that a phyrric victory? no that's egyptian. anyway, congratulations to everyone who marched on every major us city, and took over campus commons across the nation in the spring and summer of an election year, chanting "from the river to the sea". i wonder if that scared the bezeezus outta just middle america or all of it. nah, probably had nothing to do with it. anyway, enjoy your victory over "genocide joe" (kamala) folks
- Are these progressives who told people not to vote for Biden or Harris in the room with us right now?
  
  https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/297de20b-14f2-4651-be4a-8d3259719cac.png
  Here's one right here. I'll keep going back through my comment history because I've interacted with quite a few "progressives" who found Biden's policy to be inadequate were ok with Trump's genocide policy nothing to worry about.
  
  Nope, but they sure are on Lemmy.
  https://lemmy.world/u/verdantbanana
  
  If you're on a Lemmy instance, you bet your ass they are
- leftists/squad progressives did tell all the young democrats not to vote for Joe/Kamala
  Interestingly, people can self-identify however they want! I didn't see a meaningful amount of genuine progressives telling people not to vote. There's speculation that foreign disinformation spread the sentiment of "protest voting" and stirred shit up.
  However. Whatever the case, people need to take personal responsibility. You decide what type of information to consume and how to vet it (if you even do). And you are to blame if you decided not to vote or threw it away on an inviable 3rd-party candidate.
- I don't get this repeated talking point. Do you just want people to say you were right? Do you want to quash discussion of politics?
  I have a feeling that comments like these, that point backward with blame and promote hopelessness, are foreign disinformation.
  They are pointless. Help or get out of the way.
  
  Do you just want people to say you were right?
  They want all criticism from their left and only their left to be silent forever.
  
  I suspect these people are astroturfers purposefully trying to stay in the way.

get the fuck out of here with this horseshit
both parties Democrats and Republicans both use voter suppression based on what their check writers want
for example there is bipartisan efforts to keep United States citizens locked up for a list of nonviolent offences such as Bidens tough crime bills and now immigrants and women are on the list too
the education system is also used to suppress votes - no democracy without a properly funded education system
bipartisan effort to keep the minimum wage at $7.25 is another way to suppress votes - tired, overworked people do not vote with an informed healthy mind thus subverting democracy more
state of healthcare is another way voters are suppressed - health people would not vote for the current state of things
the politicians' check writers also suppress by controlling the media that is consumed along with the entirety of culture deleting content as needed to keep us in line
and the list goes on we need to throw both parties out and start fresh
- Both parties this both parties that, why don't you try using both sides of your own brain.
  
  Funny how all the bipartisan stuff they mention truly is Republican stuff...
  
  They won't. All they post is "both sides!@!#&$+$($:" over and over again.
  
  Because both parties use voter suppression to their advantage
  https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/new-hampshire-attorney-general-accuses-dnc-voter-suppression-rcna132945
- While many of those things may effect people's ability to vote, how many of them target republican voters? I'm pretty sure that's what "this shit" that you want them to "fuck out of here with" is talking about.
  
  Reading through their list I can think of specific examples for each point on each side (except the education point though that may be more local or referring to something less specific i.e. religious charter school support) - though that isn't to imply equality. On most of these points Republicans are pretty clearly worse generally speaking....
  Still, I think it was an interesting comment because, while a lot of people dismissed it out of hand, it isn't wrong to highlight that both sides are guilty of all (except education) these things and to excise this rot will take a lot of effort.
- I guess the 78 voters suppression laws red states introduced is exactly the same as the 0 suppression laws blue states introduced.
  
  of course not the blue states have to word their suppression laws differently
  if both parties appeared to be the same then they could not continue this charade we call US elections
  both parties are bought and paid for by the same oligarchs but if they acted like they were for the same thing then citizens would catch on even with an underfunded education system and we have to keep the bread and circuses going for as long as possible
- Keep in mind that minimum wage makes it harder to get a job in the first place (supply and demand) and a higher minimum wage causes inflation.
  Just... something to note there. If minimum wage wasn't so high more 16 year Olds would get jobs while they still live with their parents and can afford having low wages - so they have experience later.
  Effectively what we have right now is a paradox where you need experience to get a job, but every job requires a certain amount of experience. This is because of the minimum wage, companies literally cannot afford to train people on the job.

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