General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Please stop calling Dems "weak" because we don't have many options for stopping Supreme Court nomine [View all]Gothmog
(145,129 posts)I volunteer a great deal of time on voter suppression efforts. For example, I helped to train over 200 poll watchers and I helped organized and run a statewide hotline for voter protection. I was a member of the Obama Voter Protection team and the Clinton Victory Counsel program. The DNC and the Democratic Party were both well aware of GOP voter suppression and fought like crazy to stop it. Several thousand Democratic lawyers across the nation volunteered to fight voter suppression. I nearly went to Wisconsin as part of the Victory Counsel program but I ended staying in Texas to run the statewide hotline. The Victory Counsel program had 100s of lawyers on the ground in each of Florida, Wisconsin, Penn., North Carolina, Michigan and Ohio.
In my county, our poll watchers were at the GOP controlled precincts and stopped the GOP greeters from lying to voters about the Texas voter id law and the new reasonable impediment declaration (RID) system that came out of a lawsuit filed by Chad Dunn (general counsel to the Texas Democratic Party and Congressman Marc Veasey). We had poll watchers in several dozen counties including Bexar stop election officials from using old posters on the Texas voter id law that did not describe the RID process. At one point I was arguing with the Texas secretary of state about armed guards being stationed outside a polling location in San Antonio due to claims of Isis (we got several poll watchers to that site).
While Russia can hack voter registration files, there is no way to hack election machines in most district. These machines are never hooked to the internet and are connected by wire connections to a machine called a judge booth controller that records the votes. The JBC has been be transported to the election office where seals are removed from the JBC and the votes counted. We have watchers observe the certification and testing of each machines each cycle. While some machines may be hackable most are not hackable.
In 2016, we turned Harris county blue and swept most of the races We have a Democratic district attorney in Harris County which has led to bail reform and decriminalization of small amounts of pot. A lady who I trained as a poll watcher in 2012 was elected to be in charge of voter registration. Every cycle we used to have to sue to get sufficient voter registration forms in languages other than English.
I am curious what the heck more do you think could be done. No one in the real world ignored GOP voter suppression and there a ton of good Democratic lawyers do what could be done to protect the vote. There is only so much that can be done under the current laws but I assure you that the DNC, the Clinton campaign and the relevant state and local Democratic Parties did what could be legally done.
No one ignored warnings about voter suppression. What do you think could have been done under the law that was not done?