Liberals have been so busy worrying about gay rights and the environment, women’s issues and the black community, and health, consumer and labor affairs that they haven’t noticed how the Corporate Right has been quietly mobilizing and organizing at the local and state level so they now increasingly control more local legislatures, governorships and House seats than the Liberals do, even though they actually get fewer voters. And by using the Electoral College, they have twice this century stolen the Presidency.

Progressives have been so concerned about civil rights that they have failed to see how the roadblocks and obstruction of the Right are increasingly dominating the political landscape by clever tactics and strategy. They can’t get the votes so they’re manipulating the process. Sure, the urban coastal regions outvote the rural heartland in national elections, but they SHOULD. That’s where most of the fucking population lives! Rigging the system so the fly-over minority hangs on to power is not the American Way.

The “typical American” is no longer a small businessman in Kansas, its a single mother in Queens.

It was bipartisan, and usually a local problem, typically down at the municipal or ward level. After the Civil War, in the South, the practice was extended by Southern Democrats at the State level to disenfranchise blacks. Today, it has become a widespread, nationwide problem by an increasingly racist and nativist Republican Party gradually sliding into minority status.

It is now no longer something done in back rooms or smoke filled precinct houses. They’re doing it out in the open now, they’re proud of it! They feel they owe it to their constituents to show how they are doing everything they can to keep “unAmerican” people, like blacks or ethnics or Liberals or “citified elites” from taking over “their” country.

Remember how Conservative posters here on the Zone used to solemnly tells us “Every democracy in history has always restricted the franchise.” Now you know what they really meant, and why.

When Democrats won the governor’s office in Wisconsin, it was one of the party’s most celebrated midterm successes in regaining power in the states. Now Republicans are striking back, moving to slash the power of the new governor even before he takes the oath of office.

Democrats reacted with fury, crowding the halls of the State Capitol in Madison on Monday and accusing the Republicans of trying to undo an election they had lost. It was only the latest such Republican effort across the country to try to use legislative action to counter blows the party suffered at the polls. For Wisconsin, a state that both parties will urgently vie to win in 2020 elections, it was one more sign of the ferocious partisan split that has rippled through the state in recent years.

“It’s a power grab,” said State Senator Jon Erpenbach, a Democrat, before a hearing on the package of bills that includes restrictions on the incoming governor’s ability to shift how public benefits programs are run, and on his authority to set the rules that determine how state laws are carried out. “They lost and they’re throwing a fit.”

The long list of proposals Republicans want to consider also includes wide efforts to shore up their strength before Tony Evers, the Democrat who beat Gov. Scott Walker last month, takes office: new limits on early voting, a shift in the timing of the 2020 presidential primary in Wisconsin, and new authority for lawmakers on state litigation. The Republican plan would also slash the power of the incoming attorney general, who is also a Democrat.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/allegations-of-gop-election-fraud-shake-north-carolinas-ninth-district

Earlier this week, Montgomery’s complaint, along with four other sworn statements, and a sixth which was not notarized, were submitted to the North Carolina election board by a lawyer for the state’s Democratic Party. These affidavits, which were first reported by the Charlotte TV station WSOC, contain the following allegations: a woman going door to door saying “she was assigned to the district to collect absentee ballots”; one instance of an unrequested absentee ballot arriving at a voter’s house; “improper” election monitoring at a polling site; unusual “coding” on absentee ballots; and two men separately saying that they overheard people talking about payments to a local political operative working for the Republican candidate, Mark Harris. As of now, these anecdotes are, of course, purely allegations. But state officials have begun to explore whether these testimonies could help explain statistical irregularities in the absentee-vote count for the Ninth District, which had previously been called for Harris over his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, by a margin of nine hundred and five votes (out of around two hundred and eighty thousand cast).

North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District begins in the Democratic suburbs of Charlotte, but the gerrymandered counterweight, which has kept the seat in Republican hands since 1963, is a rural Republican stronghold stretching east along the South Carolina state line. It is here, in Bladen County and the neighboring Robeson County, that the problems began. Steve Stone, the chairman of the Robeson County Board of Elections, told the Washington Post that election officials became concerned in August by people dropping off large numbers of registration forms and absentee-ballot requests. He said that county residents had also made reports of people going door to door, telling voters that their registrations had been dropped, that they needed to re-register, and that they should sign an absentee-ballot-request form. The large number of complaints prompted state investigators to seize completed absentee-ballot-request forms and envelopes from both counties in the days after the election.

On Tuesday, the state’s Board of Elections—made up of four Democrats, four Republicans, and one Independent—which tabulates and verifies every vote in the weeks after an election, shocked North Carolina’s political establishment by voting unanimously not to certify Harris’s win. “I’m very familiar with unfortunate activities that have been happening down in my part of the state,” Joshua Malcolm, the board’s vice-chairman and a Democratic resident of the Ninth District, said during the meeting. “I’m not going to turn a blind eye to what took place. To the best of my understanding, which has been ongoing for a number of years, that has been repeatedly referred to the United States Attorney and district attorneys to take action and clean it up.”

The board’s actions inspired J. Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics at Catawba College, near Charlotte, and a self-described “North Carolina politics data geek,” to reëxamine some of the voter returns. In Bladen and Robeson counties, Bitzer found that Harris won an unusually high share of mail-in absentee-ballot votes. Bladen was the only county where the Republican prevailed in the mail-in-absentee vote, winning sixty-one per cent of the votes from mail-in ballots—despite registered Republicans accounting for only nineteen per cent of the county’s returned absentee ballots. To achieve that margin, Harris would have needed to win not only all of the Republican ballots but almost every single mail-in vote from Independents, as well as a significant number of votes from crossover Democrats. Since posting his findings on his blog, Bitzer has been answering so many media calls that his voice has grown hoarse. “Now it feels more like an avalanche rather than the snowball effect,” he said. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”