I guess Senators Chuck Chuck BoBuck Schumer and Kirsten “Let’s lynch Al Franken” Gillibrand are too busy fretting over the Democratic candidate for 2024, in spite of the expressed will of a giant majority of Democratic voters, to read their hair on fire constituent emails, even if sent five times. My Congressman has also been silent as a sphinx, though the woman I spoke to at his office today seemed to share my concerns about DeJoy. I suppose every able bodied Democrat on Capitol Hill, if corporate media is to be believed, is clenching their collective anuses too hard to read constituent emails and have a staffer do five minutes of follow up google research.
My expressed concerns about Trump mega-donor Postmaster Louis DeJoy might be validly dismissed, if only a tiny number of American ballots were actually cast by mail. If mail in votes did not constitute a margin that could swing a close election, my worries would be stupid and a distraction. What if the number of mail in ballots in recent elections were in the 30 to 66 million ballots range? It turns out they are.
Read on, from a United States government website:
The number of by-mail ballots sent to voters nationally increased from 28.5 million to 42.4 million between 2008 and 2018, while returned ballots rose from 23.1 million to 30.4 million. Although the totals rise and fall based on the type of election held that year, examining the data when separated as midterm or presidential election shows that the ballots transmitted and returned nonetheless increase within the election categories.
In the 2020 election, 43% of all votes cast, more than 66 million ballots, were cast by mail (per US Census Bureau).
In the 2022 midterm electionsthere was a 31.8% vote by mail rate, over 34,000,000 votes, in a historically large turnout for a midterm. This is also from the US Census:
For the 2022 election, the survey found that nearly one-third (31.8%) of all voters cast ballots by mail, up from 23.1% in 2018. Almost half (47.1%) voted before Election Day, up from 37.8% in 2018.
Other highlights:
Among those who were registered but did not vote in the 2022 elections, the most common answer given for not voting was, “Too busy, conflicting work or school schedule.”
The most common way people registered to vote was at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV); 29.8% of respondents reported registering at their DMV.
Among the citizen voting-age population, homeowners had higher voter turnout than renters, with 58.1% of eligible homeowners and 36.5% of renters voting.
Turnout rates for the citizen voting-age population differed by length of residence, 67.6% for those living in the same place for five years or longer and 40.5% for those in their current residence for one year or less.
Turnout was higher among the married (61.2%) than unmarried (42.5%) citizen voting-age population.
Turnout was higher among veterans (62.7%) than among nonveterans (51.3%).
Native-born citizen voter turnout was 53.4%, greater than the 41.4% turnout of naturalized citizens.
The South had the nation’s lowest voter turnout (48.9%), while turnout in the West (54.7%), Midwest (54.1%) and Northeast (53.8%) were not significantly different from each other.
You can’t expect a spineless man like Chuck Chuck BoBuck to step up and do the bold thing, he never has. Neither does it profit you to put faith in a female Senator who calls for a colleague who asked for an ethics hearing in his alleged misconduct to be ousted from the Senate immediately, without a chance to clear his name. As for my Congressman? Fuck that fucking puto, I’ve been in contact with his people several times, in addition to the papers I put in the mail to him and the sympathetic woman I spoke to at his office today. She promised she’d pass it on to her busily fundraising boss. So I am holding my breath, of course,
This corporate democracy we have here, where corporations and mega-wealthy donors can get any politician they want on the phone immediately to deal with their concerns, is rotten, corrupt and pathetic. We are in position to fix it, but we have a lot of hard work to do if we’re going to. Our first order of business is putting aside the petty squabbles to show a little unity and just a drop of fucking courage and soundly defeat Donald “Project 2025” Trump in November.
Then we have to remember how fucked up our corporate democracy still is and start fixing it, from Day One.
Project 2025, written by the far-right ideologues of the influential Heritage Foundation, sister think tank to the rightwing judicial fraternity the Federalist Society, The Institute for Humane Studies, The American Legislative Exchange Council and dozens more funded by Charles Koch and every fascist billionaire in the country, begins with these words:
It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.
see footnote
Winning elections, at this apocalyptic moment in human history, against the “Radical Left” already in control, due to the irreversibly rising tide of ignorant majoritarian hordes, is simply not enough to preserve their sacred values of unlimited wealth and uncheckable power for the privileged.
Also, they cannot win honest elections anymore and they know this very well. Hence, Project 2025, a plan to go for all the marbles, once and for all.
Charles Koch learned in 1980 that his “libertarian” beliefs could not win elections, at best, his brother and his presidential running mate were barely able to get one percent of the national vote, which was appropriate since those were the only interests they represented. The far right’s project, seeing they could never prevail through fair democratic elections, became to capture the religious extremist vote, and the vote of every angry, lost soul, to make the vote look competitive, and to seize power by extra-electoral means.
Brilliant, privileged, covetous men like Charles Koch understood their ideas would never win elections, being of benefit only to a tiny fraction of the top 1% of Americans. So they began the long game of Making America Great Again (for Robber Barons, Monopolists and families of inherited wealth) by funding strong rightwing candidates in local elections, taking control of state houses, gerrymandering to keep control of state legislatures, churning out political philosophy and propaganda from “think tanks,” generating model legislation like Stand Your Ground and other gun protection laws, anti-voting, anti-labor, anti-environment and anti-abortion laws and bringing carefully constructed ideological lawsuits that would be heard in captured federal courts and ultimately decided by graduates of their far right, religious extremist judicial fraternity, the Federalist Society.
Their bigoted, polluting, oligarch-empowering ideas cannot win democratically, so their project is to destroy democracy with a very firm-handed minority rule, enforced by carefully vetted loyalists to a strong leader. They are authoritarians, or, as I always see it, regular ambitious folks always ready to go full Nazi on the citizenry.
Heather Cox Richardson lays out the connection between Putin, Trump, the forces of global authoritarianism and its angrily righteous partner, religious extremism, tying together recent events and a little bit of recent history, which is worth noting again, including this:
The use of Russian disinformation to destabilize democracy in the U.S. looks much like the information warfare Russia has used to establish Ukrainian leaders that worked for the Kremlin. It was the ouster of one of those leaders, Viktor Yanukovych, in the 2014 Maidan Revolution ten years ago that prompted Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine later that year. Yanukovych won office with the help of American political consultant Paul Manafort, who advised and, briefly, chaired the Trump campaign in 2016, when it weakened the Republican party’s platform plank that supported arming Ukraine against Putin after his 2014 invasion.
Seeding lies about corruption that came from Russian-linked Ukrainians was central to Trump’s 2019 impeachment: his phone call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky demanding Zelensky announce an investigation into Burisma and Joe Biden’s son Hunter was part of an attempt to create dirt on the Bidens. That call happened after Trump’s advisor Rudy Giuliani went to Ukraine, where he talked to “an active Russian agent,” according to the FBI. FBI agents warned Giuliani that he was a target of Russian disinformation.
That poison has now spread from Trump’s rogue team in the White House to the Republican Party itself, which has apparently been carrying water for Putin at the very center of our government.
The whole piece is here, very much worth reading in its concise entirety, and thinking about as we prepare to preserve democracy and prevent Project 2025, the billionaire funded plan to make Bill Barr’s theocratic worldview the permanent government of our nation of immigrants.
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