Tag Archives: elections

Time to wake up, voters

My concern about the power of a pugnacious partisan postmaster to not deliver millions of ballots, a guy who has already crippled mail delivery nationwide, has been met by silence or dismissal from every one of my elected officials and everyone in progressive media I’ve contacted. Here’s what a Democratic strategist I contacted wrote back to me.

I’ve read the proposed headlines below. This is out of my area of expertise, but these sorts of fears were very prominent in 2020 when Trump was president and Covid was making mail in ballots central to the election. When we looked into them then, they didn’t materialize. I don’t have more information than that. 

Here were my proposed headlines:

headline one:  Trump megadonor Postmaster General has the ability to halt delivery of millions of mail-in ballots from selected zip codes

headline two:  Federal Voter Suppression Scheme, under color of law, in full effect

This guy clearly suffers from smartest man in the room syndrome. There’s a lot of that myopia going on among our best and brightest public champions of democracy these days. Dismissing concerns about a corrupt partisan postmaster using his discretionary power to help his candidate, since it didn’t happen four months into his now four year reign, is as asinine as insisting that, clearly, since the January 6th attack on the Capitol didn’t bring democracy down, there is no reason to be concerned about it or anything like it anymore.

I intend to write back to him like so:

Subject: Instant expertise:

You dismissed this concern when I raised it the first time, since, in spite of similar fears, it didn’t happen in November 2020 when DeJoy had been postmaster for a few months.  Now it is four full years, full-steam ahead on “Delivering for America”, the Postal Regulatory Commission’s urging DFA be suspended until after the election be damned.  You conceded a lack of expertise in this matter.  Here is some information you need:

In 2020, during the depths of Covid, 66,000,000 votes were cast by mail, 43% of all ballots cast.

34,248,000 mail in ballots were cast in the 2022 midterms, 31.8% of 107,700,000 total votes cast in that high turnout midterm election  source Beyond that, numbers for mail-in voting have been on the rise since 2008.  source

DeJoy claimed, in his recent PR piece in the Washington Post, that in August 2023 there was a 98% on-time rate for mail delivery coast to coast. He is silent about what the current on-time delivery rate is. I wonder why.

We note that Senator Jon Ossoff reported on-time delivery from the new Atlanta processing and distribution center was 98% in 2022, 52% in 2023 and 72% YTD 2024.

This is not something to be concerned about, smartest man in the room? Do sixty seconds of research by clicking the links above to become an instant expert.

Please pass this on to your contacts, I can’t get anyone in government or media to give a rat’s ass about it and I’ve been trying for a solid month.  Hopefully someone in your network has a connection that can break through and get this issue public attention.  Otherwise we just have to trust that a MAGA partisan will not bend any rules, laws or norms to get his candidate elected.

Your best, most brilliantly targeted campaign donation advice will be in vain if my concern is even 20% true.  We’re talking about nationwide, easily targetable vote tallies 5-10 times larger than Biden’s robust margin of victory in 2020 (leaving aside the slim Electoral College margin).

Yours in the fight to save our fragile, problematic experiment in democracy,

Eliot Widaen

A little data on ratfucker Louis DeJoy’s power

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.

source, also source of the graph below

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 elections there 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.

More information about voter turnout for the election is available in the America Counts story, High Registration and Early Voting in 2022 Midterms.

source

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.