Originally posted by whodey
Have you joined any protests Suzy?
Now that you believe the system to be rigged, what should be done about it?
While I am an idealist in theory, I am a realist in practice. I doubt if anything can be done at this point. Too many people just want "the madness to be over".
When I sat and watched the election results, I was devastated. Two phrases kept floating around in my mind. 1) "I don't get it." and 2) "I thought we were better than this." As I watched the electoral votes roll in, I knew as well as I know my own face that the best person for the job was going to lose this election. I also knew that the number of Trump supporters were not enough to win this election for Trump. There were far, far more people who understood that "love trumps hate". So I was hurt, and shocked that, apparently, more people than just the haters, the bigots, the racists, the xenophobes and the misogynists thought that Hillary deserved to lose and, somehow, that Trump deserved to win.
I was taking a while to run through the five stages of grief involved in a loss of this magnitude, and so for several days I was still in the anger phase, looking at people in cars on the road, in the mall, at the gym, even at work, thinking "how many of you a--holes voted for that scumbag?" "How many of you lying pieces of garbage told pollsters you were going to vote for Hillary and then once you got in the voting booth, the monster came out and you finally showed your true selves?"
I knew that the polls showed that only 2-3% of blacks supported Trump so I wondered where the hell is the black vote? I knew that in my county in Arizona, hispanics came out in force to vote against Sheriff Arpaio, so where was their vote for Hillary? I started thinking that maybe people were just dumber than I thought, that they somehow swallowed all the BS Trump dished out during the campaign. I was still angry, and so I stayed home mostly, trying not to end up in a fight at Wal-Mart with some fat, stupid slob over the last diet coke six-pack.
Then finally, on Tuesday night, surfing the 'net after work, I stumbled across links to this article in Rolling Stone Magazine by Greg Palast titled "The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters". It referenced a program entitled Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, used in over two dozen states and promoted by none other than Kris Kobach. (Kris Kobach also helped draft and defend in court the disastrous Arizona SB 1070, and then after that bill was mostly struck down by the Supreme Court, he tried again, with Alabama's HB 56, which was even tougher than Arizona's bill.)
Wikipedia says this about Kris Kobach:
"On September 2, 2015, representatives of groups most likely to be disenfranchised by Kobach's plan to shorten a deadline for tens of thousands of suspended voters to produce proof of citizenship, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP and the National Organization for Women, all testified against Kobach's strategy. Kobach did not appear for the hearing but he was supported by an official whom Kobach had appointed to a government post. In response to criticism from the campaign staff of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Kobach called them "left-wing knuckleheads," and remarked that Clinton was getting her "pant suit in a twist," over his stance in favor of implementing some of the toughest voter ID legislation in the nation. Clinton had claimed Kobach's interventions were an attempt to make voting more difficult for key Democratic constituencies, such as young people and racial minorities."
So he has a record of trying to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters, and this is what Crosscheck is all about. Crosscheck has tagged approx. 7.2 million voters in 28 states. Hundreds of thousands of these voters (on average per state) have already been purged from voter rolls in these states. African-American, Latino and Asian names dominate these lists.
Now I see all the puzzle pieces, including that annoying last piece you eventually find under the dog dish. The pollsters were right all along. America IS "better than that". And it's not that Americans are so damned stupid, it's just that a significant percentage of them were stripped of their right to vote in this election. Hillary did not "lose" the election. It was stolen right out from under her, right in front of everyone watching at home. Clearly, had all these voters been allowed to vote, the predicted landslide would have occurred. Hillary would have beaten Trump by hundreds of thousands of votes
per state. Votes that were not cast because those voters had been removed from the voting rolls. The 2016 "Great Election Robbery" has placed Donald Trump, possibly the least qualified person
ever to run for President, into the White House.
You ask me "What should be done about this?" How does Federal investigation into Kris Kobach, the Crosscheck program and Donald Trump (including kickbacks and payments) grab you?
When do you think the hearings will start? We can start with Federal subpoenas to the state Elections Office in each of those 28 states using the Crosscheck program.
Yeah, I know.
When pigs fly.