this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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"If the purges [of potential voters], challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast."

"[...] Democracy can win* despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.

And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK."

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[–] Skyrmir@lemmy.world 103 points 1 week ago (14 children)

So the new campaign is that the DNC did nothing wrong, they were just thwarted by voter suppression?

Couldn't be they completely fucked up by campaigning to a center that doesn't exist any more. The DLC's triangulation bullshit is dead and needs to stay dead. Every Dem from the Clinton era needs to get that through their damn heads, they should have retired a decade ago anyway.

[–] blackbelt352@lemmy.world 94 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It's a combination of everything, DNC has been spineless and bought out by corps, voter suppression techniques from Republicans skewed votes in their favor, white rural voters came out in droves to vote for trump, the Harris campaign failure to meaningfully address the genocide or get enough messaging out to address people's financial troubles.

[–] Zexks@lemmy.world 29 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The genocide voters are idiots. Harris spent too much time trying to court “moderate” republicans.

[–] blackbelt352@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Congrats, the dems passively let a decades old tradition of passively supporting Israel go mildly unchanged and the idiots let a genocide accelerationist into power. Not stopping a genocide is not the same as accelerating it.

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[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The voter suppression problem is a symptom of the spineless and bought out DNC problem. Dems should be talking about nationwide voting laws and how red states aren't democratic and don't have legitimate rule of law constantly, but that would be too radical and unpredictable for the corps to feel comfortable with, so instead they focus their legislative efforts on just cutting checks to all the state governments for this infrastructure initiative or that climate bill or whatever, which helps assholes like Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp run the systems of patronage and oppression that keep them in power (also, those checks are eventually ending up in the corps' accounts, so they're happy too).

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They don't talk about voting laws during the campaign because it loses.

Contrary to popular belief, they're not idiots.

If you get all the corporations to turn against you, especially the media companies, you lose. Ask Bernie.

They're not doing everything right, certainly, but it's also not a simple problem to solve. There are some very fine lines to walk for Dems. Kamala tried to walk those lines and failed.

She offered a $50k credit towards buying your first house. Does Gen Z remember that?

Meanwhile Trump could shout "hail Hitler" tomorrow and all the corporate media (and then 50% of the voters) would make excuses for him.

We need voters to seek out primary sources. We need them to be more resistant to manipulation. The problem isn't getting the information out there; it's getting people to hear it. How many people who didn't vote for Kamala went to KamalaHarris.com? And how many of those seriously considered what she had to say?

The problem is that saying nothing is more of a winning strategy than saying something. People always want to tear you down, and more words give them more ammo. So every politician's website is filled with fluff and platitudes.

The problem is Fox News telling people what to think 24/7 in a way that they actually listen.

Honestly, The Daily Show and Colbert Report of around 2000-2015 were one of the best things this country had going for it, and we were hardly aware of it.

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[–] Banana@sh.itjust.works 48 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'm never gonna stop sharing this

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[–] ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago (40 children)

The Democrats have plenty of problems, but none of that compares to Republicans who are worse in every conceivable way. Propaganda, foreign interference, and domestic voter suppression won this for Trump and his goons.

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[–] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They didn't campaign to the center, they campaigned to the right. It was incredible obtuse and stupid.

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[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 84 points 1 week ago (6 children)

FTA:

The crucial statistic is that not everyone’s ballot gets disqualified. One study done for the United States Civil Rights Commission found that a Black person, such as Maj. Turner, will be 900% more likely to have their mail-in or in-person ballot disqualified than a white voter.

Okay, I went into this expecting cope, and it's an actually good article, worth a read or at least a skim. So, let's do something about it.

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[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 67 points 1 week ago (2 children)

One lesson 2020 should have taught everyone and that's vote by mail WORKS.

Lifting the restrictions on vote by mail for Covid won the election for Biden, and replacing those restrictions in 2024 lost it for Harris.

We should have 100% vote by mail in all states.

[–] samus12345@lemm.ee 55 points 1 week ago

vote by mail WORKS.

Which is why red states didn't want to use it. Can't stay in power if you don't suppress votes.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago

One lesson 2020 should have taught everyone and that’s vote by mail WORKS.

It was a lesson national administrators learned. That's why it was heavily clawed back. 2020 was a big year for Popular Socialist Candidates. Neither party enjoyed a wave year that included The Squad and put a guy like Bernie Sanders in arm's reach of Biden after Super Tuesday.

We should have 100% vote by mail in all states.

Republicans have been outspoken in opposition to mail-in voting, particularly for younger college-aged voters. But even Dems are lackluster in their support for full enfranchisement, on the grounds that higher participation tends to make controlling primaries more difficult and expensive (the NY-14 upset by AOC being a classic example).

Incidentally How Voting Laws Have Changed in Battleground States Since 2020: Most have made it harder to vote, but others have expanded access.

[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 63 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (28 children)

It's always "funny" when people act like systemic racism is some reformable problem rather than a major foundation of the entire system.

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[–] suburban_hillbilly@lemmy.ml 59 points 1 week ago (6 children)

This article is in desperate need of citations and a public revelation of the calculations involved. It also has problems. I can't speak to other states but where it does mention Pennsylvania, where I live, it omits critical information.

In Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), the Poison Postcards wiped out 360,132 voters, three times Trump’s victory margin.

These don't get sent out for fun. This is how the ordinary voter roll maintenance works. The cards are sent out after you fail to vote two consecutive federal elections, or when the department of state gets notified you moved or died through some other means, not for 'targeting' voters. You only actually get purged from the roll if you fail to respond to the card AND fail to vote for at least five consecutive years (This isn't specified as far as I know, but a product of the timings involved). If you show up and vote in every presidential election, you do not get removed from the rolls even if you throw out the postcard. So if this:

According to the EAC data, before the 2024 election, 4,776,706 registrants were removed nationwide simply because they failed to return the postcard.

Includes Pennsylvania, it is simply false. You can read the actual law yourself, they are all online. It's PA Title 25. Chapter 19 lays out the rules for removal.

Details on Pennsylvania specific mail-in ballots being cancelled, which is a real issue, are woefully absent. According to the Governor's office only about 1% of the 2 million returned (about 20,000) mail in ballots were rejected.

https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dos/newsroom/shapiro-administration-announces-57--decrease-in-mail-ballots-re.html

Of the roughly 1% of mail ballots rejected in the 2024 general election, the most common reasons for rejection were:

receipt after the 8 p.m. deadline on Election Day (33%), incorrect or missing date (23%), lack of a signature (17%), and lack of a secrecy envelope (15%).

Harris lost by ~120,000 ish votes in PA. 'Clerical errors' are not even close to closing that gap.

It also mentions Secretaries of State being partisan hacks, but some odd reason fails to mention Pennsylvania's Secretary of State was appointed by our Democratic governor who was not only a Democrat, obviously, but short listed for consideration as a running mate for Harris. Nevertheless, it is implied we should concerned about his Secretary of State targeting voters from her own party for removal in an election that could have had handed the governor his own path to the White House. Forgive me for my skepticism.

Voter suppression is a big deal, I'm sure there are elections it will swing at times. Heck, there is a fair chance it swung the senate race in PA since that one was only decided by ~15,000 votes, but based on what I already know, this article isn't credible enough to be taken seriously in its current state.

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[–] Furbag@lemmy.world 58 points 1 week ago

I knew that this was going to happen as soon as they started purging voter rolls and passing draconian voter suppression laws after Trump lost. Biden just barely beat Trump in 2020, so all they had to do was give Trump a little bump - a few thousand votes nullified here or there would win him a whole state. The media focus in 2020 was on the "historic turnout", but how many of those were covid mail-in ballots that red states didn't allow this time? How many people showed up on election day ready to vote for Kamala only to get turned away because they weren't on the registry even though they voted in 2020?

Republicans cheated in more than one way this time, and we got screwed because we failed to stop it early.

[–] cultsuperstar@lemmy.world 50 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Once again, Trump said (during his first term, I believe) on Fox News Republicans would never win another election if minorities vote. They know this. They consistently make it harder and harder for people to vote, while targeting minorities.

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[–] Freefall@lemmy.world 39 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We all know. Nothing was or will be done. Now they can rig it from the inside. Was a fun run!

[–] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Democrats had the opportunity to fix this when they were in office. They chose to protect the filibuster instead.

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[–] Floon@lemmy.ml 28 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Dem pols are always too afraid to exercise the power they have when they win. Always. When Biden won, DC and Puerto Rican statehood should have been the first things on the agenda.

The GOP is never afraid to exercise as much power as they can get away with.

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[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 27 points 1 week ago (7 children)

This is why Kamala accepting the outcome "No matter what", to prove she's better than Trump...

Was the dumbest thing she could have done because it was just playing into the GOP's hand.

The Republican game is "You go high, we go low, because low gets us elected and furthers our agenda."

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[–] Glasgow@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] nexusband@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago

That's some thorough analysis, holy cow...

[–] IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

While voter suppression exists, voter suppression didn't make safe blue states go down 2 digits of percentage.

Its the propaganda that did it. Money won. Unlimited money to throw at the propaganda manifacturing, won (thanks to citizens united)

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[–] inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Oh please. We had the same shit in 2020 and we had a record turn out.

Don't put the blame on voter suppression when it's American stupidity and apathy that's the cause.

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