SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
ron desantis
'Unhinged and Undemocratic': Florida Cops Question Abortion Petition Signers
"This is what state-authorized election interference looks like," said the ACLU of Florida.
Sep 06, 2024
Floridians and reproductive rights advocates responded with alarm on Friday to Tampa Bay Timesreporting that Florida law enforcement officers have been sent to the homes of multiple voters who signed a petition to get an abortion rights measure on the November ballot.
While Isaac Menasche told the newspaper that he isn't sure which agency the plainclothes officer who came to his home is with, fellow Lee County resident Becky Castellanos said Florida Department of Law Enforcement Officer Gary Negrinelli showed his badge and gave his card.
Both visits were about potential fraud related to the petition for Amendment 4, which would outlaw pre-viability abortion bans in Florida. Menasche was asked if he signed the petition, which he had. Negrinelli inquired about Castellanos' relative, who also signed the petition.
"This is pure voter intimidation, just like with the 'election police' in 2022. It's Gestapo tactics."
The officer inquiries appear "to be part of a broad—and unusual—effort by Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration to inspect thousands of already verified and validated petitions for Amendment 4 in the final two months before Election Day," the Times reported.
The Republican governor signed the state's six-week ban that would end if the ballot measure passes. He has also faced criticism for creating an Office of Election Crimes and Security, whose work has led to the arrest of Floridians who believed they were legally allowed to vote following the passage of a referendum that restored voting rights to many people with past felony convictions.
As the Times detailed Friday:
Since last week, DeSantis' secretary of state has ordered elections supervisors in at leastfour counties to send to Tallahassee at least 36,000 petition forms already deemed to have been signed by real people. Since the Timesfirst reported on this effort, Alachua and Broward counties have confirmed they also received requests from the state.
One 16-year supervisor said the request was unprecedented. The state did not ask for rejected petitions, which have been the basis for past fraud cases.
While Department of State spokesperson Ryan Ash said the agency has "uncovered evidence of illegal conduct with fraudulent petitions" and "we have a duty to seek justice for Florida citizens who were victimized," a representative for the coalition behind Amendment 4 criticized the state effort.
"This is very clearly a fishing expedition," ACLU of Florida spokesperson Keisha Mulfort, whose group is part of Floridians Protecting Freedom, told the Times. "It is more important than ever for Floridians to reject these authoritarian tactics and vote yes on Amendment 4 in November."
Promoting the report on social media, the ACLU of Florida added, "This is what state-authorized election interference looks like."
Democrats in the state were similarly critical. Florida state Rep. Anna V. Eskamani (D-42) shared a social media post in which Menasche described feeling "shaken" and "troubled" by the encounter with the officer.
"This is unhinged and undemocratic behavior being pushed by DeSantis and his cronies in an effort to continue our state's near total abortion ban," said Eskamani. "It's clear voter intimidation and plain corruption—continue to call it out and fight back. Vote @yes4florida and spread the word."
Responding to Eskamani, Pamela Castellana, chair of the Brevard Democratic Executive Committee, said: "This literally took my breath away. This is pure voter intimidation, just like with the 'election police' in 2022. It's Gestapo tactics. If you live in Florida you know. If you don't—please help me get the word out. Stop authoritarianism."
Journalist Jessica Valenti argued Friday that Republicans "don't care that voters want abortion rights restored—and if they need to dismantle democracy to keep it banned, so be it."
"We've seen lots of Republican attacks on pro-choice ballot measures—but what makes this one especially insidious is that it's trying to gaslight Americans into thinking that voters don't really want abortion rights restored, but that the overwhelming support is fabricated," she added.
In addition to raising concerns about the fraud allegations, Amendment 4 supporters are outraged over the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration on Thursday launching a webpage claiming that the ballot measure "threatens women's safety."
Florida Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book (D-35) pledged that she is looking into "appropriate legal action," while Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a statement that "this kind of propaganda issued by the state, using taxpayer money and operating outside of the political process, sets a dangerous precedent."
"This is what we would expect to see from an authoritarian regime," added Jackson, "not in the so-called 'Free State of Florida.'"
Keep ReadingShow Less
The GOP’s Voter Intimidation Strategy Is Straight Out of the Confederate Playbook
Republicans have come to genuinely believe that they cannot retain political power without resorting to morally criminal, nakedly unethical voter suppression tactics.
Aug 28, 2024
The Republican attorney general of Texas sent armed police officers after Hispanic voters—some in their 80s—to intimidate, threaten, and destroy them financially by forcing them to hire lawyers to defend themselves, even though they are perfectly legal voters.
It’s a manifestation of the new unofficial Republican slogan:
If you can’t win on the issues, cheat. And if cheating doesn’t get you over the top, intimidate!
As is the case with so many bad Republican ideas (outlawing labor unions, ending welfare programs, banning abortion, gutting women’s voting and economic rights, etc.), this one started during the failure of Reconstruction in the 1870s. White supremacists had taken over the federal government and, in the states, Black voters were routinely threatened with violence and imprisonment when they tried to vote.
We thought those days were over. But in August of 2022, three months before he would face voters for reelection, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis reprised the neo-Confederate strategy of using the levers of official state power to intimidate Black voters.
DeSantis put together a special police force to go after “voter fraud,” and they executed a number of arrest warrants against Black voters who’d been told by various state officials that they could vote even though they had a felony conviction. They all believed they were eligible, and apparently most were. There was absolutely no effort to commit voter fraud involved, and there hasn’t been a single conviction.
The Texas attorney general bragged that Republicans only held power in Texas as a result of voter suppression, and added that if voter suppression were to end, Republicans would never again seize power in that state.
(With a 64% margin of victory, Florida’s voters had approved a ballot measure in the 2018 election giving voting rights back to the roughly 20% of Florida Black citizens—1.5 million potential voters—who’d had a felony conviction. The Republican-controlled state legislature then—quietly—essentially overturned the ballot measure in 2020, although many Black voters never got the memo.)
With cameras rolling, around 20 Black former-felon voters were arrested for “illegal voting” and paraded before the media in shackles.
As a result, many Black voters that November concluded showing up at the polls just wasn’t worth the risk. As the Palm Beach Daily Newsnoted shortly after the 2022 election:
In 2018, before the new voting laws were enacted, the state had a 63% turnout among registered voters in the midterms. This year, turnout dropped to 54%...
DeSantis’ brutal intimidation strategy was so effective at suppressing the Black vote in Florida that year that he even won Miami-Dade County, which had been a Democratic stronghold since 2002, and Palm Beach County, which had not voted Republican since 1986.
But what starts in Florida rarely stays in Florida, particularly if it helps a white Republican administration stay in power in a state with a large minority population.
Now the “notoriously corrupt” Republican attorney general of Texas, desperate to hang onto his party’s majority in this 2024 election, has picked up on DeSantis’ strategy of intimidating minority voters in August to keep them away from the November polls.
After putting 2 million people on the “suspense” list—forcing those mostly urban voters into provisional ballots which won’t be countered unless they take time off work to show up at a county office to confirm their identities in the week after the election—Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is now sending police officers into Hispanic neighborhoods to kick in doors and arrest Latino voters.
In 2021, Paxton bragged to right-wing hate purveyor and now-imprisoned criminal Steve Bannon that he’d successfully prevented Harris County—home to Houston and its 2.4 million mostly-Democratic voters—from voting by mail in 2020, thus keeping Republicans in charge of the state.
That’s right. The Texas attorney general bragged that Republicans only held power in Texas as a result of voter suppression, and added that if voter suppression were to end, Republicans would never again seize power in that state.
His effort forced the few willing brave souls among Houston’s citizens—fully 14.5% of the entire state’s registered voters—to navigate crowded polling places in person during a deadly pandemic before vaccines were available.
“If we’d lost Harris County” by allowing people to vote by mail, Paxton crowed, “Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million… and we were able to stop every one of them.
“Had we not done that, we… would've been one of those battleground states… and Donald Trump would’ve lost the election.”
After purging over a million Texas voters, most from big cities, off the voting rolls over the past few years, putting 2 million on the “suspense” list, and then preventing Houstonians from voting by mail in 2020, Paxton’s newest trick to keep the GOP in charge of Texas is a naked rip-off of DeSantis’ minority voter intimidation strategy.
One of the members of LULAC Texas (League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the oldest Latino voting and civil rights groups in the country), retired schoolteacher 87-year-old Lidia Martinez, had publicly spoken out against Paxton when he forbade Texans from getting mail-in ballots in 2020.
He got his revenge this past week.
At six in the morning, according to The New York Times, nine officers, some with guns, showed up at her home after having broken down a door to raid the home of Manuel Medina, the chair of the Tejano Democrats. Martinez asked who was at the door and, the Times noted, the officers “then pushed open the door” and invaded her home:
Ms. Martinez said that the officers told her they came because she had filled out a report saying that older residents were not getting mail ballots. “Yes, I did,”she told them. For 35 years, Ms. Martinez has been a member of LULAC, the civil rights group, helping Latino residents stay engaged in politics. Much of her work has included instructing older residents and veterans on how to fill out voter registration cards…
Two of the agents went to her bedroom and searched everywhere, “my underwear, my nightgown, everything, they went through everything,” Ms. Martinez recalled. They took her laptop, phone, planner and some documents.
All across the state, apparently, police were raiding the homes of Hispanic voters. The head of Texas LULAC Gabriel Rosales, who was on my radio/TV program Monday, told me and the Times, “It’s pure intimidation.”
When asked for an explanation, AG Paxton told the Times, without a trace of irony:
Secure elections are the cornerstone of our Republic.
Reporter Greg Palast, who’ll be premiering his new movie Vigilantes, Inc: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmenon Sunday, September 8 in Los Angeles (I’ll be there, too), has pointed out that the former Confederate slave states of Texas, Georgia, and Florida would all be Blue were it not for voter suppression, voter purges, and the intimidation of Black and Hispanic voters.
“There is no doubt about it,” Palast told me recently on the air. “It’s just demographics.”
As I detail in my book The Hidden History of the War on Voting, this has been a fundamental, core strategy for Republican efforts to hold power once they take over a state since the 1960s. Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich laid it out when he told a group of Texas Republicans in 1980, as they prepared to suppress votes during the Reagan campaign:
I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
The late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, for another example, started his rise in Republican politics in the Goldwater/Johnson election of 1964 standing outside Hispanic and Native American polling places to challenge and intimidate would-be voters. His program was called Operation Eagle Eye, and over the next decade it expanded to multiple Republican-run states.
Voter suppression is now a primary political tool for Republicans, which is why when Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs signed an executive order last week expanding locations across the state where people can vote, the Arizona Republican Party sued to prevent them from opening to voters.
Republicans have come to genuinely believe that they cannot retain political power without resorting to morally criminal, nakedly unethical voter suppression tactics.
As former President Donald Trump toldFox “News” about unsuccessful Democratic efforts to offer mail-in ballots to registered voters nationwide during the 2020 pandemic:
They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again…
Because of a series of bizarre rulings by five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court over the past two-plus decades, America is the only country in the world where a state must go to court to take away your gun but doesn’t even need to inform you if it prevents you from voting or keeps your vote from being counted.
Vice President Kamala Harris has promised to make voting rights a top priority if she’s elected president and Democrats take both houses of Congress. This is part of what Democrats mean when they say that democracy itself is on the ballot this fall.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Enhancement Act, for example, will outlaw most of these types of voter suppression by making voting a right, rather than simply a privilege.
The stakes for this election couldn’t be higher. Tag, you’re it!
Keep ReadingShow Less
Report Shows USDA Summer Meals Programs Reach Only Fraction of Kids in Need
"When the school year ends, millions of low-income children lose access to the school meals they depend on," an expert said.
Aug 07, 2024
An advocacy group on Tuesday published a report showing that only a fraction of children who receive free or reduced-price lunches during the school year get such benefits through United States Department of Agriculture programs in the summer, leaving many families with school-age children food insecure.
Only 15.3% of the number of children who receive subsidized school lunches received a summer meal in 2023, the last year for which data was available, the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) report, Hunger Doesn't Take a Vacation, says. The findings highlight the difficulty of reaching children outside of school.
"When the school year ends, millions of low-income children lose access to the school meals they depend on," Kelsey Boone, a FRAC policy analyst and report co-author, told Common Dreams.
The report assesses the 2023 impact of two long-standing USDA programs that were rebranded this year under the name SUN Meals. The USDA also added two new summer meals programs this year, SUN Meals To-Go and SUN Bucks, the latter of which has been the subject of political controversy.
The SUN Bucks program provides a modest $120 per child for the summer to low-income families in electronic benefit transfers (EBTs), similar to the way food stamp money is distributed. The program is administered by states, territories, and tribes and is expected to bring $2.5 billion in grocery benefits to 21 million children this summer.
But it could reach even more children: 13 Republican-controlled states have opted out. They cite reasons including philosophical opposition to "welfare," other summer lunch programs already on offer in their states, and high administrative costs. All of the EBT money comes directly from the federal government, but states are required to pay 50% of the costs of running the program.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom's press office responded to news of the Republican opt-outs by writing on social media earlier this month that "California has fed over 3.2 million kids through summer meal programs while Republican states refuse free federal dollars."
Connecticut State Sen. Bob Duff, a Democrat, responded by writing, "Is being cruel part of the [Republican] party platform?"
In Florida, where the Republican administration opted out of SUN Bucks, families who could have benefited expressed disbelief.
Crystal Ripolio, a woman in Tallahassee who said she struggles to feed her 8-year-old daughter, toldThe Associated Press that her state should offer the same summer meal money that other states do.
"If other states are able to do it, why can't we?" she said, standing outside a food bank that happened to be near Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' official residence in Tallahassee. "That doesn't make sense."
Some Republican-controlled states, such as Louisiana and Nebraska, initially declined to opt in but ultimately decided to do so. States that opted out of SUN Bucks in 2024 may enroll next year.
The USDA's other programs, including those addressed in the new report, face challenges that are not as explicitly political. Though the summer programs did reach 2.8 million children per day in 2023, logistical challenges abound.
"We believe that the low ratio of summer lunch to school year lunch is due to many factors including barriers to participation such as lack of transportation and lack of meal sites in a child's area and high area eligibility thresholds, meaning an open site (a site that serves all children that come to it regardless of income status) must be in an area where 50% or more of the population of children are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch," Boone said.
"It is much easier to access meals when children are already at school," she added.
The FRAC report calls on Congress to allow more communities to offer summer meals and to let more sites operate year-round and provide three meals a day.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular