Republican Anti-Democracy and Voter Disenfranchisement

I guess this is as good of a place to put this.  I can't believe that we are still talking this much about a past loser president.  It proves what kind of a disaster he was on a personal level.  We got post insurrection news, his corporate legal issues, the fake stolen election news and we got the below. How Trump wanted to go full dictatorship on the protesters last summer.   I'm sure he wanted to keep up his 'law and order' so call image. 

The miracle of the last presidency was that we survived it and that sanity won over craziness last November.  Trump was / is certifiable nuts :blink: and a lot worse could have taken place under his deranged leadership as if the insurrection wasn't 'beyond worst'.   Unfortunately, the GOP is still tied at the hip with they guy out of fear or ineptness, and so it makes it a party that is difficult to support regardless of its policy positions.

https://www.axios.com/trump-mark-milley-protests-michael-bender-a41db287-7f6a-43d9-9a4c-1ba7a0307881.html

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, repeatedly blew up at President Trump over how to handle last summer's racial-justice protests, The Wall Street Journal's Michael Bender writes in his forthcoming book, "Frankly, We Did Win This Election."

The backdrop: Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and put Milley in charge of a scorched-earth military campaign to suppress protests that had spiraled into riots in several cities.

Milley — now a GOP villain for his testimony last week on critical race theory — pushed back, Bender writes in a passage Axios is reporting for the first time:


Seated in the Situation Room with [Attorney General Bill] Barr, Milley, and [Secretary of Defense Mark] Esper, Trump exaggerated claims about the violence and alarmed officials ... by announcing he’d just put Milley "in charge."



Privately, Milley confronted Trump about his role. He was an adviser, and not in command. But Trump had had enough.



 "I said you're in f---ing charge!" Trump shouted at him.



 "Well, I'm not in charge!" Milley yelled back. 



"You can't f---ing talk to me like that!" Trump said. ...



 "Goddamnit," Milley said to others. "There's a room full of lawyers here. Will someone inform him of my legal responsibilities?"



"He's right, Mr. President," Barr said. "The general is right."


Asked for a response, Trump told Axios through an aide: "This is totally fake news, it never ever happened. I'm not a fan of Gen. Milley, but I never had an argument with him and the whole thing is false. He never talked back to me. Michael Bender never asked me about it and it's totally fake news."

  • Trump later added: "If Gen. Milley had yelled at me, I would have fired him."

Bender then told Axios: "This exchange was confirmed by multiple senior administration officials during the course of hundreds of hours of interviews with dozens of top Trump World aides for this book."

  • "Contrary to Mr. Trump’s assertion, I asked the former president for his side of this particular argument in a written question — as he requested — along with other queries included in my thorough fact-checking process. He did not reply.”

A spokesman for Milley declined to comment.

P.S. At Trump's Ohio rally on Saturday night, he attacked Milley without naming him: "You see these generals lately on television? They are woke."
Click to expand...
 
A little follow-up on this thread. Remember when we were chastised for crying foul about these laws? Remember when we were told no one's right to vote had been messed with?

Funny story...


A new Georgia voting law reduced ballot drop box access in places that used them most


 
NPR, WABE and GPB compiled drop box usage data by reviewing thousands of forms used to document the number of ballots deposited in drop boxes daily across Georgia in 2020 and calculating travel time intervals to a drop box for more than 7.5 million voters. 2022 drop box locations are current as of Georgia's May 24 primary.

An analysis by NPR, WABE and Georgia Public Broadcasting also found:

  • More than half of the roughly 550,000 voters who cast their ballot using a drop box in the state's 2020 general election lived in four metro Atlanta counties — Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett — where about 50% of the voters are people of color.
  • Under the new law, the number of drop boxes in these four counties plummeted from 107 to 25.
  • Nearly 1.9 million people, a quarter of the state's voters, have seen their travel time to a drop box increase from the 2020 election.
  • More than 90% of voters who saw an increase in their travel time to a drop box live in cities or suburbs, which are home to most of the state's minority voters and vote heavily Democratic.



NPR, WABE and GPB compiled drop box usage data and locations by manually reviewing more than 9,000 collection forms from drop boxes used in the 2020 presidential election. Poll workers documented the number of ballots deposited in 295 drop boxes across the state daily.

Ballot drop boxes were provided to Georgia voters in the 2020 primaries for the first time as a way to vote safely while COVID-19 ravaged communities. Even before the pandemic, they were a popular tool for voters in states such as Oregon, Washington and Colorado.

After former President Donald Trump's defeat, many of his allies in Georgia and elsewhere equated drop boxes with voter fraud. So, Republican lawmakers, particularly in Georgia, have moved to curtail access to the boxes before the November midterm election.

The new law, known as Senate Bill 202, requires all 159 Georgia counties to have at least one box — but no more than one per 100,000 voters. Instead of making them available outdoors 24 hours a day as in 2020, the drop boxes must be kept inside early voting locations with limited hours — typically 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. That can be problematic for voters with inflexible work schedules or those with other time constraints. The bill received no Democratic support.

While it's too early to measure the law's impact on turnout, experts say even small changes to voter behavior and turnout can sway election outcomes and erode trust in the voting system, especially in a politically divided state like Georgia with a history of discriminatory voting practices that disproportionately impact people of color.

"In any state that's going to have tight elections, and Georgia's had some nail biters, then even those marginal changes could have significant effects on the outcome of elections," said Benjamin Gonzalez O'Brien, who teaches political science at San Diego State University and has studied drop box access and voter turnout. "Not every election is decided by tens of thousands of votes. Some are decided by under 100 votes."



 



 
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