Remember all those news stories a few months back about an attempt to close 7 out of the 9 polling places in a majority-black Georgia county which voted for Clinton in the last presidential election? The one which the entire press spun as a Republican attempt to suppress the black vote? That was a Democrat elections board. Supposedly, while the county as a whole was majority-black and voted Clinton, those voters were all concentrated around the two urban polling locations which weren't closing, whilst the seven more rural ones which were closing returned a majority for Trump last election. Not that you'd know that from the media reporting...
More recently, the official Democrat party organisation in North Dakota tried to suppress the Republican vote there by running bogus, pants-on-fire Facebook ads falsely claiming that voting could cost people their hunting licenses, the state's Democrat senator stood behind this claim, and this wasn't any kind of national media scandal at all. I'm not sure if Facebook even banned them for it or anything despite this being a clear ToS violation.
I presume that any other Democrat voter suppression which wasn't an in-your-face, public ad campaign with the name of the party literally written all over it and didn't get mistaken for Republican voter suppression has simply gone entirely unnoticed. Why wouldn't it?
Elections consultant recommended to the director of elections that poll sites which were not ADA compliant (required by HAVA) be closed, because there was no funds to upgrade them.
Both candidates for governor, many organizations, and the residents opposed this plan. The two member bipartisan elections board voted against.
This was all easily fact-checked with a quick google.
Please try harder.
The takeaway lesson from this particular drama, for you, should be that our elections are chronically underfunded and mismanaged.
Most smaller county's clerk (auditors) are completely dependent on their secretary of state to keep the lights on. A cynic might suggest the director forced the issue to shake some more money out of the state, for which I would strongly approve.
Cast that as a partisan issue if you wish.
I didn't bother to fact check your North Dakota stuff. I assume it's also less than wrong.
> Elections consultant recommended to the director of elections that poll sites which were not ADA compliant (required by HAVA) be closed, because there was no funds to upgrade them.
That was the official reason, yes. Pretty much the entire mainstream press, plus the ACLU and other similar advocacy organisations, spun this as an obvious lie covering for what was in reality a Republican plot to suppress the black vote.[1][2][3][4][5][6] The candidates for governor spoke out opposing this and the board voted against it after a massive, viral tide of outrage based on the belief that this was a racist Republican voter suppression scheme, including "two packed town-hall meetings in which residents berated local elections officials".[2]
The closest I've found to any mention of the fact that the supposed voter suppression scheme - a claim which was and still is uncritically regurgitated in every major news outlet - would in fact have had the opposite effect from that claimed is a single quote from Republican secretary of state Brian Kemp in one CNN article: "I was the first elected official in Georgia to publicly oppose the plan to close Republican leaning precincts in Randolph County, which is under Democratic rule".[7] The rest of the article is spent repeating the original voter suppression claims. Even now, publications like the New York Times summarize it as a "recent proposal to close seven of nine polling places in majority-black Randolph County".[8] (Which is of course technically true - just hideously misleading.)
You're mad that corporate media misreported 1 out of 100s of voter suppression efforts?
So you're saying that oversight should be 100% accurate, no false positives, to be considered legitimate?
You realize the Randolph County mess got sorted out, right? Isn't that exactly what's supposed to happen? Checks & balances.
You previously stated it was a Democratic election board. That was false. I watched an interview with that board. And they, one Republican and one Democrat, made it clear there was never a chance those poll sites were going to be closed. Believe them at your own peril.
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Okay, I fell for it. I clicked that link. That North Dakota ad about hunting licenses was a bad move. The use of weasel words (eg "may lose") is no defense. As a staunch Democrat, I condemn all such BS. We are the party that enfranchises, not disenfranchises. (I'd much rather you vote for our opponents than not vote at all.)
Further, the trogs that go off script and pull this kind of stunt gives ammo to our critics, allowing people like you to falsely compare one bozo in the badlands with a deliberate nationwide effective perennial effort to disenfranchise us.
I begrudgingly thank you for pointing out the ND stunt. In response, I'll present a resolution to my local party condemning that action, with the goal of amending our state party platform to prohibit such nonsense.
Because that's how we Democrats roll: we clean house with sternly worded letters.
It's not just that the entire media screwed up that story so badly that they convinced the entire planet that a scheme that would suppress Republican votes would instead suppress Democrat votes, or that they continue to do so. It's that from what I can tell the only reason this turned into a major voter suppression scandal is because of which votes were supposedly being suppressed. Even your own initial reply to me demonstrates how this happens; every right-thinking person who saw the official justification in the context of supposed Republican voter suppression saw it as obvious bullshit, and when presented in the actual context suddenly it's obviously true and a non-scandal.
The North Dakota business is strong evidence of this. The official Democrat state party establishment engaged in a blatant attempt at voter suppression via bogus ads in one of the most tightly-contested and critical Senate races in the entire country, they've stood by it, the state Senator whose at-risk seat they're protecting has stood by it (when asked, she said “it is really important people understand the consequences of voting”[1]) - and this has received infinitely less mainstream press coverage than random online trolls joking about how Democrats should please vote on Wednesday. Random Republican bozos posting things that could never suppress a single vote[2] are treated as proof of widespread malfeasance while actual Democratic establishment misbehaviour is treated like the obscure ravings of some bozo which should be ignored.
And again, North Dakota was a case where the state Democrat establishment literally waved their shady bullshit in the face of everyone whose vote they wanted to suppress with their own name printed on the ad. Anything that would require investigative reporting to discover? Forget about it. We know the mainstream press don't investigate or report on this stuff. We'd never even know it happened. That's my point too.
I doubt the Georgia voter suppression claim is the only one the media got wrong either. It's the only one I've found out about that is wrong in this particular way, but given just how obscure and little-reported this error was, if there were others how would I even know?
[2] Seriously. The old and nasty tactic of targetted flyers with the wrong election date on, sure, but Tweets with a wink and a nod about how only "Democrats" should vote on that day? Not a chance, not with the saturation bombing of the entire Internet with reminders to vote.
More recently, the official Democrat party organisation in North Dakota tried to suppress the Republican vote there by running bogus, pants-on-fire Facebook ads falsely claiming that voting could cost people their hunting licenses, the state's Democrat senator stood behind this claim, and this wasn't any kind of national media scandal at all. I'm not sure if Facebook even banned them for it or anything despite this being a clear ToS violation.
I presume that any other Democrat voter suppression which wasn't an in-your-face, public ad campaign with the name of the party literally written all over it and didn't get mistaken for Republican voter suppression has simply gone entirely unnoticed. Why wouldn't it?