Tag: elections

New law allows non-citizens to vote in US

Incoming New York Mayor Eric Adams has allowed a bill giving the vote to non-citizens to become law automatically. That’s after the City Council passed it last month.

Non-citizen New Yorkers who have lived in the city for at least a month may legally vote in city elections as of next year, according to a bill which became law through the mayor’s inaction on Sunday. Adams, while expressing reservations with certain aspects of the bill, did not choose to veto or otherwise challenge it, allowing the City Council’s passage of the legislation to stand after what he called “productive dialogue” with others in city government.

While there are more than a dozen communities in the US that allow non-citizens to vote, New York – with more than 800,000 non-citizens calling the city (at least a temporary) home – is by far the most populous to pass such a measure. Eleven towns in Maryland and two in Vermont have done the same, but their populations amount to only a fraction of the country’s largest urban area.

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Man running for Texas Lt. Governor drops out of race to make room for non-white candidates

Matthew Dowd has ended his campaign to become Lieutenant Governor of Texas in order to “step back” and make room for non-white candidates. Dowd, who is a white man, appears to believe that his presence in the race would make it harder for candidates of color to win the race.

In a December 7 statement, Dowd referenced a 2018 column of his entitled “Us white male Christians need to step back and give others room to lead.”

In a justification for his dropping out of the race, he quoted the column, saying “We as white male Christians should do what real leadership demands and practice a level of humility which demonstrates strength by stepping back from the center of the room and begin to give up our seats at the table. We should make this move not because we feel threatened, but because we know it is morally right and it is what would help America in this troubling time.”

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Government watchdog agency can’t figure out where 20% of federal election grant funding went

An audit by the Government Accountability Office could not account for a significant portion of Election Assistance Commission grants provide to states to assist with voting last year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After Congress approved the CARES Act, which was designed as a pandemic relief measure, the commission received $400 million in grants, but thus far, the GAO has only accounted for $326 million of that money, meaning the watchdog agency does not know where or how roughly 20 percent of that money was spent, according to a November report.

Republicans in the House first voiced concerns about the election grants in September 2020 in relation to an item of expenditure in California. According to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, the GAO’s analysis and findings provide validation for Republicans’ concerns that the problems are not limited to a single state.

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The US Has As Much Moral Authority As Saudi Arabia On The Legitimacy Of Elections

“Let there be no mistake – Sunday’s regional and municipal elections in Venezuela are nothing more than a sham,” reads a recent statement authored by Republican US Senators Jim Risch and Michael McCaul. “The illegitimate Maduro regime has taken drastic measures to dismantle or control every independent institution in the country, including hijacking political parties and the National Electoral Council to ensure state-sponsored electoral fraud.”

“Today’s elections in Venezuela are as illegitimate as Maduro’s tyrannical regime,” reads a tweet by Republican Senator Rick Scott. “The Venezuelan people deserve free and democratic elections NOW. The U.S. and all freedom-loving nations must stand up, condemn these sham elections and support the people in their fight for freedom.”

The imperial media are lining up behind the official US government line on Venezuela’s gubernatorial and mayoral elections, with The New York Times assuring us that conditions “are far from freely democratic” and The Washington Post reporting that opposition parties “say the elections have been stacked against them by the socialist government of President Nicolás Maduro,” who sees the elections as “a chance to reassert strength while projecting a veneer of legitimacy.”

This level of intrusiveness into Venezuela’s heavily internationally monitored democratic process is typical of what we’ve been seeing from the US political/media class with regard to electoral contests in empire-targeted Latin American nations like Bolivia and Nicaragua. Which is really silly, because the US has no more moral authority over the legitimacy of democratic processes than a totalitarian monarchy like Saudi Arabia.

US elections are of course corrupt and fraudulent, entirely dominated at the federal level by legalized oligarchic bribery in the form of campaign contributions, manipulated primaries, gerrymandering, voter suppression, shutting out third parties, and the worst voting system in the western world.

More than this, though, the United States is also the world’s single most egregious offender when it comes to interfering in foreign elections. As Claire Bernish has observed in The Free Thought Project, the US government’s own data shows that it interfered in no fewer than 81 foreign elections just between the years 1946 and 2000. You’d never know it from the shrieking of the political/media class post-2016, but this would also include brazenly interfering in Russia’s elections in the nineties to ensure the presidency of Washington lackey Boris Yeltsin.

And that’s just election interferences. It doesn’t include more brazen interferences in who governs foreign nations like direct military invasions, staged coups, color revolutions and proxy wars.

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Votes to count even if they are mailed in on napkins in Washington state

Interesting voter protocols came to light during a recent election review training in Seattle, Washington which had many question the integrity of elections throughout the state of Washington.

While reviewing ballots that were improperly filled out, an official with King County Elections admitted that if a voter were to mail-in a candidate’s name on a napkin along with the position that they were running for, the vote would be counted.

The example the official showed during the training on whether or not a ballot should be counted was for a voter that was allegedly attempting to vote for Seattle mayoral candidate Lorena Gonzalez (D) in the November 2021 elections.

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