Talk about a waste of public money and rather direct voter intimidation! Voter fraud is rare, generally individual cases, and is usually caught, but DeSantis created a state police force to “investigate voter fraud.” But it ends up being used to intimidate non-Republican voters in the spurious guise of looking for fraud.

“State police are showing up at Florida voters’ homes to question them about signing a petition to get an abortion rights amendment on the ballot in November, and a state health care agency has launched a website targeting the ballot initiative with politically charged language.

“Critics say they’re the latest efforts by Florida’s Republican elected officials to leverage state resources to try to block the abortion rights measure, moves which some Democratic officials argue could violate state laws against voter intimidation.”

“Critics say the investigation is a brazen attempt to intimidate voters in the country’s third-largest state from protecting access to abortion — and the latest in a series of efforts by the governor’s administration to target Amendment 4.”

“DeSantis signed a law in 2022 creating a state police force dedicated to investigating voter fraud and elections crimes. Voter fraud is rare, typically occurs in isolated instances and is generally detected.

“He said elections police are going to the homes of people who signed the petitions that got Amendment 4 on the ballot not to intimidate them, but because questions have been raised about the legitimacy of the signatures. He said the police have found evidence that some of the supposed signatures were from dead people.”

Source: https://apnews.com/article/florida-abortion-ballot-amendment-elections-police-cfd4e3479498e63e65f1116acd95f7be

Georgia is actually making it HARDER to vote! They’ve spent taxpayer money to develop a website — not to register to vote or to get an absentee ballot — but to REQUEST THE CANCELLATION OF VOTER REGISTRATION OF OTHER PEOPLE!

The Georgia Secretary of State says it’s intended for people moving out of state or who have a deceased family member. But in the last few years, Georgia has had hundreds of thousands of challenges of voter registrations by right-wing groups that didn’t even know the people involved, and most of those challenges were groundless and eventually denied.

When it launched on Monday, it was “marred by a glitch that allowed people to access a voter’s date of birth, driver’s license number and last four numbers of a Social Security number. That’s the same information needed to verify a person’s identity and allow a registration to be canceled.” Apparently the glitch only lasted an our or so, but it underscores concerns that the site could allow outsiders to unjustifiably cancel voter registrations.

“If someone knows my birthdate, you could get in and pull up my information and change my registration,” state Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, a Stone Mountain Democrat, said Tuesday. Democratic staff showed The Associated Press a copy of a document with Butler’s information that they said was produced by the system.

This kind of website isn’t actually needed and is clearly to make it even easier for extremists to challenge the voter registrations of anyone they don’t want on the rolls. The original language on the website attested to that, but was later changed.

Not only is there this context of right-wing challenges of voter registrations of so many legitimate voters, but there have been laws passed in Georgia that make it HARDER to vote. Example: requiring a “wet-ink signature” for people to be able to vote, but setting up this online portal to allow anyone to try to remove voter registrations. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t someone asking to remove someone have to sign a piece of paper, perhaps under the penalty of perjury? Making it easy to ask for the removal of voter registrations is simple disenfranchisement.

Source: https://youtu.be/MK4b-meIGPU

Source: https://apnews.com/article/georgia-cancel-voter-registration-personal-information-5bf7d7d474e0e077c7fd50141ff487e8

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/08/01/georgia-voter-cancelation-portal-launches/74616004007/

Source: https://www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/peace/democracy/ask-the-experts-voter-challenges-georgia.pdf

Signs at the Republican National Convention called for “Mass Deportation Now!”, giving a full embrace to Donald Trump’s pledge to expel millions of migrants in the largest deportation program in American history.

“Some Republicans aren’t quite ready for that.”

“Historians go back to at least the 1850s when German and Irish immigrants were targeted as degenerate thieves. An undercurrent of popular belief that immigrants breed crime persisted through the 20th century and into the 21st.

“But no one compares to Trump, who reached the pinnacle of power by making immigration a signature issue and portraying the foreign-born as criminals. Yet the weight of evidence shows no support for claims that immigrants are more responsible for crime than native-born Americans.”

Source: https://apnews.com/article/trump-mass-deportations-latino-voters-ec64f85e3633c9c7a8a247eaf9feb64f

Putin has described the incursion as a “large-scale provocation.”

What? More of a large-scale provocation than INVADING ANOTHER COUNTRY and STARTING A WAR??

“The Russian Defense Ministry called it one of the largest cross-border incursions of the war as the Russian military and border guards block Ukrainian forces from pushing deeper into the region in southwestern Russia.”

Source: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-kursk-fighting-sudzha-a49c55fc367bcbaed2e95e515bf99b80