Greetings friends! The midterms are so close, are you registered to vote?
You: I can’t vote, I’m an Ex-Offender
ARE YOU SURE?
I live in Vermont or Maine: You never lost your right to vote
I live in DC, Hawai’i, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland*, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, or Utah: You can vote upon your release from incarceration.
That’s cool but I don’t live in those states. I live in: Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Washington (state), West Virginia.: You can vote once you have completed your sentence (parole and/or probation)
Wow! That’s really cool. But, um. I don’t live in those states. I live in:
Alabama: You cannot vote if you have been convicted of any felony listed here. Crimes of ‘moral turpitude’ including: Murder, Manslaughter, Kidnapping, Rape, Sodomy, Sexual Torture/Abuse
Arizona: First time offender? Complete your probation and payment of any fine or restitution and you can vote. Multiple Offender? You have to apply to a judge to vote.
Delaware You cannot vote if you have been convicted of murder, bribery or sexual offenses. If you have been pardoned or had your sentence completed, get your vote on!
Florida Rights must be restored via the governor and a clemency board. In the November elections Floridians have the opportunity to vote for Amendment Four and restore voting rights to over a million Floridians. So that man that threw an alligator at someone can vote?? YES but so can your dumb little brother who thought carrying a concealed weapon would be cool when he was 19. So can the drug addict who robbed a convenience store but has been clean for 20 years.
Iowa You must petition the governor
Kentucky You must petition the governor
Mississippi If you have committed one of the following crimes: armed robbery, arson, bigamy, bribery, carjacking, embezzlement, extortion, felony bad check, felony shoplifting, forgery, larceny, murder, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, rape, receiving stolen property, robbery, statutory rape, theft, timber larceny, and unlawful taking of a vehicle. you cannot vote unless a bill passed by both houses of the legislature or through the governor. If you did NOT commit one of those crimes, you can vote even while incarcerated
Nebraska Voting rights are automatically restored two years after the completion of all supervised release
Nevada Voting rights are restored automatically after sentence completion if convicted of a non-violent felony. However, those convicted of a violent felony and all second-time felony offenders (whether violent or non-violent) can only have their rights restored by the court in which they were convicted.
Tennessee Individuals convicted of a felony since 1981–except for some felonies such as murder, rape, treason and voter fraud–may apply to the Board of Probation and Parole to have their voting rights restored once their sentence is completed.
Virginia: You can vote if you completed your sentence, including probation and parole. This is not a law but an order by the governor. A new governor can repeal this.
Wisconsin-Voting rights are automatically restored upon completion of all supervised release
Wyoming- Voting rights restoration is dependent on the type of conviction: first-time non-violent felony offenders can apply to the Wyoming Board of Parole five years after completion of sentence. All others must apply to the Governor for either a pardon or a restoration of rights, but must wait ten and five years, respectively, after completing their sentence.
In many cases you must RE-REGISTER to vote but you can vote.
*If you are guilty of buying or selling votes, you have to get the governor to pardon you.
This is not intended to be comprehensive, you should check out your state’s laws for any quirks.
Remember people of color are disproportionately incarcerated. Double check you may be able to make your voice heard
Belgium had the highest voter turnout at 87% while America only had 55% turnout in 2016. So having 40% of voters voting in the mid-terms is pretty pathetic.
If history is any indicator, only around 40 percent of eligible voters will vote in the midterm elections.
But it’s more likely that most Americans do want to vote, and one of the root causes of low turnout is this country’s framework of restrictive voting laws.
To explore the hurdles that voters face this election, we created five voter profiles:
The No-ID Voter: could not vote in 23 states
The Procrastinating Voter: could not vote in 34 states
The Eager Student Voter: could not vote in 7 states
…When they’re suppressing votes, they’re going to come up with any kind of excuse about what your problem is.
…
After the seniors got off the bus, they were initially told they could
ride in a county van provided by the senior center to go vote, Brown
said. But then the seniors had to get off the van because the senior
center’s leaders decided it was close to lunchtime, and the seniors
could vote another day.
“Black Voters Matter had received permission in advance for the event at the senior center, Brown said. The event was originally intended to encourage seniors to vote, and when some of the seniors asked whether they could ride the bus to an early-voting location, Black Voters Matter agreed to take them.But someone apparently saw the bus, painted with the words “The South is Rising Tour,” and called county government offices, Brown said. That led to the phone call from the county clerk to the senior center. When they were asked, the senior citizens agreed to leave the bus.“
The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to toss out an appeals court order that allows North Dakota to enforce its voter ID requirement during the 2018 elections.
The request to toss out the order came from a group of Native American residents who are challenging a new state law that requires voters to present identification that includes a current residential street address.
The challengers argued the new rule disenfranchises a disproportionate share of the population because many Native American voters live on reservations without standard addresses.
I give you that the system is allowing illegal immigrants to vote isn’t fair, although you’ll find it’s those who pay taxes who are allowed more than those who don’t, but the voter ID laws passed by conservatives are, by and large, targeting black communities and black people specifically, on top of the fact that some of the requirements break the law on making voting harder to access. Course there are lots of voter ID laws that don’t target any one group but are still unnecessary, yet I don’t see you or your ilk complain about those. – Purple
anyway I don’t think the story of the 2016 election is that America wanted Trump.
I think the story of the US election is that a supreme court decision allowed states with a history of totalitarianism to arbitrarily change voting law in ways that made it disproportionately difficult for people likely to vote Democrat to vote while a foreign country was running an intelligence campaign to discourage voting on the left and, real time, prod right wing voters in important districts to vote during the election in a race with massive question marks about the security of voting infrastructure, with a widely unpopular Democratic presidential candidate–
And Trump still lost. By roughly three million votes.
That’s six times the loss George W Bush had when he won the electoral college without winning the popular vote in 2000.
Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by a larger margin than Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon or John Kennedy; she just won it in the wrong places.
Trump is now president because the electoral college assigns more weight to rural states, which are also states with more discriminatory voter laws and more disenfranchisement and therefore states in which it is harder to vote for people likely to vote Democrat.
And all of that is what I mean when I say the biggest problem with the American system is gerrymandering.
“The right has succeeded in forcing candidates in the center and left to devote considerable time and resources simply to ensuring that their supporters will be allowed to vote. By necessity, Democratic campaigning is now at least as much about the practicalities of voting—how to register, how to request absentee ballots, how to find polling places, how to confirm the validity of an existing registration, how to help a disenfranchised ex-felon apply for reinstatement, and so on—as it is about the candidate and ideas they’re running on. Republicans believe unconditionally that higher turnout among the young, the poor, and people of color is damaging to their efforts to stay in power. They’re right, and their campaign to keep these voters away from the polls is not new—it just involves new methods. Ways to keep the poor, African Americans, Latinos, and other “undesirables” from the polls have gotten more sophisticated, more disingenuous, and harder to combat. In the short term, progressives and liberals have little hope of overturning these measures wholesale. The social and economic inequalities that make them possible are simply too entrenched. But there are a number of important steps we can take to mitigate them, while hopefully paving the way toward a broader restoration of voting rights—namely, by electing people at the state and local levels who reject policies clearly aimed at disenfranchising specific demographic groups.”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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