monkinetic the blog

Posts tagged with 'voting' (6 posts)

Newbern, Alabama: No Elections for 60 years

I recently learned about a small town in Alabama that has not held a public election for more than sixty years. The town is Newbern, Alabama. While nearly eighty-five percent of the town residents are Black, before 2020 the town never had a Black mayor.

An unbelievable and yet completely believable story of voter suppression in the deep south

Guy Nave, Jr gives a well-written and succint history of voting rights for former enslaved Black people in the south, then tells the story describing the incredible “hand-me-down” white mayorship in the majority-Black town.

“We’ve never had an election out here. We don’t have ballots and machines to do it.” Stokes became mayor in 2008, when he inherited the position from Haywood Stokes Jr. Their ancestor, Peter P. Stokes, served in the Confederate Army and “owned” enslaved Black people when Newbern was a cotton plantation town.

#voter-suppression #racism #voting-rights

#WhitePeopleLearning - The Vote

From a thread I posted on Play Viscious, re-posted here for posterity:

  • My wife and I watched part 1 of the PBS documentary “The Vote” last night and I am learning a LOT. Some notes (a thread):
  • If I learned anything about women’s suffrage in school was quickly forgotten, pretty much everything in there was new. I think I knew Susan B. Anthony’s name and Ida B. Wells.
  • I think this documentary started to help me see intersectionality in action some? the fight for the ability to vote included conflicts over who should be granted the franchise first: educated white women, or black men. And black women getting left out either way (it was black men).
  • The fight for voting rights for women was absolutely necessary, but it hurt to see the racist attitudes and decisions coming from the white suffragettes from leadership on down.
  • Frederick Douglass was a huge proponent of women’s suffrage - and he and the black women’s suffrage clubs were pushed out when it seemed like black involvement would set back the cause in the jim crow south.
  • also: white men are bastards

#whitepeoplelearning #votingrights

Steve Ivy

I knew the term “grandfathered in” had to do something with #voting and #racism but this story really explains the #history https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586/the-racial-history-of-the-grandfather-clause thanks @lmorchard

~ # 18:34 ~

Observations in Election Redesign

Jared Marcotte on Turnout.rocks: Los Angeles County Primary: Observations in Election Redesign

Some may also advocate for all-mail voting, pointing to states like Colorado and Washington that enjoy higher rates of participation. There are highly migratory populations that have participation problems if mailed ballots are the only option. There’s another concern around mail ballots: with so many jurisdictions looking to quickly switch to this model, no one knows what kind of strain this will put on the postal system.

So yeah, there are going to be issues with mail-in #voting for voters - while eligible - who do not have a permanent address, something many of us take for granted. Ultimately, solutions to fair and free #elections are going to have to be multi-modal.

#elections #voting

Steve Ivy

Seeing calls for national mail-in voting based on success in WA/OR, which seems like a good idea on its face. However I believe those two states are majority white (78%/86% respectively)… anyone looked into how that’s working for poorer and underprivileged communities in those states? #voting

~ # 17:54 ~

Steve Ivy

Lawrence Lessig on #rankedchoicevoting: “My Turn: New Hampshire primary proves we need ranked-choice voting for president” https://www.concordmonitor.com/We-need-ranked-choice-voting-32890873 #uspol

~ # 13:33 ~