Maryland’s House of Delegates passed the Student & Military Voter Empowerment Act the 3rd week of February 2021; I signed the petition to urge the Maryland Senate to pass it.

If passed, the bill will ensure that institutions of higher education*:

• Have a student voter coordinator, who will take point on forming a plan to support student voter registration and ensure students have the information they need to register to vote and turn out.

• Post the link to the online voter registration form on the website students use to register for classes to keep it visible.

• Provide input to local boards of election as they select polling locations for our elections.

And the bill will ensure military members can easily to register to vote online.

According to Common Cause Maryland, over 72% of people between the ages of 18-24 did not vote in the 2018 election. Historically Black colleges and universities report declines in overall participation, largely due to lack of access to information on how to register and vote, and thus, leading to young people voting less frequently than the rest of the population. But this legislation would help to reduce the barrier faced by young people who want to participate in our elections.

Attending college and university is often the first time many young people are on their own for the first time – a time to grow and learn. It was for me. I remember I looked forward to voting, to finally participating in society!

It seems to me that colleges and universities are well-positioned to inform students about voter participation; after all, what college or university doesn’t have a student government? If colleges and universities encourage students to vote for their fellow students, why can’t these institutions of higher education make it easy and accessible for them to vote in the outside world?

Voter registration, accessing voter information, and the act of voting made simple and accessible to ALL eligible voters – including students – this is a no brainer, right?

Young people, after all, are our future!

Empower them to vote! Some of them may be governing how we live someday, when we’re old and gray.

I’d rather vote for an informed candidate who (hopefully) respects the value of every eligible voter participating than a candidate who only thinks certain people ought to vote and harbors some perceived paranoia over voter fraud despite FACTS to the contrary.

As the most recent US Presidential Election 2020 laid bare.

Yes, even after the Director of United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – the agency handling election security, declared the 2020 presidential election was was the country’s most secure ever, repeatedly debunked the claims of massive fraud and election interference by the former president (and his cronies) to Congress and the media, a certain segment of society continues to believe the 2020 election was a fraud. A steal.

Even after the former president’s powerful lackey in the form of his US Attorney General said the US Justice Department found no evidence fraud to make a difference in the outcome of the election, that wasn’t enough to convince the president’s followers that the election was valid. The former president and many of his followers could not accept that the majority of the people spoke: they wanted a different president.

But what punishment did America get from those who could not accept reality?

No. 1: the January 6th, 2021 insurrection upon the nation’s capital to “Stop the Steal”.

And insidiously, as of February 27th, 2021, at least 253 voter suppression bills have now been introduced across the country in 43 states – just in 2021 alone. You read that right: 2021…THIS year!

Laws in direct contradiction to Maryland’s Student & Military Voter Empowerment Act.

Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman reported earlier this month on the GOP’s ongoing nationwide push to make voting more difficult, particularly for communities of color and other Democratic-leaning constituencies – and in some cases to empower state legislatures to overturn election results.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice’s report,

These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) limit successful pro-voter registration policies; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges.

Here’s a very condensed sampling of proposed nightmarish laws to come:

Georgia

• Eliminating no-excuse absentee voting, which was passed on a bipartisan basis in 2014, and limiting absentee voting to only a few categories of voters who fit into narrow, predetermined exceptions.

• Restricting county election officials’ ability to utilize mobile precincts to serve rural and other hard-to-reach voters.

• Removing restrictions on poll watchers that keep election officials safe without facilitating additional transparency for voters.

• Eliminating automatic voter registration, making it harder for Georgians to register to vote and less efficient for Georgia election officials to update and maintain accurate voter rolls.

In most cases, according to various sources, these state lawmakers argue that these restrictive measures are necessary because, “the public has lost confidence in our election system,” but they refuse to acknowledge the reason some voters believe elections are unfair: because those same legislators spent months spreading disinformation about the integrity of the 2020 election.

Arizona

• Require voters to obtain a notary stamp on all absentee ballots, a not only burdensome but costly requirement.

• Prohibit voters from mailing their absentee ballots to election officials, instead requiring them to return them in-person.

• Require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote—a likely violation of federal law. 

• Purge eligible voters from the rolls if they change their address—even if that address is still in Arizona—another likely violation of federal law.

FYI: Arizona has had a robust mail voting system for decades with no widespread fraud or administrative issues, and Arizona voters across the political spectrum have been voting by mail since long before the COVID-19 pandemic—78% of Arizona voters voted by mail in 2018, according to Campaign Legal Center.

Pennsylvania

• Eliminate the permanent early voter list, requiring voters to submit a separate application for each election, rather than submitting one application for the entire election cycle.

• Prohibit the use of ballot drop boxes, eliminating a safe and secure option for voters to ensure that their mail ballots are returned directly to election officials on time.

• Increase poll watcher access to absentee ballot processing and canvassing activities (which are already publicly observable), allowing poll watchers to more easily harass election officials and volunteers and reducing limitations that keep our election officials safe while maintaining transparency.

• Prohibit counties from notifying voters about issues with absentee or mail ballots and providing voters an opportunity to fix those issues. Current Pennsylvania law allows, but does not require, counties to contact voters and give them a chance to fix issues with their ballots.

Campaign Legal Center writes that one legislator who sponsored an anti-voter bill said that his goal was “not to fix what happened but to restore integrity and trust” back into the voting process. That’s because these new voting restrictions wouldn’t “fix” anything—they only make voting harder for Pennsylvanians.

Geez, these anti-voter measures are created by legislators have a serious mean streak running through them, you think?!

To my mind, conservative lawmakers don’t have any ideas that can benefit ALL citizens. I mean, why the insane focus on restrictive voting measures – especially when these lawmakers lose the White House and collectively lose their seats in Congress and throughout state legislatures?

You must have a pretty sorry platform, if you have one at all, to be so paranoid as to make it hard for people to vote – people who you think will likely not vote for you! People who include minorities, women, students, those low on the socio-economic ladder who may not vote for you due to your record of misogynistic laws against women’s health care, tax cuts for the uber-wealthy, cutting of social programs that address mental health, health care access, education, job training, and yes, restrictive voter suppression laws.

I find voter suppression laws disgusting. The very thought of them makes my blood boil. Voter suppression laws demonstrate a cynical and contemptuous regard for people.

Hey, anti-voter legislators and supporters:

You don’t like democracy?

You dig authoritarianism? There’s plenty of authoritarian regimes around the globe you can try! Why not try Russia? China? Brazil? Iran? Saudi Arabia? I’d venture to say there’s plenty of people in those countries who would LOVE to swap places with you! If you don’t like democracy here, then get the fuck out of here.

Take your authoritarian tendencies to the lands of Vladimir Putin, Xi Xinping, or any of the other countries led by dictators drunk on power – those who want to rule til their last breath. Go find out how beautiful life in an authoritarian country really is! You respect strongmen, don’t you? There’s plenty of strongmen to spare around the globe who cannot handle the slightest bit of criticism, and who cannot handle the idea of everyone having a voice. Go live with them! But do not shove authoritarianism down America’s throat – not least of all by severely restricting Americans’ vote.

You’re such sore losers! You lose an election, then you immediately scream FRAUD!

Why don’t you come up with ideas to empower every American to thrive instead of resorting to restricting voter participation?

If you really “love” America and want to “fix” voting problems (and they do exist), why not urge Congress to pass the For The People Act, H.R.1/S.1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, H.R. 4?

The For The People Act sets national minimum standards for our elections based on bipartisan best practices, ensuring that Americans’ ability to access the ballot isn’t dependent on which state they live in, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would revitalize the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to defend against racial discrimination in our elections.

Instead of trying to spread disinformation and making American lives harder through stupid voter suppression laws that threaten our democracy, support the Congressional acts listed above…dig yourself out of a dark, insidious, anti-voter hole!

Just sayin’.

* note: according to a campaign email.

Sources

Common Cause Maryland
Alternet.org
Campaign Legal Center
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law
Salon
ABC News
CBS News – 60 Minutes
LA Times
PBS News Hour
Fox13 News
Mother Jones
CNN
Salon
Campaign Legal Center
Congress.gov
Campaign Legal Center – The Bipartisan Origins &Impact of the For the People Act (H.R. 1/S. 1)
Human Rights Campaign
Wikipedia