“Democracies in advanced industrial societies. . . can fall victim to decay, the slow erosion of liberal institutions by populist and authoritarian leaders who wrap themselves in the legitimacy of democracy but chip away at the rule of law, minority rights, and independent media.”
Welcome-
Our site is devoted to your right to vote and be counted.
These days that right requires a robust defense, as there are forces devoted to upending free & fair elections, the heartbeat of our democratic Republic.
Count the ways as you play a wicked game of Blackjack.
Then resolve to vote and support the unfettered right to vote that others deny.
Read More What is Required of Us? Trump’s Big Lie of election fraud has fully metastasized. It sanctions lying in all political discourse. Promotes violence in the public square. Is openly disdainful of the rule of law. Unchecked, Trump & enablers will undermine our republican institutions, those assure our liberties and American leadership of the free world. But we have been through this before and we will again prevail over those leaning into autocracy. As with the threat of McCarthyism in the early 1950’s, confronting Trump’s utter disdain for the accountability that our Republic demands concerted action — of citizens, public servants, journalists and clear-eyed historians, all dedicated to restoring our national promise and bedrock principles. Commit to restoring America as a beacon of republican principles, democracy and justice. Be informed, get engaged, and actively support voting rights organizations devoted to voter registration, Big Lie Begets Voter Suppression and Ominous Project 25 Staged elections may no longer be the exclusive domain of autocrats like Russia’s Putin and Hungary’s Orban. In 2021 and 2022, nineteen Red states, falsely trumpeting the Big Lie of Election Fraud, piously adopted measures of “election integrity,” deviously designed to suppress eligible votes, corrupt local election administration, deny citizen referenda, and subvert the federal electoral process. Leading this unwarranted assault? The now alt-right Heritage Foundation (and baby PAC Heritage Action) and the Trump-controlled Republican National Committee (and its state counterparts). In 2023, Project 25 emerged, this Heritage-sponsored plan designed to subordinate longstanding regulatory powers of federal agencies to Trump’s will, assuring no push back to Trump’s assurances of a Day One dictatorship and political retribution, reducing the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and others to mere Trump vassals. An Honest Look at Voting Rights We all understand that the long struggle for voting rights is the seamy underside of our exceptional American story. To reject that history is to desecrate our collective promise to form a more perfect union. To understand the present, we must know where we have been. To know where we are going, we must know where we are and where we have been. From our Nation’s founding fast-forward to today, the history of voting rights is not a story to lull little ones to sleep. In 1776 we declared to the world our ideal of political equality for all. In 1865, we began to act on that promise. In 1965, we renewed the promise with the enactment of the Voting Rights Act. Recently, however, our U.S. Supreme Court has prematurely dismembered the Voting Rights Act, enabling Trump-led Republican state legislatures to resurrect vote-suppressing measures of the Jim Crow era formerly forbidden by the Civil Rights Act. These so-called “election integrity” laws not only disenfranchise eligible voters but also corrupt the integrity of election administration. They tilt elections, undermine civic trust, and promote civic violence. Support national voting rights legislation to put all voters on level ground. “Democracy is never a thing done”. – Archibald Macleash But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family? We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper. Robert Kagan, November 30, 2023 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/ “The Republican Party — or whatever it is that goes by that name now — will not change until they have been defeated enough that they have to change out of self-interest.” John “Mac” Stipanovich, a longtime GOP operative in Florida and staunch Trump critic Still not persuaded?
See Timeline: Voting Rights. . . . reflect on the many impediments Americans have fought to overcome in order to secure the unimpeded right to vote.
And – most importantly – make a personal commitment to “prioritize public-spiritedness, tolerance, open-mindedness, and active engagement in public affairs”.
Support grass-roots organizations, voter registration efforts and national voting rights legislation.