Pop quiz. Which of the following countries does not guarantee its citizens the right to vote? Is it:
(A) Iran
(B) Libya
(C) The United States
(D) All of the above.
” —Read the article accompanying today’s New York Times Op Doc on the right to vote. (via electoraldysfunction)True:
Are you hearing this, young voters?
45 million American young voters = the future = our best chance at fixing the USA’s broken voting system by protesting restrictive voting laws. Do you care? Looking for passionate young folks to join me on HuffPost Live later today!
Another reason politics is broken:
“Roughly 2.5 million people have kicked in $200 or less to the various committees helping their candidate win the White House.
“But those 2.5 million people account for less than 18 percent of the total money haul.
“By contrast, 2,100 donors giving $50,000 or more have contributed about $200 million to the Obama and Romney campaign committees, victory funds and their supportive super PACs. That’s far more than the $148 million all those 2.5 million small donors contributed through the end of June, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by POLITICO and the Campaign Finance Institute.”
My Dear Fellow American,
Forty-seven years ago today, my friend, Dr. Martin Luther King stood beside President Johnson as he signed the Voting Rights Act and proclaimed that America had “once and for all opened the doors to the polling places…and the wondrous rewards which await the wise use of the ballot.” On that day, partisanship took a back seat to citizenship, as a moral effort of historic proportion led to legislation, which we all believed would give all Americans unfettered access to what President Johnson called “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man.”
Sadly, today we confront the shameful reality that forty-seven years later, voter turnout in American ranks 139th out of 172 democracies around the globe and dead last amongst the G8. Another horrifying reality is that this presidential election cycle will be the most expensive and excessive in world history, as billions of dollars will be deployed through conventional donations and non-transparent Super PACs.
With the tidal wave of money being spent by candidates and their Super PACs on negative ads, apathy among citizens is growing as the average person no longer believes his or her vote really matters. Ironically, not one ad talks about how to upgrade our antiquated voting system even though both presidential candidates and so many others acknowledge…that the system is broken.
When asked in 1965 why it took America so long to make the voting booth accessible to all Americans, Martin said it was due to the silence of good people. Sadly, that silence has once again become deafening as the ever-growing barriers to the ballot box in America is a global embarrassment.
So I call upon all of you today to join me in a new march on Washington; a march that will serve to end the silence of good people by putting voice back into an upgraded Voting Rights Act, what I call “VRA 2.0” to remove unreasonable barriers to voting and to make voting more accessible to all; a march that will remind everyone that when great men of courage of commitment put the moral issues of society ahead of the political issues of party, America can once again be the beautiful beacon of democracy that it always was.
God bless you,
Andy Young
F yeah early voting!
When someone asked me if I wanted to vote early I was like:
but when they explained that I would get my ballot in the mail 40 days before the election and could mail it back in with free postage I was like:
