[Text of Tweet: George Takei: If you are turned away at the polls because your name is not on the register, don’t walk away. Say this: I REQUEST A PROVISIONAL BALLOT AS REQUIRED BY LAW.
Don’t let them steal your vote]
Additional info:
“Provisional Ballot Laws are laws that require a provisional ballot upon verficiation of the idenity of the voter if a voter fails to present proper identification at the polls or when registering before voter registration deadlines.”
Poll worker here! Let’s talk about this “I DEMAND A PROVISIONAL BALLOT AS PROVIDED BY LAW” thing.
== TL:DR; Yes, provisional ballots are important! And yes, you should absolutely ask for one if you need to. But there’s a couple of things to try first. A provisional ballot is a last resort. ==
It’s very common for voters to come up to the “check-in” desk, and not be found in the poll book. Some non-nefarious reasons why that might be the case:
1) The poll worker doesn’t understand how to spell your name. 2) You’re not in the right precinct (this happens ALLLL the time) 3) New married name? 4) You’re a college student, and you are registered, but you’re registered at home.
Here’s my recommendation for what to do: * Make sure the poll worker is looking in the right spot (the book will be right in front of you; you can help find your name.) * Mention your home address to the poll worker. THey may very well immediately say something like “Oh! Yes, you should be voting in the cafeteria. Here in the GYM, we are your next precinct over.” * Ask politely to speak to someone to verify your status with the county. They will get on the phone with county folks, who will look you up in their BIG COMPUTER.
The steps above will, eight times out of ten, change you from the scary status of “Huh? you don’t exist!” to “Oh, right! Okay, here you go, voter!”
If that doesn’t work, ask firmly and politely for a provisional ballot. If you say “AS PROVIDED BY LAWWWWW”, you will only get an eye-roll from a tired and hungry poll-worker. But hey, you do you – it really IS the law.
If you don’t get satisfaction, all is not lost. Step outside the precinct and call the ACLU, and they will send someone over to have some FIRM WORDS with the Judge of Elections.
How do I know? I’ve had ACLU lawyers sent to talk to me during an election: “Hey, we heard that you were turning voters away!” they said.
I wasn’t, but I DID NOT MIND having someone smart and informed come to check on what was up. The ACLU counsel was smart, engaged, and knew the rules. Had I been trying some crap, this person would have SHUT. IT. DOWN.
So, the BOTTOM bottom line is: 1) Provisional ballots are a last resort. You can read up on them; they’re definitely riskier than a full, “real” ballot. You want to vote at your proper precinct as your first choice. 2) Don’t panic if you’re not in the book. Are you in the right place? 3) If you decide you do need a provisional, be firm, polite, and persistent. There’s no “secret phrase” that’s going to make us poll workers hiss with dismay: “CURSESSSSSSS! They know about the provisionalssssss!” 4) But do stick up for yourself! And if you don’t get what you want, call it in! There’s LOTS of folks to help!
Don’t let anyone forget the fact that the President of the United States skipped out on visiting military graves for Armistice Day’s 100th anniversary.
Because of rain.
He has golfed in the rain. He was inaugurated in the rain. Other leaders–and his own subordinates–made it out there in the rain.
President Trump, though? The man who loves our troops and our country? Yeah, it’s weird that he didn’t go to the ceremony and chose to stay in his hotel room. He left our country on Veteran’s Day weekend to visit Paris for the reunion, but could not be bothered to face a little rain in order to pay his respects to the troops.
He forgets the names of the fallen. He cuts funding for veteran welfare programs. He sends our soldiers to the border for needless exercises in intimidation. Then he claims that others are weak on the military and don’t respect our troops?
What a joke.
Oh, and when I say “don’t let them forget”, I mean “every time some alt-right nutjob comes at you, hit them with that question”.
Also, if you need to cite facts:
An hour. This isn’t a “scheduling thing”, this is something that should have been planned. At the least, the President doesn’t have staff who know how to plan a trip.
The thing is, this drags military respect into the conflict.
If you want bonus points, remind them of the time Hillary got pneumonia from attending a 9/11 memorial.
Never trust someone who fetishizes the military in one breath and spits on veterans in the next; just saying.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
-Orwell, 1984
Normally, I feel like people are way too liberal in calling things “Orwellian”, because I’ve seen people claim everything from speed limits to environmental laws to privately owned security cameras in stores as being “Orwellian”, but Trump, in this instance, is utterly Orwellian.
I still support him? what do you expect me to say? i hate him and now support cruz?
do you know how expensive campaigns are? they’re not cheap. the average cost of a winning Senate candidate from 2016 was $10.4 million. Million.
Cruz had PACs/super PACs and special interest groups pouring millions into his campaign. Beto’s came from the people. i still support him, and I will continue to support him.
EDIT: so, i got another ask from someone (probably the same person) about how he wouldn’t give money to other dem candidates, so screw beto.
let’s do the math here. there were a total of 33 seats up for grabs in the senate. Subtract one to account for Beto himself. So now there are 32 senate seats up for grabs. If Beto’s campaign (his campaign, not him. He himself does not hold the money, it does not go into his pocket) donated to all 32 candidates, that would be $64,000.
Take it to the House. All 435 seats were running this time around. If the campaign had donated to them as well, that would come out to $870,000.
He can’t just freely give other candidates money. He is limited by federal law how much he can donate.
I know that it definitely looks scary looking outside in. take it from me, this is major progress. i’m gonna speak from a texas perspective again lol, but texas was effectively purple for this election, which is huge.
still angry, but i have hope that things will get better. I think enough people are pissed off that they are getting ready to fight for change.
So, I know I’ve been bitching these past two days about the election results, specifically what happened in Texas. While I’m still undeniably angry and I’m probably gonna turn this anger into action, I wanted to take a moment to thank y’all. Y’all have put up with me for the past ~month as I pretty much spammed y’all with Beto posts. You guys reblogged my posts and helped how you could when it came to spreading the word.
So to those who dealt with my constant Beto posts and my constan politics, thank you.
I won’t stop with political posts, not now, not ever. But still, thank you.
Something to remember, as the election approaches:
The work is never wasted.
Even if the Republicans keep control of Congress–yes, that would be terrible, yes, I would be furious and frustrated and sad and it would hurt like hell–EVEN SO: the work we have done to get here was not wasted.
I was part of the previous “biggest worldwide protest ever,” the global protests against the Iraq War in February 2003.
We lost. The war happened. Is still happening.
But some of the people who got involved then worked for Obama’s campaigns, a lot of them are part of the resistance now, and all of us learned something. The work was not wasted.
Even if we lose. There were Democratic primary debates in my hometown for the first time I can remember. Even if our terrible Republican Congresswoman gets re-elected, there’s still a broader and stronger Democratic Party organization in Mike Fucking Pence’s home state.
The election can’t be an end. It will only be an end if we win and get complacent, or if we lose and give in to hopelessness. We cannot afford either. We do the job that is in front of us. No matter what.
The work is never wasted.
The stories our world tells us are about Great Heroic Struggles With Triumphant Climaxes In Which Good Vanquishes Evil And They All Live Happily Ever After. It’s all about the one extreme emergency during which people rise to the occasion.
Problem is, that’s not how the world actually … works. That’s not how change happens. That’s not how societies are reshaped. We hear about MLK and the bus boycott and the protests, but not the DECADES OF WORK that came before, the organizing and the education and the legal challenges and the hundreds of thousands of people, from great heroes to ordinary people, who put in the grinding every-day work to make the world a better place, step by step, bit by bit. The big things–the speeches, the marches–were the tip of the iceberg. Nothing would have happened without the rest of the iceberg.
The 2018 midterms are the tip of the iceberg. They are incredibly important, yes. But without the rest of the iceberg, they mean nothing. Without ordinary people across America organizing and talking to their friends and coworkers and paying attention to politics and getting involved and volunteering (not just politically, but for all the nonprofits out there working to make the world a better, fairer, more just, more merciful place) the election is useless.
This is not a sprint. It is a relay marathon. If you can run a major leg, awesome. If you can help organize the marathon, awesome. If you can coordinate the people running, awesome. If you can hand out bottled water along the route, awesome. If you can cheer along the way, awesome. If you can remind people that the marathon is happening, awesome. It’s not about great heroes or one person doing it all or one climactic battle in which everything magically gets fixed.
It’s about ordinary people doing what they can. What you can do right now is vote. What you do on November 7 and the months and years following (no matter who wins the election) is stay involved and stay working.
Take care of yourself. Take care of others. Don’t hyperfixate and burn out. Be the tortoise, not the hare. Vote. And then keep moving on.
Don’t be. You’re hearing media do what it does: harp on one person’s lack of enthusiasm and make it seem that that one opinion is held by thousands.
This race went precisely as I thought it would. Precisely.
And it was absolutely a massive success.
So let me tell you why, so that you feel better and can easily put down the annoying crowing that republicans are going to do, because they managed to cling to a few things.
If the votes fall as I believe they will, the democrats will have retaken the house by some 30 seats. This is impressive and somewhat unique in our country’s history. The GOP, upon taking the house originally, gerrymandered these districts in impressively screwball ways. Wherever that rigging has been overturned, the districts have gone blue. Which is, of course, why they did it. Democrats have the house now, 30ish flips in republican rugged districts. 15 of those being female candidates.
That is absolutely impressive.
A few key candidates to whom many people were paying close attention did not perform as people desired. Abrams, O’Rourke, Gillum. Well…I’m not surprised. Abrams faces absolute state wide fraud. Her opponent being the person also in charge of voter registration, withholding some 50k votes of which 70% were black. Voter intimidation. This is blatant corruption. And yet still…her race was very close. So too with Beto. Ted Cruz was a presidential candidate! When he took Texas, he did so with a wide margin in most districts. Last night in Texas he was fighting tooth and nail. Gillum’s gubernatorial race for Florida was a figurative dead heat. 99% of the vote in—49% Gillum, 49.7% DeSantis. These are CLASSICALLY and FULLY republican regions in which Trump took the presidency by huge margins. That these races, with all those challenges, were as close as they were PROVES that something unprecedented happened.
3-400% voter turnout increases for a midterm election. Mostly with the youth.
But let’s talk about what it means to have the house.
Now I know you’re probably concerned about the federal judgeships that are about to pop up for consideration, and it’s true that the Senate was needed to stop approvals of those candidates, but…
Control of the house means that Democrats now take hold of some critical committees. These committees are the very ones that will be overseeing corruption allegations. Ways and Means, energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Intelligence, appropriations, foreign affairs, armed services, judiciary, transportation and infrastructure, and…government reform.
How do you feel now?
The worst political fallout of a GOP controlled government, the worst sound bites that weren’t Trump’s, the worst slaps across the face? All came from footage of those very same committees. Those committees now belong to Democrats.
Massive policy shifts also occurred in many classically conservative states—legalizing marijuana votes, Florida giving the vote back to former criminals who’ve served their time thus giving the vote back to a HUGE portion of the African-American Community that has been held in check by a racist and classicist policing method, then there were upsets in many small ways too.
I promise you…this is all excellent and it will have truly important and forceful impact. In 2020, if we can keep that same enthusiasm and rage, the entire government will shift. But that can only happen if we keep moving forward, if the candidates who won keep their noses to the grindstone and push back hard, if you and I and everyone on the ground continues to talk about this and force out bigots and greed.
Do not be discouraged. I promise you…this was an amazing election. Don’t focus on a few bright stars and think that all is lost because they fell. There is a great deal happening here, and one thing I know from being at sea—when a wave is building, there is first a terrifying shift, as the water level begins to rise. The ship will first dip, surrounded by walls of water, and then of a sudden, the swell. The ship raises and passengers suddenly realize that they are much higher than before, with an incredible view. Then the wave crests and takes the ship with it.
We didn’t see a wave crest tonight. So what? That means it’s a much larger wave than we realized. It will crest in the future. But only if that fluid pressure is maintained.
This is good. It is. So long as everyone keeps working. This is good.
Calm down. Have a glass of champagne. A cup of tea. When they Trumpet all their noise…say nothing. Nothing needs to be said. You’re higher than you were with an excellent view of the ending. So relax. Don’t fret.
for a quick change of pace–i know we’ve all seen a thousand posts about voting, but what i haven’t seen (not yet) is one saying thank you.
thank you for those who made it out in the rain and the cold, who organized and canvassed and took on the onerous task of working with non-voting & conservative friends/family to change their stance if at least just this once. thank you for those who stood in line for hours, who had to travel because your voting place was moved, who had to jump through ridiculous fucking hoops to register, who weren’t inspired but showed up anyway for the disenfranchised and the greater good. thank you as well to everyone who voted early, absentee, and provisional.
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