Ignoring The Voters

[RANT]

In many states they have ballot initiatives where voters can place on the ballot laws and constitution amendments, but what happens when the legislators ignores the will of the voters?

GOP Works to Override Voters on Medicaid, Higher Wages, Pot
Pew
By: Sophie Quinton 
April 27, 2021


 Progressives cheered last year when voters in several red states approved left-leaning ballot initiatives.

Floridians voted to raise the minimum wage to $15. South Dakotans voted to legalize medical and recreational pot. Missourians voted to expand Medicaid to adults who earn under $18,000 a year. Arizonans voted to tax the rich to fund public schools.

But this year, Republican lawmakers in all those states—plus Idaho, Oklahoma, Utah and others—are trying to undermine such voter-approved measures and to make it harder for future ballot initiatives to pass. At stake is the power to make state laws.

Attacks on the initiative process have escalated, said Matthew Schweich, deputy director of state campaigns for the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group that in 2020 backed successful cannabis legalization campaigns in Montana and South Dakota.

[…]

The fight over ballot measures stems, to some extent, from arguments over who best represents the will of the people. While Democrats and initiative sponsors say Republicans are trying to silence voters, GOP lawmakers counter that they were elected to represent voters through a more deliberative process.

It seems like for all their bravo over how they are the party of the people, they sure ignore them when the vote the way that the Republicans don’t like.

Editorial: Missouri Republicans ignore the voters on Medicaid. The courts must step in.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
By the Editorial Board
April 29, 2021


Now that Republicans in Missouri’s Legislature have officially voted to sacrifice the health of 275,000 of their poorest constituents, and thumbed their noses at the expressed will of the state’s voters, it will be up to the courts to force the state to live up to its responsibility to expand Medicaid, as last year’s ballot initiative demanded. The stubborn heartlessness of those who put Missouri in this position with their refusal this week to fund the program shouldn’t be forgotten or forgiven. It’s the clearest evidence yet that in place of a functioning government, this state has a klatch of right-wing zealots whose anti-government — indeed, anti-democracy — fervor borders on anarchy. Voters at least still have the power in next year’s elections to change that, and they should.

[…]

Last year, fed-up Missouri voters went around their legislators to pass a referendum forcing the state to finally expand Medicaid. That effectively required the state to provide $130 million toward expansion — a bargain, considering that the rest of the $1.9 billion expansion program would come from the federal government. Yet Republicans in the House and, now, the Senate have said no, scuttling the expansion by refusing to approve the funding in blunt defiance of the voters. No one should doubt that the 20 Senate Republicans who delivered the final coffin nail on Wednesday were operating under the familiar, abhorrent philosophy of sacrificing the poor for the sake of partisanship.

This is not a new phenomime this has been going on for a while back in 2020 in Florida the Republicans did it over on restoring voter rights which goes against their philosophy of “Lock ‘em up and throw away the keys.”

How Republicans gutted the biggest voting rights victory in recent history
Florida voters overwhelmingly supported restoring rights for those with felony convictions. But tens of thousands of people remain disenfranchised
The Guardian
By Sam Levine
6 August 2020


On election night in 2018, Meade and Wright would find out that 64.5% of Floridians had voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to end the policy. More than 5.1 million people – more than voted for Ron DeSantis, the Republican elected governor that evening – were in favor of the measure. The referendum – often referred to as amendment 4 – was one of the most dramatic expansions of the right to vote in US history since the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

But more than a year and a half after amendment 4 went into effect, hundreds of thousands of people still remain blocked from voting.

The promise of amendment 4 remains largely unfulfilled because Republicans in Florida moved aggressively to gut it. They passed a law that put insurmountable hurdles in front of those with felony convictions and required them to navigate a byzantine bureaucracy to get their voting rights back (one county official testified in May that records from crimes decades ago had been kept on index cards in shoeboxes). As of late May, Florida’s top election official had tens of thousands of pending registrations from people with felony convictions, but had yet to fully review a single one.

Their goal is a one party system like Russia and China… they want to form an authoritarian government.

Like Smokey the Bear said “Only you can prevent a Coup. VOTE!"

[/RANT]

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Update 4:20PM

The Republicans are going one step further in canceling the voters…

Arizona bill would allow legislature to overturn election results
The Hill
By Reid Wilson
January 27, 2022


An arch conservative member of Arizona’s state House of Representatives has proposed a mammoth overhaul of the state’s voting procedures that would allow legislators to overturn the results of a primary or general election after months of unfounded allegations and partisan audits.

The bill, introduced by state Rep. John Fillmore (R), would substantially change the way Arizonans vote by eliminating most early and absentee voting and requiring people to vote in their home precincts, rather than at vote centers set up around the state.

Most dramatically, Fillmore’s bill would require the legislature to hold a special session after an election to review election processes and results, and to “accept or reject the election results.”

You know we can’t have the voters voting the wrong way.

“I don’t care what the press says. I don’t trust ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox or anybody out there. Everybody’s lying to me and I feel like I have a couple hundred ex-wives hanging around me,” Fillmore said. “This is not a President Biden thing. This is not a the other red-headed guy thing.”

“We should have voting in my opinion in person, one day, on paper, with no electronic means and hand counting that day.  We need to get back to 1958-style voting,” he added.

At one time we would call a person like this paranoid and put them in a padded cell back in the 1950s. I don’t know about Arizona but Connecticut as long as I remember had absentee voting and now we still use paper ballot that you fill-in the little circles like you used to do on SAT tests.

Besides his bill would violate federal election laws, just a minor detail for the Republicans.

This bill would violate 52 U.S. Code § 20511

A person, including an election official, who in any election for Federal office—

(1)knowingly and willfully intimidates, threatens, or coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any person for—

(A)registering to vote, or voting, or attempting to register or vote;

(B)urging or aiding any person to register to vote, to vote, or to attempt to register or vote; or

(C)exercising any right under this chapter; or

(2)knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by—

(A)the procurement or submission of voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held; or

(B)the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held,

shall be fined in accordance with title 18 (which fines shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury, miscellaneous receipts (pursuant to section 3302 of title 31), notwithstanding any other law), or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.