So I wrote ’bout how California’s on Salon’s top 6 list of states where voter suppression could happen.

The skinny on why: “Between January and June, 26,824 voter registration forms received by Los Angeles County alone were rejected because of these new restrictions,” according to the People of the American Way.

Rules have been modified somewhat by our current Secretary of State, McPherson, but it’s unclear if all issues’ve been adequately resolved –

But now — what to do?

So far, I’ve joined the email lists for People for the American Way and Common Cause. Both’re orgs working on issues that promote democratic values and voter rights.

PFAW seems to more explicitly liberal (the site talks about how a diverse, democratic society’s threatened by the influence of the radical right) while Common Cause takes a “nonpartisan nonprofit advocacy” stance.

PFAW’s current action: “Urge Your Members of Congress to Co-sponsor the Count Every Vote Act.” This act was intro’d in Feb. 2005 by Hillary Clinton in the Senate (S.450) and Stephanie Tubbs Jones in Congress (H.R.939).

This Act would “amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified paper record, to improve provisional balloting, to impose additional requirements under such Act, and for other purposes.”

But I’m not sure what’s happening now — The Senate bill was referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration a while back; the Congress one to the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security over a year ago. And I don’t know whether that means the Act is dead, or just moving v. slowly — Can someone help me out?

Common Cause‘s action for Cali: Supporting Prop 89, which I’ll write about soon :) The prop isn’t focused on voter rights issues specifically, however.

Other good things happening — My Dem party’s got a new national hotline, 888.DEM.VOTE, to help out all you dem voters who may run into probs while casting your vote.

One other site that Art, the person who wrote the original Salon article that got me started, recommends — The Brad Blog. I’ll be reading the blog now, but I gotta say — it’s literally super difficult to read — yellow text on green background with distracting flashing siren type things all over the place. Still, the info seems valuable –

0 Comments