Nearly 1 Million Californians Registered to Vote Are Ineligible, Says Non-Partisan Group
 
A non-partisan group has reported that there are still several counties in California where the number of registered voters is greater than the number of eligible citizens, with the total nearing one million people.

The Election Integrity Project California (EIPCa) stated in a release on July 8 (pdf) that if voter problems are not promptly addressed by state officials, fraudulent election activities may continue to haunt the state.

Using the state’s own data on active and inactive status registrants, the organization found that eight counties have not cleaned up their inactive registrant lists, despite a 2018 legal settlement that requires California counties to properly maintain their voter rolls and remove inactive voters according to federal law.

According to EIPCa, there are currently 991,411 people registered who are ineligible to vote. This is an increase of 63,376 from the group’s 2017 report, which found 928,035 ineligibles registered to vote.

As the number of names with inactive status continues to grow, the organization noted that these excess registrants open up the doors to fraud.

Voter registration rates that exceed the eligible population range from 103% in Ventura, San Benito, and Plumas counties to 115% in San Diego. Other counties include San Mateo at 104%, Solano and Santa Cruz at 107%, and Los Angeles at 109%.

Just months ago, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) acknowledged making 105,000 registration errors, with at least one noncitizen claiming the DMV improperly added him to the voter rolls.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, EIPCa Chief Analyst Ellen Swensen confirmed that the DMV’s practices still need improvement, although the EIPCa doesn’t have a way of finding out who is or isn’t a citizen by just looking at their voter registrations.

In addition to the errors made by the DMV, she said, people who are ineligible to vote might also be getting registration forms from people who are paid to register voters and who might be unaware of the law.

“This can harm [immigrants’] future chances of gaining citizenship, so it’s important that non-citizens become educated about this,” she said. Furthermore, there are “thousands of duplicated [and ineligible] registrations” that can be used during elections “with or without the person’s knowledge.”

Recently, nine people were accused of offering cash or cigarettes in exchange for forged signatures on voter registration forms and petitions in Los Angeles. Prosecutors claim the group was active during the 2016 and 2018 election cycles, targeting the homeless to help them register fictitious persons.

EIPCa says this type of abuse may have been enabled by the state’s voting laws.

“Because California does not require an ID for a person to vote, and because some counties include the names of inactive registrants on their publicly-displayed Election Day rosters, anyone can claim to be the inactive registrant and receive a ballot,” Swensen said.

“All that is required is an oath (verbal or signed) that they are who they say they are.”

Swensen said officials need to do more to fix this problem.

“EIPCa would like to see counties become more proactive with list maintenance by mailing a card to every registrant on the list, not just those with inactive status,” she explained.

“This would allow all registrants to update their information and would, for those who have moved, died, etc., begin the lawful [process of inactivation and cancellation]. This would go a long way to reduce the almost 1 million ineligibles currently on CA’s list.”

In early 2019, the Sacramento Bee reported that Secretary of State Alex Padilla’s office was investigating whether noncitizens had voted in the June 2018 primary. At the time, Padilla admitted that voters were losing their trust in the system due to registration errors, echoing others such as State Sen. John Moorlach (R-Costa Mesa), who said that despite his “high level of confidence in California’s election systems,” he knew that the state should “do more to assure the voters that the system doesn’t have holes in it and that the boat isn’t leaking.”

Meanwhile, in November 2018, San Francisco became the largest city in the United State to give noncitizens the chance to vote in a local election. While the city’s move did not impact any election in the state or federal levels, some believe that the trend could spread to the rest of the state, and errors could continue to occur.

“Noncitizen voting is a very contentious issue,” said Robin Hvidston, executive director of We the People Rising, a Claremont organization that lobbies for stricter immigration enforcement, at the time, according to the Los Angeles Times. “The move to extend voting rights to those illegally residing in San Francisco has the potential to backfire among citizens with a moderate stance on illegal immigration.”

SOURCE 

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Atonement as Activism

JOHN MCWHORTER

Today’s consciousness-raising on race is less about helping black people than it is about white people seeking grace.

By the age of 50, you have lived long enough to remember being a mature adult in what is now a distant era. I recently recalled a conversation I had as a graduate student in 1991 that demonstrates a key change in America’s “conversation” on race over the past 30 years.

A white humanities graduate student was a member of a campus organization that had brought black activist and filmmaker Marlon Riggs to campus to give a talk. The student recounted that in his critique of racism, Riggs had leveled some potshots at the students themselves. This surprised and hurt her, as she had supposed that Riggs would consider her and her friends on his side in having invited him to speak.

Today, that same graduate student would be much less likely to take remarks like Riggs’s that way. Rather, today’s “woke,” educated white people would quite often lap up being apprised of the racism inside of them by a black speaker they paid, lodged, and fed. That speaker as often as not today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, who charismatically limns America as a cesspool of bigotry in his writing and in talks nationwide, and is joyously celebrated for it by the very people he is insulting.

Coates is a symptom of a larger mood. Over the past several years, for instance, whites across the country have been taught that it isn’t enough to understand that racism exists. Rather, the good white person views themselves as the bearer of an unearned “privilege” because of their color. Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down. The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.

This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues.This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness. After the black man I mentioned above spoke, the next speaker was a middle-aged white man who spoke of having a coach come to his office each week to talk to him about his white privilege. The audience, of course, applauded warmly at this man’s description of having what an anthropologist observer would recognize not as a “coach” but as a pastor.

I have seen whites owning up to their white privilege using the hand-in-the-air-palm-out gesture typically associated with testifying in church. After the event I have been describing, all concerned deemed it “wonderful” even though nothing new had been learned. The purpose of the event was to remind the parishioners of the prevalence of the racist sin and its reflection in themselves, and to offer a kind of forgiveness, this latter being essentially the function of the black people on the panel and in the audience. Amen.

Some might see all of this as a healthy sign of moral advance. And I suppose if I had to choose between this performativity and the utter contempt most whites had for any discussion of discrimination 50 years ago and before, I’d choose our current moment. But goodness, it piles high and deep, this—well, I’ll call it fakeness. The degree of fantasy and exaggeration that smart people currently let pass in the name of higher-order thought on race parallels, again, Biblical tales.

Coates, for example, argues in one article after another that America’s progress on race has been minimal, despite pretty window dressing here and there, and that there is no reason to hope things will get any better. Yet one can be quite aware of the prevalence and nature of racism in America while also understanding that the recreational pessimism of views like Coates’s is melodramatic and even unempirical. To insist that Starbucks or even Dylan Roof define America’s progress on race is as flimsy as treating certain young black men’s misbehavior as embodying the black essence. Perfection is ever a dream; we are, as always, in transition. Everybody knows that.

The very fact that the modern equivalent of the graduate student I knew reveres Coates’s writing is a sterling indication that America has grown up quite a bit on race even in the past quarter of a century. The fact that this brand of enlightenment has not made it to every barstool and kitchen table in the country hardly disqualifies it as influential. Anyone who really thinks that on race America has merely rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic isn’t old enough to realize that most smart white people as late as 1978 would have found The Wire about as interesting as Chinese opera.

Also, views like Coates’s qualify more as performance art than thought in their disconnection from activism and pragmatism. If the government is not doing enough to help black people, precisely what would a Coates offer as counsel? Coates argues for reparations, ignoring decades of careful argumentation that has shown the impracticality of the idea. Who would the money go to? And for exactly what? And whence the sense many have that to ask such questions is to miss some larger point? Is the larger point to provide fodder for personal atonement? It would seem that for some, bemoaning that reparations aren’t happening is as active, vital, and self-affirming as making them happen, or, better, moving on and considering realistic strategies for forging change.

The self-affirming part is the rub. This new cult of atonement is less about black people than white people. Fifty years ago, a white person learning about the race problem came away asking “How can I help?” Today the same person too often comes away asking, “How can I show that I’m a moral person?” That isn’t what the Civil Rights revolution was about; it is the product of decades of mission creep aided by the emergence of social media.

What gets lost is that all of this awareness was supposed to be about helping black people, especially poor ones. We are too often distracted from this by a race awareness that has come to be largely about white people seeking grace. For example, one reads often of studies showing that black boys are punished and suspended in school more often than other kids. But then one reads equally often that poverty makes boys, in particular, more likely to be aggressive and have a harder time concentrating. We are taught to assume that the punishments and suspensions are due to racism, and to somehow ignore the data showing that the conditions too many black boys grow up in unfortunately makes them indeed more likely to act up in school. Might the poverty be the key problem to address? But, try this purely logical reasoning in polite company only at the risk of being treated as a moral reprobate. Our conversation is to be solely about racism, not solutions—other than looking to a vaguely defined future time when racism somehow disappears, America having “come to terms” with it: i.e. Judgment Day. As to what exactly this coming to terms would consist of, I suppose only our Pastor of White Privilege knows.

Another problem is that I am not sure that today’s educated whites quite understand how unattainable the absolution they are seeking is. There is an idleness in this cult of atonement, in that it cannot get whites what they want.There is an idleness in this cult of atonement, in that it cannot get whites what they want. I wonder if today’s atoners quite understand that “getting it” will not, for example, make Ta-Nehisi Coates like them any more than Marlon Riggs liked the graduate student and her friends despite their leftist politics. There is an Old Testament quality to the Coates preachings, for example. He is unmoved by the deaths of white firefighters during 9/11, uncomfortable seeing his son as a tot playing comfortably with white kids, and sees young white parents with their big strollers as white people taking up too much space as always. The degree of self-hatred—if sincere—is staggering in whites proclaiming how much they “love” this kind of scripture.

And all of this, ultimately, is often as condescending as nakedly dismissive views of blacks were in the bad old days. I doubt most whites truly think racism is so acridly pervasive and persistent in this country that a middle-class black man ought to fear his children playing with theirs, or look upon firefighters barbecued on 9/11 as mere racists getting their just desserts. Pretending to believe this sort of thing is insincere and insulting. It’s a pat on the head.

Mendacious, even. I recently attended a read-through of a play written by a black man about himself travelling back in time and viewing plantation slavery. The leader of the discussion afterwards was a white woman of a certain age who attested to how taken unawares she had been to learn that slave families were often separated and that slaves were sometimes whipped to death. However, this woman’s age, occupation, and demographic were such that the chances are infinitesimal that she did not see Roots and 12 Years a Slave, has not read Beloved, and has not read the New York Times daily and The New Yorker weekly for at least 30 years. In other words, she was, in all of her good intentions, lying.

It is not 1960, and a person like her is quite aware of the horrors of slavery. This was testifying again—she felt it her job to declare herself hip to the horrors of racism. The problem was that the point of the play concerned the protagonist’s psychology. Having taken in her time’s directive to internalize and parrot the proper “woke” message, she missed the essence of the play and reduced it to a school auditorium civics lesson. This isn’t woke, it’s weak.

We have gone from most whites being unaware that racism was a problem for black people at all to whites being chilled to their bones at the possibility of harboring racism in their souls, terrified at the prospect of being singled out as a heretic, and forgetting that the indulgences they purchase and the praying they do for their souls has more to do with them than with anyone black and their problems. This is a white America in which the message has become garbled. Among too many, the activist impulse has stuttered, faded, and jelled into a therapeutic one somewhere between “I Have a Dream” and Between the World and Me.

Whites today are in a hard place on this, I know. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You’re taught that on race issues you are morally obliged to suspend your usual standards of logic. Faced with a choice between some benign mendacity and being mauled, few human beings choose the latter.

But it all makes me miss 1991 in some ways. I think that graduate student had it about right in being insulted by Riggs that night. She needed to understand that the hurt of racism can make its victims act out at times, but not to pretend to think she actually deserved the potshots. Yet I wouldn’t be surprised if she today has learned to enjoy being told what a moral reprobate she is on race no matter what she does or thinks, and considers herself the wiser for it.

Let us pray?

SOURCE 

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House Democrats Overcome Internal Fissures to Approve Defense-Spending Bill

In a 220–197 vote, the House passed the National Defense Authorization Act on Friday, giving a win to Democratic leaders who’d spent months coaxing progressives to vote for the defense-funding package.

Progressive lawmakers had expressed distaste for the high price tag of the $733 billion measure and argued unsuccessfully for imposing stricter guidelines regarding the treatment of migrants at the southern border. Despite those progressive objections, House Armed Services Committee chairman Adam Smith and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn convinced all but eight Democrats not to vote against the House measure, after the inclusion of a number of progressive amendments.

Before the bill’s passage on Friday, the House approved an amendment requiring congressional approval for military strikes on Iran amid rising tensions with the country. It also approved amendments repealing the 2001 authorization for the use of military force, removing the Trump administration’s ban on transgender service-members, stopping emergency arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and ending U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

The measure’s passage sets up a conflict between House Democrats and the Republican Senate, which passed a $750 billion dollar defense budget backed by the White House last month.

SOURCE 

Most of the progressive bits will presumably be stripped out in the reconciliation process

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