The Best Comments (Yours)

The best readers (mine)

I’ve been meaning to let y’all know how much I enjoy reading your comments to the newsletter. You’re smart and funny. And you cheer me up on the tough days. I’m really glad so many of you liked Chicken Conspiracy.

Now it’s time to put all of our smarts together. This weekend, we’re 100 days out from the midterm elections. You may have primaries or runoffs left in your state, but the big dance is on Tuesday, November 8, 2022. Mark your calendars now!

That means we have work to do. I should confess here to my bias as a former U.S. Attorney. I want to make sure everyone can exercise their right to vote. Doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re a qualified citizen, I think you should be able to vote. That means I focus on making sure people can

• register,

• stay registered,

• educate themselves about candidates & issues,

• vote, and

• have their ballots count.

Each of those items has a lot of content, and I thought we’d spend some time over the next couple of months thinking about what has to happen, and most importantly, what each of us can do to make sure Americans can vote for the candidates of their choice. That’s where your comments will be more important than ever. I know many of you have ideas about how to engage and past success stories to share. Please use the comment function to make sure we can head into this election well-educated and fully prepared to uphold the right to vote.

Long before there was a big lie, I learned that Republicans used a litany of fake voter fraud claims to justify passing laws that, in practice, suppressed people’s rights to vote. As a line prosecutor, as the appellate chief in my U.S. Attorney’s office, and as the U.S. Attorney, I heard complaints about everything from dead people voting to a falsely expressed certainty that “illegal aliens” were voting. The complaints never panned out, no matter how surely they were voiced. Even my Republican predecessors never found a case that influenced the outcome of an election.

Republicans beat that drum to justify laws, like voter ID and cleaning up voter rolls, that might sound good but are really just excuses for making it more difficult for black people, working people, immigrants, people of lower socio-economic status and older people to vote. In other words, voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates. Trump took the big lie to new heights, but he didn’t originate it.

There is a lot we can do, from building awareness to becoming poll workers ourselves—a menu of choices with a role for everyone who wants to help. I’ll be posting about voting frequently.

Since we’re at the 100 day mark, I’ll share a tip tonight that I hope you’ll pass on to friends: if you’re registered, you can’t be removed from the voter rolls, or from status as an active voter, once we are less than 90 days out from the election. Since we don’t want any surprises when we go in to vote, put a reminder on your calendar to check your status sometime in mid to late August, after we hit the 90 day mark. Go to vote.org and take a screen shot so you have a record of your status as an active voter. This is a great time to encourage your friends to do this too or to register if they aren’t already. It’s going to take a massive effort at the polls this November to break the midterm curse, that usually sees the party that’s out of power make gains. But we can do it if we all work at it.

We’re in this together,

Joyce