Commentary

Your Power to Vote With Your Wallet, Too

by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, October 29, 2018

Why is it that when you say you’re in favor of voting, people know you’re thought of as a Democrat?

Maybe it’s because America’s demographics are diverse, increasingly a mix of languages, voices, and identities. If they vote for people who support their beliefs and communities, we’re going to have a government that is less white, less male, and less blue-collar Americana.

If you believe in a representative democracy, that’s good.

But if you want to keep the power in this country in the hands of good old boys and the money that funds them, then you see voting as bad. Voting is about change. Suppressing the vote, keeping people afraid to go to a polling place, is a fundamentally anti-American ideology.

So, what can you do this week to encourage others to stand up and get to the polls? Medium’s Jeff Berman had some good ideas:

-- “Be a Voter. Confirm you’re registered to vote. Make a plan to vote. And find at least one other person to join you.

-- DownloadVote With Me. Upload your contacts. The app will identify your friends in swing districts/states, and, where the data allow, identify who hasn’t voted in recent elections along with who is a member of what party. Reach out to all of them” and try to persuade them to be a voter.

-- Get involved. ”Check out Vote Save America,The Last Weekend, or Indivisible for how to get involved.”

If you want to go further, you can ask media companies to draw a line between fact and fiction. Fox News, in covering the arrest of the alleged bomber last week, blurred the logos on the bomber’s van. Why? Not because they were a secret, but because they were images of the President, and drew a bright line between the President’s hateful speech and the bomber’s terrible actions. Explosive rhetoric leads to explosive devices.

How can you let Fox News know it’s too much? Reach out to Fox’s top 10 sponsors on Twitter, who are funding this coverage: Keurig Green Mountain (@Keurig) Ford & Lincoln (@Ford @LincolnMotorCo) Pfizer (@pfizer) Liberty Mutual (@libertymutual) Bayer AG & Monsanto (@Bayer @BayerUS) Honda & Acura (@Honda @Acura) Ace Hardware (@acehardware) Procter & Gamble (@ProcterGamble) Allstate & Esurance (@Allstate & @Esurance) Capital One (@capitalone)

You can vote with your ballot. You can vote with your wallet. Better yet, do both.

politics

4 comments about "Your Power to Vote With Your Wallet, Too".

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Judson Beck from Nexstar, October 30, 2018 at 5:04 p.m.
"Why is it that when you say you’re in favor of voting, people know you’re thought of as a Democrat?"

I'm sorry, but who thinks that, exactly? That's an absurd statement. Republicans, Independants and Democrats alike are in favor of voting.
Reply

steven rosenbaum from Magnify.nyc replied, October 30, 2018 at 5:14 p.m.

Ok, let's trade examples. Here are some examples of GOP voter suppression efforts.

-On Monday, former President Jimmy Carter urged Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp to recuse himself from overseeing the state’s elections.

Voter suppression practices include:

Closing polling places in communities of color
Purging eligible voters from the rolls without their knowledge
Barring felons from voting
Voter ID laws
Eliminating early voting

Here's a quick overview, feel free to share any democratic voter suppression issues you can find.

Kansas Access to the ballot box in November will be more difficult for some people in Dodge City, where Hispanics now make up 60 percent of its population

North Carolina thanks to Republican rule, and a new law is making the state even less democratic. According to the state board of elections, Over 60% of North Carolinians voted early in 2016, and that will be much more difficult to do now

Nevada [The state sends] postcards to…voters. The [original] postcards were not forwardable-meaning if a voter moved, the postcard wouldn’t follow them to their new address. Postcards that came back as non-deliverable resulted in the state sending a forwardable postcard to the old address.

Georgia In Georgia, election officials have suspended more than 50,000 applications to register to vote, most of them for black voters, under a rigorous Republican-backed law that requires personal information to exactly match driver’s license or Social Security records.

Texas More than 2,000 potential voters in Texas had their voters’ registration applications unfairly rejected by the Texas Secretary of State, a national advocacy group said Wednesday.

North Dakota On Tuesday, the Supreme Court chose to stand by and allow the war against voting to continue. Just a little less than a month before midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, the court decided not to block North Dakota’s restrictive voter ID law, which will make it harder for people in that state to cast their ballots.

Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited, October 31, 2018 at 7:27 a.m.

Also, both in Texas and Georgia, voting machines are changing votes from democratic to straight republican. The republicans in those republican controlled states have been notified and do nothing.Odds they had something to do with it. Check for your self which company manufacturers those machines and which party they have sworn allegience and support.

Ken Kurtz from creative license replied, November 7, 2018 at 7:56 a.m.

Agree Judson. Patently absurd statement by Rosenbaum, and equally absurd false assertions of suppression (which even if correct, would not justify Rosenbaum's absurd statement) by him, and his lemming.