State of elections since 2020

ANTNATPARKSERV adbook post

Thank you! California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced that the state will send its own observers to keep an eye on federal election monitors sent out by the Trump administration before the upcoming election.

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ICYMI — “If Donald Trump’s administration really wants to find evidence of foreign interference in Georgia’s elections, then they need look no further than the president’s old friend Elon Musk and his shady super PAC.” https://newrepublic.com/post/206857/georgia-voter-fraud-elon-musk

Michael Garret NC State Senator adbook post.....

I need to tell you what I've seen. Not what I've read. What I've watched happen, with my own eyes, from inside the room.

They're not even hiding it anymore. And that's what scares me the most.

I'm a state senator in North Carolina. I am also a father. I have an eight-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter, and I think about the world they're inheriting every single day. And what I am witnessing right now, in my own state, in real time, is a masterclass in what happens when the powerful start to feel the ground move beneath their feet.

They don't listen. They don't evolve. They grab every lever they can find.

For nine years, politicians in my state have tried to seize control of how we run our elections. They passed laws to take over election boards. Courts struck them down. They tried again. Struck down again. They put it before the voters as a constitutional amendment. The voters said no.

Six times in nine years. The answer always came back: "No."

So, they changed the court. They changed the rules. And then they passed virtually the same law again, buried inside a Hurricane Helene relief bill, 131 pages deep, betting that the court they now controlled wouldn't stop them.

They were right.

The NC Supreme Court voted 5-2, along party lines, to let it stand. And the justice who wrote the opinion? He's the son of the most powerful state senator in North Carolina, the same man whose legislation created the scheme in the first place. This is what a machine looks like. Not in a textbook. In real life. In your backyard.

And just this week, the man they put in charge of our elections, the one whose power this whole scheme created, showed up at an early voting site and publicly campaigned for that senator. Then he walked inside and chaired an elections meeting that same afternoon. The man who controls the elections, campaigning for the man who controls him.

I wish I could tell you this is where it stops. It's not.

Last year, when politicians in my state gerrymandered our congressional districts at the President's request, openly admitting the purpose was to deliver him another seat, I stood on the Senate floor for eighteen minutes and spoke against it. I talked about the promise we make to the next generation. About the people who bled at Valley Forge and marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge so that we could govern ourselves. About what it means when politicians choose a president's power over their own people's voice.

They didn't address a single word I said.

Instead, they voted, straight party line, to erase my entire speech from the permanent Senate record.

They couldn't answer the truth. So, they tried to delete it.

That's the moment I understood something I want every person reading this to understand: you don't erase words you're not afraid of. You don't build a machine like this if you think you can win without one.

Their fear is the proof.

This isn't a North Carolina story. This is an American story. And some version of it is playing out wherever you live, in statehouses and county commissioner meetings and school boards, wherever powerful people have decided that the rules exist to protect them, not you.

They count on you not to notice. They count on the complexity, the bill numbers and the legal challenges and the bureaucratic shuffling, to wear you out, to make your eyes glaze over, to make you feel like you can't possibly keep up.

Don't let them.

Because here's what they don't want you to see: right now, in a rural county in North Carolina, a sheriff with $39,000 in his campaign account is giving a man with $2.4 million and the full weight of a political machine a real race. The most powerful politician in our state is fighting for his political life, not because of some massive opposition campaign, but because the people in his own backyard started paying attention.

That's all it took. People paying attention.

I think about my kids every time I walk into that Senate chamber. Jack is eight. Charlotte is five. They don't know about gerrymandered maps or dark money PACs or election board takeovers. They know their dad goes to Raleigh to try to make things better. And someday they're going to look back at this moment and ask what we did when the powerful tried to rewrite the rules.

I want them to see that we didn't go quietly. That when they tried to erase the words, millions of people read them anyway. That when they built a machine, ordinary people showed up and threw sand in the gears.

Every machine ever built by powerful people who believed they were untouchable has met the same end. Not because a stronger machine came along, but because regular people, tired people, people with $39,000 and a whole lot of fight, decided they'd had enough.

The cracks are showing. Wherever you are.

Push.