The GOP Turns Against the League of Women Voters

[Nevilledog]

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Steve Mills
@smmills1960
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NEW: The League of Women Voters has been around for what seems like forever, but the GOP is turning away from it and the organization is struggling to play a role in elections. Fascinating story about the @LWV by reporter @MegsNewz and @propublica.

propublica.org
The GOP Turns Against the League of Women Voters
The league, long known for focusing on voter registration and other fundamentals, became more willing to speak boldly during the Trump era. Now, some on the right are portraying it as a tool of the...
6:09 AM · Aug 18, 2022

https://www.propublica.org/article/league-of-women-voters-gop-trump

For decades, the League of Women Voters played a vital but largely practical role in American politics: tending to the information needs of voters by hosting debates and conducting candidate surveys. While it wouldn’t endorse specific politicians, it quietly supported progressive causes.

The group was known for clipboards, not confrontation; for being respected, not reviled.

But those quiet days are now over, a casualty of the volatile political climate of the last few years and the league’s goal of being relevant to a new generation.

In 2018, the league’s CEO was arrested, along with hundreds of other protesters, for crowding a Senate office building to demand lawmakers reject Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative accused of sexual harassment.

Two years later, the league dissolved its chapter in Nevada after the state president penned an op-ed in July 2020 accusing the Democrats of hypocrisy for opposing gerrymandering in red states while “harassing” the league in Nevada over its activism on the issue.

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[Mad_Machine76]

1. GOP:

Is we a cult now?

[Diamond_Dog]

2. Those Marxist rabble rousers!

Supporting voting rights and clean water! Why, that’s simply un-American!

[msfiddlestix]

3. They've been kicked the curb some years ago, by the GOP and the Media

just saying, this isn't news unfortunately.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. One of my good friends is an officer in the League of Women Voters

This lady is a past president of the League of Women's voters and was on the board that checks signatures on vote by mail ballots. It took Pam over a month to get her vote by mail ballot

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But Gaskin’s pledge was put to the test this year after a new state voting law implemented extra ID requirements for mail-in ballot requests. Republicans championed the changes last year in the name of election security, but the stipulations have also created mass confusion and a record number of rejected applications ahead of the March primaries.

Gaskin and her husband, Michael, were denied ballots twice this month over procedural mishaps — and if she were any less determined to vote, it may have stayed that way.

“I’ve been a voting rights activist all my life, and I'm 74 years old,” said Gaskin, now a Missouri City resident. “And I have not seen anything like this. I really haven't.”,,,,,

“I keep up with changes in the laws that affect voters and often speak to church groups and other community organizations,” she wrote. “I have NEVER experienced anything like these misguided and Jim Crow-like rules concerning voting. This is almost as bad as asking people how many jelly beans are in the jar.”

Gaskin, who has been a member of the Texas League of Women Voters for about 25 years, worries that others won’t be as persistent as she has been.