Category Archives: Libertarian

Last week, Clark County commissioners passed a resolution sponsored by Justin Jones declaring vaccine misinformation a public health emergency. We are seeing more and more jurisdictions across the country make similar declarations. Having divergent opinions is as American as apple pie. Our nations founding is based on the compromises of opinionated men. Somewhere along the way though, rather than disagree about what facts meant, there are those who began to throw out facts altogether and substitute their own.

Over the years, we had at least one family member who would read fringe conspiracy theories and spread them as gospel. It was an oddly endearing feature of Thanksgiving dinner and family gatherings. Everyone had a crazy relative who just thought differently, and then everyone would go home and that would be that. With the internet and social media, though, everyones crazy relatives could find one another, and with cable news, some gained legitimacy. (Its not a conspiracy theory; I saw it on the news!) Even that wasnt enough for us to delete family members and friends from social media or our phones, though. Folks got their news from different sources, but the facts stayed the same.

The television show South Park has dedicated many hours of programming to the idea that our nations critical thinking skills have gone off the rails. Whether its the lowering of the bar or the member berries story lines, the writers of this cartoon have asked an important question: What has happened to us? The spreading of misinformation is a plague on the United States. The inescapable truth is we are now a siloed nation; the information you believe can generally be tied to the political ideals you hold; and the gullibility factor does seem to be trending more toward one party than the other.

The Libertarian Party put out a tweet calling the Confederacy evil. A person who responded was adamant that while the Confederate States of America werent perfect, neither was the Union because General Robert E. Lee released his family slaves before President Abraham Lincoln released his. As I contemplated this reply, I found myself speechless (and anyone who has known me for longer than five minutes knows thats nearly impossible).

Anyone who has watched Clark County School District or Clark County Commission public comment at any time in the last several months can see things like this play out in real time. Anti-vax and anti-mask supporters of the Big Lie speaking for hours, hurling insults at our elected representatives as well as at speakers they disagree with share one very clear thing: These people who spread misinformation are manipulative predators seeking to derail the operating of our systems of government. They may not have been there on Jan. 6, but their motivations are no different.

Purveyors of misinformation are so adept at manipulating people that they have convinced ordinarily rational people that they are so entitled as to be immune from consequences. When they are escorted out of meetings, their microphones are cut, their favorite coffee shop wont let them in, they cant go see the Raiders, or they lose their job because of their opinion on masks or vaccines, they shout outrage and blame Communism rather than owning up to a decision they made with manipulated information.

President Dwight Eisenhower said, [t]he hand of the aggressor is stayed by strength and strength alone. I am heartened that the county commissioners and the Clark County School District Board of Trustees have borne the criticisms and threats and shown the strength to do their jobs. It will take nothing short of the collective strength of every rational thinking Nevadan to counter misinformation in our state. We can disagree on policy as we often have. That is America. I like to believe I have a healthy questioning of authority. I have disagreed with policies of elected leaders and the viewpoints of others, but I could never imagine abdicating reason and throwing my lot in with zealots. Fanaticism is not patriotism; threats are not civil discourse; and misinformation is deadly.

Nathaniel Waugh is a member of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District Board of Trustees and the manager of Policy Advocacy and Training at the Nevada Homeless Alliance. He received his Master of Arts in Urban Leadership from UNLV.

Read more:

The misinformation wars - The Nevada Independent

Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 2, and voters will face decisions in local and state races across Warren County.

This is a look at contested races -- in which there are more candidates than open seats -- for municipal and state government and school board. County Commissioner Director James Kern III does not face a challenger in the lone county race.

Click here for the full candidate lists for Warren County government and school board races.

New Jerseys deadline to register to vote is Oct. 12.

(vote for 1, 4-year term)

Philip Murphy (Democrat)

Jack Ciattarelli (Republican)

Madelyn R. Hoffman (Green)

Joanne Kuniansky (Socialist Workers)

Gregg Mele (Libertarian)

(vote for 1, 4-year term)

Sheila Y. Oliver (Democrat)

Diane Allen (Republican)

Heather Warburton (Green)

Vivian M. Sahner (Socialist Workers)

Eveline Brownstein (Libertarian)

Senate (vote for 1, 2-year term)

Michael J. Doherty (Republican)

Denise T. King (Democrat)

General Assembly (vote for 2, 2-year term)

John DiMaio (Republican)

Erik Peterson (Republican)

Nicholas F. Labelle (Democrat)

Hope Kaufman (Democrat)

Senate (vote for 1, 2-year term)

Steven V. Oroho (Republican)

Frederick P. Cook (Democrat)

General Assembly (vote for 2, 2-year term)

F. Parker Space (Republican)

Harold J. Hal Wirths (Republican)

Scott P. Fadden (Democrat)

Georgianna Carol Cook (Democrat)

Borough council (vote for 2, 3-year term)

Peter Pettinelli (Republican)

Jodie Smith (Republican)

Michael Schwar (nominated by petition)

Committee (vote for 2, 3-year term)

Rob Moorhead (Republican)

Charles Makatura (Republican)

Samuel Bolshoi (Democrat)

Committee (vote for 1, 3-year term)

Brian Tipton (Republican)

Manuel Manny Escaleira (nominated by petition)

Town council (vote for 3, 4-year term)

Robert W. Fulper (Republican)

Mark S. Lutz (Republican)

Peter J. Marino (Republican)

Lee M. Clark (Democrat)

Derick J. Lewis (Democrat)

Keith A. Kennedy (Democrat)

Committee (vote for 1, 3-year term)

Bryan Vande Vrede (Republican)

Arnold G. Hyndman (nominated by petition)

(vote for 3, 3-year term)

Abigail Abby Christmann

Harriett Gaddy

Francis Gavin

Lisa Marie Strutin

(vote for 3, 3-year term)

Thomas Ackerman

Robert J. Czopoth

Laura Kennedy

Kathryn Pell

(vote for 1, 2-year term)

Robert A. Blum

Sean Johnson

(vote for 3, 3-year term)

Michele Benigno

Sotie Hambos

Kathryn Hawkswell

Jennifer Leach

Sam Scocozza

Shanna R. Sikkes

(vote for 3, 3-year term)

Giovanni Falco

Molly Fraumeni

Kevin Iaione

Diane Margolin

Constance B. Quinn

Linda Watters

Blairstown Township (vote for 2, 3-year term)

Taylor Casey

Wen-Ling Lai

Courtney Matash

Lauren McQuown

Tara Prezioso

Jennifer Unick

Christopher Zwarych

Knowlton Township (vote for 1, 3-year term)

Don Biery

Mary Ann Boyd

Lorielle DeRomo

(vote for 3, 3-year term)

Robert Case

Donald T. Kophazy, Jr.

LaDean Mitchell

James Shelly

(vote for 3, 3-year term)

Patricia Babcock

Joseph Delesky

Read the rest here:

Warren County elections: Here are the contested races on Nov. 2 - lehighvalleylive.com

Sentinel Staff| The Holland Sentinel

GRAND RAPIDS Grand Valley State University will hold its 11th annual Progressive/Conservative Summit this weekend. The event, presented by the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, will take place Friday and Saturday, Oct. 1 and 2.

The event begins at 7 p.m. Friday in the Loosemore Auditorium at the DeVos Center on GVSUs Pew Campus in Grand Rapids. It will continue with a full day of events Saturday, beginning at 9 a.m.

There will be four keynote addresses with libertarian, conservative and liberal speakers, panel discussions, a luncheon workshop and networking opportunities.

Topics of discussion will include the future of conservatism and liberalism, civic engagement and how the nation can unite on issues.

Subscribe: Receive 6 months of unlimited digital access to hollandsentinel.com for $1!

Speakers for this years event include Jane Coaston, David French and Matthew Yglesias.

Coaston was a former senior politics reporter for Vox before joining The New York Times in September 2020 as host of its opinion podcast, The Argument. French is senior editor at The Dispatch and a columnist for Time. He is also a former senior writer for the National Review. Yglesias is one of the co-founders of Vox, and its senior correspondent covering politics and economic policy and host of the websites The Weeds podcast.

The Hauenstein Center is partnering with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation and the Progressive Womens Alliance to host the summit.

More here:

Grand Valley hosting annual political summit this weekend - HollandSentinel.com

Even as our nations capital remains stuck in the post January 6 dysfunction of a failed insurrection that lingers on in GOP obstructionism, there are signs that the anti-immigrant racism that Donald Trump used to mobilize his troops is running out of steam.

Four years ago, the Trump induced hate fever, that put migrant children in cages and relished tearing apart families, was potent enough that it completely infected the brain stems of the 2017 Virginia andNew Jersey Republican campaignsfor Governor.

With just 24 hours to go before voters headed to the polls formerLieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno and Virginias GOP standard bearer Ed Gillespie used their final push to link their Democratic opponents to MS-13, the violent El Salvadorian drug gang. The GOP line of attack linked both Phil Murphy and Lt. Gov. Ralph Northams support for so called sanctuary cities as the equivalent of endorsing the harboring of violent illegal aliens.

The linkage between undocumented immigrants and a propensity for criminal behavior had been widely debunked and yet Trump rode that hobby horse all the way to the Oval Office. In a 2015 report from theNational Academy of Sciencesresearchers concluded that immigrants are in fact much less likely to commit crime than natives, and the presence of large numbers of immigrants seems to lower crime rates.This disparity also holds for young men most likely to be undocumented immigrants: Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan men.

TheCato Institute, a libertarian think tank, reached similar findings in a 2017 report. Empirical studies of immigrant criminality generally find that immigrants do not increase local crime rates and are less likely to cause crime than their native-born peers, and that natives are more likely to be incarcerated than immigrants, Cato researchers concluded.

Yet in 2017, the Trump tractor beam had New Jerseys GOP locked in its anti-immigrant position.

Scroll forward to the fractious Sept. 28 debate between Gov. Phil Murphy and his opponent former Assemblyman Republican Jack Ciattarelli and the under reported consensus the two rivals espoused on the subject of New Jerseys hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants.

We are not going to deport 14, 15 or 16 million people that came to this country and are undocumented, said Ciattarelli. We need to put them on the path to recognition. We need to do thatI voted for the Dream Act. I was one of the few Republicans that did that. We are not going to deny young people who came of no power of their own the opportunity to pursue their American dream.

And as far as the Murphy and Democratically controlled legislatures 2019 decision to permit New Jersey almost half a million undocumented immigrants to be able to get a drivers license, Ciattarelli was on board.

The former Assemblyman described the controversial measure as a great security measure that lets us know who they are while ensuring all of the states drivers are licensed and not driving around uninsured.

I celebrate New Jerseys diversity, Ciattarelli proclaimed. We are the most diverse state in the union. Theres power and beauty in that diversity.

I will seize on a moment of common ground and echo on the celebration of our diversity particularly given this question which has a disproportionate impact on our Latino communities, Murphy responded.

In that fleeting moment the earth shifted. Our state was inching toward a more harmonious and generous, life affirming place, but that hopeful moment was largely missed because it came amidst the clanging cacophony of our partisan calliope.

The Governor went on to describe the State of New Jerseys 2018 Immigrant Trust Directive issued by then Attorney General Gurbir Grewal which directly challenged the Trump administrations anti-immigration policy that expressly targeted so-called sanctuary cities which prohibited their local police from assisting federal authorities in arresting residents based on their immigration status.

New Jersey police officers cannot participate in federal immigration raids, according to the NJ Attorney Generals online explainer. They cannot stop, question, arrest, search, or detain an individual based solely on actual or suspected immigration status. And they cannot ask an individuals immigration status except in rare cases when it is relevant to a specific criminal investigation.

It continues. The Directive sends a clear message to Washington: we will not allow you to drive a wedge between New Jerseys law enforcement officers and our immigrant communities. And we will not allow federal authorities to stop us from ensuring the safety of all nine million New Jersey residents.

During the recent debate the 2021 GOP standard bearer didnt use his rebuttal time to push back but only to make a direct appeal to the states immigrant business owners suggesting their ambitions for prosperity were better entrusted with another self-made businessman.

Back in 2017, GOP strategists were making a different calculation that in off year elections, when turnout was likely to be lower, it was key to activate the most angry and fearful in your base. So, the Guadagno campaign, running double digits behind, thought it had no other play than to make other than to run ads linking Phil Murphy to Jose Carranza, an undocumented immigrant whose 2007 brutal murder of three New Jersey students in Newark outraged the entire state.

It did not matter to the GOP back then in urban places like Newark, Paterson and Camden, where a high percentage of New Jerseys 500,000 undocumented residents live, overall crime wasactually down. It was precisely that influx of immigrants that helped to stabilize neighborhoods as well as staunch a steady state population decline that has seen our Congressional delegation shrink from 15 to 12 over the last 30 years.

So, whats different in 2021?

Could it be our collective soul has shifted after a bit after a mass death event that killed close to 700,000 Americans, many of them people of color and no doubt many of them undocumented immigrants who in life were essential workers who lost their lives serving us?

Perhaps, you can only fuel your existence with hate for so long. Its love that goes the distance.

(Visited 384 times, 28 visits today)

Continue reading here:

Ciattarelli Tries to Negotiate the Trump Hate Fever - InsiderNJ

Former U.S. treasury secretary and chief economist at the World Bank, Larry Summers, says cryptocurrency will do better regulated in a sound way instead of being treated as a libertarian paradise.

Lawrence Summers, who served as the Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration and director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama administration, talked about cryptocurrency regulation during an interview with Bloomberg Friday. A former chief economist at the World Bank, Summers is currently Harvard Universitys President Emeritus.

He was asked why regulators worldwide are deeply skeptical about cryptocurrencies. China, for example, has been cracking down on crypto activities. Summers began by stating that the word crypto suggests a desire for secrecy with respect to large financial sums, elaborating:

When you have large financial sums happening in secret, you have risks of money laundering, risks of supporting various kinds of criminal activities, risks of innocent people being ripped off.

The truth is that we wouldnt have a viable airplane industry if we werent regulating airline safety, he continued. We wouldnt have the transportation system we do if we didnt regulate automobile safety.

He added that the blockchain-based payments industry is going to do better regulated in a sound way, rather than trying to be some kind of libertarian paradise, noting:

I think the crypto community needs to recognize that, and needs to work cooperatively with governments and if they do that. I think that this innovation can be one of the important innovations of this period.

The former IMF chief economist pointed out that some people believe in the idea that cryptocurrency is going to be some kind of a libertarian paradise where we are not going to be able to enforce bank rules, like knowing your customers [KYC], where we are going to be able to move money freely and avoid paying taxes.

Summers opined, I think its a recognition that all industries need to come to that are systemic in their importance, adding:

Its not entirely unlike the discussion of big tech companies. They need to have a regulatory framework. They dont just need it for the protection of their consumers, they need it for the protection of themselves.

In conclusion, he said, We wouldnt have the New York Stock Exchange as the center of the worlds stock market if we didnt have a strong SEC, emphasizing, Even if people didnt like the rules some of the time.

What do you think about Larry Summers comments? Let us know in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

Read this article:

Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers: Cryptocurrency Will 'Do Better Regulated' Regulation - Todayuknews

Paul Hager| Guest columnist

This guest column was submitted byPaul Hager of Bloomington.

Following the dramatics of the California recall from afar, I found myself terribly conflicted. As some people may know, Im an occasional libertarian politician from Bloomington, but those who know me best are aware that I view many aspects of nations and governments from a systems perspective. This perspective gives rise to my conflict, one that could be called a matter of heart versus mind.

The USA was founded, ultimately, as a federal republic. A republic is a representative democracy, not a democracy like ancient Athens where citizens had direct control of the government. History demonstrates that the Athenian system was unstable, and our founders rejected it. The chief advantage of representatives in a republican system is that they are ideally separated from transient passions and able to render a judgment based upon facts, facts then weighed on the basis of moral, legal, and such other considerations as may affect the commonweal. One of the greatest exponents of this view was a British member of Parliament during the Revolutionary War named Edmund Burke. Burke supported the arguments of the colonists legally and logically, generally presenting their case. This was his job and doing it risked making his constituents quite unhappy, which it in fact did.

I have never spoken to a little-l libertarian over the years who didnt know something about Burke or, lacking that knowledge, couldnt easily explain the qualities of a good representative. Telling unpleasant truths and making people angry is, from time to time, a representatives job. Political philosophy aside, there is a practical consideration: What if, after every decision a representative makes that angers people, there is a legal mechanism allowing the majority to remove this person from office? This sounds a lot like the dangerous sort of democracy that the Founders concluded was a very bad idea. Aside from that, most humans (even politicians) understand rewards and punishments. If representatives are being promiscuously removed after unpopular decisions, the only ones that are elected will be those who cater to their constituents and dont do their job.

Im a libertarian and a Burkean. I therefore must oppose the very idea of a recall. Let me put it to readers at this point, even if you havent thought about these points before given this history, doesnt the idea of a recall seem at least a little un-American?

But heres the thing. Larry Elder is a great guy and, best of all, he is, like me, a little-l libertarian. Initially, even though I knew he wasnt likely to win, I allowed myself to imagine him winning and how much that could benefit California and the country. But, what if, miracle of miracles, he did win? Edmund Burke immediately appeared before my minds eye. This was for me, an agnostic, as close as Im likely to come to committing a mortal sin and having some divine spirit reproach me for it.

I have a great deal of respect for Elder and think he has the makings of a great representative. But not that way. Please, sir. Reread your Burke and run in the next regular election.

Continued here:

Column: Considerations on the California recall effort and its potential consequences - The Herald-Times

The year 2021 has proved a landmark for the "school choice" cause a movement committed to the idea of providing public money for parents to use to pay for private schooling.

Republican control of a majority of state legislatures, combined with pandemic learning disruptions, set the stage for multiple victories. Seven states have created new school choice programs, and 11 others have expanded current programs through laws that offer taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schooling and authorize tax credits and educational savings accounts that incentivize parents moving their children out of public schools.

On its face, this new legislation may sound like a win for families seeking more school options. But the roots of the school choice movement are more sinister.

white Southerners first fought for "freedom of choice" in the mid-1950s as a means of defying the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which mandated the desegregation of public schools. Their goal was to create pathways for white families to remove their children from classrooms facing integration.

Prominent libertarians then took advantage of this idea, seeing it not only as a means of providing private options, but also as a tool in their crusade to dismantle public schools altogether. This history reveals that rather than giving families more school options, school choice became a tool intended to give most families far fewer in the end.

School choice had its roots in a crucial detail of the Brown decision: The ruling only applied to public schools. white Southerners viewed this as a loophole for evading desegregated schools.

In 1955 and 1956, conservative white leaders in Virginia devised a regionwide strategy of "massive resistance" to the high court's desegregation mandate that hinged on state-funded school vouchers. The State Board of Education provided vouchers, then called tuition grants, of $250 ($2,514 in 2021 dollars) to parents who wanted to keep their children from attending integrated schools. The resistance leaders understood that most Southern white families could not afford private school tuition and many who could afford it lacked the ideological commitment to segregation to justify the cost. The vouchers, combined with private donations to the new schools in counties facing desegregation mandates, would enable all but a handful of the poorest Whites to evade compliance.

Go inside New York politics.

By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy.

Other Southern states soon adopted voucher programs like the one in Virginia to facilitate the creation of private schools called "segregation academies," despite opposition from Black families and civil rights leaders. Oliver Hill, an NAACP attorney key to the Virginia case against "separate but equal" education that was folded into Brown, explained their position this way: "No one in a democratic society has a right to have his private prejudices financed at public expense."

Despite such objections, key conservative and libertarian thinkers and foundations, including economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, Human Events editor Felix Morley and publisher Henry Regnery, backed the white Southern cause. They recognized that white Southerners' push for "freedom of choice" presented an opportunity to advance their goal of privatizing government services and resources, starting with primary and secondary education. They barely, if ever, addressed racism and segregation; instead, they spoke of freedom (implicitly, white freedom).

Friedman began promoting "educational freedom" in 1955, just as Southern states prepared to resist Brown. And he praised the Virginia voucher plan in his 1962 book, "Capitalism and Freedom," holding it up as a model for school choice everywhere. "Whether the school is integrated or not," he wrote, should have no bearing on eligibility for the vouchers. In other words, he knew the program was designed to fund segregation academies and saw it as no barrier to receiving state financing.

Friedman was far from alone. His fellow libertarians, including those on the staff of the William Volker Fund, a leading funder on the right, saw no problem with state governments providing tax subsidies to white families who chose segregation academies, even as these states disenfranchised Black voters, blocking them from having a say in these policies.

Libertarians understood that while abolishing the social safety net and other policies constructed during the Progressive era and the New Deal was wildly unpopular, even among white Southerners, school choice could win converts.

These conservative and libertarian thinkers offered up ostensibly race-neutral arguments in favor of the tax subsidies for private schooling sought by white supremacists. In doing so, they taught defenders of segregation a crucial new tactic abandon overtly racist rationales and instead tout liberty, competition and market choice while embracing an anti-government stance. These race-neutral rationales for private school subsidies gave segregationists a justification that could survive court review and did, for more than a decade before the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.

When challenged, Friedman and his allies denied that they were motivated by racial bigotry. Yet, they had enough in common ideologically with the segregationists for the partnership to work. Both groups placed a premium on the liberty of those who had long profited from white-supremacist policies and sought to shield their freedom of action from the courts, liberal government policies and civil rights activists.

Crucially, freedom wasn't the ultimate goal for either group of voucher supporters. White Southerners wielded colorblind language about freedom of choice to help preserve racial segregation and to keep Black children from schools with more resources.

Friedman, too, was interested in far more than school choice. He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn't intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some "charity" cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, "In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing." Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children's education, Friedman said, "The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it."

Today, the ultrawealthy backers of school choice are cagey about this long-term goal, knowing that care is required to win the support of parents who want the best for their children. Indeed, in a sad irony, decades after helping to impede Brown's implementation, school choice advocates on the right targeted families of color for what one libertarian legal strategist called "forging nontraditional alliances." They won over some parents of color, who came to see vouchers and charter schools as a way to escape the racial and class inequalities that stemmed from white flight out of urban centers and the Supreme Court's willingness to allow white Americans to avoid integrating schools.

But the history behind vouchers reveals that the rhetoric of "choice" and "freedom" stands in stark contrast to the real goals sought by conservative and libertarian advocates. The system they dream of would produce staggering inequalities, far more severe than the disparities that already exist today. Wealthy and upper-middle-class families would have their pick of schools, while those with far fewer resources disproportionately families of color might struggle to pay to educate their children, leaving them with far fewer options or dependent on private charity. Instead of offering an improvement over underfunded schools, school choice might lead to something far worse.

As Maya Angelou wisely counseled in another context, "When people show you who they are, believe them the first time." If we fail to recognize the right's true end game for public education, it could soon be too late to reverse course.

Nancy MacLean is William H. Chafe distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University and author of "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America."

See the article here:

'School choice' developed as a way to protect segregation - Newsday

VIDEO: Congressman Alcee Hastings' career in Palm Beach County

from: May 22, 2019. Hastings was a civil rights lawyer, a groundbreaking political candidate and Palm Beach County's longest serving member of Congress.

Produced by Jennifer Podis / Narrated by Wayne Washington, The Palm Beach Post

The special election to fill the congressional seat left vacant by the late Rep. Alcee Hastings is upon almost a half million voters in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

The first important deadline in this election is Monday, Oct. 4.

Thats the final chance to register to vote or to change parties before the primary, which will be held Tuesday,Nov. 2. If a voter misses that registration deadline, they can still participate in the Jan. 11 general election, as long as they register to vote before Dec. 13.

Since Florida is a closed primary state, voters who belong to a certain political party can choose only the candidates belonging to that party in the primaryon Nov. 2. There are 17 candidates in all 11 Democrats, two Republicans, one Libertarian, one write-in candidate and two candidates with no party affiliation who have qualified.

The congressional district includes swaths of western Palm Beach and Broward counties, as well parts of Miramar, Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, West Palm Beach and Riviera Beach.

Hastings, who had served in the U.S. House since 1993, died of pancreatic cancer in April at the age of 84. Gov. Ron DeSantis set the primary and general special election datesfor November and January, rather than the typical August-November dates, leaving constituents without representation in D.C. for months.

Remembering Hastings: Colleagues, supporters remember Alcee Hastings as civil rights fighter, advocate for poor

Hastings' seat: With Alcee Hastings' House seat empty, Democrats have one less vote

Voters in this district 70% of whom reside in Broward County are heavily Democratic. Of the nearly 460,000 active District 20 voters as of Sept. 1, 282,808 were Democrats, 58,368 were Republicans and 112,433 voters did not have any party affiliation.

Early voting in Palm Beach County runs from Oct. 23 through Oct. 31. Polls open at 10 a.m. and close at 7 p.m. There are five early voting sites in Palm Beach County, where any eligible voter can cast a ballot in person.

Those sites are:

Voters can also cast a ballot in person on primary election day, Nov. 2, between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. On that day, a voter must cast a ballot at their assigned precinct.

The deadline to request a mail ballot for the primary is Oct. 23 at 5 p.m. A request can be made after this date through election day, but must be picked up in person.

Elections officials have already begun to send ballots by mail. It was not immediately clear how many ballots the Palm Beach County elections office had sent. More than 65,000 ballots had been mailed in Broward County, according to its elections office website.

'We will no longer tolerate disinterest': Frustrated with Democratic Party, Black Palm Beach County residents form independent political caucus

Lawmakers this year put restrictions on the times and places a voter can drop off their mail ballot. In recent elections, voters in Palm Beach County were able to place their mail ballots in drop boxes that were open 24 hours a day and constantly surveilled.

Now, voters may only drop off their ballots at early voting sites during voting hours, or during specific times at one of the four Supervisor of Elections offices in West Palm Beach, Belle Glade, Palm Beach Gardens and Delray Beach.

At the main office on Military Trail in West Palm Beach,drop boxes can accept ballots from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on the weekend days during the early voting period. On weekdays during early voting, and on Nov. 1, the hours are 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.

The mail ballot drop boxes will be closed on Saturdays and Sundays at the Supervisor of Elections offices in Belle Glade, Delray Beach and Palm Beach Gardens. Voters can drop off their ballots at these offices between Oct. 25 and Oct. 29 or on Nov. 1 between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Voters can drop off their mail ballot at any of the four offices on Nov. 2 between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.

For more information, visit votepalmbeach.gov or call 561-656-6200.

hmorse@pbpost.com

@mannahhorse

Go here to read the rest:

What voters should know about the special election to fill Alcee Hastings' House seat - Palm Beach Post

A supporter of former President Donald Trump holds up a painting of him outside of the Maricopa County Recorder's Office on Nov. 6, 2020. AP Photo/Dario Lopez-MIlls

In 2020, Stephen Richer defeated incumbent Adrian Fontes by just over 4,000 votes.

He promised to make the office of Maricopa County Recorder "boring" again.

His office maintains the county's list of 2.6 million registered voters.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Stephen Richer ran on a pledge to make things boring again. And he thought he ran for the best position to do that: as head of the Maricopa County Recorder's Office, best known for processing documents, like deeds to a property, in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area.

But the Arizona Republican - a 30-something attorney who worked at conservative and libertarian think tanks - inherited a responsibility that has made the position of Recorder far more interesting than he would have liked: maintaining the county's list of registered voters. That has put him and his staff right at the center of allegations over the 2020 election.

"This position has given me a front-row seat to many disturbing sides of humanity, really disturbing sides," Richer said on a press call Wednesday. "Our latent herd mentality; our willingness to lie for personal gain; our predilection for violent rhetoric or even physical violence; and our extreme aggression toward contradicting facts and people. It's been eye-opening."

Earlier this month, Richer and a fellow Republican with a normally boring job, Eddie Cook of the Maricopa County Assessor's Office, issued a joint statement rebutting claims from a right-wing activist that "ghost votes" had been cast from vacant lots in the November 2020 election. Meanwhile, for the past several months Cyber Ninjas, a private firm with no experience auditing elections, has been purporting to do just that, searching Maricopa County's 2.1 million ballots for evidence of massive fraud that would discredit President Joe Biden's victory there.

Led by a conspiracy theorist who has made clear that they believe the election was stolen, Cyber Ninjas has accused Maricopa County Republicans of trying to cover up the alleged crime - saying, for example, that they had destroyed key election data, a claim amplified by former President Donald Trump that the company's amateur sleuths later retracted, admitting the information in question had been found on one of their own hard drives.

Story continues

The particulars aside, the broader, sprawling conspiracy makes no sense, Richer said. In Maricopa County itself, he noted, "Republicans won the majority of down-ticket races, including mine, in which I unseated the incumbent Democrat chief county elections official - yes, in a race that was supposedly rigged for Democrats."

But we now live in an age of "declining respect for professionals in the public space," Richer said. The knowledge that enables one to counter accusations of voter fraud is itself suspect. It's not enough for local election officials to hand count some 47,000 votes and finding "zero variances," as happened in Maricopa County last year - to be trusted, one has to have already concluded that fraud was there, as the founder of Cyber Ninjas did before being awarded a $150,000 contract from Arizona's Republican-led Senate, supplemented by another $5.7 million in private donations.

We live in an age, Richer argued, where authority is based on the number of followers on Twitter and views on YouTube, at the cost of faith in institutions and the reliability of election results. It's a lucrative hustle for a few, but "it also has a real human cost," he said. "I can't tell you the number of people on my staff who have been targeted, who have been denigrated, [and] who have been harassed."

In the field of politics, and now with vaccines and COVID-19, too many trust the demagogue and grifter - the likes of Cyber Ninjas and their "horror show" of an audit, Richer said - over the boring and competent.

"Oddly, we still know the importance of professionals in our personal lives," he said. "We still send our cars to the mechanic, our taxes to the accountant, and our teeth to the dentist ... And yet, in the public arena, many now seem to favor the loudmouth astrologists over actual experts and professionals."

After weeks of delay, Cyber Ninjas is believed to be on the verge of releasing a report on its findings. In the meantime, legislators from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, inspired by the example and eager to please a base that still supports the losing candidate, are engaging in their own efforts to relitigate the results of 2020.

It's a trend, Richer said, of undermining faith in elections and experts "will soon cause irrevocable damage - if it hasn't already."

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com

Read the original article on Business Insider

Read more from the original source:

Arizona Republican says false claims of voter fraud have led to violent threats and a 'front row seat to many disturbing sides of humanity' - Yahoo...

Last week, the California legislature unanimously passed a bill making it illegal to nonconsensually remove a condom during sex, an act known slangily as stealthing. If the bill is signed into law, which Governor Gavin Newsom has until October 10th to do, the state will become the first in the U.S. to explicitly acknowledge stealthing as an illegal violation of consent. (Several countries, including Germany, Switzerland, and the U.K., have prosecuted the act as a form of sexual assault.) The bill, which was introduced by the assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, would amend the states civil code and allow victims to sue perpetrators for damages. This is the second time that Garcia has written legislation on the issue. Her previous bill, introduced four years earlier, proposed making the act a criminal violation but did not pass the legislature.

Garcia has credited her interest in addressing nonconsensual condom removal to a 2017 article written by the attorney Alexandra Brodsky, who was a third-year student at Yale Law School at the time. Brodskys paper, Rape-Adjacent: Imagining Legal Responses to Nonconsensual Condom Removal, uses a combination of first-person interviews and legal analysis to make a case for stealthing as a transgression on par with other forms of sexual assault. It was published in the Columbia Journal of Gender & Law in the same year that Garcia introduced her first anti-stealthing bill. Uncommonly for a law-review article, it went modestly viral. It will never stop surprising me that I wrote a term paper in law school, a bunch of people read it, and now theres maybe going to be an actual law??? Brodsky tweeted last week.

I recently spoke to Brodsky, who is now a civil-rights attorney with the nonprofit Public Justice. Soon after graduating from college, she co-founded Know Your IX, an organization helping students navigate Title IX protections, and she is now the author of the recent book Sexual Justice, which turns an activist-cum-lawyers lens on ways that colleges, workplaces, and other institutions can fairly and humanely handle allegations of sexual misconduct. (An excerpt was published in The New Yorker last month.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Californias groundbreaking bill, the implications of whether sexual misconduct is a civil or criminal violation, and the surprising range of opponents to anti-stealthing laws.

How did you come to the idea of exploring nonconsensual condom removal as a legal topic?

Before and during law school, I spent a lot of time working with college students and young alumni who were concerned about sexual violence. I met a lot of survivors, and I was exposed to stories about a lot of different kinds of sexual harm. Sexual violence takes many formsvery little of it looks like the clich of rapists jumping out of the bushesand, especially among young people, sexual violence often happens in the context of otherwise consensual sex. When I started law school, I had this question in my head of whether nonconsensual condom removal is cognizable under any of the laws that we have today that address sexual assault, and in my final semester of law school I decided to dig into the question in a more meaningful way.

The bulk of the paper is legal analysis, which I think is probably not interesting to anyone other than lawyers. But I also talked to people who had experienced [stealthing], and heard them describe the injuries that it had caused. Even among people who agree that sexual violence is badwhich I would like to think is most people, though certainly not allwe sometimes have thin understandings of how sexual violence hurts people. The survivors of this harm talked to me about a range of feelings: how it made them feel powerless, how it made them feel as though their partners just had no concern at all for their autonomy. It was also interesting to me that a lot of the people I talked to were deeply hurt by the experience but didnt know if they were right to feel that way. They didnt know if what they felt as bad was really bad. In my experience, part of the value of naming these things is to affirm for survivors that they have the right not to be treated this way.

Theres a strong feminist tradition of making harms legible by giving them nameslike sexual harassment.

Yes, thats exactly right. It will never stop being bizarre to me that people have read this paper who are not directly related to me, or who are [not] my academic adviser. Usually legal scholarship does not gain a broad audience. But, if I have any explanation for it, its the fact that it was one of the first times that this phenomenon had been given a name in a public forum.

There was a pretty forceful critique of your paper, shortly after it came out, from the writer and activist Judith Levine. She argued that criminalizing nonconsensual condom removal, or making it a civil violation, would be a grievous overreachshe used the phrase the privatization of sexual safety.

I read Levines critique to be a civil-libertarian critiquein effect, that basically any turn to the law to address sexual violence will inevitably serve illiberal ends. In many ways, I understand the root of this critique, but the answer just cannot be that victims of sexual violence are allowed no legal remedy whatsoever. Im a lawyer, so I obviously think that the law is useful sometimes, but I am much more interested in a careful balancing of the benefits and risks of law, and coming to sensible solutions, than I am in just throwing up my hands and giving up on the possibility of legal recourse for victims just because its hard.

Its interesting to me how often civil libertarians seem particularly eager to decry any kind of legal regime specifically when it comes to sexual harms. I fear this sometimes reflects an expectation that victims of this particular kind of harm, who are disproportionately going to be women, must suck it up for the greater good in ways that we dont expect of people who experience other kinds of harm.

In your paper, you ultimately conclude that this violation demands not criminalization but a civil remedywhich is what California is pursuing now. Cristina Garcia, the assemblywoman behind the bill, put forward a similar bill in 2017 aiming to criminalize the act, but it didnt pass. Do you think that shift from criminal to civil violation made the difference?

I havent been involved in the behind-the-scenes of this bill at all. I do think that, for good reasons, many people are worried about expanding the reach of criminal law in any way, even for the kinds of harm that we would all agree are bad. This goes back to my partial sympathy for a civil-libertarian critique. Whenever were making something illegal, we have to figure out what the costs are of making it illegal. There could be many good reasons why people would feel more comfortable with a civil bill than a criminal bill. I favor a civil remedy because I think its far more useful for survivors. Im not speaking for my employer here, but in my day job Im a civil-rights lawyer. Many of my clients are victims of sexual harassment, and the criminal law has almost universally been utterly useless to them. A civil remedy has the benefit of keeping decision-making in the survivors hand. In a criminal prosecution, the victims rely on police and prosecutors to decide whether a case moves forward, which can be a profoundly disempowering experience, coming on the heels of the initial violation, which was itself a supremely disempowering experience. In contrast, in a civil violation, the victim makes the decision about whether to file the lawsuit. Theres a real feminist tradition of innovative civil remedies. The Violence Against Women Act originally had a civil remedy, though it was eventually shut down by the Supreme Court. Im hopeful that this California bill will be an invitation to return to that tradition.

Continued here:

The Meaning of Californias Anti-Stealthing Bill - The New Yorker