Office of the Texas Secretary of State reads DU

[shanen]

I just got the email below from the representative of the
Secretary of State office for Texas. I'm not interested in
bantering with the evil person. However, I'd be quite willing
to support a lawyer in "bantering" with her. Know
any candidates? I'm going to contact a few possibilities, but
I basically despise lawyers--and the email is just another
despicable data point.

As regards my actual vote. You remember the vote, the thing
the Secretary of State of Texas is supposed to be supporting,
right? To me it doesn't seem to matter right now. For the
primaries Edwards has dropped out, and for the big election in
November, the neo-GOP doesn't have a prayer. I used to have an
actual political representative in Texas, but he was
gerrymandered out of my district, so WTF.

I still hope Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn gets fired, and how.

Latest "thoughts" of Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn:


Ms. Jacobs,

 

The answer that the legal department provided to you was based
on the information you provided to our office.  In particular,
the information you provided specifically indicated that your
PERMANENT address is in Japan.  Our answer is legally correct
based on this key fact. 

 

In the future, if you wish to post information regarding your
communications with our office on any website, we respectfully
suggest that you include all the relevant information.  It is
in the best interest of all voters, as well as our office, to
responsibly circulate complete and accurate information.

 

*********************

 

 

Sad story below... Capsule introduction is that I'm an
American citizen living outside America, and I thought I was
supposed to continue voting. Maybe you can point me at a
lawyer who can do something about it?

I guess I need to start with why. It's because I believe
freedom and democracy are good. As a free American, I believe
that I have both a right and a duty to participate in American
elections, to consider the candidates carefully, and to
vote--but each election it becomes more difficult.

Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn, speaking officially on behalf of the
office of the Secretary of State of Texas, apparently
disagrees with me about voting. She would apparently find it
much more convenient if I stopped bothering her with my
annoying interest in voting. That's funny. I could have sworn
her job was supposed to be encouraging people to vote, not
figuring out new wrinkles to discourage voters and to limit
their voting in any way she can devise. Her admittedly
subjective judgment is that I am no longer a resident of
Texas. Actually, she's making a self-fulfilling prophesy
there. I do not want to live around people who don't love
freedom and democracy, and she just made it much less likely I
will ever live there again. It almost makes me laugh to see
the local "foreigners" as more free and democratic
than supposedly pro-democracy Americans like her.

Do I need to justify my beliefs? Or is it sufficient that I
was born free? Perhaps I was just indoctrinated to believe
that democracy is a good thing and that the citizens should
control the government? Maybe I'm just rationalizing? Can I
prove freedom and democracy are good? I'm willing to try. I've
always favored proof by contradiction, so I'll consider the
negations, and show they are bad:

The negation of freedom is slavery. Slaves are motivated only
by fear of punishment, and they get no benefits from the grand
profits of their masters. It's only natural that slaves
respond by doing as little as possible just to get by, but
that is not enough for a competitive services-based economy in
the modern world. Defining slavery is difficult because there
are many kinds of slaves. There are 'classic' slaves with
chains, indentured servents, women sold into marriage (or
worse), and serfs bound to the land. None of those models is
currently relevant in America, but are you a wage slave? I
think more and more Americans are now trapped in a rat race,
struggling harder and harder to keep up with their debt-loaded
bills, with no refuge or escape and the increasing fear of
being thrown on the streets and dying in utter poverty. Slaves
have no choices at all--and many Americans are running out of
real choices, even meaningful political choices. For example,
you can't risk changing your job if you don't dare to risk
missing a monthly payment. Your spouse can't help by earning
more money if your spouse is already working, too. Many
Americans in the supposedly richest country on earth can only
pray that no one in their family becomes sick...

What about the opposite of democracy? The extreme negation of
democracy is a dictatorship. Dictatorships are fundamentally
bad because dictators are human beings, too, and human beings
make mistakes. The more power a dictator has, the greater the
harms of the dictator's mistakes. Maybe America isn't a
dictatorship--but has the Dick Cheney asked you for your
opinion? Are any of you going to argue the presidency has
become weaker since Dubya seized the White House?

Freedom is about meaningful choice. The truth alone is not
enough to make you free, but it is a prerequisite. You can't
make meaningful choices unless you know the truth about your
options, whether you're buying laundry soap or buying into a
war. In particular, to have meaningful elections, we need to
know the truth about the candidates, whereas all we are
offered is mass media media pablum about the horse races,
increasingly focused on the biggest horse race.

Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn is interested in the electoral horse
race, too. On the one hand, I'd like to sue her for trying to
prevent from voting. I'd be eager to vote for any candidate
who promised to fire her--unless the other candidate was
promising to fire her and her boss, too. But why bother? After
all, the game's rigged.

The largest voting bloc in modern America is not red or blue.
It's the bloc of non-voters, the people who have the right and
duty to vote, but who've figured out that it's a total waste
of their time. Their votes were counted in advance, and the
districts were gerrymandered to make sure the incumbents would
be reelected. (Yeah, that happened to my own district in
Texas.) Sadly, the "right" to be reelected is the
only thing the politicians of every stripe are able to agree
on, and they're increasingly willing to let the rest of their
jobs be handled by the White House.

I'd like to be an optimist and believe that the problems can
be fixed. Voting is supposed to be the proper mechanism to
make change in a democracy of free citizens. However, right
now I feel like I might as well join the 'enlightened'
non-voters. It's obvious that Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn has more
influence on Texas than I do. In the best case, I
theoretically have one vote. How many votes has she quashed?

[Maribelle]

1. Have you read this:

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080121/D8UA8VGG0.html



Good fortune to you and yours!

[shanen]

2. Democrats Abroad

Thanks for the link about voting in the primaries. I looked at it, but it doesn't seem particularly helpful... For one thing, I don't really regard myself as a Democrat per se. It's just that the neo-GOP has so many *TERRIBLE* candidates, and Edwards was the only candidate I really wanted to support.

I'm mostly just pissed that the office of the Secretary of State of Texas has the anti-voting attitude. How can they disenfranchise as many Americans as possible?

[Melissa G]

3. That's easy. Most voters they are trying to disenfranchise are Dems

Heck, most Texans are Dems. They do such a good job disenfranchising us and re re districting us that they stay in control of the Lege and major state offices.

[shanen]

4. Texas Secretary of State office monitors DU

I really doubt that most Texans are Democrats these days. Now if you say Democrats or former Democrats, I think that would be a hefty majority. That would pick up the old Southern Democrats who became Reagan Republicans. I think that was mostly because of LBJ's civil rights legislation, though there was a delay related to some non-racist Republicans and stubborn and mindless conservatism.

Right now what I'm mostly curious about is whether or not the Germans were aggressive about disenfranchising certain so-called citizens in the early 1930s. I'd wager they were, and it was just as legal, not to be confused with right. I'd actually say that Adolf showed more respect for the laws in his early days than the Dick Cheney is showing now.