HOW DO WE PROTECT DEMOCRACY DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC?

How do we protect our democratic rights during COVID-19 crisis?

Let’s not create a precedent for Trump to cancel the November election. Rather than argue about canceling primaries and elections, let’s talk about how we can vote without dying:

• 1. Push for mail-in balloting in all states. Some (Washington, Colorado) require it (with exceptions). 40 million were expected to vote by mail — let’s make it 90 million.
• 2. A church I visited substituted Souls-to-the-Post in place of Souls-to-the-Polls. They had a church “ballot fill-in” picnic. (These meets may have to be “virtual.”)
• 3. Check your registration NOW so you don’t have to be one of the three MILLION voters who must go in to fill out a bogus provisional ballot.
• 4. Extend early voting hours and locations. I find that early voting stations are virtually empty (except for Souls-to-Polls Sunday). You saw all those lines of fools waiting hours to vote in California. Two days before, I stood in the giant UCLA voting station for an hour and exactly three students came in to vote.
• 5. When you fill in that absurd absentee ballot and envelope — have someone else check it over to make sure you filled in the envelope carefully, signed it in TWO places (most states), with your registration signature, and ONLY using the official envelope.

Decades ago, the right-wing said, “Better dead than Red.” Today: “Better postal than Orange.”

Palast, a Puffin Foundation fellow in investigative reporting, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight. Palast, a Puffin Foundation fellow in investigative reporting, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. He is known for his reports in the Guardian, Rolling Stone and on BBC television.

“Greg Palast is one of those inconveniently stubborn journalists who gets his teeth into a story and shakes it bloody right there in the middle of the parlor, dreadfully inconveniencing the pampered swells of the elite political press, and revolting the serious thinkers who get to go on PBS and moan about the genuine crisis of American political civility. Palast has been on the voter-caging story ever since people like Pastor Whiting got screwed 14 years ago. Palast [has] dropped a bomb into the elections that has left credibility shrapnel all over the democratic process, if anyone cares to look for it.” - Charles Pierce, Esquire

GREG PALAST is America’s wittiest (and wickedest) muckraker. An award-winning Guardian investigative journalist, he is causing crooked election officials all over the country to shiver in their shoes as they wait for a knock on their door from the FBI – thanks to his explosive book and feature film (“The Best Democracy Money Can Buy”), which identifies these campaign cockroaches by name and exposes their illicit tampering with the 2016 election.