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Just like the rest of you I react to the news of the day or lately the scandal of the day. Now I am reading that Governor DeSantis is trying to restrict mail-in voting. Now why would he want to do that? There are a lot of old people in the State of Florida and I am one of them. Why would he want to make it harder for older people to vote? Over two dozen states have introduced legislation to suppress voting. Now in the 2020 election here was no evidence of voter fraud that would have changed the election. Everything worked. I would think that that we should be encouraging voting. Our Country was founded on representative government. Men died so we could have representative government. Did we forget the phrase "No Taxation Without Representation”? Are we going to tax people while denying them representative government? 

Now the very first election I voted in was in 1980 even though I had been eligible to vote in earlier elections. The big race was of course Carter against Reagan and of course the Iran hostage crisis was in full bloom. I voted for Reagan. I felt the country needed new direction and I liked his Vice President nominee. There was another big election going on for the City of Kenosha. That was the mayoral election of Saftig against Billoti. Now my wife at the time and I had never voted before. In fact we were not even registered to vote. Now an hour before the polls closed I said let’s go vote. We grabbed an electric bill to show proof of residency and walked to the to the polls which was two blocks away, registered right there and voted. It was very simple. Now both of us voted for Billoti and do you know what? Billoti won by one vote. From that day on no one could never tell me my one vote never counted. I have voted in every election I could ever since. 

Ever since that first election I have told that story and encouraged everyone I know to vote. Voter suppression to me is this country’s worst nightmare. Passing the voter ID law to me is just a way to suppress votes. If you don’t have a driver license then you must have a voter ID card. Then you put the voter ID card place that is not a convenient location like the court house. You put is out in the county to make it hard for people to get to. That folks is voter suppression. In today’s digital age we should be making it easier to vote not harder. We should be shooting for one hundred percent participation. We should be voting by computers, mail, in person. Whatever it takes to get everyone involved in the electoral process. Make voting day a national holiday. Voter suppression is just minority rule. Gerrymandering is just minority rule. Wisconsin has made gerrymandering an art form. What is it really? Voter suppression.

We need Congress to step up to the plate and protect our voting rights. We also need to have the courts step-up and protect our voting rights. Now the Supreme Court has ruled that it has no power to protect voters form gerrymandering and that can create minority rule in states. Did the Supreme Court forget we were founded on representative government? To me what this does is lets the states have its own version of Apartheid. Minority rule. 

We are not a free nation if only some of us are free.

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