But please, please, please, if you are eligible to vote in the U.S., make sure you’re registered this year.
Midterms matter.
Elections that can tip the balance of state legislatures are happening in MANY states, and it will take substantial voter turnout by progressives and democrats to win those elections (thanks to districts redrawn to benefit conservatives in power BY those conservatives in power). State legislatures make state laws, like the ones regarding abortion that are taking aim at the Supreme Court this summer.
Research who’s running.
Not familiar with the candidates? Check with a newspaper or two in your state. There are good, local journalists who often provide write-ups on the list of candidates as election season approaches.
Then, most importantly, vote. Make your voice heard. Or someone else will decide your future for you.
This is our Quarter Final voting round which will run from March 12th to April 10th.
The survey is completely annoymous, however if you need to take a pause while voting, you have the option to “save” your place. Doing so will allow you to come back and finish voting (while still remianing annoymous).
Once you’ve voted, you can not go back and edit your vote. Please limit yourself to voting only once.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please let us know!
SUMMER INTERNSHIP The Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs Association (APAPA) is a national non-profit, non-partisan and grassroots organization founded in 2001. APAPA was established with the primary mission of empowering Asian and Pacific Islander (API) Americans in civic and public affairs through education, active participation, and leadership development. APAPA developed voter registration events, internships, scholarships, voter education forums, leadership, and networking programs designed specifically for the education, betterment, and advancement of the API community. The APAPA-Southern California Region (APAPA-SCR) was established eight years ago to serve the SoCal community. The SCR currently has five chapters (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Gabriel, Youth, and Orange County). APAPA-SCR along with the Los Angeles Chapter, San Gabriel Chapter, and Orange County Chapter are awarding a number of leadership and summer internship positions for current Asian and Pacific Islander college and graduate school students. The purpose of the internship is to help students better understand California state and local government and to develop future leaders in the API community. Each intern must spend a minimum of 50 hours in the assigned office between July 6 – August 14, 2015, working for a local/state legislator, congress member, or constitutional officer in Southern California. Upon completion of the internship, each intern will be awarded a $500 scholarship. There is also a week-long, all-expense-paid study-tour to Northern California to work and play together national and international student leaders from many other partner organizations. We would like to invite your students to apply for this comprehensive leadership program. With our positive experience working with your students in the past, we are going to give favorable considerations for your student leaders. We appreciate your help dispersing the application information. The internship application form can be found at APAPA website: http://apapa.org/scc/tp-apapa-scc.aspx or download directly from: http://apapa.org/scc/pdf/APAPA-SCR_internship_appl_2015.pdf
the fact that biden cant landslide an impeached president responsible for a massive lethal disease outbreak shows how fucking pathetic he really is
Biden has over 70 million votes, which is the most of any Presidential candidate in history. He’s leading Trump by 4 million votes.
He came very close to flipping Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina.
The take is that 1) the electoral college is fucked up and 2) white supremacy and hate are extremely strong motivators for this country’s right wing, not “Biden is pathetic,” you fucking dimwit
Also this was in the face of massive voter suppression
And there’s a certain percentage of the voting population who are just … kind of terrible people?
The ones who like Trump because he hurts people they think he should be hurting. The ones who want to overturn things like marriage equality. They were never going to vote for Biden - or any Democratic candidate.
I saw this thread earlier from Ursula Vernon that helps put a lot of this in perspective: (ID and transcription below)
[ID: a series of tweets by twitter handle @ursulav, username Kingfisher & Wombat, who has a cute little hand-drawn wombat as their user ID pic.
“Basically, though, it seems like people expected a landslide denunciation of authoritarianism. And I feel like that was never actually on the table? Of course it would have been nice! Sure! No question! But that’s never how it seems to work?”
“I’m not enough of a historian to have any go-to but Hitler, sorry, but I seem to remember that he was quite popular and then he lost the war and a few years later nobody in Germany had ever been a Nazi and that was all other people in some other town.”
“We all wanted the big repudiation without the war. I get it! But I think we did something more impressive, in its way. We saw it coming before we got that far.“
“More Americans than have ever voted in the history of America saw down the road and went “Oh HELL no!” Before we had to have the big collapse where suddenly nobody had ever supported the despot, ha ha, no, not us, that was some other town, nobody here.”
“So yeah, it would have been more emotionally satisfying if all the Trump supporters had a Come to Jesus moment and threw down their MAGA has. But you only get that if the despot runs unchecked long enough to destroy…well, everything.”
“If there’s a really unsafe road and you block it off, a lot of people aren’t going to be grateful. They’re going to yell that it’s safe and anyway, they’re a good driver. Somebody has to die on the road—maybe multiple people—before they’ll admit it’s dangerous. Some never will.”
“But the sooner you close the road, the more lives you save. And that’s worth it.”
End ID.]
I know things are still unsure, right now, but I think this is worth taking heart from.
I’m aware that this really has nothing to do with F2D or Indonesia. It does however have to do with personal responsibility as an American citizen. Plus. I may or may not have a major girl crush on Lena Dunham. I sent in my absentee ballot over a month ago. That’s right, I’m in Indonesia. No excuses. VOTE.
In November 1962, JFK recorded a psa to encourage American citizens to vote, where he said: “Tuesday is Election Day. I hope every American will vote- will vote for his candidate & party of choice- but vote.”
“You’re under attack!” “They’re coming for your family!”
Take a look at how fear has been used as a tool to inspire both action and inaction through “The Rhetoric of Fear”on VCU Libraries Image Portal.
[Image Description: Anti-woman suffrage handbill warns that Socialists will gain power while New York rural voters will lose if woman vote. “SOCIALIST INCREASE 220%” is highlighted in bright red.]
Day 25 of Black History Month and I’m honoring the incredible Stacey Abrams. She is an American politician, lawyer, voting rights activist, and author who served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017, serving as minority leader from 2011 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Abrams founded Fair Fight Action, an organization to address voter suppression, in 2018. Her efforts have been widely credited with boosting voter turnout in Georgia, including in the 2020 presidential election, where Joe Biden won the state, and in Georgia’s 2020–21 U.S. Senate election and special election, which gave Democrats control over the Senate. In 2021, Abrams was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in the 2020 election
New from Liveright and the author of Rat F**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count,Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy, by David Daley.
Friendly reminder that they are trying to make abortion illegal because they want you to get pregnant at 16. They want you to be a parent at 16. They want more children to be born of underprivileged, marginalized groups. Children who will grow up to receive poor education, who will then not be able to go to college and crawl over the poverty line. They want kids who’ll grow up and end in prison (free labor) or take the worst paid jobs (anything no matter the condition is better than starving right?) in order to just put something on the table. People that can be kept ignorant, that will resent whatever those in power will tell them to resent, be it the immigrant, the disabled, the queer etc.
They will not only make it harder if not impossible to have an abortion. They will also ban schools from teaching sex ed (not that they are doing a good job right now) unless it is sex ed based on abstinence.
And if you think this is only America, think again. There are places here in Italy where you can’t get an abortion because doctors can “object” and refuse to carry out abortions in public hospitals. There’s a region in Italy where there is no OB in the public system who will perform an abortion. You have to go to a different region or pay privately.
Think about Poland.
A right isn’t something you automatically get to keep forever just because of a court ruling or a law. Laws can be changed, precedents overturned. We have all grown complacent, we all stopped fighting. We all in some small part opposed some right be extended to a different subcategory of people because we thought, due perhaps to inherent bias, that it eroded ours.
We are complicit every time we do not exercise our right to vote because “all the candidates suck”. It’s an excuse, and boy are we so full of excuses.
What happened in Poland, what’s possibly going to happen in the USA, what’s been subtly, insidiously happening in Italy for decades can happen in your country too.
