Yesterday I wrote about a call I received from a local Texas activist that discovered there may have been a problem with the Texas voter registration site. It occurred on the last weekend of voter registration so it was very suspicious to many included yours truly.
I wrote a blog about the problem and placed it on my Facebook as well as on the Facebook pages of Coffee Party USA, Rachel Maddow, many Democratic sites, and in many other places. The post took off. Another activist in Northeast Texas saw the post and queried a friend that was her county’s Republican voter registrar. She placed us in contact with each other and he stated that the outage was a scheduled outage. I detailed that in the previously mentioned blog post.
What I found encouraging is the speed with which an awareness was built for this potential problem on a Sunday afternoon. In a society where a party is attempting to suppress our vote or attempting to have us disengage from politics, it was great to see the action that occurred yesterday.
What made my day however was an email I received from a Texas resident who came across the blog post via her social media. Susan wrote,
Thank you for your article about the “nonfunctioning” feature on the SOS site. I want to pass along to you that the same thing happened to me last year when I tried to check on my registration. This leaves no doubt, as far as I’m concerned, that this is a deliberate tactic to a avoid the VRA, and should be investigated.
Most importantly she decided to engage. She refuses to allow Texas from keeping us all with a feeling of impotence. She subsequently wrote,
I am getting a late start, but have just begun a blog, Vote2016Texas, related to voting in Texas, and hope you wouldn’t mind giving me your input. The public must be educated about these dirty tricks. I am also a title researcher/abstractor and would like to help those who need to find or get their birth certificates, etc. For this I would need some funding, and would appreciate any tips you might have as to going about raising funds. I was laid off when oil crashed, or I would be doing my best to fund this myself.
Thank you for all you do; by the way, I Iive about 90 miles north [of my location]… and feel the need to be circumspect in this atmosphere.
Texas needs the thousands of Susans out there to self-activate. Even though Susan has to be cautious in her approach because of the very conservative area she is surrounded by, she understands that every action however large or small is one step closer to liberation.
A couple of weeks ago I made a trip as part of the NAACP America’s Journey for Justice, that covered over 1000 miles. We cornered Reverend Barber, an advocate for voting rights, the poor, and the middle-class and he had some prescient words we must heed.
We need to support each other to bring our corrupt Texas government to account for its bad deeds. We need to support each other to ensure we get national middle-class centric policies to make life better for us all. We cannot do it alone. But working together we can.
Are you an activist? Today’s politics demand that we all become activists now.