Anyone who is legally eligible to cast a ballot in an election should be allowed to do so in whatever way is most convenient for them. If that's in-person on election day, great; by mail, great; in-person in the weeks leading up to an election, great.

That is the only acceptable way for a democratic republic to function. Voting should be easy and it should be encouraged. There should be:

- Automatic voter registration.
- No excuses needed to vote absentee.

This is not controversial.
It's telling how people defend more restrictive voting methods. Look at this ridiculous quote from Pete Hegseth about how everyone being able to easily cast a ballot somehow stripping people of the "recourse" of the ballot box.
https://t.co/4AcTPT2HfD
They know there's not widespread fraud. It's not about "fraud." It never was.

They just want to put as many obstacles in the way as humanly possible, to make it more difficult for people to vote.
"We could've voted in person. I can go to Walmart. I can go to a store, I can go to a restaurant, I can go to sports games in some places. You tell me we couldn't have voted? I just don't buy it."

No one stopped you from voting in person, Pete!
If you're a minimum wage worker who doesn't get paid time off, who lives in an area where the number of polling places is limited and always has hours of lines... you're going to be less likely to vote *on* election day.
Only Republicans could look at record turnout and treat it like a problem that needs to be solved.
Efforts to limit early voting, to make it harder to cast votes by mail, to make it easier to reject ballots on technicalities like whether or not it was sent inside a special envelope... those are efforts to disenfranchise people.
Because all of those things are designed to affect the ability of people who work hourly jobs with little flexibility and an inability to take hours off in the middle of the day and live in densely-populated areas to cast votes. It's no coincidence that those are people who
tend to vote for Democrats. It's an attack on people of color. It's an attack on democracy. It's unacceptable.

And it's time the press started treating it as such.
Look at how often mainstream media outlets adopt the conservative framing on these election restrictions: "election security measures," "anti-voter fraud initiatives," etc.

Shameful. It's not a matter of "this side says it's about security, this other side says suppression"
"Both sides" coverage is how we got to this place. A fascist mob tried to overturn the election results. Mainstream media played a role in it.
How often are the people trying to add various "election integrity" measures asked what the ratio of instances of fraud their bills will prevent to the number of disenfranchised voters is? Never?
A lot of the DC media acting shocked and appalled with what happened yesterday are the same outlets that have led us to this point.

And had they, personally, not felt threatened, could they have even mustered up what outrage they did have?
Yesterday needs to be a major wake-up call. This is what endless "in this Trump town, they never stopped saying 'Merry Christmas'" profiles and "Meet the dapper Nazi" pieces have created.
Do better. And that means more than just a single day of acting outraged. That means reevaluating what the role of the press is in a functioning society, and rethinking journalism. It can't be entertainment anymore. It just can't.
The people who make decisions at CNN, NYT, WaPo, CBS, ABC, the AP, NPR, Reuters, USA Today, NBC, etc., won't see this thread. Or if they do, it won't sink in.

I can hope, though.
(I use "in this Trump town, they never stopped saying merry christmas" as an example because, I kid you not, it's something the Washington Post actually published... as if the rest of the country had stopped recognizing Christmas https://t.co/DaO6vPXR5A )

More from Parker Molloy

If you're curious what Trump's defense will look like, all you have to do is turn on Fox News. My latest at @mmfa

The tl;dr is that for years right-wing media have been excusing Trump's violent rhetoric by going, "Yes, but THE DEMOCRATS..." and then bending themselves into knots to pretend that Dems were calling for violence when they very, very clearly weren't.

And in fact, this predates Trump.

In 2008, Obama was talking about not backing down in the face of an ugly campaign. He said "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

https://t.co/i5YaQJsKop


That quote was from the movie The Untouchables. And there's no way anybody reading that quote in good faith could conclude that he was talking about actual guns and knives. But it became a big talking point on the

In 2018, Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder was speaking to a group of Georgia Democrats about GOP voter suppression. He riffed on Michelle Obama's "When they go low, we go high" line from the 2016 DNC.
This is trash, @AP. Utter garbage. Shame on the “journalists” who wrote this (really? You needed 2 people to report out this garbage?) Also, you don’t even make clear that this lady is wrong. You treat it as a legitimate position. What the fuck is wrong with you?


Look at this. This treats both views as legitimate. Fucking garbage.


Have you learned nothing?! This is such bullshit. Why the fuck do I even bother trying to push back on bad journalism? No one in positions of power ever listen.

I used to think that bad journalism was mostly the result of honest mistakes, but the past few years have really hammered home for me how much it is intentional trash. Shame on @AP for that bullshit. Shame on @ABC for letting Rand Paul rant about his election conspiracy theories.

Seriously, @AP @ClaireGalofaro @JulietLinderman? You didn’t even bother to note that this lady’s delusions are false.
There are a number of reasons bills like these are wrongheaded. One is that it tries to implement the same kind of one-size-fits-all solution that opponents of trans inclusion claim to oppose.

But let’s get nuanced for a minute...


Do trans women and girls have an advantage in sports over other women and girls?

I’m here to provide a very unsatisfying answer: It depends.

What sport are we talking about?

How old are people competing in it?

What sort of hormone treatment has the person in question had and for how long?

Those are all factors that play into the fairness question.

Trying to implement broad policies in the name of ensuring fairness can actually have the opposite of the intended effect.

Take the case of Mack Beggs.

A few years back, Beggs was a high school student in Texas. He was a wrestler, and wanted to do it at the college level.

Beggs is a trans man, meaning his birth certificate said female on it. Like many trans guys, he takes testosterone as part of his medical transition.

He wanted to wrestle. Specifically, he wanted a spot on his school’s boys team.

He wasn’t allowed.
This is what pisses me off about the constant bad faith victimhood crap people on the right do:

1. They wildly misrepresent something innocuous (no, Pelosi did not “ban” anything).

2. They come up with a “gotcha” example of hypocrisy... that relies on their misrepresentation.


This same exact nonsense gets trotted out constantly. “Oh, so now we’re not allowed to call ourselves husbands or mothers or uncles or aunts or men or women?! Outrage!” But no one at all is doing that, nor have they ever been doing that.

Yet the right loses its shit over this every few months. A lot of the time it’ll be something like... a lawmaker will introduce a bill that would tweak applications for marriage licenses to say “spouse 1” and “spouse 2” instead of just “husband/wife” because the status quo ...

... will have been creating actual legal issues for gay couples who then have to put something false on legal documents designating one of them as “wife.”

It’ll be something like that, just meant to fix an issue that has no material impact on 99% of people.

And the right, like clockwork, will lose their minds over it as though anyone is trying to “ban” the concept of someone being a husband or a wife or a man or a woman or whatever.

From a few years back, here’s Bill O’Reilly doing that

More from Legal

As usual, @C_Stroop is right that we need to get ready to roll up our sleeves. This doesn't end on inauguration day. Christian Nationalism needs to be in the spotlight it must be exposed to be fought. Small town Christo-fascism is on the rise, and my hometown is an example. 1/


My hometown is Alamogordo, New Mexico. It's a military town. Holloman Air Force base is nearby, and so is the Army's White Sands Missile Range. It's also a hotbed of White Evangelical Christian Nationalism. 2/

Currently, the most notorious Christian Nationalist from Alamogordo that I can think of is Couy Griffin (no relation to me). He's a former pastor, turned County Commissioner, and founder of the group "Cowboys for Trump." I've talked about him before.


Couy Griffin and his Cowboys for Trump attended the the Coup Klux Klan in D.C. I'm not surprised. They went prepared for extremism. Here's a quick video of them outside the kitschy "Running Indian" trading post just outside Alamogordo. 4/


Notice what they say. "Give me liberty or give me death" and "We've god God on our side, and we've got the Truth on our side." Probably every Ex-evangelical I know has heard those words in church. 5/

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