From gerrymandering to voter roll purges, we showed people around the world how the American system works. It didn’t go well.
Watch this video!
Here are some highlights from the video:
On Gerrymandering:
Ott (Estonia): “Well, now when you tell me what gerrymandering is then this sounds like cheating.”
Linda (UK): “That’s illegal. I’m sorry, firstly, gerrymandering needs to be illegal.”
Dan (Australia): ”In Australia, redistricting is done by an independent commission, not done by the politicians who won those districts, so it is a lot fairer.”
On Voter Registration
Ott (Estonia): “What is voter registration? I mean, I know what it is, but I understand, why do you have this kind of thing?
Olga (Germany): ”In Germany, you don’t need to register yourself for the vote.”
Ott (Estonia): “In Estonia, voter registration is automatic.”
Hridaya (India): “I actually had somebody who is an election officer come over to my house and help me out with my process of voter registration, and mind you, this is in a country of 1.3 billion people.”
On Voter Purging
Linda (UK): ”Come on. No one thinks of a word ‘purge’ and thinks of anything positive. We have seen the ‘Purge’ films.”
Clara (Italy): “Georgia likely removed nearly 200,000 from voter rolls wrongfully? How?”
Olga (Germany): ”I can’t imagine for this to happen in Germany.”
Nikita (New Zealand): “Nope, you don’t get to vote. Nope, you don’t get to vote either. Nope.”
On Making Voting Inconvenient
Ott (Estonia): “To me, it sounds like 19th century to be honest.”
Olga (Germany): “What I really appreciate about Germany is it’s so easy for you to go and vote. It’s on a Sunday. It’s on a free day.”
Hridaya (India): “In India, it’s actually illegal to keep your employees from voting.”
Dan (Australia): “So in Australia, we have this thing called a ‘democracy sausage.’ You take a selfie with your democracy sausage. You haven’t voted in Australia unless you’ve gotten your democracy sausage.”
Ott (Estonia): “In the last Estonian parliamentary elections, I think I cast my vote during breakfast. I have this identity card. I insert it into a computer reader, pick my candidate, and cast my vote.”
Jezza (New Zealand): “It took me two minutes.”
Ott (Estonia): “Approximately a minute.”
Linda (UK): “Five minutes.”
Hridaya (India): “Five to seven minutes.”
Olga (Germany): “Five to 10.”
Dan (Australia) “Ten minutes.”
Linda (UK): “Wait, wait, wait, it took him the amount of time it will take for me to fly from the U.K., from London to New York.”
Hridaya (India): “This feels like the opposite of easy to vote.”
Ott (Estonia): “This is not acceptable. It’s just not acceptable in a democratic country, I think.”
Linda (UK): “I’ll say 80 percent, just because they’ve haven’t been doing too well recently with everything else.”
Linda (UK): “64 percent.”
Nikita (New Zealand): “Yeah, that’s not good.”
Sibs (South Africa): “That’s almost half of the Americans have no voice.”
Hridaya (India): “It’s like you want to stop people from voting.”
Sibs (South Africa): “Why is that so?”
American democracy is broken.
Republicans in particular seem to want to make it hard for many Americans to vote.
Unfortunately, the conservative justices appointed by Republicans frequently uphold these kinds of voter suppression tactics.
We have to fix our democracy.
Voting Blue right now is the best chance we have to do so.
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Posted 11.02.20; updated 06.29.21
Time to reblog this. I’m so tired of some right-wing conservatives denying voter suppression exists in the US.
