You’re So Lame Duck

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Gavarone switches residence to Huron to take on Kaptur for 9th Congressional District
Ohio Revised Code 3.15

Proposal to make future amendments more difficult to pass will return next year, sponsor indicates
Ohio Rep. Stewart gives amendment game away on extremist abortion bans and illegal gerrymandering
Ohio education overhaul falls short
Ohio House sends stuffed ‘chicken bill’ to governor’s desk, defining natural gas as ‘green energy’

A closer look at Ohio voting restrictions now at desk of Gov. Mike DeWine
What will DeWine sign? Lawmakers sent the governor more than 30 bills on the final day of session

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[0:02] GOP gerrymandering shenanigans caused an Ohio GOP state senator to lose her seat. And we look at more fun from the lame duck session of the Ohio legislature. You really didn’t want your right to choose to be restored, did you?

[0:19] I’m Doug Berger. And this. If secular left.

[0:24] Music.

[0:35] The Ohio 134th General Assembly concluded its work at 5:45 a.m. on December the 15th. The final day was filled with voting on various legislation that the GOP supermajority needed to pass since any outstanding bills would die when the session was over. Would it surprise you to learn that one of the state senators, a Republican who had run and lost a primary for a congressional seat in the spring, may have held office and voted after forfeiting her office?

[1:09] That I have a story for you. State Senator Teresa Gavron, Republican from Bowling Green, wanted to run against long time Representative Marcy Kaptur, in a new ninth congressional district that had been redrawn during the latest gerrymandering fiasco. Here in Ohio. They had taken the ninth District that had run. It was called the Snake on the Lake, and it had run a thin line from Toledo to Lorain, and they moved shifted it to the West so that it included more rural, Republican areas of northwest Ohio, so that now the district leaned Republican. And one of the reasons was they targeted Kaptur. And they wanted Teresa Gaborone to do it. At least the people in Columbus wanted Teresa Gambaro to do it. She was appointed to the State Senate in 2019 and won election in 2020 and one of the committee, committees that she served on was the redistricting redistricting committee that drew the congressional district that she now wanted to run against.

[2:23] The problem was that Gaborone Senate district and home. Was in the fifth Congressional District. So she moved to Huron, Ohio, which is a city on the shores of Lake Erie, east of Sandusky in Erie County. She already owned a vacation home there, and the Republicans had redrawn the second Ohio Senate District to include Huron. Probably on the assumption that Gaborone would fall back to her state job. That wasn’t up for election until 2024 should she lose the election. The lecture for the congressional seat. She officially moved and changed her voter registration to Erie County in November 2021 as she announced her run for the ninth District seat.

[3:12] The little side note on this is that there is no federal requirement. That a representative or a representative live in the district that they represent. There is in the state and the state. There is a state law in the constitution, the state constitution that a member of the legislature has to live in the district that they represent. And so what the problem was with Gaborone moving in November 2021 is that the new Ohio legislative maps, that were technically adopted in November 2021 were ruled unconstitutional several times, but by the Ohio Supreme Court, due to illegal gerrymandering, the Republican supermajority, gerrymandered the maps to favor Republicans, and the state isn’t.

[4:11] The state is not 60% Republican, 40% Democrat. It’s more 54 to 48. But they gerrymandered the district so that it was like 67 to 40 or however that works out. My math’s bad at that. So the maps were ruled unconstitutional several times. A federal court then imposed the illegal maps for the 2022 elections on May 28 of 2022.

[4:44] The congressional primary was on May the third of 2022.

[4:50] So from at least November 2021 until May 28th, 2022, Gaborone did not live in the Senate district she was elected to serve in until 2024.

[5:05] In order to establish your residency to vote, you have to register at least 30 days before an election. Gaborone did vote in the May 2022 congressional primary in Huron, and that was held on May the third because the congressional district maps were adopted for this election. And then they have to go back to the drawing tables for the next election. So she established her residency in Erie County, according to news reports. This happened in November 2021. According to the Ohio revised Code, Section 3.15 on residency requirements for public officials. In Division A. Except as otherwise provided in Division B of this section. At all times during one’s term of office. One each member of the General Assembly and each elected voting member of the State Board of Education shall be a resident of the district the member represents.

[6:08] Division be any person who fails to meet any of the requirements of Division A of this section that apply to the person shall forfeit the office.

[6:20] So basically the takeaway is if you don’t live in the district you represent at all times during your term of office, you forfeit the office.

[6:33] It’s like people who don’t show up for work three days in a row. They quit. You don’t have to say I quit. You quit by not showing up three days in a row. That’s how this particular higher revised code works is if you do not live in your district, a new establish your residency outside your district, you forfeit your office.

[6:58] Now there is a bit in the in the section that states division A of this section applies to persons who have been either elected or appointed to an elective office. Division A of this section does not apply to a member of the General Assembly or the State Board of Education to a member of a municipal Legislature authority who represents, a ward or to a member of a Board of Education of a city school district who represents a sub district during the remainder of the member’s existing term of office. After there is a change in the member’s district ward or subdistricts boundaries, that leaves the members permanent residents outside the district, ward or subdistrict. And I’m sure there are people saying, Hey, Doug, that covers Teresa Gambaro because they redrew the second District and and her home is now in the second District and her term of office was not up.

[7:56] The thing is that Gaborone moved out of her district before the boundaries changed. Now, I’m sure she did not intend to do that. The new maps didn’t become official until the court imposed them on May the 28th, after she had already voted outside her district. The district maps before May 28th had Huron outside the second Senate District.

[8:24] Gaborone also has two active voter registrations on file, and that doesn’t fit Ohio election laws either. After she lost the congressional primary, she reregistered in Wood County and established residency back in Bowling Green. She then voted in the August 2nd state primary and the November 2022 general election. All this information is publicly available on the Board of Elections website. Ohio Voting laws talk about not allowing a temporary residence for registration that those have to be for your primary residence. Also, if you register in one county, the registration and the other county needs to be canceled. And it looks like that that’s what happened when Gaborone moved, quote unquote, to Huron, but not when she moved back after the May primary. She is currently registered under two different names. So she intentionally didn’t update her registration, but she registered in Wood County using a different name.

[9:29] And here on she was registered under Theresa a Gaborone, which is, her middle name is a starts with an A and in the Wood County re registration that she used to vote in the 2022 elections. She was registered under Theresa charter or charters. Theresa Charter. Gaborone Which is a combination of her married and maiden name.

[9:59] Now, of course, the question then is what name does she have on her photo ID? Teresa Gaborone was a huge proponent and one of the sponsors of legislation to require photo ID when when people vote. And if your photo ID does not match your registration, you were not you are not permitted to vote. So I have the question, what was the name on her photo ID?

[10:28] Because under that law, she championed this past session, she wouldn’t have been allowed to vote in the August primary or the November election if the name on her photo ID was different than the one on the poll book, which is from the registration. And my guess is her driver’s license probably, says Teresa a Gaborone. Because when you register to vote, your name has to match your driver’s license. See, that’s another that’s another thing, another reason why I oppose the photo ID law. Because you already verify your identity when you register to vote. So if her name is different on her license than it is on the poll book, she shouldn’t have been allowed to vote under the law that she championed. And it was passed. And now it’s supposed to be signed by Governor DeWine.

[11:19] Also know that Republicans are always a stickler for election law. Because at least in one case, a court I believe this was the Ohio Supreme Court forced the secretary of state of Ohio, Franklin, Frank LaRose, to put a replacement Democrat on the ballot for this, past election because state deadlines weren’t adjusted, which was caused by their foot dragging over redistricting because they dragged their feet and got illegal, maps adopted so late in the process, that when there was a Democrat that had been had won the primary and withdrawn, and the Democratic Party in that county, and I believe it was Athens County, tried to put a replacement on the ballot and Lareau said no because the deadlines had passed. See, they’re doing a little gamesmanship. I’m sure he would. Well, it was a tie vote in the board of elections. And and he that he always has the tiebreaker. So I’m sure if it had been a Republican needing to be put on the ballot, he would have voted with the Republicans. But as it was, he voted with the Republicans and denied the Democrat. And the court said, no, you can’t do that because you created the situation where the deadlines were passed. So you have to fix it.

[12:42] So if the Republicans are such a stickler for election laws as they claim to be.

[12:49] Then at least I feel Gaborone has forfeited her office when she moved and voted in Huron. And any vote she participated in at the State House after November 2021 are illegal and should be stricken from the record. She would have had to be appointed back to the seat after she moved back to Wood County in May.

[13:13] So be very interesting. I kind of this is probably an exclusive to this podcast, this story, and I’m hoping maybe it gets picked up along the lines. But it’s a very interesting story and it just goes to show you what happens when you try to game the political system. Sometimes it bites in the butt and in this case it did, because if everything had gone according to the way the Republicans had planned it, they would have adopted those maps. They would have been official in November 2021. She would have moved into the new second District in Huron, part the part new part of the second Senate District in Huron. And she’d been fine. But because she moved before the master official, she forfeited her office. And that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

[14:11] For more information about any of the topics covered in this episode, check out our show notes at Secular Left Dot.

[14:18] Music.

[14:24] Period between the election and a new year. A new legislative year is called a lame duck session. And during the lame duck session party that’s in power or the majority that’s in power tries to get as much work done as they can because a lot of states have rules. Ohio included, where legislation that does not get passed by the end of the legislative year as we’re coming up to die. That means that the bills go away. And if they want to pass something that that’s similar to that bill, they have to reenter. They have to introduce it the next year, the next session. And so we have the lame duck session for the Ohio legislature. And I wanted to highlight a few things. There’s been a couple of things that that the supermajority, the Republican supermajority have been trying to get passed, which is kind of funny that they’re not they’re getting some of this stuff passed, but some of it’s not. And I’ll explain it. One of the items that it’s working on is stripping the powers of the Ohio Department of Education.

[15:46] The Ohio Board of Education and moving all of those functions, most of those functions to the governor’s office and.

[15:58] What that would mean is the governor governor would appoint a cabinet person who would be in charge of education and they would make decisions about curriculum, and what what books should be bought and things like that. The State Board of Education, then they would only consider concern themselves with teacher licensure and things like that.

[16:25] And what this what’s happening is the reason why this is happening is because Democrats won several state Board of Education seats in the past election. And since the state Board of Education makes a lot of policy for that, school districts have to follow the Republicans. The bigots on the in the Republican Party wanted to get control of or keep control of the state Board of Education. And so one of those ways that they do that is they strip the powers from the state Board of Education and give it to somebody else. In this case, the governor.

[17:07] Um, it’s a down and dirty trick, obviously. Political trickery, shenanigans, as it were.

[17:16] A second item that the supermajority is trying to do is make it harder for citizens to get ballot initiatives passed in the state ballot. That’s one way that that people in the state of Ohio have to amend the Ohio Constitution, is that they raise a lot of money, hire people to get signatures, or if they have volunteers that are able to do it to get, about probably 400,000 signatures. And there’s certain other requirements that they have to meet on these signatures and then they can put a ballot initiative on for people to vote on.

[18:02] And these ballot initiatives only require 50% plus one, which means a simple majority. So basically it just needs 51% to vote for something. Well, the Republicans wanting to maintain their power, their grip, their supermajority, bigotry, in the state house in Columbus want to change the rules again, as Republicans like to do. They like to change the rules. Is they want to make it harder to put these initiatives or get these initiatives passed. And one of those how they want to do that is they want to raise the threshold for passage to 60%. Which is a lot when you’re considering millions of votes, that’s that’s a lot of votes that it would then require. Now, this particular effort doesn’t seem it’s stalled out right now in the legislature. It could pass at any time, but it’s stalled out right now and it might be reintroduced. But. The proponents are Frank LaRose, the secretary of state for Ohio, and a state senator, Bryan Stewart. And one of the things that they were saying was that it would secure.

[19:28] It would secure the Ohio Constitution from from outside, special interest groups looking to cause havoc and and and put your kids in danger or whatever whatever excuse they come up with. In a letter, a recent letter that the sponsor of this legislation, Brian Stewart, sent to fellow Republicans, he, exactly tells why they want to come up with this amendment to make it harder to get amendments to the Constitution. And that’s to.

[20:05] Head off. The effort to put, a constitutional amendment to protect abortions and to fix the illegal gerrymandering that gave us this bigoted, supermajority of Republicans during the committee debates about this bill, They were claiming that that wasn’t the case, but obviously he was lying, as they usually do. The Republicans are scared because of what happened in Kansas, where they defeated in an attempt to ban abortion and in Michigan, where they passed a constitutional amendment to protect abortion. And so the Republicans are scared because the Republican Party and in Ohio State House in Columbus is made up of religious bigots, Christian, evangelical, Christian nationalists, white supremacists. And most the majority, the super majority. And so they want to try to protect their power. And they also want to take away strip rights away from women. And so they’re scared that people are going to do well because and I’ll tell you, they are there was a coalition of pro-choice groups that announced that they are going to work on getting a, constitutional amendment on the ballot.

[21:31] And they were going to do it for targeting 2023, which is next year. And the reason why they were targeting next year was because even if they get the Republicans get this supermajority, requirement for constitutional amendments on the ballot, it would also need to be voted on and it wouldn’t take effect until 2024 at the earliest, with the legislative session being over now until next year. We did dodge some serious damage because the state education revamp and the constitutional amendment to make it tougher to amend the Constitution. Both of those attempts died at the end of the session. However, there’s still something to keep an eye out on because they could be reintroduced at the beginning of the year and they could be passed very, very quickly.

[22:27] And then the other thing I wanted to talk about that is being under current current consideration. And I think it actually passed. Yeah, it did pass. It’s called the chicken bill. And so they had this this bill, House Bill 507, passed in the House, 59 to 33 without hardly any discussion. When you have a supermajority of bigots. You really don’t have to talk about what you’re going to pass because the decisions already been made. Anyway. House Bill 507. Was a it’s been dubbed the chicken bill because it was originally introduced to reduce the number of poultry chicks that can be sold in lots from 6 to 3. And it was to encourage for participation in areas where there’s more low, low income kids. And so they tacked on amendments for this that had nothing to do with chickens. One amendment that they tacked on was to expedite the process for companies to get fracking leases. In state parks.

[23:46] They changed the the legal language from that department. So Ohio departments may lease state land to that. These departments shall lease state land. So it goes from you may do it to you have to do it. And this is a big issue. Fracking is, it doesn’t lead to energy dependence and in fact it’s dirtier and more prone to to environmental damage than regular drilling. And fracking is where you take particular like liquids or steam and you break open shale rock to get to extract oil and gas. And so it’s not it’s not an energy efficient method of getting oil or gas. So they’re doing that. And the other thing which really cracked me up is it’s going it would this bill is going to redefine natural gas as green energy.

[24:58] And that is just hilarious, just on the face of it. And that’s what these Republicans do, is they redefine stuff. You know, they redefine it to make it out to be something that it’s not. And and so I wanted to read this bit here about redefining natural gas. Into green energy. And this is from the Channel four in Columbus, a news article on their website. And I’ll have the link up in the show notes. It says Another amendment added to the chicken bill redefines natural gas as a form of green energy. Also also newly defined under the bill to include forms of energy that are, quote, more sustainable and reliable relative to some fossil fuels, unquote. When discussing the bill, Kaylor, who’s the, one that tacked on the amendment, shared an example of municipal landfill he lives near that used to have large stovepipes releasing methane gas from compost. He said over the course of a decade, a truck manufacturer built a pipeline to run the methane into its factory to power the plant.

[26:17] If that’s not renewable energy, I don’t know what is. Kaler said. Well, Representative Kyle Kaylor, Republican from Springfield. You’re a moron. Natural gas is a fossil fuel, and the methane from a landfill is not a fossil fuel. It is a bio gas. And bio bio gas and natural gas that we get from oil deposits are not interchangeable. They have different chemical makeups, even though they contain methane. They’re not exactly the same. Now, there is the ability you can substitute methane from landfills, for natural gas and methane natural gas in other applications, but you have to make adjustments to your equipment and your machinery to to run bio gas. And it is a totally separate category. And it’s just funny that these this Republican, Kyle Keller, didn’t realize that or just assumed it was. But again, that’s expected from the Ohio legislature, where they make decisions about health care, health care, women’s health care without actually talking to medical doctors.

[27:40] They decide that the pandemic is no big deal and that business is more important when people are dying without actually talking to medical experts and that they they they undermine experts and fields because they have a political ax to grind, or a religious ax to grind, and they make decisions based on their religions. So it’s not a surprise that Kyle Keller doesn’t know the difference between bio gas and natural gas. And to call natural gas a green energy source is ridiculous because it’s not green.

[28:17] It. In some cases it might be cleaner to use it than coal, especially if you have sulfur coal like we have a lot of in Ohio. It might be cleaner to use natural gas, but it’s not green, it’s not renewable. It’s not it’s not sustainable. And it’s not reliable. To get it out of the ground. Unlike bio gas, which comes from landfills, which can be, sustainable and renewable because you have a lot of garbage, you’re going to have landfills, so you’ll be able to get the methane. And it’s a good alternative. Sure. Instead of just letting that methane out into the atmosphere or burning it off. And so that’s what.

[29:12] I just read that read that article about that, and it just cracked me up that that these people got elected to this job and they’re they’re morons.

[29:26] And and they don’t follow the law. And they’re making laws, but they don’t follow them. One of the lobby groups that was trying to get this bill passed to redefine natural gas into clean energy to green energy, is a group that was also responsible for the bribery scandal in at First Energy that got House Bill six passed. And nobody’s been tried or convicted for the bribery for that. Now it’s still being investigated. And so just the fact that one of the groups lobbying for it was involved in this bribery scandal, it tells you all you need to know, that Republicans do not have your your best interest in mind. You know, it’s what? Who’s ever paying them the most money and and what? How they can impose their religious beliefs on you. Those are the two main concerns. And it’s doubly a win win for them if they’re able to get those two viewpoints aligned. And so that’s what we get for the lame duck session here in Ohio.

[30:45] Hello, this is Doug. Host of Secular Left, reminding you that I like to be validated. If you like this podcast and want to thank me. Feel free to buy me a coffee. Go to buy me a coffee Mi.com slash secular left and donate some cash to help make this a better show and validate me as a person. You’ll feel better in the morning.

[31:13] Another fun, fun bill that the bigoted supermajority Republicans are considering in the lame duck lame duck session of the Ohio legislature is a bill that would significantly change, voting in the state. Again, Republicans are afraid of losing their power. So not only do they gerrymander voting districts, we voted under an illegal map this past November, but now they want to change the rules on how people vote. One of the. This bill would require a photo ID. To vote. It would also eliminate curbside voting for anyone who was not disabled, and it would change the date that absentee ballots could be returned on time to the Board of Elections, by three days. And so that’s going to affect military ballots. What happens when your friend who is serving in Europe gets their, releases, their ballot on time, gets it in the mail on time, but because of delays, it ends up arriving seven days after the election. Well, they’re going to have to toss it under this bill.

[32:38] And of course, the common argument made is it’s to secure our elections. Which is poppycock. Voter. Voter fraud. People Fraud from actual voting. Where people vote. Who shouldn’t be voting. Made up eight 1000. Of a vote.

[33:04] In the 2012 election and its its negligible voter. Voter fraud does not really exist. Nationwide in the state of Ohio. But this is just this is just ways of Republicans to suppress the vote. Now photo ID most people I mean, common people, if you go if people, not that low information, people that don’t look into these things very closely, you say, you know, you should require a photo ID to vote. And they’re going to say, yeah, that’s reasonable. You know, we have to have license to drive, we have to have a photo ID to cash a check, blah, blah, blah, whatever they say. Essentially a poll tax because state IDs, driver’s licenses and state IDs are not free. You have. You have to pay money to get in. We just moved to enhance driver’s licenses here in the state in order to get an enhanced driver’s license. One that you can use to fly on airplanes, cost about $50 to get to get them. It costs roughly $25 to replace it, I believe.

[34:23] The state IDs are probably 25 to $30. And there aren’t any convenient places to get these you have to travel to. A Bureau of Motor Vehicles office to get them. You can’t get them online because you have to prove your identity to get to get a photo ID So you have to show up in person. You have to bring your birth certificate, a passport, all those other items to prove who you are in order to get a photo ID. All right. Well, besides that, it’s a poll tax, and the methods of getting one discriminate against the elderly and people who are disabled and people who are low income.

[35:08] The other reason why I oppose photo ID is for the simple fact that you have to prove your identity to register to vote. That means you have to prove your identity either using a photo ID or the last four digits of your Social Security to just sign up to vote. So why should you have to? Then show or prove your identity in order to get into the voting booth, especially for something that doesn’t happen. It’s minuscule the number of times it happened, you know, the the most voter fraud that happens that actually happens, are people who are registered in two different places and who vote twice. There were several cases recently of people being referred to criminal for criminal charges, for violating for voting twice. And they were what we call snowbirds. They lived in Ohio during the summer and they live in Florida during the wintertime. And they were registered in both places and they voted in both places and they got caught. And that’s a felony. You could go you could serve prison time for that.

[36:28] Know, luckily these people were elderly and so they that’s not what happened. But that is a majority that is 99.9% of reported voter fraud are people who vote twice, most of the time by mistake. If you look in the media, any time that something is something goes wrong with voters, with voting shenanigans happens, it’s usually a Republican at the center of it. For example, a operative for a Republican candidate in North Carolina and ten other people ended up pleading guilty, to misdemeanors for their roles in an absentee ballot fraud in North Carolina during the 2016 and 2018 elections. And what it was was this guy worked in the, 2018 congressional race for then Republican candidate Mark Harris, who appeared to have received the most votes in the general election for the ninth District seat in South central North Carolina. But allegations against Dowless the operative surfaced and testimony and other information revealed at a state Board of Elections hearing described him running an illegal ballot harvesting operation for the 2018 general election in Bladen County. In it, according to testimony, Dallas and his helpers gathered up hundreds of absentee ballots from voters by offering to put them in the mail.

[37:57] Some of the workers said they were then directed to collect blank or incomplete ballots, forged signatures on them, and even fill in votes for local candidates.

[38:07] And according to North Carolina law, it is against against the law for anyone other than the voter or a family member to handle somebody’s completed ballot. That’s one of those other boogeymen for Republicans is ballot harvesting. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to collect absentee ballots and drop them off as a group. You know, as long as you don’t open because if you know how absentee ballot works is you get the ballot, you fill it out, then you have to put it in an envelope. Then you have to put that envelope inside another envelope where you prove your identity, you sign it and put your identity information on it. Then when it gets to the Board of Elections, they take that first envelope, register that you voted. Then they take the ballot separately and then tabulate the vote.

[39:03] So they use the the the outside envelope to verify your identity and then the inside envelope is then your vote. So it’s still secret. So I don’t have a problem with, let’s say, my uncle taking my absentee ballot to a drop box. But for Republicans, that’s who knew? Who knew? But again, most of the time, for these supposed shenanigans that happen with voting, it’s usually Republicans that get busted for it and not nefarious, and Antifa people or or socialists or whatever Republicans come up with eventually. Again, I’m against the photo ID. I think if you prove your identity. With the materials. I don’t think.

[39:57] You need to prove your identity to vote. Only if you do it to register. You don’t need to do it to vote. Put it that way. The other thing too, is I worked as a poll worker for a couple of elections. And we would have people come up and give us their driver’s license because that was some common form of ID before this bill passed. Other common methods of ID was you could bring a utility bill that showed your name.

[40:28] You could have a passport. You could have passport. Has a photo. When I was a poll worker and we get somebody with the thing with the driver’s license, we wouldn’t look at their photo and making sure it was. You didn’t have time. Especially if we were busy. You didn’t have time to do that. The only thing that we had time to do was to to verify signatures. So we would we would swipe the card or in this case, they had it set up the poll books. You could scan the cards, the barcode, or because it had like a QR type barcode on the back and bring up their information on the book, they would sign it. You would look at the signature, you would look at the signature on the driver’s license. And if they seemed like they match, they were good to go. And again.

[41:20] Somebody was making a comment about the photo ID that that we have all these undocumented people coming into this country. We need to secure our elections. Undocumented people don’t vote. And the reason why they don’t vote is because they can’t register to vote. They can’t prove their citizenship or their identity. That is another thing about registration. You have to prove your citizenship to register. Undocumented people can’t do that. Undocumented people, the reason why they come to this country isn’t to to steal your jobs or steal your land or rape your children or groom your children. It’s to get a better life for themselves, to get a job, to make money and send it back to their family and whatever country they came from to help them with to have a better life. So they want to keep their head down. They’re not going to do anything that could get them prison time or deported. Most most undocumented people, you don’t have, you know, the way that it’s characterized by bigoted Republicans is this swarm of unclean, drug gangs coming in to to kill all of us and take our take our property and all this. Now, a majority of the people that come to this country are undocumented. They’re just looking for a better life. They’re looking for a job.

[42:44] And so, like I said, they’re not going to vote. Even if they were allowed to vote in a municipal election, they wouldn’t be registering with the state to vote. There would be other methods for cities to have people register to vote or they might not require that you vote, register to vote, that you show up and just prove that you live there and you can vote. And so, like I said, that’s what this Republican or that’s what they do now is they change the rules. You know, they they’ve they’ve undermined and demonized absentee ballots and mail in ballots. And so now they’re making it harder for people to do that because they lose elections, because people that vote against them use those methods to vote against them. And so they change it. The same with requiring a photo ID. It’s not going to affect them. It’s not going to affect elections. There’s not going to be any protection. It’s not going to prevent somebody who really wants to to vote, who shouldn’t be voting. It won’t prevent them from voting. You know, there’s ways of making fake IDs. And if you have a poll worker who’s barely trained in how to conduct the election, because we only had maybe three or 4 hours of training.

[44:12] It doesn’t take much to have a fake ID that gets by them. You know, So it’s not like you’re going to do anything about it. It’s just it’s just how they it’s just how Republicans respond to their base. And and it’s just one more way of suppressing or attempting to suppress the vote and keep their power and prevent people from fixing the gerrymandering.

[44:41] Thank you for listening to this episode. You can check out more information, including links to sources used in our show notes on our website. At secular left us.

[44:55] Secular left is hosted, written and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content.

[45:05] Send us your comments, either using the contact form on the website or by sending us a note at comments. At secular left dot us.

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Founder, editor and host of Secular Left - please be gentle For media inquiries see our "About" page.