Saturday’s “No Kings: Vote Early” events were certainly impressive in their breadth – more than 3,000 events in all 50 states. And the events were designed to drive voting, rather than fill streets.
So while the fourth No Kings Day was vastly smaller than the first three, organizers are still calling it a success – “the largest early vote activation in U.S. history.”
Gauging its effect won’t be easy. In interviews with MS NOW, the co-founders of Indivisible, Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, said that while early voting is up everywhere – around 32% over the last midterm elections, in 2022, Greenberg said – in zip codes that hosted a No Kings event, it’s up 51%.
Nationally, the total number of early votes is certainly up dramatically since Friday, Oct. 16 – but it would have been anyway. NBC News counted 7.7 million early votes nationwide as of Friday, compared to 14.4 million as I write. In the same time span, the University of Florida Election Lab saw its numbers go up from 8 million votes to 16.1 million.
Some fraction of those increases was surely due to No Kings, it’s just hard to say how much.
There was significant turnout in many cities, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, New York City, Denver, and even Kalamazoo.
But the events that spoke to me the most were like the one in Cache County in Northern Utah, where a crowd estimated at more than 500 gathered at the Cache County Courthouse, then marched in a parade to the nearby voting drop box in the parking lot of the County Administration Building.
At one of the events in Phoenix, Sen. Ruben Gallego held aloft a mail-in ballot and proclaimed “This is it. This is your ticket to change the direction of this country... So let’s get going.” Attendees then marched from the park to a nearby drop box.
In Charlotte, a crowd of locals gathered at a street corner, then marched to a nearby library, where they all cast their votes. “I’m so unhappy with the spinelessness of our government,” Charlotte resident JN Janbusch told the UNC-Charlotte newspaper. “I want to see something happen in Congress. I need these people to stand up.”
Fox 5 Atlanta reported that “Black Voters Matter hosted a ‘Party at the Polls’ featuring food trucks, music, and an informational voting village, followed by a collective stroll to the ballot box.”
Enjoy these No Kings Day overviews from Rachel Maddow and The Contrarian.
There was a whole lot of outrage about Meta suspending the No Kings Instagram account for several hours on Saturday – it says by mistake. But I’m not sure how much effect that had.
What’s Next?
No Kings is hosting a call tonight at 8 p.m. ET titled: “No Kings: Vote Early: What’s Next After 10/17? Election Defense.”
They’ll talk about “the final push for voter turnout, as well as what happens post-election: how we’re preparing for election enforcement, how you can start to plan now to be ready to protect the results of the election.”
Indivisible’s “Hands Off Our Vote” campaign already has over 50,000 volunteers signed up to become election defenders. The group is also gathering volunteers “to talk with voters about the issues that really matter, whether they live next door or across the country.” There’s a list of target races.
MoveOn wants you to “Adopt a District.” “We’ve done the math, and identified voters who can make the difference between a win and a loss in our top priority congressional districts just by showing up this year!... You’ll connect with constituents a few times over the course of the next few weeks leading up to Election Day. You’ll set your own pace, so this work can be as flexible as it needs to be to suit your schedule.”
Like COINTELPRO Meets the Patriot Act
Probably the darkest story I’ve been following here is about the Trump administration’s efforts to criminalize protest, which the Justice Department then prosecutes as a conspiracy, leading to wildly inflated sentences. (See, e.g., “DOJ and DHS break the law in their hopeless quest to prove that peaceful protesters are actually antifa terrorists,” Sept. 7.)
Free Press – the media consumer advocacy group, not the woke-scolding blog – is out with a terrific and really scary report about the Trump National Security Policy Memo called NSPM-7 that put all that in motion. The report is titled “Enemies of the State: NSPM-7 and the Trump Plan to Crush Dissent.”
The memo “is a blueprint to neutralize the administration’s opponents and suppress dissent,” the report says.
NSPM-7 seeks to empower various tentacles of the federal government to coordinate and expand surveillance, investigations and prosecutions, all in the name of stamping out “domestic terrorism” and crushing “antifa.”…
NSPM-7 couples this counterterrorism framework with sophisticated conspiracy charges the Justice Department prosecutes. In so doing, it enables the federal government to wield its strongest weapons against anyone it considers a threat. The Trump administration is using these powerful tools to target dissidents, protesters and civil society.
The executive summary concludes with this warning:
NSPM-7 sets the stage for the administration to deploy vastly outsized and unprecedented cross-agency authorities to criminalize whatever public-engagement activities it seeks to eliminate. The midterm elections are at our doorstep; the president is eagerly pursuing election-fraud narratives, telling voters he will pay them off if they vote for Republicans — and leveraging his executive power to sway election results if he can. Already Homeland Security officials have investigated more than 150 nonprofit organizations under the guise of “election integrity.” It’s by no means outside the realm of possibility that NSPM-7 becomes the vehicle to shut down civic engagement and political expression in the months to follow.
The report also cites examples of the government’s overreach that are very familiar to Heads Up News readers: DHS’s failed, massive and outlandish “Operation Puppet Master,” and DOJ’s successful crusade to make an example of the Prairieland defendants.
Two Aggrieved Cities
Haitian immigrants and other community members today started their four-day, 40-mile-plus march from Springfield, Ohio, to the statehouse in Columbus. Over 15,000 Haitian immigrants living in Springfield face deportation after the revocation of their Temporary Protected Status. Some have already been deported or are being detained. And many who are still free have been outfitted with ankle monitors that remind some of slave shackles.
The marchers’ demands:
Officially end the ankle monitor program.
ICE out of Springfield.
Return Haitian people in detention to their families, including pastors.
Permanent Protected Status for Haitian People.
Meanwhile, the city of Memphis has effectively been under siege by a Trump-spawned task force since September – of last year. And they are sick of it.
The Memphis City Council on Tuesday passed a resolution calling for the removal of ICE agents and members of the National Guard, who have been part of the so-called “Memphis Safe Task Force.”
“It’s time for them to leave,” Councilwoman Michalyn Easter-Thomas told WREG News. She likened the federal presence to “slave raids” of the past.
“People are being rounded up on buses in the middle of the night because of the color of their skin and their accent. They are being asked for their papers like Nazi Germany,” said Councilwoman Jerri Green, a Democrat running for governor.
You may recall that back in July, a National Guard member shot and killed a 20-year-old Black man, Tyrin Johnson, who law enforcement officials said had turned to them with a gun. An autopsy later showed he had been shot in the back.
The task force has killed four people in total and shot four others.
The Week in the Courts
Lots of legal drama over the Trump administration’s efforts to force state election officials to block the votes of people on lists the government claims are non-citizens who were sent ballots.
A naturalized California voter is suing to block any such move on the grounds that it would “interfere with the rights of naturalized citizens to vote in California by coercing state election officials into a slapdash removal of voters from voter rolls based on a dubiously secure list of purported non-citizens.”
And top Democratic groups are suing because fully legitimate voters “will be purged, denied ballots, or have their ballots set aside based on unauthorized, unverified, and ever-evolving lists that have already misidentified citizens as noncitizens.” The suit’s conclusion: “Thwarted in Congress and the courts, the administration has now simply disregarded the tools Congress provided it and fashioned its own cudgels instead. It once more falls to the judiciary to staunch the resulting lawlessness.”
Meanwhile, the DOJ is suing California, asking a judge to force the state not to count the ballots of those voters who, after what it insists was a “thorough analysis,” it has found are “likely noncitizens.” Likely!
Also, Trump and the DOJ have threatened to arrest California officials who tabulate those ballots, which is transparently ridiculous. In fact, what would be illegal is disenfranchising those voters for no good reason.
And, in other news, legal service providers representing immigrant children filed suit to stop the fast-tracking of children’s asylum cases. “This is not the immigration process that Congress intended for unaccompanied children,” the suit says. “It is a deportation assembly line depriving them of their rights.”
End Note
On Monday, Oct. 26 – the first day of early voting in Washington, D.C. – join the DC Poor People’s Campaign and Repairers of the Breach in an afternoon “Moral March to the Polls” from Black Lives Matter Plaza to a nearby voting site.