cross-posted from: https://yall.theatl.social/post/3474840
From WABE Politics News:
Georgia’s secretary of state on Thursday came out against election rule changes pending before the State Election Board, specifically rejecting a proposal to count ballots by hand at polling places […]
They’ve been doing this type of shit for years.
Legit three years ago, I was at the local property records office and there was some old bag conservative in there with no job cross-referencing the voter rolls with the land records, just looking for people who might not be registered at the correct address, or who have recently moved but haven’t reregistered in a new town yet, to challenge their names on the roll.
On the other side of the coin, to the Republicans in the state legislature keep trying to raise a bill that’s filled with all these loaded terms about transparency and the right to petition and open government, and what the law does is says that at any public meeting, members of the public have a right to be heard up to fifteen minutes. Under the current law, there is only a right to be heard at one or two public meetings on a subject and limited to three minutes. Like, I’m not sure exactly how the law is written now, but it’s something like public comment is only required when the item is added to the public agenda for public discussion/hearing and before it’s voted on. The new law would give numbers of the public the right to speak at any public meeting in which the topic is discussed.
It’s like, the government has work to do, and this is a way to jam up their work by giving every whack job MAGA dumbass 15 minutes to waste at very meeting. It’s a very obvious attempt to stop the government from working.
These aren’t even new tactics.
That’s a different tactic than what is being discussed in this article. It is happening – and what’s worse, they’ve made it easier/automated it – but we need to be figuring out countermeasures for this problem, not distracting ourselves by making everything about the other thing.
Public comment at meetings is good, actually. This is why you earned my downvote.
See also: https://atlantadailyworld.com/2023/05/17/hundreds-of-atlantans-oppose-cop-city-in-record-breaking-7-hour-public-comment/
To be clear: the tactic that this article is about is new.
Yeah public comment is good. Opening up every single public meeting for an unlimited period of question and answer which is what this bill I was talking about proposed, is intentional sabotage of government. There is limited time for public comment at public meetings, The amount of time allowed should absolutely not be increased fivefold and allowed to go on until there is no one left that wants to speak. It would ruin the government’s ability to function.
The article you linked says right on it that those 288 people had to sign up in advance to speak. The bill I am talking about would allow anyone to show up and be able to speak at any hearing, not just hearings held for the purpose of public testimony, but any hearing on which the subject matter is discussed.
I understand that basically allowing the public to collectively filibuster would theoretically be bad, but – as someone who is very much paying more attention to local politics than most – the likelihood of that happening is incredibly insignificant compared to the danger of government bodies abusing it by censoring public input to shield themselves from legitimate criticism.
How small is your town? Where I live every single committee with grind to a halt and the phone to members would resign before they sit there in meetings until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning every night listening to internet trolls who have been sent out to waste everyone’s time.
It’s Atlanta, so… not small?
Maybe the far right does not have this sort of local organizing presence in Atlanta? I was expecting you to say some super small town that nobody’s ever heard of. I’m in a blue state but in a rural community and I promise these brainwashed morons show up to every meeting spouting conspiracy theories and bitching about government this and government that. That they are as bad as sovereign citizens except that are way more of them, and sometimes the people in charge actually take them seriously. And if they can’t conjure up any bullshit, they will simply read forwarded emails into the record for three minutes before they get cut off.
I laughed so hard that my daughter literally just walked into the room to ask me what was so funny after I read this. You do realize what state and region Atlanta is in, right?
I will give you some credit, though: it is true that the City of Atlanta itself (not the metro area with population 6.3M, but the incorporated central city with population 500K) is, for the most part, very Democratic. We definitely have different factions within the city (e.g. socially-conservative black democrats vs. white progressives), but the Republicans in the city are more of the rich businessperson type than the sovcit dipshit type.
As such, things like Atlanta City Council meetings (which is what I was thinking of when I wrote that) and other public meetings within the City really don’t tend to have those sorts of problems to any great extent. Instead, Atlanta’s problem (both “City of” and the metro as a whole) is that the region is very Balkanized and when fuckery happens, it often tends to come in the form of one jurisdiction trying to impose bullshit on another (e.g. the state government fucking with the city, Fulton County fucking with the city, the city fucking with the school system, Cobb County fucking with the Atlanta Regional Commission, the state government fucking with MARTA, etc.). In other words, the far right are represented in other places where they don’t need to disrupt the meetings to get their way.
I guess it’s also possible that other parts of the metro could have enough intra-jurisdictional ideological diversity that they have boards where the “public filibuster” problem outweighs the “censoring public input” problem, but I don’t go to public meetings out in the suburbs (or at the state government level, for that matter) so I wouldn’t know.