The GOP war on voting keeps on going:
We’ll begin our journey into the modern Jim Crow in Vice President Mike Pence’s home state of Republican-controlled Indiana. Per investigative journalist Greg Palast:
Indiana has purged no less than 20,000 voters in violation of a federal court order.
A team of database experts, statisticians, lawyers and investigators working with the Palast Investigative Fund discovered — and Indiana now admits — that these thousands of voters were cancelled in violation of a June 2018 federal court order that barred the state from using the notorious Interstate Crosscheck purge list sent to state officials by Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas.
The court order stemmed from a suit by the NAACP and League of Woman Voters against a 2017 Indiana law ordering counties to remove voters if they appear on Kobach’s list which purports to identify voters who have left the state. The NAACP and League cited the Palast team’s evidence in our 2016 Rolling Stone article showing that Crosscheck is overwhelmingly wrong in identifying voters who have moved — and extremely racist in operation.
The report found that in total, Indiana canceled the registrations of 469,000 voters. That’s equivalent to a little over 10% of the registered voters in Indiana’s 2014 midterms. These efforts are no small thing, and they’re just getting started now that the Supreme Court has emboldened them.
Kudos to journalist Greg Palast for bringing this to our attention. If your a Hoosier, click here to see if you’ve been purged from the poll.
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Things are getting heated in Indiana with both sides bringing in big names to excite their bases. Braun is bringing in the clown car:
Vice President Mike Pence implored Hoosiers on Friday to elect Mike Braun to the U.S. Senate to continue the progress he said the Trump administration has made the past two years.
"We have got to re-elect a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and we have got to expand the Republican majority in the United States Senate by electing Mike Braun," Pence said to loud cheers at the Indiana Republican Party's Fall Dinner Downtown at the JW Marriott.
Pence flew in from Washington after a campaign stop in Illinois to serve as the keynote speaker. He said he would continue campaigning over the weekend for Braun, who is locked in a pivotal election battle with incumbent Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly.
Pence said he got to know Braun when he was governor and Braun was a state legislator. Pence painted a picture of Braun as an everyman: a born-and-bred Hoosier who married his high school sweetheart and turned down a job on Wall Street to build his business in his hometown of Jasper.
Along with this douche bag:
Former President George W. Bush is coming to the Hoosier State.
The former president will be in Indiana Monday, October 15, campaigning for U.S. Senate candidate Mike Braun, the Republican national chairman announced Friday.
Vice President Mike Pence was in Indianapolis Friday to speak at a GOP rally in support of Braun.
Meanwhile, Donnelly has a big name riling up the base:
With early voting underway in his battleground reelection campaign, Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) turned to red-state Democrats' best national surrogate to gin up enthusiasm among his base: former Vice President Joe Biden.
Biden peppered his speech here Friday night with red-meat applause lines for the hundreds of enthusiastic Democrats in the crowd: he talked of protecting health care and coverage for pre-existing conditions, gave shout-outs to union and middle-class households and criticized the current administration, saying that “basic American values are under assault” and President Donald Trump is “cratering” America’s reputation abroad.
Biden praised Donnelly as a man of character, and joked that he told him at the start of the campaign he would come to Indiana to rally for or against him, whichever was more helpful -- a nod to Donnelly’s tough path to reelection as a moderate Democrat in a red state.
His speech also included a very specific call to arms: Biden gave the crowd the address of the county courthouse and a website to check their polling locations, and implored them to vote early.
“We win back the Senate, you're going to see about seven U.S. Senators flip overnight,” Biden said to cheers from the crowd. “Not to be Democrats, but to vote their conscience."
Along with a local sports hero:
Indiana Pacers all-star Victor Oladipo endorsed Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly on Friday night at a campaign rally with former Vice President Joe Biden in Hammond.
Donnelly's camp had already announced that Biden would be rallying in Indiana with Donnelly, but Oladipo's appearance was a surprise to the crowd.
Oladipo opened the rally by emphasizing his love for Hoosiers. He came to prominence as a basketball player at Indiana University and now plays for the Pacers.
“I call everybody from the state of Indiana my adopted family, because at the end of the day, this state believed in me when no one else did," Oladipo said.
His brief speech was focused on his love for Indiana, rather than politics. But he closed by saying: “Vote Donnelly.”
Afterward, he posted pictures on social media with Biden and Donnelly.
Let’s help Donnelly and his fellow Hoosiers fight back against the GOP’s War On Voting and ride the Blue Wave to victory. Click below to donate and get involved with Donnelly and his fellow Indiana Democrats campaigns:
Joe Donnelly
Liz Watson
Mel Hall