Most of the world simply has no health care… vast tracts of land and vast populations of people don’t have doctors  –  or at best must make great efforts to reach medical care.  In addition, masses of displaced people and refugees – over 100,000,000 at last count – desperately need to be rescued from their desperate situations.  Doctors Without Borders, Medecins Sans Frontieres in French (MSF) is on the ground providing quality medical care to those in need across the world.  A few of these healers tell the stories of their work in the field.

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The post Women Rising Radio: Rescuing The Isolated and Displaced, Women of Doctors Without Borders appeared first on Making Contact Radio: Media that helps build movements.

Currently the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest are in a struggle with worldwide multinational corporations that want to take over their lands for oil extraction, commercial palm oil, commercial agriculture, mining, and other massively destructive enterprises. Women leaders have taken center stage in the indigenous activism to guard the Amazon rainforest from those who would use it for profit. These women have faced down criticism, violence, and other tactics from powerful corporate and government adversaries, and they have achieved some remarkable victories. We get to know two of these women, and learn of an indigenous women’s uprising to protect Mother Earth.

Image Credit:
Amazon Watch
Image Caption:
Sápara indigenous leader, Gloria Hilda Ushigua Santi, speaks out against Ecuadorian government plans to drill for oil on their Amazonian territory.

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Music:

• Maria de Lime Dorsey

The post Guardians of the Amazon Rainforest – Women Rising Radio #35 appeared first on Making Contact Radio: Media that helps build movements.

Indigenous Women Speak Their Truth On The Climate Crisis

The climate emergency on Earth has become critical.  So when California Governor Jerry Brown called for a Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, Sept, 12-14 2018, people took to the streets to let the governor and attendees at the summit know they don’t want inadequate or false climate solutions, including cap and trade. Women, including frontline and Indigenous women activists, also made their views known in a powerful way at the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International’s, ‘Women’s Assembly For Climate Justice’, which was held in parallel to the summit.

Image Credit: WECAN

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The post Climate Uprising: Indigenous Women at the Global Climate Action Summit appeared first on Making Contact Radio.

Women Rising 37

Abortion and women’s reproductive rights are hot button issues around the world. Women have a long way to go to obtain control over our own bodies, our family planning, our reproductive health. There are influential well-funded efforts to keep that control out of women’s hands.

Women Rising Radio visits with two key organizers in Europe whose work is advancing women’s reproductive rights. Marta Lempart, an organizer with the Polish Women’s Strike of 2016, and the annual International Women’s Strike, is battling ultra right-wing forces in Poland. Ailbhe Smyth is a feminist activist and organizer in Ireland’s successful Together for Yes campaign, which made abortion legal there in 2018. Sara Hutchinson Ratcliffe is an advocate with Catholics for Choice in the USA and abroad; and her colleague Sarah Flores is a youth organizer with Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. All these women are on the front lines of activism for women’s reproductive rights.

Image Credit: Strike 4 Repeal 2017 Protest

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Music:

• Ani Difranco – Amendment, ¿Which Side Are You On? 2012Special thanks to Ani DiFranco for permission to use her song “Amendment”
• Dylan Garven

The post Choice, Church and State: Poland, Ireland, the USA : Women Rising 37 appeared first on Making Contact Radio.

Migrations: Standing in Solidarity With the Desperate:

The USA and many nations in Europe, have slammed the gates shut against desperate immigrants and refugees, criminalizing and brutalizing them.  Three activist women co-founded groups to challenge the policies of detention, deportation, discrimination and denigration of migrants. They are organizing to transform the current immigration policy of the USA, and to uphold immigrants’ human rights internationally.  Dr. Satsuki Ina co-founded Tsuru for Solidarity; Serena Adlerstein co-created Never Again Action; and Devi Machete co-created the Hecate Society, helping migrants stuck at the Mexican border with the US.

Photo by Brooke Anderson

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Music: 

• Japan Polydor
• Judi Collins
• Alcvin Ryuzen Ramos

The post Women Rising. Migrations: Standing in Solidarity With the Desperate appeared first on Making Contact Radio.

Election Protection and Democracy, with Women Rising Radio

Election protection is increasingly seen as a critical issue in the US. Since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court, there have been problems with voter purging, voter ID laws, what some call modern-day ‘poll taxes’, precinct closures, and difficulties with voting machines. Congress has noted serious attempts to hack into voting systems in the US based in partisan politics. Women Rising Radio joins two election protection activists to talk about threats to the US electoral process. Like this program? Please show us the love. Click here and support our non-profit journalism. Thanks!

Photo is of Andrea Miller speaking in Making Contact’s Oakland studio.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW

TRANSCRIPT

This week on Making Contact,

Bite from Jennifer Cohn  “I think election fraud has always been a problem and a concern to various extents and the main issue. Whether you’re talking about paper ballots or voting machines is transparency. Transparency is really the number one thing. I think you have to really have the public involved from beginning to end.”

Bite from Andrea Miller  “We’ve got people that are really trying to cheat to win at all costs. Remember, we are talking about power. Power is never going to be given away by anybody. So it has to be taken.”

Host Sandina Robbins:  In the United States vote rigging and election fraud have become increasingly high tech and more difficult to expose in this Women Rising Radio edition of Making Contact we feature two election protection activists. Andrea Miller is an organizer and digital strategist fighting voter suppression. Jennifer Cohn is an attorney investigating the dangerous flaws in voting machines and technology.

I’m your host, Sandina Robbins.

I remember when after the hotly disputed Bush versus Gore election in 2000, I volunteered to be a poll worker to see democracy in action for myself. At the end of a 12 hour day, we had to pack up our voting machines, count all the leftover ballots and supplies, and drive them to an unmarked trailer truck where they were loaded up and sent off into the dark of night. No one could tell me when or where these votes would be counted. Meanwhile, election results were already being announced on the radio based on early voting trends.

It left me wondering, does every vote really count for the next election in 2004? I was asked to be in charge of a precinct and sent to a training that primarily dealt with how to set up the voting machines so their legs wouldn’t collapse.

I was told to pick up our precincts equipment before election day. That meant that I had the keys to the voting machines. Ballots, a card encoder all in my home for a week with no security to prevent anyone from tampering with the system. On election night, we packed everything up, drove to a drop off center, and once again I watched in amazement at how our votes were being boxed up, just as the election results were being called. The question remains for me. Does the U.S. really have free and fair elections?

TV SOUND BITES:

Many of us don’t know the first thing about how all votes get counted.

When you cast your ballot, how do you know that they’re getting it right, that they’re getting it right?

Yeah. Well, isn’t that their job?

Do you trust that your vote is being recorded as intended? What do you think? I think so. What are you basing that on? How do you know that they got it right? Well, I’m sure they did. What are you basing? I wouldn’t be there in the machine. I have to assume

A roomful of hackers all trying to hack into voting machines. You can possibly make it accept the fake card or accept any card so you could add your own votes.

These are supposed to be the latest machines. They’re still used in elections and they’re running ancient software. I think that like if somebody wanted to, it would be pretty easy to fake an election

VOICE: Report from the Select Committee on Intelligence. United States Senate:

Cybersecurity experts have studied a wide range of U.S. voting machines, including both D.R.E.s and optical scanners. And in every single case, they found severe vulnerabilities that would allow attackers to sabotage machines and to alter votes. That’s why there is overwhelming consensus in the cybersecurity and election integrity research communities that our elections are at risk.

HOST: One of the critical issues facing our democracy is the use of electronic voting machines. Election officials have tried to assure voters that the machines are accurate and safe from hacking. But an increasing number of digital security experts are saying, no, they are not secure nor reliable.

Attorney Jennifer Cohn has done extensive investigation into voter technology and is sounding the alarm.

Jennifer Cohn I got drawn in by at least two things. The first was this chasm between what election officials were telling the public about the security of our elections, comparing that with what election security experts were saying about the security of our elections. Tom Hicks, who is on the Federal Election Assistance Commission, which certifies voting machines, was on the news telling the public that we didn’t have to really worry about voting machines being hacked because they weren’t connected to the Internet.

But even when voting machines themselves are not connected to the Internet, they all receive programing from these centralized county or state computers. And in many cases, those do connect to the Internet.

So in reality, we’re really just one or two steps away from having an Internet hacker attack our system. When you’re dealing with a black box voting machine, the public has no way of knowing what’s happening inside of the machine.

And the best way to describe transparency in this context is the translation from a German court ruling. I think it was in 2009, their constitutional court outlawed touchscreen voting machines ———-and said that the average person needs to be able to understand the mechanisms that are being used to count their votes. And if you can’t do that, then it’s unconstitutional. That was in Germany. But the same principle, if not in law, just in logic, applies to elections everywhere.

Transparency is really the number one thing. And I think it’s certainly conceivable that political operatives have hacked some prior elections. There are very many red flags. I don’t say that there’s proof. But one of the red flags is that no one ever seems to really allow meaningful manual recounts.

And the other thing with these touchscreens is to have disproportionate distribution of touch screen voting machines. In Ohio in 2004 typically, it was in the high proportion minority districts. There were lines from 5 to 10 hours long, which absolutely can make a huge difference. I actually, I’m pretty certain there’s going to be some disproportionate distribution. There are arguments over that already in Georgia. In Georgia there is a lawsuit that was filed by a small nonprofit called the Coalition for Good Governance, and it’s founded by a woman named Marilyn Marks, who’s a really fantastic election security advocate. And they have done a few things.

The first step was to get a court ruling that Georgia’s current paperless touch screen voting machines are unconstitutional because they deprive voters of the right to have their votes counted as cast. And they actually got the federal court to rule, to find them unconstitutional, which was huge.

The second step is to get a similar ruling for these new touch-screen universally used barcode ballot marking devices. It appears that it is not going to happen in time for the primaries. But I think there is knock on wood, (I don’t wanna jinx anything) a reasonable chance that they may prevail in time for the general election.

HOST: Jennifer Cohn is concerned about electronic ballot marking devices or BMDs,  because there’ve been problems with them in previous elections. She wants them banned from use.

Jennifer Cohn:  They’re essentially really complicated, hackable malfunctions, all electronic pens. And then if you’re going to want to have a machine count the ballots, you still need the scanners. And I’ve really been tracking the purchases of these systems throughout the country, and it’s very alarming.

It’s often the most populous counties in many states that have purchased these between 2016 and now. And there are some swing states that have done this. We’ve had over a decade and a half of vote flipping that’s always attributed to calibration errors. .And these new ballot marking devices are going to have the same problems.

And this is despite the fact in Pennsylvania an ES&S representative gave this presentation and it’s on YouTube where he’s assuring everybody ,scout’s honor, that you don’t have to worry about calibration with these new machines and everybody sort of cheers. Yay, we don’t have to worry about calibration. Well, guess what? In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, they had massive issues with calibration and vote flipping. So this is just another problem.

HOST:  Jennifer Cohn mentioned E.S& S., a company that provides almost half of the voting technology in the U.S., she contends that it raises serious red flags when private for- profit companies, using proprietary rights to keep their technology secret, monopolize our elections. And an investigation by The Guardian found that voting machine companies have been actively seeking to avoid scrutiny.

Jennifer Cohn: Right now, two vendors, ES&S of Omaha, Nebraska, and Dominion Voting, which at least started out as a Canadian company, account for more than 80% percent of U.S. election equipment. There’s a third vendor called Hart InterCivic that accounts for about another 11% percent.

So combined, the three vendors account for about 93% percent of U.S. election equipment and all three are owned by private equity—– which means we really don’t know very much about who specifically owns the companies. They’re LLC’s

ES&S which accounts currently for about 44 percent of U.S. election equipment, was founded in the 1970s by two brothers named Bob and Todd Urosevich. And they founded the company with money from the families of two religious right activist billionaires.

One was named Howard Ahmanson Jr and the other was named Nelson Bunker Hunt. Both of these billionaires were major donors to the  Chalcedon Foundation, which is Christian reconstruction’s main think tank. Both of these individuals, Hunt and Ahmanson, were high profile and early members of a very powerful and secretive right wing group called the Council for National Policy. And its recent members as of 2014, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center which obtained a copy of its 2014 directory, include the whole Cambridge Analytica cabal, which includes Kellyanne Conway, who is a consultant for Cambridge Analytica.

Steve Bannon, who was the vice president of Cambridge Analytica, and Bob and Rebekah Mercer, who were the founders of Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica is the organization that worked with the 2016 Trump campaign on big data assimilation, and they used stolen Facebook data from many, many Facebook users to do targeted advertising.

Other members of the Council for National Policy include Richard DeVos, Jay Sekulow, who is Trump’s personal attorney. And it also includes Wayne LaPierre of the NRA.

This 2014 directory also states that the Council for National Policies goal is by 2020 to have, as they put it, reestablished or reaffirmed both religious and economic liberty under the U.S. Constitution. Many of the members in the group are very devout or hard right religious right activists. And it’s really a networking group for the religious right and billionaires.

HOST:

After it was sued by the U.S. government in 2019, Cambridge Analytica declared bankruptcy. It was then acquired by a holding company with direct ties to its previous founder, right wing billionaire Robert Mercer.

Mercer and others in the Council for National Policy preach an ideology called Dominionism, which seeks to impose a Christian government in the U.S. based on a fundamentalist interpretation of biblical law.

Jennifer Cohn monitors the progress of legislation designed to rein in private equity voting technology companies and supports passage of the SAFE Act, which will ban BMDs or ballot marking devices. She also advocates for the use of hand marked paper ballots and mandatory audits.

Jennifer Cohn:  There have been several bills in the U.S. Congress to make our elections more secure. So the first it’s called the Pave Act. Most of the universally used ballot marking devices would be banned under it. The ones with barcodes, which is most of the current generation. but it would also ban Internet connectivity and remote access. There’s another bill called the Safe Act, which incorporated most but not all of the provisions of the Pay Act. And it passed the House and went back to the Senate. But Mitch McConnell pretty much said that they were all dead on arrival and hasn’t even allowed a Senate vote on any of them.

Mitch McConnell is not, my knowledge, directly connected with Kellyanne Conway and the other members of the CFP. But he did receive donations from both of these mega vendors and S. and Dominion voting before putting the kibosh on any sort of meaningful election security legislation.

There are always things we can do short of even federal legislation. And what that requires is advocacy at sort of the grassroots. You can start with just an inquiry, just sending an email or making a phone call and asking, are we going to be using electronic poll books on Election Day? And if so, are you going to have backup paper voter lists? And then if the answer is no. I’m on Twitter at @Jenny Cohn1. And I now have this very large following of over 100,000 people and quite a few in the media do follow me now, and I will amplify it for you.

HOST:    Andrea Miller is the co-executive director in charge of information technology with People Demanding Action based in Virginia. She also spearheads the Center for Common Ground’s Reclaim Our Vote Campaign. In 2015, nearly half of the seats in the Virginia state legislature did not even have a Democratic Party contender.

Miller and other grassroots organizers helped change that, making Virginia’s legislature more representative of the state’s diverse population. Andrea agrees with Jennifer Cohn about the dangers of voting machine technology, starting with electronic poll books.

Andrea Miller: uuug– Electronic poll books.

Wow, those are amazing things because, my mother had a really great saying anything made by man bricks. It’s not a question of if it’s a matter of when. So polling books, when they break, they’re going gonna break on election day. And so you can’t be sitting there, going, “Well I have no idea who the voters are so, you know, nobody gets their vote.” How’s that?

Or we also have seen the threat and the issue with hacking. You have an electronic poll book. It is living out there in the ether. Someone could go in. They could change addresses, shift one column down, aAnd everybody on that poll book is screwed because now nobody is giving you the right address. So now what do you do? Our technology, while it’s designed to help us, we haven’t thought it through properly and we are just opening ourselves up for a major, major fall.

Can anybody say 2020 Iowa Caucus?

Virginia had voting machines up until 2013. So when I voted in the 2013 primary, I was voting on a touch screen machine. And when I touched the screen for the person I wanted to vote for and went next and it was showing me what I’d marked, that was not what I marked. So I went back, did it again. It took me three tries on that touchscreen machine before I was able to get the candidate that I wanted.

Now, that also happened to the man who was governor. The governor tried to vote and the machine, it wasn’t properly calibrated. It would not accept the people he had selected. So that’s why Virginia went suddenly. We literally turned on a dime 2014 and the general machines were gone and 90 percent of Virginia counties were voting on paper. So let’s look at Virginia. In 2017, wWe got a lot of candidates to run. Grassroots activist type people decided they were going to run for office. All of them, it was their first run. Many of them had $10,000, maybe $20000 for a well-funded one going up against a 5, 10, 15-year incumbent who had millions of dollars in the bank.

And with grassroots support we came within one vote of one seat of tieing for control of a house. And then 2019 Democrats took control of her Senate and her house. That is what changed Virginia.

Virginia ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, the Virginia Green New Deal, which is a very aggressive, progressive green new deal passed out of the Labor and Commerce Committee. Virginia is working on repealing right to work. Virginia is a completely different place. And I always say thank you to everybody who helped us because Virginia and now say she is the former capital of the Confederacy.

We did two main things, and there’s really only two things you can do for elections. Number one, we looked at who were the people who have been–I call it de-registered– and we work with what we call underrepresented voters: African-American and Hispanic Native American Asians.

And so I started looking at how many voters of color were in Virginia who voted, who didn’t vote. And I realized what we really needed to do was add community of color voters. So we were giving people valuable information. We were letting them know you better check your voter registration status. And if it’s not active. You’re going to have to get reregistered.

NEWS CLIPS COLLAGE Election election purging, voter purges, people from its voter rolls a hundred twenty five thousand vote, Representative Raul Grijalva released a statement. It reads in part,

“where there are lines lasting hours on end ballot shortages, ID issues, erroneous party affiliations or sparse polling locations. We must document these problems and implement policies that ensure they never happen again. “

HOST: Since the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, it’s been open season on voting rights nationwide. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, voter suppression happens in many ways.

That’s why Andrea Miller founded the Center for Common Ground to empower underrepresented voters. Her advocacy focuses on the American South, a region well known for voter disenfranchisement against communities of color and more recently, against younger voters.

Her Reclaim Our Vote campaign is changing southern states like North Carolina, where a recent court ruling said that the state’s suppression of African-American voters was done with, quote, “almost surgical precision. “

Andrea Miller: The Voting Rights Act did put standards into place. And the others in that it did was it looked very hard at states that had tried to prevent people from voting based on race or religion or various things.  And they had come up with a term that they called pre-clearance: in order to change your state election laws, you had to get permission from the Department of Justice to make these changes.  And that had kept everything much more even handed. And so what happened was under President Obama, there was this voice and this rolling call that. America is now “post-racial.”  “We don’t need pre-clearance anymore,” which basically neutered it. And the moment that happened, then we started seeing states doing these wild and crazy things.

We see Kris Kobach of Kansas saying, oh, there are these rampant issues of voter fraud. People are voting in multiple states. It’s like, wait a minute. How is it possible? You know, are we talking about people jumping on their own private jet, flying from state to state to to vote and 7.8 million people lost their ability to vote.  Notice I didn’t say “right” I  said their ability.

If we had a right {to vote} it wouldn’t be so easy to take it from us, which is why they stopped too soon in the civil rights movement. They needed to take voting as a right all the way to the constitution. If they had done that, that would have struck down felony disenfranchisement laws. So they stopped too soon.

So that’s one of the other things that I do work on — constitutional right to vote.

One of the other incredible forms of voter suppression and it was in the movie Suppressed would be closing a polling location. So they wanted to close that polling location in Georgia saying, “oh, it cost $4000. And that’s just we can’t spend $4000 to allow all these Black people to vote. You know, who can afford that?”

And then it turns out they’re spending $18,000 a year on Christmas decorations. You know, it’s like, guys, really? Come on, please.

Music

So you just have every state has different rules. Every state has come up with a new twist or a new gotcha for the unsuspecting voters. My favorite was in 2015 when Alabama went to strict photo I.D. they closed every DMV in the Alabama black belt. Just closed them, said, “gee, gosh, golly, we don’t have money to run the DMV.” Apparently in no county in the black belt did they have enough money to keep the DMV office open.

HOST:  For the upcoming election, Andrea hopes to mobilize the largest turnout ever, and key to that turnout is the 18 to 24 year old voter. Andrea Miller has turned her attention to the youth vote.

Andrea Miller:  There are so many different ways that the 18 to 24 year old vote is suppressed, for instance, in Texas, a you can vote and use a handgun license as your I.D., but you can’t use your college I.D. as a photo I.D. You have to either get a Texas driver’s license or buy a Texas I.D.  In many states, the voting precinct is a long way from campus, so in Alabama we are working on the notion of let’s get voting precincts on campus.

HOST:   Andrea Miller is also convinced that in order to win in 2020, Democrats must concentrate on taking back the South. Her work promotes this strategy.

Andrea Miller  Civics lesson on America, America: We do not elect a president by popular vote. So when I ask the question, how many votes do you need to win the White House? There is only one correct answer. Two hundred and seventy. We need 270 electoral votes. Boom that’s it. That’s the way it works. Doesn’t matter that we wish it works some other way. It doesn’t. So that means we’re thirty nine votes short.

Texas has got thirty eight of the thirty nine votes that we need. One state. Texas is coming in right behind California.  And then Georgia. Georgia’s got two Senate races and 16 electoral votes. North Carolina has got 15. Alabama’s got nine. Arizona’s got eleven. Florida’s got 29. These are the numbers that I live with— Everyday of My Life.

HOST: Andrea Miller supports eliminating electronic voting machines and returning to verifiable paper ballots, restoring voting rights to formerly incarcerated people and making Election Day a federal holiday.

And that’s it for this Women’s Desk edition of Making Contact. Produced by Women Rising Radio, listen to our programs at WomenRisingRadio.com and at RadioProject org. Special thanks to Lisa Fiorino and National Voter Corps and to Lisa Rudman, and Making Contact. Women Rising Radios producer is Lynn Finerman, audio engineers Emily Harris and Stefanie Welch. And I’m your host, Sandina Robbins. Thanks for listening.

Music credits:  instrumental intro from “Democracy” by L. Cohen and America the Beautifiul” by Charlie Haden.

The post Election Protection and Democracy, with Women Rising Radio appeared first on Making Contact Radio.

Election protection is increasingly seen as a critical issue in the US. Since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court, there have been problems with voter purging, voter ID laws, what some call modern-day ‘poll taxes’, precinct closures, and difficulties with voting machines. Congress has noted serious attempts to hack into voting systems in the US based in partisan politics. Women Rising Radio joins two election protection activists to talk about threats to the US electoral process.

This program was produced by Women Rising Radio.

Like this program? Please click here and support our non-profit journalism. Thanks!

Women are challenging male-dominated power structures, and creating alternatives to the profit-driven economic model of capitalism. Women Rising Radio features Jinwar, a women-led village in Northern Syria. And we meet worker-owners of Up & Go, a cleaning cooperative in New York city. To place this global movement in historical perspective, we speak with feminist scholar Silvia Federici. Her books chronicle centuries of persecution and violence against women, including witch hunts carried out to steal womens lands, knowledge and practices by capitalist nation-states.

Image Caption: Photos courtesy of Jinwarand Up & Go  

Like this program? Please click here and support our non-profit journalism. Thanks!

Music Credits:

• Bonnie Lockhart
• Betsy Rose Women of Jinwar Village Raghav Sachar

Today, in the lead up to the next general election, many Americans in custody still cannot vote. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, of the almost 740,000 people in jail, about two-thirds are awaiting court action on a charge. In other words, nearly 500,000 of them may be eligible to vote. A year ago, Illinois passed a law requiring all jails to ensure that pre-trial detainees have an opportunity to vote. In Chicago’s Cook County Jail, the nation’s largest single-site jail,about 95% of detainees are awaiting trial and the vast majority is eligible to vote. The sheriff there is an enthusiastic supporter of expanding their voting program.

Image: By Pamela Kirkland; Image Caption: Talman Anderson votes in the Illinois presidential preference primary from the Cook County Jail

TRANSCRIPT below

Like this program? Please click here and support our non-profit journalism. Thanks!

Music Credits:

• Like the Others (intro) – Jeff Dodson
• Cosmic Spheres – (No Artist Listed, ALIBI Music Library)
• Undiscovered Secrets – Derek Whitacre
• Time Is Running Out – Derek Whitacre
• Unknown Passengers – Derek Whitacre
• Moonbathing – (No Artist Listed, ALIBI Music Library)
• This Is Camille – Jeff Dodson
• Elemental Power – Derek Whitacre
• Silent Steps – Derek Whitacre
• Until The Next Time (credits) – Derek Whitacre

TRANSCRIPT

Salima – I’m Salima Hamirani and on today’s Making Contact we bring you a piece from our friends at 70 million, about voting from prison. Did you know that those awaiting trial have the right to vote? But how do you exercise your right to vote if you’re incarcerated? Well, one solution is to set up polling places inside jails and prisons. Here’s host Mitzi Miller from 70 million, with their story about the polling place inside Chicago’s cook county jail.

Miller: In 1974 the Court upheld the right to vote for people convicted of misdemeanors and those in pretrial detention​— asserting protection under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Today, in the lead up to the next general election, many Americans in custody still cannot vote. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, of the almost 740,000 people in jail, about two-thirds are awaiting court action on a charge. In other words, nearly 500,000 of them may be eligible to vote. As the country prepares for a historic election, this segment of the incarcerated population underscores how criminal justice and the franchise intersect. We went to Chicago to see for ourselves. A year ago, Illinois passed a law requiring all jails to ensure that pre-trial detainees have an opportunity to vote. In Chicago’s Cook County Jail, the nation’s largest single-site jail,​about 95% of detainees are awaiting trial and the vast majority is eligible to vote. The sheriff there is an enthusiastic supporter of expanding their voting program. Reporter Pamela Kirkland has the story.

(Ambient sound)​

Clapping…”Thanks for voting Mr. Anderson”

Pamela Kirkland: Was this your first time voting?

Talman Anderson: Yes. Yes, it was my first time voting.

Miriam Tello: It was my first time voting too.

Cook County Jail Sergeant: Three coming at you…

Kirkland: It’s a cold, drizzly Chicago day in March. Talman Anderson and Miriam Tello speak to me at the Cook County Jail. It’s their first time voting in an election. And it’s the first time the jail will be an official polling location so people in custody can physically cast a ballot.

Anderson: They say every person’s vote counts, so I just went ahead and just voted.

Kirkland: ​​Anderson, along with about eighteen hundred people held in Cook County Jail, cast his vote in the jail’s chapel, which for the day serves as a makeshift polling place

Sergeant: Gentlemen, take it up the stairs…

Kirkland: Detainees sit in chairs in neat rows along the wall, watching as each person makes their way through a maze of voting equipment and election officials. They’re asked first if they’re registered to vote. Their answer either sends them to a plastic folding table to fill out a voter registration card, or over towards the voting machines to cast their ballot in the Illinois presidential preference primary.

Anderson​: It was a cool experience. If they would have come on the deck and did it, but you wouldn’t have gotten off the deck so it was like a breath of fresh air. Got to do a little moving around. So it was alright.

Kirkland: ​​Miriam Tello cast her vote across the street where the women in custody are held.

Tello: At first, I was a little nervous–like I was walking up. But all the directions were clear. Like they gave me all the information. When I went to the booth, it was all smooth, all their information was clear to read, too.

Kirkland: ​​Many of the people I spoke with that day praised their voting experience, including Ioan Lela.

Ioan Lela: It was smoother than I thought it was going to be. I didn’t think they were going to be organized ‘cause, nothing’s organized here, but it was smooth.

Kirkland: ​​Things ran smoothly inside the Cook County Jail for two weekends in early March, but the journey to bring those voting machines inside was anything but.

Sheriff Tom Dart: I was enthusiastically in favor of it, supporting it and pushing it from day one.

Kirkland: ​​Ever since Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart took office​ in 2006​, he says he’s made expanding voting inside the walls of the jail a top priority. He worked alongside nonprofit Chicago Votes and the Chicago Board of Elections to turn the Cook County Jail into a polling place.

Dart: I thought it was a moral imperative that people who are in custody, particularly none of them have been convicted. Who better to be engaged in their community and their society and you know, fixing their, the ills that may have got them there, identifying the issues in their community there that are lacking that could have made their lives better. I mean I just find the whole notion that people who are involved in the criminal justice system shouldn’t vote is repugnant.

Kirkland: In ​August of 2019​, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed into law legislation making Cook County Jail Chicago’s newest polling place. SB2090 was a package of bills to expand access to voting and voter education programs in jails and prisons around the state. Pritzker talked about the jail in his remarks at the bill signing that month.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker: “​We’re going to be putting ​a polling place in the Cook County Jail for detainees who are eligible to vote and a vote-by-mail program in every county across the state of Illinois, that’s 102 counties.”

Kirkland: ​​The law requires county jails and election officials across the state to establish systems giving eligible voters, including pretrial detainees, the opportunity to vote. It also requires counties with more than 3 million residents to establish a temporary polling place within a jail. Cook County is the only Illinois County to meet that requirement. Before voting booths moved in in the lead up to the March 17 primary, detainees had been able to vote by mailing in an absentee ballot. ​Eugene McGraw has been awaiting trial in Cook County since 2018 . He says he’s been voting in elections since 2008, even while in custody. He described how the voting process used to work in the jail.

Eugene McGraw: We did a vote maybe last year sometime, but it was like, they brought some sheets of paper in and we just signed them and it was like, it was real, it was real depressing.

Dart: I couldn’t have said it any better. There’s something about physically being with other human beings in that room, in that environment where there’s serious people deciding the direction of their government. And there’s an energy there.

Kirkland: ​​This March, 1850 people were able to vote from the Cook County jail polling location, roughly 40% of detainees. Sheriff Dart says it’s a sharp increase from past elections

Dart: We only had 700 people vote in the March 2016 primary, and at that point in time, we probably had about, I’d say about eight, 8-9,000 people in custody.

Kirkland:​​ Even before the results had come in, civil rights organizations touted the Cook County Jail as a potential model for other correctional facilities to expand access to ​the ballot​ — demonstrating that not only is it possible to bring a polling place into jail, but showing it can be successful. In jails across the United States, many of those in custody are actually eligible to vote, but the process of voting can vary from state to state. In Massachusetts, a detainee can request a ballot to be mailed to the jail without having to register first. In Arizona, county officials must submit a plan showing exactly how people in custody will be able to vote. And earlier this year in Alabama, “incarceration” was added to the list of acceptable reasons for requesting an absentee ballot. Because the registration and ballot process varies based on location, it can create confusion.

Amani Sawari: We need to make sure that we’re not just, saying, “hooray” when a polling booth is created in the jail, but we need to say, “hooray” when people feel fully equipped to use that polling booth.

Kirkland: That’s Amani Sawari. She’s a community organizer in Detroit, Michigan. She’s also a spokesperson for the Right 2 Vote campaign for incarcerated citizens and a well-known prisoners’ rights advocate. Her company, Sawari Media, produces a newsletter called the Right to Vote Report. It reaches tens of thousands of people, by her count, in jails, prisons and detention facilities in more than 30 states.

Sawari: The prison itself and jails, these facilities have a monopoly on what information is distributed in their facilities. They come up with the rules, they get to say what channels can be on the TV, what magazines come in. They approve of everything that is distributed amongst their populations. And so what’s really important about the Right to Vote report is that we are committed to protecting people’s right to be informed.

Kirkland: ​​Voter education options in jail are limited. Before the March primary Sheriff Dart made sure access to public television was available.

Dart: We have a PBS station here in Chicago and they do a service where they let candidates all give like a two minute spiel. I had that played because I wanted candidates to have the ability to reach out to detainees and have it done in a neutral way.

Kirkland: ​​In the Cook County jail, it’s something many of the detainees talked about, including Kathy Hughes and Ioan Lela.

Kathy Hughes: Only way I knew who was on the ballot is through the television. I think that they don’t show enough through the television about the candidates and what they represent or what they stand for.  I think they don’t show enough.

Lela: We go in there blind a lot of times. We don’t know any of the judges. Um, you know, we see some commercials, but we don’t know their credentials. We don’t know their track records or none of that. A lot of brothers actually did mention that they don’t know nothing about these candidates, you know. So, it would be helpful to have some type of brochures or pamphlets and some type of information, some type of research that we could get from the law library or from outside sources on these candidates.

Kirkland: That’s what Sawari hopes to do with the Right 2 Vote report — put more information into the hands of people in custody.

Sawari: We want to make sure that people know what the newest legislation is that impacts them where it is on a federal level and on a state level, particularly around the area of ending felony disenfranchisement. Our role is to measure that people are informed about what’s going to be on the ballot, and if not, what the best method would be of participating, at least making sure that they know whether or not they can participate.

Kirkland: ​​For the November general election, Sawari is partnering with other groups in an effort to reach overlooked voters in jails.​The effort to contact those jails had just gotten underway when I spoke with Sawari. She said the August edition of the Right 2 Vote report would officially launch the vote by mail in jail campaign. Efforts to expand access to voting for people in jail and prison are happening across the country. While Sawari’s work is nationwide, she’s particularly focused on Michigan and issues related to the rights of incarcerated people there.

Sawari: When it comes to the November election, a lot of people are on edge about wanting to see the repeal of Truth in Sentencing on our November ballot.

Kirkland: Michigan’s Truth in Sentencing law requires that a person convicted of a crime serve the minimum sentence attached to that crime — ​without exception​. It’s one of the issues related to imprisoned people that she’s keeping a close eye on. Among organizations like Sawari’s, the focus is mainly on states with harsh criminal justice policies​. But also places where officials running jails and prisons just don’t know how to facilitate an election for people in custody. In Texas, for example, activists found the administrators running the Harris County jail, which holds over 10,000 people, didn’t know how to let their detainees vote.

Durrel Douglas: That’s the size of a town, right? We were shocked to learn how little education was happening inside when it came to voting. And even when it came to staff and like top brass and actually the administrators, like how much work needed to be done to make sure that even they understood kind of what the rules were and what all we needed to do.

Kirkland: Durrel Douglas worked in the Texas Prison System for 5 years. He eventually ascended to the rank of lieutenant. Now, he’s the executive director of Houston Justice, a group focused on coordinating voter registration drives inside ​the​ jail​. Douglas is working with Amani Sawari to continue pushing for expanding voter access in the Harris County jail and ​beyond​.

Douglas: On one hand, we’re reaching out to jail administrators, you know, some in some states, it’s the warden in some states, it’s the, what, it’s the, whoever the sheriff, that’s the top, top cop at the jail. And we’re saying, “Hey, do you guys have a system?” If you do great, we want to help. And in the event that you don’t have one and you don’t want to do it,​​we’re going to reach directly out to the inmates because in every state there’s some kind of workaround.

Kirkland: ​​Douglas decided to focus his outreach on people in custody.

Douglas: So we said, tell you what: Why don’t we start with all the inmates that we communicate with already that are behind bars, but are gonna be behind bars? And how about we start with them as the very first people to sign on, to commit to vote if they’re eligible,” right? And if we start with them, why not ask them? I’m a community organizer. I understand that it’s the grassroots that really makes things grow. Why not have them be organizers in their pods, on their cell blocks where applicable to sign up their quote unquote neighbors? And there, we have a vote by mail in jail.

Break

Salima: You’re listening to Season 3 the podcast 70 Million and the episode “Voting from Jail is a Right, and Now a Reality in Chicago” which is about the push to introduce polling places within prisons. We’re airing 70 million as part of our ongoing series on voting rights in the run up to the 2020 election, so make sure you keep up to date on our shows and get behind the scenes information on our website radioproject.org. And now back to 70 million.

Foster Bates: Mr. Bates is probably hanging outside, hang tight…

Kirkland: Foster Bates has built a very strong network behind the wall. Bates is serving a life sentence at the ​Maine State Prison​.

Bates: Hello?

Kirkland: Hi, Mr. Bates. How are you?

Bates: I’m not too bad. How are you?

Kirkland: He’s been in prison for 19 years. He’s also served as president of a special NAACP prison chapter for the last 6 years. He spoke with me on the phone from his caseworker’s office in a building called 400 G-pod. He talked about one of his main responsibilities as president — getting other people in the prison registered to vote and distributing information about who and what is on the ballot.

Bates: It’s an important voting bloc because if you look at prison society itself, it’s a community. Maine state Prison, I believe in, my opinion is that we have, decided on, quite a few Gubernatorial races in Maine. We’ve also decided on quite a few state representatives in the state. I believe, people incarcerated, if allowed to vote they can swing an election.

Kirkland: ​​Bates tells me this anecdotally. An MIT study suggests that incarcerated voters are unlikely to swing an election​ in any given way. But a recent Marshall Project survey of more than 8,000 people in prisons and jails found that ​76 percent​ of respondents supported restoring voting rights to all incarcerated people.​ Maine and Vermont​ are the only two states that allow people in prison to vote. ​Puerto Rico​, also. In July, the District of Columbia’s City Council voted to approve a measure extending voting rights to residents with felony convictions incarcerated in jail or prison.​ And in Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds signed an executive order in August that temporarily reinstates voting rights for some residents who’ve been convicted of a felony and completed their sentences. Bates says, the Maine State Prison Branch of the NAACP has registered thousands of voters over the years. But for Bates, voting is about much more than any single election.

Bates: It allows people to stay engaged and it allows people to not only take some control and responsibility back for their lives. It also allows them to be able to dictate and create laws and statutes that affect our everyday lives. If you take away the person’s right to vote, you know, we, we believe that you take away a part of their humanity…

Kirkland: An ongoing legal battle in Florida could show the impact incarcerated voters may have on elections. In 2018, a majority of Florida voters elected to amend the state’s constitution to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions who completed their sentence, excluding murder and sexual offenses. The passage of the amendment meant about 1.4 million ​people would be eligible to vote. But partisan politics intervened. The Republican-led legislature passed a law requiring that the prison term is completed AND ​all fees and restitution​ have been paid. Democrats accused Republicans of voter suppression by creating a modern day ​poll tax​. The prolonged legal battle has shown how polarizing voting rights issues have become. But contrary to assumptions that the formerly incarcerated would lean politically left, a study by the Marshall Project earlier this year showed that granting the right to vote to currently or formerly incarcerated people wouldn’t benefit ​one political party​ over another. Foster Bates says he sees evidence of that being true in the Maine State Prison.

Bates: One of the misconceptions is that, you know, the majority of people who are incarcerated are Democrats and independent. And, and I can personally tell you, that’s furthest from the truth, particularly at this facility

So, we can remove that misconception on how people incarcerated vote.

Kirkland: The study also found that the longer a person was in prison, their ​motivation to vote increased. In the 2008 election, Bates says the prison chapter of the NAACP registered about 500 people to vote. He thinks 2020 could be even bigger.

Bates: I think this voting cycle is probably one of the most important voting cycles that we had in decades.

Kirkland: Then, Covid-19 hit…

Bates: Our education building is shut down for the time being. The library is shut down for the time being. So the only activity we have is just basically physical activity, just going outside, walking around on the track. We’re all wearing a mask, every, everybody wear a mask, anywhere we go into a facility, we have to wear a mask except within the area which we live in.

Kirkland:​​ Normally, Bates would gather groups of about 150 people in one room to walk them through the process of registering to vote or re-registering to vote. He’d also invite representatives into the prison to talk about party platforms and candidates.

Bates: This year, what we’re gonna try to do is we’re going to try to do it virtual. We’re going to try to do what to set up on a Zoom type of format, where we can have the candidates Zoom in, set it up in the multipurpose, chapel area like we, like we’ve done in the past and have it on a big screen.

Kirkland: But how do you safely run an in-person election while trying to contain the spread of a deadly virus? For months, the Cook County jail​was a hotspot for the coronavirus. In fact, just after we spoke with detainees about their voting experiences for this episode, in-person visits were banned from the facility until infection numbers came down.

Stevie Valles: The impact of having polling machines in the jail was felt immediately. And then Wednesday after our first weekend having elections in the jail, the NBA season was canceled. Then everything just started getting shut down.

Kirkland:​​ Stevie Valles is the executive director of Chicago Votes, the nonprofit that worked with Sheriff Dart to get voting machines into the jail in March. For Valles, part of the reason the primary election was so successful was that voting inside the jail meant his group could register voters on the same day. He estimates that of the approximately 1800 voters over those two weekends, about half used same-day voter registration. Now, they’re strategizing how to move forward to November.

Valles: Well, we can’t register voters right now inside the jail. We can’t go into jail right now because the jail is a hot spot.​​ Is this the right thing for us to be doing right now with all that is happening?

Kirkland: Valles estimates that roughly 80% of Chicago Votes volunteers in the jail are over 50, and therefore are at a higher risk for severe illness or death ​from Covid-19.

Valles: We’re at a place now where a lot of the conversation is pivoting towards the election. It does feel like this is an appropriate time to lean back into this work because, let’s face it, voting right now is one of the few direct actions that nobody can stop people from doing. A lot of people are looking for that. ​​They’re looking for some level of empowerment and what has felt like a very helpless year. So, we are now moving in a direction where we’re figuring out what, how we would like the elections to look inside the jail come November.

Kirkland: Sheriff Dart is also looking toward November and the safest way to keep voting in the jail.

Dart: It was just beginning to really take hold when this was going on. And just basic things like getting election judges in our poll watchers that was trickier than because of that. For us to then allow detainees out to go to a poll to vote, I just don’t think that’s going to be that tricky to do. I mean, we can obviously social distance people away from the actual polling machines and in the line to come in and vote. So I don’t think that will be that difficult, but there will be some logistical hurdles that we didn’t have before, but I honestly don’t see a change in a heck of a lot.

Kirkland: That’s a relief for the folks at Chicago Votes.

Valles: If the sheriff is thinking, yeah, we can figure it out to where we can have polling machines in here do say social distancing, no problem. Plus let’s have an absentee ballot chase program running at the same time to be incompliance with the law that was just passed Illinois, then me and the sheriff agree. Turning the Cook County jail into a polling location was the first step in what we plan on being a very long term initiative to unlock civics for people who are in the justice system specifically the incarcerated community.

Kirkland: ​​After what she says was a positive first experience, Miram Tello is anticipating November.

Tello: I’m looking forward to voting again. Kirkland:​​Criminal justice advocates have highlighted the need to make voting more accessible from all carceral facilities and have pointed to a resistance to doing so as an infringement on a constitutional right.

Tello: We’re definitely not convicted. We’re just, it’s sad because it says innocent till proven guilty, but technically in here we’re guilty until proven innocent. So I think they should have it in all jails because we are all innocent at the moment.

Kirkland: Miriam Tello knows she has every right to vote.

Miller: Pamela Kirkland reported this story. After Florida voters passed the Voting Restoration Amendment in 2018 to restore voting rights ​to people with past felony convictions, two years later an appeals court decision has effectively ​stalled access​ to the voting booth for hundreds of thousands of people. In early September, an appeals court upheld the state’s decision to require people with felony convictions pay court fines and fees before they can register to vote. Julie Ebenstein, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement, quote “This ruling runs counter to the foundational principle that Americans do not have to pay to vote” end quote.

Salima: You ‘ve been listening to the podcast 70 million – Voting from Jail is a Right, and Now a Reality in Chicago.” You can find a full list of credits, and even an activism toolkit on this issue on our website, if you’ve gotten inspired to help prisoners vote. That’s at radioproject.org

And we’d love to hear from you – what other election topics do you think we should cover?  Join the conversation on Facebook;  — Our Twitter handle is Making_Contact and on Instagram we’re  makingcontactradioproject.

The Making Contact Team includes:

Monica Lopez, Anita Johnson, Lisa Rudman, Sonya Green. I’m Salima Hamirani.  Thanks for listening to Making Contact!

Election protection is increasingly seen as a critical issue in the United States, a nation that travels worldwide to “supervise” other nations’ elections. Since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court, there’ve been major problems with voter purging, voter ID laws, poll taxes or policies that make people pay to vote, closing of precincts, and other attempts to make voting harder for US citizens. But grassroots election protection and voting rights groups drove a massive surge of voters of color, in particular, to the polls in 2020 – turning out the incumbent Trump regime.  We speak with voter turnout expert  Andrea Miller, union organizer Carolina Miranda, and pro-democracy activist Pam Wilmot, about what must come next to protect democracy in the USA. (Part Two – #39 is Part One)

Image Credit: Carolina Miranda photo  –  Carolina Miranda; Andrea Miller photo  –  The Tennessee Tribune; Pam Wilmot photo  –  The Boston Globe

Caption: Voting Rights Advocates Carolina Miranda, Andrea Miller and Pam Wilmot

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Music Credit:

• Sass N Harmony  – “Wisteria” and “Younger Witch”
• Mississippi John Hurt  –  “Frankie”