For America's Birthday 2026

 I began reading this book that the author subtitles A Biography of the First Amendment on the 4th of July which is indeed America's birthday. I purchased Freedom For The Thought That We Hate by Anthony Lewis at a public library's bookstore for one dollar.  George Washington's portrait appears on every one dollar bill.  By that measure, a dollar could be considered an appropriately patriotic price.

 

  Representative John Allen of Connecticut said in the John Adams administration's House of Representatives that newspapers in Philadelphia were attempting to "raise an insurrection", but they were actually urging people to vote for Democratic Republicans.  This was the opposition party.  The Federalists were in power. 

 So leaping to the 20th century,  I was reading internet articles about criticizing the U.S. President and discovered what happened during Wilson's Presidency.  Woodrow Wilson prosecuted about  4,000 Americans under the Espionage and Sedition Acts.  Hundreds were deported even though they weren't illegal immigrants or even convicted of any crime.   See an article about The Palmer Raids. I had no idea that this sort of thing had happened historically. I was flabbergasted.  The Palmer Raids were not taught in school when I was of high school age. 

The most famous person arrested during The Palmer Raids was Emma Goldman.  The link is to her Wikipedia article.  Below is a public domain photo of Emma Goldman from her Wikipedia article.

                                                       

   It's mentioned in the Emma Goldman Wikipedia article that she was interviewed by feminist reporter, Nellie Bly.  I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that interview.  I recommend a novel dealing with Nellie Bly called The Girl Puzzle by Kate Braithwaite that I reviewed here .                                                    

 When the U.S. entered WWI, a mob in Lewiston, Montana went into the high school and burned all the textbooks for a class on studying the German language.  I suppose that the Americans who would be spying on the Germans would already have mastered their language.  A pardon petition for the German textbook burners was circulated among law students at the University of Montana in Missoula.  Yet it wasn't until 2006 that Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer pardoned 78 dead Montanans convicted of sedition in 1918. 

I admit that I have resisted the idea that FDR was responsible for Japanese American internment, but author Anthony Lewis is absolutely certain of it.  I think that FDR would have privately considered Japanese American internment barbaric.  Even if he thought it was necessary, surely Eleanor Roosevelt would have been opposed to it.

The alternative to internment for Japanese Americans during WWII was enlisting in the military.  No Japanese American who fought in WWII was ever charged with disloyalty.  A number of them were honored as heroes by the U.S. military, and by French civilians that some of them rescued.

 In a discussion of the definition of obscenity in this book, Justice Brennan was quoted as saying that it wasn't obscene if there was something that redeemed it or had "social importance".  Now I know where the phrase in Tom Lehrer's song "Smut" came from --"To be smut it must be utterly without redeem or social importance."

Author Lewis discussed politicians wanting to ban "a film like The Miracle."  I'd never heard of it, so I had to look it up.  It was the focus of Burstyn v. Wilson (1952)  dealing with a movie about a girl who thought the man who seduced her was St. Joseph and that the baby she gives birth to as a result of the seduction was Jesus.  There were Catholic protests demanding that the film be banned.  The Supreme Court said that banning it because it was religiously objectional was a violation of the First Amendment. 

  Professor Paul A. Freund of Harvard Law School is quoted as saying "They say money talks.  I thought that was the problem, not the solution."  In 2007 the Supreme Court decided that restrictions on campaign spending violated the First Amendment.  If that is how our political system is going to be run, we will have a country we don't recognize eventually.

                                               

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                       

                                                

 

                                                     

                                                        

Memoir Dealing With Gender Issues

 Journalist Susan Faludi's father had a realization about his gender identity.  Although she was born biologically male, they were psychologically female.  S/he had sex reassignment surgery and wanted to become known as Stephanie. This was an important aspect of Susan Faludi's own life story.  I purchased this memoir from the used section of an independent bookstore.

                                               

As a photographer, Stephanie Faludi made a career out of altering images.  I'd like to comment that image alteration has become much more prevalent with the recent usage of artificial intelligence. 

 I would also like to observe that Stephanie Faludi's photographic career was about deception.  Another deceptive practice that Stephanie enjoyed was switching price tags on items at stores, and called this "getting away with things".  In contrast, my own father was a tremendous rule follower.  He never tried to get away with things.  He thought that was wrong, and taught me to be a follower of rules.  If people don't follow basic rules, society descends into chaos.

During Susan's childhood, Stephanie had been violent toward Susan's mother who had reported Stephanie's aggression to the police.  The police eventually told Stephanie to leave the family home.  This was after twenty years of marriage.

Susan Faludi was related to the Grunberger family.  Leopold Grunberger owned a large lumber company in Hungary.  He served in World War I in the Austro- Hungarian Army which was an ally of Germany.  He was also a Hungarian Jew who was opposed to Zionism.

In this context, we need to understand the Hungarian Jewish community during this period.  Hungary was making a special effort to preserve Hungarian.  Jews were encouraged to speak Hungarian, assimilate and become citizens.  Jews were called "Hungarians of the Mosaic persuasion".   Yet the "blood libel" about Christian blood being an ingredient in Passover matzot was part of Hungarian culture until the late 19th century.  I guess non-Jewish Hungarians never saw matzot.  There is no red tinge on them.

 I learned from Faludi that the nephew of Zionist leader Theodore Hertzel was briefly the Mayor of Budapest.  

 Attila Petschauer was a Jewish Hungarian who competed on behalf of Hungary in the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam and won the silver medal in the individual saber competition.  Hungarians lionized him as the "Magyar Musketeer".  In the 1932 Olympics he also participated, but did not win an individual medal.  In 1943, Petschauer was arrested by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp in Davidovka, Ukraine where he died. 

I discovered this blog review unfinished about a month later and decided to finish it, but my focus has been on the Jewish connection rather than the gender identity of  Faludi's father. I originally became interested in Faludi's memoir because Faludi's father transitioned to female.  Yet my attention scattered due to difficulties in my personal life. Mea culpa!  Still, now I can say that my readers now have another completed review.

                                 

                                                    

                                                       

 

 

 

  

 

                                         

A Women's History of the Ancient World

I acquired The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World by Daisy Dunn from a public library.  I hoped that I would learn from this book, though I also expected that there would be a great deal of content that I already knew.  When I got around to reading it, it took me ten days. 

                                               

    

Women were allowed to run in footraces  at the Olympics every four years in honor of the Goddess Hera.  The women ran on a slightly shorter track than the men.  In high school, I ran the mile on my school's track because my father had done it.  It wasn't an official event.  I ran before school, so that the boys wouldn't be using the track.  I was caught because I stayed later once than I should have.  The coach clocked me and said it was a shame that I couldn't compete.  There was no girl's track team.  In gym class, the girls ran the quarter of a mile.  I was, of course, the fastest.  When I went to college, there wasn't any women's track team there either.  This was in the early 1970's. 

    In  ancient Rome, women weren't allowed to wear colorful garments.  The married women engaged in a protest. They blocked the streets leading to the Forum.  The women then picketed the home of the Brutus family.  I never heard of these protests by Roman women.  I identify with these women as someone who has been a protestor beginning when I was teenager protesting the War in Vietnam.

This is a short review because I knew most of the content in this book, but what I did include felt significant to me.  I'm going to give this four stars on Goodreads. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                           

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

 

                                                        

                                                       

Food Fix: A Thorough Study of Important Food Issues

 I read Food Fix because I am interested in nutrition.  I think that I purchased it on 
Amazon.

                                                  

 

 I wasn't aware of how little land is used to grow healthy food.  I try to eat organic, but I do eat food that isn't organic when organic isn't available.

I learned from this book that 60% of Americans have one chronic disease and 40% have more than one.  When I originally read this book, I wrote in my notes that I had no chronic diseases, but I have since realized that I have hypoglycemia.  

Farm work is a dangerous activity, author Hyman reveals.  Farm workers die at seven times the rate of workers in other occupations.  Many die from pesticide poisoning.  This is a world wide problem due to our food system.  It's linked to the issue of high health costs.  The agencies that are supposed to be regulating pesticides aren't doing their jobs.  Hyman uses a Hebrew phrase for what we should be doing.  It's tikkun olam.  This means repair the world. He points out that grass fed meat and regeneratively grown fruits and vegetables should be cheaper than industrial (non-organic) food.  Clean ups of chemical dumps by the food industry are included in our grocery costs. We are losing our topsoil, and it's projected that it will be gone in sixty years.  I'll definitely be gone myself well before.  I looked up the U.S. state with the lowest obesity rate. It's Colorado, but that lowest rate is 25%.  This means that a quarter of the population of Colorado is obese.  I suppose this is considered relatively good.  

By 2050 it's projected that there will be 200 million to 1 billion climate refugees. As I expected, a major cause of the current wave of refugees who are arriving in the United States is climate change.  I found an article on the subject here. This means that the U.S. could decrease the tide of refugees by assisting with programs that could help to slow down climate change in their home countries.

I am happy to say that Uruguay and Peru have put warning labels on junk food.   In the Philippines they have doubled the tax on sodas made with high fructose corn syrup. San Francisco taxes soda in order to provide nutritious meals in public schools with locally grown fruit and vegetables.   At the University of California in San Francisco there has been a 25% reduction in drinking soda which has improved weight and cholesterol.  Plus there has also been a lower rate of pre-diabetes.  More than six U.S. cities and counties have soda taxes.  Berkeley was the first  American city to institute a soda tax.  Oakland also has a soda tax.  They are the result of referendums.  On the other hand, the poor who receive SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) are targeted with junk food marketing.   Promoting healthy food for SNAP recipients would lower health care costs.  Congressman David Swift blames obesity on lack of exercise, but Hyman wants us to believe that diet is the real cause of obesity.  I happen to think that both poor diet and lack of exercise are serious issues for Americans. 

In 2015 a study revealed that dietary fat didn't cause weight gain or heart disease.  I'm suspicious of that result.  I might believe that dietary fat causes less weight gain than sugar, but none at all?  I suppose I should read Hyman's book on the subject, Eat Fat, Get Thin . I ordered a copy on Amazon.  

Hyman  complains about marketing junk food in schools.  This didn't happen in any school that I attended.  I noticed that most students did eat junk food.  When I was younger, Mom packed healthy lunches for me to take to school, but I would add an unhealthy sugar packed dessert.  I have always liked sugary desserts.  I think TV commercials probably influenced me.  Of course, they wouldn't be in the refrigerator if my mother had refused to buy them when I put them in the cart.

 I also ate fruit and vegetables, and the low fat protein that my mother tended to buy.  My mother probably thought the sugar was a low percentage of what I ate, and therefore not particularly worrisome.  I never got fat like some of my friends.  My doctor currently tells me that my weight is normal.  I still eat the way I did as a child with dessert as a sugary indulgence twice a day.  I admit that I always look forward to dessert. And I love going out for pizza, usually for lunch, once or twice a week.  Sometimes I'll have ice cream for dessert after the pizza.  Now that's probably my equivalent of a diet disaster.  

This book doesn't just deal with diet.  It deals very centrally with the food industry which involves giant corporations who donate to members of Congress.  Over 600 companies spent $500 million  to influence the 2014 Farm Bill.  The members of Senate and House Committees dealing with food receive money from one of the largest food oriented corporations, Monsanto.   

I was shocked to learn that each of the fifty U.S. states has an obesity rate of at least 20%!  

 I also found it very disquieting to discover from Food Fix that after the American Civil War, the restaurant industry lobbied to hire freed slaves and have them work for tips alone!  These freed slaves would have been very close to being slaves financially.

There is a great deal of focus on the consumption of soda, which I never drink because I don't like it.  I prefer to drink water, organic milk and organic juices.  The taxpayers pay for 31 billion servings of soda for the poor through SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) which is what food stamps are now called. Junk food advertising targets SNAP recipients.  It's advertised the same week that they get these benefits.  Providing healthy food to SNAP recipients would reduce chronic conditions and lower the costs of health care.  Sugary drinks should be eliminated as something that can be purchased through SNAP.

Hyman discusses ending processed food on military bases. I think processed food addicts would go off base to get their unhealthy meals.  The most obvious junk food was banned from school vending machines, but there is unregulated processed food marketing. Hyman points out that processed food kills more people than cigarettes. Children are being marketed to on the internet.  This includes processed food ads.  Junk food has also been integrated into games.  My mother told me to ignore all advertising as a child, and I trained myself to ignore all ads wherever they were.  I still ignore them. 

There are places where soda is taxed.  This is a highly contentious issue with some being very anti-soda and others being very pro-soda.  There was a law in Columbia against even mentioning soda taxes.  On the other hand, the government of Columbia wanted to ban the marketing of soda.  San Francisco uses their soda tax for the production of nutritious school meals with locally grown fruits and vegetables.  At the University of California in San Francisco there has been a 25% reduction of soda consumption which has led to an improvement in weight, cholesterol and less development of diabetes. Hyman says that you have to walk four miles to burn off one 20 oz. bottle of soda.  He recommends that tax rates on soda with more sugar should be higher, and should be lower on soda with less sugar.  This would encourage soda companies to make products containing less sugar.  The Philippines had an excellent idea.  In 2017 they doubled the tax for soda with high fructose corn syrup.  The bad news comes from Mexico.  It's the country that consumes the most soda in the world.  It's also a nation with one of the highest rates of obesity.  On the other hand, Berkeley, California was the first American city to tax soda. It was the result of a referendum.  Why am I not surprised?   Hyman thinks we should have soda free zones. 

  I am happy to inform you that Uruguay and Peru have put warning labels on junk food. 

Hyman wants to convince the authorities to feed prisoners a healthy diet because violence in prison could be reduced.  It seems to me that healthy food would be more expensive.  Could we afford healthy food for prisoners ?  Has it been proven that there would be less violence in prisons, or it a theory?  Would this be an expensive experiment that doesn't reduce violence, or  maybe not by very much?  

There is another category of persons that has become overweight due to their diet.  That's our military.   Fat soldiers who can't fight well, is a more serious problem than overweight prisoners. 

It boggled my mind that many who work on assembly lines in the fast food industry have to wear diapers because they don't get bathroom breaks.   Yikes!

 Chemical dumps that the food industry must clean up are included in the price of food.   Dumping chemicals isn't legitimately part of the costs of food. So why should we pay for it when we buy food?  We should find out how much more we're paying for food than we really need to pay, and start picketing food companies with signs about having to pay for dumping chemicals or any other unnecessary noxious cost.  

I looked up causes of soil depletion and found that one cause is overgrazing.  Why can't we periodically stop grazing the cattle on one piece of land?  We move the cattle to graze elsewhere which will also be left alone after a while.  Then the original piece of land will have recovered and can be used for grazing again.  I seem to recall that medieval people had an agricultural rotation system of some kind.  Maybe they understood the land better than we do. 

So Hyman later moves on to sea food.  He advises us to eat sustainably raised, low mercury and high omega 3 sea food.   Sardines and wild caught salmon are given as good examples.  He also recommends avoiding dairy products from cows.  This reduces type 2 diabetes, heart disease and strokes.  Similar products from goats and sheep that feed on organic grass are better for your health, but those are probably difficult to obtain.  I eat sardines and wild caught salmon already.  

 Hyman is concerned about having to decipher ingredient labels.  For me, only one aspect of food labels is important.  That's the word "organic".  If that word isn't there, I don't buy it.  Organic means that the food item contains natural ingredients and that they are organic.  There are no chemicals in organic food to figure out, and no food dyes which Hyman covers somewhat later in the book.  

I had to sit up and take notice of  this quote from Hyman:

"Fast food kills more people than drive by shootings."

This is self-evident when you think about it.  Drive by shootings are in the headlines, but fast food is daily life.  It doesn't make the headlines.  The people fast food kills are dying of dietary causes.  People eat it without thinking about it and neither do newspaper reporters.  A book like Food Fix dealing with nutritional issues is one of the few places you'll see fast food deaths discussed.

Hyman's website is at Mark Hyman M.D.  He is also the host of a podcast at Content Library – Podcast – Mark Hyman, MD.

 I want my readers to know that I would grade this book A++ if I could, but I can only give it the five star maximum on Goodreads.  This is so thorough, and there were so many revelations of significant information.  I was bowled over by this book.

 

                                                  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Excellent Memoir of African Slave History and Scuba Diving

My first February read was a smash!  What it smashed was my previous beliefs about African American history.  My reading on this topic has admittedly been limited.  I know I read several books by Zora Neale Hurston, but they must have been read pre-Goodreads because I have no record of them.  I had this problem with my last review which did not deal with a book by an African American.  It had been some time ago since I read that author, Nicola Griffith.  So I am again trying to excavate my memories. 

 When I did a search of my Goodreads books for "African American", I found that I had read  King Peggy by Peggielene Bartels in 2012.   This is the only book that came up since I've been recording my books on Goodreads.  I am really sorry that I've read no other books about African Americans since I started recording my books on Goodreads before the book that is the subject of this review.    

  

                                                     

 

  The book that I'm reviewing is the memoir Written in the Waters by Tara Roberts, and I obtained it from a public library.   Tara Roberts is an African American explorer who decided to learn how to scuba dive in order to locate and document wrecks of  ships that had gone down carrying kidnapped Africans brought to the Americas to become slaves.  Roberts needed courage and tenacity to follow through on such a commitment.  I  have a great deal of respect for her.  She now works for The National Geographic Society.  If you want to know more about Tara Roberts than I provide in this review, go to her website .

The Yoruban Goddess Yemaya dances in Tara Roberts' imagination.  She wonders if Yemaya is her "patron saint".  Since she is a diver, I would think that Yemaya definitely is her Goddess. She needed to do thirty dives to prepare for training.  Roberts thought of herself as "an intrepid explorer".  I agree with this self-concept. Roberts felt that diving is "a holy communion with Yemaya".

Artifacts that are found underwater need to be drawn where they were found.  They also have to be measured with precision using rulers, pencils and mylar paper which can be used underwater. Once the object and its location have been fully recorded, the artifacts can be moved for conservation, additional analysis or display.

Ayana, another Black diver mentioned in Written in the Waters, pointed out that only 1% of archaeologists are Black, and that less than twenty of a possible one thousand slave vessel shipwrecks have been found and documented.  This is because Black history hasn't been considered a priority.  Yet most of the planet is covered with water, so Black history beneath the sea needs to be more of a priority.

Rebellions and suicides occurred on many of the slave ships that shipwrecked. I would think that they may have caused the shipwrecks.

Captives intended for slavery were made to walk around a tree called the Tree of Forgetfulness--seven times for women and nine times for men in order to forget their identity, culture and history.  A King of Dahomey began this practice.  The original tree from the 17th century wasn't there, but there was a newer baby tree.  I would think that the baby tree would have less power and might even be ineffective.

 Author Tara  Roberts thinks that her Africa is in the U.S.  I wonder if she means adapting elements of African culture and religion to living in an American context. It could also be that she might feel more at home in the African descended communities in  Puerto Rico or Brazil.

This author lists water deities from African Diasporic Religion.  They are Yemaya, Oshun, Olokun, Mami Wata and Abena.  I knew about all of them except Abena.  So I looked her up and found that Abena Motianim was on the list of knowledge deities. Then I found information on YouTube which indicated that Abena is a personification of the nation of Ghana. 

Tara Roberts didn't go to Ghana nor did she list it as a potential destination.  She was invited to Costa Rica in Central America to document a slave ship, but she wanted to go to the Afro-Punk Festival in Johannesburg which is in South Africa.  Roberts is aware that White South Africans based apartheid on Jim Crow. I discovered online that Jim Crow originally referred to a song called "Jump Jim Crow", but it became a pejorative term for African Americans. It later meant segregation laws.

I was actually very impressed with Written in the Waters.  I graded it A+ which would be five stars on Goodreads.  The large time investment I put into reading and taking notes on this book was very worthwhile.

                                                         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

She is Here: A Nicola Griffith Anthology

 I requested She is Here from Edelweiss in advance of publication because I have read this author, and thought I'd like an anthology of Nicola Griffith's work.   The books that I have read by this author are the novels Ammonite and Hild.  Unfortunately, I read them so long ago that I have no record of them, but I do have a good impression of these books which is why I decided to review She is Here.       

                                                  

                                                                                                

Griffith tells us that a writer is "a kind of  shaman"  which she defines as being able to "explore unknown territory and bring back maps".  Shamanic trance is an alternative state of consciousness.  Your mind is elsewhen.  There are no maps.

Griffith  continues from her author perspective to discuss immersion.  This means experiencing what a character experiences.  It's not only thoughts and feelings, but the sensory aspect--what the character sees, hears, smells and tastes.  In order to accomplish this, the writer must not only do research, she must be able to live within the book's context herself. 

In an article about branding for books and authors  that appears in She is Here,  branding is defined as "knowing who you are...and showing it".  I dispute this definition because it's author oriented and implies authenticity.  If you write a novel, self-publish it, and it has a few reviews on Amazon, you may be thrilled that anyone has read your book.  Yet such a book doesn't even require branding.

Branding is really  about selling a concept of a marketable product.  If you have a self-published book that only sold a few hundred copies, then it won't interest a major publisher.  They would say that there is no established market for this book. The marketing department at a major publisher develops the brand.  Branding is a commercial concept.  It involves what the marketing department can sell to the audience who is the market for the product. Major publishers want your book to sell hundreds of thousands of copies at the very least. They spend money on advertising their products, and they want to make a profit.  Authenticity doesn't even enter the equation.  In fact, commercial marketing inflates the value of a product through branding.  Authenticity goes out the window.  

I was reminded in this book that the Bechdel Test involves works that contain at least two female  characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. Griffith tells us that the disabled version of the Bechdel Test is The Fries Test  which was developed by Kenny Fries.  The disabled characters can't be cured or killed.  Fries is a memoirist, poet and librettist. Since I am interested in opera, I'd like to note in this review that he wrote the libretto for The Memory Stone for Houston Grand Opera which premiered in 2013.  For more about Kenny Fries see his Wikipedia article.

Griffith put out a call for book length manuscripts intended for adult readers that pass the Fries Test toward the end of 2017.   Eventually, she had a list of more than fifty submissions.  Of those fifty some were written some time ago, some were out of print and a few were in a foreign language.  Based on my own reading of fiction by disabled authors, I believe that most have dealt with the blind.  I don't know if a seeing individual in a wheelchair feels represented by fiction centering on blindness.  At that time, there were five million novels in English.  Griffith says that a census from a non-specified year recorded that one in five people were disabled.  So in order to represent the reality of English speaking people, the proportion of novels with disabled characters passing the Fries Test should be one in five. There would need to be one million novels that pass the Fries Test.  I don't think that will ever happen because the publishing industry is controlled by non-disabled people.

Griffith claims that a million novels centering on disability are needed  to "overwrite the corrosive influence of "ableism".  They wouldn't necessarily do that because the Fries Test  doesn't require that disabled characters be positively portrayed.  Some readers might say that positive portrayal is implied by the Fries Test, but I think it should be specified because non-disabled authors may be trying their hand at dealing with disability themes with no background in these topics.  They should immerse themselves in positive work by disabled authors before attempting their own works on this subject.

 I was glad to learn from this book that Griffith intended her novel Ammonite to challenge the science fiction writer Doc Smith's misogynist assumption that women aren't human without men. 

 Her novel Hild deals with the 7th century Abbess of Whitby Abbey which was founded as a double house that separately included both nuns and monks.  Griffith tells us that Hild means battle in Old Norse.  A search revealed that on Wisdom Library the name is associated with the Valkyries. This Abbess hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664 C.E. (Common Era) that dealt with trying to resolve the differences in the practices of the Celtic Church and the Roman Catholic Church. Hild was baptized in a mass conversion.  She probably wouldn't have known very much about Christianity then. The only biography of Hild is five pages long.   It emphasizes her visions and the miracles attributed to her. We also know that she advised royalty.  It isn't known where Hild was buried.

Griffith realized that she wanted to become a writer at Whitby Abbey.  She thinks of the Abbess Hild as having made both Whitby Abbey and her.  She was named  the 2025 Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers Association.  

Despite this recognition, I have to say that  I liked this anthology, but didn't love it.  I'm giving it a B which will be three stars on Goodreads.

 

                                                    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                   

 

                                                        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New York Times Book on Voter Suppression

I decided to read this library book because I'm interested in a book on voter suppression that was written by New York Times staff.   I subscribe to this newspaper and I respect it a great deal.  

I have a great deal of interest in voting and have always voted ever since I became eligible to vote.   I understand when people have challenging work schedules and can't manage to vote. Yet if they have relatively easy circumstances for voting in their precincts, I really don't understand why they absent themselves from the polls on Election Day.

                                                   

 I was amazed to learn that a national Election Day was established in 1845 in order to prevent fraud.  According to political science professor Michael McDonald, a single election day was considered to be needed so that people couldn't vote multiple times at more than one location. The U.S. has been obsessed with election fraud for almost two centuries. Consider how hard political organizations have to work to get people to vote at all, yet our leaders think that people would vote multiple times in the same election if they didn't actively prevent fraud.  Election fraud is actually so rare that it's nearly non-existent. Yet I predict that there will never be national elections held online because of the fear of fraud.

In 2002 the Help America Vote Act passed both houses of Congress. HAVA required all states to have electronic voting machines.  This doesn't mean that an individual precinct will have an electronic voting machine.  A precinct may be hand counting ballots.

I discovered that my impression that persons who had ever been convicted of a felony weren't allowed to vote in my state was completely wrong.  They are allowed to vote after serving their time.   I looked it up online.  This is the case in most U.S. states.  Though Republicans in Virginia and other states are trying to keep people with convictions from voting permanently.

The case of a woman who was released from prison in Florida was mentioned.  She was suing the state because she was charged $1000 in court fees that she considered a poll tax.  I imagine that she was considering it a poll tax because she needed to pay it in order to vote. That is a considerable barrier to voting for a newly released prisoner who will probably have difficulty finding employment.  

I learned about voter suppression of Native Americans in states where you must have a residential address.  Many Native Americans don't have residential addresses if they live on reservations.  Those Native Americans who are allowed to vote and register to vote, usually vote for Democrats. 

Then I read in this book about Maine Republicans ending voter registration on Election Day claiming it will stop voter fraud. Maine has had only two cases of voter fraud in 38 years.  The Republican governor of Wisconsin predicted that his state's voter ID law would cost Hillary Clinton votes.  In 2012 he claimed that the voter ID law would lower Obama's voter tally because Democrats cheat more often.  One of the few instances of voter fraud in Wisconsin was a vote for this same Republican governor.  Later in 2015 a staff aide to a Republican state legislator resigned because the Republican caucus was discussing voter ID bills as a means of suppressing the votes of college students and minorities.  

Photo ID laws mandating that voters must display their photo IDs when they vote tend to suppress the votes of the elderly and minority groups because an ID costs money.  The author of this article does consider requiring IDs to vote a kind of poll tax.  In Missouri, as of the publication of this book, the Missouri State Legislature had voted to approve a referendum in which Missouri voters will decide whether there should be a constitutional amendment requiring that voters show a photo ID when they vote. 

In an article on early voting, I discovered that a 1977 flood control proposition that was on the ballot in Monterey, California was the first modern American election decided by people who voted early.  The author of this article predicts that in the future campaigns may be starting up to six weeks before Election Day.  He must have meant local elections, not elections involving candidates for state or national office which start a great deal earlier.  

I was astonished to learn that in 1978 California was the first state to allow anyone to cast absentee ballots.  I would have thought that absentee ballots began earlier than that to allow soldiers who are serving outside their districts to vote. 

There is an article in this book with the title "The Student Vote is Surging, So Are Efforts to Suppress It" by Michael Wines.  In 2018 there was a poll taken at Harvard University.  45% of students aged 18-24 identified as Democrats, 24% considered themselves Republicans and 29% called themselves Independents.  Students became an important voting bloc in the 2020 election.  The Speaker of the Republican majority state legislature in New Hampshire promised to "clamp down" on students voting.  He said that students should be discouraged from voting because they have no life experience, but I encountered students who were working part time at a lower level in their professions while I was in graduate school.  They also did all the practical things that people who may have been high school dropouts have needed to master such as shopping for groceries, doing laundry and paying the rent.  

Disenfranchisement, as the New Hampshire Speaker of the State Legislature demonstrated, is an actual issue.  Voters recognize this. 3/4 of Americans say that the country is going in the wrong direction.  Gerrymandered districts cause certain voters to be favored over others.  So does the campaign finance system that gives corporations and the wealthy greater power. 

Another issue is that in most elections voters don't see any candidate that understands their problems.  So they end up voting against a candidate who they believe will make things worse rather than for one who will make their situations better. 

Almost every state allows ordinary citizens to challenge a voter's eligibility on or before Election Day.  I challenged a voter's eligibility once.  I was an election officer in several elections.  During one election, I did see someone enter the precinct a second time and stand in line to vote.  I informed the other election workers in case they hadn't noticed that this individual had already voted. The voter's signature on the rolls would have stopped this person, but I thought that the individual should have been escorted off the premises.

I spent some time poring over my notes on The New York Times articles in this volume because I care so much about this topic.  I want my readers to stay informed and please find the time to vote!