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The Justice Department is suing Texas – alleging that its new voting law is plain old voter suppression.

For example, in Texas, it’s a felony for a public official to send a mail-in ballot application to someone who didn’t request it. Which means under Texas law, Washington’s entire voting system would be illegal, and our secretary of state would be under arrest.

Thank goodness we don’t have voter suppression here!

Or so I thought. Until I went to the secretary of state’s website and discovered that of 4,814,877 ballots mailed out — each one of which would have led to a felony prosecution in Texas – over THREE MILLION are missing! They were never returned. Even though we are not in Texas!

Over three million people here in Washington state suppressed their OWN votes!

In King County — of the 1.4 million ballots mailed out, 600,000 are missing.

And no one’s investigating! Even Trump is silent!

All that talk about election fraud – you know what the real fraud is? That none of the people elected Tuesday was the choice of a majority of the qualified voters. Not the mayor-elect, not the county executive, … not a single one of the candidates. Because a majority of voters chose to suppress their ballots.

The only difference between us and Texas is that we did it to ourselves – in an election where we were choosing who controls most of our local services, including the police and the schools.

I know we have a lot of young activists in this area who want to protest vote suppression by taking it to the streets – but why not take it to your friends first? Especially if you’re in the 18-24 age group where 85% of the ballots are missing.

You can actually enter a friend’s name and birthday on the website and see when they last voted. It could be a great icebreaker. Or it might creep them out. But if you want to stop vote suppression, you might as well start right here at home.

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