 As you all know, Texas passed their voter suppression bill, and now we're kind of seeing what that looks like in practice. And spoiler alert, it's not good. So this is from Ursula Pirano of the Daily Beast. So Texas' new voting law is an absolute nightmare. Election administrators in Texas are reporting a record number of ballot rejections and early voting has only just begun. So just full stop disenfranchisement. This is exactly what we all expected. But this is the goal. This is not an unintended consequence of their voter suppression law. This is the goal of their voter suppression law. So rapid rise in rejected mail-in voting applications and ballots, limited resources among election workers, confusion galore, and a March 1 primary election quickly approaching. This is the reality in Texas as SB1, a controversial voting bill rather signed into law last year, goes into effect. With primary voting already underway, election officials, advocates, and everyday voters are struggling to navigate the newly enacted rules with little room for error. And folks on the ground are sounding the alarm concerned about disenfranchisement among perfectly eligible voting populations. Honestly, it's been an absolute nightmare. Charlie Bonner, communications director for the voting rights group Move Texas told the Daily Beast. SB1 is jam-packed with new rules for voting throughout Texas, among those is a provision requiring voters to provide a driver's license number or the last four digits of their social security number on their mail-in voting applications and ballots. The number provided must match with the state he has on file for any given voter. Opponents worry that's a gateway to rejection with the potential for mail-ballot applications or mail-ballots themselves being balanced because their identification information doesn't match the voter's file. Advocates are also concerned about a lack of awareness of the new law potentially causing voters to unknowingly leave the identification information off their forms. So let's just pause right here. So do you think that after they passed this law, they sent out mailers to voters letting them know about the changes, letting them know, hey, we just made some changes. You're going to have to verify that the information that we have on file matches what you put down on the paper because if you changed anything, you're fucked. Do you think that they did this? Of course they didn't because the goal is to make less people vote and that's exactly what the outcome will be. The current rejection rate for mail-in ballot applications in Texas seems to support that worry. Officials across the state are reporting higher than usual defect rates for mail-ballot applications. Leah Shaw spokesperson for Harris County Elections told the Daily Beast, her county is seeing an 11% rejection rate specific to the new laws. Last month officials in Travis County said they were rejecting about half of the mail-in ballot applications they received, half. That is insanity, according to the Texas Tribune. While 325 applications were rejected in Bexar County for failing to provide an ID number or providing one that was not on file. So this is not just one, two percent of voters getting rejected. Half? 11%? I mean, this is true voter suppression here and it's just, this is awful. Texas voters are entitled to correct their mail-in voting applications or ballots if there's an error, but elections administrators say the process for alerting voters to errors lacks uniformity from county to county. Hmm, interesting. Largely depending on a county's budget and resources, of course. Chris Davis, the elections administrator for Williamson County, said he's blessed to have a staff of 15 and ample resources. Shaw said her office has been able to double its call center team and has mail-ballot staffers who often work 12-hour days in order to go above and beyond in contacting voters, but not all of Texas's 254 counties have the wherewithal. We're able to, because we are the largest county in the state and the fourth in the country, Shaw said, but smaller or less populous counties don't always have those resources and this is the way it's going to be, you know, across the country. So this right here is specifically why it was so crucial that Democrats passed voting rights. And so for them to just give up because Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin won't support a carve out for the filibuster at a minimum and just to have them say, okay, that's it, unacceptable. I mean, what did Joe Biden say after the filibuster carve out was rejected? He said, I don't know if we can get this done, but I'll fight for it. Has anyone seen that? Has anyone seen him try to follow through on that promise to fight because it doesn't even seem like he's trying to make us think that he's fighting. He's just not doing shit. He's sitting on his ass playing chess in the Oval Office with fucking Jill. He's not doing anything. This is a serious threat to our democracy. They have less than a year to act if they don't pass this before November. This is the new normal. This is the new normal. And yet there's just no urgency. They're just moving on and they're saying, okay, let's call it in February. We've got an election this year. Let's just run on what we passed earlier. This is our democracy we're talking about. You can't undo the damage caused to democracy. It's very difficult to do that. So the fact that this wasn't priority number one for the Democratic Party shows how unserious they are about politics. Only 28 states move to change their voting laws after the 2020 election, right? Right? Isn't that more than half, more than half. Democrats are like, we tried. That's it. No pressure on mansion and cinema. No direct condemnation publicly. Look, if it were the case that this was happening and Democrats weren't in control, it'd still be completely unacceptable. But what makes matters worse is the fact that we have a Democratic administration and they have control of both branches of Congress and there's always some fucking excuse. Unacceptable. Either you support democracy or you don't. One thing that really frustrates me is how the media covers this. So the media will say, well, you know, mansion and cinema support voting rights, but they just don't support a carve out to the filibuster. That's fucking bullshit. They don't support voting rights. Otherwise they would support a carve out to the filibuster as they have in the past. They don't want to get rid of the filibuster entirely, but they have supported carve out cinema, supported a carve out for the budget just a couple of months ago. And so they're using the filibuster as plausible deniability. But in actuality, they just don't support the fucking voting rights act. They don't. Yeah. AOC. Right. We may not have a democracy in 10 years. Yeah. That's what I'm worried about too. And I did a video covering her remarks on that because it's so important. I don't think that people really have grappled with the reality of the situation currently. I think that people believe that, you know, things will just improve down the line. No, it's going to get worse. We are reaching territory that is not sustainable for our democracy. The long-term health of our democracy really depends on what we do in this moment. If we don't take action now, when I say we, I mean Democrats specifically in power, if they don't take action right now, if they don't take this seriously, you can't, you can't fix how bad this is becoming. It's bad enough that we have a Supreme Court that's far right with a supermajority, but to not even pass the bare minimum, which by the way, the John Lewis voting rights act that is watered down legislation before the people act was voting rights and electoral reform to an extent and anti-corruption measures. But then they took all that out, watered it down and they just have voting rights act with the John Lewis voting rights act. And they can't even get that done. So it's just, it's infuriating to think about the ways that they have fucked this up and now seemingly they're just done. Yeah, we couldn't get it done. That's it. That's it. You're still in power dummies. What are you doing? Do you or do you not believe in democracy? Because if you don't fight and Republicans further do voter suppression and they pass these Orwellian laws and draconian laws in their countries that allow them to literally override the will of voters and send their own rogue electors to the electoral college to choose whoever wins the next presidency. That's on you. You're complicit. You're complicit. Inaction at this point in time makes you complicit.