Migrant Caravan, Oregon Voter Law, Suspicious Packages: 3 Stories You Should Read 10/24/2018
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In the category of: Democracy under attack, quite literally.
Suspicious packages sent to Time Warner Center, Clinton and Obama
He said the people of New York won’t be intimidated and will be undeterred.
“We cannot be terrorized if you refuse to allow the terrorists to win,” de Blasio said.
In the category of: More of this please.
Under new Oregon law, all eligible voters are registered unless they opt out
Americans are required to register if they want to vote; as of this week, Oregonians will have to register not to.
In front of a packed and cheering audience Monday, Gov. Kate Brown signed a first-in-the-nation bill to automatically register all eligible Oregonians to vote when they obtain or renew a driver’s license or state identification card.
Those who are registered through the new process will be notified by mail and will be given three weeks to take themselves off the voting rolls. If they do not opt out, the secretary of state’s office will mail them a ballot automatically 20 days before any election.
When Brown signed House Bill 2177 into law, she was building on the Beaver State’s history as a ballot-box innovator, which has led to high voter participation. Oregon was the first state in the country to switch to all-mail voting when Ballot Measure 60 was passed in 1998 by a wide margin. Washington state and Colorado later followed suit.
In the category of: It’s more complicated than it looks, and it looks pretty complicated.
How a group of Central American migrants hundreds of miles from the US border became Trump’s closing election argument.
They made the decision to leave their home countries, assessing that the danger of leaving was outstripped by the danger of facing gang death threats or feeding a family on $5 per day. And they made the decision to go together, joining the caravan as it progressed, instead of alone like tens of thousands of their fellow Guatemalans and Hondurans (and Salvadorans) do every year.
The caravan has provided an irresistible visual for Republican closing arguments about immigration. In Trump’s first TV ad of the presidential primary in 2015, he used an image of a mass of immigrants; fact-checkers revealed the picture was in fact taken in Morocco. Now, as he nears the midterm elections, Trump has the image he wanted all along.
The decision about 160 Honduran migrants made to travel as a group in the open to the US — and the decision thousands have made to join them en route — is the result of a situation that predates Trump. The United States and Mexico have worked to make the journey to the US less appealing to Central Americans, but many residents of the Northern Triangle find the prospect of eventual asylum in the US — however difficult it is to get there — more appealing than the insecurity they’re facing at home.
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