Solartopia Green Power & Wellness Hour - 11.17.22

THE “MIRACLES” OF GEORGIA & ARIZONA, 2021-2:   HAS DEMOCRACY BEEN SAVED?

 

Our GREEGREE zoom #117 welcomes RAY MCCLENDON of the Georgia NAACP, JOHN BRAKEY of Arizona’s election protection “scanned ballot image” movement, and democracy journalist STEVE ROSENFELD.

 

Together they outline the hard realities of the struggle—in many ways successful—to protect our democracy as seen in the outcome of the 2021 “Georgia Miracle” and the 2022 mid-terms.  

 

As a pillar of grassroots/relational campaigning, McClendon has played a key role in promoting the Get Out the Vote movements that made the difference in twin Senate victories in 2021, and that may hold the key to the “Manchin Runoff” in 2022.

 

Working with Andrea Miller of the Center for Common Ground, McClendon has been at the core of shifting progressive campaign donations away from mainstream Democratic Party media buys and into the machinery of on-the-ground organizing.

 

Based in Arizona, Brakey has pioneered the use of digital scanning in tandem with mailed-out hand-marked paper ballots.  Making a mockery of the 2020 Cyber-Ninja recount fiasco, Brakey has made Arizona into a living laboratory for reliable vote casting and counting.

 

Working the election protection beat, Rosenfeld has published innumerable articles on the 2021 double victory of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof, and in the on-going struggle to securable a reliable voting process.

 

With these three critical players, we provide an absolutely unique and irreplaceable primer on how American democracy must proceed if our nation is to survive.  

 

Above all, we come to understand the pivotal, permanent role of female and Millennial/Zoomer voters in re-shaping the government core of the nation in the age of Trump fascism and eco-suicide.