Fair Districts PA still helps you tell Gov. Tom Wolf to call a special session of the state legislature to end gerrymandering once and for all in Pennsylvania. Word on the street is that Gov. Wolf wants legislators to come to a compromise on redistricting reform and then call a special session so they can vote on a bill. But legislators already have every incentive to keep things the way they are so they don't have to work to win elections or do the people's will, and since the legislature would, by law, have to pass redistricting reform by late July so it can take effect in November, it sure seems like they also have every incentive to run out the clock. They've gutted anti-gerrymandering bills and swamped them with amendments; do they seem like they want to do the people's will here? Our Governor would be better off dragging them back to work kicking and screaming.
Meanwhile, Color of Change helps you tell Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner to sign HB 4469, which would (among other things) require state and county prisons to provide voter registration forms to folks released from prison. A lot of folks who get out of prison think they've forfeited their right to vote just because they served time; I wonder where they got that impression? From politicians all over America who pretend to be "tough on crime" by depriving felons of the right to vote, maybe? HB 4469 would also ensure that folks in prison who have not yet been tried can still vote by mail. Folks awaiting trial aren't convicted criminals, after all! And if I thought of how easy it'd be to simply detain people you don't like on a maelstrom of charges so they couldn't vote, you can bet the politicians thought of it a long time ago. So let's help our politicians resist temptations such as these.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then Common Cause still helps you do that. I don't think any corporation should ever own any other corporation, but I certainly don't want one corporation being able to reach three-quarters of Americans through faux "local" news channels. Seriously, they're not being "local" if they're reading the same scripts or running the same must-run op-eds or running the same fearmongering "terrorism news desk" stories. Sinclair does all that, and once armed with all those Tribune Media TV channels, Sinclair will get to do all that in front of a lot more people who are running from the drama of cable news channels and hoping they'll get real news they can use from their local channels. They deserve a lot better than yet another big corporation looking to emotionally manipulate them.
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