Electoral Systems-Effects

Why Fox News was created

WILLIAM FALK NOVEMBER 22, 2019 The Week

If Fox News had a DNA test, it would trace its origins to the Nixon administration. In 1970, political consultant Roger Ailes and other Nixon aides came up with a plan to create a new TV network that would circumvent existing media and provide "pro-administration" coverage to millions. "People are lazy," the aides explained in a memo. "With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you." Nixon embraced the idea, saying he and his supporters needed "our own news" from a network that would lead "a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition." 

Lee Atwater Republican Southern Strategy From Gold Water to Trump

"You start out in 1954 saying niger niger niger but then you get abstract and start saying you want to cut taxes and the by product of that is blacks get hurt worse than whites.

The House Map’s Republican Bias Will Plummet In 2022 — Because Of Gerrymandering

by By Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejía 3/31/2022 538

Even in Democrats’ worst-case scenario at this point, the House’s long-standing (we’re talking over 50 years) bias toward Republicans would drastically diminish. That would certainly be historic — but it wouldn’t mean everything is finally hunky-dory with our congressional maps. Some of this increase in balance is thanks to courts striking down Republican gerrymanders in states such as North Carolina, but Democrats achieved this near-parity mostly through gerrymanders of their own in states such as New York and Illinois. The result is an overall national map that looks fair but individual state maps that are anything but.
We have metrics to show this. Efficiency gap is a statistic that attempts to quantify how efficient a map is at converting votes into seats for a given party. For example, a map with an R+10 efficiency gap would be expected to produce 10 percent more Republican-leaning seats than a fair map would. The inventors of efficiency gap proposed a test whereby any map that produces two or more extra House seats for a party should be considered an unconstitutional gerrymander. Under the maps in place for the 2022 elections, seven states flunk that test, and several others come close.

The Supreme Court is Ready to Revive a policy to Make Most of Government Unconstitutional

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In 2019, four conservative members joined a dissent authored by Neil Gorsuch, who wrote that “the court should revive the dormant nondelegation doctrine.” Samuel Alito authored a separate opinion that also praised the nondelegation doctrine, and wished for an opportunity to make that clear in a case that was not about expanding prosecution of sex offenders. Since then both Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett have joined the nondelegation chorus.

Our generation will either renew democracy -- or lose it forever

by Garry Kasparov Nov 17 2021 CNN

Because democratic sentiment is weak, the rights to vote and free speech are more vulnerable in my adopted home of America today than at any point in my life. And so I founded the Renew Democracy Initiative with leaders and thinkers from across the political spectrum to push back against America's growing illiberalism -- and to highlight the experiences of those like me, who have been at the forefront of fighting for democracy for decades.

How ranked-choice voting saved the Virginia GOP from itself

By Raymond J. La Raja and Alexander Theodoridis the Washington Post 11/01/2021

Under a ranked-choice system, when the ballots are tallied, the last-place candidate is removed and the second choices of his supporters are distributed to the other candidates. This process continues until one candidate is left standing. There are several benefits to doing things this way. First, voters can vote sincerely for their favorite candidates — even sure losers — because they know that their subsequent choices will be counted. More important for the quality of the selection, requiring that candidates do more than eke out a modest plurality makes it less likely that a factional candidate disliked by most of the party will prevail. 
Had the Virginia GOP held an ordinary primary, Chase might well have won — or at least, her attacks on Youngkin might have left him wounded in the general election. Chase might have also fared better in the pressure cooker of an in-person convention held under one roof — because Trump supporters are more likely to show up, and can be vocal and aggressive in support of their candidates. (That the pandemic prodded Republicans to distribute voting across the state was a lucky break.) In the end, Youngkin straddled quite deftly the Trump-loving base and pragmatic GOP-leaning voters in the suburbs, even as he made headway with persuadable independent voters.

Dominion sues Sidney Powell for defamation, seeking $1.3 billion in damages

Axios Policy and Politics 1/08/21

The big picture: Dominion alleges that Powell acted "in concert with allies and media outlets determined to promote a false preconceived narrative about the 2020 election—caused unprecedented harm." In an interview with the Axios Re:Cap podcast last week, Dominion CEO John Poulos did not rule out suing Trump himself.

What they're saying: "As a result of the defamatory falsehoods peddled by Powell ... Dominion’s founder, Dominion’s employees, Georgia’s governor, and Georgia’s secretary of state have been harassed and have received death threats, and Dominion has suffered enormous harm," the lawsuit reads.

After 50 years of riding waves of hate, the GOP must finally decide if Trumpism is its future

DailyKos Ian Reifowitz 12/26/20

For the purposes of this piece, I’d point you to the second episode, which focuses largely on how Reagan, starting with that 1966 campaign, repeatedly employed race-baiting rhetoric in order to exploit white Californians’ fear of and resentment toward African Americans. In the speech that launched his campaign, Reagan made very clear exactly what kind of politics he would practice. In talking about crime, he intoned, “Our city streets are jungle paths after dark,” and twice cited his support for “law and order.” There are distinct echoes in Trump’s present-day “law and order” rhetoric.

Getting rid of Trump won't be enough to fix America's broken democracy

David Daley Sat 7 Nov 2020

Skewed institutions like the senate and electoral college, plus gerrymandering and voter suppression, have rigged the system in Republicans’ favor
Even with a Biden administration, the worsening structural inequities embedded in the nation for centuries – and cynically exploited by Republicans to govern with narrow minority support – will still be with us. They are embodied in institutions such as the electoral college, which elected Trump in 2016 despite his losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes.

In fact, including Biden, the Democratic candidate for president has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. But in part because of the electoral college’s rural bias (a vote cast for president in Wyoming counts nearly four times as much as a vote cast in California), and in part because the college heightens the importance of a handful of largely white, midwestern battleground states, Republicans have won the White House with fewer votes twice since 2000.

Representational fairness is even more dire in the US Senate, which gives disproportionate power to older, whiter, more rural and more conservative interests. Right now, states representing just 17% of the nation’s population could elect a majority of senators. By 2040, the 15 most populous states will be home to 67% of Americans yet represented by just 30% of the Senate. Add up the actual votes received in the winning election of every sitting US senator, and Republicans haven’t won a senate majority since the mid-1990s. Yet they’ve controlled the Senate for 10 of the last 20 years, and used that advantage to shape the ideological balance on the federal courts.

Democracy Diverted: Polling Place Closures and the Right to Vote

The Leadership Council on Human and Civil Rights

Texas, a state where 39 percent of the population is Latino and 12 percent is African American, has closed 750 polling places since Shelby, by far the most of any state in our study. Five of the six largest closers of polling places are in Texas. With 74 closures, Dallas County, which is 41 percent Latino and 22 percent African American, is the second largest closer of polling places, followed by Travis County, which is 34 percent Latino, (–67). Harris County, which is 42 percent Latino and 19 percent African American, (–52) and Brazoria County, which is 13 percent African American and 30 percent Latino (–37) tied with Nueces County, which is 63 percent Latino (–37). Many, but not all, of these polling places were closed as part of a statewide effort to centralize voting into “countywide polling places.” This effort slashed the number of voting locations but allowed voters to cast ballots at any Election Day polling place. Without Section 5 of the VRA, we cannot assess the impact these mass closures have on communities of color.

'Just like propaganda': the three men enabling Trump's voter fraud lies

'Just like propaganda': the three men enabling Trump's voter fraud lies The Guardian by Sam Levine and Spenser Mestel 10/26/2020

Now the myth of voter fraud is dominating the election. Trump has questioned the legitimacy of the vote, falsely suggesting it will be “rigged” against him and his campaign has floated using the idea of a fraudulent election as the basis for overriding the popular vote in key states, according to the Atlantic. Despite the pandemic, the president and his campaign have litigated to restrict mail-in voting and expand the use of poll watchers, citing the potential for tampering.

State Republicans have followed suit. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, limited each county to only one place where voters could return their mail-in ballots. South Carolina Republicans successfully fought to preserve a witness requirement for absentee ballots. Alabama Republicans have pointed to the potential for fraud to justify mail-in ballot restrictions. And in Wisconsin, a conservative group is urging the state supreme court to order the swift removal of more than 130,000 people from the voter rolls, citing the need to prevent fraud.

Chief Justice Roberts’s lifelong crusade against voting rights

Chief Justice Roberts’s lifelong crusade against voting rights, explained VOX By Ian Millhiser  Sep 18, 2020

The House had recently passed legislation extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a seminal civil rights bill that dismantled much of Jim Crow — and shoring up one of its key provisions after a 1980 Supreme Court decision had severely weakened the law. Meanwhile, a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate had co-sponsored the same bill.

Roberts was distraught.

“Something must be done to educate the Senators on the seriousness of this problem,” Roberts wrote his boss, Smith, just a few days before Christmas. In a subsequent memo, he argued that the rapidly advancing bill — which now forms much of the backbone of American voting rights law — was “not only constitutionally suspect, but also contrary to the most fundamental tenants [sic] of the legislative process on which the laws of this country are based.”

Pamela Karlan speaks during impeachment hearing 12/04/19

Pamela Karlan is a professor of law at the Stanford Law School. She has a serious person’s resume—something that most ranking Republicans do not have. She has worked on the California Fair Political Practices Commission and for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and is one of the leading attorneys on voting rights in the country. She took exception to Rep. Collins’ weak-sauce dismissal of her expertise in her opening remarks to the committee.DailyKos 12/04/19 <embed>https://youtu.be/9Wz23qd76QA</embed>

WAPO CHOP photo.jpg| CHOP or CHAZ America's History of Social Experiments Washington Post 6/16/2020

How white supremacy went mainstream in the US: 8chan, Trump, voter suppression

The Guardian 8/10/2019

 "Law professor Ian Samuel explained, in relation to Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation – Trump’s first appointment – that it was the first time “a president who lost the popular vote had a supreme court nominee confirmed by senators who received fewer votes – nearly 22m fewer – than the senators that voted against him”.

For his second pick, Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s choice to replace the moderate Anthony Kennedy, the senators who voted against him represented 38 million more people than the ones who voted to confirm."

As Jamelle Bouie noted in the New York Times: “Today, the largest state is California, with nearly 40 million residents, and the smallest is Wyoming, with just under 600,000 people, a disparity that gives a person in Wyoming 67 times the voting power of one in California.

The Way the Census Counts Prison Populations Seriously Distorts Redistricting

Slate 7/19/2019

But the bureau failed to understand the nature of its role. The current census policy leads state administrators to shuttle incarcerated people across states and deposit them in districts where atrophying population counts are bloated by the presence of prisons. One study analyzing state senate districts found that prison populations were often shifted in tandem with the life cycle of legislatures or governorships, conferring partisan advantage after switches in party control over the redistricting process. The bulk of the prison population—which numbers in the millions—is planted in small towns and rural areas, though many individuals hail from cities and surrounding suburbs. The result is that census data—both in terms of redistricting and in terms of an accurate population count—is soiled by the bureau’s own rules on counting people in prison.

To Beat the Gerrymander, Think Outside the Lines

The New Republic 6/08/2019

Voters in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maryland deserve fair maps that don’t lock in a partisan advantage for either Republicans or Democrats. Federal courts nationwide had recently begun to insist on that, repeatedly declaring districts tainted with extreme partisan intent unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court put an end to that dream last week. Its 5–4 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause closed the federal courts to anyone seeking review of this undemocratic practice, despite those bipartisan panels of judges who repeatedly found they had all the tools and standards they needed to evaluate when district lines egregiously favored one side over the other.

Democrats Can’t Be Afraid to Gerrymander Now

Slate 7/03/2019

After last week’s Supreme Court decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, we find ourselves, again, in an age where anything goes. Thanks to Rucho, there is literally no partisan gerrymander a federal court may strike down—no district plan so politically egregious it may be held to violate the Constitution. So what might today’s mapmakers do now that they’re certain the federal judiciary won’t interfere with their work? Quite a lot, it turns out, including several tactics that, to date, have barely seen the light of day.

Think Progress How Lincoln rigged the Senate for Repubs 5/05/2019