Electoral Systems-Effects
Getting rid of Trump won't be enough to fix America's broken democracy
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.
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
