Electoral Systems-Effects
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. <embed>https://youtu.be/9Wz23qd76QA</embed>
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
