Some gerrymandering my assembly district was accidentally won by a Republican woman, so a Republican neighborhood was removed in 2010
Sharpe
2798
You quoted me in regard to state level gerrymandering then your post appears to be about voter suppression. As to the lack of voter suppression date, I agree that the data is thin. That’s not the point I am making.
My point is that several of the purple state legislatures are gerrymandered to the point of being dark red when that doesn’t reflect the voters. Someone posted some stats on Wisconsin up thread a bit and I believe something similar applies in North Carolina as well.
My view for a number of years has been that voter suppression is a smaller problem than gerrymandering. In recent years a third problem has cropped up: fear of outright vote-counting BS like officials refusing to certify results or legislatures turning over elections. But those concerns, although founded on real possibilities are mostly speculative in actual impact thus far.
Bottom line: the biggest issue right now IMO is gerrymandering but it is primarily at the state level not the national level. Nationally, there’s plenty of gerrymandering but the impact has been muted b/c of a combo of Dems also doing it and demographic change being faster than the Census. On that note, I read an article today on some site, where I can’t recall, about the impact of COVID on this year’s election, both in terms of work from home causing many blue voters from large urban areas to move to red or purple areas, and also the greater death toll of red voters after the vaccines became available.
But “voter suppression” I consider something of a bugaboo. It’s something to fight against but I don’t believe there is good evidence of hard numerical impact. I’m not saying it’s a non-issue but I do believe liberal posters sometimes freak out about it a bit.
Gerrymandering is still the big problem, and the fear of actual election BS is another serious concern. Voter suppression, well we should oppose it but don’t let fear take over.
You left out the SC’s impending ruling on ISL as a potentially serious 4th problem.
I’m sure there is gerrymandering in Hawaii, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that you would expect that a place that was 65/35 Dem would elect a lot more Dems than Reps. That’s not what is going on in states like Wisconsin.
JonRowe
2801
Yes, WI is essential 50/50 in all national elections (anything voted state-wide) yet the republican party in the state has nearly a 65/35 advantage.
It is nuts.
Menzo
2802
McCarthy warning House Republicans - back me or else disaster! I think at the end of the day he’s going to get the spot, but he’s going to have to give the Trump contingent a lot of committee seats and concessions.
KevinC
2803
It’s amazing that Republicans continue to find ways to lower the bar, year after year. Like… Kevin McCarthy isn’t bad enough? There’s even slimier actors in his caucus? Good lord.
Gym Jordan raises his paw.
That dude is going to be US Attorney General in 2025.
Timex
2806
I’m always impressed by how weak McCarthy is, and how he just exudes that weakness through every pore.
And according to the SCOTUS, permanent one-party rule due to gerrymandering in the states is totes OK! “Vote harder” is the only remedy. They’ve stripped Evers of all but veto power and I bet they’re looking to change the state constitution so he doesn’t even have that.
So the “no providing water to people standing in hours-long lines to vote” never made it into the law?
Regardless, “hours-long lines” is effectively a voter-suppression “feature, not a bug” according to its designers.
In Oregon we’ve been voting by mail for over twenty years and it works fine.
/projective vomits
Pretty sure Boehner’s pores are all blocked up.
KWhit
2811
No it made it into the law that was passed. And of course, the longest lines are most often in the districts of minorities.
Technically that’s been a law for the better part of a century – a Federal law in fact.
You’re not allowed to provide money, goods, or services to someone in order to vote or withhold their vote. Providing water to people in line - as altruistic and neutral as you might try and make it - is absolutely spending money to keep those people in line and voting rather than leaving. Worse, it is a crime under the same statute to accept the money, goods, or service, so the people in line who accept the water could go to jail for two years.
So, the solution is to provide water to people before they get in line?
Anyway, it’s mess up how people in Australia get to eat sausages when they vote, and we can’t even give out water
Sure, but you can see how it would be easily abused, right? Republicans only giving water to White people in line; a Democratic group providing water to all the reliably Blue voting sites but neglecting to do so for the Red ones; the guy handing out sausages preferentially hands them to people to took the Democratic sample ballots; or even just as simple as having GOP branding on the water bottle labels so that Democrats would be reluctant to take them.
Under your interpretation, handing out “I voted” stickers would be a Federal offense. (It’s not.)
Here is information on restrictions on what can be distributed near polling places. It’s mostly governed by state law, and varies wildly from state to state, though it would seem some states don’t have any. The most common restrictions are on signs or distributing leaflets/pamphlets, and generally “influencing voters/soliciting votes/political persuasion.”
(Federal law prohibits voter intimidation. There’s also a Federal law forbidding spending money to buy votes, but good luck proving handing out stickers or water to everybody in line is buying votes. If it’s a Federal crime, then Chef Andres is never getting out of jail.)
Yeah, I don’t believe that is how the federal law has traditionally been interpreted. That’s why Republicans are passing the state laws to prevent giving water, because the federal law doesn’t prevent it.
