I can’t find a cite, but I think I remember reading that the stickers were challenged once. If I recall correctly (and I’m not sure I do), since the stickers are handed out AFTER voting they were not considered an inducement. Plus they have pretty much zero cash value and are provided by the State, not a candidate.
Sure. In a sane environment, such a charge would be laughed out of court as long as the water was provided to everyone in line.
A couple of the states weren’t actually making new laws regarding the water, they were amending the existing laws to use water as an example of what “inducement” meant so they could make waiting in long lines even more unpleasant for poor people.
ShivaX
2818
I would think as long as the water couldn’t be obviously tied to any candidate or party, it would get around it.
If nothing else Church groups and the like could easily do it and make it a First Amendment issue.
IANAL, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express. However, I keep seeing articles online refer to how it’s illegal for businesses to provide anything to people for having the “I voted” sticker, but how prosecutors have better things to do than go after these “scofflaw” companies which is why nobody is ever brought to court. That strikes me as rather weird in the super litigious society of America. Some articles have directly cited article 42 and even linked to the prohibited actions, yet that only has coercion listed as a vaguely related action. They also link to 52, which is really long but a word search didn’t find incentive or inducement.
None of this is to say the various assertions are wrong because wtf do I know, just that perhaps there’s more confusion and/or nuance involved. When it comes to people standing in line, Snopes seems to believe it’s a matter of state laws, and found only a few with restrictions (Georgia’s being the most restrictive).
Ugh, so close to holding the House: less than 7,000 votes.
Menzo
2821
I think he misspelled “mandate.”
This is the end result of gerrymandering. Eliminate gerrymandering and redraw state districts based on geographical and population factors the way they should be and it becomes unlikely the GOP ever controls the House again. Our system is broken, but I am preaching to the choir on this subject.
Matt_W
2823
Probably not true. @Strollen has pointed out that Republicans actually underperformed in the House this election cycle relative to their popular fraction. That is, they won a lower percentage of House seats than popular votes. In general, despite gerrymandering and vote suppression efforts, the House is pretty representative.
Yeah, I think it shows how well Dems did / how much R’s underperformed this cycle. Those 5 races were considered either solid R (2 races) or tossup / lean R (3 races) ahead of the election.
How do we measure voter suppression though? Do we assume those people would or would not vote if they didn’t have to wait in line for multiple hours?
Would more competitive districts lead to higher turn out? And wouldn’t higher turn out favor the Democrats?
Honestly, there are a lot pieces to the puzzle, so it’s easy to argue with the information presented. It assuming that voting behavior doesn’t change when people’s votes have more of an impact, or when people have the opportunity to vote at all.
This is true, it’s hard to measure voter suppression. (But pretty easy to measure gerrymandering.)
Democrats clearly need to get better at gerrymandering.
Alstein
2828
Didn’t the GOP win the popular House vote this time?
BTW, why do I hear people talking about a 4 vote House margin? Are they referring to the current Dem House majority? Because the results I’m seeing for the next Congress are a 9 vote majority for the GOP.
If the Ds had won 5 seats, the Rs would not have won 5.
I understand that.
That’s why the 4 figure is weird. A 5 vote margin means that the numbers are 220 to 215. If there’s only a four vote margin that means someone on the majority side resigned or died, because the difference should always be an odd number, 218-217, 219-216, 220-215 etc.
I don’t understand how this statement can be true at all. Gerrymandering and voter suppression by definition allow one side a marked advantage in an election, and that side has overwhelmingly been Republicans in the past several election cycles. If a district is gerrymandered to result in a “solid-R” or “leans-R” and post-election that district only goes to a Republican candidate by a slim margin, then logic would dictate that without that advantage the district may have gone Democrat instead. How does that reconcile to a House that is “pretty representative”?
Sharpe
2833
The margin of popular voting for the House in favor of the GOP actually exceeds the margin of seats they won (slightly) so basically the GOP gerrymandering got roughly cancelled out by various factors this year: changing demographics due to COVID, some counter-gerrymandering by Dems in a few states, GOP “overvoting” in heavily red districts in some states, the mathematical impact of FPTP voting. Note here: in a first past the post system, a completely non-gerrymandered state with a strong lean to one party almost always results in a non-representative slate of House reps. If the entire state is say 60-40 Dem and the districts are pretty evenly distributed then the Dems will win ALL the seats and the GOP will get zip (and visa versa in the converse scenario). Our system is not designed to produce representative delegations based on party. Also, FPTP/single-rep-districts is a terrible system.
In theory, the GOP vote margin could have been produced by “voter suppression” but you know why I put that in quotes? B/C I don’t see any good hard evidence of its numerical impact. I realize the GOP is trying that sort of thing but I refuse to engage in conspiracy style thinking without evidence. Show me the actual data that shows large numbers of votes being suppressed in a way that impacts elections. Until then, I will oppose GOP efforts to suppress votes but I refuse to get all squirrelly and go around yelling “the voter suppression is falling! the voter suppression is falling!”
I assume something like the link below doesn’t seem pertinent to your line of thinking @Sharpe?
Sharpe
2835
So some of those studies don’t have numbers and the one I found with some numbers showed this:
Using exact matching and a difference-in-differences design, we show that for the 3 percent of voters who lack ID in North Carolina, the ID law caused a 0.7 percentage point turnout decrease in the 2016 primary election relative to those with ID.
So 0.7% of 3% is 0.007 X 0.03 = 0.00021 or 0.021% (21 thousandths of 1%) which is 21 voters out of 100,000. So in a typical state with roughly 2 million primary voters, that is 420 votes. For a House district with around 300,000 voters typically, that is 63 votes.
Perhaps Trig or other knowledgeable folks can comment but I’m not sure that is statistically significant in the context we are talking.
And that exemplifies this issue. I don’t like voter suppression efforts; I oppose the GOP efforts, but honestly I feel that a lot of folks are treating them like bugaboos. The math, to my layman’s understanding, doesn’t really support that.
Sharpe
2836
One more thing: the GOP won the House popular vote by 2-3% IIRC this year. In that context, voter ID having a 0.021% impact is to quote our former comrade Jason McCullough, rounding error.
