191–200 of 268 posts
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What is the alternative to acceptance? My state has closed hundreds of polling places over the past decade or so. Mostly in poor area, college towns, or cities. What should we do if our option for making our voices heard are removed? I hope we just make voting compulsory and a national holiday, but I won't hold my breath.
NC? GA? Another state that was (prior to 2013) limited in what it could do by the VRA?
I think the most worrying aspect is an emerging strain of political thought in the US that USA is merely a republic but not a democracy. I find it quite shocking that it has gained a great deal of acceptance. edit : typo
The USA is technically not a democracy and is instead a representative republic which is a fact. I guess you're alluding to how citizens can "vote" which means it's actually a democracy to which I would strongly disagree. I have little to no influence over my government as I live in a gerrymandered district so my representative is decided for me ahead of time. I also only get to pick between 2 old white guys every 4…
In what way is your republic "representative" then?
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I am not. My point is that the reason we are here, that this repression even exists, is due to the media marketplace. Without it, this kind of blatant repression isn’t possible. It is here because of decades of propaganda and distraction by the right that has allowed then to take advantage of I’ll informed people who have become enemies of their neighbors and democracy itself.
I don't buy it. Like I said, the US has systemically disenfranchised voters from inception through the present. One of our two major political parties is explicitly invested in continuing that practice, and the other is only nominally opposed. This is not a recent invention, and it's not due to the media. It's built right into the foundation of our country.
Attention is the currency of media.
You dont actually believe that the Right is able to thwart decades of decency and abidance to a common good based on solely on will do you?
They do it by lying and thus enraging people into believing that the other guy is coming for them...that the other guy is evil. That is how you control a so-called democracy, you divide and distract and create a sideshow while you do the dirty work, sometimes in the open (like this) or mostly in the back, like the judiciary packing.
I just ask that you dig deeper and look for the root cause, not he symptoms. Only when we realize the cause can we make the appropriate changes and restore health.
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I'm one of those people. I certainly see America as a republic first and foremost. I appreciate the design of America that incorporates democratically electing one's representives in the House of Representives while balancing the downsides of such a process against other forms of voting. It's necessary to capture the passions of the body politic at large - which democratic voting does! - but it's also necessary to in…
I used to agree with you on this line of thinking, but over the past few years my thinking has been changing quite radically. What good is protections against tyranny of the majority if it just results in tyranny of the minority? The majority will only play a rigged game for so long - as you are beginning to see with Democrats seriously discussing court packing should they win power. One party has gotten Presidents i…
Which is why CA has 53 congressional representatives and WY only has one.
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Because where they do exist, it's really hard to tell if that ballot box is real. Because one political party has decided to install fake ballot boxes.
The Republican Party of California set up ballot boxes in locations frequented by Republican voters so that they can harvest Republican-favorable ballots and... throw them away? I get that putting up ballot boxes that pose as "Official" should/may be illegal, but the ballots that go into those boxes are going to get delivered and counted.
I get the impression that this is an opportunity to paint a political story that makes your side look better (other side is suppressing the vote, therefore my candidate lost!), or perhaps in this specific case, to poke fun at America as it is a favorite international past time. The data I see shows another possibility: voter turn out has increased by a large amount and the government is struggling to meet the demand.…
According to [1] and plenty of other studies of their kind, closure of voting locations have been a major problem since the Shelby decision gutted the voting rights acts. Summary: > We found 1,688 polling place closures in places once covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Of the 757 counties in our study, 298 (39 percent) reduced the number of polling places between 2012 and 2018. Because presidential electi…
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Isn’t the issue that it isn’t every county, but that it is specific counties that are targeted to suppress specific voter demographics? For a clear cut example, look at Texas. “Abbott in July acted to lengthen the early voting period and allow voters to deliver completed absentee ballots in person for longer than the normal period. But after large Democratic counties including Harris and Travis established several si…
That's unacceptable in my opinion, but it's not the norm at all, even in traditionally democratic-voting areas.
> Across the country, more than 2,000 polling places closed between the 2012 and 2016 general elections… for every 10 polling places that closed in the rest of the country, 13 closed within the jurisdictions once under oversight [of the Voting Rights Act]. Policies that introduce barriers to voting — like Texas’ strict voter ID requirements and North Carolina’s elimination of same-day registration and limits on early voting — have been widely criticized for discouraging minority voters, who disproportionately vote Democratic. The vast majority of the jurisdictions once under federal supervision are in states with GOP leadership.
> About a third of all counties that used to be subject to the Voting Rights Act reduced their per capita number of polling places from 2012 to 2016, compared to only a fifth of the rest of the jurisdictions… Some of the most egregious examples of counties closing a significant percentage of their polls are in Arizona. Phoenix-area Maricopa County initially slashed its polling places by 70 percent before the state’s 2016 primary election, spurring a DOJ investigation. [1]
[1] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/kz58qx/how-the-gutting-o...
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Are the officials administering the queue part of the conspiracy to create a long line to make a political statement (or more skeptically, are virtue signaling) as well?
In general, no. They assumed people would just wait until more polling stations opened up closer to election day (or on election day itself) to avoid waiting in these lines.
In Australia we have two things the US system desperately needs: mandatory voting and preferential voting. Preferential voting allows you to vote for a third party without wasting your vote. The standard argument against mandatory voting is people not wanting the uninformed to vote (trust me, they're voting) and the usual US predilection against that infringing "freedom". I was sympathetic to this until I saw the US…
Some states use preferential voting for local elections, but right now Maine is the only one that does it for the presidential elections. I hope preferential voting will be the next major change to the election, after the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact gets enough members to activate.
Put it this way: what happens (and this will happen) when the popular vote is ridiculously close? We had a preview of this in Florida in 2000 when a few thousand votes decided the election. Now imagine the litigation, the endless recounts and the uncertainty but it engulfs the entire country. Imagine an election decided by less than 10,000 votes and litigants try to scrounge up a few dozen votes in every county in the country.
As much as people like the crap on the electoral college it has (thus far) done one thing well: and that is to create w winner. Creating a winner is _way_ more important than creating the "right" winner.
The one big problem with the electoral college is that the Founders never envisioned the huge population disparities we have today ie California has >500 times the population of Montana, Vermont or North Dakota.
There are legitimate issues with the electoral college. A national popular vote for president is not the answer.