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University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

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Re: University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

#311

Post by angelzen »

ceejayoz wrote: post #162
briffle wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oregon just got a new House Rep member, and if you look at the new maps it has created, its pretty obvious this isn't a one party problem.

Gerrrymandering indeed has a long history, and it's a bit like nukes - if the other side is already using them, it's hard to hold off on your side. In 2018, North Carolina saw 50% of the vote go to Republicans, but they received 77% of the Congressional seats. A couple rounds of that is a recipe for a permanent minority for the other party.

The ability of the partisan brain to consistently be outraged by the perceived foul play of the other side, while never bothering to check how one's own side is measuring up, is a fascinating phenomenon.

This is really easy to sanity check. For example CA, the best known blue state in the nation. 2020 elections, 79% of the Congressional delegation is D, while only (edit) 66% of the popular vote went for (edit) Ds.

But, but, but, the other guys are even worse than us. We won't stand for truth, fairness or justice, obviously the correct course of action is to out-foul them whenever we can. And then we wonder why the country is on the brink of an ugly divorce.

Re: University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

#312

Post by mthoms »

angelzen wrote: post #302
tptacek wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last major story about ballot harvesting was a conviction for a Republican operative doing it in North Carolina.

Great point. Mail-in voting is a disgraceful corruption of the voting process. You'd think that the elementary task of getting rid of it would be a shoe-in bipartisan issue. Not so fast, this is USA, the beacon of hope for democracy in the world. Or have we moved on to identity based rights instead? I'm losing track of the excuses. Tribal brain kicking in 5... 4... 3...

Why is mail-in voting a “disgraceful corruption of the voting process?”. Lots of people can’t vote in person (eg military and others temporarily overseas).

Note: I’m not American and have no stake in this. I’ve just never seen such a strong negative opinion about mail in voting in principle.

Re: University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

#313

Post by ceejayoz »

angelzen wrote: post #311
ceejayoz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gerrrymandering indeed has a long history, and it's a bit like nukes - if the other side is already using them, it's hard to hold off on your side. In 2018, North Carolina saw 50% of the vote go to Republicans, but they received 77% of the Congressional seats. A couple rounds of that is a recipe for a permanent minority for the other party.

The ability of the partisan brain to consistently be outraged by the perceived foul play of the other side, while never bothering to check how one's own side is measuring up, is a fascinating phenomenon. This is really easy to sanity check. For example CA, the best known blue state in the nation. 2020 elections, 79% of the Congressional delegation is D, while only (edit) 66% of the popular vote went for (edit) Ds. Bu…

I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing.

That said, 50-77 versus 63-79 seems like a different order of magnitude worth of gerrymandering.

Re: University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

#314

Post by bsanr »

rayiner wrote: post #253
RickJWagner wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, it's been an escalation of tit-for-tat from both sides of the aisle. News sources, 'Community organizers', corporate activists, religious leaders etc. have all been increasingly brazen as they take increasingly polarized positions to counter actions from the other side. What's missing is common decency and sympathy for the other person's point of view. We won't find it by clinging to our own political party or…

Exactly. It's tit-for-tat. Moderate Democrats won't push back against the "community organizers" when they push highly questionable practices such as ballot harvesting or allowing ballots to be counted that arrive days after election day. Moderate Democrats also never pushed back on two decades of claims about election fraud and stolen elections from the likes of people like Terry McAuliffe and Stacey Abrams: https:/…

This is where truth and "truthiness" diverge, I suppose. "Two decades of claims about election fraud" shares character with "two decades of high rates of Stop-and-Frisk detainments of black New Yorkers." The rest of the world looks at the reasonable behavior of liberal election workers and would be reformers - no the "Moderate" Democrats, who as recently as last week were working to gerrymander one of their own party members out of office because they're a progressive - and the way they're received by certain subsets of the electorate, and justifiably consider us insane. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071163]

This statement

>That, in turn, has destroyed trust.

Is useful, though not in the way you probably think. The notion of "trust" in American politics is an important and powerful one, and the root of much of our history. Our basic structure as a federation is built on interstate trust. Our major flirtation with dissolution was not predicated on actual legislative action, but a lack of trust that certain actions wouldn't eventually be taken. So, trust is both a bedrock of our society and a curiously fragile thing.

As far as that notion goes, an examination of our history can yield the following statements:

That the Left has not always trusted the Right to make the "correct" decisions, but has always trusted them with the right to vote.

and

The Right has never trusted the Left with the right to vote.

Re: University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

#315

Post by alistairSH »

ceejayoz wrote: post #313
angelzen wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability of the partisan brain to consistently be outraged by the perceived foul play of the other side, while never bothering to check how one's own side is measuring up, is a fascinating phenomenon. This is really easy to sanity check. For example CA, the best known blue state in the nation. 2020 elections, 79% of the Congressional delegation is D, while only (edit) 66% of the popular vote went for (edit) Ds. Bu…

I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing. That said, 50-77 versus 63-79 seems like a different order of magnitude worth of gerrymandering.

The 63-79 isn't apples to apples - it's comparing Congressional representation to Presidential votes.

We should be comparing number of seats assigned to each party and % of vote cast for each party.

Re: University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

#316

Post by _jal »

isoskeles wrote: post #233
_jal wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always nice to see people willing to write off other peoples' disenfranchisement as a rounding error or 'worth it' (whatever 'it' is.) That is exactly the attitude the authoritarians are counting on. This is how you lose your own representation.

Thank you for scare quotes around something I never said. What will you accuse me of next? I don't think any of this is "worth it," I just don't agree with coming up with sob stories as a counterexample. It's not that hard to hold onto important government documents like your birth certificate, social security card, etc. The argument against disenfranchisement shouldn't look like such a clear edge case. If anything,…

Wait, are they scare quotes, or am I quoting you?

The fact that you can't decide makes me think you know I wasn't quoting you, which was contextually obvious.

I find the rest of your argument equally sincere and convincing.

Re: University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

#317

Post by thehappypm »

whatthesmack wrote: post #187
cmh89 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My state in the US (Oregon) has had universal mail-in voting for two decades and we don't have any voter fraud to speak of. There isn't really a debate here. Anyone complaining about voter fraud is uninformed or purposefully making a bad faith argument in order to justify voter disenfranchisement.

> we don't have any voter fraud to speak of You probably mean you're not aware of any voter fraud. The whole objective of fraud is to have it not be discovered, so it's possible fraud has in fact been occurring and it has not yet been discovered (and/or nobody in a position to do so is interested in discovering it).

I'm curious, what does mail-in voter fraud look like? When I voted by mail in 2020, I had to register to vote just like in person, then they mailed a gigantic ballot to my address (which again validated that I actually lived in the state). I signed a scary thing on the ballot saying it was me. I put it in a mail box. It was then processed by a vote counting center. It's not like there are easy ways to game this system, you'd need to produce fake ballots, fake people with real addresses, or cheat the vote counts when the tallies are reported (which can be done through non mail in ballots as well).

I hear this "mail in vote fraud" line all the time but I think what it really is, is that making it more convenient to securely vote means that people who might not have been able to vote before get to, and that scares people who like that it's hard to vote.

Re: University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

#318

Post by qqqwerty »

justaman wrote: post #212
ceejayoz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gerrrymandering indeed has a long history, and it's a bit like nukes - if the other side is already using them, it's hard to hold off on your side. In 2018, North Carolina saw 50% of the vote go to Republicans, but they received 77% of the Congressional seats. A couple rounds of that is a recipe for a permanent minority for the other party.

Should the region/counties that have a smaller population but different work forces or geographical makeup not have representation? Population alone cannot dictate the house of representatives.

That is what the Senate is for. A minority party should never get control of all three branches of government with only 46% of the popular vote. Control of one branch of government is sufficient to exert influence on the legislative process. In our current setup, the minority party has zero reason to appeal to the median voter. This results in increasing polarization as the two parties are no longer competing against each other for voters, but instead are trying to drive turnout.

Re: University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

#319

Post by JaceLightning »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #293
mullen wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you did voluntary signed a Contract. As part of a commercial exchange, you agree to do and do not certain things for money. Inalienable Rights can't be signed away, so the argument that you are signing away Inalienable Rights really does not hold water.

I need person X to teatify so that I don't go to jail, and I never signed a contract. Also, did amazom workers voluntarily sign up to pee in bottles?

Yes

Re: University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

#320

Post by JaceLightning »

josefresco wrote: post #26
elliekelly wrote: post #10

I have a colleague who does environmental litigation. (Think Erin Brockovich.) They have a big civil case against a large energy company in a southern, “energy-friendly” state. They had an expert witness all lined up - a professor at the (public!) state university. Well this expert happened to be up for tenure and was (allegedly) told in no uncertain terms that, should they testify as an expert witness in this case,…

This seems like clear "witness intimidation" aka "Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant" https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1512 (b)Whoever knowingly uses intimidation, threatens, or corruptly persuades another person, or attempts to do so, or engages in misleading conduct toward another person, with intent to— (1)influence, delay, or prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding;…

Yep. Just like the George Floyd trial "if they don't find him guilty, we'll burn the city down."
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