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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

#371

Post by joveian »

angelzen wrote: post #340
qqqwerty wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, your numbers are wrong[1]. And second, thanks to Trump, R's lost a lot of seats in CA by close margins. Before Trump, the CA delegation was more balanced. It should also be said that CA Democrats are a super majority. Once you get into super majority territory, it would essentially require a reverse gerrymander to protect minority seats. CA uses a nonpartisan process to create their congressional maps.…

Thanks for the link. The congress vote went 66-34. The congressional delegation, 79-21. There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it?

The plan to fix it would be proportional representation (independent redistricting is also a good plan for most states but California already has that). It seems to be getting a bit more attention recently but nowhere near a major push for it that I've seen, even here in Oregon where unaffiliated voters outnumber Republicans and are getting closer to outnumbering Democrats as well. I think we have a decent chance of getting independent redistricting in the next few years and hopefully the state supreme court will improve the districting passed by the legislature.

Edit: We also don't have the top two system that California and Washington have and that high number of unaffiliated voters is even under a closed primary system.

Edit2: Unaffiliated voters in Oregon do include most non-voters, unlike some states.

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

#372

Post by nceqs3 »

zackmorris wrote: post #172

Probably what's going on is that someone on the board of trusties gets money from the political establishment in Florida and is worried that they'll lose it if the voting barriers are fixed and different leadership is elected. This has similarities with the shenanigans pulled by Sinema and Manchin around the Build Back Better plan. Political horse trading to advance the agendas of special interests, at great expense…

Most states have restrictions on what the donor data can be used for...

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

#373

Post by ska »

angelzen wrote: post #340
qqqwerty wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, your numbers are wrong[1]. And second, thanks to Trump, R's lost a lot of seats in CA by close margins. Before Trump, the CA delegation was more balanced. It should also be said that CA Democrats are a super majority. Once you get into super majority territory, it would essentially require a reverse gerrymander to protect minority seats. CA uses a nonpartisan process to create their congressional maps.…

Thanks for the link. The congress vote went 66-34. The congressional delegation, 79-21. There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it?

> There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it?

A gap doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem, unless you believe that proportional representation is important enough to do away with seats having a regional tie completely.

If you don't want to go all that way, algorithmic/automatic redistricting goes a long way to address issues.

[edit since I was obviously not very clear. I'm not suggesting you do actually want to get rid of all districts, just making the point that by nature regional representation and proportional representation are in conflict in pretty fundamental ways. You can hack around it with ideas like floating representatives, super-regions, etc. but you can't really solve it. Gerrymandering, otoh, is an issue in its own right.

I probably should have said "not a problem, or at least not a problem addressable at this level of the system"]

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

#374

Post by dragonwriter »

ska wrote: post #373
angelzen wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link. The congress vote went 66-34. The congressional delegation, 79-21. There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it?

> There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it? A gap doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem, unless you believe that proportional representation is important enough to do away with seats having a regional tie completely. If you don't want to go all that way, algorithmic/automatic redistricting goes a long way to address issues. [edit since I was obviously not very clear. I'm not suggesting you do actuall…

> A gap doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem

Yes, it does.

> unless you believe that proportional representation is important enough to do away with seats having a regional tie completely.

Two problems here:

(1) it prevents a false dichotomy that the only way to address the gap is erasing regional ties completely, and

(2) it confuses the question of “does a problem exist?” with the question of “is there a means of fixing the problem that doesn't have it’s own, equally or more significant problems?”

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

#375

Post by joveian »

ska wrote: post #373
angelzen wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link. The congress vote went 66-34. The congressional delegation, 79-21. There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it?

> There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it? A gap doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem, unless you believe that proportional representation is important enough to do away with seats having a regional tie completely. If you don't want to go all that way, algorithmic/automatic redistricting goes a long way to address issues. [edit since I was obviously not very clear. I'm not suggesting you do actuall…

Proportional representation does not necessarily (or even usually) completely do away with seats having a regional tie, although it does increase the size of the region.

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

#376

Post by davorak »

nickff wrote: post #365
iudqnolq wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supreme court has historically taken a more nuanced stance on this sort of issue than you. Broadly speaking in the US everyone has many constitutional protections against the government restricting them in certain ways. When you become a government employee you give up only the most narrow subset of the protections necessary for the government to effectively be your boss. This means the professors have a reasonab…

The critical question here is whether the University is restricting alternate employment or speech. It seems reasonable that a full-time employee on salary be prohibited from accepting simultaneous alternative employment in their primary field of work.

> The critical question here is whether the University is restricting alternate employment or speech.

The process that stopped the professors was not one for restricting additional work in general, but one for restricting additional work based on a conflict of interest. Since they are a public University their ability to limit free speech like this is more limited than a private institution as iudqnolq mentioned above.

If the University of Florida has a general rule for restricting any additional work by default for professors they are an outlier among Universities.

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

#377

Post by xphilter »

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:/…

What exactly is the problem with ballot harvesting if they’re legitimate votes? Maybe the State shouldn’t make it hard to vote. And your source is not exactly unbiased, stating without evidence that “ Updating the voter rolls by removing dormant registrations does not “disenfranchise” voters; it is necessary in order to keep the rolls accurate and up to date, as many people move or die every year.” How do they know that? Just a gut feeling? White conservatives have for centuries tried everything under the sun to stop Black people from voting, that’s just one more try.

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

#378

Post by pmyteh »

angelzen wrote: post #340
qqqwerty wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, your numbers are wrong[1]. And second, thanks to Trump, R's lost a lot of seats in CA by close margins. Before Trump, the CA delegation was more balanced. It should also be said that CA Democrats are a super majority. Once you get into super majority territory, it would essentially require a reverse gerrymander to protect minority seats. CA uses a nonpartisan process to create their congressional maps.…

Thanks for the link. The congress vote went 66-34. The congressional delegation, 79-21. There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it?

Gerrymandering and disproportionality are separate issues: the former implies the latter, but the First Past The Post voting system (where the winner is the person with the plurality of votes in a given district, irrespective of magnitude) tends to generate the latter even if apportionment is fair.

Example: the United Kingdom. We have independent redistricting, and the Boundary Commission are genuinely not in anyone's pocket. The criteria are debatable in some areas, but gerrymandering is essentially absent. And yet, if you look at the most recent general election, the SNP won the overwhelming majority of the seats in Scotland with only 45% of the vote! [0]

Now that's partly because there are four effective parties in Scotland, but they would have done very nearly that well against any single opposition party. FPTP magnifies the seats for the more popular party.

Bluntly, if the votes are distributed completely evenly, 51% of the votes gets you 100% of the seats. See the Eisenhower/Stevenson presidential election in 1956: Eisenhower got 86% of the electoral college votes for only 57% of the popular vote, because he was (a bit) more popular nearly everywhere.

There are systems which aim to have seats and votes be proportional: they're very popular in democracies beyond Great Britain's former colonies. So the gap you mention is, in principle, fixable. But it's not in either party's interests to do so, so it's likely to persist.

[0]: https://i0.wp.com/ballotbox.scot/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/...

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

#379

Post by denton-scratch »

selimthegrim wrote: post #158
denton-scratch wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the majority of "postal voting fraud" in the UK consists of very patriarchal families in which the father directs family members as to how to vote, and submits the votes himself. Arguably, this isn't much different from persuading people to change their voting intentions, which is entirely legitimate. Postal voting used to be restricted to people who could show that they were unable to vote in-person, e.g. be…

Are they still prosecuting "undue spiritual influence" cases in the UK?

Wut? Wow -

https://lawandreligionuk.com/2016/08/30/undue-spiritual-infl...

I thought you were going on about voting while under the influence of spirits.

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

#380

Post by glup »

zackmorris wrote: post #172

Probably what's going on is that someone on the board of trusties gets money from the political establishment in Florida and is worried that they'll lose it if the voting barriers are fixed and different leadership is elected. This has similarities with the shenanigans pulled by Sinema and Manchin around the Build Back Better plan. Political horse trading to advance the agendas of special interests, at great expense…

The most sophisticated resource I know of this sort is https://littlesis.org
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