Voter Suppression/Election Integrity

[GreyhoundFan]

"Republicans everywhere are waging a desperate battle against democracy"

Spoiler

We are two years removed from an election in which the Republican nominee became president despite getting 3 million fewer votes than the Democrat, six months removed from a midterm election in which Democrats won sweeping victories at all levels, and 18 months away from the next presidential election. The Republican Party is in a panic — as well it should be, not just because its leader is extremely unpopular, but because its electoral coalition is shrinking as a proportion of the population.

In response, Republicans are waging a scorched-earth campaign against democracy itself.

The latest news on this front comes out of Michigan, where a panel of federal judges just ordered the legislature to redraw its district maps after finding that the state’s extreme gerrymander, undertaken by Republicans, violated the rights of Democratic voters.

“Evidence from numerous sources demonstrates that the map-drawers and legislators designed the Enacted Plan with the specific intent to discriminate against Democratic voters,” the judges wrote.

Let’s take a little tour around the country, to see some of the other blows that Republicans are trying to strike against democracy:

• In Missouri, Republican state legislators are attempting to undo a constitutional amendment passed overwhelmingly by the state’s voters last November which took the power to redistrict out of the hands of the legislature and gave it to a nonpartisan state demographer.
• In Florida, after voters overwhelmingly chose to restore voting rights to felons after they serve their sentences, the Republican-controlled state house passed a bill requiring felons to pay all court fines, fees, and restitution before they are allowed to exercise their right to vote. In other words, a poll tax.
• In Tennessee, Republicans are moving to impose a raft of restrictions on voter registration drives, including the possibility of jail time for organizers who file faulty registration forms, even though those who register voters are legally required to submit all the forms they receive even if they contain mistakes.
• In Texas, the state Senate passed a bill imposing harsh criminal penalties for people who make mistakes on their voter registration forms.
• In Arizona, Republicans are pushing a bill that would throw voters off the mail-in ballot list if they failed to vote early in either a primary or general election in two consecutive elections; if it becomes law, hundreds of thousands of Arizonans will likely lose their ability to vote by mail.
• In Washington, D.C., the Supreme Court is poised to allow the Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the census, with the obvious intent of discouraging people in immigrant communities from answering, thereby making those communities look smaller than they are and depriving them of political power.

This kind of thing has been going on for a while. When Republicans win an election, one of the first things they usually do is change the rules to increase the chances that even if they lose the next election, they will still retain power.

That’s above and beyond all the structural elements of our system that enable minority rule, such as the disproportionate power given to small states in the Senate and the electoral college that has allowed Republicans to become president with fewer votes than their opponents in two of the past five elections.

But all of this is taking on a greater urgency right now. As they look toward 2020, Republicans see an election with the potential to profoundly degrade their power, both in Washington and at the state level. President Trump is extremely unpopular, with approval ratings that have long hovered around 40 percent. Even more threatening, the 2016 election increasingly looks like the last gasp of the monochromatic Republican coalition, its final opportunity to win a national election with almost no nonwhite votes.

The 2018 elections offer Republicans a frightening preview of the future. Newly released census data shows that turnout spiked among young people, rising from 20 percent in the last midterm election in 2014 to 36 percent in 2018 among those under 30. It also rose proportionately more among those with higher educations and those living in metropolitan areas, both of which favor Democrats.

Obviously, the circumstances of every election are different. But all the demographic trends favor Democrats, as the country grows more ethnically diverse, more urban, more educated and less religious with each passing year. That means that every election, Republicans have to do something more than they did the last time in order to win.

They could do that by expanding their appeal, reaching out to voters in new ways so that they don’t depend so much on a shrinking white, older, Christian electorate. Perhaps someday they will, though it will have to wait until after Trump is gone, since he works so hard to restrict his focus to the party’s existing base.

In the meantime, Republicans have decided that if democracy is working against them, they’ll work against democracy.

 

[Howl]

OK, this is getting interesting.  Very interesting: 

 

 

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, Howl said:

OK, this is getting interesting.  Very interesting: 

 

 

I gave this a WTF upvote, but what I meant was: 

So. If it turns out he's not the legitimate president, what then? Will he be removed, and Hillary installed instead? And then what? Will all of whatever happened during his illegitimate tenure in the White House be undone? Like, all the conservative judges be removed from theirs seats (buh bye Gorsuch, beer bye Kavanaugh, and byee all those countless others). Will the taxcut for the rich be rescinded? Will the tariffs be nixxed? Will NAFTA return? Will the US sign the Paris accords? Will all the EPA regs be upturned? There is so much that will need to be undone, it's mindboggling.

 

[Howl]

No, it can't be rewound back to 2016.  The value of this, if it does turn out that the FL election is not legitimate, is that people will wake the F*CK UP to the vulnerabilities of the voting process in EVERY STATE.

Russia has not stopped social media manipulation and with every campaign, is refining their techniques and not just in the US.  

States are in the process of buying totally hackable voting machines whose ballots can be altered AFTER a ballot has been cast and a paper ballot printed for the voter.  @JennyCohn1 has been expounding on twitter about this issue. 

The second front against voting rights are GOP actions at the state level.  Texas is trying to pass a law that criminalizes unintended errors or incomplete information on voter registration forms. In the last election,  a woman on probation, who genuinely (but incorrectly) thought she was eligible to vote was sent back to prison for a number of years (maybe five years?) to serve out the remainder of the her sentence.  Not a coincidence that she is African American. 

Edited April 28, 2019 by Howl

[fraurosena]

What a sorry state of affairs, where an illegitimate and completely corrupt person can remain in office to do irrepairable damage to the country and its democracy, even though there is irrefutable proof of his illegitemacy.

I can’t even.

I’ve also been following @jennycohn1 on twitter. Scary stuff, showing that democracy in America is being eroded in front of your very eyes, and nobody is paying attention.

I remember that story about the woman out on probation (for a relatively mild offence, something about a fraudulent check, I believe). She got 5 years, whilst her sentence for her original offence had only been a year. Like you said, she was a POC who erroneously thought she could vote. 

All this voter suppression, rigged voting systems and nobody is out on the streets fighting for democracy. You would think your freedom would be worth it.

[Audrey2]

I think that anyone who is caught surpressing votes, including politicians, should have their right to vote permanently revoked.

[Howl]

Here's the problem.  The Voting Rights Act, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, was struck down by the conservative majority judges on the Supreme Court in 2013.  This has allowed Southern states to go back to what in essence are racially discriminatory voting processes without having to go through the Voting Rights Act review.  Texas is especially busy in this respect. It's blatant. 

Because of the hackable voting machine issues, indifference on the part of the administration to Russian active measures in the 2020 election, I anticipate there could be chaos.  As horrible as Trump is, he could be re-elected. 

Also, I personally am in the "get rid of the electoral college" camp.  We can't keep having presidents who are not elected by a majority vote. 

Speaking of Russian active measures, Brad Parscale is having a "Russia are you listening?" moment by projecting that the Trump campaign can turn blue states Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and New Hampshire red in 2020. Note that three of those states are in the southwest/western US.   I don't see how New Mexico can be turned red, I just don't. 

However, Trump's tariffs have left Wisconsin dairy farmers circling the drain.  He had to bail out the soybean farmers, but that can't go on forever.  Other farmers must be suffering as well -- I'm thinking corn and beef.  At some point, some of those people who are losing farms and livelihoods are going to have Trump regrets. |

I live in Texas, the land of cheap gas.  The US has been binging on cheap natural gas and fossil fuels for a few years now, but gas prices are inching back up from a low two or three years ago of 99 cents/gallon to $2.39 (for regular) now.   If prices at the pump go back to $3 to $4 dollars a gallon, things will get crazy.  There will be an inflationary spiral, because cheap gas holds down the cost of food, because it costs less to transport it.  People who bought gas-hog trucks and monster SUVs during the cheap gas days still have to fill those tanks. 

IF there is a serious market downturn/correction, Trump may be doomed. 

Edited April 29, 2019 by Howl

[GreyhoundFan]

35 minutes ago, Howl said:

I live in Texas, the land of cheap gas.  The US has been binging on cheap natural gas and fossil fuels for a few years now, but gas prices are inching back up from a low two or three years ago of 99 cents/gallon to $2.39 (for regular) now.   If prices at the pump go back to $3 to $4 dollars a gallon, things will get crazy.  There will be an inflationary spiral, because cheap gas holds down the cost of food, because it costs less to transport it.  People who bought gas-hog trucks and monster SUVs during the cheap gas days still have to fill those tanks. 

I live in Virginia. Our gas is at ~$2.80 per gallon for regular. We haven't been at 99 cents for decades. We hit a low of $2.19 a couple of years ago.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Voter registration groups sue to block Tennessee law with tough penalties for signup mistakes"

Spoiler

To Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R), the bill he signed Thursday that threatens voter registration groups with criminal charges and fines over incomplete forms and missed deadlines is simply about creating “elections with integrity.”

Voting rights advocates, however, argue the law’s true purpose is keeping new voters, particularly African Americans and other minorities who have signed up in droves since 2016, away from the polls in a state with one of the lowest registration rates in the nation.

A coalition of those groups sued hours after Lee put his signature on the bill, arguing that it violates the First Amendment through a web of unclear new regulations.

“This law comes on the heels of a historic efforts to reach people not yet registered to vote in Tennessee, including African Americans,” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told The Washington Post. “This will no doubt chill the efforts of those organizations working to get more people registered.”

The bill was proposed after a group called the Tennessee Black Voter Project turned in more than 36,000 new registrations in Shelby County, where Memphis is located, last October just before early voting began in the midterm elections. The state threw out more than half those forms, claiming they were incomplete or otherwise flawed — a move that prompted a lawsuit and claims of voter suppression.

“There are schools and grass-roots organizations and churches around Tennessee that have all been working to do what the state hasn’t been able to do — to address this crisis of low voter registration,” Clarke said.

Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett, a Republican, argued that the episode in Memphis wasn’t evidence of suppression, but rather proof that voter registration groups needed to be reined in.

“We want every eligible Tennessean to vote, and voter registration must be done responsibly and in a manner that does not compromise the security or integrity of elections,” Hargett recently said.

The bill that Hargett helped push through the state legislature in Nashville includes fines of up to $10,000 per county against groups that submit more than 500 faulty forms, the Associated Press reports. It also includes class A misdemeanor charges for a range of violations, including paying workers quotas to sign up new voters, enrolling more than 100 voters without undergoing state training and missing deadlines to send in forms — a crime that could carry nearly a year in jail or $2,500 in fines, according to the AP.

When Lee signed the bill Thursday, he argued that the new rules would ensure fairer elections.

“This bill was presented because of actual circumstances that were meant to confuse the integrity, or to create a lack of integrity in the voting process,” Lee told the AP. “I think we want to provide for fair, for genuine, for elections with integrity, and that’s why I signed the bill.”

But the lawsuit filed against Hargett and other state officials by groups including the Tennessee State Conference of the NAACP argues that the law violates the Constitution because “the collection and submission of voter registration drives is intertwined with speech and association.”

“The right to vote is one of the most important rights in our democracy,” said Clarke, whose organization is litigating the suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. “This law no doubt seeks to penalize the groups that worked very hard in this midterm election cycle to bring people into the fold and ensure they’re able to exercise their voice in our democracy.”

State officials declined to comment on the lawsuit, the AP reported.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Federal judges declare Ohio congressional map unconstitutional"

Spoiler

A unanimous panel of federal judges on Friday declared Ohio’s Republican-drawn congressional map unconstitutional, a ruling similar to those in a number of states where partisan gerrymandering has been outlawed.

The action comes as the Supreme Court is deciding whether judges even have a role in such decisions. The high court has never found lawmakers’ efforts to preserve their party’s political power so severe that it violates the constitutional rights of voters. The justices’ decision is expected in June.

Last month, a similar panel of federal judges in Michigan found that some of that state’s legislative and congressional maps were unconstitutional gerrymanders, and it appeared the lower courts were attempting to send a message to the high court.

“Judges—and justices—must act in accordance with their obligation to vindicate the constitutional rights of those harmed by partisan gerrymandering,” Judge Eric L. Clay of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit wrote in the Michigan case.

The Ohio court took a similar approach in Friday’s decision.

“We join the other federal courts that have held partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional and developed substantially similar standards for adjudicating such claims,” the panel said in a unanimous ruling.

“We are convinced by the evidence that this partisan gerrymander was intentional and effective and that no legitimate justification accounts for its extremity.”

The judges said the district lines were drawn by Republican legislators to entrench Republican control, and that violated the rights of Democratic voters. The maps drawn after the 2010 Census have consistently resulted in a 12-4 Republican advantage in Ohio’s delegation.

The Supreme Court in March heard arguments in similar cases from North Carolina--where judges found Republicans manipulated the maps to their advantage--and Maryland, where Democratic lawmakers drew a district that resulted in a loss for a longtime Republican congressman.

At the oral arguments, the conservative justices who make up the Supreme Court’s majority seemed skeptical that the court could find a manageable test for deciding when politics plays an unconstitutional role in mapdrawing.

 

[Howl]

Jennifer Cohen is now going back to the 2004 election and the very likely possibility of major tampering, pointing out that exit polls had Kerry with a solid lead until.....that lead mysteriously evaporated election night. 

I'd sure like to see this showing up somewhere other than twitter, like the MSM  every. damn. day.  like 60 Minutes, Dateline, and a book format, because the entire scandal with Diebold, convicted embezzlers, and rich reich wing guys deserves a big discussion with national exposure.  And this is a long, complicated thread, referring to many other threads, with supporting evidence.  I need to see if Jenny Cohn has a website. 

 

Edited May 12, 2019 by Howl

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Howl]

@GreyhoundFan, I keep thinking  I can't be more shocked, and then I am.  Obnoxious politicians are one thing; the incredible level of blatant corruption on so many fronts at this point in time is chilling and frankly, horrifying.  GOP has realized that they can do this and get away with it and don't need to cover their tracks.  

[formergothardite]

2 minutes ago, Howl said:

GOP has realized that they can do this and get away with it and don't need to cover their tracks.  

There seems to be no way to stop them. They have the elections rigged so they can win no matter what. They are working feverishly to rig the courts to ensure that even if they are challenged on their corruption nothing will happen to them. I don't know how you beat something like this. They aren't going to give up their power. 

[Howl]

I'm so grateful for fj.  Had I not had exposure to the fundamentalist mind set, Domionists, conservative Catholics + greed, I'd be a much more credulous person regarding our current political situation.

After following Jenny Cohn for a bit now, I'm of the mind set that widespread vote tampering is a real possibility.  It popped up on my horizon the first week of November 2018 when a Houston voter noticed that s/he had voted a straight Democratic ticket, but on closer inspection of the full ballot before clicking the final VOTE button,  the Beto vote for Senator had changed to Cruz, Ted Cruz  (Texas voting procedures allow a voter to click on an option that fills in a straight-ticket vote, Republican or Democrat.)  I'm realizing now how easy it would be to program something like this.

Jenny Cohn recently linked to an article from Feb 2018, over a year ago:  Are voting-machine modems truly divorced from the Internet?  It has lots of simple diagrams to show how astoundingly easy it would be to hack modems with vote data with simple, easily available devices. 

 

Edited May 13, 2019 by Howl

[CTRLZero]

This has been brought up a couple times in this thread, but was there ever an explanation of why Ivanka Trump acquired trademarks to voting machines from China?  Were they to be used in the US?

Voting machines article - Reuters

[Howl]

So, here we go: 

 

[Howl]

 

[Howl]

Pretty much sums up the current situation. 

 

[Howl]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Gerrymandering is A-OK according to the Supreme Court

 

Democracy dies in Supreme Court.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

52 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Gerrymandering is A-OK according to the Supreme Court

 

The motivation is a rare pearl 

"The Supreme Court has dashed efforts to crack down on partisan gerrymandering, ruling that attempts to gain political advantage through the redistricting process are so pervasive that allowing judges to police the practice would lead to a boundless quagmire of litigation."

It's too difficult people. Better do nothing. Gerrymander away as much as your heart desires.

[formergothardite]

It is very much feeling like we are doomed. 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

I find this excerpt from the Court's opinion particularly appalling. ETA sorry this excerpt is not from the opinion itself but from the petition. Still appalling ETA2 it's in the opinion's syllabus therefore, part of the opinion, I think.

"This Court’s one-person, one-vote cases recognize that each person is entitled to an equal say in the election of representatives. It hardly follows from that principle that a person is entitled to have his political party achieve representation commensurate to its share of statewide support. Vote dilution in the one-person, one-vote cases refers to the idea that each vote must carry equal weight. That requirement does not extend to political parties; it does not mean that each party must be influential in proportion to the number of its supporters."

For real?

Yes dear, your vote counts as one but once it is added to the other votes it may count a bit less than one depending for which party you voted.

3 hours ago, formergothardite said:

It is very much feeling like we are doomed. 

If you survive, you need a Constitutional reform. Like yesterday.

Edited June 27, 2019 by laPapessaGiovanna
Damn formatting

[WiseGirl]

1 hour ago, formergothardite said:

It is very much feeling like we are doomed. 

Do you ever find yourself planning an exit strategy from the country?  I do and I never ever thought in millions of years I would ever be thinking of that.  As in how far to the northern border and which crossing I think would have the shortest line or straight up through say a further north state or should I retire earlier and become an expat?

What is even sadder is that my niece made me promise to take her with me and she is only 15.  ?  (And yes, I even know how many hours that would add to my trip.)  I really do dislike that I think this way.

I always thought The Handmaid's Tale, Hunger Games, and others were works of fiction, not plans to be followed by these fucked up money and power hungry politicians.