This is why we should stop letting states decide how their votes are counted and sent in, because they cheat for their own teams. The feds should go to every god damn state and count the votes without those states being allow to fuck with it, states themselves are commiting election fraud openly without consequence.
Little bit off topic but as an outsider this whole continual redrawing of districts seems so dodgy. Making it so there are more white Republicans than black Democrats and using little sneaky tricks to get as many red districts as possible.
It seems they need to basically keep moving the goalposts just for them to have any chance at winning, yet they cry to the heavens about elections being rigged. Shameless shower of arseholes.
Redistricting by itself isn’t bad, gerrymandering is. In California, we don’t do gerrymandering, there’s a committee of four Democrats, four Republicans, and two independents that all have to work together to redistrict the maps.
Eh...having an "algorithm" figure it out isn't a panacea. After all, someone writes the algorithm. All that does is shift the responsibility to a black box that only a few people know how it actually works, and give the illusion of impartiality when algorithms often operate on the biases we give them.
The problem is not the transparency, it’s about the process of choosing who write the algorithm, what factors are prioritized, and how it gets updated. Stating that it will be “open-source” does nothing to address those questions.
The current process of explicitly partisan redistributing is also 100% transparent. Every Congressional hearing is public. Anyone can get the transcripts, staff notes, and review every version of a bill as it goes from introduction to floor vote. All the litigation around maps is similarly public record. But just because you know who, what, when, where, and why a problem exists does not mean you can fix it.
It does though because you can have experts brought in by both parties as well as independent experts brought in to validate the algorithm does what it does.
The current process is transparent but at the end of the day it's five or six people with different biases for each state. An algorithm implements uniformity across the entire country. You can have a non-partisan committee set the initial inputs and revamp them every X number of years.
This is a zero sum problem. All the possible inputs are a known state so you can mathematically create an optimal distribution.
I agree with the intention, but then who gets to write that code/create the algorithm? And of those written/created, who gets to decide which one is the "fairest?" What are the emergency valves when the algorithm does something unintentional? What if the code written is sabotaged, and can we depend on our usual tech illiterate electorate to know when something is wrong, and how to solve it?
Not to say its a bad idea in itself, but the buck has to stop somewhere in having someone make a decision, a human decision on how these districts are drawn. A human using a digital code to draw it is still a product of human decision making.
the idea that computers and algorithms are immune to bias is dangerous. algorithms are just as fallible to human bias as we are. algorithms are, after all, created by people and trained on data created by people..
however, unlike us, algorithms don't have the ability to address nuanced context unless specifically programmed to do so.
there are certain districts that are gerrymandered in order to preserve specific minority voices in Congress, specifically to keep predominantly black communities to be grouped in their own district instead of spreading them between other districts.(this process, while allowed under the Voters Right Act, has been abused before in order to further dilute black communities' representation. most southern states with large black populations tend to abuse it)
Seems dodgy? It's openly and blatantly treasonous. Redrawing districts with the express purpose of removing political power from the people is betraying democracy, and the people who do it should have to pay for their crimes.
Treason is a monumental crime, because it is destroying the very foundation of our democracy and ruining the lives of hundreds of millions. A crime for which their can be no justice, only a vicious and ugly punishment to dissuade future traitors.
I have been hearing people fighting over gerrymandering my entire life, it's one of the go to examples wer were taught I highschool of how system of government are corrupted.
Yes many states will send it to a court which can say no and make them do it over again. It's one of the reasons Republicans have been packing courts for years.
Dems are more concerned with the appearance of doing something than actually doing something. They're better than the Republicans a huge amount on account of not being fascists, but let's not pretend the highers up in the party give a shit about the working class. Remember Pelosi forbidding us peasants from insider trading, but not herself or her compatriots?
There are undoubtedly plenty of good people in the Democratic party. The problem is, they're not the ones who are running it or controlling it's trajectory.
Oh most definitely. It just really sucks that because of our toxic 2 party system, we have a fascist party, and the party of everybody who is not a fascist. Obviously the latter is the better choice, but since it has to cover such a broad swath of people, it's full of strife and disagreements. There are plenty of Democrats who are ideologically closer to the fascists than they are to the progressives in their own party.
Harm reduction is better than the alternative, but it's ultimately not enough to use a thimble to bail out water from a sinking ship that the other party is drilling more holes into.
It is, but there's been a lot of times where states will just decide to use the maps that have been stricken down by the courts anyway. There's been a major effort in the last few years by dems to combat it (with moderate success) but there was a period in the early 2010s where republicans had a nationwide strategy to gerrymander that was met with very little resistance.
While I entirely agree with you on wanting someone to act rather than talk, the US was formed with the current system being the compromise. If the popular vote was all that mattered, many states wouldn't have joined the union.
If you want your state your way, that's the part that needs undone. People threw a fit when Russia got involved in American politics despite the election having impacts on them. Similarly (though, admittedly, to a lesser degree), California might be impacted by the things Georgia does but maybe they shouldn't have a lot of say in states' matters.
The problem is in how much power the fed gov has. Lessen that and the electoral college has less impact.
Looking back we can see how this was probably the gravest mistake made by the founding fathers & only compounded later by agreements made to end the Civil War.
I mean, what’s the worst that could happen to them? They lose their seat? They still have the same benefits (because it’s for life) and they get to be highly-paid lobbyists/consultants instead.
If they keep Making ruling like this people are going to take away their right to rule on anything, were crawling up to a new age, a d these openly corrupt cocky bastards are not going to be pleased watching their halls of lies and reason turned to ash
Unfortunately it would basically take a Constitutional amendment, as Article 2 Section 1 says “Each state shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct….” which basically means states get to decide how they run their own elections. That’s why it took the Fifteenth and Nineteenth amendments to give protections based on race and gender. And considering Congress can’t even pass a budget, there’s no way any amendments are getting passed any time soon.
That’s not exactly true. A big reason why this happened is SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act in Holder vs Shelby County.
The new ruling eliminated the requirement for certain states — those with a history of racism — to obtain permission from independent federal committees before implementing any changes to their States voting rules.
Since that ruling in 2013, Republican legislatures have proposed and passed thousands of laws that gut voting rights, specifically targeting minorities and democratic strongholds.
Limitations to mail in voting, cutting early voting, closing thousands of polling stations, cutting same day voter registration, prohibiting black church voter drives, passing restrictive voter ID laws, creating ever-changing arbitrary rules on how and when people cast their ballot and dozens and dozens more.
This is the consequence of the Bush v Gore election with Nader splitting the left vote. Bush put Roberts and Alito on SCOTUS and Holder v Shelby passed with a 5-4 vote.
Yet another reason why it was so fucking agonizing hearing so many people casting “protest votes” in the 2016 election knowing a SC judge was already on the line.
We could have had a liberal Supreme Court for the first time in over 75 years and we threw it away for nothing.
Democracy doesn’t collapse in a day. It takes decades. People need to stop thinking so short-term when voting for president. It’s a shitty feeling when your preferred candidate doesn’t win the primary, but that doesn’t mean it’s all for nothing. Right now who you’re keeping out is more important than who gets elected and in the long run your vote still helps protect democracy.
Presidents are important for judges, SCOTUS and veto-power. That’s literally it. All you have to do is ask yourself which candidate you’d prefer nominating a lifetime Supreme Court position. These rulings affect generations of Americans — not just the four years that President is in office.
If you live in a swing state make sure you are registered to vote and cast your ballot. Vote early. Research absentee ballots. And ffs vote in the midterms and any other Congressional election. The Presidency is severely limited if congress is gridlocked and can’t get anything passed.
Looking back — history will judge these two specific elections as major contributors to the downfall of democracy simply because of the SCOTUS appointments.
But we can still fight for democracy. The youth vote can single-handedly crush fascism at the ballot box — all we have to do is vote. It doesn’t matter if you think the candidate isn’t going to win — voter apathy is the tool of fascists.
Many important elections have come down to just a few hundred votes and not all of them get national media coverage. Citizens need to be proactive and vote by default. The youth vote made a huge difference in the last midterms and only 27% of people under 30 participated. Think about how much progressive legislation we could pass if we get those numbers up to the senior participation rate — which is 75%.
It’s all within reach. Don’t give up and don’t listen to anyone saying “democracy is dead” or that voting “doesn’t work”. They’re wrong.
Thisnis supposed to be a democracy, but the will of the people is not being upheld by the cheats, liars, schemers, and crooks in government.
We need to band together as the people we are and make those liars and cheats answer for their collective fucking treasons. A couple thousands political assholes and their several thousand rich friends are fucking over 300 million people. The American people need to remember where the power really is.
Well remember, at least 75 million of those people are a lost cause. Also there's no time off to protest or take any action because you're living paycheck to paycheck. Lose your job, you lose your livelihood, and likely your health insurance as well. Even if all those stars do align, you go to the protest and it's just standing around waving witty signs for a half hour before going back home. Something that the ruling class can chuckle at and ignore because it does not endanger their power in any way.
Of course, it's understandable why it wouldn't be anything other than that. Because the moment a hand is raised, you get attacked by a police force frothing at the mouth to murder people along with all of their right-wing militia friends doing the same. Then, even if you did manage to keep your job and such, you get the shit kicked out of you by the cops and militias, resulting in you going bankrupt from medical expenses. And if you were severely injured by the cops and their buddies and couldn't go back to work? Well, say goodbye to your job, livelihood, and insurance!
Assuming you weren't arrested and simply fined more money you don't have, you limp home and turn on the TV before your electricity is shut off, and you see the mass media talking about how a violent and destructive riot of extremists was heroically foiled by noble patriots and our underfunded barebones police force. The Republicans go on TV and screech about how you're all dangerous radicals who need to be imprisoned or exterminated, and the democrat leadership tut tuts at you for using such violent methods instead of voting for them. Even though you have been your entire life and nothing has changed.
I'm not trying to be a Doomer or discourage any form of civil disobedience since that's how things get done. I'm just trying to paint a picture of the very bleak situation we find ourselves in.
Basically if people want things to truly change for the better, they'd better be prepared to risk just about everything for it. And as dismal as things are, I think most people don't want to risk their meager comforts. And I can't say I blame them. Comforts are what make life worth living, small as they might be.
I agree wholeheartedly. But at the same time, it's easy to say that now. Much harder to keep saying it when faced with a group of state-sponsored thugs who can maim and kill with impunity.
Were dying every day to these thugs anyway. A lot of people don't even think life is worth living under this oppressive regime.
People who work 40 hours a week to sleep Ina. Gutter
People who are ten of thousands of dollars in debt from medical emergencies
People who can't afford live saving medications
We are hitting a turning point where the violence of oppression is nearing the actual violence of ...well, violence
"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators."
Basically congress can outlaw such behavior without an ammendment, but they never have or never were willing to do so.
Article 1 is for the Legislative Branch, the OP is specifically talking about the Electoral College which is covered by Article 2 for the Executive Branch. You are correct that for senators and representatives Congress can pass a regular law, because they are regulating themself. They cannot do so in regards to regulating the Executive Branch, requiring a Constitutional amendment for that is part of the system of checks and balances at the heart of how our federal government is structured.
What do you think electoral districts are? They are the same districts as the congressional ones. Also, remember congressional and presidential elections are held at the same time.
That is done for convenience, it is not a federal requirement that the same ballot be used to vote for both the president and congress or that the same districts are used. The only requirement is that the state sends the same number of electors as they have members of congress, how they decide that is up to them. It would be wildly impractical to hold two simultaneous elections with different district maps, but there’s nothing legally stopping them from doing so if they wanted to.
Actually the federal congress gets to decide when the presidential elections are held, so they would have to separate them on purpose. States cannot change that, thus as it is currently illegal attempting to discriminate against certain peoples in a congressional election it could be unconstitutional. If the federal government separated the two out then yes, they might be able to discriminate.
And any laws congress makes regarding congressional elec5ions also have to be followed.
I am a firm believer that every system, be it a computer, or a government, will become bloated, confused, and bogged down with issues. The solution is a reboot.
You don't want to read about the independent state legislature theory which is likely to go in front of the SCOTUS next time and might pass. It will enrage you.
But what happens when one party gets control of the federal government and uses it to manipulate the votes to keep themselves in power? Leaving it to states is a huge check on a president like Trump who tried to have Georgia and Michigan change their votes.
I do however agree that there should be federal voting laws. But federal government shouldn’t run elections.
Good point, than at very least it should be joint operations where both that state and the feds work together, just like how Dems and repubs are supposed to have a seat at every table, both the feds and the state should be there too.
I think passing federal voting rights is the federal government’s “seat at the table” the only issue is that republicans in congress are curtailing meaningful voting rights legislature to be passed. They know that the only way they can win is with low voter turnout.
I mean, that's a double edged sword. You would have also given Trump the ability to send his people into those states to access the ballot boxes and count.
Looks like it wasn't just that either, red states make an effort to suppress voter turn out in poor and black areas (like always), meaning that even when the country is in that state they still need to cheat for him to win by less than 1%
There were more voting irregularities than merely the suppression of African Americans. Also, Ohio used voting machines manufactured by Diebold, whose CEO and chairman, Walden O'Dell, was a GOP partisan and long-time donor to the GOP and Bush campaign and in a letter pledged "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." And Diebold bribed then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell when he was evaluating Diebold's bid, and after it was exposed, he went on to award Diebold a $100 million unbid contract for electronic voting machines. But despite that, "a substantial percentage of Ohio's 2004 votes were counted by Diebold software and Diebold Opti-scan machines which frequently malfunctioned in the Democratic stronghold of Toledo. ... Diebold's GEMS election software was used in about half of Ohio counties in the 2004 election."
Wherever Diebold and the other most well-known voting machine company Election Systems & Software (ES&S) go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow.
...
“The state where the biggest upset occurred, Georgia, is also the state that ran its election with the most electronic voting machines.” Those machines were supplied by Diebold. ES&S and Diebold would later merge and now count about 80 percent of all U.S. votes. Wired News reported that “. . . a former worker in Diebold’s Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches on its machine before the state’s 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials.” Questions were raised in Texas when three Republican candidates in Comal County each received exactly the same number of votes – 18,181 – on ES&S machines. Following the 2003 California election, an audit of the company revealed that Diebold Election Systems voting machines installed uncertified software in all 17 counties using its equipment. In 2012, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted approved a secret last-minute contract allowing ES&S to install untested, “experimental” software patches on central voting tabulators in 39 Ohio counties. Congressional testimony exposed that last-minute patches were installed in several Ohio counties including Miami and Clermont in the 2004 election. Johns Hopkins researchers at the Information Security Institute issued a report declaring that Diebold’s electronic voting software contained “stunning flaws.” The researchers concluded that vote totals could be altered at the voting machines and by remote access.
Diebold was also involved in the mess that was the 2000 presidential election:
The rush to embrace computerized voting, of course, began with Florida’s 2000 presidential election. But, in fact, one of the Sunshine State's election-day disasters was the direct result of a malfunctioning computerized voting system; a system built by Diebold. The massive screw-up in Volusia County was all but lost in the furor over hanging chads and butterfly ballots in South Florida. In part that is because county election officials avoided a total disaster by quickly conducting a hand recount of the more than 184,000 paper ballots used to feed the computerized system. But the huge computer miscount led several networks to incorrectly call the race for Bush. The first to call it was Fox News where Bush’s first cousin, John Ellis, was in charge of election night coverage. The first signs that the Diebold-made system in Volusia County was malfunctioning came early on election night, when the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Vice President Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes poured into the plus column for Bush that didn't belong there.
...
Diebold blamed the bizarre swing on a "faulty memory chip," which Harris claims is simply not credible. The whole episode, she contends, could easily have been consciously programmed by someone with a partisan agenda. Such claims might seem far-fetched, were it not for the fact that a cadre of computer scientists showed a year ago that the software running Diebold's new machines can be hacked with relative ease. In 2006, Princeton computer scientists revealed that a computer virus could be easily implanted on a Diebold AccuVote Touch Screen voting system allowing the vote to be flipped. Professor Edward Felten noted that a single individual, “with just one or two minutes of unsupervised access to either the voting machine or the memory card” could rig the system. Carnegie Mellon’s Michael Shamos called the discovery “the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system.”
In fact, Diebold just seems to constantly miscount votes and those miscounts conveniently mess up in ways that always favor Republicans. But justice would be done, because Diebold would finally be indicted by the FBI ... but only for its crimes overseas, not in the US.
Yep, at lunch time Ohio was trending toward Kerry according to GOP operatives, so Karl Rove put in a call to the states' secretary of state- who was also the Bush campaign Ohio chairman - J Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell then removed more than half the voting booths in areas going heavy toward the Democrat. As a result, lines started getting longer and longer, and when the polls closed at 7pm, everyone who was still in line was turned away.
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u/WatchItAllBurn1 May 26 '23
There is also a chance that in bush' second election that there were some genuine problems
54% of votes discarded in Florida were African americans
in the same election, Ohio made it harder and less accessible for African Americans and poor communities to vote too.
While these were ultimately rejected by the republican congress at the time. It does not change the fact that Bush only won the popular vote by 0.7%.