Comment by taxicab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taxicab | Hacker News Reader

The US needs voting reform badly. Race is currently one of the strongest predictors for how long people wait in line to vote even when you control for poverty [1].

Sadly, I don't see it happening without a change in our political landscape. The Senate has been actively blocking legislation to restore the voting rights act for the past 315 days [2]. This is the legislation introduced in the 1960's to prevent racial discrimination in elections at the height of the civil rights movement. Unfortunately, enforcement has been stripped out over the past few decades making it completely toothless. The tragedy, is that the legislation to restore its power isn't even being blocked because of discussions and legislative differences that can be worked through. It is being blocked by the majority leader just refusing to even hear or vote about it.

[1] https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/study-rac...

[2] https://www.axios.com/john-lewis-voting-rights-senate-5fb8d3...

> Race is currently one of the strongest predictors for how long people wait in line to vote even when you control for poverty [1].

Surely the most causal factor is location? The black & minority vote generally goes to Democrats; so presumably in Democrat controlled states any impediments to minority voters would be dealt with promptly.

Of course I would have doubts about pulling causality out of something as complicated as this, but here is an interesting paper that talks about a few possible mechanisms [1]. The big ones it seems are:

- Inflexibility in when people may vote; The types of jobs people have access to has a racial bias. Black people tend to have jobs where they literally aren't allowed to leave during they which means they can't stop by the polling location during off hours. This can make polling places deal with larger peaks in predominantly black areas.

- Partisan resource allocation; predominantly black regions tend to lean democrat and so in republican areas they may receive fewer resources to deal with voting.

- Voter ID laws; These also have a racial lean and can clog up regions where they are enacted. Minorities also tend to have a more difficult time gaining access to IDs for voting and so people may have to come back multiple times or be turned away.

- State voting laws; Regions vary with who has access to early voting, vote by mail, etc. These tend to have a racial bias as well.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w26487?sy=487

Discrimination due to working times, location, and ability to show ID are not racist. They may affect black people disproportionately, but they also affect millions of whites and other races too. Those things seem to have more to do with economic status than race to me.

I’m fed up seeing this kind of shallow dismissal. This is a particularly egregious example; you are a hair away from saying “discrimination that affects <race> disproportionately is not racist”.

I mean, you’re basically describing redlining (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) - a textbook case of a “we all already agree that this is racist and it’s not particularly controversial” concept.

You don’t need a law that says “Black people can’t vote” in order to have racist policies!

The mechanism by which modern racists work is to find categories that are not strictly racial but which have a very strong racial correlation and then apply restrictions and barriers on this correlated category while claiming to not be acting with racial bias. What is changing is that people are starting to see right through these and courts are also starting to exhibit basic statistical literacy with regards to these tactics.

73% of all arrests are male[0]. This imbalance does not mean that there is systemic bias against men, though. It means they commit more arrestable actions.

[0] https://www.drugwarfacts.org/node/986

Taxicab's first post explicitly stated that the study they linked found race to be significant even after controlling for economic status.

It's about race.

The most mind-blowing example I've seen is in Texas, where Loving County (population of 169) and Harris County (~70% people of colour, population of 4.7 million) both have 1 ballot drop off location.

Why do you need ballot drop-off locations for mail-in ballots? Can't they be, you know, mailed in?

We don't have separate drop off boxes for tax returns, why would this be different? And that's something that carries penalties for not submitting on time. Or am I missing something?

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/11/texas-ballot-drop-of...

You're definitely missing something, cause 82.3% of voters in Texas thus far went for in-person drop-off. (That's 24.3% of total turnout in 2016.)

While I agree in principle, imagine for a moment a crazy world where a president tried to defund the post office and the senate approved a postmaster who actively tried to prevent ballots being delivered on time. Wouldn't you feel better taking your ballot in yourself, just to be safe?

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