The US Eliminated Nearly 21,000 Election Day Polling Locations for 2020 | Hacker News Reader

The US Eliminated Nearly 21,000 Election Day Polling Locations for 2020

vice.com

41 pointsjbegley17 comments

My perception, from outside the US, is that the Republican party, in particular, works to actively subvert the voting process to exclude groups that are unlikely to vote for them (disproportionately poor minorities).

But this view is of course based on what I read and hear. I’m curious what this looks like inside from the US - is my perception just not true? If it is true, why isn’t it seen as a huge scandal?

Your perception is spot on. It is seen as a huge scandal, just not by the party it benefits, which controls about 5/6 of national government (partially thanks to said policies), so nothing changes.

EDIT: As others have noted, of course, perception depends on media bubbles, and reality may differ by place and time. Read my statement to be the perception of liberal mid-30s white male from the northeast coast, looking at the past ~15 years or so.

Being also from outside US I have the opposite impression - that Democracts are actively manipulating comming elections. Of course this is from my random reading - I do not follow politics much. Must be living in a different media bubble. :)

My personal opinion: There is no inside-the-US view on that, it changes based on the filter bubble you and your peers live in. The party in power is still in power and did a pretty good job making it harder to find out what is an actual fact and what is an alternative fact, so it takes more time and willingness to verify any claim. Instead it comes down to perception, beliefs and tribe behavior.

The mere fact that a party strategy is based on "alternative facts" disqualifies it in my eyes. Even if they might be right on everything else, one just shouldn't use made-up lies to win arguments, or votes.

While it's hard to be confident that one's information is not misleading for any political topic in the US, yes, your perception does appear to be the case. It is seen as a huge scandal by the minority of people who both consume news and are not on the same side of the political aisle that the story casts a shadow on, but that's how everything works on both sides (not to say both sides commit equivalent sins).

From the article: California alone accounts for almost half of national polling location cuts.

Yeah, it's all those Republicans controlling California who are suppressing the vote... You're being misled.

What you are overlooking is that California is going heavily for mail-in voting this year, with all registered voters automatically being sent a mail-in ballot.

That's quite different from states that are cutting polling places without expanding mail-in voting.

Per this Pew study, Democrats are twice as likely as conservative Republicans to believe that "everything possible should be done to make it easy for every citizen to vote", while the majority of conservative Republicans believe that "citizens should have to prove they want to vote" by taking steps to ensure they have the opportunity to vote.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/31/conservativ...

The founders of the United States also disagreed on this. If I remember correctly, some of them openly worried about the impact of letting poorly educated people vote, whereas Benjamin Franklin argued that the poorly informed vote essentially randomly, and so cancel each other out.

Interesting. I wonder how Franklin's views would change in a world of social media driven mass emotional manipulation.

>I wonder how Franklin's views would change in a world of social media driven mass emotional manipulation.

Not entirely different than the era of newspapers and the town crier. The volume might be more now, but the end result is roughly the same. A couple loud sources blanketing the majority of public opinion.

Also, for his view not to stand up, wouldnt one group or the other need to be more represented on emotionally manipulative platforms?

Not so much one group, but rather I was thinking of the directionality of emotional arguments. "Think of the children!" and all that. In a competition between a powerful emotional argument and logical counters to it (uninformed vs informed), the uninformed will not be voting randomly.

I don't think thats anything new. Misinformation, propaganda, bias, and persuasion have been a part of democracy since forever. They are really parts of it. Theres nothing to say misinformed votes shouldnt count.

>In a competition between a powerful emotional argument and logical counters to it

Our current situation seems like two powerful emotional arguments pitted against each other, with no logical counters or nuanced precision. They are both yelling the same things too, just in different forms. Most posturing right now boils down to different forms of economic safety and physical safety. Are you safe from the police? Are you safe from crime? Are you safe from unemployment? Are you safe from health care costs? Are you safe from government inefficiency and overspending? Are you safe from having to fund your neighbor? Do you have the freedom to be who you want to be (whether that means not being Christian, or not serving non-Christians?) They are all selling themselves, utilizing the same base fears. The main difference between the parties appears to be one being good at bending the rules to win, and one priding itself in losing with integrity. Utilitarian vs Principled. Neither seems super concerned with facts. If they were, they would more loudly make arguments against their own cases, to demonstrate strength.

This is exactly the impression the author wants to make upon the reader. But it fails to point out the relevant numbers:

1) most deleted polling places are in blue states, not red States.

2) what is most important for access is not the raw number of polling places but the total time polling places are open and usable. Traditionally, this was just 12 or so hours on election day only. Now, many are open for multiple days... or weeks.

I wonder if the historians from 100 years ahead, when analyzing this period of time, will not wonder why the society did not react on time for those evident signs of democracy degradation.

As today I use the present to understand better the past, and why we had multiple civil and world wars, and how is that former rich societies supported corrupted politics that ruled against them.

If you have ever visited a polling place, many of the volunteers are elderly.

The article goes on to say the drop is 20% from 2016. I wonder if concerns over Covid-19 are what is causing this drop?

Its the pandemic. Some of these states are as liberal as they come: California and Maryland. Other states are Red, but still are taking the pandemic seriously.

Instead of having many places open at once during election day, states are preferring the safer route, of having weeks of "early voting", to spread out the crowds.

> Exclusive VICE News analysis shows a 20% cut in election locations nationwide, and much deeper cuts in California, Maryland, Kentucky, New Jersey, Nevada and North Dakota.

There's no ideological similarities between these states. The fear of the pandemic crosses party lines.

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