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

So then you get excessive claims like "no state purges voter rolls" which is just easily falsifiable, and then it gets falsified and leads one side to believe that to be the end of it.

Whereas what really happens is that a state goes to purge its voter rolls, they have a list of 100,000 "dead people" and the list is erroneous and contains hundreds of live people, because government databases are full of dung. So then they get sued, often right before the election, to prevent any of the names from being purged, including any of the 99,000+ who were actually dead.

Another thing that happens is that someone dies between the last purge and the election. Then either they submitted their ballot before they died (but were ineligible to vote because they weren't alive on election day), or they were sent a ballot after they died and a member of their family submitted it. So there are always a few dead people in every election who voted after they died, and some of these are actually fraud (in the second case), and others aren't "fraud" but they're still invalid votes that shouldn't be counted. Rarely if ever does this, alone, change the outcome; but the ballots are there.

Which results in the over-claim on the other side. "There are zero dead people voting." Also easily falsifiable.

Then each side gets to declare the other side wrong and biased and hidebound and irrational.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

No one on the left is complaining about Utah. When elections are winner take all, big majorities result in oversized representation. And there are still ways for minority party voters to exert influence in these states. For example, they can vote for the more moderate candidate in the other parties primary. The problem is when a state is voting closer to 50-50 like Wisconsin. The Republicans hold a near super majority in the state legislature despite receiving fewer total votes. And because the legislature controls redistricting, Republicans can essentially maintain permanent control of the legislature. That is not healthy for Democracy.

But if you really wanted to fix the CA delegation representation, I would fully support moving to a system where the congressional delegation is determined by statewide popular vote. But that introduces a whole set of issues. For example that means folks would vote for the party instead of candidate, which means we could see further entrenchment of party insiders. The flip side is it would probably make it easier for third parties to get representation in congress. I think this generally would be a hard sell in the US though. I think both core left and core right are too distrustful of their respective party bosses to trust the selection process, and we are a very diverse country, geographically and culturally. So having local representation is meaningful (for example, neither AOC or Taylor Greene would survive a process like this, but both of them have very passionate followers that deserve some representation in congress).

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.

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"]

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/...

Why do you care about this? I'm asking sincerely; I don't get it. I know about the Bladen County thing in NC (Bladen County was the subject of the last Serial podcast) --- again, that was Republican election fraud. But my reaction to that isn't that we should make it harder for people to cast ballots.

I do not think this is the case for Texas I voted absentee in the last presidential election and I was only able to do so because I was out of state during the election. If I had not been out of state I would not have qualified for absentee voting. That does not match what I would call 'no excuse-needed absentee voting'.

We are supposed to be the flag-carrier for free and fair elections. That means fairness with respect to the capability of all voters to "get to the polls", however that may be. We meet them where they are, not the other way around. The alternative opens the door for nominally-unrelated-but-practically-critical barriers to voting - like underfunding public transportation, for example.

>But that’s exactly what’s happening. Foreigners aren’t looking at the actual laws in Florida or Georgia and comparing them to their own laws, they’re hearing Biden call those laws “Jim Crow on steroids.”

>Except, apparently, the “facts” regarding the actual content of these laws.

Let's be clear: I am glad that foreigners recognize the righteousness of American elections when they're at their most free, regardless of how that might impugn their own processes. But that's not where my argument draws its legitimacy. It comes instead from the appropriateness of less restrictive election laws in the face of America's particular values and America's particular history. The actual content of restrictive voter laws allow conduct that is substantially similar to the Jim Crow-era conduct - of the segregationist governments that today's Texas and Georgia and Florida and others are heir to - that the VRA was meant to curb.

If you don't want to be accused of conjuring Strom Thurmond's ghost, don't pass laws he would have applauded for reasons he also would have applauded. You accuse others of not looking at the content of laws when you refuse to critically examine the content of our history.

>conservatives are married to a century-and-a-half-long campaign of doing whatever it takes to try to restrict voting along lines of identity (sex, race, class, location), and that liberals are the ones trying to get the citizens, of a country that prides itself on its free and fair democracy, to vote

The protected classes in question tend to vote with the Left. Therefore, the Right has largely, generally, in sweeping fashion, resisted the extension and protection of major portions of the Left's right to vote. "Never" is the correct word. You are wrong.

You fooled me. I’m fine with your later “there’s no evidence of a conspiracy.” But saying “there’s no conspiracy” is indeed a claim in casual speech.

The potential evidence of a conspiracy is that the professors were denied permission to testify, when, as you point out, they’ve been allowed in the past. What changed?

Everything I have read from the University and the professors so far indicates they are being denied under any circumstance. Including doing it pro bono at least according to one of the professors: https://twitter.com/ElectProject/status/1454526638578880516 it is being denied by Gray Wimsett, Assistant Vice President of Conflicts of Interest.