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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Agree. With all the anti-democratic practices being rolled out across the states it’s pretty scary to imagine things even a year from now and a long time forward. Life threats against election officials and all the way up to Senators. Gerrymandering. Even the SCOTUS is biased. Seems civics in the US are about to be rigged for one party rule.

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we’ve been oligarchic since at least the 90s, so it doesn’t really matter that there are two major parties. in fact, having two parties has been an effective shield against criticism and activism, keeping us distracted (see every comment on hn and beyond that mentions democrat/republican, liberal/conservative, etc.) from the real roots of our growing inequality and stagnation. consolidation of power, wealth and influence is the enemy of the people, as it’s been for all of human history. we keep failing at understanding this throughout that history to our continued collective misery.

we need to (continue to) decentralize governments and markets. we now have the technological means, so it’s largely a matter of popular will at this point.

Your analysis is good.

Be careful with your proposed solution. No matter what you do, the powerful and wealthy will always find a way to capture the system. I think the real problem is the sheer amount of wealth and power in a few hands.

> we’ve been oligarchic since at least the 90s

You mean the 1890s?

1790s

But I would say "oligarchic tendencies" rather than a pure oligarchy, which is the natural and default state of the world once you chop off the head of the monarch and no longer have power vested in a single individual -- it devolves to a smaller group of more powerful individuals.

But elections and popular movements are still in the mix as well, and occasionally make an impact. Thus it's an oligarchy influenced by popular pressures, which is a pretty good classification of all non-monarchic/non-dictatorial governments.

Serious question, does anyone have any insight into how we got into this mess? It seems like the past few years has seen a whirlwind of anti-democratic rule at almost every level of government - state, local, and federal.

as hinted at in my sibling comment, there’s a natural gradient toward the consolidation of power, propelled by individual actions to that end. we’ve reached a tipping point in the past 40–50 years where enough consolidation has happened that politicians no longer need to genuinely care about the populace at large, but rather only the plutocratic class.

IMHO, it's been an escalation of tit-for-tat from both sides of the aisle.

News sources, 'Community organizers', corporate activists, religious leaders etc. have all been increasingly brazen as they take increasingly polarized positions to counter actions from the other side.

What's missing is common decency and sympathy for the other person's point of view. We won't find it by clinging to our own political party or news sources. We're going to have to interact with real, actual people who are different than we are and learn to strike a balance between their needs and our own.

Exactly. It's tit-for-tat. Moderate Democrats won't push back against the "community organizers" when they push highly questionable practices such as ballot harvesting or allowing ballots to be counted that arrive days after election day. Moderate Democrats also never pushed back on two decades of claims about election fraud and stolen elections from the likes of people like Terry McAuliffe and Stacey Abrams: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/terry-mcauliffe-sprea...

That, in turn, has destroyed trust. Now, moderate Republicans won't push back against Trump's outrageous claims of voter fraud and stolen elections. Nobody trusts each other to act in good faith and do the right thing.

Ultimately, it is almost always the fault of Democrats- whether it is fake electoral fraud allegations, gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement. Stacey Abrams and fauci are the true villains here. /s

Btw, electoral fraud via voter disenfranchisement is a well established reality. Voter disenfranchisement has been a Republican tactic for decades that Democrats are finally fighting against. Yes, this is fraud - which is why Republicans are now upset that their fraud is being shut down by Stacey Abrams. Georgia already proved this.

Your partisan colors are showing.

Strong election processes and voting processes can go both ways.

> Your partisan colors are showing

Is this the best counter argument to support voter disenfranchisement that you were able to come up with?

The last major story about ballot harvesting was a conviction for a Republican operative doing it in North Carolina.

Great. We can get behind it being a bad thing, right?

First, can we agree on a set of premises --- for instance, that "ballot harvesting" is not an idiosyncrasy of the Democratic party? It's an article of faith among conservatives that the Democratic Party is the party of voter fraud, but that's empirically untrue.

When we agree on what the facts are, it should be straightforward for us to work out what good changes would be.

What does that have to do with ballot harvesting?

I don’t think democrats are “the party of voter fraud.” I do think they overvalue activist rhetoric about voter access while undervaluing the importance of overt displays of trustworthiness in building trust in elections. The whole point of elections is so people who don’t trust each other can agree on the result, and ballot harvesting pretty much screams untrustworthiness.

Voting isn’t rocket science. Plenty of advanced democracies do it well. My point of reference is basically: is this practice common in the EU, or Japan/Taiwan/Australia/Canada? As far as I can tell, ballot harvesting isn’t.

I guess I'd ask why I should care about that particular wrinkle of vote casting. I took the time to go read up on state ballot harvesting laws, and there's essentially no apparent correlation between state parties and ballot collection laws. I learned that ballot collection is kind of a big deal for Native Americans (who rely on collectors for far-flung reservations, where otherwise getting to a sanctioned ballot box might involve a multiple-hour drive) and for elderly voters in assisted living homes. There seems to be no studied connection between lax collection laws and incidence of fraud.

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.

There is a basic data science question here. What kind of data errors exist in the US system.

Precision error = invalid voter voting

Recall error = valid voter unable to vote

You can look up detailed definitions on wikipedia.

US is plagued by recall errors. Like tptacek pointed out miniscule precision errors identified so far are by Republicans. The errors trade off with each other. Reducing precision errors will increase recall errors and vice versa.

When someone makes a song and dance about virtually non existent precision errors and tries to worsen recall errors - the intent is not to reduce the errors, but increase it to subvert the democratic process.

This is where truth and "truthiness" diverge, I suppose. "Two decades of claims about election fraud" shares character with "two decades of high rates of Stop-and-Frisk detainments of black New Yorkers." The rest of the world looks at the reasonable behavior of liberal election workers and would be reformers - no the "Moderate" Democrats, who as recently as last week were working to gerrymander one of their own party members out of office because they're a progressive - and the way they're received by certain subsets of the electorate, and justifiably consider us insane. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071163]

This statement

>That, in turn, has destroyed trust.

Is useful, though not in the way you probably think. The notion of "trust" in American politics is an important and powerful one, and the root of much of our history. Our basic structure as a federation is built on interstate trust. Our major flirtation with dissolution was not predicated on actual legislative action, but a lack of trust that certain actions wouldn't eventually be taken. So, trust is both a bedrock of our society and a curiously fragile thing.

As far as that notion goes, an examination of our history can yield the following statements:

That the Left has not always trusted the Right to make the "correct" decisions, but has always trusted them with the right to vote.

and

The Right has never trusted the Left with the right to vote.

The rest of the world gets an extremely biased view of what’s happening in America. They may view “liberal election workers and would be reformers” as the good guys based on that, but the best way to tell what they think is reasonable is from the rules they impose on themselves. French people might not like Georgia Republicans, but France banned mail in voting in the 1970s, while Georgia has extensive mail in voting. Germans might not like Georgia Republicans either, but residency registration there—which is required for voting—requires shlepping down to a citizens office in person with a bunch of paperwork. Meanwhile you can register to vote in Georgia completely online.

You can see this for many other issues as well. International media portrays American Republicans as crazy religious fundamentalists. But Mississippi’s 15-week abortion law is less restrictive than the laws in France or Germany. (In the latter country, abortion is technically still illegal under the basic law, though not punished.)

I agree referencing international norms is a good way to sanity-check what’s within bounds. But obviously the way to do that is to look at the actual rules in place in other liberal democracies, not how people in those countries perceive Americans. On that front, the American left is outside the liberal democratic mainstream on many issues: voting, abortion, religious education, etc.

Cherry-picking restrictive (and, might I say, somewhat off-topic?) policies doesn't change that some form of postal voting is associated with national freedom and wealth, which is both an image I imagine that we'd like to project and a reality level-headed lovers of democracy support. Japan has it. Australia has it. The UK. Canada. Germany. It's a good thing.

Many foreigners recognize this, just as they recognize the truth that "liberal election workers and would-be reformers" ARE the good guys, because they are not bombarded with cynical, horse race-style coverage of the minutiae of our collective political life. When they learn of our goings-on, they usually receive facts, like:

There has been no widespread election fraud in American federal elections at any point in living memory.

and

Certain US states have a documented history of voting discrimination.

and

A 2013 SCOTUS decision struck down key provisions of a law meant to protect people from this discrimination.

and

The conservative governments of those very same states immediately enacted new restrictive voter laws.

and

Officials have admitted that, in some cases, these laws were expressly designed not to enhance election security, but to lower turnout of "undesirable" voters.

So, if non-Americans come away with the impression that 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? It would be an accurate impression. It would be the truth.

You completely ignored the bulk of my reply, probably because there's no getting around the fact that American conservatism, historically, radically diverges from liberalism on voting rights. They don't hold the same values at all, and the delineation is clear, as I'll state again:

Liberals want people to be able to vote.

Conservatives want to withhold the right to vote.

Now, you can argue the merits of each stance. I would probably counter your likely argument that undue and onerous restrictions, which substantially resemble capricious tactics of the past, run counter to the most basic American ethos, and that our national experiment has been one of slowly uncovering the diamond of liberty that is recognizing and assuring the right of all sound-minded adults to agency and self-determination and a voice in the public square. It's a really pretty diamond. People around the world think so, too. I'm going to ask you to put down the shovel you seem intent on using to cover it back up again.

> Japan has it. Australia has it. The UK. Canada. Germany. It's a good thing.

Sure, but Texas, Georgia, and Florida have no excuse-needed absentee voting. Democratic rhetoric about “Jim Crow on steroids” is precisely about these restrictions such as number of days of early voting—which are still generally more liberal in these states than in advanced western countries.

> Many foreigners recognize this, just as they recognize the truth that "liberal election workers and would-be reformers" ARE the good guys, because they are not bombarded with cynical, horse race-style coverage of the minutiae of our collective political life.

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.”

> When they learn of our goings-on, they usually receive facts, like:

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

> Sure, but Texas, Georgia, and Florida have no excuse-needed absentee voting.

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'.

>Democratic rhetoric about “Jim Crow on steroids” is precisely about these restrictions such as number of days of early voting—which are still generally more liberal in these states than in advanced western countries.

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.

> That the Left has not always trusted the Right to make the "correct" decisions, but has always trusted them with the right to vote.

Packing the Supreme Court because you can't trust the justices appointed by the right to vote the right way?

That crazy plan to make a separate state out of each DC neighborhood, so that DC would have dozens of senators?

Yeah, they trust the right with the right to vote, as long as the left can finagle a way to outvote them. (Yes, I know, neither of those passed, nor has any likelihood of passing. Still, there's a profound distrust of democracy on the part of at least some of the left.)

> The Right has never trusted the Left with the right to vote.

That is so ridiculously wrong that it looks like you're just making stuff up to fit a totally slanted worldview. In particular, the word "never" is a dead giveaway.

>Packing the Supreme Court because you can't trust the justices appointed by the right to vote the right way?

As much as I wish we would have breached this point of trust by now, liberals have never actually packed the Supreme Court.

>That crazy plan to make a separate state out of each DC neighborhood, so that DC would have dozens of senators?

I have never heard of this.

Please focus on things that have actually happened, and not wild conspiracy theories.

>That is so ridiculously wrong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_suffrage#Dates_by_co...

Each point of contention, hard fought by conservatives, who were dragged kicking and screaming into the future of a country that ever-so-slightly further embodied its highest ideals, despite their protests.

I'm not sure what you think that article demonstrates. It certainly doesn't demonstrate that "The Right has never trusted the Left with the right to vote".

I will give you that there have been times when the Right has not trusted the Left with the right to vote. I will give you that in some places, that is true right now. But a general, sweeping statement? "Never"? C'mon. You're simply wrong.

It demonstrates that

>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.

What exactly is the problem with ballot harvesting if they’re legitimate votes? Maybe the State shouldn’t make it hard to vote. And your source is not exactly unbiased, stating without evidence that “ Updating the voter rolls by removing dormant registrations does not “disenfranchise” voters; it is necessary in order to keep the rolls accurate and up to date, as many people move or die every year.” How do they know that? Just a gut feeling? White conservatives have for centuries tried everything under the sun to stop Black people from voting, that’s just one more try.

Are you tracking what just happened in Wisconsin?

> What exactly is the problem with ballot harvesting if they’re legitimate votes

It destroys the chain of custody. See section 5.2 of the Carter-Baker report, which recommended banning the practice: https://www.legislationline.org/download/id/1472/file/3b5079...

Also what does this have to do with Black people? Most older people in the country who supposedly would benefit from this are white—the median white person is a decade older than the median Black person.

Almost like they were cooperating?

I think this is the normal evolution of political systems. Historically it needs something like war, revolution or a big crisis to break things up and start again.

We got into this mess because the activist wing of the Democratic party doesn't know how to accept a win.

For example, in 2019, Pennsylvania did a bi-partisan electoral reform allowing widespread mail-in voting: https://www.governor.pa.gov/newsroom/governor-wolf-signs-ele...

What did Democratic activists do then? They sued to gut every compromise in that bi-partisan bill, including provisions that are common in mail-in voting systems all around the world, like requiring ballots to arrive by election day.

I don't think I understand how delivered-by could possibly be a better standard than postmarked-by. Once postmarked, delivery is out of the hands of the voter (and, in fact, there are some really fucked up incentives for the party that controls postal delivery).

The postmarked-by standard didn't meaningfully delay the Pennsylvania count (the drastic shift from in-person to mail-in ballots sure did, but the ballots that decided the election on D+4 weren't late-to-arrive so much as they were late-to-count).

> I don't think I understand how delivered-by could possibly be a better standard than postmarked-by.

The purpose of delivered-by is obviously to allow for the election results to be known on election day (or as soon thereafter as possible).

A sensible alternative would be to use postmarked-by, but make the postmarked-by date sufficiently in advance of "election day" to allow for the ballots to have been delivered by then. In practice this is the same result while addressing your concern for intentional postal system delays, since now intentional delays wouldn't change the result so there would be no incentive to do it. (And a large number of ballets mailed well in advance of election day but delivered after would then be highly suspicious, as it ought to be.)

> The postmarked-by standard didn't meaningfully delay the Pennsylvania count (the drastic shift from in-person to mail-in ballots sure did, but the ballots that decided the election on D+4 weren't late-to-arrive so much as they were late-to-count).

A delay that was overwhelmed by a different delay in a specific election doesn't mean it isn't a delay.

It's a 50/50 country. We're not going to get results known on election day, if for no other reason than that true absentee ballots (not convenience mail-in ballots) are a thing, and many jurisdictions don't allow them to be counted until election day. Since no proposed policy change gets us the outcome you're looking for, it doesn't make sense to inconvenience (and, really, jeopardize) votes in the name of achieving that goal.

I view not having results on Election Day as being akin to lag in game controllers. It really undermines the feeling that the election result is causally related to the voting.

I was surprised to see how much it upset me to see the NYC mayoral primary drag on.

I think we should be angry when incompetence causes undue delays, which is what happened in New York state, for pretty much the same reason we should be angry about any incompetence. I think the idea that the delays undermine democracy are a canard (they're a canard the Democrats have employed in the past, too). Vote tabulation is complicated because we're complicated.

Well, to begin with, the the United States has never been completely democratic even at the best of times. If you run the clock back 50 years+ full rights were denied to many minorities. This was not microaggressions. It was full out refusal to treat people equally based on race.

For example, my first grade class in Alexandria, Virginia was in a segregated school. It was appropriately named Robert E Lee Elementary. Alexandria desegregated in 1966 and I went to school two blocks down the street instead of across town.

For more on how uneven progress in rights has been I highly recommend "The Republic for Which It Stands - The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896" by Richard White. [0] It's a weighty tome but helped me see through a lot of the myth-making about American Democracy. Also, at least some of the issues dividing the nation seem like replays of disagreements that were never resolved after the Civil War.

[0] https://history.stanford.edu/publications/republic-which-it-...

> If you run the clock back 50 years+ full rights were denied to many minorities.

Are you sure on your math?

That is 1971 btw.

Any answer that doesn't include the phrase "Southern Strategy" is suspect. Not that that is the ultimate source of the issue; but that, from that era forward, there is an unbroken through-line of tone and tactic.

Due to demographic shifts, much of the Republican party has discovered that it won't get what they want through democracy, so when pressed with the choice of weakening its power, and weakening democracy, it has taken the second one.

In parallel, due to the difficulty of getting legislature through a 50/50 deadlocked congress, the power of the executive has grown to fill the gaps, so you get people on both sides grousing about executive overreach. If congress would do its job, that problem wouldn't be present.

We already have one party rule by the super wealthy. The fights between Democrats and Republicans are just show business to distract from the real problems of the country.

Which party? Presumably the one that has control of the House, Senate, and Oval Office?

He's talking about states

GOP has the majority of state governors. GOP has the majority of state legislatures.

Both of the above are currently drawing Congressional districts based on the latest census data.

Both of the above are currently rolling out voting rules that are nominally about preventing fraud (of which there is zero evidence of anything widespread) but will impact the ability of people to vote.

This is what I don't understand. Why can't legislators be proactive when it comes to protecting voting rights? We don't need to see any evidence of fraud to ensure the safety of voting rights.

Gerrymandering erases any hope that they will take up a genuine interest in voting rights when they can just manipulate the entire system in their own favor.

I never mentioned gerrymandering at all - not sure why it's being brought up...

Because the "protections" end up disenfranchising voters, particularly people who vote for the opposite party.

No, the State of Florida isn't protecting voting rights, your words. It is attacking voting rights.

For example, Florida passed Amendment 4 in 2018 which returned the voting rights of most felons after they'd served their sentences.

  This amendment restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation. The amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or sexual offenses, who would continue to be permanently barred from voting unless the Governor and Cabinet vote to restore their voting rights on a case by case basis.

The state government wasn't protecting voting rights when it litigated the result. Indeed they are attacking the will of the citizens of Florida as expressed by their votes.

I think you are making biased comments.

There are good arguments both for, and against tightening, or loosening up a number of processes around voting.

Currently in the US, most voting processes are significantly weaker than processes around getting a driver's license, purchasing alcohol, or buying a gun. This encourages participation at the cost of security.

On the other hand, having to be at a certain place in a specific time window, or having to produce a strong identity can reduce voting participation to a minor extent. If this was altered such as by mass mail-in voting then this would reduce security at a benefit of accessibility.

Part of the penalties for a conviction can be paying a fine to your victims or to the state. A logical example of your argument would be that you'd permit Bernie Madoff to vote after his release (provided he lived) regardless of whether or not he fully compensated the numerous victims of his financial crimes.

Its basic data science to identify what kind of errors the current system introduces. Is it Type 1 errors or type 2 errors.

Type 1 = right people not being able to vote

Type 2 = wrong people voting

The US has massive type 1 errors by far. So far I have only seen one instance of Type 2 error - a Republican voting twice. When I see people pounding on reducing non existent type 2 errors I have to question their intent.

Of course there is zero evidence of Voter fraud. States don’t even check for dead voters or voters who moved out of state. Diebold designs black box systems that aren’t audited by hackers.

Saying there is no evidence of voter fraud is like refusing to get an MRI and saying there is no evidence of cancer.

Not sure what you're talking about, there was definitely evidence of voter fraud.

Not on a large scale, but still voter fraud.

It just happened to be from the party that complains about voter fraud non-stop, ironically projection, and gets zero media coverage.

In the event it does get media coverage, it's typically presented in skewed or twisted way.

For example, an Arizona audit found 99 non-counted votes for the current president, and 261 falsified votes for the challenger.

Instead of stating this outright, the number one cable news channel in the United States briefly mentioned it as "360 votes found for the current president" - no mention of the falsified votes of the loser.

A bit dirty, dont you think?

edit: revised numbers I'd incorrectly remembered

Do you have any direct refutations to my allegations? Do you have proof states are auditing for dead voters for example? I am willing to change my opinion if there is evidence to suggest credible voter fraud audits happen, but so far I have not been able to find any.

> Do you have proof states are auditing for dead voters for example?

I mean, that's trivial.

KY: https://www.wtvq.com/more-than-10000-dead-voters-removed-fro...

NC: https://wlos.com/news/local/how-are-names-of-deceased-people...

CA: https://www.ocvote.com/registration/keeping-your-registratio... (this one is particularly detailed on the methods used, including "The Registrar of Voters office checks the obituaries listed in the newspapers daily" and "a list of deceased voters provided by the California Secretary of State’s office multiple times per year")

FL: https://www.duvalelections.com/Voter-Information/Removal-of-...

The Social Security Administration provides a list (https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/request_dmf.html), and states check against their own death certificates, bounced mail, and other methods.

Sometimes people have trouble proving they're still alive, even. https://www.texastribune.org/2012/09/12/concerns-raised-afte...

People who try it tend to get caught, because it's harder than it seems to get away with:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/republican-official-ohi...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/2...

Yeah, 15 seconds of the slightest search efforts can bring any of this up.

I've found time and time again that anybody who believes there is or ever has been even the slightest issue with "dead voters" is somebody who simply can't be reasoned with, and engagement just isn't worth the effort.

They're completely lost and engulfed in a sea of "their own research"

The problem with all of this is that it's complicated, people misstate things, and everybody is eager to prove that "their side" is right.

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.

What you say is true, but at the same time there was a voter fraud commission started in 2017, formed with the explicit charter of investigating such claims. This commission was disbanded after they couldn’t make progress showing that “thousands and thousands” of people fraudulently voted in 2016, causing then President Trump to lose the national popular vote. He made very specific claims about people being bussed around New England to vote across state lines, which is why he claims he lost New Hampshire that year.

The claim is perpetually that there is a problem that needs to be fixed. Literally millions of dollars and an entire political party has set out to answer this question in the affirmative, but they can’t even prove their claims in a court of law. The most telling instance if this in the last year was Rudy Giuliani refusing to make a claim of “fraud” in front of any judge after the 2020 election, but claiming “fraud” as often as he could in front of any TV camera.

So yes, both sides have overstated their case at times. But only one side is perpetually making a very strong case that they will never take to court where they have to provide specific evidence of their claims. It’s very notable and telling that the extreme case they say is the status quo (rampant voter fraud that stole the election from Trump not once but twice) has never been proven by them or anyone else.

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

Here is where we are right now. A team of auditors in Arizona spent months trying to show fraud occurred there that tipped the scales in Joe Biden’s favor. The result of their audit was that Joe Biden won a slightly larger margin than originally counted. How was this result spun by Trump?

“We won on the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn’t believe … They had headlines that Biden wins in Arizona when they know it’s not true … He didn’t win in Arizona. He lost in Arizona based on the forensic audit."

Did you get that? Trump loses Arizona, demands a recount, gets the recount, recount determines Trump did in fact lose, Trump claims exact opposite, and millions of people follow his lead and repeat this lie.

That is the level of reality denial and irrationality coming out one particular party. This is a mind bending level of denial and delusion.

So when you say things like the above, that “each side gets to declare the other wrong” it really serves to blur the context and normalize this insanity, making it seem like the two sides are the equally deluded. Yea maybe if you look only at the extremes, but this is the main stream GOP party leadership pushing this, not the fringe. The two sides are not the same on this issue.

Let me see if I can try to make the case for the other side here.

> Did you get that? Trump loses Arizona, demands a recount, gets the recount, recount determines Trump did in fact lose, Trump claims exact opposite, and millions of people follow his lead and repeat this lie.

Here's the results of said audit:

https://www.azsenaterepublicans.com/cyber-ninjas-report

They found a lot of irregularities, e.g.:

> Official Canvass has 3,432 more ballots cast than the list of people who show as having cast a vote (VM55)

> 9,041 mail-in voters show returning more ballots (EV33) than they were sent (EV32).

> 277 Precincts show in the Official Canvass as having more ballots cast than people who showed up to vote (VM55) for a total of 1,551 excess votes.

> There are 2,472 ballots shown in EV33 that don’t have corresponding entries in the VM55, and only 2,042 ballots show as rejected in the Official Canvas for a discrepancy of 430.

> 397 mail-in ballots show as received (EV33) that never show as sent (EV32).

> 255,326 Early Votes show in the VM55 that do not have a corresponding EV33 entry.

The trouble with this is that you can find that the numbers don't add up, but then what? You don't know which ballots were the extra ones. All you can do is count them again and then you get the same count from before.

There was one category of irregularity where they could actually redo the count. Ballots that were in some way messed up get "duplicated," i.e. copied onto clean ones. But they still had both the originals and the duplicates. The counts didn't match, which is bad. They had more duplicates than originals. But they could redo them.

The assumption in doing this was that the "extra" duplicates should be discarded, rather than that some of the originals had been lost. Under that assumption, Trump lost a few hundred votes. Naturally this is the only part of the report of any significance to media outlets on the blue team.

Trump goes the other way. Declares that all of the remaining irregularities would have been votes in his favor.

There is apparently no way of proving it one way or the other at this point; the information is not available. We don't know which ballots were the "extra" ones in the other cases. Which means he can't prove it. Because nobody can prove it one way or the other. But something went wrong.

Having a number of unexplained irregularities that exceeds the margin of victory for the state is bad. "Undermines confidence in the election," as they say. If nothing else we need to make sure this doesn't happen again by figuring out how it happened this time and keeping better records going forward.

> The most telling instance if this in the last year was Rudy Giuliani refusing to make a claim of “fraud” in front of any judge after the 2020 election, but claiming “fraud” as often as he could in front of any TV camera.

This is why the media is such a trash fire.

After the election they were filing a zillion lawsuits all over the country. Some of them were alleging fraud. IIRC one in particular was about something like the state violating its state constitution, or violating election laws, something like that. So he says it on camera in court; that particular case wasn't about fraud. The media picks it up like he's made a confession of wrongdoing.

All of the coverage was like this. One side: Massive fraud unprecedented mountains of evidence! Other side: There is no fraud whatsoever stop looking immediately STFU!

As far as I can tell what actually happened was something like this.

Most elections are pretty messed up. There is some fraud here and there, and a vast sea of incompetence. The 2020 election was like that on meth, because of COVID.

Then it all mostly just cancels out. If each party commits a similar amount of fraud, and the effects of incompetence are random, it doesn't change the outcome. Also, most elections aren't close enough for it to matter.

Then Trump figured out you can challenge individual districts. If you go into a district that went 80% for Biden and find all of the problems that actually did happen there, you might invalidate enough ballots to matter, and probably the same 80% of them went for Biden.

This is kind of a dick move, but in theory it's a valid thing to do and the response from the other side should be to go into a district that went 80% for Trump and find all the problems there. Then if the problems cancel out it doesn't change the outcome and all you're doing is excluding all the ballots that actually ought to be excluded.

In practice there are two reasons Democrats didn't want to do that. First, it would have taken a long time and they wanted to be able to declare victory. This isn't really a legitimate reason but you can see why they would want to do this.

Second, mail-in ballots. If a higher percentage of mail-in ballots were messed up than in-person ballots, and more of the mail-in ballots went for Biden, uh oh. You don't know that's going to happen before you look, but it could, so do you really want to look?

So then it's a media war. Trump sucks. He's making a zillion fraud claims and most of them are crap because he's just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. But if they just let him, something might stick. Maybe not, but "maybe" is a big risk. So the other side decides that they want to suck too. If a report comes out, it's bad for Trump. It doesn't matter what it says; strip out anything that helps him, remove all context, find some excerpt that sounds like it's bad for him, whatever it takes.

Then everybody is doing the Big Lie. Mischaracterizing everything the other says, acting as political operatives instead of journalists. It's not the truth vs. the lie; everybody's lying. The other side is evil. They must be stopped.

Come on. The other side is the guy sitting next to you on the subway.

Oregon just got a new House Rep member, and if you look at the new maps it has created, its pretty obvious this isn't a one party problem.

Gerrrymandering indeed has a long history, and it's a bit like nukes - if the other side is already using them, it's hard to hold off on your side.

In 2018, North Carolina saw 50% of the vote go to Republicans, but they received 77% of the Congressional seats. A couple rounds of that is a recipe for a permanent minority for the other party.

Should the region/counties that have a smaller population but different work forces or geographical makeup not have representation? Population alone cannot dictate the house of representatives.

Why should empty land get a vote? Why should the majority of the populace be beholden to an even-dwindling minority?

It's required for keeping the country intact. All the low population states would leave if they had no say at the federal level.

But that is how the House is explicitly defined in the US constitution: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers..."

Part of the problem is that the number of Representatives in the house has been fixed at 435 since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. There would be no "small/rural/unique regions aren't represented without drawing crazy district lines" argument if the number of people represented per US Rep were lower.

And, as we see now, the lines of districts are simply not drawn according to regional peculiar needs. They are drawn by party affiliation, by the parties themselves. Which is insane.

That is what the Senate is for. A minority party should never get control of all three branches of government with only 46% of the popular vote. Control of one branch of government is sufficient to exert influence on the legislative process. In our current setup, the minority party has zero reason to appeal to the median voter. This results in increasing polarization as the two parties are no longer competing against each other for voters, but instead are trying to drive turnout.

The ability of the partisan brain to consistently be outraged by the perceived foul play of the other side, while never bothering to check how one's own side is measuring up, is a fascinating phenomenon.

This is really easy to sanity check. For example CA, the best known blue state in the nation. 2020 elections, 79% of the Congressional delegation is D, while only (edit) 66% of the popular vote went for (edit) Ds.

But, but, but, the other guys are even worse than us. We won't stand for truth, fairness or justice, obviously the correct course of action is to out-foul them whenever we can. And then we wonder why the country is on the brink of an ugly divorce.

I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing.

That said, 50-77 versus 63-79 seems like a different order of magnitude worth of gerrymandering.

The 63-79 isn't apples to apples - it's comparing Congressional representation to Presidential votes.

We should be comparing number of seats assigned to each party and % of vote cast for each party.

I could not find the Congressional vote totals on the Wikipedia page. If you have a source with the Congressional vote totals, please share.

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

Congressional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Re...

Thanks for the link. The congress vote went 66-34. The congressional delegation, 79-21. There is a noticeable gap there.

Perhaps this is a moment to step back, and at the very least analyze the full data set? How much being in charge of the State Legislature gives room for gerrymandering promoting candidates from the same party? Is it really a one side issue, or both parties engage in it with abandon whenever they get the chance?

Well, that was a deeper foray in US politics than I ever wanted. Hastalavista!

It's quite clear that both sides of the aisle gerrymander. (I was in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York%27s_28th_congressiona... when it existed; just look at that map!)

The point is, barring consequences for doing it, or a Constitutional amendment banning it, once the other side is doing it, you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back if you don't reciprocate.

It's bad, but it's largely unavoidable in the current legal setup.

Order of magnitude means 10x. This is 27 vs 16, not even a binary order of magnitude :)

I agree that gerrymandering is a major issue. I wholeheartedly disagree that it can be solved if framed through partisan lenses.

Our brains crave to know who is on our side and equate that with the good guys. As long as we don't make an explicit effort to snap out of this very seductive mode of thinking, the future is tribal. Memorably, "why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

First of all, your numbers are wrong[1]. And second, thanks to Trump, R's lost a lot of seats in CA by close margins. Before Trump, the CA delegation was more balanced. It should also be said that CA Democrats are a super majority. Once you get into super majority territory, it would essentially require a reverse gerrymander to protect minority seats.

CA uses a nonpartisan process to create their congressional maps. If and when the Republicans manage to claw their way out of super minority status, I fully expect that the congressional delegation will return to a more balanced state.

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

Thanks for the link. The congress vote went 66-34. The congressional delegation, 79-21. There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it?

I don't think anyone on either side really thinks this is a problem. Look at Utah for a counter example, 75% of delegates with 60% of the congressional vote.

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).

How about we eliminate party affiliation on voter registration, census, etc. Make it as difficult as possible to gerrymander with confidence.

Of course, that would destroy party primaries, party nominations, etc. Hmmm... even better.

Who ever thought it was a good idea for a private club to control who can or cannot participate in elections?

The plan to fix it would be proportional representation (independent redistricting is also a good plan for most states but California already has that). It seems to be getting a bit more attention recently but nowhere near a major push for it that I've seen, even here in Oregon where unaffiliated voters outnumber Republicans and are getting closer to outnumbering Democrats as well. I think we have a decent chance of getting independent redistricting in the next few years and hopefully the state supreme court will improve the districting passed by the legislature.

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.

> There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it?

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"]

> A gap doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem

Yes, it does.

> unless you believe that proportional representation is important enough to do away with seats having a regional tie completely.

Two problems here:

(1) it prevents a false dichotomy that the only way to address the gap is erasing regional ties completely, and

(2) it confuses the question of “does a problem exist?” with the question of “is there a means of fixing the problem that doesn't have it’s own, equally or more significant problems?”

> Yes, it does.

For a concrete scenario: a 50/50 split state with three Congressional seats. One party will likely get one seat, the other two. Potentially by tiny margins.

There will be a major gap in representation, even with perfectly fairly drawn districts.

Heck, even with three seats with PR you get that result; that's a proportionality problem from limited granularity.

This is also why strong, independent, unitary executive systems are themselves an additional proportionality problem on top of any that exist in the legislative branch, as a one-member body is the extreme limit case of granularity-limited proportionality.

Of course, granularity-limited proportionality in a representative body has a fairly obvious trivial approach for mitigation to any arbitrary extent desired, so proportionality gaps from this source are neither non-problems or problems without corrections available.

Proportional representation does not necessarily (or even usually) completely do away with seats having a regional tie, although it does increase the size of the region.

Gerrymandering and disproportionality are separate issues: the former implies the latter, but the First Past The Post voting system (where the winner is the person with the plurality of votes in a given district, irrespective of magnitude) tends to generate the latter even if apportionment is fair.

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/...

California, indeed no state, uses proportional representation. The last person to recommend looking at that was ... Lani Guinier. In fact, it's a good idea but it would mean that Wyoming wouldn't get two Senators for its population of 578,000. As a Californian, yeah, proportional representation is a good idea.

California passed non-partisan redistricting back in 2005. This took re-drawing the districts out of the hands of the legislature. It was proposed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and passed as a ballot proposition by the electorate.

You should look at Democratic states. Illinois looks quite gerrymandered as well. I think Maryland (maybe?) was quite bad as well. This is a bipartisan thing. It just so happens that Republicans have the majority of states.

At a national level, Senate Democrats have been trying to pass laws that place general limits on the practice. It would be nice for "both sides" arguments if some version of this project enjoyed bipartisan support: unfortunately it does not.

I don't think the federal government has the authority to stop states from gerrymandering? Am I mistaken? It seems like the Democrats are just virtue signalling.

I think the "elections clause" (Article 1, Section 4, clause 1) gives Congress broad authority to override state laws regarding how its own representatives are elected. (Note: edited to simplify...)

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-4...

I am aware of that clause but I am not sure I interpret "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections" as the same thing as drawing district lines.

Is there any precedence you are aware of?

You can be for reform while at the same time benefiting from the current system. If you don't have power, it doesn't matter what your opinions are. If the playing field isn't level, you still must either play on it or forfeit. If you decide to play, it doesn't mean you want the field to remain as it is.

My point is, if Democrats actually cared about this they would fix it in the states they have power in. Instead, they just benefit from it without trying to reform it. It feels like virtue signalling to me. If you think it is a problem then fix it.

Conservative voter here.

I'll gladly trade you the state-level advantages held by the GOP for the national media machine controlled by the Dems. I think the media is the most powerful over the long haul.

I know that a lot of conservative news outlets have been repeating this over and over, but the facts just simply don't support this statement.

The largest TV news organization by viewership is Fox News, and has been for a long time. Fox News was founded to give conservative voices a bigger platform. So it was founded to be a right-leaning (biased) platform.

But that does not make everything to the political left of Fox News left-leaning. And if you start to look at talk-radio listenership then the numbers lean hugely to the right, and often far to the right. The left-wing equivalents are tiny. People who lean to the left tend to gravitate towards centrist media like NPR News, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Again, I know that those are often painted as being left-leaning in the conservative media, but they are starting to paint Fox News the same way, and their politics have been tending right for a decade now.

Conservatives have an extremely powerful media machine too. Some of the most viewed personas on TV and online are conservatives, with the same being true for radio.

No, the one clinging to power despite support from a shrinking minority of the electorate.

With due respect, the media has worked Democrats up into a froth over nothing. These "anti-democratic practices" are literally just a partial rollback of unprecedented COVID-related loosing of voting rules. E.g. the Florida law at issue here requires voter ID and guarantees a week of early voting: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facts-on-floridas-election-...

Canada also requires voter ID, and Canadian federal elections feature four days of early voting: https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=vote&d...

In many countries, like France, elections are still held (gasp!) entirely in person on election day.

> Seems civics in the US are about to be rigged for one party rule.

The good news is that it doesn't actually work that way. First past the post results in a two party system. Nobody can gerrymander that away.

Drawing the lines different affects what party platforms need to be in order to get half of the seats, but there will still be two parties and they will still each control the government half of the time.

Which isn't to say that it doesn't matter, but the thing it does is different than the thing you think it does. Even the party drawing the lines is reshaping what they'll need their own positions to be in order to win.

If you really want to fix it, replace first past the post with range voting. Good luck gerrymandering that. Might even solve polarization by getting rid of the poles.

> First past the post results in a two party system. Nobody can gerrymander that away.

Really?

Consider the Democratic party lock on the US southern states for roughly 50 years after reconstruction.[1] A huge portion of the population wasn't permitted to vote (despite laws on the books being racially blind, most blacks were prevented from voting in many of these states up until the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And even among those who DID vote, a single party remained utterly dominant.

Does this counterexample mean anything to you?

(PS: I agree with you that I'm strongly in favor of changes to our voting system to move away from first-past-the-post and government gerrymandering. But I'm NOT going to claim that single party rule is impossible when there are hundreds of examples of it across the world.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_South

> Consider the Democratic party lock on the US southern states for roughly 50 years after reconstruction.

Yet each party still controlled the government around half of the time, because the Republicans took the North.

Each party will change the amount necessary to flip the marginal district. The districts in the South were harder for Republicans to flip than some others, so they took ones it was easier for them to get, and didn't take the ones they didn't need.

> But I'm NOT going to claim that single party rule is impossible when there are hundreds of examples of it across the world.

The rest of the world uses different voting systems (or lack thereof). There was "single party rule" in the USSR and it wasn't because of gerrymandering.

> Yet each party still controlled the government around half of the time, because the Republicans took the North.

That is not correct.

Counting the House, the Senate, and the Presidency individually:

Republicans had control of 52 time periods, compared to the Democrats 23.

Based on a starting point & ending of the following:

44th (1875–1877)

45th (1877–1879)

46th (1879–1881)

47th (1881–1883)

48th (1883–1885)

49th (1885–1887)

50th (1887–1889)

51st (1889–1891)

52nd (1891–1893)

53rd (1893–1895)

54th (1895–1897)

55th (1897–1899)

56th (1899–1901)

57th (1901–1903)

58th (1903–1905)

59th (1905–1907)

60th (1907–1909)

61st (1909–1911)

62nd (1911–1913)

63rd (1913–1915)

64th (1915–1917)

65th (1917–1919)

66th (1919–1921)

67th (1921–1923)

68th (1923–1925)

69th (1925–1927)

Sure, elections aren't that frequent and then you get large variation because the sample size is small. Notice that your stopping point is just before FDR and Truman (both Democrats) held the Presidency for 20 years straight, which was still before the South stopped going for the Democrats.

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