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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

A popular vote win by a meager ~1.5% is nothing to cheer about [1]. In 2020, Biden won popular vote by 4.5% [2]

Even Hilary got a higher percentage of the popular vote in 2016, by earning 2.1% more over Trump [3]

After you consider Republicans have been pushing for voter suppression and purging voter rolls in states for _decades_ [4]. We are just now seeing the effect. I suppose you can say it worked in the 2000 election and subsequent recounts in FL.

The laws and regulations around voter rights are not _constitutionally_ guaranteed. So unlike gun rights, voting rights can easily be taken away by the state. [5]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_president...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_president...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_president...

[4] https://www.salon.com/2000/12/04/voter_file/

[5] https://hartmannreport.com/p/democracy-undone-the-texas-plac...

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You’re making a critical mistake:

Democrats, correctly or not, see voter roll clearing as a vote suppression tactic. (Salon and Wikipedia would certainly say so.) Democrats argue there is no evidence of a large scale organized fraud (no death by machete), so the worry is purely suppressive.

Republicans, correctly or not, see voter roll clearing as an election integrity measure for preventing fraud. All it takes is 2% fraud, as you yourself admit, for a victory. Republicans are concerned about slow, minor, unorganized fraud in lots of little places, that might add up to 2% (death by paper cuts).

Until a narrative wins, this will continue; and any election victories will be ignored by the other side.

You seem to be overlooking the numerous things other than roll clearing that can make it harder to vote. There are several more in this comment [1], and a large list of references in the comment linked in footnote 5 there.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42935056

Please explain to me why harder to vote has an automatic correlation with hurting Democratic, but not Republican, turnout; especially considering Republican’s greater propensity to live in rural areas with a longer distance to the voting booth.

Please explain to me how this discussion of voter turnout and voter suppression in the lens of Democrat versus Republican is not too political for Hacker News?

Please remember that this entire sub thread was precipitated from you saying that the mention of a reality TV star in the context of the effects of reality TV is too political and now you are actually discussing politics.

you should look up how voter supression works and how it is designed to prevent what demographic from voting. additionally, one thing you failed to mention is that republicans are trying to “solve a problem” (voter fraud) which simply does not exist. there are SERIOUS consequences related to fradulent voting that it just does not make any sense for anyone to even attempt it. hence, this is absolutely never about voter fraud, it is now and always has been about voter supression. if republicans wanted everyone to vote they should be pushing for mandatory voting with serious not-paying-taxes like consequences. make every American vote, do it literally through the IRS. You file your tax return in an election year (well technically 04/15 of the following year) you have to show a proof you voted in the election or you get mandatory prison time. it is shit like this that would be about “hey, lets make sure EVERYONE eligible votes and see who wins” … the republicans only want to make sure to supress votes they know will not be kind to them :)

I've lived and voted in rural areas. Even if they had closed the convenient polling places that were typically in the nearest elementary school or nearest large church so that we would have had to go to the nearest town to vote--it wouldn't have actually made much difference. Since we had to go to that town for pretty much all of our groceries, consumer goods, health services, etc we were already set up so that going there was no big deal.

It still can cause problems, but the problems are usually not "I don't have a reasonable way to get to my new polling place" problems. They are "Can I fit a trip to the polling place in with my Tuesday schedule?" problems.

People in poor urban areas in cities with little public transportation are often actually much less mobile than people in rural areas. For them it is more likely to be a "I don't have a reasonable way to get to my new polling place" problem.

But the biggest reason closing polling places correlates well with hurting Democrats is that the people who decide which ones to close tend to pick ones that they will be more likely to hurt Democrats. E.g., from 2012 to 2018 Texas closed 542 polling places in the counties that had the biggest growth in Latino and Black populations (both of which are more likely to vote Democrat) and only 34 in counties with the least growth in those populations.

Republicans say that. But also, regarding pandemic voting provisions (vote-by-mail, same-day registration, early voting) proposed by Democrats in 2020: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” — Donald Trump, March 2020

You’re making a hypocritical mistake:

You claimed the passing mention of a reality TV star in the context of the effects of reality TV on society was too political for Hacker News, and now you have descended into Democrat versus Republican percentage based figures on voting.

> All it takes is 2% fraud, as you yourself admit, for a victory.

Barely gets to 0.0001% fraud[0] (and the only 0.0001% finding is an estimate.) Even if you add up all the frauds on the link, I think you'd barely get past 0.002% fraud and that's over a multi-decade period.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_...

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