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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

There are no “attacks on people’s voting rights.” It’s a canard Democrats trot out to energize their base, just like Republicans trot out lies about election fraud. For example, studies show voter ID doesn’t reduce turnout (but also doesn’t reduce fraud). https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/21/18230009/v.... Gerrymandering doesn’t affect the presidential election. But the GOP won the House popular vote by even more than Trump won the Presidential popular vote.

Extensive post-election voter surveys showed that if everyone had voted, Trump would’ve won by 4.8 points: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202...

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Gerrymandering can have an effect, but I'm not sure how to measure it. Gerrymandering contributes to voter disenfranchisement. If you have been disenfranchised for the 3 years before the presidential election, why would you then choose to participate in the elections in the 4th year? To me, that number has to be non-zero, but it isn't obvious if it's anything significant.

For instance, how many Democrat supporters just don't show up to the polls in Texas because they feel that their vote doesn't matter due to gerrymandering in the state?

I think the issue here is that we are trying to apply logic when the American voter tends to be very emotional.

I’m a republican in Maryland. Am I “disenfranchised?” That terminology is just activist wordplay. It is insanely easy to vote in America.

Also, Trump is the one who performs better among your supposedly “disenfranchised” voters. The folks who didn’t vote in the last 3 elections were more likely to vote for Trump in 2024: https://amac.us/newsline/elections/trump-victory-explained-n.... The only group Harris won were super voters (who voted in all four of the most recent elections).

I'm not sure how you can call disenfranchisement activist wordplay. It makes me not even want to engage with you.

Just because someone didn't vote doesn't immediately mean the reason was disenfranchisement.

Given you live in Maryland, how can you claim voting is easy in the the entire US? Are you familiar with voting laws in every state and how elections can be weaponized by the state governments against certain populations?

Easy voting would mean drive thru voting, mail in voting, automatic voter registration, not weaponizing polling locations, etc.

I think you are taking your lived experiences and applying it to everyone. Are you elderly, disabled, a single parent, or are you living in poverty? Do you have immediate access to your birth certificate or a passport? Do you have a government ID at all? Do you have access to transportation? All these factors play into how easy it is for someone to vote.

> I'm not sure how you can call disenfranchisement activist wordplay. It makes me not even want to engage with you.

"Disenfranchisement" means legally or physically people from voting. Activists repurposed that term to attack any sort of rules and regulations around voting, with the specific purpose of making Voter ID seem akin to laws requiring a grandfather eligible to vote. The whole point is to muddle the facts rather than clarify them.

> Easy voting would mean drive thru voting, mail in voting, automatic voter registration, not weaponizing polling locations, etc.

No, voting is a civic ritual and should be treated with an appropriate level of solemnity to engender trust in the voting system. Look at how Taiwan counts votes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUZa7qIGAdo. What's the purpose of the ritual? Surely a machine could count all the votes easily. But that's not the point. The point is to have a public exercise that people can see and easily understand, to build civic trust.

If you cannot vote because you have no way to prove who you are or cannot get to a polling location, that is a de-facto lack of a right to vote, otherwise knows as disenfranchisement. If you can own guns but not buy ammo, you also would not have a second amendment right.

I don't even know what you're going into with the civic ritual portion of the comment. You originally said voting in the US is easy, which I countered, and you seemingly did not respond to it.

You are so dead wrong I don't even know where to start.

Gerrymandering doesn't affect the presidential election? Surveys show how everyone would have voted? Do you even hear yourself?

There are attacks on people's voting rights, but gerrymandering actually doesn't affect the presidential election in the US. The electoral votes are chosen by statewide popular vote, except in Maine and Nebraska.

> The electoral votes are chosen by statewide popular vote, except in Maine and Nebraska.

Which means it does :-) just not by much.

He's wrong, yes, but no, gerrymandering does not affect the presidential election, since the gerrymandered borders are congressional district borders. (Unless you've got an argument that the state borders are gerrymandered, in which case, let's hear it!)

I think, indirectly, gerrymandering might impact the presidential election because a) redistricting can cause polling location changes[1] and b) the voter's knowledge/sentiment of living in a gerrymandered system.

If either a) or b) impacts voter turnout then it could impact the presidential election even though the districts themselves don't matter.

I found some evidence both for and against voter turnout impacts from redistricting[2] or from gerrymandering[3] but it didn't seem conclusive.

[1] https://stateline.org/2022/05/20/check-your-polling-place-re...

[2] https://da.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/da/kernel/90008864/90008864.pdf

[3] https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/gerrymandering-turnout-...

It could be used electron more of party X, which could be used to get enough votes to make new laws to try to effect voting on a national level.

It is more tenuous than the others in the list, but I suspect it could be used.

And either way it had the psychological effect of people knowing their vote may not count because they vote for the wrong party in their district and have no chance of their candidate winning.

The presidential election is not directly gerrymandered. It's also not the president who chooses where ballot locations are, who gets registered and how, or who gets sent a mail in ballot. The more local the politician, the more power they have over the voting system that is used for all elections.

Gerrymandering is not just used on its own. The legislators that use their authority to disenfranchise voters use gerrymandering to dodge accountability. When Republican state legislators, congressmen, and senators do this, they do it to disenfranchise the same voters that would vote for a non-Republican president.

So yes, it's technically indirect, but gerrymandering obviously affects presidential elections. It couldn't not.

The presidential election depends on where the borders of each state are, and the population of each state as determined by the decennial census. Gerrymandering does not affect either of those things.

(I otherwise 100% agree that Republicans engage in various forms of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. Not sure what fantasy world GP lives in where they don't.)

Setting rules and regulations for elections isn’t “voter suppression and disenfranchisement.” That’s just activist propaganda to delegitimization elections. David Shor, a top Democrat voter researcher, conducted millions of interviews after the 2024 election and found that if everyone had voted, Trump would’ve won by almost 5 points: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202...

The intense high quality polling that’s been done since Trump won in 2016 has completely dismantled the notion of “voter suppression.” It’s the left’s version of illegal immigrants voting.

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