12
votes
Republicans are trying to kick thousands of voters off the US electoral rolls during a pandemic
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Ari Berman, Becky Z. Dernbach, Ali Breland, Camille Squires, Molly Schwartz, Edwin Rios, Sinduja Rangarajan, Jacob Rosenberg, Dan Friedman, Tom Philpott
- Published
- Apr 14 2020
- Word count
- 3600 words
Naked gerrymandering and voter suppression... all backed up with rulings by the supreme court that there was no need for a recount in Bush v Gore (but this did not set a precedent, the ruling only applied to Bush v Gore) and that states with a long history of voting discrimination no longer needed to get federal approval for changes to their election laws and voting procedures under the Voting Rights Act.
Now we have a president who is openly courting foreign interference, blatantly profiteering off the presidential office, and clearly obstructing justice, and the supreme court is blocking any attempt to hold him accountable.
The Democrats made a huge mistake when they didn't push through a supreme court nomination in 2015.
My understanding is that the Democrats hands were tied; any attempt to push Garland through would have been shut down by the Republicans, and to circumvent procedure would have required their assistance.
To wit, Republicans had a majority in the Senate. It's not that the Democrats were being soft; it's that there was no legal mechanism they could use to compel the Republican majority to acknowledge Obama's nomination.
align this up with no postal system / no mail in voting = 4(?) more years of trump
am in colorado and voting by mail/dropping off at a polling place has been standard for something like 15 years.
There is brinkmanship going on with the US postal service but I don't see it coming down to no mail delivery. Even going to 3 days a week would be a big change.
Eh. Republican voters probably aren't too concerned about more expensive mail since more expensive services are in their view better and Republicans don't seem to care about voter ID ("who doesn't have an ID?") So I don't think they are too concerned about voting rights either. (And to be honest, cultural/economic conservatism are fundamentally inconsistent with equality and democracy.)
It is undoubtably the case that Republicans are trying to make voting harder and Democrats are trying to make it easier.
But, as we've seen in Wisconsin, that doesn't mean that Republicans will succeed. Making voting harder doesn't actually mean making it all that hard, it just means there's a hurdle, and it's pretty low. And there are lots of Democrats who vote in every election and are unlikely to be removed from polls, so the damage is limited. If enough people get out and vote, it won't matter in the end that some weren't able to.
A well-organized Democratic party should be able to do a lot to make sure their voters are registered and have ID's. This may be unjust, it may be a challenge, but that doesn't mean victory isn't achievable.
I worry that dwelling on the unfairness of it all results in a lack of perspective that leads to fatalism. The articles about voter enrollment rarely talk about the bigger picture. They should be taken as useful intelligence about what needs to be guarded against, not reason to abandon hope.
I gotta wonder if Obama thought of/had a chance of attempting to put a roadblock against such a worst-case scenario on 2008 when the Democrats swept every sect of Congress with something like a national referendum or just a plain bill on who should draw voting districts/decide voting law. A state's rights to gerrymandering and making voting more difficult is basically what the GOP's ""electoral"" 'strategy' has become since REDMAP. If he did then he has made the worst decision in the early 21st century, damned be the short-term.
It would have come down to the ACA and voter reform, and voter reform would have probably been seen as self serving.
Yeah, that makes enough sense. Unfortunately the media environment of 2008 wasn't (and still isn't despite everything Trump) really good for conveying the need for systemic change because they are (likely the most important) part of it. I definitely think voting reform is far simpler to do than the ACA and could just follow it though.
I wouldn't be so sure. Voting is almost entirely handled at the state level, not the federal. While you probably could craft some sort of reform package, I actually think it would be much more difficult than the ACA, and suffer a much greater risk of being shot down by the same supreme court that decided to burn the voting rights act a few years later.