We agree with respect to abuse by both parties and gerrymandering. For example, when the DNC sends both Illinois and New York recommendations on how to gerrymander their states, it does become a bit ludicrous. At least the states should be doing their mischief on their own without help from national political parties.
Illinois Democrats agonize over how much to gerrymander — POLITICO
I do support courts throwing out plans that are clearly designed to disenfranchise voters, Republicans or Democrats, minorities or whites. So, we can agree gerrymandering is a problem, but you should fairly present it as a problem being practiced by both parties, not unique to Republicans.
As an aside, the reverse of DeSantis’s actions as you describe them is occurring in the suburbs of Chicago, where historically conservative areas are losing representation as their districts are being knitted into urban voting districts to basically deny them representation in government.
The Democrats undermine their creditability when then call southern states out for voter suppression when their own laws are more restrictive, or the state adopts a law based on a recommendation by the USPS. One of the most common changes across many states was the cut-off date for mail in ballots. The Democrats and news media have described these changes as voter suppression, when in fact states were acting on a USPS request dominated by Biden’s appointees to the board or expanded their voting access.
I do agree there should be adequate polling stations and access, but even in 2020 the studies suggest the bigger problem in not polling station access but rather “hours”. This reflects itself in the higher turnout by women than men in an almost inverse relationship to the percentage of men vs women that work outside of the home.
Combine these statistics with the fact that working men are more conservative based on polling numbers and truly fair elections are likely going to cause this country to shift to the right. I do think Election Day should be a national holiday so we can spread the votes over the whole day. But are most progressives to prepared to support laws that provide conservatives greater access to polling stations or is their position largely channeled towards those who might vote Democratic. In California, Democrats who control the state, opened a new polling site right in the middle of a strong Democratic area when the early mail in voting results showed Democrats losing. Open a new polling site once voting has begun is against state law… but the Democrats ignored it, counting on judges not to throw out any votes just because the polling station was illegal.
This type of behavior is wrong regardless of party, but the point is, it is not unique to Republicans or Democrats.
Meanwhile, the commission chaired by Jimmy Carter to ensure election integrity strongly opposed mail in voting except when on site voting was not an option (which led to the absentee voting rules in place prior to Covid). The current return to those rules is not some Republican conspiracy, but recognition of the vulnerabilities of mail in voting. Covid resulted in some emergency actions, that are not justified absent the underlying emergency.
Here is a summary of its findings…
“The nonpartisan 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, noted among its many findings and recommendations that because it takes place outside the regulated environment of local polling locations, voting by mail creates increased logistical challenges and the potential for vote fraud, especially if safeguards are lacking or when candidates or political party activists are allowed to handle mail-in or absentee ballots.”
The latter point is impossible to police. I live in California, and it has simply given up on what the Carter report considered a major vulnerability… vote harvesting. Vote harvesting is a problem in California. One raised by Republicans in 2018 and raised by Democrats in 2020. Well financed campaigns employ political party supporters to “get the vote out” by knocking on doors and “helping people to fill out their votes” and then they go the extra step and deliver them to the polling places.
When we can figure out how to stop the abuse that vote harvesting represents, then I think mail in voting should be expanded. But I have seen little from the Democrats to suggest how to handle that problem and pushback when some solutions have been suggested (one proposal that got pushback in our state was to use very advanced signature software to trigger callback audits to confirm voters sent in their ballots, which I thought made sense). If ballots are being stolen, this control might pick it up. Instead, most Democratic states “relaxed” the signature software control since it would have rejected “to many ballots” as the number of mail in ballots increased.
Think about the logic of that. When the size of the abuse was limited to the number of mail in ballots, the signature software was considered a good control, but when the volume of mail in ballots exploded, the signature software was “dummied” down. The real reason for dummying down the software was recognition that mail in ballots would be disproportionally in favor of Biden… but is political preference a reason to dummy down software designed to insure election integrity?
In California which has had mail in voting for a long time, the state has simply accepted such abuse as acceptable. As an aside, this view is not shared by most democratic countries in the world. So, is it voter suppression when most democratic states see mail in voting as problematic? Why not fix the vulnerabilities? I am all for that…
Your last point is a bit of an exaggeration, here is the legal premise.
“The legal theory that would allow state legislatures to go rogue and appoint electors without regard for the popular vote rests on an argument made by Chief Justice William Rehnquist in Bush v. Gore, for himself and two other justices. On this view, a legislature is unconstrained in its power to set the manner by which electors are selected — meaning that even after an election, the legislature could ignore the results and select a different slate altogether.”
“But advocates for this view need to recognize that between Bush v. Gore and today, the Supreme Court has unanimously decided that presidential electors are not actually “electors” but instead are bound to the people’s vote.”
So, in order for a state to select electors contrary to the will of its citizens, it would have to prove to the Supreme Court that their state’s election was “compromised”. If some of the allegations made by Trump turned out to be true, that would have been the case. But to date they have not been proven in court.
In 2020 some states chose two sets of electors (Hawaii did the same thing in 1960, but the media never points this out). The first group was based on the “people’s vote” and the second group was comprised of people of the “losing side”. The reason they did so was because enough votes were contested in their state and the cases were unresolved by the courts prior to sending the electors to Washington, DC. In that case, it made sense to have two groups of electors pending the court cases.
Sometimes there is a bit of a gap between truth and how the hyperbole that often accompanies political theater spins the truth. I think most honest Americans want citizens to have access and want voter integrity.
I gave my employees two hours of paid time off on Election Day to go vote knowing most would vote for the “other candidate”. But I also know, what undermines elections in Russia and China is nobody trusts the integrity of the system. Lose integrity and access does not matter.
