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I'm assuming the discussion over red state efforts to crack down on voter fraud are sufficiently far downthread to justify another top level comment:
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/2022/10/19/435531/texas-agencies-plan-to-monitor-harris-county-elections-raises-concerns-among-observers/
TLDR is that Texas government agencies are sending their own teams of pollwatchers, inspectors, and legal advisors to Harris county(Houston metro area) to monitor the conduct of the election. This is only the latest round in an ongoing saga of escalating tensions between the Harris county and state governments, the previous episode of which- a controversy over property taxes and policing- is fascinating in its own right.
My priors, like with other red state election security measures, is that it will spend some amount of money to accomplish precisely nothing, but it will give Beto O'Rourke and Rochelle Garza ammunition to claim voter suppression/vote rigging if they underperform in Harris county(which is likely; Harris county is probably the lightest shade of blue of Texas's blue counties and also has an unpopular dem county judge running for reelection). It should go without saying that the commission being sent to oversee things is... not exactly non-partisan, the line between the Texas GOP and Texas governor being much thinner in the case of the secretary of state(a political appointment in a one party state) and Ken Paxton's office, but the Texas government has historically not taken large risks they weren't 100% sure they could get away with and even if Abbott and Paxton were able to flip votes, they almost certainly wouldn't be able to do so without it being widely known, and in any case they both have a single digit chance of losing which gives them almost no upside to pulling stunts like that.
As someone who believes democratic elections are indeed fixed structurally, watching Republicans flail around trying to catch literal voter fraud is very frustrating. In the adjacent thread on the New Right the point was made that one has to put up with watching the Stupid Version of your ideology be the one that actually gets to see the light of day, and I certainly get that sense here.
Elections in Texas are rigged because:
The blue tribe has been importing a new electorate hand over fist for decades
The media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to manufacture consent
Lawmakers just change the rules whenever they feel their hegemony slipping (e.g. Covid mail voting), "We had a vote to rewrite the ballot rules at 3 in the morning the day before the election with no public consultation, that means it's legit :^)"
It doesn't matter whether the Reps or Dems win anyway because the politicians of both parties come from the same class stratum and are pursuing UniParty agreed goals anyway
And even if they weren't, the example of Trump proves that even if an outsider were to win, they'd just get stymied by the Deep State
It's all fake and gay kayfabe, stop buying into the horse and pony show
...but they are probably NOT rigged due to ballot stuffing. I feel like a guy who muttered in frustration "Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?" and then I have to watch Reginald FitzUrse literally kill Thomas á Beckett. It was FIGURATIVE you guys.
You forgot the bits about gerrymandering!
When did this happen? A casual google has failed me.
If I had been able to remember the specifics I'd have linked them, but (to my shame) I'm not a high enough level Motte-ian who curates a linkbank of every gotcha example of malfeasance I've ever seen (this sounds sarcastic, but it's not, I wish I had the diligence to do that).
The best I can tell you is that I vaguely remember second-hand discussion of the vote-by-mail rules getting relaxed in some purple state's senates at the last second and in questionably quorate circumstances, ostensibly due to Covid, read-between-the-lines-ibly because they knew mail voting helps Dems. For some this was seen as a smoking gun that Dems were planning massive mail fraud; I was of the more prosaic mind that they were trying to lower the effort bar so as to improve turnout rather than literally fake turnout. One is technically illegal cheating, the other is technically legal cheating, but in my mind it's the cheating makes it wrong, not which side of BureaucratSpeak Administrative State Law #16493B Subsection 17F you're on.
Ah, it's one of those irregular verbs: my clever stratagem, your underhanded ploy...
What is it about trying to lubricate the voting process that makes it 'cheating' compared to throwing sand in the gears of the same (e.g. by closing polling places or purging voter from the rolls on dubious grounds), or gerrymandering, or challenging the signatures on your opponent's petition to get them thrown off the ballot, or anything other bits of legal maneuvering used to push and pull electoral outcomes? If we're not alleging actual fraud, what is the objection?
When you do it at the last minute in response to an ideologically ginned-up fake crisis which you ginned-up in part precisely so you could do this, all the while complaining that other people aren't respecting "institutional norms".
That the praxis of Western democracy in it's entirety has become fake and gay, I suppose. Two wolves and a lamb voting who's for dinner may constitute above-board, by-the-numbers, all nice and legal democracy... but an autistic loyalty to the rules while shrugging your shoulders at the result has confused means with ends.
So essentially your argument boils down to 'my preferred candidates and policy preferences are losing'?
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So what? If it is legal and we're not claiming it fatally compromises election security, what is the problem? Is the claim that these people aren't entitled to vote?
What does that mean? It's not like Republicans can't win elections, and if the media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to "manufacture consent"*, it doesn't seem to be succeeding.
*scare quotes mine
This argument assumes that "legal" is equivalent to "moral", "acceptable". Alternatively, the laws are wrong, and the laws that establish the laws are also wrong.
Our system requires buy-in for its continued operation. What you're looking at is the metastasizing death of buy-in. People conclude that the system is not capable of operating in their interests, so they stop arguing over how to tweak the fine details and start looking for revolutionary change.
The way to prevent this is to argue that the system is, in fact, capable of operating in their interests. Our society has failed to do this in a number of ways, so people turn to the solutions promised by extremism instead.
Alright, what is the moral complaint about enabling people to exercise their right to vote, especially given that per the initial point we are not positing a fraudulent election?
What does that mean? Do these people have the right to vote? If so, why does facilitating the exercise of that right undermine buy-in? I struggle to find a charitable interpretation for this.
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In the specific context here--2020 election rules changes, justified on the basis of "COVID emergency"--I wouldn't be so quick to concede that they were legal. Many of the people making structural changes on a state or county level did not have the legal authority to do so, and while there were lawsuits after the fact, the bell could not be unrung.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wisconsin-supreme-court-outlaws-ballot-drop-boxes-elections-2022-07-08/
Wisconsin's state Elections Commission approved the use of ballot drop boxes in the 2020 election. The above article describes the state Supreme Court's decision that this was contrary to the requirements of state law, nearly two years after the fact.
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This is always horrible. The petition requirements should only be there to prevent random nutters with no support from making the ballot massive and unreadable. Anyone who's expected to get 5% should be allowed on without question.
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I wouldn't consider this to be a republican tactic, given that it was the VRA that enshrened it into law.
I don't know what relevance this has to my point, which is that it seems weird to identify lubricating the voting process as technically legal but actually illegitimate while ignoring the myriad of other technically legal things done to de facto disenfranchise voters unless you are alleging that it fatally compromises election security.
The VRA and associated case law impose specific requirements on how you draw districts with respect to minority populations. They do not in any way mandate the partisan gerrymandering you see in numerous states (including, prominently, Texas).
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Not to mention that "gerrymandering," both the term and the practice, predate the founding of the Republican Party by several decades. Elbridge Gerry, the politician that the term was named for during his lifetime, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and later Vice President under James Madison. The Republican Party wasn't founded for fifty years after Gerry's death. Ironically in this case, Gerry was a member of the precursor to the Democratic Party.
It's tedious when people get so worked up over gerrymandering. The practice is universal and has been for literally centuries. It's also better than the alternatives, because those either rely on myths like "actors outside the political system" or reduce accountability to the electorate, or both. Gerrymandering is aesthetically ugly, but better that than moving to systems more prone to capture.
Or you decrease the size of districts such that it becomes harder to effect certain results based on demographic projections. If the original first amendment had been fully ratified, we'd have congressional districts an order of magnitude or more smaller than what they are now. Much easier to draw compact districts when they're that tiny.
True, though you end up hitting scaling issues wherever you end up on that balance. Larger districts put more distance between the citizen and his representative; smaller districts make for a different mix of coordination issues at the elected level. I realize this is moving away from strict "how to draw district lines" analysis, but there are second and third order knock-on effects.
This was one factor deliberately introduced that contributed to different organizational cultures in the US House and US Senate. The House was always the larger body, with correspondingly smaller districts (in most cases). While there were other factors adding to the effect and some ebb and flow over time, the presiding member of the House always had more centralized power than in the Senate, due to how the coordination issues were resolved differently.
Over the past couple of decades, the Senate has shifted organizationally to become closer to the House; one reason I find Senator Sinema (D-AZ) interesting is that she appears to be an institutionalist who wants to reverse that trend and bolster the individual-Senator prerogatives against Senate leadership.
If House districts were downsized substantially, increasing the size of the House accordingly, a strong institutional effect would be to empower the Speaker, other House leadership, and the parties. The House is already prone to party-line voting now; this change would push further in that direction.
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Gerrymandering has been around in some capacity for centuries, but a) that's not a defense of an odious practice b) it is false to say that it is universal. Numerous states have independent redistricting commissions and even when they don't they don't always gerrymander.
Relative to what? I would remind you that hardcore partisan gerrymandering is a relative novelty and for a long time one of the major aims of gerrymandering was protecting incumbents. And what basis do we have to think gerrymandering is superior to boundary commissions?
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Do you include computer / algorithmic generated districts that use compactness and county / geologic boundaries to compute and score districts?
I've seen proposals I would prefer to those drawn by committee.
Yes, I'm familiar with the "set rules, draw by algorithm" method. (And there are rules that people find generally agreeable for this process; compactness and existing political/geological boundaries are good examples.) One issue is that when you make a list of popular and well-justified rules, it becomes hard to simultaneously satisfy them. The bigger deal is that someone has to code the setup, and someone has to approve the result, and these are capturable positions. Unfortunately, it is very very hard to make a job "apolitical" and also retain accountability in cases where a partisan sneaks in--Madison et al. tried their best at this exact problem with judges, and various controversies with the judiciary only emphasize the limited success you can have.
...There's another, and much bigger problem, though. If you district by naive algorithm like this, Republicans win the districting process an overwhelming majority of the time. The reason is the actual, on-the-ground political map--Democrats tend to cluster in cities, Republicans dominate the towns and rural areas. The goals with political gerrymandering are sometimes known as "packing and cracking"--pack one district with all the opponent voters you can stuff in, 90%+ if you can get it, and crack other concentrations between districts, with no more than 40-45% opposition. If your opposition is already clustered, packing and cracking are much easier to accomplish using inoffensively shaped districts.
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The usual ‘better idea’ than gerrymandering seems to be proportional representation, which is probably a poor fit to the US political system but for reasons other than the ones you’ve just described.
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And challenging the signatures shouldn't count either, because you shouldn't have to be in power in order to do it.
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