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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 รก 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?
I wouldn't consider this to be a republican tactic, given that it was the VRA that enshrened it into law.
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.
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.
I agree it's hard to fill any political position with non-partisans, not too different than what we have presently.
I also agree it's difficult to 'optimize' for many inputs / variables simultaneously.
Given that; I think having a set number of candidate maps perhaps with different measures of compactness and / or different weightings of the well justified rules. The apolitical / political could then vote / choose among the candidate maps. This I believe would still be a more apolitical and transparent process than what we have now.
That members of one party may choose to live in cities, disproportionately, doesn't strike me as an argument in favor of not adopting a more transparent process. Nor do I find the argument that if we don't gerrymander, Republicans win, convincing.
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