Both parties are bad but the magnitude is totally different.
Why not have more severe consequences for voter suppression?
Because that would lead to fair elections. And if elections were fair republicans would never win any. So they block any attempt to fix elections.
Because that would lead to fair elections. And if elections were fair republicans would never win any.
Why would Democrats not simply extend and expand the Voting Rights Act when they have a Congressional majority? Dems had this in 2021 when Biden took office - both branches, plus the White House. They had it back in 2009 as well, when the House had two dozen votes to spare and the Senate enjoyed a 60 vote supermajority.
Why not send down more financial and legal aid, as Howard Dean championed back in 2008 when he was head of the DNC and delivered one of the largest landslide majorities in the party’s history? Why not use federal money and manpower to amp up Mississippi state election offices?
Don’t Democrats want to win in Mississippi?
I imagine it’s because the Republican party is “absolutely evil turds” and the Democratic party is “everyone else”. Unfortunately, “everyone else” includes some farts and sharts, too.
Why would Democrats not simply extend and expand the Voting Rights Act when they have a Congressional majority?
Because such majority is not guaranteed forever and whenever they come close to something like that, the Republicans threaten to implode the country.
Why would Democrats not simply extend and expand the Voting Rights Act when they have a Congressional majority? Dems had this in 2021 when Biden took office - both branches, plus the White House.
Because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refused, so Democrats didn’t have a senate majority. Both have now quit the party and sit as independents.
The Supreme Court has already placed strict limits on federal intervention in state elections. So it probably wouldn’t go anywhere although I would support an attempt at least.
Because Voter Suppression usually comes in the form of laws and judgements, and legislators can’t be arrested for passing unjust laws, and judges can’t be arrested for passing unjust rulings, partly because…well who the fuck could even prosecute such a case without risking biased prosecution?
The supreme court is ordinarily supposed to be the check for when the law itself is unjust, but that ship has sailed and it ain’t coming back until, IMO, we institute a sortitionate bench, IE the judges for any given case before the supreme court are selected at random from the pool of all federal judges who don’t have a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of one, on the case.
Really like the thought of the Supreme Court being pulled from a random pool of Federal judges for each case. Fuck this appointed for life shit!
But then with how partisan judges are now, you would get completely random rulings. Better than what we have now I guess, but in theory you could have two landmark cases against, for example, Roe v Wade, and the SC might handle these challenges completely differently depending on composition.
How do you run out of ballots? Why don’t they ship enough for every single legal voter?
Step 1: Be opposed to free and fair elections.
Step 2: Determine which districts vote for you less often.
Step 3: Ensure that fewer ballots are delivered to those locations.
It is intentional, not accidental. They probably used low turnout from prior elections (due to voter suppression) as justification for not providing enough ballots for every registered voter.
They should, at a minimum, have a ballot for every single voter registered to that precinct.
That’s what voter registration is for.
The problem with the US system seems to be that it’s partisan all the way down. It’s too easy for the parties standing for election to influence how the election itself is run and counted. This is, I guess, an effect of the USA’s highly decentralized approach to elections: if the Republicans run a county, they get to decide how elections work in that county. A more centralized system wouldn’t leave the same scope for tweaking each local election to get the desired result in that locality.
Republicans also love to volunteer / run for local elections that oversee these logistics purely because they want to manipulate it in bad faith. It’s SOP for them.
Hell, they have even been caught multiple times putting up fake ballot areas, and “helping” non-native English speakers fill out their ballots, and being in full control of delivering those ballots.
Both sides are not the same.
A more centralized system is ironically easier to rig too. But we’re getting there with decentralization as well.
This is election fraud. Republicans know they can’t win on policy or reputation, so the only way they can win is by removing voters.
Literally never because they always have some bullshit way to legitimize their actions. It is fraud in the colloquial usage of the word, but not legally if they have specific arguments like “we were just referring to previous (lowest they could find) turnout numbers to save the taxpayers money!”
This is such a weird thing to think about being Australian, where you can go to almost any local school to vote.
But you can still have you vote outside of the area you live in from basically any other polling place in the country (if it is a federal election). And the same can be said for state and local, go to the closest open polling to you, let them know you’re out of district and they point you to the correct line, done.
Yep, and it’s compulsory voting, on a sensible day of the week and even pre-poll so you can just go in early if you want to. And sometimes there are sausages.
And sometimes there are sausages.
Okay you trying to hurt me? Because it seems like you’re trying to hurt me.
I have lived in several counties in Illinois and North Carolina. They have been urban or semi-urban counties. I have never experienced any problems voting anywhere I’ve lived. In fact, it seems like they bend over backwards to offer every option for voting. I am much more concerned about gerrymandering and effective bribery of elected officials using campaign donations.
At a school. Imagine! We vote in the churches across the street from the schools.
Schools, town halls, community centres, some libraries, some council buildings, certain community spaces like scout halls, basketball stadiums, rotary clubs etc.
Old churches that are now public halls are also opened as voting stations, and some actual churches while not open for voting due to conflicts of interest, do establish rapid housing programs so people can get legal addresses for electrotal enrolments in time for voting, and others will be open as census sites for homeless folk to record themselves on census night. I grew up in bum fuck nowhere and on election day if the weather was tolerance AEC would set up an open polling station on the local football oval just to move through the register faster than what the tiny local school could handle.
Since covid lock downs, eastern states especially have enhanced their postal and early voting processes.
For about 2 weeks before elections (local, state, federal) for the most part you can just walk into any of the above buildings, in litteraly any suburb town or city that’s participating in the election, and cast your vote.
If you do your research on best venues and times, you can knock out your vote in 10 minutes flat. No queue.
Some people are eligible for postal votes too, you can request the ballot be mailed to you, or pick one up from the post office and cast your vote without leaving your home block.
But we’re far from competent. While I love our preferential voting system, it’s not well understood by the public, our LGA’s are still subject to gerrymandering, and there are large swaths of our community that are legally prohibited from voting for various reasons that I personally feel is an unethical antidemocratic policy. There are also huge groups of indigenous peoples who do not have accessible electoral education, trustworthy polling processes, and are disenfranchised from the electrotal process, with little government support or funding for culturally appropriate programs for engagement. Despite our preferential voting, we have essentially devolved to a two party system with neither major party really being any better, do we want the party of bigots, or the party of other bigots?
