Inb4 assholes come out of the woodwork to both sides this.
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.
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.
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.
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 many people will vote in a county is super predictable. There are only 2 reasons to run out of ballots
- Turnout is unusually high (Not likely).
- You printed less ballots than you needed (Really likely).
That’s it, that’s the end of the reasons. You can literally print the same number of ballots for the last similar election and you’d have a good chance of having enough at least for most of the voting with some good early indicators that you need more at the beginning of the election. To run out 2 hours into an election shows you didn’t even print as many ballots as you did for the last major election.
The math for how many ballots to print is “last similar election * (county growth percentage * last election turnout percentage) * 1.05”. That’s it. That will cover enough ballots for pretty much any election except for an extreme one where turnout is WAY higher than what could be predicted.
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Enough ballots were printed but not all were delivered
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Ballots were printed but the wrong quantities were delivered to different polling stations
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Ballots were delivered and some “disappeared”
Not saying it’s any of those things, but that’s 3 more possibilities
- You intentionally lower the amount of ballots sent to precincts you want to suppress the vote of.
That math actually results in not having enough ballots in areas with more voter suppression if they actually turn out for the next election. The correct number of ballots is 105% of the number of registered voters so everyone can vote in any given election, with some spares for mistakes.
How do you run out of ballots? Why don’t they ship enough for every single legal 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.
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.
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