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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 á Beckett. It was FIGURATIVE you guys.
And by importing, you mean advocating fewer restrictions. Isn't it just possible that people support immigration because they think it's good for a range of economic or moral reasons, not for some nefarious reasons regarding the partisanship of immigrants. I do, at least.
This is just silly. Not only does media coverage mostly just respond to demand - at the end of the day even MSNBC just want viewers, that's what they exist for - cable news is not the entirety of media in America. Local news and most print media (with a few notable exceptions), especially tabloids, don't 'blare of left-propaganda' at all.
Sure, that's why famously liberal Kentucky, Montana, West Virginia, Indiana, Arkansas, Alaska and Missouri also expanded mail voting during Covid.
Probably not the place for this discussion but consider that 'uniparty agreed goals' may exist because of genuine overlap in the preferences of both sections of the electorate, not some conspiracy.
Again, probably for another time, but I'd just ask on what specific issues wholly within the President's power Trump was stymied on.
I can't speak for OP, but this is only kinda true. Yes, the nice white Unitarian types and Matt Yglesias do advocate for fewer restrictions, and feel bad when they see ICE hustling some poor dude in a hoodie onto a deportation flight because they figure the guy just wanted to make more money than he could in [$othercountry].
However, there are also well-organized NGOs, as well as less-formal ideological networks that exist explicitly to facilitate migration up and down Latin America, with the terminus being in the United States.
Most frustratingly, withdrawing from Afghanistan and otherwise fighting the foreign policy blob.
That article just makes is seem as though Trump was uniquely incompetent at getting things done. Most of those frustrating him were his appointees, he could have just sacked them. I mean, Biden got it done.
There's a reason populist movements are habitually plagued by administrative mismanagement and procedural incompetent. When you decide that the experts are all frauds, you end up implicitly excluding competent people and making yourself vulnerable to grifters and charlatans.
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"A person" can do that kind of supporting, perhaps. But when 75% of people named José vote Democrat, then no, I absolutely do not believe that the opportunity to import a reliable electoral bloc is absent from the minds of the Democrat politicians advocating for low immigration restrictions.
I suppose I can't fault you for countering my Just So assertion with your own Just So assertion, but let's not pretend that yours is any better supported than mine. "MSNBC exists to serve viewer's demand" is one possibility. "MSNBC exists to spread it's owners propaganda to the masses" is another, and I feel like it's a better fit to the evidence of it's content.
One could just as easily turn this round the other way and say that Republicans don't want immigration because they lean Democratic significantly. Seems pointless to get caught up in this hyper-partisan reading of policy, why not just debate the actual merits?
'Media companies exist to make money' seems like a fairly simple assumption to make in the absence of evidence suggesting otherwise; and I'm not a partisan about this, I would say the same about Fox or Newsmax or whatever.
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I agree with this, and to amplify it: I think Republicans would have done better to write off the Covid elections as "weird" than as "fake." The equivalent of a team losing a game when half their starters are injured, you don't argue that the other team didn't win, but should it really count as a sign of the quality of the two teams?
A united front of Republicans arguing that the combination of the weirdness of the election and the narrowness of the Dem majority meant that it was inappropriate for Democrats to attempt major legislative actions or fundamentally change the country would have been highly appealing. It would have given a hook to a lot of people who desperately don't want Democrat policies in place, but do want the country to actually operate and run fundamentally well. It would have put Democrats in the position of obstructionists trying to keep the government from running properly.
Instead we get periodic infighting between the Election Truthers and the Responsible Adult caucus. We're losing lots of good veteran pols from statehouses to the Senate because they don't want to be pressured to be part of the R clownshow.
To who? Even if we assume Trump is induced to keep his mouth shut and the election conspiracy theories never take off, the ACB/Garland jutxaposition is going to make any suggestion that the Democrats ought to refrain from wielding power seem utterly laughable to both Democratic office holders and Democratic voters.
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Meanwhile, I thought a good faith, conciliatory effort from Democrats would potentially look something like saying, "well, that was certainly a weird election, we did what we could to keep it safe even when it required some last-minute changes, but we promise to return to normal next time". Instead, I see histrionics about voter suppression any time someone wants to take us back to the dark days of 2016 when we didn't have ballot drop boxes in public parks and an insistence that 2020 was the "most secure election ever".
Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any Responsible Adult caucus for this one that wants to admit that it was actually weird that a quarter million people in Wisconsin decided they were "indefinitely confined". I really, sincerely don't think there was any mass fraud, just a general freakout over Covid, but I don't get why it's impossible for people to just admit that this was pretty weird and probably a bad idea to reify.
I agree. Calling a 50/50 Senate a "mandate" to make irrevocable changes is deeply bad faith. Complaining that "two senators" are holding up your agenda is deeply bad faith when you could have just won another 20 elections. Congress is deeply broken.
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You are running off of mistake theory.
Not really though, I'm just hypothesis checking. If the last minute Covid changes in elections had been good faith, I would have expected to see something like I described above. I didn't think the Covid changes were good faith, but if they were, I would have expected a different post-election tone than what we got.
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But Abbott, Paxton, Patrick, Hegar, Christian(his actual name)- the five big statewide officeholders up for election this year- have low single digit chances of actually losing. By definition the races can’t be rigged, at least not against them, because they consistently win.
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I don't think Stupidity is genuinely the issue here. Instead, I think the Republican party is an engine for managing the gradual and peaceful surrender of it's base to intolerable conditions. If you say, look the Democrats have openly violated all the rules on which the country is based and they won't stop, then there is little else left to do but to fight. It's a cross the Rubicon or perish moment and the GOP base still has a shot at prevailing in open conflict. Instead, the party tells it's people that if we can just catch them pulling off this criminal conspiracy, then the system can be saved. At the end of the day, party operatives would rather lead their base to irrelevance than to allow for a war which would hurt their class allies. It's why we get all this talk about Hispanics or Blacks as natural conservatives, as the party abets the dilution of it's own loyal voters... etc.
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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.
I appreciate your honesty about not having an example for Texas. I’m pretty sure the Northeast had some of the last minute changes, but can’t remember for sure.
Re: cheating, I don’t see how improving turnout can be considered cheating at all. In my mind the ideal election has 100% (real) turnout, and encouraging that is generally good. Allocating state resources holds some risk of impropriety, but just lowering the barrier to entry should be fine.
If that benefits one party...well, I’ll cite the Litany of Tarski.
When I see people talking like this my "Goodhart's Law" detector starts going off. An election is many things besides just a numbers game. It is (1) a public ritual in which people are seen to be taking part in collective decisionmaking. (2) An actual decisionmaking process, through which the public provides answers to questions put to it. (3) Symbolic nosecounting among the different tribes; a peaceful proxy for warfare. (4) A process by which political outcomes are legitimated.
Achieving each of those goals does not necessarily require progress along the exact same axis, labeled "number of unique ballots cast."
Require, no. Benefit from, I think yes. Which of those goals is not served by higher participation?
The public ritual only benefits.
Decisionmaking depends on whether the additional voters are, well, smarter or dumber than the original ones. If your best and brightest were already voting, I don't see much benefit. There's a case where turnout consists of one benevolent philosopher-voter who is always wise. In the absence of such, I'm inclined to vaguely gesture at "wisdom of the crowds".
The sublimation of violence clearly benefits as more potential rioters are included in the safe, sane, boring process.
Giving everyone a "voice," however small, seems like a pretty well-established way to get the stamp of legitimacy. Mostly for reasons 1 and 3. The classic alternative is divine-right kingship. If we constrain our solutions to the axis where ballots are being cast, I don't see how that justification is available.
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Harris county(the same one discussed here) did institute drive thru voting at close to the last minute in 2020 and may or may not have been totally within the confines of what state law allows to do so. They certainly wouldn't be to do so again. And the state did actually try to throw out a batch of Harris county ballots over the issue, which the county sued over, and won.
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Speaking generally, but when it comes to juicing turnout selectively in areas highly likely to yield "helpful" votes, i.e. with questionably-legal drop boxes on university campuses and in extremely Democratic districts (and even at highly Democratic-aligned events) as was done in Wisconsin, it seems a lot harder to defend.
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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.
Your question presupposes legitimacy-by-default of the existing, highly complex political system, when the system's fundamental legitimacy is the question at hand. Two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner is likewise not a "fraudulent election".
People ultimately judge systems by the outcomes those systems deliver. Convince a large, reasonably cohesive slice of the population that the system is not capable of delivering acceptable outcomes, and they will not necessarily argue indefinitely over where exactly the system is going wrong, but may simply scrap the system and try something different.
Two people are rolling dice, and get into an argument. The first guy claims that unless the other guy can prove he's cheating and explaining exactly how the cheat works, it should be assumed that he's playing fairly. The other guy points out that his dice win too often to be fair.
From that level of information, notably, one can't actually tell in a rigorous fashion who's in the right. On the other hand, the first guy's argument flies in the face of human psychology, of how people actually work, while the second guy's argument is exactly how people have always worked and always will. You should not expect this argument to result in a return to the dice-rolling, and you should especially not expect the dice-rolling to continue indefinately.
When dealing with vast, complex systems, people observe outcomes and judge the system thereby. Our current system has delivered unacceptably bad outcomes from a Red perspective, and it's done it long enough that there's no reasonable hope that the problem can be corrected within the general processes and norms of that system. Reds therefore demand significant, revolutionary change, and are not interested in appeals to the norms or processes that they have long-since grown to deeply distrust.
If this is still mysterious to you, try looking at how black people treat react to appeals to "trust the system" when it comes to questions about the police and justice system.
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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.
Did the people responsible go to jail? Did they suffer any consequences at all?
Does the letter of the law matter if it isn't followed? Does the letter of the law matter if the punishment for breaking it is a shrug and a sad face, maybe a brief soliloquy about how mistakes were made, whaddayagonnadoaboudit?
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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.
If compact districts favoured Republicans as much as you think they do, then Republican legislatures would draw maps with compact districts. The fact that Republicans are drawing salamander-shaped districts suggests that the bias inherent in compact districts (which is real) isn't enough to satisfy them.
Incidentally, if you measure bias as "who gets more seats when the popular vote is a 50-50 split" then the largest natural bias is the one if favour of the party whose safe seats have lower turnout.
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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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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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