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allmyleftistsliveintexas · 3 years

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Gerrymandering in Austin, Texas and What We Can Do to Fix It

Below is a deep dive into Austin’s gerrymandering problem. It includes defining gerrymandering, a look into how Austin’s congressional districts are drawn, some actions we can take to make this drawing more fair, and more.

Note: while gerrymandering can occur in any electoral district, this post focuses on US congressional districts in Austin, Texas.

The Redistricting Process

To best understand gerrymandering, it's important to understand the redistricting process.

Every part of the country is divided into different congressional districts. Each district is represented by one congressperson. Redistricting is the process of drawing these districts so that each congressperson represents a relatively equal amount of people.

In every year ending with a zero, the US Census Bureau aims to count every person in the country or every American citizen, depending on the party in power. (Trump did not want to count undocumented folks. Biden will.)

This data is then used in reapportion, where it is decided how many congressional seats/districts each state receives based on population. Typically, the reapportion report is delivered by the US Census Bureau on the last day of the year. This year it is expected by April 30th. This year, Texas is expected to gain three seats. California is expected to lose one.

Next, the US Census Bureau releases redistricting data to the states. Typically this happens for April of the next year, but this year it will happen before September 30th. States then utilize different methods to redraw district lines.

Who redraws the lines depends on the state. While 21 states currently utilize some sort of nonpartisan redistricting committee, in Texas, the state legislature is in charge of redrawing the lines. The current Texas redistricting committee includes 10 republicans and 7 democrats.

"Redistricting is like an election in reverse. It's a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters." - Thomas Hofeller, Redistricting Chair of the Republican National Committee

What is gerrymandering?

"The practice of dividing or arranging a territorial unit into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections" - Merriam-Webster Definition

Gerrymandering refers to when electoral districts are drawn to favor one group of people over another. This often means that districts are drawn counterintuitively and in strange shapes so that like-minded voters are separated into one district instead of spread out over multiple districts. Because these voters end up in the same district, they are only able to win that one district instead of the multiple districts they could win if the districts were drawn fairly.

The word "gerrymandering" is named after Elbridge Gerry. (pronounced Gary.) While he was governor of Massachusetts in 1812, he helped create a partisan district of Boston that resembled a salamander. This led to the district electing three Democratic Republicans into historically Federalist seats that same year. While this wasn't the first time the US experienced gerrymandering, this was the first time a name stuck to the practice.

salamander district, via vox/boston centinel 1812

Today, gerrymandered districts play a massive role in keeping political parties in power. While both democrats and republicans are guilty of gerrymandering, the majority of gerrymandered districts are drawn by republicans. In 2010, Republicans launched "REDMAP" which utilized software to strategically redistrict in favor of republicans. This led them to retain control of the US house by 33 seats, even though democrats had a one million voter majority. Additionally, AP found almost four times as many republican skewed states than democrat in 2016. An AP analysis indicated that Republicans won 16 more congressional seats in 2018 because of gerrymandering than they would have with fairly drawn districts.

"When the representatives are drawing their constituencies in a way that allows them to choose their constituents, you've reversed the dynamic quite fundamentally." - John Akred

Gerrymandering Strategies

There are many tactics used in gerrymandering districts, but the two main ones are cracking and packing. Note: there are even *more* methods of gerrymandering than those included on this list.

Cracking - Cracking is when voters of the opposing party are "cracked" or split into many different districts so their voting power is diluted across many districts.

Packing - Packing is when all voters of the opposing party are "packed" into one district to reduce their voting power in other districts.

Kidnapping - Kidnapping is when an incumbent's home address is moved to a different district making reelection more difficult.

Incumbent Protection - Incumbent Protection is when redistricters use any of the above strategies or others to create districts that favor the incumbent over the opponent.

Additionally, there are two main kinds of gerrymandering: racial and partisan.

Racial - Racial gerrymandering seeks to disempower voters of a race or races of people. Racial gerrymandering is illegal but still frequent throughout the country.

Partisan - Partisan gerrymandering seeks to disempower voters of one political party. In many cases, partisan gerrymandering is racial gerrymandering.

What does it look like?

While gerrymandering can occur in any electoral districts, this post is focused on US congressional districts in Austin, Texas.

Here’s what the six congressional districts in Austin look like:

via The Austin Chronicle

A Closer Look at Austin’s Districts

Despite Austin being a heavily blue-voting city, five of the six congressional districts are represented by Republicans. This is one reason why Austin has been identified as one of the worst cases of gerrymandering in the country.

Austin is mostly gerrymandered using the "cracking" method. Austin's blue voters have been spread out among multiple districts, all of which include large swaths of country towns. For example, district 25 travels from Austin all the way to Fort Worth, district 17 travels beyond Waco, and district 10 touches Houston. By including hundreds of small Texas towns into Austin's congressional districts, the firmly red voters in the country outweigh the blue city voters. This design is intentional, and is slated to get much worse this year unless we receive federal protection.

district 10 (michael mccaul-r)

57% caucasian

26% hispanic

10% black

5% asian

.6% indigenous

district 17 (pete sessions-r)

57% caucasian

26% hispanic

13% black

5% asian

.5% indigenous

district 21 (chip roy-r)

62% caucasian

30% hispanic

4% black

4% asian

.5% indigenous

district 25 (roger williams-r)

70% caucasian

19% hispanic

8% black

3% asian

.5% indigenous

district 31 (john carter-r)

59% caucasian

24% hispanic

11% black

5% asian

.4% indigenous

district 35 (lloyd dogget-d)

26% caucasian

61% hispanic

10% black

2% asian

.5% indigenous

Additionally, district 35 is packed. Hispanic voters are grouped together from East Austin to San Antonio so that their voting power is isolated to only one district instead of many districts.

You can view an interactive district drawing map here.

Why this is Bad

Gerrymandering is a racist tool that politicians use to strip minority voters of their political power. If we do not stop gerrymandering in it's tracks right now, districts will be redrawn to be even more oppressive than they are now.

Though racial gerrymandering is illegal, Texas districts still get away with it. In 2018, a seven year legal battle regarding Texas's racially gerrymandered districts (like district 35) ended because the Supreme Court rejected nearly all claims.

Districts in Texas are drawn strategically so Republicans retain power. We need a fair districting map to ever have a realistic chance of unseating republicans.

A Possible Solution

Independent Commissions - 21 states are currently using some sort of nonpartisan commission to redraw their maps. Utilizing independent commissions means districts are drawn sensibly and without favoritism for one group or another.

HR1 is an act that recently passed congress seeking to implement independent redistricting commissions for every state. Should it pass the senate, we would no longer have to trust Republican legislators to draw our district maps.

There are other possible solutions including proportional representation, using artificial intelligence, and ranked choice voting. However, independent commissions seem to be the most realistic future for Texan gerrymandering prevention at this time.

What We Can Do

1. Register ASAP to speak at the Texas Senate's public hearing on Thursday, March 11th at 9am!

The Texas Senate is having a public hearing about Austin's congressional districts on Thursday, March 11th at 9am on Zoom. This is an opportunity for the public to "share details about their local communities and information that they believe is relevant to the upcoming redistricting process." Sign up and tell Texan representatives why your community should be kept together in the redistricting process. Request and independent commission be used if possible. The Texas government canNOT be trusted to draw districts fairly.

Testimony Guide at fairmapstexas.org/testimony-guides

Leave a written comment at senate.texas.gov/redistrictingcomment

2. Call your senators and tell them to vote YES on HR1, the For the People Act!

The For the People Act would incorporate 800 pages of voting rights legislation. Among other things, it would guarantee mail in voting and at least 15 days of early voting for federal elections, would require states to automatically register citizens to vote, would restore voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences, and would require all states to use an independent citizen commission to draw congressional districts.

HR1 passed the US House on March 3rd. To pass the senate, all 48 democrats and the two independents would need to be joined by 10 republicans to overcome a filibuster.

Will Ted Cruz & John Cornyn vote yes on this bill? Very unlikely.

Should we let them know how we feel by blowing up their inboxes anyways? Yes.

Ted Cruz: (512) 916-5834 - email him here.

John Cornyn: (202) 224-2934 - email him here.

"Historically, gerrymandering has been used both as a racist weapon to undermine the political power of minority communities and a political weapon to ensure partisan advantage... Gerrymandering fundamentally undermines a fair and representative democracy."

****act now. sign up to testify. call your senators. ensure a fair redistricting process.****

Additional Reading:

https://www.keranews.org/2019-04-14/texas-matters-gerrymandering-in-texas

https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/

https://www.caller.com/story/news/local/2019/11/01/why-redistricting-important-and-why-should-you-participate-texas-democrats-republicans/4103303002/

Sources:

The Redistricting Process Sources:

https://indivisible.org/resource/fighting-gerrymandering-states

https://ballotpedia.org/Redistricting_in_Texas_after_the_2020_census

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/30/940116088/supreme-court-weighs-trump-plan-to-cut-undocumented-immigrants-from-census

https://www.npr.org/sections/inauguration-day-live-updates/2021/01/20/958376223/biden-to-end-trump-census-policy-ensuring-all-persons-living-in-u-s-are-counted

https://www.ltgov.state.tx.us/2019/06/28/lt-gov-patrick-announces-2021-redistricting-committee/

https://www.c-span.org/video/?165594-3/2000-redistricting-review

What is Gerrymandering? Sources:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gerrymandering

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/01/this-is-the-best-explanation-of-gerrymandering-you-will-ever-see/

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/5/17991968/gerrymandering-name-elbridge-gerry

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/REDMAP

https://www.businessinsider.com/partisan-gerrymandering-has-benefited-republicans-more-than-democrats-2017-6

https://apnews.com/article/9fd72a4c1c5742aead977ee27815d776

https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2017-07-28/big-data-and-the-gerrymandering-of-america

Gerrymandering Strategies Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#:~:text=Two%20principal%20tactics%20are%20used,voting%20power%20in%20other%20districts).

https://www.policymap.com/2017/08/a-deeper-look-at-gerrymandering/

https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/7/24/16012440/racial-partisan-gerrymandering-redistricting-supreme-court-video

What Does it Look Like? Source:

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2018-02-09/u-s-congress/

A Closer Look at Austin’s Districts Sources:

https://thefulcrum.us/worst-gerrymandering-districts-example/7-austin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_10th_congressional_district

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_17th_congressional_district

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_21st_congressional_district

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_25th_congressional_district

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_31st_congressional_district

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_35th_congressional_district

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-maps/texas/

Why this is Bad Sources:

https://indivisible.org/resource/fighting-gerrymandering-states

https://newrepublic.com/article/149357/texas-republicans-got-away-racially-discriminatory-electoral-map

https://www.caller.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/02/27/texas-republicans-democrats-gerrymandering-legislative-districts-voter-suppression/4545917002/

A Possible Solution Sources:

https://apnews.com/article/4d2e2aea7e224549af61699e51c955dd

https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=vlr

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1/text

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/05/hr1-bill-what-is-it/

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16453512/gerrymandering-proportional-representation

https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/04/ai-drawn-voting-districts-could-help-stamp-out-gerrymandering/

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/473788-replacing-winner-takes-all-system-would-end-gerrymandering

What We Can Do Sources:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJItde6gpjMvH9Mn_8FA26GFQaVkPVxEzQNL

fairmapstexas.org/testimony-guides

senate.texas.gov/redistrictingcomment

https://www.vox.com/2021/3/3/22309123/house-democrats-pass-voting-rights-bill-hr1

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/five-ways-hr-1-would-transform-redistricting

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-house/u-s-house-passes-sweeping-election-bill-senate-prospects-unclear-idUSKCN2AV2JM

https://www.cruz.senate.gov/?p=form&id=16

https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/node/5853

#austin #austintexas #texas #politics #texaspolitics #leftist #leftists #leftistpolitics #gerrymandering #hr1 #forthepeople #forthepeopleact

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jennymanrique · 3 years

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Redistricting battle heats up - Houston activists fight for fairer maps

The lack of representation provoked that during Hurricane Harvey, neighbors were not properly assisted by local governments.

Activists in Harris County, Texas, mobilize to make the once-every-decade redistricting process fairer to communities of color and low-income neighborhoods.

Every time Myrtala Tristan recounts her experiences during devastating Hurricane Harvey, she relives the scenes of relentless rain that turned her neighborhood’s streets into rivers and her home into a floating furniture museum.

“They never told us that we would have to evacuate or that it was going to be so terrible,” Tristan, a resident of Houston’s Lakewood suburb for nearly 40 years, recalled at a June 30 briefing on redistricting. “I live with my husband. For five hours I was calling (emergency) 311 and they never answered. We were up all night.”

Early the next morning Tristan left her house with just her driver’s license and some money, packed in a Ziploc bag. Outside, a boat was rescuing people from the fetid waters, prioritizing children and senior citizens.

“We were navigating those dirty waters all day. They didn’t give us water or food … I think this is very unfair and that the government should be helping us in a different way,” said Tristan. Almost three years later, “we are still applying for some help. Nothing ever came.”

Tristan joined the Northeast Action Collective, a group of advocates and neighbors that emerged in response to the lack of public investment in drainage and flood mitigation in her community. “It is time for our voices to be heard.”

Right now, Tristan is focusing on a county-wide effort to engage communities of color and low-income neighborhoods in redistricting – a process of redrawing political boundaries that determine what candidates people vote for.

“Redistricting is about drawing lines on a map to represent who is going to vote for certain elected officials,” explained Nina Perales, vice president of litigation for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). “It is a very political act to create groups of voters, so it is very important to get involved.”

Neighborhoods are grouped into districts that are redrawn every 10 years based on census data. Depending on what the electoral district is, those lines are drawn by the city council, the school district board of trustees, county commissioners, and ultimately the state chamber.

In places like Pasadena, a suburb in Harris County, these lines have effectively segregated the Latino from the Anglo population: Latinos live in the northern area that has historically received fewer services than the southern area – where Anglos live – making it more prone to floods and natural disasters.

When the Texas House of Representatives drew other lines within the northern zone that further divided the Latino vote, MALDEF filed a lawsuit and won, regrouping them in District 144 .

“The representative of that district, who was Anglo and conservative, lost his election. And he was replaced by a progressive Latina woman in the House of Representatives,” Perales said. “Our increased political participation is strongest when the political lines that are drawn around our neighborhoods are fair.”

Lost in translation

For Miguel Rivera, the Redistricting Outreach Fellow at the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), one of the challenges is that the Hispanic community is still not familiar with these processes, starting with terms such as “gerrymandering” and “redistricting” that are difficult to translate.

“I first came upon this conundrum when trying to explain to my parents, who were both born in rural Mexico, what I did for a living,” Rivera said. “They understood the fight for voting rights which had a lot of translatable terms, but their understanding of the census and redistricting was very different based on what they knew in Mexico versus in the U.S.”

Now the TCRP is doing educational campaigns for the Hispanic community to coalesce behind a specific term: redistribution.

Cassandra Martinez, who just graduated from high school and will attend Columbia University in the fall, first heard the term in census workshops organized by Mi Familia Vota.

“Hispanics don’t know the specifics behind redistricting and census counting, but the community cares about income inequality, about the schools children go to, about the construction projects that never quite get done,” Martinez said.

“A lot of us come from immigrant households; our parents…feel disconnected from politics,” she added. “There is this whole mentality of ‘my vote doesn’t matter.’ What really helps people in my age group is connecting voting with the future of our families and communities.”

Deborah Chen, an attorney and activist with OCA-Greater Houston, relates a similar experience with Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders whose numbers are growing faster than Latinos in Texas. She said her organization knocked on more than 221,000 doors to make sure AAPIs were counted in the census. “You don’t have to be a citizen or registered voter to participate in redistricting,” she emphasized.

OCA uses “opportunity maps” to demonstrate how majorities and minorities in those districts receive services such as sewers, electricity, pavements, pipes, and so on.

“Everyone who got counted in neighborhoods in the greater Houston area is worth $15,700 in federal money, and districts determine how that money is spent,” Chen said. “You want to live where multiple communities are evenly balanced and they have an even chance of having representation.”

African-Americans also have suffered discrimination in how lines have been drawn mainly by Republicans in power, and for this reason organizations such as Pure Justice promote their participation in electoral map drawing.

“Everybody wants to crop the map out in a certain fashion for certain beneficiaries,” said Roshawn Evans, co-founder of this organization. “At the top of the political food chain, Republicans are on everything, but we still can make suggestive maps and draw them ourselves.”

“We want to keep together people who have the same kinds of problems, so I just want to emphasize that voting really matters,” he concluded.

Originally published here

Want to read this piece in Spanish? Click here

#English #redistricting #Harris County #Houston #Texas #Latino #Asian Americans #African Americans #Census 2020 #Hurricane Harvey #maps #redrawing districts

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potteresque-ire · 4 years

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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - My Rambling Review

This is a book that at times floors me, at times frustrates me.

(Under the cut, because 1) rambling and 2) spoilers)

I’ll lay out my frustrations first — then, I’ll do a 180 degrees turn around and explain why these frustrations also make the book such a haunting, powerful read for me. All in all, I really enjoyed this book. It’s just that, while reading, I also kept thinking:

This book is a several edits away from a masterpiece.

I’ll begin with this. I can’t say how much I adore Suzanne Collins’ dedication in driving home the themes of the Hunger Games in TBOSAS. The nature of war and how it serves a tool for those who want to retain power, the opposing view of whether human nature is inherently good or violent or self-destructive.

Control, chaos, contract.

But this is also why, I think, the book stumbles in places. The themes are given such a strong, at times heavy-handed treatment that they threaten to swallow up other elements of storytelling. The plot, the characterisations etc have all at times given way to serve the themes, and the story’s believability is compromised. The Hunger Games, as a series, requires more believability to work than a novel about our world because of the sheer brutality of the games, both inside and outside the arena. This requires a sure hand in the writing. Suzanne Collins accomplished that in the original trilogy — I never doubted the existence of these games, and the horror that is the Capitol that has created and enjoyed them. But I did have moments of doubt while reading TBOSAS.

I think, if I have to sum up the shortcomings of TBOSAS, it is this: everything in this book is about war and totalitarianism. Every plot point speaks to these themes. Every major character is a walking symbol of a set of ideals related to these themes. Everything they think and do, every backdrop of their thoughts and actions including the imageries, the songs, the objects (compact, compass, snakes etc), all serve the themes in some way. This undermines plausibility of the story because actual human beings aren’t like that. Actual events don’t happen like that. Our lives are pulled in multiple directions by numerous purposes, most of them trivial. The trivialities may not serve any larger themes but they round us, complete us as humans. They provide the context, the texture of who we are.

Because only the aspects of them connected to the themes are told/emphasised, The characters in TBOSAS are prone to reading flat, textureless. Dr Gaul (DG) is the most extreme of examples. She feels no more than a voice (not a human) for the singular purposes of bringing up questions about the themes. Other major characters are relatively spared, but the issue is still evident in places. The thoughts of Coriolanus Snow (CS) are too focused on several issues (poverty; the three Cs; how the Plinths offend him, for example). Lucy Grey (LG) is somewhat saved by her songs and her mystery is her draw, but the same mystery also prevents us from engaging emotionally with her. Sejanus Plinth (SP) repeatedly tries to defy the Capitol, which is noble, but does little else that we’re aware of. His presence seems to serve as a contrast to CS rather than being a person on his own. The secondary characters suffer even more under the weight of the themes: the mentors, for example, are so similarly unlikeable that they border on cartoonish for me. It makes sense in the trilogy that Katniss doesn’t know much about those in the arena with her and their mentors; it makes sense that her descriptions of them veer towards two-dimensional and therein lies the tragedy of the Games — Katniss and Peeta are fully aware that every tribute is a human being but they’re robbed of any chance to treat them as such. In contrast, the mentors in TBOSAS are CS’s childhood friends. CS may be self-centred and calculating, but he’s too observant to see his friends as all alike. Symbolically, I can understand why the mentors share certain traits — they will be the audience for the next 65 Hunger Games, after all — but the implausibility of these mentors undermines the plausibility of the 10th Hunger Games itself, as CS sits among them.

The shortcomings in characterisations are reflected in the plot. The romantic scenes between CS and LG tend to get into the discussions of the nature of the Games, of Panem and the Capitol’s rule very quickly (for example, the one by the Lake, the one during their final trip out of District 12). It allows a direct compare-and-contrast between his views and hers, but at the plot level, it makes their romance, healthy or not, difficult to believe, which makes some of CS’ decisions hard to believe. Sometimes, I almost sense a disinterest in the writing, a hastening in the pace at what are significant plot points that don’t directly serve the themes (for example, the confrontation in the shed). And there are many of such beautiful plot points in this book, fantastic moments when things don’t go as expected or the writing nails the scene and brings the emotions to the max (The last hanging. * Sigh*). But this book, like CS, isn’t interested in lingering in those moments. This book, like CS, doesn’t allow itself to veer out of emotional control.

Related to the plot too is that I feel the treatment of the tributes before 10th Hunger Games is a bit too heavy handed, and as a result, fail to achieve the chilling effects of the games in the original trilogy. How the tributes are dumped in a zoo and treated with veterinarians, how they’re treated in the funerals etc … the cold-heartedness of these acts, the villainous nature of the Capitol is so overt that it’s difficult to imagine the Capitol’s citizens going along with them (watching the tributes at the zoo, for example; the fans outside the arena during the games). The luxury offered to the tributes before the Games in the original trilogy adds on a whole layer of brutality, because it’s there to appease the conscience of the Capitol citizens, because it’s equivalent to fattening the pig before slaughtering it. The 10th Hunger Games misses that. Like everything else, I understand this choice of presentation at the symbolic level (more on that later), but it also makes some of these sequences read almost caricature, if the Games were a human. It’s Evil spelled out for all to see; it’s evil for evil’s sake.

Okay, so this seems to be a long list of complaints. If you get here, you must be wondering, how come I said I enjoyed the book? What is there left to be enjoyed, if the characterisations, the plot and the pacing all have somethings left to be desired?

And my answer is: this book is a very different book if I adjust my perspective, think of everything in terms of its themes and symbols. After this adjustment, TBOSAS becomes a very different read.

It’s also brilliant.

My thoughts are rough — I’m not familiar with the Hobbesian theories, but I’ll try to explain my alternate view of TBOSAS via my understanding of the 4 major characters, Coriolanus Snow (CS), Lucy Grey (LG), Sejanus Plinth (SP), and Dr Gaul (DG). I think of them as the major characters because I feel they each represent a set of perspectives regarding totalitarianism and the wars and chaos associated with it. In the books, these perspectives are engaged in a Hunger Games of their own, a battle raged because the governing set of perspectives, the one of Dr Gaul, is failing. The victor of this Game doesn’t get the Plinth Prize, but decides the fate of the Districts and Panem. I’d summarise the 4 perspectives as follows:

DG (Dr Gaul) is the closest to the classic villain. She views the line between the Capitol and the Districts as not the line between good and evil, but between winners and losers, who are violent animals without the line. The line is rigid and unmovable and must be maintained via constant war. She wants to make a totalitarian regime.

SP (Sejanus Plinth) is the closest to the classic hero. He also sees the line between the Capitol and the Districts, and as clearly and insistently as Dr Gaul (he insists he’s from District 2 throughout the book). The difference is, he sees it as the line between the oppressors and the oppressed, the evil and the good. He wants to break the totalitarian regime, make the line obsolete by making one side disappear. The road to achieve his ideals also involves war.

LG (Lucy Grey) refuses to acknowledge the line between the Capitol and the Districts. She has no trouble becoming friends / lovers with those who are from the Capitol as long as they do not commit the same brutality, while her sympathies also lie with the rebels who’re brutally treated. She has no interest in wars, in the making or breaking of any regime. She is her own judge of who’s good and who’s evil, who’s the oppressor and the oppressed and contrary to DG (and eventually, CS), she believes humans are inherently good.

CS (Coriolanus Snow), on the surface, also sees the line between the Capitol and the Districts. Unlike DG and SP, however, he sees it as something fluid, which can be erased and redrawn to suit a purpose. The line CS sees doesn’t demarcate good vs evil, or winners vs losers. It separates CS and what CS wants. Like LG, CS has no true loyalty to the Capitol or the Districts, has no inherent interest in wars or making or breaking a regime. Unlike LG, however, he is open to participating in them as long as there are rewards to be reaped. As such, CS has no qualms cheating in the Games, which does far more damage to the Capitol’s image of strength and control than anything else (by making LG a victor despite her unthinkable odds but more importantly, making her a person instead of an animal), or later on, taking over SP’s place in the Plinth’s family.

DG, despite being the game maker, is the first loser of this Hunger Games between the ideologies. Her control is cracking. Her Games are a bore, and discontent and hunger have lent chaos to the Districts, like the fight in the dark in District 12. Chaos is also in the Capitol when CS, discontent and hungry in his own way, begins to erase the line between the Capitol and the Districts by showing up in the train station with a rose. Despite her powerful façade, DG is also weak against LG and SP. LG defeats DG’s snake mutts easily in the arena. DG has to give SP chance after chance, given his father’s ammunition empire.

DG’s strength is that she’s aware of her weaknesses, and willing to adjust her tactics in exchange for the control she craves. I don’t think she’s grooming CS as much as she sees something in him that she doesn’t have. The something that is symbolised by the compact — the remaining humanity in CS after the war that allows him to gain the trust of LG and SP. DG fails to even pretend to have that. Like the 10th Hunger Games she’d staged, like her dumping the tributes in the zoo and abusing them, her intent is too obvious, her distaste too overt and … tasteless. Even the Capitol audience aren’t keen on her designs; they go to the zoo to watch the tributes but skip the Games. She needs a CS who knows how to re-package the Games as something that appears fun and harmless and beautiful, like LG. LG who can make tributes in a cage look dignified, who can entertain and sing DG’s snake mutts into oblivion.

SP’s strength is, of course, his moral fibre, which is also his weaknesses. He’s too idealistic; his inability to accept compromises, especially when he’s still too young to bring about actual changes to the Capitol, render him useless towards his goal — even if he doesn’t meet his end, what good can he do for the Districts, for Panem, once he heads North (with the likes of Billy Taupe)? I find myself agreeing with CS when he talks SP out of the arena — morality is of limited use if it can’t be translated into meaningful actions. I also (somewhat shamefully) find myself agreeing with CS’s frustration / bitterness about SP’s constant, vocal insistence that he’s District, if only because I find it disrespectful to the actual suffering the District 2 folks must be going through. As the Plinth heir, SP is in a very powerful position to bring about reforms to Panem if he can be a little more patient, a little more scheming, … a little more CS. Instead, he constantly engages himself in largely performative acts that compromises his own potential. Acting out in front of Dr Gaul. The bread crumbs for Marcus, even. It’s touching, yes, but does it change anything? No. The bread ritual isn’t the same as Katniss’s funeral for Rue; Katniss and Rue are both tributes. SP gets out of the arena because of the privilege he has in spades but fails to see in himself. He should also know, because he’s seen it before, what happens to whichever tribute who would’ve killed him if CS doesn’t show up.

That said, it doesn’t mean SP doesn’t do any good; it’s just that the good he’s done isn’t what he’s intended, which, perhaps, makes SP’s end even more tragic than it is. I think SP and his idealism have inspired CS to be a better person. I believe CS, despite himself, like SP more than he admits and SP delays his final turn for at least a while. SP may not have helped anyone in the Districts as he’s wished, but he’s close to changing the mind of someone who’ll one day decide the fate of everyone in the Districts.

LG. Her strength is her independent thinking. She isn’t naive about the Capitol-Districts line she refuses to acknowledge — she knows where the snakes are. She knows that better than anyone else. On the surface, she appears to be the weakest among the four, the girl in a rainbow dress whose only survival skill is her ability to manipulate snakes. But someone can sense evil and manipulate it to their advantage is a threat; someone who doesn’t buy into the Capitol’s propaganda is a threat, especially those who remember that the cruel laws and “traditions” (the Games) the Capitol attempts to pass as “lessons” are artefacts and therefore, transient. Transient things are weak; subservience to them is then an option, not a must. LG and her kind can be even more threatening to the Capitol than the rebels, because while the latter can be rid of with sentences of treason, the LGs of Panem cannot be removed the same way because they haven’t acted against the regime. They cannot be sentenced for singing songs about the good and bad in humans, about human emotions, about the day to day sightings of their human neighbours, dead and alive, about the humans that arch between reality and imagination and prophecy. They cannot be hanged for knowing songs that predate Panem and the Capitol, for being the mockingjays that still have the jabberjays in them but nonetheless find a way to sing whatever they choose.

DG, I believe, fails to fully grasp the danger of LG, but CS does. His biggest fear of LG is that she can locate snakes, that she can see through him. They bond at first as they both sees themselves above the Capitol-Districts line, but once the Games are over, the cracks between them almost immediately begin to show. She thinks of her knowledge of snakes as self defence. He sees it as something she’ll coil around him one day. Like a hope — LG is CS’s chance of getting back the humanity he lost in the war — and also like a rope.

The weakness of LG is, of course, that she’s after all, just a girl in a rainbow dress. Even if she wants/needs to, she doesn’t have the power to make any changes to the Capitol. She can only run once perceived as a threat, but she can’t fight back.

She can’t fight CS, the ultimate winner.

All through the book, I keep shifting my own mind lens to see how I would perceive CS if I cannot read his thoughts, if I’m like everyone else around him. And I realise how he … smells like roses through a significant portion of the book, given how unifying awful his classmates are except SP. He’s the first mentor to treat a tribute like a human. He helps his classmates (Arachne and Clemensia; the mutts attack on the latter isn’t his intention). He’s the only Academy student who’s kind to SP and while he’s forced to save the latter, he does so with tact and an understanding of SP’s thought processes that can only come from friendship. Do we judge a person with his actions or his thoughts? I’d say, his actions, and from an outsider’s perspective, CS does seem to be the one who can change Panem for the better. He does seem to be the one who can fix the Capitol from within, who can get it to rethink its treatment of the Districts while preserving its own dignity as the ruling class. And herein lies the greatest strength of CS—he’s a diplomat; he’s all about soft power. He knows how to work within a system (eg. his cheating), how to wage a war without firing a shot. He can be everyone’s ally and at the same time: while he’s making a major contribution to the Hunger Games by his betting proposal, he’s also destroying the Games at its foundation by equalising his Capitol self and his District tribute (picnicking with LG at the zoo in front of the camera, for example). When DG says she destroyed the records of the Games because the mentors’ death makes the Capitol look weak, I wonder if it’s a lie. Aside from my suspicion that DG staged the arena attack — her intention being to remind the Capitol of the Districts’ “evilness” and draw the Capitol to watch the Games as revenge — I believe DG is aware that CS and LG are chiefly responsible for making the Capitol look weak during the Games. The invention she’s proud / confident enough of to go on an interview right before its introduction into the arena turns out to be pets in their collective hands.

My understanding is, DG sees CS as both her potential successor and potential threat. Her campaign is to find out where he stands and to get him on her side: her extra homework for him, the breadcrumbs she lays down for him (the peacekeeper-ship, the officership) are all to corner him to out of his diplomatic exterior and to force him take a stand, to bait him to take her stand.

The ones doing the tug of war with DG are SP and LG — if this is a war for CS’s soul, then SP represents his conscience, and LG, his humanity.

SP loses first. Between conscience and safety, CS picks the latter. This is a decision I can understand on some level; many in our world, too, have opted for safety (from being ratted out, punished by association) instead of speaking out against injustice, especially when the injustice is committed by those in power, especially when the association is also protected by power (CS is not entirely wrong in thinking that SP may be able to buy his way out of the jabberjay incident, given his privilege). LG goes second and last. The choice between humanity and power isn’t as much a more difficult decision to make as it is reserved for relatively few, for those already with power within their reach.

CS is aware of that.

It takes a 500+ page journey for CS to make a conscious choice of giving up his humanity. He misses it, and I believe his pain is real. He misses the humanity he lost during the war, symbolised by the loss of his mother who left him with the rose powder in the compact. The rose powder he smells for comfort. I think Suzanne Collins deserve major kudos for using CS as the sole narrator of TBOSAS. It’s a risky move and doesn’t always pay off, but it offers a unique, in-depth perspective in how real world villains come about. CS starts out as talented but also mundane in that on the scale of morality, he starts out as neither exceptionally evil nor exceptionally good. He’s neither the classic villain nor the misunderstood villain. His views of the world is still being shaped, and the book doesn’t shy away from the messiness of the process, the back and forth between CS’s better and worse thoughts, the discrepancies between his thoughts — including what he perceives as his motivation — and his actions.

CS so desperately wants to be believe he’s in love with LG and the renewed, post-war humanity she represents. He’s so convinced that he’s already in love. But he never truly is (he dislikes LG’s songs), because the rewards LG can offer him turns out to be far from enough. The rewards humanity can offer him turns out to be far from enough, not in a world where war, where the Capitol and the likes of DG have already so de-valued humanity. A life with LG will be about digging worms from the soil. Free, but poor in every other way. It may satisfy his conscience, but SP has already been killed at the Hanging Tree.

CS fails to kill his humanity as he did with his conscience. CS cannot fully divorce himself from humanity, being human himself. And so LG disappears into the woods.

With all this in my mind, the climax of the book, in which CS hunts for LG by the Lake, is both emotionally and intellectually intense. As his actions become more and more threatening, as he starts with a seemingly concerned search for LG and ends with firing shots at the echos of “The Hanging Tree”, his taking the stand of DG is complete. As a reader, his decision has been evident for a while, but this is when he faces and owns his decision himself, and the chapter is haunting as it is powerful. At that moment, CS turns into DG’s most powerful mutt, a human mutt but with its humanity left only as a veneer, like the compact he’ll get back from Casca Highbottom with his mother’s rose powder long disposed in the trash, with his only hope of a new rose powder — his renewed humanity in the form of LG — long banished into the unknown by his peacekeeper’s rifle. CS becomes an actualisation of DG’s and his own belief that he’s but an animal that requires constant control, which in turn requires with constant war. It’s an apt end for TBOSAS because by then, the fate of the Districts, of Panem for the next six decades is sealed. Because by then, the return of humanity into the Capitol, in the form of Katniss Everdeen, is also sealed.

No matter how much jabberjays there is in them, mockingjays will find a way to sing whatever they choose.

#pie metas #tbosas #the ballad of songbirds and snakes #the hunger games #thg

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heyheyrenay · 5 years

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Gotta say, as a fellow Arkansan I’m super happy to see somebody trying to do the good work here with the DPA ^^ my home district is responsible for Steve Womack and sometimes it feels hopeless. Not giving up, but how do you move beyond improving your own party and actually starting to turn the tide?

I’ve honestly met so many great people. I currently work the most closely with the Vice Chair of Counties, but all our current officers (they were just elected in December 2018) are good and responsive, which is a massive change from 2016 when all my emails bounced. :(

I really wanted Josh Mahony to take Womack’s district in 2018, since I figured out of all the races he and Tucker had the best shot. Out of all the districts (until the lines get redrawn, anyway) I think Womack and Hill are the most at-risk.

A good thing to remember about the party, which I have to remind myself periodically: the party is a tool, not the endgame. You build the infrastructure to mobilize during campaigns to reach voters. Reaching voters is the goal. So in my original post it was about how to do some stealth empathy with progressive concepts to people who mostly think Tumblr is an off-brand dryer sheet while at the same time doing activism. That’s to make the party more welcoming to younger/queer/disabled folks, because the Democratic Party sorely needs our skills. You create a good environment and start bringing people in. Build the party infrastructure on the county level (i.e. people) and then use those people to go to voters and advocate for ideas.

What changes things is regular exposure to good ideas. Regular is relative, too; it basically means just showing up once a year or something. For example, one of my friends ran for Arkansas House and while he was canvassing some really rural areas, people would tell him, “I haven’t had a Democrat knock on my door in 40 years.” Needless to say, when people critique the Democratic Party for not giving people a reason to vote FOR them, sometimes I think that misses that we just assume they’ll be there and never ask them to vote for our ideas, and if we never ask how can we prioritize the issues they care about and make sure we really reflect their concerns? I mean, rural folks aren’t aliens. We have the same concerns as someone in the city—the context is just a little different.

So how do you turn the tide? It’s literally getting a group of people together and going to do the work, whether that work is tabling somewhere to ask people to register to vote (lowkey, because it should be nonpartisan and lots of businesses will let you do it), deep canvassing an apartment building on an issue (and also asking them to register to vote), or going around a neighborhood to ask people the issues they care about and sharing that data with the state party/local progressive groups. It’s hard work, it’s tiring, but the only guaranteed thing that will change someone’s mind and get them to turn out is to engage with them and ask them to vote. You can look at any of the House races in 2018—AOC in NY, winning her primary? That was 100% hitting the streets and engaging people. The races in CA where we flipped districts that we thought would be red forever? Same thing, and we repeated it all over the country.

Arkansas is red now, because the DPA sort of exploded after coasting for decades on easy wins. But we don’t have to be forever. If you can, get involved! Maybe I’ll see you on the streets for the Senate campaign next year? :)

#politics #savvylikeapirate

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a-wandering-fool · 6 years

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Complaining About the ‘Senate Popular Vote?’ You Suffer From Civic Illiteracy

That didn’t stop, of course, a particularly dumb take from circling the Internet: Republicans lost the “popular vote” in Senate races and still picked up seats! As of this writing, the New York Times has Republicans with about 12.4 million fewer votes than Democrats in Senate elections! That’s unfair! The Constitution must burn for this!

So I think I have an answer: the population of the United States is 328 million. There are 50 states. Clearly to guarantee equal representation in the Senate, each state boundary needs to be redrawn so we have 50 equal population states of 6.5 million.

Of course that means New York City must be split into multiple pieces.

It also means many metro areas need to be subdivided into multiple states with their own state legislatures. (Specifically, the LA area, the Chicago area and the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston areas are all more populous than our hypothetical average state.)

Now there is nothing magic about this number, 50. And if you want to preserve metropolitan areas, a smaller number would work better. Since the New York MSA has around 20 million, a good round number would be 12.

Twelve districts, each with a population of around 28 million. Big enough to handle the New York MSA.

Of course this also means the abolishing of all state laws and the rewriting of the laws of the land at the Federal level, in Washington D.C., our Capitol District. (Remember: States were sovereign entities, each with their own laws against things like murder, rape, assault, etc.–which is the whole reason why states have equal representation in the Senate. But since state representation is bad, clearly we need to abolish states, right?)

And since we’re rewriting the laws in the Capitol District, each District doesn’t really need significant local representation. Of course many of the Districts may rebel, but after the rebellion it may make sense to set up a unifying game or cultural event which keeps the 12 Districts in line a cohesive unit under Capitol rule.

Let’s call those games The Hunger Games.

Okay, was that stupid?

Yep. But it is a natural consequence of the latest bit of liberal stupidity that somehow it’s not fair States get their own senators regardless of population.

=========================

Actually, this is the first I’m reading of this nonsense with the Senate.

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moondeerdotblog · 3 years

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Walking Through On Political Ideologies

It was brought to my attention as I was sharing a threadified version (must have been the week I thought folks might be more likely to read a thread on Twitter than a linked post. I was wrong. Folks just aren’t interested in reading. So, technically, I am talking to myself right now) of On Political Ideologies that the way I express my thoughts often obscures the point I intend to make. To remedy this I created a thread walking through the obscurities of the aforementioned thread. I figured I may as well do the same for the post from which that thread had been transcribed (So … for the record … I wrote a post which became a thread which warranted the creation of an entirely new thread to explain what the first original thread that used to be a post ought to have just said plainly from the start which is now becoming a new post).

Let’s walk through On Political Ideologies to make sure everything in my head makes its way out. Might be overkill (but more likely everything I touch could use one of these).

So the post starts off with some digital art I created. The information depicted becomes the focal point of the entire post so let’s have another look at it before we start.

The introductory text is aimed at setting up the delivery of this mysterious information depicted I just referenced while, at the same time, addressing some of the societal abrasion and inner turmoil some may encounter that may be lessened to a degree upon its reception (the walkthrough is shaping up to require its own walkthrough … I see it too. It will clear up startinnnnnggg now).

So let’s have a look and do a bit of italicized rephrasing with the emphasis on clarity.

As the January 6th committee begins holding hearings, it feels worth pointing out once more just where Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger fit into the ideologies of today.

Twittersphere, has this ever happened to you?

You find yourself grateful for something Adam or Liz has said.

Being liberal can make supporting Liz and/or Adam feel weird. This is because of their conservative record voting against the liberal agenda you’d like to see succeed.

You admit as much on Twitter … and inevitably some a$$hat takes this opportunity to berate you.

They’re all, “these people are not your friends. They did ‘X’, ‘Y’, and ‘Z’. Blah-dee-f$&king-blah.”

People on Twitter can be a$$holes. They often are not shy about telling you that any support given to a conservative is wrong and you are a bad liberal for providing it.

Well … here is what these useless blowhards fail to comprehend (and what resolves that inner conflict I’m sure you felt) … one mustn’t be a friend to be an ally.

Things used to be black and white … but these are unprecedented times. The a$$hole is not adjusting their derivative blather for our current environment. Battle lines must be redrawn in a broader scope. Take two people that disagree on damn near everything. Toss in something they happen to agree on. Make it the most consequential g0dd@mn something one could conjure. Then gather a group of people that disagree with the first two people about this consequential thing. The two that started out on opposite sides now have all their disagreements superseded by a common consequential cause. You know the cliche … I needn’t include it here.

Liz and Adam are to the right ideologically. Adam’s 2020 record scored a 0.66 while Liz’s scored a 0.68. Were we to respect our political norms and precedents such scores would easily land Liz and Adam on our list of enemies … and whichever a$$hat trying to sh$t all over your gratitude would have at least one leg to stand on.

Traditionally, we have scored how politically left or right a legislator leans on a linear ideological line by scoring their congressional voting record.

Searching for such scores online led me to govtrack.us and the 2020 Report Cards found here (scroll down to Ideology Score). The site describes its ideology scores as follows:

Our unique ideology analysis assigns a score to Members of Congress according to their legislative behavior by whether they sponsor and cosponsor overlapping sets of bills and resolutions with other Members of Congress. The score can be interpreted as a left—right scale measuring the dominant ideological difference or differences among Members of Congress, although of course it only takes into account a small aspect of reality.

On this left—right scale ranging from 0.0 through 1.0, Adam received a score of 0.66 while Liz received a score of 0.68. Contrast this with someone like Pramila Jayapal, who received a score of 0.07. If this were all there was to the story, that a$$hole berating you would have a fairly solid position backing his douchery.

Side note: a score of 0.68 would stick Senator Krysten Sinema on that very same list. Bet that m0therf$&ker didn’t know that sh$t.

This one’s just a dig at Sinema being as “politically right” as Liz Cheney (based on ideology scores alone, which are identical).

The trickiest bit to comprehend is likely the bits about bifurcation. Let’s revisit and italicly tackle what I mean by the bifurcated information ecosystem.

Okay … back to friendship ≢ allyship.

The symbol ≢ denotes not identical to.

When we bifurcated our information ecosystem, we doubled the number of realities hosted by our nation and available to our citizenry for occupancy …

The phenomenon I am referencing is easily recognized once seen. You may know what I am calling bubbles as echo chambers or something else (Joy and Rachel often employ the Earth One and Earth Two monikers). Whatever we call them, the effect is that it feels like there are two distinct realities in this country.

To greatly simplify my hypothesis, I believe our dual realities were fully developed when social media supplanted print media as a primary news source for millions of Americans.

My essays often focus on how this alternate reality has been used to exploit its occupants, to lead them to believe in a shadowy high power cabal drinking up babies whilst wearing little girl faces in the pursuit of immortality, or even to convince them the last thing they want amidst a deadly pandemic is a prophylactic vaccine; but, if you get the Earth One and Earth Two reference you’re good. You can just think Earth wherever you see bubble.

what I like to refer to as our dual reality bubbles. I also like to number these bubbles from oldest to newest. Let’s look again at the House ideology scores.

Notice that the traditional score is not sufficient for plotting ideologies for our current legislators. We must adjust for the bifurcation by assigning each representative to one of our bubbles.

So here is where my ideology scoring system breaks with tradition. It reflects an additional data point specifying whether the congressional voting record leans more Earth One or Earth Two (which, of course, I was calling bubble one and bubble two). I posit that in a dual reality America, bubble associations are required to fully understand the ideologies of our legislators.

Rather than repeat myself here, I would point you to the evolution of the post we are walking through (where, just to confuse you even further, I introduce the Upside Up and the Upside Down as yet another pair of monikers for these bubbles), as it includes a more thorough treatment of how my bubble scores were calculated.

With so many House members, I only had room for the district labels, so you’ll find Liz labeled by her district, WY0, and Adam by his district, IL16, and so on.

Labels that begin with an asterisk (*) indicate freshmen for which a traditional ideology score from govtrack.us was unavailable. The x-axis value for these labels indicates only where I felt I had the most room for working them into the plot.

Every label that does not begin with an asterisk (*) has been properly placed along the x-axis according to the traditional ideology score received for 2020.

I was able to generate a bubble association score for every member, including those represented by a label that begins with an asterisk (*). Labels residing in the top half of the plot were scored as associating with bubble one. Labels placed in the bottom half of the plot were scored as associating with bubble two. Y-axis values are arbitrary aside from this bubble assignment. There were a sh$t ton of labels to fit.

Before beginning to explore the implications of the information depicted, a minor digression.

The traditional two-party system with which we’re all familiar requires both parties to reside within a shared common reality. Without a common reality, there is no civil discourse as there is no common ground.

Civil discourse is all about finding common ground … and finding common ground requires a shared reality. The implication here is that dual realities prohibit common ground, which prohibits civil discourse. Consequentially, dual realities and the American Experiment are incompatible.

Time to italicly explore those implications I promised.

Within each reality bubble, however, political systems are recognizable. Within the alternate reality bubble, bubble two, we find a strong one-party system (this tracks with the pivot towards authoritarianism we’ve all noticed).

Things get interesting when we consider each bubble in isolation. Let’s look just at the bubble two labels. What do we see?

We find a sea of red, only one party enjoys representation on Earth Two. One-party states tend to be authoritarian in nature.

Within bubble one, we are clinging to our two-party system. The extra ideological dimension is the missing piece of the puzzle for sorting that inner conflict (and all the ammunition you need when telling that numb-nuts to go f$&k himself).

Liz and Adam represent the conservative element within bubble one.

Now, let’s have a look at just the bubble one labels. What do we see?

We clearly find two parties represented in bubble one (however lopsided the numbers). This is the two-party system we with which we are all familiar. Civil discourse is only made possible when representation is split across two or more parties. Liz and Adam represent the conservative element on Earth One. Their presence on Earth One is weighted more heavily than their conservative ideology.

On the home stretch now, let’s italicly rephrase the conclusion I’ve drawn, in part, from the information depicted.

We are b@lls deep in the War of the Bubbles. The dual reality configuration is unsustainable and will lead to a failed democracy. This is why we are allies. We believe in democracy. We want bubble one to outlive bubble two.

To rephrase this uncharacteristically crude sentiment, okay, so remember 7485 characters ago ( give or take) when I was all:

Battle lines must be redrawn in a broader scope.

This is where it gets redrawn. The battle for the soul of America is not between the left and the right, it is between bubble one and bubble two. That metaphorical battle line we have always drawn along the x-axis … that line must now be drawn along the y-axis. American democracy is unsustainable under a dual reality configuration. One reality must swallow up the other. The bubble is now the tribe.

The bubble merger … that is earliest point at which it becomes safe again to dabble with norms and precedents. That is when all bets get called off concerning Liz and Adam.

Any inner-turmoil fueled by x-axis concerns is superseded by y-axis concerns for as long as those concerns lay unresolved. All Earth One denizens want Earth Two to implode so we might return to a shared reality that is compatible with civil discourse. Once (knock on f$&king wood) we have achieved this, we no longer need to align with Liz or Adam and the battle line may once more be drawn along the x-axis.

Okay, let’s italicly rephrase the big finish and call it a day, shall we?

Anyone dabbling with norms and precedents before that second bubble f$&king pops is f$&king up … for they’ve failed to see the forest through the trees.

Until our dual realities have merged into that shared reality (knock on f$&king wood), one mustn’t rely on old knowledge … on norms and precedents that do not take into consideration the dual reality bubbles within which our populace has been divided. Those doing so are inherently ill-equipped as they are oblivious to an entire dimension of relevancy.

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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How Many Seats Did The Republicans Lose In The House

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-seats-did-the-republicans-lose-in-the-house/

How Many Seats Did The Republicans Lose In The House

‘the Squad’ Coasts To Reelection

Democrats take House, Republicans keep Senate in historic midterms

Three high-profile Democratic members of “the squad” in the House of Representatives held their seats in a comfortable fashion.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will continue to represent New York’s 14th District, defeating the Republican John Cummings by a wide margin, while Rep. Ilhan Omar also ran well ahead of the Republican Lacy Johnson in the race to represent Minnesota’s 5th District.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib also defeated her Republican challenger, David Dudenhoefer, and will continue to represent Michigan’s 13th Congressional District.

Democrats Odds Of Keeping The House Are Slimming Fast

The Democratic House majority emerged from the 2020 election so bruised and emaciated that experts gave it less than three years to live.

In defiance of polling and pundit expectations, Republicans netted 11 House seats in 2020, leaving Nancy Pelosis caucus perilously thin. Since World War II, the presidents party has lost an average of 27 House seats in midterm elections. If Democrats lose more than four in 2022, they will forfeit congressional control.

If the headwinds facing House Democrats have been clear since November, the preconditions for overcoming those headwinds have also been discernible: The party needed Joe Biden to stay popular, the Democratic base to stay mobilized and, above all, for Congressional Democrats to level the playing field by banning partisan redistricting.

A little over 100 days into Bidens presidency, Democrats are hitting only one of those three marks.

Historically, theres been a strong correlation between the sitting presidents approval rating and his partys midterm performance. Only twice in the last three decades has the presidents party gained seats in a midterm election; in both cases, their approval ratings exceeded 60 percent.

The party that controls the presidency tends to gets less popular as time goes on, and future declines are surprisingly correlated with first quarter polling.Many reasons that this cycle might be different, but so far public polling points to Dems getting 48% on election day.

))

It didnt.

Gop Women Made Big Gains

While the majority of the Republican caucus will still be men come 2021, there will be far more Republican women in Congress than there were this year. So far, it looks like at least 26 GOP women will be in the House next year, surpassing the record of 25 from the 109th Congress. Thats thanks in part to the record number of non-incumbent Republican women 15 whove won House contests. And its also because of how well Republican women did in tight races. The table below shows the Republican women who ran in Democratic-held House districts that were at least potentially competitive,1 according to FiveThirtyEights forecast. As of this writing, seven of them have won.

GOP women have flipped several Democratic seats

Republican women running for potentially competitive Democratic-held House seats and the status of their race as of 4:30 p.m Eastern on Nov. 11

District D+22.1

Results are unofficial. Races are counted as projected only if the projection comes from ABC News. Excludes races in which the Republican candidate has either a less than 1 in 100 chance or greater than 99 in 100 chance of winning.

You May Like: Are Democrats Red And Republicans Blue

House Democrats May Well Have To Contend With A Republican Senate

House Democrats have spent the past two years passing bills at a rapid clip, on everything from sweeping anti-corruption reforms to lowering the cost of prescription drugs to a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. But the vast majority of these bills were dead on arrival in the US Senate. It seems likely this ambitious agenda could continue to be on ice, unless Democrats flip two Georgia Senate runoff races that will be decided in January.

One of the few bipartisan pieces of legislation Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and President Trump were able to agree on was the $2.2 trillion CARES Act at the beginning of the pandemic; a second stimulus package has been held up by partisan bickering. McConnell recently signaled willingness to pass another stimulus package before the end of the year. He for the Senates lame-duck session but was vague on concrete details.

Even on infrastructure one of the few places where there seemed to be bipartisan agreement getting a bill through could be elusive. Should Democrats flip the Senate, Pelosi has provided them a road map.

But its too early to say if they will get to use it.

Update: This piece was updated with recent Decision Desk calls in several key House races.

Republicans Won More House Seats Than More Popular Democrats Though Not Entirely Because Of How Districts Were Drawn

The Democratic member of Congress from Austin, otherwise represented in Washington, D.C. by Republicans, says Democrats nationally got more votes in 2012 yet Republicans ended up with their House majority.

During the last election, Democrats won over a million votes more than Republicans, Rep. Lloyd Doggett said in a Nov. 4, 2013, talk at the University of Texas at San Antonio. But because of the way House districts are designed, the Republicans got 33 more members of the House of Representatives than the Democrats did.

The first part of his claim sounded familiar, but is it right that this outcome arose from the way House districts were designed?

In every state, districts must be redrawn every 10 years to adjust for population changes as measured by the decennial U.S. census. Each state has its own method for drawing districts. And Texas, like most states, entrusts most of the line-drawing to state legislators.

Over the past dozen years or so, Doggett pointed out in his talk, he has represented a variety of communitiesat one time holding a district that stretched from the Texas-Mexico border north into Austinlargely due to how districts were drawn by the states dominant Republicans.

Nationally, he said, the redistricting process has had a significant impact on more than me and indeed on the whole framing of the national debate that is going on right now. His lecture later touched on the influence of money in politics.

Featured Fact-check

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Democrats Find A Message

Nancy Pelosi did not want to talk about Planned Parenthood.

It was a meeting of House Democrats early in 2017, during Republicans drive that March to strike down the Affordable Care Act. Ms. Pelosi and her political lieutenants laid out their counterattack: Democrats would talk about pre-existing conditions and millions of people losing coverage. And they would talk about an age tax a provision in the Obamacare replacement passed by the House, which would have allowed health insurers to widen the premium gap between younger and older customers.

Ms. Pelosi acknowledged it would require restraint from Democrats. In her own San Francisco district, she said, people wanted her to fight the health care battle over funding for Planned Parenthood and Medicaid. Those things are in our DNA, but they are not in our talking points, Ms. Pelosi became fond of saying, according to a close associate.

That narrow focus on health care and a few economic issues came to define the Democrats midterm campaign. It represented a wholesale rejection of Hillary Clintons failed strategy in the 2016 campaign, which focused on Mr. Trumps fitness for office.

Every time he would say something or tweet something, it would come back: We need to come right back at him! Define him! Mr. Luján recalled. We would say: Look, we dont need to talk about him, hes going to do it himself. We need to continue to have a conversation with the American people about kitchen-table issues.

Dems Head Toward House Control But Gop Picks Off Seats

WASHINGTON Disappointed Democrats headed Wednesday toward renewing their control of the House for two more years but with a potentially shrunken majority as they lost at least seven incumbents without ousting a single Republican lawmaker.

They were all wrong, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters about Democrats assumptions of adding to their House numbers. Repeating a campaign theme Republicans used repeatedly against Democrats, he said, The rejection that we saw last night from the Democrats, was that America does not want to be a socialist nation.

McCarthy also touted his partys modest additions to its small cadre of female and minority lawmakers. The Republican coalition is bigger, more diverse and more energetic than ever before, he said.

The latest Democratic incumbent to fall was freshman Rep. Abby Finkenauer of northeastern Iowa, who lost to GOP state Rep. Ashley Hinson.

Democrats setbacks were measured not just by seats they lost but by districts they failed to capture.

Recommended Reading: How Many Democrats And Republicans Are Currently In The Senate

United States House Of Representatives Elections

2018 United States House of Representatives elections

The 2018 United States House of Representatives elections were held on November 6, 2018, with early voting taking place in some states in the weeks preceding that date. Voters chose representatives from all 435 congressional districts across each of the 50 U.S. states. Non-voting delegates from the District of Columbia and four of the five inhabited U.S. territories were also elected. These midterm elections took place halfway through the term of Republican President Donald Trump. On Election Day, Republicans had held a House majority since .

In the 2018 elections, the Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi, won control of the House. The Democrats gained a net total of 41 seats from the total number of seats they had won in the 2016 elections. The 41-seat gain was the Democrats’ largest gain of House seats since the post-Watergate 1974 elections, when they picked up 49 seats.

Upon the opening of the 116th United States Congress, Pelosi was elected as Speaker of the House. Incumbent Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan chose not to run for another term. In November 2018, House Republicans elected Kevin McCarthy as House Minority Leader.

Impact Of Special Elections On Partisan Composition

Representative Kevin McCarthy discusses if Republicans can take back the House in 2020

The partisan breakdown for the special elections was as follows:

In districts where the incumbent legislator does not run for re-election, the seat is guaranteed to a newcomer.

85.1% of incumbents sought re-election, the highest percentage in a decade.

14.9% of incumbents did not run for re-election, meaning newcomers were guaranteed to win those seats.

394 Democratic state legislators did not seek re-election.

477 Republican state legislators did not seek re-election.

Six third party or independent state legislators did not seek re-election.

Open state legislative seats, 2020 State

See also: 2020 primary election competitiveness in state and federal government

As the charts below show, there were 1,135 fewer primary candidates in 2020 than in 2018, reaching levels similar to 2016 and 2014. 2020 saw the lowest number of open seats, meaning more incumbents seeking re-election, compared to the previous three even-year elections. The number of incumbents facing primaries was roughly similar to 2016 and 2014, but less than 2018. There were fewer total primaries in 2020 compared to 2018 and 2016, but more than there were in 2014.

To read more about the competitiveness of state legislative primary elections in 2020, .

Don’t Miss: How Did The Democrats And Republicans Switch

Election Results 2020: Veto

More on voter purges

Report: Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote | Congressional Testimony by Sophia Lin Lakin, Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project

Redistricting and Gerrymandering

Every 10 years, states redraw district lines based on population data gathered in the census. Legislators use these district lines to allocate representation in Congress and state legislatures. When redistricting is conducted properly, district lines are redrawn to reflect population changes and racial diversity. But too often, states use redistricting as a political tool to manipulate the outcome of elections. That’s called gerrymandering — a widespread, undemocratic practice that’s stifling the voices of millions of voters.

The Census Bureau released data from the 2020 Census in August 2021, triggering this once-in-a-decade line drawing process in most states. These new district lines will determine our political voice for the next decade.

The 2020 Census

In 2018, the Trump administration announced plans to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, with the goal of suppressing participation of immigrant communities, stunting their growing political influence. The question would have resulted in an undercount that goes against the census’ very purpose — to count everybody in this country. Accurate population data is essential in apportioning representation and public funds. The ACLU sued the administration and successfully blocked the citizenship question before the census was conducted.

The Trump Administration's Census Cover-up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFJdOJwMm2w

Resources on Redistricting and Gerrymandering

See how your district lines have changed over time

Voter ID Laws

Over 21 million U.S. citizens do not have qualifying government-issued photo identification, and these individuals are disproportionately voters of color. That’s because ID cards aren’t always accessible for everyone. The ID itself can be costly, and even when IDs are free, applicants must incur other expenses to obtain the underlying documents that are needed to get an ID. This can be a significant burden on people in lower-income communities. Further, the travel required to obtain an ID is an obstacle for people with disabilities, the elderly, and people living in rural areas.

Voter ID Restrictions Imposed Since 2010

For more information on each highlighted state, click image for full display.

Map as of February 2020

Resources on Voter ID Laws

Look up your state’s voter ID laws

Who's Affected By Voter Suppression?

Across the country, 1 in 16 Black Americans cannot vote due to disenfranchisement laws.

Counties with larger minority populations have fewer polling sites and poll workers per voter.

In 2018, Latinx and Black Americans were twice as likely as whites to be unable to get off work while polls were open.

25 percent of voting-age Black Americans do not have a government-issued photo ID.

Geographic isolation is a major barrier to Native American voters due to the inaccessibility of nearby polling locations in many reservations. In South Dakota, 32 percent of Native voters cite travel distance as a factor in deciding whether to vote.

More than one-sixth (18 percent) of voters with disabilities reported difficulties voting in person in 2020.

Nearly two-thirds of polling places had at least one impediment for people with disabilities.

How To Protect Your Vote

The right to vote is the most fundamental constitutional right for good reason: democracy cannot exist without the electoral participation of citizens. We vote because it’s we, the people, who are supposed to shape our government. Not the other way around.

President Biden and states can enact measures to encourage rather than suppress voting. Automatic, online, and same-day voter registration encourage participation and reduce chances of error. Early voting helps people with travel or accessibility concerns participate. And states must enforce the protections of the Voting Rights Act.

At an individual level, the best way to fight voter suppression is to know your rights — and vote.

Tell Congress to pass the VRAA, which would reinstate critical protections against voter suppression left behind after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. This is even more urgent in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which significantly undercut the protections of another vital provision of the Voting Rights Act.

https://action.aclu.org/send-message/senators-protect-our-voting-rights?ms=wwwactionpage&initms=wwwactionpage&ms_aff=NAT&initms_aff=NAT&ms_chan=web&initms_chan=web

Know Your Rights before you get to the polling booth. Read and share our guide on what to do if you face registration issues, need disability or language accommodations, or come across someone who’s interfering with your right to vote. Share the guide on Facebook and Twitter to spread the word.

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/voting-rights/#someone-is-interfering-with-my-right-to-vote

What you can do:

Expand Voting Access During a Pandemic

Send your message

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-voter-suppression-in-2020 via http://www.rssmix.com/

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orbemnews · 3 years

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Democrats fear a delay in redistricting threatens Black and Asian residents in two southern states Last month, the Census Bureau announced that it won’t be delivering data that state lawmakers and redistricting commissions use to redraw legislative districts until the end of September 2021. Threadgill-Matthews is a board member for her local branch of the Alabama New South Coalition, an organization that works to mobilize Black voters in Alabama. Her concerns come as her home state’s neighbor, Georgia, is the center of the national conversation over voting rights after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed SB 202, which voting rights groups have said would target Black residents and other voters of color in the state. “If this is enacted in Alabama, you can probably come back and cover the story because I’m going to jail,” Threadgill-Matthews told CNN. “I’ve been thinking of going to Georgia to offer (voters) some water because I feel like it’s ridiculous,” she said, referring to a provision in the law that makes it illegal to hand out food or water to people standing in line to vote. Georgia’s SB 202 offers a glimpse into how certain laws can reduce voting accessibility for communities of color across the Southeast, some experts say. It also serves as a warning for what could come next. Many advocates currently have their eyes on the chance for decreased transparency due to the possibility of a shorter redistricting process because of the data delay. “Unfortunately, a pattern we have seen over and over again, is that when incumbents view a community as a threat to their maintenance of political power, they will use their own power to push back against that threat,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School. Redistricting data, originally due at the end of 2020, is late due to complications stemming from the coronavirus pandemic as well as the Trump administration’s push to exclude undocumented immigrants from being counted. This has led the Black and Asian American electorate in Alabama and North Carolina, two of the states at the greatest risk for gerrymandering, per a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, to start sounding the alarm on how they could be impacted in major ways. For Chavi Khanna Koneru, this has everything to do with how much influence the state’s Asian American vote will have. As the executive director of North Carolina Asian Americans Together, she works with organizations to increase the political participation of the state’s AAPI community. “The time crunch is going to make everyone use that as a justification for having to move faster and not being as transparent. Because the community has grown, it really does impact our ability to have an impact on who gets elected and what that representation looks like.” The ripple effects Threadgill-Matthews worries that the delay in redistricting data will lead to voter apathy in some cases. “Questions about redistricting and not knowing who’s going to be the representative or what district voters might be in would cause some apathy. When voters get used to representation from one person they are familiar with it’s easy,” she said. “If someone got thrown into a district with an unknown candidate or someone that’s been in office that’s not known to us, that may cause some apathy and some low voter turnout.” However, Alabama state Sen. Linda Coleman Madison is hopeful that voter apathy in the Black community will not be an issue, but she said that above all, she wants an accurate count. “I don’t think a delay will cause further voter apathy. We in the Black community are always concerned with gerrymandering, stacking and packing. My district is 32% White and 65% Black,” she said. “When lines were redrawn after the last census I picked up areas that were traditionally White and I’ve worked to represent all areas fairly and get to know local leaders. I think people are beginning to look at what the person can bring and their commitment to overall good government.” As in the previous decade, Republicans are set to control the redistricting process in Alabama and North Carolina, something that worries Democrats regarding the implications of how maps could be drawn. Threadgill-Matthews worries splitting up congressional districts in Alabama’s “Black Belt” would lead to vote dilution and disruption in relationships between representatives and constituents that have been years in the making. Black voters in Alabama tend to vote Democratic. And although it hasn’t posed a serious long-term threat to the “hegemony of the Republican Party” in the state, there have been repeated concerns with incumbents using “the mechanisms of rules for how ballots are cast and counted … and drawing lines in order to diminish the voices of groups they disfavor for whatever reason,” Levitt, the law professor, said. Threadgill-Matthews lives in the state’s 7th Congressional District, which is 62% Black, with 45% of active voters self-reporting as Black in 2020, according to data from the Alabama secretary of state. In 2019, federal trials were held over claims that Alabama’s 2011 congressional redistricting map packed one-third of the state’s African American population into the 7th District, instead of creating two majority African American districts. The current maps remain unchanged and the way in which they will be drawn this time around will greatly impact constituents. “When it comes to the questions of redistricting, the linking thread, whether it’s suffrage restriction, or polling place restrictions, or redistricting questions, what they all come down to are questions of democracy, anti-democracy, and anti-democratic tendencies,” said R. Volney Riser, a history professor at the University of West Alabama. “In American politics, because political partisanship tends to be so closely aligned with race, anything that involves one partisan seeking advantage over another partisan has the potential to introduce race into the equation,” Riser added. In North Carolina, the Asian American and Pacific Islander electorate shares similar concerns over redistricting. Koneru said she has witnessed the rapid increase of the Asian American population in the past decade, which has grown by 154% since 2000. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders accounted for 3.5% of the state’s electorate in the 2020 elections, according to data provided by non-profit APIA Vote. This means that close to 88,000 Asian Americans voted in the 2020 general election, Koneru said. Much of the state’s Asian American population are concentrated in three counties that encompass North Carolina’s primary metro areas. Koneru says that if districts are drawn fairly, Asian Americans have the potential to sizably impact the vote in these areas. Despite the growth in Asian American voters, gerrymandering threatens to reduce the political impact they can have. “We’re finally in a place where we have a seat at the table, are getting our voices heard. Politicians or elected officials who aren’t happy with that turnout will certainly push for gerrymandered districts,” Koneru said. The Covid-19 pandemic motivated Asian American voters in North Carolina to become more politically engaged to combat the uptick in discrimination, Koneru said. The turnout of the AAPI voting-eligible population in North Carolina in 2020 was 62%, compared to 39% in 2016. “We talked to a lot of people who were first-time voters, even though they had been registered for a while. It was really about wanting to have their voices heard because discrimination was impacting them economically,” Koneru said. It can be difficult to address redistricting concerns Not everyone believes that these concerns surrounding redistricting are warranted. Patrick Ryan, a spokesperson from the office of state Sen. Phil Berger, president pro tempore of the North Carolina General Assembly, issued a statement on behalf of North Carolina Senate Republicans saying that in 2019, “The legislature conducted all map-drawing in a committee room fully open to the public, and the computers used to draw the maps were livestreamed for any and all to observe.” The 2019 redrawing of those legislative and congressional districts was ordered by state courts, which found evidence of gerrymandered districts. Democrats picked up two US House seats in 2020. “It’s difficult to specifically address anonymous criticisms of a process that hasn’t even begun, and it would seem that those lodging complaints are unaware of the widely praised model employed just two years ago,” he said. North Carolina state Sen. Wiley Nickel, a Democrat, disagrees. “The issue of fair maps is especially important at a time when Asian Americans are facing increased discrimination and xenophobia across the country because of false COVID-19 related claims.” The 2020 election produced a more conservative state Supreme Court that is likely to influence redistricting this time around, Nickel and others fear. State Sen. Ben Clark has been leading the effort in the Senate’s Democratic caucus to monitor the redistricting process and the census data in North Carolina. “The delay in receiving census data coupled with the adverse impact of extreme partisan gerrymandering should be of great concern to all North Carolinians,” he said. “It is my hope that the condensed timeline will not be used as justification to obscure the redistricting process from engaged citizens who deserve an opportunity to choose their representatives, rather than allowing representatives to ‘choose their voters.'” Source link Orbem News #Asian #Black #delay #Democrats #DemocratsfearadelayinredistrictingthreatensBlackandAsianresidentsintwosouthernstates-CNN #Fear #Redistricting #residents #Southern #States #threatens #us

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lodelss · 4 years

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Block the Vote: Voter Suppression in 2020

Voting should be as easy and convenient as possible, and in many cases it is. But across the U.S., too many politicians are passing measures making it harder to cast a ballot. The goal is to manipulate political outcomes, and the result is a severely compromised democracy that doesn’t reflect the will of the people. Our democracy works best when all eligible voters can participate and have their voices heard.

Suppression efforts range from the seemingly unobstructive, like voter ID laws and cuts to early voting, to mass purges of voter rolls and systemic disenfranchisement. And long before election cycles even begin, legislators can redraw district lines that determine the weight of your vote. Certain communities are particularly susceptible to suppression and in some cases, outright targeted — people of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities.

Below, we’ve listed some of the most rampant methods of voter suppression across the country — and the advocacy and litigation efforts aimed at protecting our fundamental right to vote.

Voter ID Laws

Thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls. Seven states have strict photo ID laws, under which voters must present one of a limited set of forms of government-issued photo ID in order to cast a regular ballot – no exceptions. These strict ID laws are part of an ongoing strategy to suppress the vote, and it works. Voter ID laws have been estimated by the U.S. Government Accountability Office to reduce voter turnout by 2-3 percentage points, translating to tens of thousands of votes lost in a single state.

Over 21 million U.S. citizens do not have government-issued photo identification. That’s because ID cards aren’t always accessible for everyone. The ID itself can be costly, and even when IDs are free, applicants must incur other expenses to obtain the underlying documents that are needed to get an ID. This can be a significant burden on people in lower-income communities. Further, the travel required is an obstacle for people with disabilities, the elderly, and people living in rural areas.

Voter ID restrictions imposed since 2010

Thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls, including seven states with strict photo ID laws.

For more information on each highlighted state, click image for full display.

Resources on voter ID laws

Blogs | Litigation | Look up your state’s voter ID laws | Fact Sheet

Voter Registration Restrictions

Restricting the terms and requirements of registration is one of the most common forms of voter suppression. Restrictions can include requiring documents to prove citizenship or identification, onerous penalties for voter registration drives or limiting the window of time in which voters can register.

Politicians often use unfounded claims of voter fraud to try to justify registration restrictions. In 2011, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach championed a law requiring Kansans to show “proof of citizenship” documents in order to register to vote, citing false claims of noncitizen voting. Most people don’t carry the required documents on hand — like a passport, or a birth certificate — and as a result, the law blocked over 30,000 Kansans from voting. The ACLU sued and defeated the law in 2018.

Some states restrict registration by allowing people to register long in advance of an election. For example, New York requires voters to register at least 25 days before the election, which imposes an unnecessary burden on the right to vote. By forcing voters to register before the election even becomes salient to the public, it discourages people from registering in the first place. These outdated restrictions — which were designed for a time when registration forms were exclusively completed with pen and paper, and transmitted via snail mail — can significantly impact voter participation. In the 2016 presidential election, over 90,000 New Yorkers were unable to vote because their applications did not meet the 25-day cutoff, and the state had the eighth-worst turnout rate in the country.

Resources on voter registration restrictions

Blogs | Look up your state’s voter registration requirements | States with online voter registration

Voter Purges

Cleaning up voter rolls can be a responsible part of election administration because many people move, die, or become ineligible to vote for other reasons. But sometimes, states use this process as a method of mass disenfranchisement, purging eligible voters from rolls for illegitimate reasons or based on inaccurate data, and often without adequate notice to the voters. A single purge can stop up to hundreds of thousands of people from voting. Often, voters only learn they’ve been purged when they show up at the polls on Election Day.

Voter purges have increased in recent years. A recent Brennan Center study found that almost 16 million voters were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016, and that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination — which are no longer subject to preclearance after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act — had significantly higher purge rates.

The most common excuses for purging voter rolls are to filter out voters who have changed their address, died, or have failed to vote in recent elections. States often conduct such purges using inaccurate data, booting voters who don’t even fall under the targeted category. In 2016, Arkansas purged thousands of voters for so-called felony convictions, even though some of the voters had never been convicted of a felony at all. And in 2013, Virginia purged 39,000 voters based on data that was later found to have an error rate of up to 17 percent.

Resources on voter purges

Blogs | Report: Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote

Felony Disenfranchisement

A felony conviction can come with drastic consequences including the loss of your right to vote. But different states have different laws. Some ban voting only during incarceration. Some ban voting for life. Some ban people while on probation or parole; other ban people from voting only while incarcerated. And some states, like Maine and Vermont, don’t disenfranchise people with felony convictions at all. The fact that these laws vary so dramatically only adds to the overall confusion that voters face, which is a form of voter suppression in itself.

Due to racial bias in the criminal justice system, felony disenfranchisement laws disproportionately affect Black people, who often face harsher sentences than white people for the same offenses. It should come as no surprise that many of these laws are rooted in the Jim Crow era, when legislators tried to block Black Americans’ newly won right to vote by enforcing poll taxes, literacy tests, and other barriers that were nearly impossible to meet.

To this day, the states with the most extreme disenfranchisement laws also have long records of suppressing the rights of Black people. In Iowa, a system of permanent disenfranchisement, paired with the most disproportionate incarceration rate of Black people in the nation, has resulted in the disenfranchisement of an estimated one in four voting-age black men.

Felony disenfranchisement laws by state

A patchwork of state felony disfranchisement laws, varying in severity from state to state.

For more information on each state, click image for full display.

Resources on felony disenfranchisement

Blogs | Litigation | Podcast: Desmond Meade and Dale Ho on restoring the right to vote

Gerrymandering

How it all begins

Redistricting is front and center in 2020. In April, the Trump administration will conduct the 2020 census and states will use its results to redraw district lines across the country. Those new district lines will determine our political voice for the next decade.

It’s no coincidence that the administration — which has a lengthy track record on voter suppression and attacking immigrants — wanted to add a citizenship question to the census. The goal was to reduce census participation by immigrant communities, thereby stunting their growing political influence and depriving them of economic benefits.

Some might wonder what the problem is in adding a citizenship question to the census. But the purpose of the census is to count everybody in this country, citizens and noncitizens alike. Accurate population data is essential in apportioning representation and public funds. By trying to suppress participation, the administration made clear that it doesn’t want certain people to count — namely immigrants and even citizens who live in mixed-status households, who might have hesitated to participate if the Administration had succeeded in adding a citizenship question to the Census.

The ACLU sued the Trump administration over the citizenship question and successfully blocked it last year. In the process, we uncovered documents proving that attacking immigrants was the administration’s goal all along, and that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lied to Congress to hide it.

The 2020 census will no longer include a citizenship question — but the administration’s attempt to add it is yet another example of how politicians can use redistricting to suppress and manipulate the vote.

How the GOP manipulated Ohio elections

Resources on redistricting and gerrymandering

Blogs | Litigation | Look up the history of your district lines

Who’s Affected By Voter Suppression?

The short answer is all of us. Our democracy is debased when the vote is not accessible for all. But the fact is that some groups are disproportionately affected by voter suppression tactics, including people of color, young people, the elderly, and people with disabilities. There’s proof that certain groups have been deliberately targeted — for example, the government documents uncovered in the census case proved that the citizenship question intended to harm immigrants. Other times, the proof is in the numbers.

Seventy percent of Georgia voters purged in 2018 were Black.

Across the country, one in 13 Black Americans cannot vote due to disenfranchisement laws.

One-third of voters who have a disability report difficulty voting.

Only 40 percent of polling places fully accommodate people with disabilities.

Across the country, counties with larger minority populations have fewer polling sites and poll workers per voter.

Six in ten college students come from out of state in New Hampshire, the state trying to block residents with out of state drivers’ licenses.

How To Protect Your Vote

The right to vote is the most fundamental constitutional right for good reason — democracy cannot exist without the electoral participation of citizens. We vote because it’s we, the people, who are supposed to shape our government. Not the other way around.

States can enact measures to encourage rather than suppress voting. Automatic, online, and same-day voter registration encourage participation and reduce chances of error. Early voting helps people with travel or accessibility concerns participate. And states must enforce the protections of the Voting Rights Act.

At an individual level, the best way to fight voter suppression is to vote. Here’s how to ensure your vote is protected:

Tell your senators to pass the VRAA, which would reinstate critical protections against voter suppression left behind after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

Know Your Rights before you get to the polling booth. Here’s a guide on what to do if you face registration issues, need disability or language accommodations, or come across someone who’s interfering with your right to vote. Share the guide on Facebook and Twitter to spread the word.

Published February 3, 2020 at 07:30PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3b9zCxi

#IFTTT #Blogger

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lovekindstrand · 7 years

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Notes on the teratology of disaster response

September, 2017

It is difficult to speak of disaster without relinquishing specificity, as if the very term insists on generalization. One reason that the massive body of literature on 3.11 — the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and ensuing nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima-1 — has not aged well is that it itself has become the vessel of grander narratives: narratives of risk and its incalculability, technological failure and its inevitability, of victimhood as universal, and of safety as myth. This report on a September 2017 study trip to Fukushima’s Iitate village, hosted by the NPO Resurrection of Fukushima and sponsored by the Atsumi International Scholarship Foundation, argues that for those that work in and on the aftermath of this disaster — whether they are government agencies, volunteers, scientists or individual citizens — negotiating these mythological or ideological inflections is a central challenge.

Over 6,000 people lived here when disaster struck: well outside the exclusion zone, the village even welcomed a large number of disaster refugees from other areas. But a few days later, changing weather patterns pushed the F1 radiation plume inland. On March 22, an inspection team from the International Atomic Energy Agency gathered samples twice that of the civilian safety limit inside the village. Anxiety and animosity grew amidst contradictory radiation readings, and conflicting information on its risks; many left on their own accord. “We have been sacrificed so that Tokyo can enjoy bright lights,” a local farmer told the New York Times. A month later, the evacuation order came. NHK showed footage of faceless workers in hazmat suits running geiger counters over childrens’ bodies, “as if radiation was contagious”. For Muneo Kanno, Resurrection of Fukushima’s local representative, this is the moment when Iitate’s collective disaster experience transformed from victimhood into pariah. When journalists reporting on a hot spot in Tokyo’s affluent Setagaya ward called it “another Iitate,” the village had been reduced to a marker of pollution. “We found ourselves right in the middle of a narrative we could not have changed or predicted.“ This time last year, nobody was allowed back, but now some six percent of villagers have returned. For those that do, it must be said, the serious problem to contend with is not radiation but sanitation. Meter-high soil platforms are caked on top of existing lots to prevent flooding from contaminated rivers. Decontamination demands the removal of top soil, traditionally considered the most fertile, which often ends up in black bags on top of the same field or a nearby one, sand and gravel put in its place and flattened by heavy truck wheels.

Surveying the landscape, the black bags are what one tends to notice first. There are a lot of them: 2,6 million in Iitate alone, by last year’s count. At one metric ton it takes a lot of work to fill one, and a truck only takes three or four. The enterprise of shuffling them about the village is a labor-intensive one, but their presence can be lucrative. When our dour bus guide addresses them some twenty minutes into the tour, one has almost had time to get used to them. Sometimes wrapped in a glaucous green tarpaulin, sometimes behind construction site fencing, they accentuate the contours of the post-disaster landscape as reminders of the fallout that lingers here, the impossibility of accounting for it all, and that place beyond the mountains whence it came: F1 with its molten cores, at once nowhere and everywhere to be found, its glacier walls, and its expanding network of contaminated water tanks… F1 and the incomprehensibly large apparatus of decommission and decontamination surrounding it: the endless lines of trucks entering leaving the compound, the hazmat-suited hordes of subcontractors attending to it, the shanty towns that house them, the convenience stores, movie theaters and red-light districts that keep them going. Just because a few reactors explode, it does not mean they stop being productive.

Iitate straddles the inner edge of Hama-dori, the coastal and most developed part of Fukushima prefecture. Yet it is far both from the booming economy of decommission, and from the avant-garde landscape architecture transmogrifying coastal communities leveled by the tsunami into wave-breaking fortresses. It is far from all of that. But there is no lack of activity here: large public works projects are everywhere, as are the traces of state-cognitive infrastructure, from the ubiquitous Geiger counters to the traffic checkpoints. The machinery of disaster management creeps outward while the no-go zones recede: newly redrawn lines between those to be repatriated and those to remain in refuge cut deep in the social fabric of the village diaspora, already stretched thin. As we descend into the next valley, we are welcomed by a dense latticework of solar panels covering large swathes of its basin. Solar has often been touted as a potential antidote to the centralized yet lossy distribution schemes exemplified by nuclear power, but these massive facilities are owned by infotech conglomerates with headquarters in Marunouchi skyscrapers, and nobody seems to know where the electricity is going. The megasolars flooding these rice fields on aggressive short-term leases, are themselves high-risk, high-return endeavors that seem to replicate the central contradictions of the nearby nuclear facilities. I reach for my phone to read up on the leasing process, triggering a brief bidding war won by an advert for “self-powered” cryptocurrency farms to be rented out, in turn, to larger mining initatives. Worlds collide: it is a photo of a solar farm identical to the one we are driving past.

Amidst this landscape of simultaneous intensity of investment and decay, the NPO Resurrection of Fukushima has crafted a powerful vision of local community and regional autonomy, and in that same context, a unique position for themselves as a conduit between outside experts, villagers and local government. Active in Iitate since the early disaster aftermath, they have developed and documented a range of experimental practices responding to the reality of devastated conditions for agricultural production through both fallout and cleanup, in addition to systematic radiation monitoring across the village. The latter seems to be organization’s primary concern during our visit, and at the core of their activities lies a map of the village split across a grid into zones for automated collection of up-to-date radiation values, a record of which can be accessed for comparison. In creating a map that is in many ways more palpable than the simultaneously derelict and investment-heavy territory it represents, Resurrection of Fukushima’s monitoring efforts interrogate the relationship between actuality and virtuality, real and representation. Differently put, what the earth gives matters less than its radiological readings. What is harvested here is but a byproduct (albeit a delicious one). For Resurrection of Fukushima’s president, Yoichi Tao, this task of making the invisible visible is also a therapeutic, because accumulation of data alleviates the anxiety of uncertainty that otherwise threatens to become all-pervasive among those trying to survive in the village. What’s at stake here is less the accuracy or credibility of individual measurement, but the threshold where data accrues sufficiently so as to afford it some weight amidst the post-disaster complexity of multiple monitoring initiatives, expert opinions and governing agencies. Yet even if people trust the numbers, “they don’t trust us”, says Mr Tao. “They think we’re some weird scientists.” In response, he argues that “we are not here for anyone else’s sake, but our own.” The metropole is a deadening place, and there are a lot of interesting things happening out here. Resurrection of Fukushima is not here to act in the name of the village or its denizens: “we empathize (kyoukan) and collaborate (kyoudou)” but it is up to the villagers themselves to wrestle back control over the post-disaster narrative. The rhetoric here is refined. Yet the concrete characteristics of this collaborative relationship remain enigmatic throughout our residency. We spend our last morning preparing seedbeds for one such experimental harvest: a few dollar store bags of radish seeds.

Concrete initiatives like this one organized by Resurrection of Fukushima seem marked by serendipity and loosely assigned responsibility, something us city-dwellers fail to facilitate. Instead we fall back onto our own hierarchies, clueless as to what larger questions shaped the experiment’s design, and how it fits into the long-term program of data accumulation. Before leaving the village, we return the dosimeters we’ve worn during our visit and each fill out a radiation exposure diary of sorts; in itself a stimulating and productive group exercise, but while their presence demanded one’s attention during the first day or two, I get the feeling that most of us have already stopped worrying about the implications of the dosimeters around or necks or their wildly uneven readings. Seventy-two hours in the stunningly beautiful surroundings of Iitate village is enough time to trouble anybody’s alarmism regarding such matters, but nowhere near enough to grasp the magnitude of the project that the organization have embarked on, nor of the post-disaster as it takes shape in their steadfast plotting of radioactive half-lives toward the vanishing point of regional resurrection and autonomy.

#Iitate #Fukushima #fieldwork

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How Many Senate Seats Did The Republicans Pick Up

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How Many Senate Seats Did The Republicans Pick Up

Gop Holds Key Seats In Battle For Majority As Ernst Cornyn And Graham All Win; Democrat Kelly Unseats Incumbent Mcsally In Arizona

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WASHINGTON—Republicans scored key Senate victories in Tuesday’s elections, with wins in Iowa and Alabama, while Democrats flipped two seats, with former Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper unseating incumbent GOP Sen. Cory Gardner in Colorado, and Democrat Mark Kelly, a former astronaut, toppling Republican Sen. Martha McSally in Arizona, the Associated Press projected.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, AP projected that Iowa’s incumbent GOP Sen. Joni Ernst had defeated Democratic challenger Theresa Greenfield, a Des Moines businesswoman. Republicans picked up a seat by ousting Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in deep red Alabama, with Tommy Tuberville, the Republican candidate and former Auburn head football coach, winning.

Control of the chamber still remains in doubt as a number of other GOP-held races hang in the balance. Democrats now have a net gain of one seat. They need to gain three seats to win a majority if Democrat Joe Biden wins the White House or four if President Trump wins re-election.

“Everything has to go right at this point in order for Democrats to have what is a very small shot to win the majority,” said Jessica Taylor, who follows Senate races for the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan outlet that tracks congressional races.

The races in North Carolina and Georgia were too close to call, and the outcomes in Michigan and Maine were uncertain. The Democrats’ opportunities to pick off seats dwindled as the vote counting deepened.

Republicans’ Senate Wins Will Help President Trump His Judicial And Cabinet Nominees And Gop Chances In 2020

WASHINGTON – Republicans held on strongly Tuesday to their second-most important bastion of power: the United States Senate.

That means President Donald Trump, who holds the most important power center, can continue getting conservative federal judges confirmed – something he has done in record numbers already. And he is in a strong position should another vacancy materialize on the Supreme Court.

It means Trump’s anticipated shakeup of his administration should go relatively smoothly: Senate Republicans will be able to rubber-stamp new Cabinet nominees for posts ranging from attorney general to, possibly, defense secretary.

It means that no matter what the new Democratic House of Representatives does in terms of investigating Trump, the Senate is poised to beat back impeachment, as it did for President Bill Clinton in 1998.

And by gaining rather than losing Senate seats, it means Republicans have a vastly improved chance of keeping control through 2020, when they will be defending 22 of 34 seats up for grabs. That represents a table-turning from this year’s election, when Democrats had to defend 26 of 35 seats.

Even Sen. Mitch McConnell, the normally stone-faced GOP leader of the Senate, showed a glimpse of glee Wednesday.

“I had one of the cable networks on this morning, and they said, “This is probably a rare opportunity to see McConnell smile,'” the Kentucky Republican told reporters.

Republicans Are Expected To Gain Seats In Redrawn 2022 Congressional Maps But Democrats Could Be Worse Off

U.S. Census data released Monday will shift political power in Congress, reapportioning two House seats to Texas and one each to Florida, North Carolina, Oregon, Colorado, and Montana — and stripping a seat from California , New York , Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and West Virginia. Florida, Texas, and Arizona — each controlled entirely by Republicans — had been expecting to pick up an additional seat.

“On balance, I think this reapportionment offers a small boost for Republicans, but the bigger boost is likely to come from how Republicans draw these seats in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia,” the Cook Political Report‘s Dave Wasserman tells Axios. “Reapportionment itself means little compared to the redistricting fights to come.” It won’t exactly be a level playing field.

“Republicans control the redistricting process in far more states than do Democrats, because of GOP dominance in down-ballot elections,”The New York Times reports. “Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted redistricting decisions in states where they have controlled the government — such as California, Colorado, and Virginia — to independent commissions intended to create fair maps.”

House seats broken down by final redistricting authority :

– Republican: 187

— Dave Wasserman April 26, 2021