#not applicable to Black Women who voted for Trump or for third party candidates

[dicapiito]

I’ll be doing the same after writing a master post about who to avoid media wise/ politician wise and because frankly I’m in agreement and it’s time to step back

[science-criticaltheory]

Why Democracy Will Be the Biggest Loser in the US Midterms by Gary Younge

Illustration by Nate Kitch

Millions will be excluded on Tuesday – the voting system is shamefully rigged against ethnic minorities and the poor.  

When Angelina Cruz, the head of the teachers’ union in Racine, Wisconsin, goes canvassing, she doesn’t just knock on doors. If she sees someone in the street she approaches them and starts a conversation.

“D’you know you can vote today,” she asked a young black man who walked by last Saturday.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m a felon.” (A felon is someone who has committed a “serious crime”.)

“On papers or off papers,” she asked. (In Wisconsin your voting rights are only restored after prison, parole and probation have all been served, and you are “off papers”.)

“On papers,” he said.

“Well, ask your friends to vote,” said Cruz.

“Most of them are on papers too,” he yelled back.

In Wisconsin, 1.47% of the electorate cannot vote because they are felons. That seems like a small number. But it adds up to 65,606 voters. In 2016, Donald Trump took the state by just 22,748 votes.

On Tuesday there will be elections in the US for the entire lower chamber (the House of Representatives), a third of the upper chamber (the Senate) and several governors and state legislatures. The results will be consequential. But the process will not be democratic. Millions of people will be excluded, potentially hundreds of thousands of votes suppressed and many voting districts brazenly configured to favour one party or the other; not all citizens are eligible, not all those who are eligible are permitted to vote, and not all votes will carry the same weight.

When it comes to felons, Wisconsin is far from the worst offender. One in 10 voters in Florida has been disenfranchised because they are a felon, and it is one of 10 states where felons may lose the right to vote permanently.

But on other fronts Wisconsin illustrates the point all too well. Gerrymandering, where politicians draw electoral boundaries to favour their own side, is openly employed here, effectively allowing them to choose the voters they need to keep them in power. The result is a series of preordained outcomes that make seats less competitive, candidates less responsive, politicians more extreme (since to keep their seat they only have to keep their base happy) and the entire process less credible.

Both parties do this when they get the chance; Republicans have simply had more chances recently and are more shameless and therefore more effective at it. In 2012 Republicans received 46% of the popular vote in Wisconsin state elections but received 60% of the seats in the state assembly; nationwide that year Democrats got 1.4 million more votes while Republicans won 33 more seats.

Efforts to suppress the vote, by demanding identification that many eligible voters don’t have – often because they cannot afford it or do not know how to get it – has also eroded confidence in the process. Voter ID laws are ostensibly aimed at countering voter fraud; the trouble is voter fraud barely exists. In the 2016 election there were four documented cases of impersonation, while a 2017 academic study put the upper limit for incidents of double voting at 0.02%.

Four women who could break new ground in the US midterms – video

But while the fraud is illusory the disproportionate number of disenfranchised black and poor voters is not. In Georgia 53,000 voter applications, most from African Americans, are currently being held up by the secretary of state, Brian Kemp, some for such petty reasons as a missing hyphen. Kemp is running for governor in a tight race against a black opponent. In a recently leaked video recording he expresses concern at his chances, “especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote”. Nicala Aiello, a poll worker in Racine, says she saw about 11 people turned away from the polling station she works at in 2016, the first election in which a new, more stringent voter-ID law was in place.

Those most likely to be marginalised from the process are those most likely to be marginalised in the economy and the polity – the black, the brown and the poor. In Kentucky, home to the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, one in four black voters cannot participate in elections because of a felony conviction; nationally it is one in 14. Felony convictions have at least as much to do with discrimination as they do with criminality. Drug use is equally prevalent among African Americans and whites, but the former are six times more likely to be imprisoned for it. Black people are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder and 12 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of a drugs offence than white people.

The voter ID requirements often demand money some people don’t have and are more onerous for the young and the poor who move a lot or may not have a driving licence. Last month the supreme court upheld a North Dakota lawthat demanded ID with a “current residential street address”. This is burdensome for Native Americans living on reservations who use post-office boxes to get their mail, and where street names and numbers are either nonexistent or inconsistent.

And as the electorate continues to get more diverse these efforts to stop some people voting will only get more perverse.

The stakes are high. Four of the states with the highest proportion of felons removed from the voter rolls – Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona – all have very close state-wide races this year. The current North Dakota senator is in a tight race that she won by just 3,000 votes in 2012.

Meanwhile, Aiello believes if what she saw in Racine were replicated across Wisconson, it could have significantly affected the result there. Neil Albrecht, the most senior election official in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, agrees. “It is very probable enough people were prevented from voting to have changed the outcome of the presidential election in Wisconsin,” he told the Mother Jones website last year.

Gerrymandering and voter suppression could be reversed quite straightforwardly. But some of this unfairness is baked into the polity. In the Senate each state has two seats; even though California has 68 times the population of Wyoming, they each get the same representation in the upper house. Moreover the presidency does not go to whoever wins the most votes, but whoever wins in the “electoral college” – a body also weighted towards less populous states.

As a result Republicans have only won the popular vote for the presidency once since 1988. In a more consensual political culture this would matter less. But when politics is so polarised, the fact that a president who was not favoured by most Americans is ramming through a deeply divisive agenda helps explains why so much opposition has spilled out on to the streets. No country’s electoral system is perfect. But America’s political class has wilfully decided to make the inherent flaws in its system worse, while adding new ones.

The broken politics that have resulted are not just the product of a profound ideological fissure but a profoundly unfair and broken process that is particularly rigged against those who are poor and dark. Whoever wins on Tuesday, democracy will have already lost.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Under normal circumstances, we would have published this article days ago. But the increased use of vote-by-mail during the coronavirus pandemic means it has taken a few days to count the votes from last Tuesday’s primary elections; some jurisdictions are still counting. Unfortunately for impatient election junkies, this may be something we have to get used to: The results of the November election may also not be known for several days if Americans continue to vote by mail in large numbers.

But nearly a week later, we do at least know who won the major races on June 2. The biggest news came in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, where Republican Rep. Steve King became the second incumbent congressman so far this year to lose in a primary.1 State Sen. Randy Feenstra defeated King by a healthy 10-point margin, 46 percent to 36 percent, and has likely punched his ticket to Washington in this deep-red district — President Trump carried it by 27 points in 2016. King is infamous for his racist and controversial comments, which came to a head last year when King wondered aloud why language such as “white supremacist” was offensive. The incident prompted Republican leadership to remove King from all House committees, which opened the door for Feenstra’s primary challenge attacking King as ineffective.

Elsewhere, it was a good day for female candidates. In 2019, the number of Republican women in the House dropped to just 13, but on Tuesday the party took a meaningful step toward diversifying its ranks, nominating women in several swing districts, including the Indiana 5th, Iowa 1st, Iowa 2nd, New Mexico 2nd and Pennsylvania 7th. And New Mexico, which has long been a pioneer at electing nonwhite women to office, looks as if it will elect a U.S. House delegation made up entirely of women of color this fall, as Hispanic or Native American women won the Democratic and Republican primaries for all three of its congressional seats.

And although the presidential primary might seem irrelevant at this point, last Tuesday’s contests helped former Vice President Joe Biden finally clinch the nomination. He won 422 of 452 delegates allocated so far from the June 2 contests, according to ABC News’ figures, which positioned him to achieve a delegate majority on Saturday thanks to results from Guam’s caucus.2

Given the scale of the vote — nine states plus Washington, D.C., held primaries, prompting the nickname “Super Junesday” — some saw the June 2 election as a dry run for November in terms of voting amid a pandemic. But if it was, it had mixed results. On the bright side, Idaho, Iowa and Montana all broke records for the most votes ever cast in a primary election. That might sound impressive, but when we look at turnout as a share of the voting eligible population, turnout surpassed the 2016 primary in six of the 10 jurisdictions that held their primaries on Tuesday.3

Primary turnout up in some states, down in others

2016 vs. 2020 primary turnout in the 10 jurisdictions that held elections on June 2, as a share of the voting eligible population

Jurisdiction 2016 Turnout 2020 Turnout Change Iowa 9% 23% +14 Idaho 15 26 +11 Montana 37 46 +9 New Mexico 23 28 +5 South Dakota 20 24 +4 Washington, D.C. 20 20 +1 Rhode Island 24 15 -8 Maryland 34 25 -8 Pennsylvania 34 22 -11 Indiana 36 20 -16

2020 turnout is based on preliminary data as of June 7.

Sources: State election officials, Associated Press, United States Elections project

Of course, we don’t know that the changes in turnout are predominantly driven by the pandemic. The competitiveness of the races on the ballot plays a big role as well, and the 2020 presidential primary is obviously no longer being contested (which may have driven down turnout in all of these states except Idaho and Iowa, which were holding only down-ballot primaries). But several states, including Idaho, New Mexico and South Dakota, featured less or equally competitive races in 2020 than in 2016 and still saw higher turnout, which was definitely a positive sign.

And the increased availability of mail voting may have had something to do with that. All nine jurisdictions for which we have data saw a huge spike in the share of voters opting to cast absentee ballots. Absentee voting was more common than in-person voting in every locale, and three states saw virtually every ballot cast absentee: Maryland and Montana, which mailed ballots to all registered voters, and Idaho, which did not open any polling places.

Tons of people voted by mail on June 2

The share of ballots cast absentee in the 10 jurisdictions that held primaries on June 2, and how much it increased since the 2016 primary

Jurisdiction Absentee % Change from 2016 Idaho 100%

–

–

+86 Montana 100

–

–

+30 Maryland 97

–

–

+93 Rhode Island 83

–

–

+80 Iowa 80

–

–

+61 Washington, D.C. 69

–

–

+62 Pennsylvania 64

–

–

+62 New Mexico 64

–

–

+57 South Dakota 58

–

–

+44

Based on preliminary data as of June 7. Data from Indiana was incomplete and is therefore not included.

Source: State election officials

Beyond that, however, there is no clear pattern regarding best practices for vote-by-mail elections. Iowa, New Mexico, Rhode Island, South Dakota and Washington, D.C., for instance, sent every voter an absentee ballot application (so not an automatic ballot), but their absentee-voting rates ranged anywhere from 58 percent to 83 percent.4 By contrast, Pennsylvania, which merely sent voters a postcard with instructions on how to request a ballot, had 62 percent of its ballots cast absentee or by mail.

The heavy volume of mail voting also led to a resurgence of some of the issues that plagued the Wisconsin primary in early April. Many voters reported not receiving ballots they requested. In Maryland, issues with a vendor delayed the delivery of more than 1 million ballots. In Washington, D.C., enough people complained about not receiving their ballots on time that election officials eventually allowed some of them to cast their ballots via email, against the recommendations of election-security experts. And in Pennsylvania, voters waited an average of seven days to receive their ballots — two weeks in some counties. But the problems don’t stop there. In Delaware County, officials simply ran out of time to fulfill 400 absentee-ballot requests and sent out another 6,000 ballots on June 1 without return postage because they did not think any voters would be able to mail those ballots back in time. (These types of fears eventually prompted Gov. Tom Wolf to give voters in Delaware and five other counties an extra week to return their ballots.)

In addition, many cities experienced long lines at polling places after the number of in-person voting sites was slashed (a problem exacerbated by those who never received mail ballots being forced to vote in person). Long waits were reported in Baltimore; Bozeman, Montana; Des Moines, Iowa; Indianapolis; and Las Cruces, New Mexico. But the worst horror stories probably came from the nation’s capital, where the requirement that poll workers clean equipment between voters and limit the number of people who could enter each polling place caused long delays. Some people reported waiting up to five hours to vote and not leaving until about 1 a.m. — which they did amid a curfew imposed as a result of the week’s protests. And although voters were supposed to be exempt from the curfew, there were social-media reports of police telling voters standing in line to vote to go home. Similarly, some voters in Pennsylvania complained of voter intimidation, as one polling place in a predominantly black ward was located in a building that houses the police station, and armed police officers in riot gear stood watch over another.

Perhaps not coincidentally, two of the places where these problems seemed most acute (Maryland and Pennsylvania) were also among the ones where turnout dropped. And amid the possibility that large numbers of voters were disenfranchised, there are now calls for election officials in Maryland and Washington to resign over the snafus. So far, this year’s primaries continue to suggest the country is not fully prepared to hold the general election in a time of crisis.