ObsidianJones said:
But please. Frame it in a way that even though Republicans received less votes overall, North Carolina and states like it still saw gains (if not the status quo) after last year's elections [https://www.apnews.com/9fd72a4c1c5742aead977ee27815d776]?
More Democrats got votes, yet Republicans still led the way. Due to the vast amount of Gerrymandering drafted up by Republicans. Is that a Democratic spin, or is that more just what the numbers show? I know it will be tempting to focus on Maryland, but there are so many more Republican Districts that has benefited from this practice that calling the one
But, for the record, It is heinous that it was done.
Was done? Every time you see people "undoing gerrymandering", they're still just gerrymandering themselves.
A "fair" map isn't a simple thing. People look at big weird shapes and assume its the result of outrageous gerrymandering. But all the voting districts start as weird shapes before anyone does anything illicit. They're influenced by geological features (rivers, mountains), and then contorted to make areas of equal population, and the result doesn't look clean in the first place. People see ugly contorted shapes and think "that's really gerrymandered", and it really might not be at all.
Gerrymandering for the benefit of whole parties isn't the thing people make it out to be. Packing opposition into a few districts where they win by large margins and then taking the rest of the districts by small margins is a high risk, low reward endeavor. It's high risk because if you're winning disproportionate numbers of districts by just a few percent, a modest swing in public opinion can flip the entire state. Remember, if every district is proportioned exactly like the state, one party wins every district. Spreading your party across districts like that is dangerous without a genuine majority. And it's low reward because if you have the power to gerrymander, you're already winning elections. And like, consider what the traditional gerrymander method of packing is: it's concentrating opposition into one district area and having slight majorities everywhere else. Democrats, the voters, literally do that to themselves, they self segregate to major cities.
Most gerrymandering isn't done for the sake of a party, it's done for the sake of individual politicians. Parties gerrymander districts so as to keep incumbents in power. The least natural shapes you see are typically done for the sake of an individual so that politician can win reelection. It could be reaching out from a different district to take away an unwanted voting bloc. It could be something as petty as a politician wanting to move to a new house but it's not in their district. The organizations pushing against gerrymandering aren't ignorant of the things I'm saying. They aren't pushing back against gerrymandering out of concern for fairness in representation, they aren't expecting a change in redistricting to significantly change the breakdown of a state's party representation, they're trying to change the map to sabotage incumbents. You can move districts lines to "fairer" arrangements, gain no actual seats, and still chase individuals out of politics because you put half their voters in a different district.
I am from Pennsylvania, my state is
the case study on this. Pennsylvania's supposedly powerful Republican gerrymander was the subject of some controversy leading into 2018 [https://www.vox.com/2018/1/22/16920636/pennsylvania-gerrymander-ruling-house]. The districts looked ugly, and there was a disparity between popular vote and representation in congress. And then the courts struck down the map, made their own, and Democrats gained seats in 2018 because of it.
Or did they? Analysis suggests that had the map not been changed, the party breakdown of representatives would have been the same. [https://www.witf.org/2019/01/31/analysis_pa_dems_may_have_made_gains_under_old_congressional_map/] As it turns out, the redistricting didn't matter on a party scale, the shift to Democrats was because in 2018, voters actually shifted toward Democrats. Not a big surprise. And ever with the new, supposedly fair districts, Republicans still have disproportionate representation, half the representatives with 10% fewer votes. I can tell you why that is with just my own family: the Democrats keep moving to Philadelphia. I have multiple siblings who live in Philly and commute
out of the city for work. Guess who they vote for. The phenomenon of urban gentrification is largely a result of Democrats moving themselves into already blue areas. It's self-packing.
The second link shows you the change in the map from the old shapes to the new. Intuition would make you think the new "compact" districts are more natural than the old long, spindly districts. But as someone who's lived in multiple of them, the old map actually has more geographical logic to it. The long stretching districts almost all just follow the highways. There's one that followed i-78, one for 81, one for 15, the one that cuts over Pittsburgh follows the PA turnpike. There are a lot of places where the new map is actually connecting disconnected people and disconnecting connected people. If you look at the new map, it has Lancaster County reach down and grab the area beneath York. I'm sure there's some algorithmic reason they split it like that, but the old district line followed the Susquehanna River. I promise, Shrewsbury, PA is not better represented by someone from Lancaster than it is by someone from York, you basically have to drive North to York to get to a bridge to cross the river that's in the way. The new map doesn't look blocky because that changed the results of the election, it just looks blocky because it disregarded geographical features. So what did the new map accomplish for anyone? "The district changes discouraged some incumbents from seeking re-election." That's what it accomplished. They gerrymandered some specific politicians out of office.
Basically, that was a long tangent to explain what the actual push against gerrymandering is. It's not about fair districting, it's about booting incumbents. That's true when Republican politicians complain about gerrymandering as well, it's just an excuse to try and take out specific opponents. And the media support it when the people being attacked are Republicans. California voted ~30% for Trump, and is represented by ~13% Republican representatives. If that were a red state, Vox might complain about it. Illinois has its infamously shaped 4th district. If that was a red state, Vox might complain about it. As it stands in the media, representative disparities and weird district shapes are only a problem if there's an opportunity to mess with Republican candidates. You're right, I can't defend Republicans against accusations of Gerrymandering, but it is done by both parties, not all misproportioned representation is the result of gerrymandering, not all weird district shapes are unnatural, and the media's not going to tell you any of that because they are blinded by their own politics.
Frame trying to put people in jail for just making mistakes they didn't realize they were making on a voter registration in the positive way it deserves.
Nobody is trying to put anyone in jail for accidental mistakes. Vox has lied to you. They're talking about Texas and Tennessee.
Texas Bill [https://www.billtrack50.com/BillDetail/1098070]
Texas Election Code [https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/?link=EL]
I don't think Vox cares about further punishing things like impeding a polling place or taking a ballot away from a voter without permission, so lets zero in on the parts that Vox is referencing. It makes violations in 13.007 a felony instead of a misdemeanor. What is 13.007? "A person commits an offense if the person knowingly makes a false statement or requests, commands, or attempts to induce another person to make a false statement on a registration application." Not accident, knowlingly. 64.012 offers more specifics on when someone knowingly votes despite being ineligible. Again, knowingly. 64.036 makes the already illegal act of knowingly assisting in voting someone not eligible into a felony instead. And that's every part of that bill that could inspire the sentence "punish people for errors on their voter registration forms or for voting if they are ineligible." And the stricter rules on voter registration groups that Vox mentions? Well, now if you drive 3 or more non-relatives to vote, you have to fill out a form with your name, and whether you're assisting just with access to the polling place or if you're assisting because they need assistance voting as well. And if you assist them voting, you write your name on a form instead of election officials writing it down for you.
Those are the chilling rules Vox is talking about. But because the bill both addresses really minor procedure changes and increases deliberate voter fraud penalties, Vox can phrase the article in such a way as to make you think they're trying to jail people for minor errors. But I've read the bill, I've linked it here, I guarantee that no part of it involves jailing someone for an accident.
Tennessee Part 1 [https://casetext.com/statute/tennessee-code/title-2-elections/chapter-2-voter-registration/part-1-registration-by-election-commissions/section-2-2-142-effective1012019]
Tennessee Part 2 [https://casetext.com/statute/tennessee-code/title-2-elections/chapter-2-voter-registration/part-1-registration-by-election-commissions/section-2-2-143-effective1012019]
The Tennessee law being discussed does actually have punishments for voter registration errors. Aimed entirely at groups that are paid to register voters. And the punishment is a fine to the organization as a whole. And the fine isn't imposed until you submit 100 incomplete registrations. And the minimum fine is $150.
Imagine the circumstances that lead to this law and make people afraid of it. Voter drive groups are screwing up people's registrations. Not just a little, the law has a second tier fine kick it at 500 bad registrations. At least one group must have hit that level or they wouldn't have set the law there. Based on this site [https://sos.tn.gov/products/elections/election-statistics], Tennessee has like 160k registrations in off years, like 250k registrations in midterm years, and like 400k in presidential election years. As the penalties are levied at errors in a calender year, take the most extreme, the 400k in one year. Look at table 12 from this census website [https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/voting-and-registration/p20-583.html], a whopping 3.6% of people polled registered in a registration drive. But again, I'll be as generous as possible to make my case, lets add in the 19.4% who didn't answer and the 4.4% who said other to get 23.8%. I'll even round up to an even 25% in case people answering "online" or "at school" did it through a voter drive (though I looked up, the state of Tennessee sponsors drives at campuses themselves). So that's a nice clean 100,000 registrations. And there are 10+ prominent national groups, so lets look at 1/10th of that. If a single, 3rd-party group being paid to register people to vote in Tennessee submits 500+ incomplete registrations, that's a 5% error rate. Let's break it down another way. Going with my exaggerated 25% through drives, if every voter drive group registered only 500 people and messed up every single registration they did, the total combined penalty would be $2 million. That's it. If your goal was to deliberately screw up Tennessee voter registration as badly as you possibly could (without making people up or double registering people), the fine would be $2,000,000. Another perspective, HeadCount.org is a prominent voter registration organization. On its website, it has a ticker of like 600,000 registrations since 2004. Tenneessee has ~2% of the US population. So HeadCount theoretically would have registered ~12,000 in Tennessee over the last 15 years. That's a whopping 800 people per year. To be even more fair, condense that into a single presidential election, you get a year with 3200 registrations. One of the biggest voter registration groups in the nation would need to fail more than 3% of the time to hit the $150 fine mark, and fail more than 15% of the time to even risk the maximum penalty. And on top of all that, it's unclear whether the law even applies to HeadCount, as they have volunteers collect registrations and have a Board of Directors that are all prominent people who might be volunteering their time as well.
So the question you should be asking is: are voter drive groups actually afraid of this law? If they aren't, if the bar is low enough and the fines negligible, then media sites and political action groups are in a tizzy over nothing and just want Republicans to look bad (I don't actually think this is the case). If they are afraid of the law (I think this is the case), it means they were messing up the registrations of huge numbers of people who thought they were properly registered. If I recall correctly, there were many stories of voters showing up to vote and having registration problems, and those headlines always seemed to make Republicans look like the bad guys. And now that they're making a law to train people how to do registration drives and fine people for messing up other people's registrations in mass, the Republicans are once again the bad guys. It's almost like they want to make Republicans look bad no matter what.
Help enlighten all of us who believe in being Born in America is enough to be an American Citizen. Because that's what happened to all of it, and it's coming on the heels of his rhetoric about Immigrants.
The argument over birthright citizenship isn't that simple. And it's not just an anti-immigrant Trump thing. Check out the map of which nations have birthright citizenship [https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-that-recognize-birthright-citizenship-jus-soli-2018-10]. The majority of the world, notably essentially all of Europe, bestows citizenship by lineage rather than place of birth. (You'll notice, people love pointing to Europe when Europe does things Democrats like, but go silent on Europe when you get to topics like immigration and abortion.) And the US stumbled into the policy basically by accident. The 14th amendment was written to give citizenship to slaves, and a change in language within it just happened to be vague enough to give dual citizenship to children of foreigners born in the US. There are consequences to this. The US has a unique issue with illegal immigration. Birth tourism, to my knowledge, is only really a major thing in the US and Canada. All it would take to iron some of this out is a little clarification on what the phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means.
I don't necessarily represent the Republican view on immigration. I'd like immigration to be easier and not based on quotas, I'd like residency in the US to be much easier, I think having to perpetually justify Visas is a waste of everyone's time, and I think we could extend that non-criminality to undocumented immigrants here now. That being said, I'd like a clear policy on citizenship that isn't playing Red Rover with pregnant women, and a reformation of birthright citizenship is almost certainly necessary to do that, and we would not be the first country to make that change. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_tourism#In_the_past_(stopped_by_changes_in_laws)]
If you discuss anything over than these issues, then I'll consider the conversation over. This is the chance to put the real optics on how people should take these things. It's a chance to actually have a discussion on what I and others consider to be not only bad, but harmful things to our country and our unity. This is not a time to talk about Obama, Democrats, or whatever. This is Republican Policy. If we have it wrong, help make it right.
Of the three major issues you just had me address, the first is actually a problem you can hold against Republicans, but the media response is multiple layers of dishonest. The second is actually just a lie by the media about Republicans. And the third is a perfectly reasonable position held by some Republicans, but portrayed as extreme by the media. That's the optics of how you should take these things. With all the lies Trump tells, the one truth he's got exactly right is "fake news." You have things wrong because you are being lied to. If my defense of Republican practices seems medium at best, good, that's because it's honest. Places like Vox have their skin-deep moral clarity because it's a fantasy world they're delivering where Republicans are the bad guy. It's a lie. And it's a lie they get away with because Democrats are in charge of all of the optics. 7% of journalists are Republican [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/just-7-percent-of-journalists-are-republicans-thats-far-less-than-even-a-decade-ago/]. That's the only reason why Republicans look bad 93% of the time.
