The next American realignment

[Valka D'Ur]

The other variable is going to be Republican-dictated voter suppression. It could well be that this new party will simply take the place of the Democrats as the latter's voters are phased out of legal eligibility.

I get utterly mind-croggled when I see this sort of thing. How can people be "phased out" of being an eligible voter? I get that some prisoners aren't able to vote; we had that here as well, until it was declared unconstitutional and their voting rights were restored. There are only TWO categories of Canadian citizens who are not allowed to vote (other than the obvious one of underage citizens): Ex-pats who have been out of the country for over 5 years and the Chief Electoral Officer and his/her deputy. All other citizens are legally allowed to vote, although Harper and his merry band of Reformacons pushed through the "Fair" Elections Act in an effort to put a dent in the ability of seniors, students, aboriginals, disabled, and homeless citizens to vote. The 2015 election was an absolute mess of eligible voters mysteriously "disappearing" from the voters' list, VICs directing people to nonexistent polling stations at nonexistent addresses, or addresses not even in the riding (one was on a private island that's inaccessible by commercial watercraft), polling stations inaccessible to senior and disabled voters, Returning Officers whose training can be politely described as "grossly inadequate" and so on.

We do have the advantage in that there is a standard way to vote all across the country. There's no such thing as one kind of ballot in one province and a different kind in another, or one province having paper ballots and another having some kind of weird machine. We use paper ballots and pencils, whether at the polling station, at the advance polling, mail-in ballots, or special ballots. All votes are hand-counted by a team consisting of a Deputy Returning Officer and Poll Clerk, and this team may be observed by various parties' official scrutineers (who may challenge the DRO's decision to accept or reject a ballot, but the scrutineer may not, under any circumstances, physically touch the ballot or handle any of the papers or envelopes used by the team they're observing).

Current voter suppression, with the exception of denying felons the right to vote, is more subtle than the Jim Crow variety and depends on getting people from targeted groups who might vote if it were convenient to decide not to bother, or to be unaware of current ID laws and happen not to have the correct ID when they do try to vote. This works to the tune of about two percentage points in any given state, which matters in close elections - but it's nowhere near as powerful as being able to just suppress most minority voters from voting entirely. I guess I wouldn't put it past the Republicans to more actively suppress minority voters and slowly stack the courts so that they always support even blatant Jim Crow-style voter suppression, but even I am not pessimistic enough to think that this is likely.

Harper tried this. Some people did just give up, but from what I gather those folks mainly fell into the situations where there were insanely long lineups at the polling station (some stations didn't have enough voting stations inside, and there were at least two that didn't open on time on the morning of election day; the polls are supposed to be open for 12 consecutive hours, but some PDROs - Presiding Deputy Returning Officers - decided to sashay in to open things up around 11 am ... 3 hours late). Some people wanted to vote at the advance polls that were held over Thanksgiving weekend and discovered that in some cases the polling stations were on the second floor of the building and the only person with a key to the elevator had the weekend off. Since people in wheelchairs and some seniors couldn't walk up the stairs (and couldn't vote on election day for various reasons), they didn't get to vote.

And then there was one station where the PDRO threatened to fire any DRO/Poll Clerk who happened to be wearing a Maple Leaf or Canadian flag lapel pin (some were wearing them in honor of the 50th anniversary of our flag). The reason? The color red. Apparently anything red was seen as some form of Liberal campaign literature or posters. As I said earlier, their training was beyond "inadequate." Some of them were blatantly partisan, not only this time but last time - when the PDRO of one polling station had a red-haired scrutineer thrown out of the station. The ironic thing is that she was a scrutineer for the local Conservative candidate...

I have to admit, I checked my status on the voter's list numerous times during that excruciating 78-day campaign. So did a lot of other people, and there were open calls on CBC.ca for the United Nations to send observers. With so many suspicious VICs (Voter Information Cards) with blatantly incorrect information and other irregularities and the new ID rules, we simply lost confidence in the government to run a proper election.


Whatever happens in the U.S., just don't do a "Republic of Gilead". Please. Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale (TV series is currently available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Bravo in Canada) was written as a warning, not a how-to-set-up-a-repressive-right-wing-theocracy manual.

 

[timtofly]

The next paradigm:
Smart people vs Dumb people

Smart people who have avoided public fed education vs the robot production lines of the current ideology?

 

[Bootstoots]

I get utterly mind-croggled when I see this sort of thing. How can people be "phased out" of being an eligible voter? I get that some prisoners aren't able to vote; we had that here as well, until it was declared unconstitutional and their voting rights were restored. There are only TWO categories of Canadian citizens who are not allowed to vote (other than the obvious one of underage citizens): Ex-pats who have been out of the country for over 5 years and the Chief Electoral Officer and his/her deputy. All other citizens are legally allowed to vote, although Harper and his merry band of Reformacons pushed through the "Fair" Elections Act in an effort to put a dent in the ability of seniors, students, aboriginals, disabled, and homeless citizens to vote. The 2015 election was an absolute mess of eligible voters mysteriously "disappearing" from the voters' list, VICs directing people to nonexistent polling stations at nonexistent addresses, or addresses not even in the riding (one was on a private island that's inaccessible by commercial watercraft), polling stations inaccessible to senior and disabled voters, Returning Officers whose training can be politely described as "grossly inadequate" and so on.

We do have the advantage in that there is a standard way to vote all across the country. There's no such thing as one kind of ballot in one province and a different kind in another, or one province having paper ballots and another having some kind of weird machine. We use paper ballots and pencils, whether at the polling station, at the advance polling, mail-in ballots, or special ballots. All votes are hand-counted by a team consisting of a Deputy Returning Officer and Poll Clerk, and this team may be observed by various parties' official scrutineers (who may challenge the DRO's decision to accept or reject a ballot, but the scrutineer may not, under any circumstances, physically touch the ballot or handle any of the papers or envelopes used by the team they're observing).


Harper tried this. Some people did just give up, but from what I gather those folks mainly fell into the situations where there were insanely long lineups at the polling station (some stations didn't have enough voting stations inside, and there were at least two that didn't open on time on the morning of election day; the polls are supposed to be open for 12 consecutive hours, but some PDROs - Presiding Deputy Returning Officers - decided to sashay in to open things up around 11 am ... 3 hours late). Some people wanted to vote at the advance polls that were held over Thanksgiving weekend and discovered that in some cases the polling stations were on the second floor of the building and the only person with a key to the elevator had the weekend off. Since people in wheelchairs and some seniors couldn't walk up the stairs (and couldn't vote on election day for various reasons), they didn't get to vote.

And then there was one station where the PDRO threatened to fire any DRO/Poll Clerk who happened to be wearing a Maple Leaf or Canadian flag lapel pin (some were wearing them in honor of the 50th anniversary of our flag). The reason? The color red. Apparently anything red was seen as some form of Liberal campaign literature or posters. As I said earlier, their training was beyond "inadequate." Some of them were blatantly partisan, not only this time but last time - when the PDRO of one polling station had a red-haired scrutineer thrown out of the station. The ironic thing is that she was a scrutineer for the local Conservative candidate...

I have to admit, I checked my status on the voter's list numerous times during that excruciating 78-day campaign. So did a lot of other people, and there were open calls on CBC.ca for the United Nations to send observers. With so many suspicious VICs (Voter Information Cards) with blatantly incorrect information and other irregularities and the new ID rules, we simply lost confidence in the government to run a proper election.


Whatever happens in the U.S., just don't do a "Republic of Gilead". Please. Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale (TV series is currently available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Bravo in Canada) was written as a warning, not a how-to-set-up-a-repressive-right-wing-theocracy manual.

Our voting conditions are worse in some places and better in others - it varies quite widely across the nation. I've never had any problems, but I've never lived in any state that was restrictive about absentee or early voting. You can just request a ballot by mail online in Illinois provided you have a valid drivers license, which is how I've done it for the last three or four elections. I've actually never voted in a traditional voting booth on election day - no need to bother with the lines. Voting by mail is much better because it means I can actually Google all the local officials and get some idea about them so as to cast an informed vote. Not that this has resulted in much deviation from just voting straight-ticket Democratic - the only Republican who got my vote in 2016 was the coroner. But there were some nonpartisan things like the board for the local community college, and a couple of minor referenda, none of which I knew about before getting the ballot and which I was glad to have been able to become informed on.

There are a lot of places where the sorts of things you describe are common, though. It's especially bad in urban districts when voting on Election Day, especially in states that have tightened voter ID laws and that have little or no early or non-excuse absentee voting. And convicted felons are barred from voting for life in some particularly repressive states (e.g. Florida). Obviously the gerrymandering and whatnot is worse here than there, and the EC is stupid, and there is virtually no campaign finance control, and so on and so forth. And we would kill to have the 78-day campaign that was long by Canadian standards: ours are more like 78 weeks.

While it is a good dystopian novel, I don't see us ending up in anything quite like The Handmaid's Tale. If the Religious Right had been much worse and had taken over society entirely during the wave of fundamentalism in ~1980-2005, then we'd have seen a lot more of that kind of theocratic repression. It was a timely book in 1985, but it doesn't quite capture the mood in 2017. Pence notwithstanding, the influence of Christian fundamentalists has declined markedly over the last decade. I mean, an obviously irreligious man who brags about being able to grab [cat], and who knows nothing whatsoever about Christianity, steamrolled the holy rollers like Cruz, Carson, and Huckabee within the GOP, and the 2016 general election contained far fewer references to religion than any previous election within my memory. Nativism, racism, dismantling welfare, a few particular culture war issues, and conspiracy theories are all running strong, but our level of religiosity has declined rapidly over the last decade. The GOP also makes quite a bit of use of conservative women as well - their misogyny is directed entirely at Democratic women. So while many horrible things could happen, I don't think a theocracy where women are treated as outright property is likely.

 

[mrt144]

If your state doesn't vote by mail, you're being screwed in voting.