The Tipping Point

[hobbsyoyo]

Similarly, Florida's voting rolls were purged right before the 2000 election and pushed Bush over the top by a couple hundred votes.

It should also scare the living crap out of everyone that officials who have been the perpetrators of these purges are often the same ones running for office or otherwise deciding election results.

Before Khris Kobach became candidate for governor of Kansas, he had a hard fight against a more moderate primary challenger. The vote came down to a few hundred ballots and Kobach used his position to prevent his opponent from obtaining a recount. As the secretary of state Kris has complete authority over the recount process and attempted to force his opponent to pay millions of dollars in fees to have his recount. I believe he did back down but ultimately he still controlled the process and ended up winning. And that's just what he was willing to do against a fellow Republican opponent.

Similarly, Kemp (Georgia gubernatorial candidate) is the secretary of state in Geogia and has directed voter suppression during this election in addition to having led a decade of purges that have removed over a million people (70% PoC) from Georgia rolls. There's another Republican secretary of state running for governor in another hotly contested state who has similarly engaged in suppression and purges this cycle (can't remember who off the top of my head).

And if these elections are tight, guess who will be in charge of recounts? The very same Republicans who are running or their allies. Similarly, in 2000 in Florida, the recount effort was shut down by the very same officials who spent the year purging the voter rolls and ultimately handed the election to Bush with the blessing of the Supreme Court. This latter point goes back to my earlier point about the court system already allowing for these abuses of our system for decades.

 

[Ajidica]

When Saddam and Putin get 110% of the vote in districts, everyone immediately points out the blatant fraud. If instead they only rigged the election to get slim majorities (but still victories) they would have a lot more legitimacy. The problem here (which your article shows) is that Republicans don't have to commit massive amounts of fraud to gain complete, near-unassailable power. They just have to tip the scales enough to give their opponents a persistent handicap such that even when the Democrats get more votes they still lose.

IIRC the dictator of Belarus remarked in a TV interview that he would he happy to change the percentage of his votes to keep election observers happy, rhetorically asking if they would prefer he win with 70% of the vote or 80%.

 

[HoloDoc]

IIRC the dictator of Belarus remarked in a TV interview that he would he happy to change the percentage of his votes to keep election observers happy, rhetorically asking if they would prefer he win with 70% of the vote or 80%.

During WWII, the USSR occupied the Baltic States, and conducted sham elections to show that they had the support of the people. They even went so far as to have quite a few votes go yo the "opposition," showing how genuine the elections were. They forwarded the results to the UK, where they were published in several newspapers. Unfortunately for the Soviets, a blizzard forced them to postpone the elections in Estonia, which made the fact that the results were published before the elections took place somewhat prophetic.

 

[Ajidica]

Remind of a quip by Robert Fisk that when looking at "elections" in the Middle East that among a sea of 99.9% election results, a 60% victory seems almost democratic.

 

[Patine]

During WWII, the USSR occupied the Baltic States, and conducted sham elections to show that they had the support of the people. They even went so far as to have quite a few votes go yo the "opposition," showing how genuine the elections were. They forwarded the results to the UK, where they were published in several newspapers. Unfortunately for the Soviets, a blizzard forced them to postpone the elections in Estonia, which made the fact that the results were published before the elections took place somewhat prophetic.

An elderly, retired Russian pensioner who did an interview after the collapse of the USSR said, when he was a young men, he had been a member of NKVD agents who supervised the 1947 Polish "election." He said the results were firmly predetermined from the start completely, with even the big "non-Fascist" opposition parties being "reserved" a "respectable" number to look legitimate. But since it was all decided in advance, he said, they didn't even bother counting the ballots - they just gathered them all up and burnt them...

 

[Arwon]

We used to have gerrymanders in Australia, and Mike Baird tried t bring it back on a local level in NSW a few years ago, but we seem to have avoided the ncredibly corrupt system you have over there.

We mostly have had malapportionment, the giving of extra seats to certain zones (typically non capital city areas). This was the core of Bjelke Peterson's system and also the Playmander in SA. Western Australia retains just such a malapportionment, albeit fairly modest by comparison.

We don't have so much a history of actual gerrymandering, ie drawing of rigged non-compact districts for partisan advantage. I can't think of any actual corruptions of the tradition of a non partisan public service to that end. They've just drawn up unfair rules for said public service to implement.

There were some very rigged local govt systems well before Baird. I lived in Mascot in Botany Bay where there usually weren't even elections due to lack of opposition. Labor had concocted a spillover vote system (preferential block voting) back in the 1990s where the first seat in the ward had its votes count towards the second. Basically despite it being multi member, the system guaranteed all seats to the largest votegetter. When Ron Hoenig became member for Heffron after being mayor, it was the first time he faced a real election.

 

[Estebonrober]

FWIW Republicans played this strategy out perfectly and democrats failed as a party on a massive level. I still believe they are failing as a party organization. They've consistently focused on national elections, they've let almost every state fall into republican hands, and their inability to get out their vote on off years has been ruinous for the last 40 years.

Karl Rove stated the mission, helped organize the network to take over before the redistricting, and then the republican party executed it to a tee. That and a black president that sent the rural countryside running into their arms locked in a decade of republican gerrymandering, court stacking, and disenfranchisement.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703862704575099670689398044

In short dems were outplayed, hugely.

 

[HoloDoc]

FWIW Republicans played this strategy out perfectly and democrats failed as a party on a massive level. I still believe they are failing as a party organization. They've consistently focused on national elections, they've let almost every state fall into republican hands, and their inability to get out their vote on off years has been ruinous for the last 40 years.

Karl Rove stated the mission, helped organize the network to take over before the redistricting, and then the republican party executed it to a tee. That and a black president that sent the rural countryside running into their arms locked in a decade of republican gerrymandering, court stacking, and disenfranchisement.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703862704575099670689398044

In short dems were outplayed, hugely.

Completely agree with this. The Democrats appear to have been intent to primarily rely on democracy, whereas the Rpublicans were only too happy to subvert it. The Democrats aren't innocent by an means, but they appear to have fallen victim to a willingness to play within the system, whereas the Republicans, to quote Frank "played by a sex predator" Underwood, "overturned the table."

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Completely agree with this. The Democrats appear to have been intent to primarily rely on democracy, whereas the Rpublicans were only too happy to subvert it. The Democrats aren't innocent by an means, but they appear to have fallen victim to a willingness to play within the system, whereas the Republicans, to quote Frank "played by a sex predator" Underwood, "overturned the table."

Question is, which is the better long game?

My local government is totally dominated by Republicans. Living in an area where the entire local economy grows out of roots in the defense industrial complex means that if you run for mayor and don't say you are a Republican you are just wasting your time. But everyone in local office will tell you that "being a Republican" has absolutely no bearing on what they do. On a local level there are no partisan issues; a pothole is a pothole.

So as the demographics change inexorably against the Republicans how much of that lower tier government they have captured is likely to remain loyal to their national causes? My local mayoral race is between two Republicans. One of them runs to the Democrats, the other is funding a Democrat candidate to draw off votes from his opponent. If the first one wins he will exemplify the term RINO. If the latter wins he will have to continue to cooperate with the local Democratic party lest he be revealed as having played them and not payed off, which would doom him in two years. But both of them know that every uptick in population makes being a Republican less of a priority, and that maybe ten years from now, maybe a little sooner, and probably not much later, if there are two Republicans and a Democrat on the ballot the Democrat is going to have a good shot at winning. Ten years after that even without splitting the Republican vote a Democrat will have a good shot at winning. The one running as a RINO now may very well be that Democrat then.

Texas is browning, and urbanizing, and getting younger. Most red states are, though not as rapidly as Texas. The overwhelming Republican gerrymandering that Karl Rove engineered in Texas that flipped the state into a platform for GWBush is being revealed as a stopgap measure. It was a dike that compensated for the first three feet of a ten foot tide. Once it is topped it will not only do the GOP no good, it will be held against them in distrust. We already see that happening.

Do you see any blue states that are whitening? Ruralizing? Aging?

Ultimately, using dirty tricks to delay the inevitable has a cost. For all their faults, I think the Democratic party is on the right track on this one.

 

[Kaitzilla]

"And I noticed all that beautiful barbed wire going up today. Barbed wire, used properly, can be a beautiful sight."

President Trump
November 3rd, 2018

'Operation Faithful Patriot'
US-Mexican border

I hope he means deterring illegal immigrants and not shredding human beings.

 

[HoloDoc]

@Timsup2nothin, unfortunately it doesn't matter if those local government officials support the program long-term; they only need to support it long enough to entrench the Republicans in permanent power.

Funnily enough, there is yet another article about this in Australia today. I guess the lurch of our own political system to the right, and several prominent conservative politicians announcing their desire to emulate Trump and/or the GOP, is frightening our academics and journalists, and rightfully so.

Source.

The American right is in the midst of a formidable project: installing permanent minority rule, guaranteeing control of the government even as the number of actual human beings who support their political program dwindles.

Voter suppression is one, but only one, loathsome tactic in this effort, which goes far beyond just winning one election. Minority rule is the result of interlocking and mutually reinforcing strategies which must be understood together to understand the full picture of what the American right wants to achieve.

Examples are everywhere. Take North Dakota. In 2012, Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, won a surprise victory in a Senate race by just 2,994 votes. Her two largest county wins were in the Standing Rock and Turtle Mountain Reservations, where she won more than 80% of the vote. Her overall vote margin in counties containing Native reservations was more than 4,500 votes.

Observing that Heitkamp literally owed her seat to Native voters, North Dakota’s Republican legislature enacted a voter ID law that requires voters to present identification showing their name, birth date and residential address. There’s the rub: many Native voters do not have traditional residential addresses, so this law effectively disenfranchises them.

Or take Georgia, where the Republican nominee for governor, Brian Kemp, is the secretary of state and in that capacity has placed more than 50,000 voter registrations on hold, many from urban areas with high black populations. That is in keeping with Kemp’s privately expressed “concern” that high voter turnout will favor his opponent – Stacey Abrams, running strongly to be the first black female governor in US history.

Exacerbating voter suppression is the ongoing partisan gerrymanderingeffort – the redrawing of electoral maps to favor one party over another. After the 2010 census, the Wisconsin legislature (controlled by Republicans) drew a map for the state’s legislative districts explicitly designed to ensure they would retain control of the legislature even if they received a minority of votes. It worked: in 2012, despite receiving only 48.6% of the vote, they won 60 of 99 seats. Democrats won an outright majority of votes cast but secured just 39 seats.

To this, Wisconsin added a voter ID requirement designed to make it harder to vote at all. Voila: voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election was the lowest since 2000 and Donald Trump carried the state. (To be sure, there were other factors at work.) The combined, national effect of partisan gerrymandering is such that in the 2018 midterms, the Democrats might win the popular vote by 10 points and still not control the House.

Legislative maps designed to promote minority rule plus voter suppression of the constituencies opposed to it is a potent combination. And there’s more.

The two most recent Republican presidents have entered office despite receiving fewer votes than their opponent in a national election, thanks to the electoral college, which systematically over-represents small states. (California gets one electoral vote per 712,000 people; Wyoming gets one per 195,000.) With the presidency in hand in the run-up to the 2020 census, minority rule will be further entrenched by adding a citizenship question to the census. This will result in systematic undercounting of the population in heavily Democratic areas, which will in turn further reduce their influence as legislatures draw maps based on the data.

Then there’s the Senate. Because of its bias toward smaller, rural states, a resident of Wyoming has 66 times the voting power in Senate elections as one in California. Thus, in 2016, the Democratic party got 51.4 million votes for its Senate candidates. The Republicans got 40 million. And despite losing by more than 11 million votes, the Republicans won a supermajority (22 of 36) of the seats up for election, holding their majority in the chamber.

The hideously malapportioned Senate and electoral college permit the last piece of the minority rule puzzle to snap into place: the supreme court. In 2016, after losing the contest for the presidency and the Senate by millions of votes, the Republicans were able to install two supreme court justices. There may be more.

In fact, when the Senate confirmed Trump’s first nominee, Neil Gorsuch, it was a watershed moment in American history. For the first time, a president who lost the popular vote had a supreme court nominee confirmed by senators who received fewer votes – nearly 22 million fewer – than the senators that voted against him. And by now, it will not surprise you to discover that the senators who voted for the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh represent 38 million fewer people than the ones who voted no.

With the supreme court in hand, all those other tactics – partisan gerrymandering, voter ID and the rest – are protected from the only institution that could really threaten them. But it doesn’t stop there. The supreme court can be used to do more than approve the minority rule laws that come before it. It can further the project on its own.

In 2015, the court came within one vote of holding that independent redistricting commissions (which reduce partisan gerrymandering) are actually unconstitutional. The swing vote in that case, Anthony Kennedy, is gone. And the court in 2013 famously invalidated a major portion of the Voting Rights Act which put checks on voter-suppression efforts of the kind now taking place all over the country.

Taken together, this is a powerful set of tools. Draw maps that let you win even when you lose. Use the resulting power to enact measures to suppress the vote of the other side further. Count on a minority rule president to undercount your opponents in the census, and a minority-rule Senate to confirm justices who will strike down any obstacles to the plan.

With the deck this stacked, it isn’t enough to win. Wresting control back from the entrenched minority will take overwhelming victory. It may take, in other words, a genuine political revolution.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

@Timsup2nothin, unfortunately it doesn't matter if those local government officials support the program long-term; they only need to support it long enough to entrench the Republicans in permanent power.

Funnily enough, there is yet another article about this in Australia today. I guess the lurch of our own political system to the right, and several prominent conservative politicians announcing their desire to emulate Trump and/or the GOP, is frightening our academics and journalists, and rightfully so.

Source.

"Permanent" is, in fact, an absolutely gigantic word. Not that I'm 'total pollyanna don't worry about the GOP,' I just think the system is probably more resilient than they give it credit for, and that when their grab for permanent power inevitably fails the backlash on them for having made such an effort will make it all worthwhile.

 

[HoloDoc]

"Permanent" is, in fact, an absolutely gigantic word. Not that I'm 'total pollyanna don't worry about the GOP,' I just think the system is probably more resilient than they give it credit for, and that when their grab for permanent power inevitably fails the backlash on them for having made such an effort will make it all worthwhile.

On the contrary, I thin the success of the GOP in rigging the system is a sign of how fragile American democracy is. I don't share your confidence that this grab for power will fail. Plenty of people are stupid enough to vote for the Republicans because they're undemocratic scum, which gives them enough mass support to promulgate their program.

 

[Birdjaguar]

On the contrary, I thin the success of the GOP in rigging the system is a sign of how fragile American democracy is. I don't share your confidence that this grab for power will fail. Plenty of people are stupid enough to vote for the Republicans because they're undemocratic scum, which gives them enough mass support to promulgate their program.

It is also a sign of how fragile the GOP is. They cannot win unless they rig the system.

 

[El_Machinae]

It is also a sign of how fragile the GOP is. They cannot win unless they rig the system.

The GOP can always rebuild. It only takes a generation or so. Pulling a country back together after it suicides though ... rarely done

 

[HoloDoc]

The GOP can always rebuild. It only takes a generation or so. Pulling a country back together after it suicides though ... rarely done

And never without massive costs, personally and financial, to the victims.

One party states tend to pretty resilient. The Nazis only lost power because of foreign adventures; same with Mussolini.. The USSR lasted 70 years. The CCP has lasted about the same length of time, and doesn't seem to be making the Soviet errors; actually attempting some reform. Speaking of reform, the Burmese "reforms" are a joke. Once the GOP achieves permanent rule, it will be incredibly difficult to end it.

 

[Kaitzilla]

And never without massive costs, personally and financial, to the victims.

One party states tend to pretty resilient. The Nazis only lost power because of foreign adventures; same with Mussolini.. The USSR lasted 70 years. The CCP has lasted about the same length of time, and doesn't seem to be making the Soviet errors; actually attempting some reform. Speaking of reform, the Burmese "reforms" are a joke. Once the GOP achieves permanent rule, it will be incredibly difficult to end it.

Hmpf, USA has lasted 240 years without 1 party rule.

1 party states are the fragile ones.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Once the GOP achieves permanent rule it, it will be incredibly difficult to end.

Please tell me that I am not the only one who sees the glaring paradox in this statement.

When "rule is achieved" how do we recognize it as permanent? Ooops, they seated a justice on the SCOTUS, does that create "permanent rule"? A generation of rule? A decade? A day? Who knows? How long do we have to observe to declare it permanent?

If it really is permanent, it isn't incredibly difficult to end, it is by definition impossible.

 

[cardgame]

USA lasted 78 years, then 160 more.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

USA lasted 78 years, then 160 more.

You could even say 78 years, then about 60, then about 80 more. The USA as it pre-existed didn't make it out of the 1930s.