Tag: elections
Limiting Mail-in Voting Won’t Make Elections More Secure
“Far from being a gateway to rampant fraud, when done correctly mail-in balloting is more secure than in-person voting. Even after an election in which 46 percent of votes were cast by mail—a huge increase that threatened to overwhelm election offices—there is nothing more than anecdotal evidence of problems with the process. In places where mail-in voting has been the norm for years, like Oregon, there is scant evidence of fraud.
Despite what critics claim, “no-excuse absentee voting still must undergo the same rigorous process to ensure ballots are legitimate, including ballot tracking measures and signature verification,” write Hyden and Greenhut (a Reason columnist) in the new R Street study. “These safeguards are highly effective, too.””
Why A Biden Blowout Didn’t Happen (And Why A 2024 Blowout Is Unlikely, Too)
“While presidential contests have been consistently competitive since 1988, it’s true that not every race has sat on a knife-edge. For instance, there wasn’t much doubt that Bill Clinton was going to win reelection in 1996, and he won by 8.5 points, the largest margin of victory in the nine elections from 1988 to 2020. But before you doubt that a 10-point margin is a helpful barometer of competitiveness, consider that from 1904 to 1984, 12 elections were settled by double-digit margins compared to just nine by single-digit ones. By comparison, not a single election from 1876 to 1900 or from 1988 to 2020 was a blowout.
It’s no coincidence that the late 19th century is the most comparable period to the present. Few people in the 1880s could mistake a Democrat for a Republican because the parties differed sharply in their views — something that is also true today. Case in point: the last time the average Democrat and Republican in Congress were this far apart ideologically was between the 1870s and early 1900s, according to Voteview, which measures the relative liberalism or conservatism of senators and representatives based on their voting records.”
How Georgia Turned Blue
“how did Georgia go from light red to blue — or at the very least, purple?
The answer is pretty simple: The Atlanta area turned really blue in the Trump era. Definitions differ about the exact parameters of the Atlanta metropolitan area, but 10 counties1 are part of a governing collaborative called the Atlanta Regional Commission. Almost 4.7 million people live in those 10 counties, or around 45 percent of the state’s population.
Until very recently, the Atlanta area wasn’t a liberal bastion. There was a Democratic bloc that long controlled the government within the city limits of Atlanta and a Republican bloc that once dominated the suburbs”
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“suburban Atlanta is trending blue”
The crisis isn’t too much polarization. It’s too little democracy.
“Imagine that, four years ago, Donald Trump lost the presidential election by 2.9 million votes, but there was no Electoral College to weight the results in his favor. In January 2017, Hillary Clinton was inaugurated as president, and the Trumpist faction of the GOP was blamed for blowing an election Republicans could have won.
The GOP would have been locked out of presidential power for three straight terms, after winning the crucial popular vote only once since 1988. It might have lost the Supreme Court, too.
And so Republicans would likely have done what Democrats did in 1992, after they lost three straight presidential elections: reform their agenda and their messaging, and try to build a broader coalition, one capable of winning power by winning votes. This is the way democracy disciplines political parties: Parties want to win, and to do so, they need to listen to the public. But that’s only true for one of our political parties.
Take the most recent election. Joe Biden is on track to beat Donald Trump by around 5 million votes. But as my colleague Andrew Prokop notes, a roughly 50,000-vote swing in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin would have created a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, tossing the election to the state delegations in the House, where Trump would’ve won because Republicans control more states, though not more seats. Trump didn’t almost win reelection because of polarization. He almost won reelection because of the Electoral College.”
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“The simplest way to understand American politics right now is that we have a two-party system set up to create a center-left political coalition and a far-right political coalition.
Two reinforcing features of our political system have converged to create that result. First, the system weights the votes of small states and rural areas more heavily. Second, elections are administered, and House districts drawn, by partisan politicians.
Over the past few decades, our politics has become sharply divided by density, with Democrats dominating cities and Republicans dominating rural areas. That’s given Republicans an electoral advantage, which they’ve in turn used to stack electoral rules in their favor through aggressive gerrymandering, favorable Supreme Court decisions, and more. As a result, Democrats and Republicans are operating in what are, functionally, different electoral systems, with very different incentives.”
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“To reliably win the Electoral College, Democrats need to win the popular vote by 3 or 4 percentage points. To reliably win the Senate, they need to run 6 to 7 points ahead of Republicans. To reliably win the House, they need to win the vote by 3 or 4 points. As such, Democrats need to consciously strategize to appeal to voters who do not naturally agree with them. That’s how they ended up with Joe Biden as their nominee.”
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“For Republicans, the incentives are exactly the reverse. They can win the presidency despite getting fewer votes. They can win the Senate despite getting fewer votes. They can win the House despite getting fewer votes. They can control the balance of state legislatures despite getting fewer votes.”
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“If Republicans were more worried about winning back some of Biden’s voters rather than placating Trump’s base, they wouldn’t be indulging his post-election tantrum. It would be offensive to the voters they’re losing, and whom they’ll need in the future. But they’re not, and so they have aligned themselves with Trump’s claims of theft — with profoundly dangerous consequences for America.
Trump is not in the White House, refusing to accept the results of the election, because America is polarized. He is there because of the Electoral College. Mitch McConnell is not favored to remain Senate majority leader because America is polarized. He is favored to remain Senate majority leader because the Senate is the most undemocratic legislative chamber in the Western world, and the only way Republicans seem to lose control is to lose successive landslide elections, as happened in 2006 and 2008.
In politics, as in any competition, the teams adopt the strategies the rules demand. America’s political parties are adopting the strategies that their very different electoral positions demand. That has made the Democratic Party a big-tent, center-left coalition that puts an emphasis on pluralistic outreach. And it has let the Republican Party adopt more extreme candidates, dangerous strategies, and unpopular agendas, because it can win most elections even while it’s losing most voters.”
Police reform was a big winner this election
“Despite being a contentious issue across party lines, voters..in cities in six states overwhelmingly approved 18 of these ballot measures, including creating and improving police oversight boards, changing police department staffing and funding, and requiring public access to police body and dashboard camera recordings. While most of these measures are a step toward reform, almost none are radical in terms of reimagining policing. Many are standards already implemented in other cities — and a bare minimum for police accountability, activists say.”
Trump unleashes an army of sore losers
“Trump, it seems, isn’t the only dead-ender holding out more than a month after the election, refusing to acknowledge defeat. Even as Trump lost again in court on Friday, with the Supreme Court rejecting a long-shot effort to overturn the election, he remains a lodestar for denialists of the GOP.
In California, a Republican congressional candidate trounced in Democratic-heavy Los Angeles is still refusing to concede — while simultaneously announcing he’s running for governor. In Maryland, a congressional candidate beaten by more than 40 percentage points is still complaining about “irregularities” in her election. And in Tennessee, a House candidate defeated by more than 57 percentage points has reached out to the ubiquitous pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to air her grievances about an election that no Republican had any chance of winning — but that she’s convinced she did.
The down-ballot parroting of Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud began right after the election. But in the weeks since, it has evolved into a self-sustaining phenomenon of its own. Republican candidates for House, legislative and gubernatorial races in more than half a dozen states are still refusing to concede.
Echoing the president, these candidates are an early sign of what Republicans say will be a sustained, post-Trump effort to tighten voting restrictions and to reverse measures implemented in many states to make voting easier. They also may mark the beginning of a Trump-inspired trend of candidates who never fold — they just fade away after weeks and months of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud.”
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“On Friday, after the Supreme Court’s rejection of an effort to overturn the presidential election, Webber suggested on Twitter that even the court’s action was a sign of something sinister.
“That’s how you know it’s deeper than anyone could have ever imagined,” he said.”
LC: This could lay the groundwork for further deterioration of democracy.
We need to talk about the white people who voted for Donald Trump
“In 2016, white voters propelled Trump to the presidency, with 54 percent voting for him and 39 percent voting for Hillary Clinton, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center study. And though the end result might be different in 2020 — exit polls are by no means comprehensive or exact — early evidence shows that white people’s voting patterns look much the same: 57 percent of this group voted to reelect the president while 42 percent voted for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, according to Edison Research’s exit polls of 15,590 voters conducted outside their polling places, at early voting sites, or by phone. That makes white people the only racial group in which a majority voted for Trump”
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“Trump appears to have gained about 3 percentage points each with Black, Latinx, and Asian American voters since 2016 (exit polls appear not to have broken out Indigenous voters, instead lumping them into the category of “other”). And pointing out that none of these groups are monolithic is an important corrective to the inaccurate idea that “people of color” are homogenous or always vote as a bloc.”
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“the majority of white Americans voted for Trump, even after a recession and a botched response to a pandemic that has left more than 200,000 dead.”
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“The focus on voters of color started on election night. Trump took Florida, one of the first states to be called, creating the impression among many liberals that Biden was on the edge of losing. Many were looking for answers, and one that got a lot of attention was the fact that Biden had underperformed Hillary Clinton in Miami-Dade County, home to many Cuban-American voters.
In the last two days, we’ve seen numerous examinations of what happened in Miami-Dade, as well as lots of focus on Trump’s gains among Black men nationwide. The fact that Trump appears to have picked up votes since 2016 with every racial group except white men also got a lot of attention (though what appears to be a small gain among white women has been less remarked upon).”
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“But an increasingly clear picture is also emerging of Black voters in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania helping push Biden to victory — and of Latinx and Indigenous voters in Arizona and elsewhere making a big difference as well. And while much attention has been paid to the minorities of voters of color who cast their ballots for Trump, there’s been less acknowledgment that according to exit polls, the majority of those voters — 87 percent of Black voters, 66 percent of Latinx voters, and 63 percent of Asian American voters — chose Biden.”
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“Despite his gains among voters of color, Trump’s base has always been white people. That didn’t change in 2020, when a majority of white voters backed him. And since white voters comprise the majority of the electorate — 65 percent according to Edison Research — they make up by far the largest bloc to support him. Black and Latinx voters, meanwhile, make up 12 and 13 percent, respectively.”
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“Trump actually lost some ground with white men in 2020 relative to 2016. However, he still captured a majority, with 58 percent of this group voting for him compared with 40 percent for Biden.”
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“white youth were the likeliest to support Trump, with 43 percent of white voters between ages 18 and 29 voting for Trump, according to exit poll data analyzed by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. By comparison, just 9 percent of young Black voters, 13 percent of young Asian voters, and 21 percent of young Latino voters backed Trump.”
US intelligence officials say Iran and Russia obtained voter registration information to interfere in election
“Iran and Russia are using voter registration data to interfere in the US elections, top national security officials announced during a surprise press conference Wednesday night.
Iran is behind the spoof emails to some voters, and is spreading disinformation online about sending fraudulent ballots from overseas, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Wednesday. Russia has also gotten access to voter registration data, just as it did in 2016, he said.
Both Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray said no votes have been compromised. “Today, that [election] infrastructure remains resilient,” Wray said Wednesday. “You should be confident that your vote counts.”
National security officials didn’t really offer many other details in their abrupt announcement. The spoof emails appear to be those sent to some voters in Alaska and Florida, which claimed to be sent from the Proud Boys, a far-right organization. The emails reportedly targeted Democratic voters, claiming they had access to voting infrastructure and threatening them if they did not vote for Trump.
The Washington Post reported before the press conference that the US government had concluded Iran was behind the emails.”
Efforts To Limit Ballot Drop-Off Boxes Are Cynical Electoral Gamesmanship
“On Election Day, there will be literally hundreds of polling places open in Harris County, Texas—which makes sense because more than 4.7 million people live in the county that includes Houston, America’s fourth-largest city.
But voters who requested absentee ballots will have to either put them in the mail or return them to a single location: a parking lot outside the Houston Texans’ NRG Stadium. That’s because Republican officials in Texas—like in Ohio and elsewhere—have ordered counties to have no more than one ballot dropoff location.”
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“it’s difficult to look at the available data regarding absentee balloting for the 2020 election and conclude that these Republican-backed efforts are anything other than a cynical ploy to salvage an election that could get ugly for the GOP. In states that track the party affiliation of voters who requested absentee ballots, the numbers are overwhelmingly tipped towards Democrats. But requested ballots mean nothing until they are returned—and therefore any barriers erected to reduce the number of ballots returned is likely to help Republicans.”
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“In close states, every little bit could matter.”
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” Until a court says otherwise (and perhaps even then, depending on appeals rulings) all of this is legal. But it’s also ugly, cynical, and corrosive to the legitimacy of elections.”