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America faces greater division as parties draw safe seats for congressional districts
by Evelyn Reynolds 12 February 2022, 09:00
America faces greater division as parties draw safe seats for congressional districtsThe US is poised to have a staggeringly low number of competitive House seats, an alarming trend that makes it harder to govern and exacerbates political polarizationWhen millions of American voters head to the polls this autumn to vote for congressional candidates, the vast majority of their votes won’t matter at all. It’s an idea that’s anathema to the very idea of US government – that politicians are accountable to the people. But America is poised to have a staggeringly low number of competitive seats in the US House, an alarming trend that makes it harder to govern and exacerbates political polarization. States havenow redrawn 327 of the US House’s 435 districts so far as part of the once-a-decade redistricting process and the number of competitive districts is dropping, according to FiveThirtyEight. Just 26 of those districts are considered to be highly competitive, meaning either party has less than a five-point advantage in them.When redistricting is complete, there could be between 30 and 35 competitive seats, predicted Dave Wasserman, a redistricting expert for the non-partisan Cook Political Report. That could leave as much as 94% of the US House running in relatively safe seats.As the number of competitive seats falls, the number of super-safe seats is also rising. As of mid-January, the number of seats Donald Trump carried in 2020 by at least 15 points increased from 54 to 70, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The number of districts Biden carried by at least 15 points had increased from 20 to 23.Competition in the US House has been falling for decades. Some of the decline can be attributed to the natural geographic sorting of likeminded voters choosing to live together. In 2012, after the last round of redistricting, there were 66 districts that were competitive, Wasserman said. By 2020, 51 districts were considered competitive. But politicians are also using their power to draw district lines to exacerbate the lack of competition.“Competitive seats are the grease that make the machinery of the House function. And we’ve seen an annihilation of competitive seats in the last several decades,” Wasserman said.“Redistricting is accelerating that decline and removing many of the incentives for parties to recruit candidates with broad appeal. The House is becoming less biased in favor of Republicans, but it’s also becoming more ossified because there will be more safe seats than ever – and the battlefield will be narrower,” he added.It’s a trend that will probably profoundly affect American politics. Instead of worrying about appealing to voters during a general election, candidates are pushed to the extremes of their parties, becoming more focused on fending off primary challengers. It also discourages compromise and bipartisanship, instead incentivizing politicians to brandish their ideological bonafides.“I’m very concerned about what’s happened,” said Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University who has written about the dangers of non-competitive congressional elections. “The more members are in safe seats, the more they’re capable of acting as these kind of independent free agent politicians … it could make the House even more ungovernable.” The 116th Congress, which was in session from 2019 to 2021, was one of the least productive in US history.The lack of competition, Pildes noted, also makes the US House less responsive to changes in voters’ preferences. “You can have a three-point swing in voters’ preferences, and it’s not going to affect who’s going to be elected,” he said. No state has seen a bigger drop in competition during the redistricting cycle than Texas. Recognizing Democratic gains in the state in recent years, Republicans used their redistricting power to reconfigure district lines to shore up vulnerable seats. They reduced the number of competitive districts in the state from 12 to just one. They increased the number of solidly safe Republican seats – ones Trump would have carried by at least 15 points – from 11 to 21. They also increased the number of solidly Democratic seats from eight to 12.One of the best examples of this approach is the way that Republicans redrew the state’s 24th congressional district, which is in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The district is represented by Beth Van Duyne, a Republican, who narrowly won the general election in 2020. Republicans reconfigured the district to make it one that Trump would have easily carried by 12 points in 2020. The Democrats excised from the district were packed into a neighboring district represented by Colin Allred, a Democrat. The packing transformed the district from one that was competitive to one that was much more reliably blue. 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in US Politics
A court caught Republicans discriminating against Black voters – here’s how
by Evelyn Reynolds 4 February 2022, 12:48
A court caught Republicans discriminating against Black voters – here’s howAn Alabama case tests how much Republicans can legally dilute the power of Black votersIt has been called a textbook example of discrimination against Black voters in the US. And a ruling on it from the supreme court is expected any day.It isn’t the kind of explicit voting discrimination, like poll taxes and literacy tests, that kept voters from the polls in the south during the Jim Crow era. Instead, it is more subtle. Let us walk you through the case with our visual explainer. The case focuses on Alabama, where the Republican-controlled legislature, like states across the US, recently completed the once-a-decade process of redrawing the boundaries of congressional maps. If partisan politicians exert too much control over the redistricting process, they can effectively engineer their own victories, or blunt the advantages of the other side, by allocating voters of particular political persuasions and backgrounds to particular districts.Under the new districts, Black people make up 25% of the Alabama’s population, but comprise a majority in just one of the state’s seven districts.In late January, a panel of three federal judges issued a 225-page opinion explaining how the state was discriminating against Black voters.“Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the panel wrote. 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The US state that fought back after Republicans tried to rig its elections
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 February 2022, 09:30
The US state that fought back after Republicans tried to rig its electionsDespite a flurry of legal action and very public disputes between members, Michigan has produced some of the fairest voting maps in the US In recent months, Michigan should have been a hotbed for attempts to rig elections, like it was in 2011. That year, the Republican-led legislature distorted the voting maps so that the GOP was able to win nine of Michigan’s 14 congressional seats despite never earning more than 50.5% of the vote statewide.After Democrats’ historic defeat on voting rights, what happens next?Read moreA decade later, as the redistricting cycle has come around again, the dynamics are just as toxic. The battleground state broke for Joe Biden by fewer than 155,000 votes, and the Republican-controlled legislature has fought endlessly with the Democratic governor about election “audits”, voter IDs and absentee ballots.But this cycle, the state’s redistricting commission has pulled off something remarkable. Despite a flurry of legal action and very public disputes between members, it has produced some of the fairest maps in the US. How did it manage it – and will the maps survive?Neither party was involved in drawing new maps, a process that is open to abuse if politicians are allowed to allocate particular voters to particular districts in order to guarantee a win there. Instead, the responsibility fell to 13 Michiganders – four Democrats, four Republicans and five independents – who were randomly selected by the state.Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletterThe Michigan Independent Citizens’ Redistricting Commission (MICRC) includes a foster care worker, a retired banker, an aspiring orthopedic surgeon, a mother of six, a college student and a real estate broker.MICRC, and the approach it epitomizes, came about thanks to Katie Fahey, a Michigan resident and political novice who posted a message on Facebook two days after the 2016 presidential election. She said she wanted to take on gerrymandering and eventually recruited more than 14,000 volunteers to campaign for an amendment to the state’s constitution. It passed with 61% of the vote and created the commission, one of the most successful ways to unrig the redistricting process so far and a potential model for other states.Combatting gerrymandering is no small feat. In 35 states, partisan politicians in the legislatures are mostly or fully in charge of redistricting, and of the maps that have been released and evaluated by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project so far, the average grade is a “D”. States led by both Republicans and Democrats – including Maryland, Texas, North Carolina, Oregon, Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois – earned the lowest possible grade.While Republicans haven’t gerrymandered as much as Democrats originally feared – in fact, the number of Democratic-leaning seats could increase by a few this year – both parties have nearly eliminated their competition. Of the 287 completed congressional districts, only 42 (14.6%) are competitive, and 13 states have passed maps with zero competitive districts, according to an analysis from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project and RepresentUs.Part of MICRC’s success is that it’s almost entirely insulated from the legislature. In December of 2019, applications to MICRC were randomly sent to 250,000 citizens. The pool of respondents was then trimmed (at random) to 200, though 60 of the applicants had to self identify as Republicans, 60 as Democrats, and 80 affiliated with neither party. At this point, Democrats and Republicans in the legislature were allowed to strike up to 10 commissioners each, after which the final 13 were then chosen, again at random.The results were nearly revolutionary. During perhaps one of the most contentious political processes of the decade, MICRC was able to find cross-partisan agreement. Their final congressional map was approved by eight of the commission’s 13 members – two Republicans, two Democrats, and four independents – and will go into effect before the primaries this year.The congressional map was graded “A” by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.However, the process still has its critics.Republicans filed a lawsuit claiming that the map arbitrarily “fragments counties, townships, and municipalities” and that it allows too much population deviation between congressional districts.Meanwhile, good government groups were upset about the committee’s first closed-door meeting, and several media outlets sued to have records from the event released to the public. In late December, MICRC turned over documents showing that it was preparing for litigation about how it split Black voters across different districts, while previously they were geographically more concentrated.On 5 January, members of the Michigan house of representatives representing Detroit and others challenged the commission’s maps, arguing that they dilute the voting strength of Black voters, particularly in and around Detroit.However, proving that point in court will be difficult, expensive and time-consuming, says Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.Federal law dictates that minority voters have the opportunity to elect their candidate of choice, but it doesn’t set a specific threshold for what percentage of voters in a district need to be of that minority group.Li suggested that even if the challenge succeeds, it will probably lead to relatively minor changes around Detroit, as opposed to the commission having to start from scratch.Still, the pressure of drawing – and then having to defend – the map seems to be wearing on the commissioners. One accused the group’s chair of bullying her and introduced a motion to censure her, and members have even disagreed over whether to produce a “lessons learned” documentary about the process, with two refusing to participate at all.Since at least early December, commissioners have also voiced skepticism of their general counsel, who resigned abruptly last week.The episode underscores a potential lesson for states looking to adopt a similar style of commission: non-politicians may be better able to work across party lines but might must be prepared for the rancor, criticism and partisan lawsuits that follow.If the goal is fairer maps, though, the trade-off may be worth it.“On the whole, these maps are really good maps,” says Li, “and markedly different than what we’re seeing around the country.”TopicsMichiganThe fight to voteUS voting rightsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More
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Republicans’ redistricting maps are motivated entirely by race – not politics | Michael Harriot
by Evelyn Reynolds 31 January 2022, 15:00
Republicans’ redistricting maps are motivated entirely by race – not politicsMichael HarriotThere has been a subtle campaign to redefine racism by the intent and not the effects of discriminatory actions, even as gerrymandered maps diminish the power of Black voters Although the phrase “All politics is local” is usually attributed to Tip O’Neill Jr, a former speaker of the US House of Representatives, the aphorism probably originated in the February 1932 Associated Press column “Politics at Random”, when the Washington bureau chief, Byron Price, wrote: “All politics is local politics.” As valid as Price’s summarization of inside-the-Beltway politics may be, there is probably a more accurate way to describe the All American sport of civic power-brokering:All politics is racial.Over the last quarter-century, white voters have overwhelmingly identified with the GOP while every other racial and ethnic group – Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters – consistently identify with the Democratic party. This unwavering reality reduces the machinations of each political party to a game of demographic mathematics, especially in racially diverse parts of the country, where one truisim dominates local politics: when non-white people can’t vote, Republicans win.Perhaps the starkest example of this racial divide is Alabama, where white people make up 69% of the population and are 89% of the Republican electorate. By comparison, the state is 27% African American, 80% of whom identify as Democrat. Six of the seven Democrats in the Alabama senate are Black, as are 26 of the 27 Democratic members of the house. In 2022, Kenneth Paschal became the first Black person to represent the Republican party in the Alabama state legislature since Reconstruction. Contrary to what Price would say, politics is not local here. In Alabama, regardless of the location, “white voter” is synonymous with “Republican” and “Black” means “Democrat”.Perhaps this reality is why last Monday, a federal court threw out the state’s congressional map that disenfranchised Black voters across the state. The three-judge panel explained that the congressional redistricting plan created by Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature meant that “Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.” The previous map packed the two Blackest cities in one congressional district, splitting the rest of the state’s Black population – three of the five largest cities in the state – among three majority-white districts that have been safely Republican for years. The judges gave the white (Republican) lawmakers 14 days to draw new districts that did not violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Alabama Republicans vowed to appeal the ruling to the US supreme court, where the court’s conservative majority ruled in 2019 that disenfranchising Black voters is perfectly fine as long as the gerrymanderers’ intent was partisan and not racial. “If district lines were drawn for the purpose of separating racial groups, then they are subject to strict scrutiny because ‘race-based decisionmaking is inherently suspect,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion. “But determining that lines were drawn on the basis of partisanship does not indicate that the districting was improper. A permissible intent – securing partisan advantage – does not become constitutionally impermissible, like racial discrimination, when that permissible intent “predominates”.Herein lies the problem with politics, conservative ideology and America in general. For years, there has been a subtle campaign to redefine racism by the intent and not the effects of discriminatory actions. According to this new American translation, disenfranchising entire communities by suppressing their voting power is not necessarily racist as long as the person didn’t mean to be racist. And, because there are very few people willing to stand in front of the world and confess to their racial prejudices, anyone is allowed to discriminate as long as they don’t articulate their racism out loud. However, this cleverly constructed loophole only applies to racism. America’s jurisprudence system has found a way to convict people for unintentional murder and hold people accountable for car accidents, but somehow white people are innocent until proven racist.But in the case of the Alabama Republican-controlled legislature, there is actual proof.A few weeks after justices sitting on America’s highest court decided that there was nothing they could do about North Carolina disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Black citizens, the daughter of the man who pioneered using race to redraw political maps leaked the contents of her recently deceased father’s hard drive, revealing that North Carolina’s redistricting plan was about race all along. Known as the “Master of the Modern Gerrymander”, Thomas Hofeller had only considered race when drawing the maps for North Carolina. The proposed maps even included a plan that would have allowed the state to elect an all-white legislature.But the leaked files also revealed that Hofeller was the main architect of redistricting plans for states across the country, including Alabama. Hofeller’s files included emails and proposals from then Alabama state House redistricting commission chair Representative Jim McClendon, who included racial data, census maps broken down by race and … well, nothing else. The basis for McClendon and Hofeller’s plan for Alabama wasn’t mostly about race; it seems as if it was only about race. After serving in the Alabama house for 12 years, McClendon was elected to the state senate in 2014, where he co-chaired the senate commission whose gerrymandered maps were thrown out by the federal court. It was probably a coincidence. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it.Alabama is not an outlier in this phenomenon. Republican-controlled legislatures in Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri and Wisconsin have submitted gerrymandered maps that diminish the power of Black voters. Of course, they won’t admit that the redistricting plans are solely motivated by race because, according to the New American definition, that would make it racist. According to America’s highest legal authorities, there is nothing wrong with stealing the voices of Black people and accidentally murdering their opportunity to participate in democracy. After all, it has nothing to do with racism.It’s just politics.
Michael Harriot is a writer and author of the upcoming book Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America
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Georgia county purges Democrats from election board and cancels Sunday voting
by Evelyn Reynolds 30 January 2022, 07:00
Georgia county purges Democrats from election board and cancels Sunday votingThe takeover in Spalding county is part of Republican efforts to dominate elections mechanisms nationwide The judges met, in private, over a two-day period in May, for what might seem like a minor task: to choose the fifth member of an elections board in rural Spalding county, Georgia.But the meetings were by no means routine. There is no record of their vote or their discussions. The interviews with Democratic and Republican applicants were conducted in private, via Zoom calls. And the position was only vacant because of a new law, specific only to Spalding county, recently introduced by the area’s two Republican state lawmakers.In the end, the judges chose a Republican, someone who had never served in a government position related to elections, to be the fifth and deciding vote for the Spalding county board of elections and registration. Almost immediately, that Republican, James Newland, cast that deciding vote to cancel Sunday voting – a historically heavy turnout day for Black, largely Democratic voters.It was just the latest blow to the county’s Democrats, and another loss for a party that is losing control of election boards across the state as Republican laws make GOP takeovers possible. But what happened in Spalding county is also just a fragment of GOP efforts nationwide to take over the apparatus of American elections. Their goal? To secure party control at every level of government – from the White House to state legislatures and election offices, all the way down to the precinct level, by employing thousands of poll watchers to potentially call into question Democratic votes.Across the US, Republican legislatures have introduced more than 200 bills aimed at reducing local control over elections and restrict voting access, according to the States United Democracy Center. All of it is aimed at ensuring that Republicans will have control over voting and elections rules, in support of Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020.And the Peach State is ground zero, thanks to its increasingly central roles – as a swing state, and as the center of bogus disputes over the 2020 election results.The turn of events in Spalding county might have come as a shock to locals – a majority Democratic election board, with three Black women, becoming majority Republican, with two white men and another of Cherokee descent, virtually overnight – but Spalding county is no outlier. In at least five other Georgia counties, local election authorities have been restructured in favor of Republicans. It’s all part of the same story: the nationwide push to place GOP officials in positions of authority over elections.“The news isn’t really covering it because it’s so local,” said Zachery Fuller, a political organizer and former Democratic candidate for office in Griffin, the county seat. “But when it happens to so many counties it’s the same thing, even though it’s different laws: it’s voter suppression.”At the heart of what happened in Spalding county is that new law, which itself is an example of the tactics Republicans are pursuing across the country to ensure they control elections.Passed in March, HB 769 changed the rules for determining the tie-breaking vote for Spalding ounty’s election board. The five-person board always has two Democrats and two Republicans; previously, Democrats and Republicans would often flip a coin to determine the fifth member. But Republican state representatives David Knight and Karen Mathiak introduced a law requiring that the fifth member be chosen by a majority vote of the county’s superior court judges.Those judges – Chief Judge Fletcher Sams, Scott Ballard and Benjamin Coker – advertised the position in the local press for 30 days. All three judges are white; Sams said he identifies as an independent, while the other judges did not comment on their political affiliations. In the end, the judges chose the inexperienced Newland over at least two Black Democrats, including Vera McIntosh – who had been removed from her position on the board because HB 769 also required board members to live in Spalding county, which she did not – as well as Elbert Solomon, a longtime Democratic operative here.“All they wanted to see was the fact that I was Black – because they couldn’t tell by looking at my résumé,” Solomon said. “I went to white colleges, I was an executive at Procter & Gamble, even my last name wouldn’t tell you that I was Black. That’s all they wanted to know.”“I can’t help what people think but that’s ridiculous,” Sams said, denying that race played any role in the judges’ decision. “I was very impressed with at least one or two Democratic candidates, and they were seriously considered.”Regardless, the new law didn’t come out of nowhere. Ever since election day of 2020, Republicans in Spalding county have used alleged problems with voting to justify their efforts to replace Democratic election officials. On election day 2020, some voters had initially been prevented from casting their ballots on machines equipped with software from Dominion Voting Systems. Marcia Ridley, the county’s former Democratic elections supervisor, said it was a temporary software problem caused by Dominion, but soon the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, was calling for Ridley to step down, citing “serious management issues and poor decision-making”. Knight and Mathiak joined Raffensperger in calling for Ridley’s removal, and less than two weeks later asked the state’s attorney general to investigate her for failing to properly post information about board meetings.It didn’t end there. After the election, local Republicans were up in arms over claims of mishandled ballots. Mathiak and a former Republican elections board member, Betty Bryant – who believes the 2020 election was “robbed” from Trump – both claimed they had heard from a person who had received 12 mail-in ballots. As a crowd gathered outside the board of elections, a Republican on the county commission recorded a video of the protesters, and posted it to Facebook. Later, he posted a picture of a ballot envelope that contained no ballot, apparently in an attempt to suggest electoral fraud. As the mood darkened, concerned for their safety, Glenda Henley, a former Democratic board member, asked police to escort election workers to their cars.Next, the crowds started showing up at previously sleepy elections board meetings. “We had so many people coming, and the audience would disrupt the meeting by shouting or saying ugly things,” Henley said. One particularly loud voice was Roy McClain, a shooting range coach with a lengthy military career who had replaced a previous Republican board member. McClain had ties to Mathiak: he had fundraised for her and appeared alongside her at numerous events.McClain “was always loud, always negative”, according to Henley. “When he came in, it was just turmoil, anything to disrupt the business of elections.” (McClain did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Knight or Mathiak.) Then, in April, just days before the end of the 2021 legislative session, Mathiak and Knight escalated the situation: they introduced HB 769. The bill caught some county officials off-guard, according to emails obtained by American Oversight. Former elections board members told the Guardian they had no prior warning that the bill was coming.But Solomon said the bill’s purpose was obvious. He and others had worked in 2020 to register new county voters, most of them African American – a get-out-the-vote effort that produced results and nearly led to the election of the Democratic candidate Daa’ood Amin as mayor of Griffin.“What happened is we increased registered voters here by 900 people in less than a year,” Solomon said. “We had a mayor’s race here and a Black person almost won – and only lost by 15 votes.”Demographics in Spalding county are changing, according to Solomon and Fuller: what was solidly Republican territory is now becoming more Democratic-leaning.“They see the writing on the wall,” Solomon said. If the new law was intended to increase Republican power, it worked: Newman was swiftly installed on the elections board. In an interview, Newman said he was chosen by the judges because they believed he would be an impartial tie-breaking vote – despite the fact that he is a self-proclaimed Republican – and rejected the notion that race played a role, noting that he is of Cherokee descent.Newland claimed the judges told him that they chose him “because I was the closest they could find, out of the people who applied to the job, to a neutral party.” As for why he voted to cancel Sunday voting, Newland claimed the county couldn’t afford a seventh day of voting.Even less neutral is the man appointed by the local GOP to one of the other two Republican board positions: Ben Johnson, a former election board member who resigned as head of the county Republican party to take the job. Johnson, a fervent proponent of the false belief that the 2020 election was beset with widespread voter fraud, also runs an IT firm, Liberty Technology, that does maintenance for the county’s computer equipment.Fuller calls it a clear conflict of interest for Johnson. “If his company has direct control over the servers for Spalding county and the city of Griffin, he can see all of the data from anyone who uses these public servers,” Fuller said. “[That] could be data collection used against voters to help organize – and that is data that other members of the board wouldn’t have access to.”Asked whether there was a conflict of interest, Mike Windham, the county’s IT manager, said, “Off the top of my head, no, but the optics are a little funny.”Johnson ignored repeated requests for comment, and at an election board meeting in early January responded to the Guardian’s questions by saying, “I don’t talk to fake news.”But Johnson’s beliefs are well documented on his Facebook page. A little more than a year after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Johnson posted about the “hours upon hours of video-taped ballot harvesting in Georgia, the phantoms all over, the dirty voter rolls, the withholding of subpoenaed materials, the list goes on”.In person, Johnson is generally known as an intelligent and capable member of the board of elections, according to current and former colleagues from both parties. But his social media posts show a different side than the calm and polite face he presents to election board meetings.Specifically, Johnson has taken issue with Dominion Voting Systems, which handles election software throughout Georgia and is the frequent target of conspiracy theories about voter fraud. Only last month, Johnson attacked Dominion at a board meeting, making a false claim that a judge in a Georgia lawsuit, brought by a Republican, had ruled that its software in Georgia was “illegal”.“[R]ight now, the judicial opinion is that the equipment we’re using is illegal, which blows my mind,” Johnson said.That’s not true. The judge has not ruled on the matter; a trial is pending.Then, last month, if all this turmoil weren’t enough, board members were hit with nearly 2,000 emails demanding yet another audit into the 2020 presidential election – despite three previous reviews, conducted by the Republican Raffensperger, which all confirmed the win for Biden. While it remains unknown who prompted more than 1,900 people, all from outside Spalding county, to join the email deluge, some clues can be gleaned from the demands themselves. The emails were form letters and include references to a notorious conspiracy theorist, Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, who was involved with the controversial and unnecessary audit by the Cyber Ninjas firm in Maricopa ounty, Arizona (which again confirmed Biden won there). According to Jim O’Brien, one of the two Democratic board members in Spalding county, the campaign has all the markings of an organized effort.It was a “cyber-attack intended to intimidate and harass”, O’Brien said. “I’d like to know if any local Republican officials knew about this.”Slowly, the sense is dawning in these communities that individual cases like Spalding county’s are not one-offs but are part of a pattern emerging nationwide. Henley, too, is concerned about the way things are going, and who is behind it. After more than six years on the board, she wants to know why the new law that allowed a Republican takeover in Spalding county was passed when it did, and who might be pulling the strings even higher up than the state Republicans who made it happen.“It was a sneak attack,” she said. “I think we were targeted, but I don’t have the evidence of what they were doing. I think it was even higher up. I think it’s more convoluted and embedded.”TopicsUS voting rightsRepublicansGeorgiaRaceUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More
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Second world war veteran twice denied absentee ballot under Texas voting law
by Evelyn Reynolds 29 January 2022, 14:01
Second world war veteran twice denied absentee ballot under Texas voting lawKenneth Thompson, 95, must submit a social security or driver’s license number, which wasn’t required in the 1940s A 95-year-old second world war veteran twice denied an absentee ballot under a restrictive Texas voting law has attracted support from prominent figures including Beto O’Rourke, a voting rights campaigner and former presidential candidate now running for Texas governor.Arizona Republicans introduce election subversion billRead moreKenneth Thompson, who served in the US army in Europe, told Click2Houston, a Harris county news outlet, he had voted in every election since he was 21 and even remembered paying a 50-cent poll tax in the 1950s.“I’ve been voting many, many years and I’ve never missed a vote,” he said, adding that he considers voting a duty.But under a voting restriction bill known as SB1 and passed last August, Thompson could be unable to meet the state’s 31 January voter registration deadline for an absentee ballot.According to the new law, Thompson is required to submit a social security or driver’s license number that matches state or county records. When Thompson registered to vote decades ago, however, such requirements were not in place.“He registered to vote in the 1940s and they didn’t require that,” said Delinda Holland, Thompson’s daughter.Support for Thompson has poured in, including from O’Rourke, who tweeted out Thompson’s story and a call to fight against voting laws introduced by Republicans seeking to restrict voting among communities likely to vote Democratic.“Now we need to fight for him by taking on [Governor Greg] Abbott’s voter suppression law that is making it harder for Kenneth and millions of other Texans to participate in our democracy,” O’Rourke tweeted.As Thompson did not meet new requirements under SB1, his application for an absentee ballot was denied twice. He says he was not notified either time by county officials and had to call to confirm his status himself.“There’s gonna be a lot of people not gonna vote,” said Thompson. “If I hadn’t have called in about mine, people wouldn’t have known.”On behalf of her dad, she said, Holland tried to call authorities including the office of the Texas secretary of state, seeking to add his license number to his registration file. She discovered there wasn’t a way to do so, which meant he would have to re-register.“We know it’s a new law, we’re happy to correct [his registration],” said Holland. “He’s a law-abiding citizen. He doesn’t want to miss voting and yet there’s no mechanism to add that driver’s license to your record.”Thompson said he now checked his mailbox every day, hoping his absentee ballot had arrived. If it did not, he said, he would vote in person.“I can get out and move around and go to a regular polling place,” he said, “but … lots of people just can’t.”TopicsTexasUS voting rightsBeto O’RourkeUS politicsnewsReuse this content More
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Republicans just wiped out a Democratic district. Here’s how | The fight to vote
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 January 2022, 14:00
Republicans just wiped out a Democratic district. Here’s howThe Tennessee legislature’s splintering of Nashville is just one example of the gerrymandering taking place across the US Hello, and happy Thursday,On Tuesday afternoon, Jim Cooper, a moderate Democrat who has been in Congress for more than three decades, announced he was retiring. The timing was not a coincidence.Less than 24 hours earlier, the Tennessee legislature had approved a map with new boundaries for the state’s eight congressional districts. Since 2003, Cooper has represented a district that includes all of Nashville, and it has been reliably Democratic (Joe Biden carried it by 24 points in 2020). But the legislature’s new plan erased his district. Republicans sliced up Nashville into three different districts, attaching a sliver of Democratic voters in each to rural and deeply Republican areas. Donald Trump would have easily won all three of the new districts in 2020.Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletterCooper was blunt in his assessment of what had happened. Republicans, he said in a statement, had made it impossible for him to win re-election to Congress. Despite his best efforts, he said, he could not stop Republicans from “dismembering Nashville”.The map doesn’t just weaken the voice of Democrats, it also dilutes the influence of Black voters and other voters of color in Nashville. In Cooper’s current district, Black voters make up about a quarter of the voting-age population. They will comprise a much smaller share of the voting age population in the new districts, making it harder for them to make their voices heard.A masterclass in election-rigging: how Republicans ‘dismembered’ a Democratic strongholdRead moreAndrew Witherspoon, my colleague on our visuals team, and I put together an interactive map that shows exactly how Republicans transformed Cooper’s district. It’s one of the clearest examples of how politicians can essentially rig elections in their favor just by moving district lines. It underscores how gerrymandering is a remarkably powerful and efficient method of voter suppression – the influence of certain people’s votes matter less before a single ballot is even cast.Tennessee isn’t the only place this is happening. In Kansas, Republican lawmakers are advancing a plan that would similarly crack Kansas City, making it more difficult for the Democrat Sharice Davids, the first Native American woman elected to Congress, to get re-elected. In North Carolina, Republicans cracked the city of Greensboro in order to dismantle the state’s sixth congressional district, currently represented by a Democrat.Democrats have also shown a willingness to engage in this kind of distortion where they have control of the redistricting process, in places such as Illinois, Maryland and probably New York. Democrats will have complete control over drawing 75 congressional districts, compared with 187 for Republicans.The day before he announced his retirement, I spoke with Cooper about why he thought this was happening and what he thought the consequences would be for Nashville voters. What’s happening now is just “raw politics”, Cooper said.“In two previous redistricting cycles, none of the politicians in the state knew that I existed as a candidate. That made it easier – they weren’t trying to get Jim Cooper. And then in cycles where they did know I existed, it was either too difficult to rearrange the counties, or they were gentler,” he told me. Politico reported recently that after Republicans weren’t as aggressive as they could have been in states such as Texas and Georgia, there is some pressure to be even more aggressive in places like Tennessee.The Nashville constituents who are being sliced up into each of the three districts are likely to have much less importance to their new, Republican representatives, Cooper said. Any input they have, “at most, it will be tokenism”.“This is not a majority-minority community, but it will limit the ability for them to be heard. Because they’ll become essentially a rounding error in much larger districts that are dominated by the surrounding towns,” he said. “The center of gravity will shift.”Also worth watching …
A federal court told Alabama to redraw its congressional districts after finding Republican lawmakers had discriminated against Black voters. Alabama is appealing the ruling.
Arizona Republicans are proposing a suite of new voting restrictions after a widely criticized review of the 2020 election results.
Texas continues to face significant problems after implementing sweeping new voting restrictions ahead of its 1 March primary.
Ohio Republicans are redrawing state legislative and congressional maps after the state supreme court struck down earlier efforts as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. There are still concerns the new state legislative maps are severely gerrymandered.
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Here’s how Republicans ‘dismembered’ a Democratic stronghold
by Evelyn Reynolds 26 January 2022, 06:00
Here’s how Republicans ‘dismembered’ a Democratic strongholdScroll through our visual guide to see why proposed Tennessee maps amount to a masterclass in gerrymanderingRepublican lawmakers in Tennessee gave final approval on Monday to an aggressive plan to split Nashville, a Democratic bastion, in a deeply Republican state, into several congressional districts as part of an effort to tilt the state’s congressional map in their favor. The plan is now waiting for approval from Governor Bill Lee, who is likely to sign it. Nashville currently sits in the state’s fifth congressional district, represented by Jim Cooper, a Democrat who has held the seat for nearly 20 years. It’s a solid Democratic district – Joe Biden carried it by nearly 24 points in 2020 – but on Tuesday, Cooper announced he was retiring from Congress.“Despite my strength at the polls, I could not stop the general assembly from dismembering Nashville. No one tried harder to keep our city whole,” he said in a statement. “I explored every possible way, including lawsuits, to stop the gerrymandering and to win one of the three new congressional districts that now divide Nashville. There’s no way, at least for me in this election cycle, but there may be a path for other worthy candidates.”The new districts crack the concentration of Democratic voters in Nashville and cram them into three districts that stretch across the state and are filled with reliable Republican voters. Donald Trump would have easily carried all three of the proposed districts in 2020. 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