> central mechanism of voter suppression in the United States is lines
LOL. So when you see long voting lines in Atlanta, it’s because Fulton County (the entity responsible for polling places)—which is run by a Board that’s majority Democrat and majority Black—is engaged in “voter suppression” of Black Democrat voters?
> American polling centres also often seem to have massive queues and long waiting periods to vote, I assume due to understaffing and insufficient numbers of centres.
Yep, due to a well-documented campaign by republicans to restrict access to voting that has been ongoing since the civil rights era.
> Reducing the number of voters by eliminating a disfavored class from representation while retaining the political power of apportionment that counts the disebfranchised citizens was the whole point of the 3/5 compromise
Thanks-- I [think I] see where you're going but still don't get where this ends. You have a district with a minority of people who can't vote. Yet they are counted among the population.
This directly suppresses presidential votes, but what besides the House benefits from an inflated population of non-voters?
> you maybe want to consider the effect on a mixed-race district where, say, a sufficient minority of whites are sympathetic to black interests that together they would, before selective disenfrnachisement, constitute a majority.
The thought crossed my mind, but the only example I'm familiar with is Atlanta-- a few blue droplets on a red ocean, yet the state is currently represented by two Democratic senators, and the House is split. There's something weird about this but I'm not a political strategist enough to understand what's going on here. Is this where population matters-- density of the metro area outweighing the rest of the state?
> Race is currently one of the strongest predictors for how long people wait in line to vote even when you control for poverty [1].
Surely the most causal factor is location? The black & minority vote generally goes to Democrats; so presumably in Democrat controlled states any impediments to minority voters would be dealt with promptly.
> Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US.
This is not the argument people are making, so I hope you aren’t making it intentionally. No one is saying that requiring voting id is inherently racist.
The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities. These efforts are subsequently dubbed racist by political opponents because the people implementing them know this to be true and do it anyway, because they prefer the outcome that minorities are disenfranchised.
Republicans have been found in court to play these tricks with “surgical precision”, to make sure the rules they come up with impact minorities more than whites.
Another example is closing polling places so that it takes 8 hours to vote in black precincts whereas it takes 8 minutes to vote in white precincts. Yes, the act of closing a polling place is not an overtly racist thing to do. But the way in which it’s done and the actual impact make clear it is done with the intent of disenfranchising minorities.
>it exposes the absurdity of counting votes and claiming that it somehow represents the voice of the people.
I actually 100% disagree with this sentence. I do not, honestly, believe it exposes that. My experience with people who vote is that they harangue about the "other side" gerrymandering, but when their preferred candidate wins their district, it's because voting works.
I genuinely believe people are either (a) willfully ignorant, or (b) pants-on-head idiotic when it comes to this issue.
Also what does this have to do with Black people? Most older people in the country who supposedly would benefit from this are white—the median white person is a decade older than the median Black person.
> I’ve always thought that voting, at the national level, might benefit from non-geographic constituencies.
The US voting system is uniquely bizarre and designed for vote manipulation by electoral district boundary fiddling. National level voting should just be by popular vote, like it is pretty much everywhere else.
> We hold fair elections for the purpose of not rioting.
Given the weakening of the Voting Rights Act and the consequent actions of some Republican states to remove/prevent/inconvenience black voters (who lean strongly Democratic), I wouldn't classify the US as having "fair elections".
>you cannot show in any voting place but one assigned to you
There have been examples of this being gamed in the US. Gerrymander the county then force your political opponents into the least convenient polling place in the county.
> Ignore enough of the people you presumably represent, and that gets shown through elections.
I mean until the moment you're a minority which is something elected officials have continually had issues with, especially in the south, here in the US.
If an elected official is using a private channel as a means of 'public' information dissemination things get messy.
> No because proximity to a Post Office isn't a reasonable criteria for suppressing a persons right to vote.
In rural areas, one often has to travel a long distance to reach a post office or DMV. In urban or suburban areas, while the distance may vary, on average it is significantly less.
So, if requiring someone to go to a government office to receive ID to vote suppresses the vote of people who live far away from that office, you'd expect that to produce more voter suppression in rural areas than in urban or suburban areas. But, since rural areas tend to skew Republican and urban areas tend to skew Democratic (with suburban areas being more mixed/swinging), this would seem to suppress Republican voters much more than Democratic ones.
Does it follow therefore that Republicans would be primarily suppressing the vote of their own voters? If that's true, why are Democrats so upset about such a self-inflicted wound?
>I can't understand how anyone in the US accepts the status quo of their terrible and flawed election system.
Your next paragraph shows you understood all too well. People support things like long voting lines because it suppresses the votes of other people they don't think should be voting at all.
I'll grant that voting works only sometimes. And when it does change things, it's often not everything we want changed, and definitively not fast enough. But it can change things. If it didn't, voter suppression would not exist[1]. (One of the ways of suppressing vote is promoting voter apathy, by the way).
The only sure guarantee is that not voting doesn't work.
> peaceably
Even something as seemingly mundane as voting carries a lot of risk of physical violence in some places. That's how voting was in the US in the 1870s[2], if you were black. It might sound like a far away past for certain US citizen, but I (an European) own a house older than that.
> A lot of us here have questions about voting machines, people voting who shouldn't, etc.
I thought only Republicans keep continuing the fairy tale of non-citizens voting, which they then use to justify voter suppression of poor people and minorities; which is the actual question this election.
> But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander.
No you (practically) cannot, that's kinda the point
LOL. So when you see long voting lines in Atlanta, it’s because Fulton County (the entity responsible for polling places)—which is run by a Board that’s majority Democrat and majority Black—is engaged in “voter suppression” of Black Democrat voters?
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