Cheating, gerrymandering and other threats

I penned an important article on gerrymandering, offering new insights, and I'm waiting to hear from various journals and zines.  Alas, in this hyper-political era, editors choose according to their polemical tastes and pals... so you can expect it will likely be posted here, soon.  Meanwhile...

Ed Burmila, in Rolling Stone, makes a cogent point that we should pay less attention to Donald Trump and more to what the confederacy is doing to our fellow citizens, down at the state level, where the GOP’s lock on more than 30 out of fifty statehouses and 65 out of 98 state legislature chambers, has set then to work doing no less than re-establishing feudalism:

“Donald Trump's presidency has been a disaster, but he has succeeded beyond his wildest expectations in one key way: getting attention – attention that fills the void where the rest of us have a soul…. (But fighting back) begins with winning back the state legislatures that draw electoral maps and make the rules that shape elections.”

In other words, this is no time for timid appetites. The Bernie Bros etc. want us to concentrate on shifting 25 swing Congressional seats, but that number should be 125, even 225! Moreover, even that will be a hollow victory without a thousand State Assembly wins.  This coalesces three themes that I’ve pushed for some time.

1: Don’t impeach! Not yet. Our civil servants are now fully alerted to the insanity and they should be able to protect us, for the time being. For now, Trump is the Republicans’ nightmare. Impeach, and the  confederates will just rally behind a President Pence and march with savage discipline. Leaks will end, as those manics plot - sincerely - to bring on the end of the world.

Last week I offered up insight into the 25th Amendment, and how it might offer even worried Republicans a way to safeguard the Republic, without even removing an unstable president from office.

2: Gerrymandering and other electoral cheats are central. They have metastacized till even Samuel Alito and John Roberts cannot ignore them, anymore. (Or else they are simply not Americans.) But we need clever and strong backup plans. More on that, soon.

3: Retaking many of those states will not be done by running Santa Monica liberals in deep red districts.  Go ahead and run liberals and Bernites etc in swing constituencies. But in districts that are deeply conservative by personality, we need candidates who are pro-science, pro-rights, honest, logically fact-loving and un-bigoted… but who can also relate to locals… by personality.  Elsewhere, in a 3-part series, I talk about the richest possible source of such candidates.  Men and women of rectitude who can compel even the reddest voter to actually listen to a democrat, possibly for the first time in his or her life.

(That is what retired Marine Colonel Doug Applegate achieved, in my own district. Republicans who had never listened to a democrat gave him their ear, and he came within 1,150 votes of toppling the infamous Darrell Issa.)

But how should you allocate your political time and energy?  Yes, national issues matter!  Give money to the fight against gerrymandering, and Arnold Schwarznegger will match your contribution!

But Burmila adds:

“The payoff of being politically active simply is greater in down-ballot races. House and Senate races are of course important, but the marginal benefit of adding one more volunteer to those campaigns is small compared to what an activist can contribute to a local race. Throwing your donation and evening volunteering hours into the miasma of money and noise that is a modern congressional race is like spitting into the ocean. In a local race, the time and money you can donate will be much more impactful. Knocking on doors and speaking to a few hundred voters on behalf of an unknown candidate in a state assembly primary could make a real difference.” 

Give the rest of it a read. Then give some thought about that retired officer you know, who happens to live in a red district.  It’s arm twisting time. 

== Vote cheating ==

The new "election fraud commission" has demanded information - including social security numbers - of every voter in America, without even setting up a secure and vetted site and infrastructure to receive and secure the information. And that sets aside the Orwellian aspects of the plan.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said about his own commission’s request for voter roll data from every state: “Frankly, if a state like Kentucky or California won’t provide available information, one has to ask the question, ‘Why not? I mean, what are they trying to hide if they don’t want a presidential advisory commission to study their state voter rolls?”

What are -- *choke * – they trying to hide?  How loud would you have screeched if Barack Obama had asked for that information, sir?

To be clear, my resistance is not purist or reflexive. I would happily allow a major beefing up in voter ID if it were part of a negotiated deal that included:

(1) massive compliance assistance to help poor people, divorced women, the elderly etc to actually get proper ID. (Without providing assistance to comply with a new burden, every single person shouting about Voter ID is a pure hypocrite. A. Pure. Hypocrite.)

(2) a national agency to vet and inspect every voting machine, ensuring that it is both secure and paper-trail hand-auditable

(3) weekend voting! 

(4) registration in parallel with drivers licenses. And finally

(4) an end to gerrymandering.

Democrats should say: “Fine. You give in on those five honorable and reasonable things and we’ll consent to a massive, five year program to ensure all votes and voters have proper ID!

Refuse those reasonable things and all you prove yourselves to be is hypocrites.  Well... that and outright cheaters.

== Those voting machines ==

Mark Anderson concisely describes the scandalous situation: “Prior to Obama's first election, multiple testimonies from various qualified experts proved that changing voting totals in U.S. states was easy enough for a smart middle-school hacker to accomplish. In one demonstration, a champion of the fallibility of the Washington State system showed, on live TV, how local results of election returns were collected and stored on unprotected PCs using flat text files. In a matter of a couple of minutes, she was able to use Microsoft Word to pick up the file, reverse the results, and repost it.

“In the same year, a security expert testified before Congress that the Diebold machines used in many states were completely hackable. He provided proof, and demonstrated the techniques for taking close elections (typical 49% vs. 51% elections) and just switching the numbers.

“Since all of this was ground truth over eight years ago, it beggars the imagination to understand how senators today (???) can try so hard to assure the American public that, yes, Russia has just hacked into 39 states' election systems, but, NO, no, no, they didn't change any votes.”

An article on NPR asks: “What would it cost to protect the nation's voting systems from attack? About $400 million would go a long way, say cybersecurity experts. It's not a lot of money when it comes to national defense — the Pentagon spent more than that last year on military bands alone — but getting funds for election systems is always a struggle.”

At a Senate intelligence committee hearing last week about Russian hacking during last year's election, Jeanette Manfra , the acting deputy under secretary for cybersecurity at the Department Homeland Security recommended that election officials have a paper-based audit process to identify anomalies after an election.  While that's the advice most cybersecurity experts give, right now more than a dozen states use electronic voting machines that have no paper backup. 

 == End the travesty! ==

High on the list of Republican nightmares is the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court might issue its long-overdue ruling against gerrymandering — a blatant cheat and crime against the people and constitution of the United States.  The court weaseled out, back in 2004, by throwing up its hands and proclaiming, “we don’t see a clean solution, so we won’t even try.” But there are signs that, in this new case, Justice Kennedy at least is reconsidering.


One difference, this time, is that mathematicians and statisticians have given the anti-gerrymandering forces a new, legal argument based not on maps but upon each voter’s proportionate likelihood of ever having a vote that matters.  




A second difference is that the maps have gotten so much worse and so spectacularly egregious that it should “shock the conscience” of even John Roberts and Samuel Alito. (To be clear, it is time for those two gentlemen to decide, at last, whether they are with the people and the great American Experiment, or rationalizing enablers of a feudal-oligarchic putsch.)
 One potential solution, offered on Slate by Jordan Ellenberg, would certainly help: increase the number of state legislators in each state.  Doubling the number makes gerrymandering much, much harder. There are drawbacks, of course, since this adds expense to state government, though miserly New Hampshire does fine with a House of Representatives with 400 members, each one representing just more than 3,000 people.

“Enlarging state legislatures obviously wouldn’t do anything to solve the problem of gerrymandering U.S. congressional seats (though lots of people think the House of Representatives, too, should be a lot larger).”




Also: “In some states, Wisconsin among them, increasing the size of the legislature would require amending the state constitution.”

And none of this changes what I wrote several years ago, about gerrymandering here.

While democratic politicians are very very different from republican ones, the DP pols used to buy into the criminal voter-rape of gerrymandering… till voters in many blue states rebelled! California, Oregon, Washington and others — blue voters slapped their preferred politicians across the face and said “stop it!” And the Goppers cheered, knowing with certainty that they’d gain advantages… but it didn’t happen!  Democrats did BETTER after the cheat was removed!

But the sheeplike confederate masses have never lifted their heads to rebel against this travesty. Nor will they.  

Lest I get repetitious... it’s down at the state level where all the political power lies… and where the confeds are most vulnerable. Examples: Two members of the Oklahoma legislature were forced to end their time in office prematurely. State Rep. Dan Kirby (R) had a nasty habit of making unwanted sexual advances toward female members of his staff, while State Sen. Ralph Shortey (R) allegedly had an even nastier habit of paying for sex...with children. So, they're both out.

Recently, Sooner State voters went to the polls to choose replacements and, in a surprise, both seats went to Democrats.

Elsewhere I have urged “Don’t Impeach! At least not yet.”  Those reasons still stand, and this article agrees… with a disturbing cavil that reminds us: “There are dozens of terrible things Trump could do on his way out of the door: He could pardon accomplices or ignore court orders. He could incite violence or start a foreign war. So, by all means, let us rejoice that Trump is weaker today than he has been at any previous point in his presidency. But let us also remember that the immense danger he poses to the American republic has not passed as long as he occupies the White House.”