#rigged voting

Confessions of an ageing tennis player: Gutted. Roasted. Fuming.

You would have thought that after my surprise wild card entry to Wimbledon this year, my subsequent tussle for recognition with the guys in the locker room, my ‘back-to-the-wall’ heroic endeavours against the forces of bureaucratic inertia, my radical stance against Hawkeye, BBGs and the state of the grass and ultimately the fact that I beat Novak Djokovic to become the first Englishman to win…

For the sixth time in the last seven presidential elections, Democrats won a plurality of the presidential popular vote on November 8 (Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump continues to grow as those last West Coast ballots are counted; it’s currently at over 1.6 million votes, or 1.3 percent of the total).

Yet Democrats are in a decisively minority position when it comes to wielding power in the United States. They lost the presidency via the Electoral College. They are a minority in the Senate and facing a terrible Senate landscape in 2018. They are a minority in the House with little hope of retaking it before the next cycle of reapportionment and redistricting after the 2020 census. And at the state level, their weakness is even more evident. Only 16 of the 50 governors are Democrats (and that assumes Roy Cooper will eventually be named the winner in North Carolina). Republicans control 68 state legislative chambers as opposed to 30 controlled by Democrats. Republicans hold “trifectas” (control of the governorship and both legislative chambers) in 25 states as compared to 6 for Democrats.

Putting it all together, according to an index of partisan electoral strength put together by Real Clear Politics’ Sean Trende and David Byler, Democrats are in the worst shape they have been vis–à–vis Republicans since  1928.

The disconnect between the Democratic plurality (and near-majority) in the presidential popular vote and a weak performance that seems to get weaker the further down-ballot you go, is not, it is important to understand, the function of ticket-splitting. Best we can tell, ticket-splitting continued its steady decline this year, as is best shown by the fact that there was absolutely no difference between the states carried by the two parties’ presidential and Senate candidates (the first time that has ever happened).

So the overall partisan imbalance between the party that keeps winning the presidential popular vote and the party that keeps winning everything else is entirely the product of a system that systematically violates the supposedly sacrosanct principle of voter equality. As right-wing talk-radio types love to insist, the United States is a republic, not a democracy. And that has created an abiding problem for the Democratic Party.

Voter inequality is most obvious and deliberate in the constitutional setup (which cannot be changed by amendment) of the U.S. Senate, which gives California’s 38.8 million people and Wyoming’s 563,000 the same representation in the upper chamber. As one recent study estimated, states representing 17 percent of the U.S. population could in theory control the Senate. The superior power of small states via the Senate is enhanced by the Senate’s exclusive power over nominations and treaties, and by the custom of allowing 41 senators to veto regular legislation via the filibuster (which could soon be abolished, however).

The Senate’s small-state bias is projected into presidential elections, of course, by the Electoral College, which then typically compounds it by making smaller “battleground states” like New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada disproportionately important.

The House is allegedly the “people’s chamber,” and the body designed by the Founders to most directly represent popular sentiment, within the bounds set by the Senate, the courts, and the Constitution itself. But the role of the states in drawing House district lines — with no constitutional limits on political gerrymandering — has significantly eroded its function as the democratic wing of the federal government. To the extent state governments tilt Republican — as they have in recent years — that bias is also injected into the House formula. And that is one reason why in this latest election it may have required something like a Democratic super-majority — or a 10-point margin in the national House popular vote — to flip the lower chamber.

Another reason for the Republican advantage in the House is that Democrats are increasingly concentrated in urban areas that reduce their efficiency as a voting bloc. Many Democratic votes are “wasted” in jurisdictions they already control. Again, that adds to voter inequality.

Since the number of state governments controlled by each party is widely viewed as a signifier of power, the persistent pattern of Republicans winning 30 states and Democrats 20 in presidential elections has turned into a big GOP advantage in state capitals. In addition to the other factors boosting GOP power in the states, 36 states hold gubernatorial elections in midterms when Republican-leaning demographic groups are significantly more likely to vote. State governments are important in their own right as policy-making bodies, and aside from their projected power into the federal system via redistricting, they also supervise elections and (especially with a Supreme Court, a presidency, and a Congress indifferent to if not hostile toward minority voting rights) participation in elections.

So for all of these interlocking reasons, the half-or-so of the American citizenry that is prone to support the Democratic Party and its more-or-less progressive agenda and ideology is and may continue to be underrepresented at the federal level to the point of powerlessness, and confined at the state and even local levels to enclaves that contain an awful lot of people but exert limited clout.  And all this is totally aside from the extrinsic factors that place a thumb on the scale for Republicans, such as their support from business and financial interests and our currently uncontrolled system of campaign financing.

What can Democrats do about this situation?

Well, there are really just two options. The first is to pursue reforms that make our system more democratic. Absent the power to remake the Constitution, the three most promising avenues for democracy promotion are the neutralization of the Electoral College via the National Popular Vote Initiative (an interstate compact wherein states controlling a majority of the Electoral College agree to name electors representing the popular-vote winner), redistricting reform to restrict or eliminate partisan gerrymandering (a tricky business but still possible), and grassroots and legal pressure to protect voting rights.

In 1920, for the first time, the Census Bureau counted more people living in urbanized America than in the countryside. This hasn’t been a rural nation ever since.

Yet the idea of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian America has receded slowly despite demographic change. We still romanticize the family farm, though few of them exist anymore. We view even suburbia in pastoral terms — the “crabgrass frontier,” as the historian Kenneth T. Jackson put it. And, as the recent Electoral College results make clear, we still live with political institutions that have baked in a distinctly pro-rural bias, by design.

The Democratic candidate for president has now won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections. But in part because the system empowers rural states, for the second time in that span, the candidate who garnered the most votes will not be president.

Rural America, even as it laments its economic weakness, retains vastly disproportionate electoral strength. Rural voters were able to nudge Donald J. Trump to power despite Hillary Clinton’s large margins in cities like New York. In a House of Representatives that structurally disadvantages Democrats because of their tight urban clustering, rural voters helped Republicans hold their cushion. In the Senate, the least populous states are now more overrepresented than ever before. And the growing unity of rural Americans as a voting bloc has converted the rural bias in national politics into a potent Republican advantage.

“If you’re talking about a political system that skews rural, that’s not as important if there isn’t a major cleavage between rural and urban voting behavior,” said Frances Lee, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. “But urban and rural voting behavior is so starkly different now so that this has major political consequences for who has power.

The Electoral College is just one example of how an increasingly urban country has inherited the political structures of a rural past. Today, states containing just 17 percent of the American population, a historic low, can theoretically elect a Senate majority, Dr. Lee said. The bias also shapes the House of Representatives.

It exists, as a result, in the formulas that determine where highway funds are spent or who gets Homeland Security dollars. It exists in state capitols, where bills preferred by urban delegations have been much more likely to be rejected.

Today, the influence of rural voters also evokes deeply rooted ideals about who should have power in America. Jefferson and James Madison argued that the strength of the nation would always derive from its agrarian soil.

“They had this vision of what they called the ‘yeoman farmer’: this independent, free-standing person who owed nothing to anybody, who didn’t receive any payments from the government, who didn’t live by a wage, but who could support himself and his family on a farm growing everything they needed — and that these were the people who were going to be the backbone of democracy,” said Gerald Gamm, a political scientist at the University of Rochester, describing what could be the forefathers of the rural voters who tilted this year’s election.

When the framers of the Constitution were still debating the shape of institutions we have today, 95 percent of America was rural, as the 1790 census classified the population. The Connecticut Compromise at the time created the Senate: one chamber granting equal voice to every state to counterbalance the House, where more populous states spoke louder.

And they made sure the compromise stuck. Today, equal state representation in the Senate is the only provision in the Constitution that cannot be amended. But even as a deliberately undemocratic body, the Senate has slipped further out of alignment with the American population over time.

The Senate hasn’t simply favored sparsely populated states; politicians in Washington created sparsely populated states to leverage the Senate’s skewed power.

“When we talk about small-state bias, all of that was an intentional policy choice,” said Jowei Chen, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. Republicans in Congress passed the 1862 Homestead Act, offering free land to settlers who would move to territories that would eventually become states — creating more Senate seats and Electoral College votes for a Republican Party eager to keep government control away from Southern Democrats. They even managed to divide the Dakota Territory into two states, worth twice the political power.

As the Plains later depopulated and American cities, then suburbs, swelled, the Senate became even more unrepresentative.

Jeffersonian suspicion of big cities also appears in the sites of state capitals: Albany and not New York; Jefferson City and not St. Louis; Springfield and not Chicago. Political scientists at the University of California, Davis, have found that most state capitals were located near what was then the population centroid of each state — typically closer to the geographical center of the state, and not the place where the most people already lived, breaking with how much of the world sited its capitals.

The state legislatures there also grew significantly less representative as America urbanized. In 1961, when lawyers in Tennessee brought what would be a seminal case before the Supreme Court challenging the practice, the state legislature had not reapportioned its districts to reflect population change in 60 years. Maryland was still using districts drawn in 1867.

Even states that had constitutions requiring equal population districts were ignoring them. Florida, Georgia and New Mexico gave small counties 100 times the voting power of the most populous ones. In California, Amador County (population 14,294) had the same representation in the state’s Senate as Los Angeles County (population 6,038,771).

“They justified it because that was a cultural norm; it was just the way things were,” said Stephen Ansolabehere, a Harvard professor of government. Rural legislators had no incentive to change a system that favored them. “They just let it keep getting worse. You’re in power. Why change?”

By the mid-20th century, no state approximated majority rule. America at the time, Dr. Ansolabehere and James M. Snyder Jr. wrote in their book “The End of Inequality,” had some of the most unequal representation in the world. A series of Supreme Court cases beginning with that Tennessee complaint upended this system and established the standard that equal representation means “one person, one vote.” Not one town, one vote. Or one county, one senator. Only the United States Senate, protected by the Constitution, remained unchanged.

Still, the House retains a rural bias. Republican voters are more efficiently distributed across the country than Democrats, who are concentrated in cities. That means that even when Democrats win 50 percent of voters nationwide, they invariably hold fewer than 50 percent of House seats, regardless of partisan gerrymandering.

The Electoral College then allocates votes according to a state’s congressional delegation: Wyoming (with one House representative and two senators) gets three votes; California (53 representatives and two senators) gets 55. Those two senators effectively give Wyoming three times more power in the Electoral College than its population would suggest. Apply the same math to California and it would have 159 Electoral College votes. And the entire state of Wyoming already has fewer residents than the average California congressional district.

In Washington, these imbalances directly influence who gets what, through small-state minimums (no state can receive below a certain share of education funding) and through formulas that privilege rural states (early road spending was doled out in part by land area and not road use).

There are policy reasons that the country might want to disproportionately spend resources on places with few people. Repairing an interstate highway in rural Oklahoma keeps national commerce flowing. And when the private market won’t build essential infrastructure, public investments like the New Deal’s rural electrification help fight poverty.

But even when you control for policy need, Dr. Lee’s research has found that a significant rural bias in resources persists. You can see it in Homeland Security funding that gave Wyoming, for example, seven times as much money per capita as New York after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. You can see it in Alaska’s proposed “bridge to nowhere.”

“In that case,” Dr. Ansolabehere said, “Alaska has so much disproportionate power in the negotiation over funds that in order for California to get some, Alaska gets a lot — to the point of not knowing what to spend the money on.”

These calculations also mean that populous states subsidize less populous ones, which receive more resources than the tax dollars they send to Washington.

The challenge for rural voters now is that their electoral strength, and even these funding formulas, have not translated into policies that have fixed the deep economic problems they face, from high unemployment to declining wages. And it’s unclear how Mr. Trump will do that for them, either — even if his major infrastructure proposal comes to pass and helps rebuild their roads. [His infrastructure plans are big giveaways to builders to build new things, not repair the ones we have which is what we need. It’s useless waste of money.]

News – Evidence Project Veritas Videos

BUSTED! Smoking Gun Evidence Project Veritas Videos Are NOT FAKE SuckMyGlobes NASA

Military Pastor Tells Off James Comey! “You Blew It!” Hillary Clinton is Guilty! World News Daily

BREAKING: RIGGED ELECTION PROOF!! RichieFromBoston

Cops raid democrat ran office for voter fraud We Are All Inventions

N.H. BUSTED democrat election fraud We Are All Inventions

Caught In…

Obama Admitted in 2008 Those in Power Tend to Rig Elections

OBAMA SAID IT: In September, 2008 at a Kent, Ohio rally, Obama was asked, what he could do to reassure voters that the election will not be rigged or stolen, his response was: It helps that here in Ohio, we have Democrats in charge of the machines. It’s not just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past, sometimes Democrats have too. Whenever people are in power, they have…