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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
The problem is that we don't have evidence that these Russian operations had any substantive weight. We know they did happen but not that their scale was important. And yet people immediately jumped
to "Russian trolls", and not for the first time either. So it looks like - similar to Hillary's emails - the Russians-Sanders thing is getting undue attention.
I also belatedly noticed that the Gallup poll wasn't counting "African Americans" but "nonwhites" so I'll need to look for that metric.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanNo, that's not quite close enough. It's far from clear that the "Russian operation" did even reach 1%
of all similar traffic, to say nothing that many voters are not online.
In these terms, the private server was probably the deciding factor. Russian trolls probably weren't as the few numbers about their proportional impact we see are smaller than the vote margin.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanState-level elections often end up different than the national ones. 3 of the last 6 governors of Illinois were Republican. 5 if you take Pat Quinn out since he took over for Blagojevich after he was removed.
Edited by Cris_Meyers on Feb 23rd 2019 at 10:20:19 AM
A couple of stories I found on https://currentstatus.io/
Judge tosses North Carolina mandatory voter ID amendment citing gerrymandering – A judge in North Carolina on Friday tossed out the state's constitutional amendment requiring a voter ID, citing prevalent gerrymandering in the state's General Assembly.
Health Care and Insurance Industries Mobilize to Kill ‘Medicare for All’ – Doctors, hospitals, drug companies and insurers have a simple message: The Affordable Care Act works reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed or replaced with a big new public program.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/us/politics/medicare-for-all-lobbyists.html
Edited by sgamer82 on Feb 23rd 2019 at 1:50:10 PM
The problem with making Gerrymandering illegal, I imagine, is that it's hard to define specifically what it is in a truly objective sense. I'd suggest instead rewriting the rules of how the district lines and such are drawn, in a way that makes it hard to Gerrymander, or to give the duty over to people with no incentive to do so or something like that.
Leviticus 19:34That’s not how gerrymandering law works at all.
And it’s often pretty obvious- packing (cramming all of a racial, ethnic, or political population into one district so their influence is limited) and cracking (splitting all of a racial, ethnic, or political population into several districts so their votes are overwhelmed) are both pretty easy to identify when you put the electoral map over the demographic maps.
And if a state population is 60A/40B between two parties A and B, yet the representatives are 80A/20B, or even 60B/40A... it’s also pretty obvious what’s going on.
Edited by wisewillow on Feb 23rd 2019 at 4:10:50 AM
The best solution is to remove the entire process from political hands (which a few states, and most liberal democracies, already do) and give it to an independent body that works based on census data, etc.
Not perfect (everyone is biased) but with enough safeguards the system does work, and its a lot better than letting politicians choose their voters.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Isn't the best solution to change the system so gerrymandering itself becomes impossible? The concept of a single person representing an arbitrary region is becoming more and more outdated with time. Far gone are the times where you could expect a person's interest to significantly overlap with their neighbors. As long as region elected a single representative, there will awakens be local minorities being ignored.
It is not like you need to eliminate local representation altogether either. Mixed systems exist, as do the possibility of a single electoral range electing multiple representatives. There are many options that would eliminate or severely undermine garrymandering.
3 dead after a Boeing 767 cargo jet crashes in Trinity Bay east of Houston.

I mean, he wouldn't win New Jersey anyway, so I don't know if he'd care.
Oh God! Natural light!