Midterms 2018 (livetopic & uitslagen)

Eur Eens al is voor mij wel de vraag of de wave hoog genoeg is om gerrymandering en selfsorting te overkomen voor een meerderheid in het Huis. Dat is waar ik wat voor vrees... Dat ze wel +7 ofzo halen en geen meerderheid.

Hm, inzoomend op Ipsos, waar het dagelijks te zien is, is dit het beeld per dag:

De knik is daar vanaf 27 september ingezet, wat ik toch niet zo duidelijk zie bij de andere polls?! Sterker, 538 ging juist vanaf 27 september een paar dagen naar beneden voor de democraten.

Schaamteloos weer:

Republicans may be about to steal an election in Georgia (Washington Post)

It isn’t often you get to watch an election being stolen in real time, but that might be what is happening right now in Georgia.

When it comes to the nationwide, comprehensive, carefully planned Republican effort to suppress the votes of people who are likely to vote Democratic, particularly racial minorities, there is a menu of techniques Republicans employ — voter ID laws, voter purges, limiting early voting, closing polling places in heavily minority neighborhoods, and racial and partisan gerrymandering.

But what Brian Kemp is doing right now is truly unique.

Kemp, the Republican nominee for governor, is locked in an extremely tight race with Democrat Stacey Abrams. He also happens to be the secretary of state, the official in charge of all elections in Georgia. You might expect him to step down or recuse himself from overseeing his own election in the interest of fairness and public confidence that the fix is not in, but that’s not how Republicans do things. Kemp isn’t just overseeing the process, he’s apparently also doing everything he can to keep as many Democrats as possible from the polls in November.

Ben Nadler reports:

Two main policies overseen by Kemp have drawn criticism and legal challenges: Georgia’s “exact match” registration verification process and the mass cancellation of inactive voter registrations.

According to records obtained from Kemp’s office through a public records request, [Marsha] Appling-Nunez’s application —like many of the 53,000 registrations on hold with Kemp’s office — was flagged because it ran afoul of the state’s “exact match” verification process.

Under the policy, information on voter applications must precisely match information on file with the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. Election officials can place non-matching applications on hold.

An application could be held because of an entry error or a dropped hyphen in a last name, for example.

Appling-Nunez says she never saw any notice from Kemp’s office indicating a problem with her application.

An analysis of the records obtained by The Associated Press reveals racial disparity in the process. Georgia’s population is approximately 32 percent black, according to the U.S. Census, but the list of voter registrations on hold with Kemp’s office is nearly 70 percent black.

Who could have predicted such a thing would happen!

We know who: the Republicans in the state legislature who passed the law and the Republican who’s implementing it. In fact, they passed their “exact match” law in 2017 after Kemp settled a lawsuit charging that a previous version of “exact match” was racially discriminatory. Kemp agreed to stop using it, but then the Republican-led legislature stepped in and wrote a new version of it into law so that the suppression could continue.

There’s one more interesting twist to this story. How does Kemp justify his racially discriminatory policy? He says the fact that so many black voters are getting their registrations put on hold is the fault of the New Georgia Project, which seeks to register voters and was founded five years ago by none other than Stacey Abrams. The New Georgia Project, Kemp’s office claims, “did not adequately train canvassers to ensure legible, complete forms.” And sure, black people are getting their registrations held up at much higher rates, but that’s just because of “the higher usage of one method of registration among one particular demographic group.”

Kemp also says that this whole thing is being stirred up by “outside agitators,” which just happens to be the same name segregationists called those campaigning for civil rights during the Jim Crow era. You can be sure that no one in Georgia misunderstands the reference.

We have to keep saying this: Suppressing the votes of Democrats is the whole point of these laws and procedures. Republicans claim to worry about “voter fraud,” and journalists dutifully repeat those claims because when one party says something over and over, you’re supposed to treat it as though it is serious. But everyone knows it’s nonsense. Voter fraud is almost nonexistent, and Republicans aren’t motivated by some deeply held abstract principle about the integrity of elections that they apply whether it helps them or not. It’s just a lie.

It’s also an example of how Republicans, who complain all the time about the stifling hand of big government, use their power to weaponize bureaucracy against people they don’t like. They impose “work requirements” on programs such as Medicaid, forcing recipients to navigate a bureaucratic maze in order to maintain their benefits — and if you make a mistake on a form, you can lose your health insurance. Did someone input an “i” in your name when it’s actually an “l”? Sorry, we’re suspending your registration. Haven’t voted in a couple of elections? We’re purging you from the rolls.

The final and perhaps cruelest piece of this puzzle is that Republicans have closed off the legal avenues for voters to challenge these discriminatory policies. In 2013, the Republican majority on the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, in a case involving Shelby County, Ga. In a bit of head-spinning illogic, Chief Justice G. Roberts Jr. wrote that “largely because of the Voting Rights Act,” racial discrimination in voting had been greatly reduced, and therefore it was time to gut the Voting Rights Act. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in her dissent, destroying the Voting Rights Act because it had succeeded in limiting discrimination was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Because of the Shelby County v. Holder decision, legal challenges to Kemp’s actions are unlikely to succeed.

So we may wind up in Georgia with the same situation we’ve seen over and over again. Republicans gain power, then enact a series of policies and laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Democrats undertake a herculean effort to register and turn out voters, but when subsequent elections are extremely close, it turns out that the Republican vote suppression efforts were enough to make the difference.

That could well happen in Georgia, where we could see the race decided by a few thousand votes and tens of thousands of legitimate voters kept from the polls. Abrams has based her strategy on registering and turning out as many Democratic voters as possible, including those who haven’t participated before. Kemp’s strategy involves being the most troglodytic Trumpite he can be — and using the powers of his office to put just enough of a thumb on the scale to ensure his victory.

If Kemp wins, Republicans around the country will celebrate it as further proof of the efficacy of their vote suppression strategy. And knowing that the Supreme Court is likely to endorse whatever new suppression tactics they come up with, they’ll move even more aggressively to restrict access to the ballot.

Helsinki Ik heb het niet over same-day registration. Na enig graafwerk in mijn geheugen ben ik op de term gekomen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_ballot waar o.a. te lezen is:

Some of the most common reasons to cast a provisional ballot include:

• The voter's name does not appear on the electoral roll for the given precinct (polling place), because the voter is not registered to vote or is registered to vote elsewhere
• The voter's eligibility cannot be established or has been challenged

Dus ... misschien?

Ossu Waarom maakt dat uit dan? Buiten dat schrijf ik mijn voornaam in talloze officiële formulieren kort ipv voluit... gewoon omdat ik er niet over denk, niet omdat ik het niet kan. Gemiddeld zal het trouwens vast wel kloppen natuurlijk, dat iemand die zijn eigen naam niet goed spelt, minder goed geïnformeerd is.

Ossu Het komt op mij niet erg sterk over als de Democraten impliciet stellen dat ze alleen kunnen winnen met de stemmen van mensen die niet eens in staat zijn hun naam foutloos van een officieel document
over te pennen.

Dat is niet wat er gesteld wordt. Er wordt gesteld dat onterecht opzettelijk statistisch zwarten vaker getarget worden met deze maatregel. Het is trouwens ook een functie van moeilijkheid van namen en zwarten hebben volgens mij gemiddeld vaker ongebruikelijke namen. Wat je hieronder voor conclusie trekt lijkt me om oa die reden wat kort door de bocht.

Mocht het hierdoor zijn dat hij wint in deze race, dan zou het een extra schande zijn. Nergens wordt impliciet gesteld dat de democraten niet anderszins zouden kunnen winnen imho. Wel dat de kans kleiner wordt.

En het komt op mij ook niet erg sterk over dat, wanneer blijkt dat zwarten ruim 4x zo veel problemen hebben om hun persoonsgegevens correct in te vullen dan de rest van de bevolking, er vooral heisa wordt gemaakt over de verplichting om het correct in te vullen, en niet over het gegeven dat het blijkbaar werkelijk dramatisch gesteld is met de gelijke kansen in het onderwijs.

Daar kun je het ook over hebben, maar staat nu wel los van deze precieze kwestie waar deze meneer over zijn eigen verkiezing gaat, waar de republikeinen bijna dezelfde wet herinvoeren waar er eerder overeenkomst was, omdat hij discriminatoir geacht werd. Ze weten dus gewoon wat ze doen en kiezen er toch voor om het weer in te voeren.

Overigens scoren de democraten beter in groepen naarmate de scholing hoger ligt. Dus dat ze het van achterstandsgevallen moeten hebben lijkt me naast een raar argument voor wat dan ook, kort door de bocht. Staat tegenover dat ze het ook beter doen in lagere inkomensklassen, dus tsjah.

Helsinki De NAACP bereidt wel een rechtszaak voor om er wat aan te doen: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/11/georgia-naacp-voter-registration-lawsuit-842679

Misschien dat ik er ooit nog eens in meer detail op reageer Ossu, maar eerlijk gezegd zie ik niet een aanknopingspunt,... ja eens met eigen verantwoordelijkheid, en tegelijk vind ik dat de staat om een misspellinkje niet ineens je stemrecht mag ontnemen. Dit alles is echter niet waar het over begon. De republikeinen hebben erkend racistisch beleid te voeren hiermee en zagen er daarom vanaf. Echter, nu het een nauwe race is, voeren ze het toch weer in.

Misschien wel een interessant side-debatje kan zijn of de gedachte achter het beleid uit zou moeten maken? Wat maakt het uiteindelijk uit of de gedachte is dat de maatregel nadelig voor democrats werkt, omdat het zwarten disproportioneel benadeelt of dat de gedacht is dat het mensen hun eigen verantwoordelijkheid is hun info goed in te vullen?

Hoe dan ook... ik vond dit een interessant artikeltje:

Democrats Have A Chance To Win One Of The Reddest Districts In The Country

Een tweet van deze democraat:

Wat een figuur?

NYTimes had er ook een artikel over: Can a Pro-Coal Democrat in West Virginia Carve a Path for His Party?

Enkele demographics over dit district vanuit dit artikel:

Around the country, Democrats seeking a path to a House majority in the midterm elections are focused almost exclusively on flipping seats in suburban districts, which are rich with college educated, racially diverse voters.

West Virginia’s Third District, a portion of which Mr. Ojeda, 47, represents in the State Senate, is none of those things. A U-shaped swath in the southernmost and poorest part of the state, the district is 94 percent white. Fewer than one in four adults has a college degree. About one-third of families with children in the district live in poverty, according to census statistics.

Still, a recent Monmouth poll found that Mr. Ojeda had a nominal lead over his Republican opponent, Carol Miller, a member of the State House of Delegates.

Het betreft dit district: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2018-midterm-election-forecast/house/west-virginia/3/#lite