Part 1
After these voting rights and campaign finance decisions by SCOTUS today, state governments which purport to be the leaders on voting rights should be having a long, serious think about how to work together and strengthen each other against a SCOTUS which wants to devolve everything about elections to the state level, feed their most craven aristocrats and gut the social safety net.
This fight should not entirely rest on non-profit orgs working together, nor on attorneys-general mounting multi-state fights in the federal judiciary, nor on mere voting rights expansion at the state level. How are these state legislatures working together? Enacting interstate compacts between each other? Blurring the bureaucratic lines between each other?
How are these pro-voting rights states counteracting the Federalist Society’s obsession with states’ rights when it comes to elections? How are these pro-voting rights states maximizing their own impact beyond state lines? Or are any and all of these voting rights expansions simply for those residents who are “lucky” to still live in these pro-voting rights states?
The VRA is dying by 1,000 papercuts. Be a bit more creative.
Part 2
How many other countries have these legal fights over voting rights? I NEVER hear about fights over redistricting in other countries.
In other countries, I never hear about “color-blind” opportunistic attacks by random regional poobahs on the ability and confidence of urban residents, car-less people, people on reservations, people who have been released from prison and finished their sentence, disabled residents, illiterate residents, introverted people, working-class people, elderly people, college students, and homeless people to register to vote, cast a vote, have that vote counted, and have proportionate legislative representation based on that vote.
What do I hear about in other countries’ elections? Citizenship being stripped. Ballot stuffing. Candidates being removed from the ballot over specious reasons. Mis- and dis-info trafficking. Violent voter intimidation at the polls. The John Howard government in Australia ending the week-long grace period for federal voter registration in 2006, which was then reversed by their Supreme Court.
But here? It’s bureaucratic and systemic. And so many people strongly believe that all of these opportunistic attacks are worth it for the sake of maintaining a majority which protects their “way of life” against some random bunch of out-groups which may undermine it.
And yet, we continue to fight these state governments because we live in these states, we have higher, broader expectations about our basic rights than the limitations of the privileged in-group, we can’t up and relocate ourselves as the monied and able-bodied can, and people don’t really factor voting rights into their reasons for relocating to any state.
But so much of how our elections are ran, and how our voting rights are put through the meatgrinder, results from the fact that we use single-winner districts and first-past-the-post elections for our legislative bodies and assume that this winner-take-all system can be improved in any way.
If our legislative elections, from local to federal, are opportunistic winner-take-all exercises, then why the hell do we expect our legislative districts or operations of legislative sessions or appointments to judicial and bureaucratic bodies to be any different? How could we possibly think that nonpartisan redistricting would make for fairer boundaries in a winner-take-all system? How could we possibly think that the Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute, and other chronically-aristocratic actors would have any interest in inserting nonpartisan mechanisms when the winner can literally win EVERYTHING and nonpartisanship does not exist in a two-way fight? How could we think that Democrats who hold office by virtue of winner-take-all in captive jurisdictions like VRA districts would want to give that up by virtue of their own magnanimity?
We sleptwalked right into this over the last 50-60 years, and our “nonpartisan”, “bipartisan” solutions for fixing this two-player, winner-take-all system aren’t worth shit.
These decisions from SCOTUS today should be your wake-up call. Your winner-take-all elections are the utter rot that is sinking your community. Stop with the “nonpartisan” narrative. Use a better election system than winner-take-all, or suffer the consequences as you already were.
