Tag Archives: politics

Abolish Legislative Districts

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In which I explain why I’m radicalized on legislative districts:

We talk about the need for nonpartisan redistricting of state legislatures and the U.S. House, and Republicans see it as a way by which they slightly loosen their intense grip on power in many states. We talk about greater competitiveness in elections as a virtue to pursue.

But nonpartisan redistricting is a band-aid on the egregiousness of first-past-the-post methods of voting, including two-round FPTP elections, whether for single- or multi-winner at-large elections. Nonpartisan redistricting of single-winner FPTP elections has to be incredibly precise to accomplish the goals of minority representation and partisan competitiveness.

Even with the proposed Fair Representation Act, which combines nonpartisan redistricting with ranked-choice voting and multi-winner elections, the job of nonpartisan redistricting is made somewhat easier with fewer, larger super-districts, but the premise of even having districts becomes questionable beyond a mere demand for geographical representation.

Why should geographical representation matter for legislative elections anymore? The long-running argument is that geographical representation through districts helps the legislature pay attention to legislators’ particular corners of the polity. But the laws which these legislators write have reverberations – direct or not – upon the entire polity.

I’d argue that we should simply bypass the need for districts altogether, and have all legislators elected statewide and at-large through party-list proportional representation, in which voters vote for their preferred party, and parties become members of the legislature by how much of a percentage of the vote they receive.

Such a method removes geographical jockeying for legislative power from the table, and places the focus squarely upon legislating for the entire polity. No more redistricting, no more fear of partisan competitiveness, no more zero-sum single-winner two-round legislative elections, no more pitting rural and urban areas against each other through structural capture of elections.

Most Latin American nations have made party-list PR work as presidential republics, and have mostly switched to party-list PR since 1908. Few have switched back to majoritarian legislative elections, even with brutal, bloody interruptions to constitutional orders by military coups. It works well, and most of these countries who retain party-list PR don’t have this “eternal” question of carving up geography and property as a tool to gain and retain partisan dominance, nowhere near how bad we have it.

This is what I mean by evolving past the need for legislative (and congressional) districts, beyond redistricting, beyond single winners, beyond electoral colleges of any type, and beyond first-past-the-post elections. Throw it all out.

The Fair Representation Act’s combo of RCV+multimember districts+nonpartisan redistricting is just a compromise.

Hot Take: Montgomery Bus Boycott Was Also a Strike

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Hot take:

The Montgomery Bus Boycott also had aspects of a strike.

They didn’t just withhold their patronage and money. They withheld their participation in the monopoly over buses held by the Montgomery city government within city limits, and, by extension, denied the bus system and its drivers the ability to deliver services to other residents. Among the reactions by city officials against the boycott was a ban on any bus charging less than the city government’s bus line. The city government and segregationist residents felt entitled to Black residents’ participation enough to brutalize those who boycotted and avoided the bus line.

A boycott only becomes effective when goes from mere avoidance of patronage to outright kneecapping when it harms its ability to deliver its goods and services to other people. But then can we call it a boycott?

And that’s what I’m thinking about regarding the #Strike4BlackLives. The players are denying sports, entertainment and perhaps more to a public and White House which feels incredibly entitled to their performance and presence, hence the attacks against those players who knelt and the admonishments to “shut up and play”.

Denying comfort to those who feel entitled to one’s participation feels more like a strike than a boycott. And that denial will be painful, maybe even more painful than the protests on the street. And that’s the point.

I look forward to seeing what comes from this strike.

The United States as a Police State

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I was just reading this article on JSTOR from right after Jean-Bertrand Aristide was first forced into exile by the Haitian military, and how one way to bring stability back to Haiti at the time is to create a police state, which had already been tried and failed (the other was to build democratic institutions in Haiti through party-list PR elections and an independent judiciary).

I wonder if this applies to us.

Is this how we maintain the semblance of peace while our elections system is below international standards, maintained by at least 50 election regimes who are in jealous, bitter legal conflict with each other, and threatened by a racist party which is willing to sell the postal service for parts and gum up the census returns to exclude noncitizen residents in order to, among other things, ensure their victory at the polls?

Does the larger body of those who have a monopoly on violence – military, reserve, law enforcement and armed partisan civilians – actually maintain a police state?

We have an incredible number of military bases per capita. I wonder if we have the most domestic military bases in the world, in addition to the most overseas military bases.

We have over 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, and we have the world’s largest prison population, maintained largely by at least 50 state governments.

We live with the legacies (and ongoing practices) of redlining and housing discrimination, draw up discriminatory districts for elections and for boards of education, segregate against multi-family housing through downzoning, and create whole cities from non-annexed land so that those apartment-dwellers don’t move near and hurt the property value.

We keep people apart by force, and have built our entire political system upon keeping people apart through geographical isolation of the undesirables. And we’re supposed to be OK with this when we see the destruction, waste and resentment caused by this forced isolation? When so many of us deride any semblance of overriding responsibility to other Americans in the name of convenience because we’re not one of those city people, only to be the recipient or cause of someone’s receiving of COVID-19?

When the Third Reconstruction comes, I hope it means we can opt out of being residents of any state and just be citizens of this country. I hope it means that we can abolish state prisons, create a federal voter roll for a single voter registration website, replace the U.S. House’s elections with party-list proportional representation (or, as a half-measure, ranked-choice voting), move to single-payer healthcare, and establish not only an affirmative right to vote, but also an affirmative right to participate in free and fair elections.

Thoughts on Biden/Harris

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The only one that fit the profile of a typical VP candidate is Harris. She’s relatively fresh to DC politics but has had some DC experience, and has little to no background that could excite the GOP beyond “something something Willie Brown”.

It was never going to be Warren, for one, thanks to the Native American issue (and I say this as someone who supported Warren for President). Rice was problematic because of the “Benghazi” fiction, and because foreign policy experience is an allergen to xenophobic conservatives. Abrams has no federal experience and sat out of two potential runs for Senate. Whitmer literally just got elected Governor. Bass has those Cuba and Scientology comments, making her a liability in Florida. Demings was even more of a cop and had a very exploitable background as a police chief, a potential lightning rod for the left and the anti-urban right.

The safest choice besides Harris was Duckworth. She’s even more boring, Midwestern and cuddlier to veterans. By the time that Duckworth was ruled out, I figured that Harris had it.

The Berniecrats may hate Harris, or hate the #KHive on Twitter (and the feeling is certainly mutual from the KHive). Harris was not the most progressive prosecutor in California. But Twitter is not real life, progressive prosecutors are still carving their way into the punitive prosecutorial establishment against political biases as we speak, and the Trump campaign will be tasked to come up with an attack line against Harris that could actually stick and not slide off like it’s been sliding off of Biden. The polls are still more favorable to a Biden win, at least for now, less than 90 days to the election.

And progressives who are situated to the left of this ticket still have room for being change agents, especially those who have won primaries this year.

So I’m not actually disappointed by this ticket. It’s not exciting, but this is not as much of an excitement election as it is an anti-incumbent election. I made peace with it a long time ago, and I’m thinking of the longer term. If this ticket wins along with a Senate majority (despite all the headwinds of voter suppression), we can stop the judicial bleeding at the federal level. But we need the Senate filibuster to be dropped so that the bleeding can reverse.

The die has been cast. We need to win it all.

State Sen. Nikema Williams (SD-39) to Rep. Nikema Williams (GA-05)

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The die has been cast: Senator Nikema Williams will now become the first woman ever nominated as a Democrat to the 5th congressional district of Georgia. This means a seat has been opened in SD39.

Nikema has worked her way up as an activist, from her earlier campus activism with Young Democrats of Georgia as National Committeewoman and Political Director in the 2000s to her work at Planned Parenthood Southeast. She served as Chair of the 13th Congressional District from 2007-2011, the youngest congressional chair ever elected in the DPG’s modern history at the time. She served as the DPG’s First Vice Chair from 2011-2019, stepping in temporarily as interim chair in 2013 upon the resignation of Mike Berlon. She then stepped into the electoral arena with her run for Vincent Fort’s seat in 2017, and then became the first Black woman Chair of the DPG in 2019.

Nikema, as the presumptive winner of the 5th district election, will also be the baby of the Georgia delegation at 41yo. For as long as no primary challenge is whipped up in the coming years, she has plenty of time to grow into the role.

I wonder how many YDG alums have become members of Congress, or have become officeholders at any level. We should be building more more Nikemas and other Democrats who are groomed and trained to run for moments like this. We need a well-oiled political machine.

Georgia Primary Advisory Questions and Results

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Working on a list of ballot questions which were placed on county primary ballots on June 9. I’m looking for the other questions placed on the ballot in 10 remaining counties.

There were 19 counties which had county-level party primary advisory questions on June 9, out which 7 had Democratic entries.

Forsyth by far had the most Democratic advisory questions with 11 questions. Cobb came in second with 6 questions, followed by Oconee and Walton which had 5 each, Dawson with 4, Glynn with 3 and Upson with 2. Clayton and Harris also had the most Republican questions with 8 each; Hart with 7; Barrow, Columbia and Rabun with 5; Forsyth and Glynn with 4; Brantley, Gordon, Henry and Jackson with 3; Union with 2; and Lincoln with 1.

Republicans had at least 6 counties where “2nd Amendment sanctuary county” questions were placed on the primary ballot. A few counties had Republican ballots replete with anti-immigrant language, including anti-sanctuary city, pro-border wall, anti-immigrant-student, anti-driver’s-license-for-immigrants, and so on.

Democrats had their own red-meat questions, ranging from climate change, pre-k education, Medicaid expansion, election reform and immigration reform.

A notable question was one asking Henry County Republicans on whether to legalize marijuana, which was supported at 51%. At least two counties asked Republicans on whether to legalize casino/horse/sports gambling, neither of which were affirmed.

Another notable exception was in Forsyth County, where one party question ended up on both primary ballots: “Should the County invest in beautification projects such as median landscaping, mast arms for stop lights, and upgraded signage similar to John’s Creek, Alpharetta, Roswell and Sugar Hill?” It was supported on both ballots.

A few may have legislative impact at the county level, with Cobb’s Democratic question 11 asking for a county non-discrimination ordinance (in lieu of Georgia’s lack of a civil rights law) being supported 97.41%.

Medicaid Expansion Comes to Oklahoma, Hopefully to Missouri Next Month

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The successful Oklahoma vote on Medicaid expansion, State Question 802, may be a resounding success, but it was overestimated in how wide the margin would be between Yes and No. Pollsters predicted a 60-40 Yes vote, but it barely passed at 50-49. A few points, and how they apply to the Missouri Medicaid expansion vote on August 11:

  • That those 7 counties in which Yes was the majority only sustained half of the total statewide Yes vote. 49% of the Yes vote came from all of the other 70 counties in the state, even the border counties. So that is another reminder that land doesn’t vote, and campaigning to the cities in a state where the urban population at the last census was 66% is not a good idea.
  • That the vote largely reflected income patterns across the state, a bit more so than urban-rural setting. Research is showing that the richest 200 precincts in the state voted in the minority for SQ802, while the poorest 200 precincts voted in the majority for the same, even as both groups of precincts are largely split between urban and rural precincts.
  • That voter suppression played a role in the final vote. Besides the antagonism of Governor Kevin Stitt, Oklahoma Republicans and Americans for Prosperity against the initiative, this primary was impacted by the Oklahoma Legislature passing new requirements for notarizations on absentee ballots, even after the State Supreme Court threw out the requirement as unconstitutional. There’s also the fact that 200k less Oklahomans turned out for this primary than the 2018 primary, when Oklahomans voted 60-40 in favor of medical marijuana.

Also, a crucial minority of Republicans voted for Medicaid expansion, pushing #SQ802 over the top in a state where Trump won 60-30 and Stitt won by more than 10 points. This result shows that the support for these ballot initiatives has swingier, more elastic votes among both party bases than how they vote in elections.

So this brings me to Missouri, which will vote on Medicaid expansion on the August 4 gubernatorial primary ballot. Missouri has a higher urban-to-rural population ratio than Oklahoma, the same as Idaho (which also passed Medicaid expansion 60-40 in 2018), and has had a similar tendency to vote for progressive measures such as nonpartisan redistricting and medical marijuana. But Oklahoma’s razor-thin margin shows that advocates for Medicaid expansion must work for this vote this month. Also, Missouri has the same requirements about absentee voting as does Oklahoma, and the same Republican legislative opposition against Medicaid expansion.

I have family in the St. Louis area, and their health would stand to gain from a Yes vote.

Option: More Blue Self-Governance

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Here’s my feeling about D.C. Statehood and P.R. Statehood.

This is the weakest bid to expand Blue self-governance and representation in the Senate. The Douglass Commonwealth may become a thing if Dems win the Senate, and it would be nice to have the Douglass Commonwealth in the Union, but Puerto Rico is still split heavily between the conservative statehood movement, the liberal (enhanced)-Commonwealth movement, and the left-wing Independence movement. And since their legislature just voted to take LGBT-inclusive non-discrimination protections out of their Civil Code, there’s no guarantee that P.R. will vote for Dems much.

American liberals in the contiguous 48 have shown ourselves to be either arrogant self-sniffers in the Blue states or selfish masochists in the Red states who don’t want to split off into their own states and govern themselves, when doing so could help win 60% of the Senate and help re-write the Constitution.

Instead the Blue staters pride themselves on their Blue state status and don’t want to divvy up some of that power for the Union’s sake, and those of us in red states are shit out of luck.

When are we going to save the Constitution? When are we going to take the Senate seriously and make the necessary sacrifices of clout and comfort to move the Senate forward? When are we going to stop being flaming hypocrites, fight for our own self-governance and tell the GOP to fuck off and die?

After Mark Jones’ Victory, the Bigger Work Ahead

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This is part of why I did whatever I did with Mark’s campaign.

This year, we blew the judicial and DA elections, badly. 4 Supreme Court justices, 6 Court of Appeals judges, 138 Superior Court judges across 49 circuits, all nonpartisan.

Out of those 138 Superior Court seats, only 14 received challengers, across 9 circuits.

Out of the 35 District Attorney races up for election, 6 will have major party candidates go up against each other in November (in Alcovy, Augusta, Dublin, Eastern, Gwinnett and Houston). Dems decided 7 DA races by default in the primary, and the GOP decided 22 other races by default. All DA races are partisan.

So the next chance we get to make an impact on these judicial and DA elections should be seriously capitalized upon.

In 2022, 1 Supreme Court Justice, 2 Court of Appeals judges, 74 Superior Court judges in 36 circuits, 44 State Court judges in 30 counties, 17 chief magistrate judges, and district attorneys in 10 circuits will be up for election. Most of these hardly ever get challengers, and that needs to be changed.

We can’t say that we are pro-CJ reform but not get involved in pro-reform electoral bids for judicial and prosecutorial seats.

So I’m writing forum questions to ask judgeship candidates for 2022.

ENDORSEMENT: Mark Jones for District Attorney

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Full disclosure: I state the following in my own personal capacity.

This mail ballot was the first time in my life I have ever voted on paper, and I voted for Mark Jones for District Attorney.

However that I may have felt about his unorthodox campaign style for DA was obliterated by the developments of the last month. After seeing his dedication to his campaign and to those who he hopes to have as his constituents, as well as the attacks made against him by the law enforcement establishment in this region, I could not be more proud of voting for him.

I also could not be more proud of supporting his move into this campaign from the get-go. He reached out to me in late February after I made a post about the need for more primary contests in the upcoming qualifying week, and asked if there was room for him to run against Julia Slater for DA. He hesitated for a few weeks, and then I reached back to him and said that he – a lawyer, a resident of the circuit, a reform-minded person – is more than qualified to run as a Democrat, and that I wanted a good, clean primary contest to draw attention to this position and it’s role in corrections reform. The following week, he did not hesitate to jump in, drive to Atlanta to qualify, and loan himself money to buy signs and digital billboards, all before buying a website domain. He has been campaigning non-stop ever since, and being charged and staying for two nights at Muscogee County Jail has not stopped him one bit. Two of his supporters being arrested, charged and jailed has not stopped him fighting to get them released and their charges dropped.

I am angry at the behavior of the law enforcement establishment in this region against Mark, his supporters and BlackLivesMatter protesters in Columbus. I am angry that the jail is filled to such capacity as it is. I am angry that the police here are no better than the other police departments who should be defunded. I am angry at civil asset forfeiture, cannabis criminalization, cash bail and other stupidities committed by the laws and law enforcement establishment of this city and this state. Damn this authoritarian system, and damn this state and this city for perpetuating it.

Out of all of the votes I filled out on paper, I may have cast my first vote for Mark Jones for District Attorney.