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14 May, 6 tweets, 2 min read
A huge blow to Mississippi democracy. Reformers had been trying to pass an initiative to finally adopt early voting & could've used one to ban gerrymandering.

Republicans in myriad states have responded to progressive & democracy-reform initiatives by trying to kill initiatives
The GOP playbook in so many states in the past decade has been to gerrymander & pass new voting restrictions in the legislature, then when activists try to fight back using ballot initiatives, pass legislation trying to kill off the initiative process too dailykos.com/stories/2019/7…
The GOP-dominated Mississippi Supreme Court used an absurd reason for gutting the ballot initiative process amid ongoing efforts to pass voting reforms & Medicaid expansion, & this should be a federal equal protection violation
And of course, Mississippi's GOP-gerrymandered legislature will be all too happy to not do this & ensure that they have a total chokehold on the lawmaking process
Preposterous legal reasoning
And of course, even if today’s ruling ultimately leads to Mississippi’s voter ID law getting struck down, Republican legislators could just re-enact it now that they’re in power

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More from @PoliticsWolf

Stephen Wolf Profile picture
15 May
Mississippi is now firmly the least democratic state:

Huge barriers to voting

1 in 9 people banned from voting for life due to a felony (Black voters at 2x the rate of whites)

Dems would have to win the popular vote by an impossible 15% to win the GOP-gerrymandered legislature
Mississippi:

Has no early voting

Requires an excuse & *notarization* for both requesting & casting an absentee ballot

Requires voters to register 30 days before Election Day, which is the maximum allowed under federal law, & no online, same-day or automatic voter registration
It is entirely not a coincidence that the state with the highest proportion of Black citizens is also the least democratic in America.

They still have vestiges of their 1890 Jim Crow constitution in effect & until last year even had a hyper-gerrymandered "electoral college" law
Read 5 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
13 May
Sigh. Oklahoma GOP legislators passed their legislative gerrymanders with most Dems voting for them just like they did last decade (story doesn't say if Dems got anything for it), which the GOP will undoubtedly use to argue in bad faith that they didn't gerrymander any districts
This is something that happens from time to time: Democrats in particular are more likely than the GOP to support the other side's gerrymander if the GOP gives certain Dems districts that they like even if they have no hope of winning significant power. Happened in Ohio in 2011
Oklahoma Republicans passed these new legislative gerrymanders using population data estimates since the 2020 census data won't be available until mid-August, risking a lawsuit, though they say could revise them later with hard census data if necessary to equalize populations
Read 4 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
30 Apr
Terrible news for American democracy: Joe Manchin becomes the first Senate Democrat to come out against the #DCstatehood bill, ensuring that 700,000 citizens remain disenfranchised & increasing the likelihood of a return to GOP Senate minority rule washingtonpost.com/local/dc-polit…
Because of how the states were drawn & malapportioned, the Senate imposes a huge penalty against Black, urban, & Dem voters like those in D.C. The GOP has run the Senate most of the time since the late 1990s despite never winning more votes than Dems once
Dems represent >56% of the U.S. population despite holding just half the Senate seats. We're stuck in a democratic doom loop where our lack of fair elections makes it impossible to make elections fairer. Manchin's vote wouldn't be needed if the Senate didn't already penalize Dems
Read 6 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
26 Apr
Happy census day! In two hours, the census will release 2020 state population counts, revealing which states will gain/lose congressional seats & Electoral College votes in reapportionment.

As a preview, here's what the 2020 estimates showed, but several states are on the bubble
While this data will tell us how many congressional seats each state gets, we still won't know how the population within states has been redistributed until the census publishes census block-level data in August, when redistricting will begin in earnest
We'll update these maps once the 2020 reapportionment numbers are out, but these cartograms based on 2019 pop estimates show the partisan control over 2020s congressional & legislative redistricting. GOP is set to draw 2-3 times as many districts as Dems dailykos.com/stories/2020/1…
Read 13 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
15 Apr
By leaving OR Dems in charge of legislative but not congressional redistricting, this doesn't actually lead to less-gerrymandered outcomes. If GOP blocks Dems from gerrymandering Congress in blue states while GOP still does it in many states, the overall map's GOP bias gets worse
Asking Dems to unilaterally not gerrymander blue states for Congress while GOP keeps doing it is like asking Electoral College foes to give blue state electoral votes to the popular vote winner regardless of what red states do.

National solutions are needed & being pushed for
Unfortunately, yes. It's the same logic as ending winner-take-all Electoral College allocation.

That only applies to Congress, though. There's no similar justification for passing legislative gerrymanders for partisan advantage, & Dems in power should pass fair legislative maps
Read 4 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
6 Apr
Colorado (Dem-run of course) is arguably the best state for making it easy to vote. They have automatic & same-day voter registration, universal vote-by-mail, & numerous countywide vote centers where any person in a county may vote in-person on Election Day or during early voting
Gerrymandering hasn't gotten as much publicity in 2021 yet as GOP voting restrictions have, but another biggie is Colorado has independent redistricting commissions while Georgia GOP is about to viciously gerrymander again. CO stands head & shoulders above GA for fair elections
CO vs GA voting law

CO registration deadline Election Day; GA 28 days prior
CO requests (non-photo) ID, not requires; GA strictly requires photo ID
CO votes near 100% by mail, so voting lines are nonexistent; GA must request mail vote
CO lets probation/parolees vote;, GA doesn't
Read 4 tweets

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