A Mathematician Redistricts Congress

 The 2013 GOP House of Representatives:

 An Embarrassment to Democracy

We've heard plenty -- including posts on this blog -- about the anti-democracy tactics being successfully employed in states where the entire state government is under Republican/ALEC control.  When a state governor, the state house and the state senate are entirely prepared to enact anti-democracy schemes, the results are not pretty.

In the 2013 election we can see the grisly results of this multi-state tactic.  Although a majority of votes were cast in the election for democratic candidates, the control of the Federal House of Representatives remained in the hands of John Boehner and the tea baggers.  When too many "Democratic" Senators refused to back Reid's proposal to reform the filibuster rule in the Senate, effective control of that body remained in the regressive hands of Mitch McConnell.

We can point at Boehner and McConnell easily enough, but we must remember that neither of these two "representatives" actually represents anyone in the states where they were elected.  Even the most generous over view of the "legislative habits" of these two, along with their respective cronies, hardly suggests that they have any particular interest in the needs of any visible constituency or the country.

Understand in no uncertain terms.  The Republican minority in the Federal Congress does, actually, represent the interests of a constituency.  It's just that this constituency is not the voters who put them into office -- or, of course, the rest of the country, either.  

These Federal boys work for billionaires.  So do their "little brothers" at the state level who have managed to successfully "crow bar jimmy" the districts back home.

This post is going to concentrate on the state level "monkey business" which resulted in the fall of majority rule in the House of Representatives.

A Few Thoughts About Gerrymandering

If you think that the farmers and ranchers in the red state "fly over" country are zealously independent now, try to imagine what this was like in the early days of the nation.  West of the Mississippi a crop of ruthless, rural barons emerged almost at once as the conquered territories were transformed into states.  The wealth and power of these earliest oligarchs was derived primarily from exploiting their ownership of various natural resources -- oil, cattle land, timber, gold and the like.

South of the Mason Dixon Line we found similar oligarchs whose wealth was derived from primarily agricultural holdings operated by slave labor.

This entire class jealously protected their advantages -- regardless of the legitimacy of how those assets had been accrued.  We may think of "Robber Barons" as banking, oil, rail road and manufacturing magnates, but this category of oligarchs operated mainly in the industrialized areas of the East.  Of course, the "Easterners" jealously protected their own holdings.

As it become increasingly clear to this class that the Federal Government was not only here to stay, but likely to become more and more of a presence as time bore on, their "control issues" began to surface.  When the end of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation and other developments started their predictable intrusion into the previously slave driven Southern enterprises, every effort was, naturally, made to promote artificial priorities such as states' rights and to do everything possible to sustain their apartheid past by controlling the election of US Representatives.

In no time, these efforts began to "deliver the goods."  The Southern oligarchs, firmly in command of their state's federal legislators were able to extract all manner of corrupt economic advantages while undercutting any potential Negro voting influence with glacial Jim Crow Laws.

The rural Western oligarchs, seeing how profitable this had been for their Southern counterparts, began their own states' rights moves.  Sewing every possible granule of "distrust for the Feds" among the voters, the cattle-oil-gold barons established themselves as a trustworthy bulwark against federal intervention in their state policies.

In both regions the underpinning of the anti-democracy appetite was the same.  If you were an oligarch, your interests would be far better served if you controlled the "democracy" than it would be if the masses of Americans did it with their votes and through normal kinds of representative government.

The heavy weights in the East may have been the last "pigs at the trough," but they jumped into "remanufacturing democracy" on their own in no time.

How the House Was Designed To Work

MeanMesa will take advantage of an interesting summation of our current dilemma from SilverBuzzCafe (Read the entire article here. )

Rebalancing The House Of Representatives

I’ve been pondering the problem of gerrymandering – the manipulation of electoral boundaries to take advantage of voter demographics. The Republicans have a significant majority (234 to 201) of the seats in the House of Representatives. However, they only won 48% of the popular vote versus the 49.2% that the Democrats won. They managed to retain control of the House because of gerrymandering by the Republican controlled States. 

The situation is now so skewed that the Democrats need 53.5% of the popular vote to gain a majority, whereas the Republicans only need 46.5%. The Republicans have a 7% advantage in a process that is supposed to be democratic. It’s a problem that will be very hard for the Democrats to overcome.

There are some other inequities in the system too. The House of Representatives is supposed to give a proportional share of power to each State based on population. The House controls spending, so States with a large population should tend to contribute more to the Federal government in taxes than small States, so it seems fair enough. There is always the problem that a small State with very high income per capita may be contributing more money than a larger one with low income occupants, but the principle of honoring the wishes of the majority comes into play. That power is balanced by the Senate, which has two Senators per State, preventing small States from being bullied by large ones.

Descending to straight mathematics, we see the United States population -- as it was recorded in the 2010 US Census -- as just under 309,000,000 (309 million) citizens. (Read more: 2010 US Census )  These citizens are represented in the US House by 435 US Representatives.

That all sounds simple enough, but there are just a couple of "special rules" which have been incorporated to make things more fair.  Although the states are divided into Congressional Districts, those districts don't cross state lines in order to create an equal ratio of citizens to Representatives.  There is also a "lower limit" as to the number of Representatives a state will have.  This provides a state such as Alaska -- one with very low population -- the opportunity not to be simply "bumped out" of the House, that is, left with no representation at all or left sharing a Representative with, say, Montana.

The following chart shows the number of citizens represented by a single House Member.  The idea was that this number would be very close as the population of states was compared.  If that were the case, the line across the top of the bars would be basically horizontal.  (You'll probably have to click on the image to find your state along the bottom of the chart.)

(Chart source.)

In practice, the allocation of the number of House seats per State has also gotten out of balance. The chart above shows the number of votes needed to elect a single Representative by State. California and Texas need around 700,000 people to get a Representative, whereas over-represented States like Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming only need around 200,000. Washington, DC is allocated the same number of seats as the lowest scored State. California has about 12% of the population and 12% (53) of the seats in the house, whereas Wyoming has 0.18% and 0.68% (3) respectively. Interestingly, the States that are disproportionately over-represented also tend to be the ones that contribute the least per person in Federal tax Dollars. However, both parties seem to be equally hit by this particular inequity.   (Read the article here.)

Back to Gerrymandering

If you happened to be a Republican Governor in a state with both state houses controlled by Republicans, you had a chance to redistrict, that is, redraw the boundaries of your Congressional Districts, after the US Census in 2010 had been completed.

If there were a way to cleverly perform that redistricting chore which could very carefully group collections of Republican and Democratic voters so that more of the new Congressional Districts had a majority of Republicans and just a sprinkling of Democrats, your state would wind up with more Republican Representatives and fewer Democratic Representatives.

Of course, you would not be outrightly disenfranchising the Democrats in your state, but you would be collecting them together in a special way which would make them a majority in fewer of the new districts you were creating resulting in a slightly larger number of Republican House members. This is exactly the reason why the US House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans when more than a million voters cast Democratic ballots.

This is also what is precisely what is meant by the term: "gerrymandering."

The result would be that your state would send a larger number of Republicans to the House of Representatives even though simply counting the number of ballots cast for each party would suggest the opposite.  However, for such anti-democracy schemes to actually work, the boundaries of the districts which are created for this purpose become grotesque.

The graphic below illustrates some examples of these bizarre Congressional Districts.  Similar district boundaries can be found all across the country in Republican held states.  Let it be added, Democrats are not even close to being "as pure as the driven snow" in this matter, either.

Examples of extreme gerrymandering

The intention is simple enough to understand.  By traipsing along a corridor on both sides of an Interstate or extending weird filaments of districts miles from population centers, the exact, desired "mix" of registered voters can be parcelled out to produce the exact election results desired.

Naturally, when we consider each case of these wildly manipulated district Congressional boundaries all across the country, there is a story of malice and conspiracy behind every one.  The current disaster in Washington is ample evidence of the anti-democracy menace posed by the practice.

The malady has never before reached the degree of the grave threat we are facing today.  One of the two established political parties has forsaken even the possibility of formulating policy which might attract a straight majority in elections and, instead, now commits its entire political effort at exploiting traditional vulnerabilities in the established electoral system.

When we look at each of the two issues brought out [above] in this post we see two serious, fundamental, problems with the system currently in place.  Some Americans have more and less access to the "representative" part of our "representative" democracy based on their state of residence, while others send "representative" delegations to the Congress which are clearly not "representative" and could have not won majorities in Congressional district elections other than arcane, snake-shaped, gerrymandered monstrosities.

The anti-democratic impact of this practice is further aggravated by the brazen voter suppression crimes being routinely conducted by states entirely under the thumb of the GOP -- and, entirely under the thumb of the oligarchs who own that party.  The prospect of the Supreme Court setting aside Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act makes ideas such as the one presented here even more immediately relevant.

None of this is acceptable.  Regardless of the original conspiracies which initially established each of the individual cases of this electoral mayhem, the task of correcting it falls directly to us.  Now.

 Re-Shaping Congressional Districts

 a Part of Election Reform

While MeanMesa visitors who pay attention to the commercial version of national news have recently heard  plenty about the problem of gerrymandering in Republican controlled states, they have also heard very little about what might be done to re-establish the representational fundamentals.  In fact, that same reporting seems to imply that any sort of meaningful correction to the current district boundaries is simply "out of reach" for citizens wishing to bring elections back to some semblance of rationality.

This is not the case.

MeanMesa is certain that we would hear the howls from some Congressmen in "safe" districts if it were even suggested that they might have to face an election where all sorts and varieties of living, breathing people were going to make that decision rather than entire land areas with painfully tailored boundaries inhabited by equally exclusive partisan voters.

Let's get the easy part out of the way first.  We know how many Congressmen we are going to elect.  We also know how many citizens are theoretically to be represented by each one.  We know the population of each state as reported by the census.  Of course, we also know all about the "special rules" which set the minimum number of representatives for low population states.

Presented with this data set, an eighth grader could assign the right number of Congressional districts to all the states in the union.  There would, naturally, be a few unavoidable inequalities in his final product, but it would look nothing like the bar chart up above in this post.  His result would show that almost exactly the same number of citizens was being represented by each Congressman.

Importantly, that is not what the chart above shows.  In fact, what the chart above shows isn't even close to that kind of equal representation.  Some of the most egregious discrepancies are indicating an almost two to one difference.

Of course there have been efforts to curtail the outrages of gerrymandering, but we can see that none of them were even marginally effective.  For the remainder of this post, we can:

1.  look at some of the traditional anti-gerrymandering plans, 

2. briefly analyze why such grotesque schemes were driven by the dated technology of the census, and

3. propose a modern solution which can reinvigorate the principles of democratic representative government.

Now, doesn't that sound like more fun than simply complaining?

Anti-gerrymandering Plans for Voting District Boundaries

The following sample is from WIKI: "Gerrymandering."  It is included here simply as an example of the pre-technology complexity of such schemes.  (Read the entire WIKI article here. Footnotes have been removed, but internal links remain enabled.)

Objective rules to create districts

Another means to reduce gerrymandering is to create objective, precise criteria to which any district map must comply. Courts in the United States, for instance, have ruled that congressional districts must be contiguous in order to be constitutional. This, however, is not a particularly binding constraint, as very narrow strips of land with few or no voters in them may be used to connect separate regions for inclusion in one district.

Minimum district to convex polygon ratio

One method is to define a minimum district to convex polygon ratio. To use this method, every proposed district is circumscribed by the smallest possible convex polygon (similar to the concept of a convex hull, think of stretching a rubberband around the outline of the district). Then, the area of the district is divided by the area of the polygon; or, if at the edge of the state, by the portion of the area of the polygon within state boundaries. The advantages of this method are that it allows a certain amount of human intervention to take place (thus solving the Colorado problem of splitline districting); it allows the borders of the district to follow existing jagged subdivisions, such as neighbourhoods or voting districts (something isoperimetric rules would discourage); and it allows concave coastline districts, such as the Florida gulf coast area. It would mostly eliminate bent districts, but still permit long, straight ones. However, since human intervention is still allowed, the gerrymandering issues of packing and cracking would still occur, just to a lesser extent. Also, it would not allow convex coastline districts, although this could be remedied by a secondary calculation using a "polygon" with a border being a defined distance from the shore

Shortest splitline algorithm

The Center for Range Voting has proposed a way to draw districts by a simple algorithm. The algorithm uses only the shape of the state, the number N of districts wanted, and the population distribution as inputs. The algorithm (slightly simplified) is:

1. Start with the boundary outline of the state.
2. Let N=A+B where N is the number of districts to create, and A and B are two whole numbers, either equal (if N is even) or differing by exactly one (if N is odd). For example, if N is 10, each of A and B would be 5. If N is 7, A would be 4 and B would be 3.
3. Among all possible straight lines that split the state into two parts with the population ratio A:B, choose the shortest. If there are two or more such shortest lines, chose the one that is most north-south in direction; if there is still more than one possibility, chose the westernmost.
4. We now have two hemi-states, each to contain a specified number (namely A and B) of districts. Handle them recursively via the same splitting procedure.
5. Any human residence that is split in two or more parts by the resulting lines is considered to be a part of the most north-eastern of the resulting districts; if this doesn't decide it, then of the most northern.

This district-drawing algorithm has the advantages of simplicity, ultra-low cost, a single possible result (thus no possibility of human interference), lack of intentional bias, and it produces simple boundaries that do not meander needlessly. It has the disadvantage of ignoring geographic features such as rivers, cliffs, and highways and cultural features such as tribal boundaries. This landscape oversight causes it to produce districts different from those an unbiased human would produce. Ignoring geographic features can induce very simple boundaries.
While most districts produced by the method will be fairly compact and either roughly rectangular or triangular, some of the resulting districts can still be long and narrow strips (or triangles) of land.
Like most automatic redistricting rules, the shortest splitline algorithm will fail to create majority-minority districts, for both ethnic and political minorities, if the minority populations are not very compact. This might reduce minority representation.

Another criticism of the system is that splitline districts sometimes divide and diffuse the voters in a large metropolitan area. This condition is most likely to occur when one of the first splitlines cuts through the metropolitan area. It is often considered a drawback of the system because residents of the same agglomeration are assumed to be a community of common interest. This is most evident in the splitline allocation of Colorado.


As of July 2007, shortest-splitline redistricting pictures, based on the results of the 2000 census, are available for all 50 states.

Minimum isoperimetric quotient

See also: Compactness measure of a shape

It is possible to define a specific minimum isoperimetric quotient, proportional to the ratio between the area and the square of the perimeter of any given congressional voting district. Although technologies presently exist to define districts in this manner, there are no rules in place mandating their use, and no national movement to implement such a policy. Such rules would prevent incorporation of jagged natural boundaries, such as rivers or mountains. When such boundaries are required, such as at the edge of a state, certain districts may not be able to meet the required minima. Enforcing a minimum isoperimetric quotient would encourage districts with a high ratio between area and perimeter.

First, we can try to "wrap our minds around" the prospect of doing something like this then explaining the results.  This scheme, regardless of the motives behind it, is practically guaranteed to deliver a product so complex that it will reinforce the very suspicious assumption that the actual working details of the democracy are beyond the grasp of common citizens.

Explaining Several Centuries of Gerrymandering

Next, let's allow our imagination to describe the actual process of traditional redistricting.  We see a basement room filled with long Formica tables where the staff from State legislators are pouring over huge paper maps of their constituent districts.  Greasy hamburger wrappers on the floor are already tempting the mice and cock roaches.

The maps themselves, now falling apart from the continuous "trial boundary lines," are covered with eraser crumbs, a literal cloud around the latest pencil lines setting the district boundaries.  At the end of the table, a road weary political hack is pounding out another few feet of tape from his ten key adding machine.  The cigarette smoke in the place is even thicker than the electoral avarice.  Heavily stained coffee cups have now been set aside, each one filled with cigarette butts and cold Maxwell House.

For the nineteenth time, the lines are once again erased, adjusted, replaced, trimmed, expanded and the process is repeated.  The geometric shape of the proposed districts grows more extreme and arcane with each attempt.

These tattered maps showed "roughly" where voters in specific districts lived, registered and voted.  They also showed the more or less permanent polling place locations.  When the election results from the last few elections were added, the gerrymanderers sitting around that table had everything they needed.

There was also a sense of stoic disassociation floating around with that cigarette smoke.  Every one present knows that a similar crew of "redistricters" was sitting through the same endless task in another basement somewhere.  Those would the the corresponding staff of the opposing party.

When the two contradictory boundary plans had been completed, there would be the inevitable court case for the next step.  An innocent judge -- we hope it will be an innocent judge -- would then laboriously reconcile the district dream boundaries.

Months later, the back breaking judicial task would be completed.  Neither party of the deadlocked State legislature would be pleased with the results, but the party in power would have managed to extract a cluster of tiny advantages from the final plan -- advantages which ultimately delivered one or two quite artificial, "safe" or even "safer," Congressional election districts and the correspondingly larger numbers of partisan House Members.

While this may be a great cartoon, this isn't funny. (image source)

All of this mischief was not only made possible by the state of electoral districting technology of the past, but it was also made inevitable by the savage political ambition of those with access to the decision making.  The rectifying technological possibilities have, of course, advanced significantly, but, unhappily, the ambitions remain just as cravenly intense today as they did then.

This anti-democratic practice was, occasionally, even openly defended by those most involved in the corruptly bewildering, manipulative process.  "We want these residents to be in one district because they have such common interests or common backgrounds."

Just remember that the elections results of the 2012 election handed control of the House of Representatives over to the party that lost the election.

Making The New Districts -- Every Ox Gets Gored

Don't kid yourselves. Unlike those old Formica gerrymandering tables of the past, every modern campaign equips itself with a cold steel data set containing the precise longitude and latitude of the pillow on every voter's bed.  The location of voters is neither a post election surprise nor a pre-election mystery.

Further, developing a "state sized" Cartesian field where every single registered voter can be located by a simple "x and y value" isn't any sort of high tech trick either.

The census has already provided the population data needed.  With that in hand, we can count on every state to jealously calculate the number of Representatives to be elected which is also the number of people living in the soon to be designed district which will elect that Representative.

A hundred years ago, the location of polling places was a consideration.  Voters had to endure a wagon trip taking a day or two just to get to cast a vote.  This is, of course, totally a thing of the past.  In Albuquerque any registered voter can show up at any polling place, have a ballot printed and cast his vote.

Next, we can return to our "not really so funny cartoon."  Those voters wanted a "consolidated" election district.

What does that mean?

For starters we can look at the grotesque examples shown up above, and we can decide that these are not the "consolidated" districts those voters had in mind.  Let's define some rough rules for the definition of "consolidated."

Why not rectangles?

We can begin at one corner of the state and start marking out rectangular shapes of various sizes, each one having just the right number of voters in it.  To avoid a politically "convenient" rectangle shape which happens to be 75 miles long and 800 feet wide, we can establish a minimum "balance" ratio of each rectangle's height to width, that is, each rectangle's North to South dimension compared to the same rectangle's East to West dimension.

Let's say that these dimensions must fall between the ratios of three and five.  This means that we may wind up with a variety of shapes for our boxes, but that  each box will be a rectangle with sides meeting these proportional limits.  This means that each rectangular district we create will be "consolidated."

When a state boundary is irregular because it, for example, follows a river or a coast line, we can employ the old tried and tested surveyor's technique of "double meridian distances."  The only additional "rule" might be to limit the length of the straight chords following the irregular side to, say, one thousand feet or less.  [The shorter the chords are, the more accurate the areas will be.]

But remember, Congressional districting is not about land, it's about people.

All this may sound confoundingly complex, but trust MeanMesa.  A ten year old PC could pull this off in a matter or minutes by raw trial and error.

What Happens

After the initial screaming begins to die off a bit, we find a very different map of political realities in the wake of these simple changes.

A Representative elected in one of the rectangular districts will have to earn his keep by actually representing all the voters -- including the ones who didn't vote for him -- in his election district.  And, horror of horrors, that constituency is going to be a mish mash of every kind of citizen.  The day of the "single agenda" Representative from a perpetually "safe" Congressional District will have ended.

Part of the notable challenge of preforming the responsibilities of being a member of the House of Representatives is to devise a way to actually represent the interests of the people who elected you.  A legitimate Congressional constituency has interests which conflict with each other.  When every effort is made to either exclude voters with such conflicted interests or strand them in synthetic district boundaries without even the most remote chance of constituent representation, democracy is not served -- it is subverted.

MeanMesa thinks that this could improve things immeasurably. Right away.  Some of the "creatures of darkness" prowling around the House of Representatives today would find their "divine right" to be outrageously out of touch had evaporated.

There are serving House members who could not even briefly "hold their own" in a civil conversation with MeanMesa.  Asimov famously said: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

These incompetents have conspired to do violence to our democracy.  The American voting booth is where these outrages end. 

How the Republicans Intend to Win in 2012

The Old Scheme Dies Slowly

The GOPCons have always employed the tried and tested "information bias" approach to swaying electorates since the days of Senator McCarthy.  Notables such as William Randolph Hearst (Hearst Mansion and Patty Hearst, veteran of the Stockholm Syndrome, a love affair with the Symbionese Liberation Army and a few bank robberies) was one of the country's most famous war mongers and war profiteers decades before military contracting was invented.

Patty Hearst, SLA bank robber (image source Wiki)

Hearst, along with others of his ilk, especially contemporary media moguls (can anyone remember Rupert Murdoch after all this time has passed?) have traditionally lent their "Fourth Estate" assets to starting wars, suppressing scandals and other incendiary efforts.  The latest culprits have assumed a slightly more sophisticated, technocratic mask, but neither their anti-democratic (or, openly fascistic) mission nor sinister leadership technique has changed much in its more modern version.

When it comes to influencing elections in the past few decades (since Reagan -- MeanMesa voted for Reagan twice), what used to be cigar chomping old newspaper barons have morphed into equally soiled network moguls receiving orders from their phones in back rooms.  The wreckage left in their trail has degraded what used to be American optimism to a state of junk yard cynicism.

Far to many Americans have, from time to time, been faced with the embarrassment of staring at their own voting history after one of the cataclysmic misinformation onslaughts subsides, revealing the gut wrenching truth of what they had previously supported.  The examples are plentiful:  the VietNam War, Iraq, Afghanistan, the PATRIOT Act and the War on Terror.  The most recent escapades have to include the neo-con efforts to permanently divide the country, ruinous tax cuts to "job creators" and the antithetical promotion of spending cuts as a means for economic recovery.

Don't confuse the time line.  For the last two years, the "interested parties" have been investing a million dollars per week to uproot ObamaCare, and a large part of this money has gone toward injecting "death panels" and "Washington Bureaucrats between you and your doctor" (if you are fortunate enough to actually have a doctor) into the hearts and minds of media consumers.

The point is that the same media twisting process continues in full swing, in fact, even fuller swing since the toadies on the Supreme Court delivered the patently anti-democratic Citizens United decision.  The "war on democracy" remains at a massive, national, psychopathic level.  Just follow the money.

The New Scheme - Going Way Out on the Limb

We may assume that the successes of the old scheme have now delivered just about all the electoral "low hanging fruit" possible.  The Republicans now find that they have brutally caricatured themselves with a flurry of new incendiaries which have fallen sorely short of the mark even as entreaties to their bigot and hill billy base.

Dorian Gray in The Mirror of the Yellow Press/Ulrike Ottinger (image source)

Disclaimers of witchcraft, testimonies that corporations are people, desperate efforts to protect Christmas from Sharia Law and photo shopped portraits of the President as a Kenyan tribesman have all but decimated the old "fire in the hole" voter loyalty which was so reliable in the past.  Countenancing these meat handed disasters, even old war mongering William Randolph Hearst would be turning over in his grave.

Stepping to the current day, the "heartbreak of defeat" becomes tragically sanguine indeed.  Perched precariously in a clutch of state capitols, modern tea bags find themselves in the company of a modern equivalent of Cleopatra and her asp.  The lurching, adolescent politics of 2010 are now little more than afternoon dreams of better days.

Banging on the front door are the local victims of the faux-austerity, wounded, cranky voters, bandaged and bleeding, carrying copies of the latest state budget with all their favorite stuff crossed out, but still plummeting further into the red.

Lurking ominously at the back door, the tiny election margins which delivered the miscreants to power are stumbling around uninterested in hearing more of the propaganda which worked last time and unwilling to passively remain in the fetid dream, devoid of facts, which constituted the false promise of fiscal maturity, whatever that was.

So, what's to be done?

Naturally, the state governing tea bags revert instantly to their traditional response to such desperate situations.  Election fraud.  After Wisconsin's favorite, seasonal ballot shredder muddied the water which used to conceal the mischief, outright miscounts have become too dangerous.  Granted, there has never been a voting machine that GOPCons didn't love, but the situation has become too threatening for anything really big, that is, big enough to swing an election in the old Alabama or Blackwell style.

Worse, the old approach of simply force feeding the electorate more misinformation has also been "grounded on the rocks." Not even the straw chewing hill billies are buying the road weary pitch to "blame both parties." The governors know that their political careers, not to mention their tenuous grip on the 2010 power grab, could die in an instant if the elections were tomorrow.

In such dire straits, the cowering state legislators release the last ogre in the basement, voter suppression. If enough voters in Democratic demographies can be prevented from casting a ballot, they may still have a chance.

For the remainder of this post, MeanMesa transfers the burden squarely to the shoulders of a trusted navigator in such affairs, The Rolling Stone. Please take a few minutes to read the following article.

From ROLLING STONE/POLITICS (original article here)

The GOP War on Voting

By Ari Berman

August 30, 2011 7:40 PM ET

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. "What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century," says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. "I don't want everybody to vote," the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP's effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.

Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year – perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP. "One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time," Bill Clinton told a group of student activists in July. "Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate" – a reference to the dominance of the Tea Party last year, compared to the millions of students and minorities who turned out for Obama. "There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today."

To hear Republicans tell it, they are waging a virtuous campaign to crack down on rampant voter fraud – a curious position for a party that managed to seize control of the White House in 2000 despite having lost the popular vote. After taking power, the Bush administration declared war on voter fraud, making it a "top priority" for federal prosecutors. In 2006, the Justice Department fired two U.S. attorneys who refused to pursue trumped-up cases of voter fraud in New Mexico and Washington, and Karl Rove called illegal voting "an enormous and growing problem." In parts of America, he told the Republican National Lawyers Association, "we are beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses." According to the GOP, community organizers like ACORN were actively recruiting armies of fake voters to misrepresent themselves at the polls and cast illegal ballots for the Democrats.

Even at the time, there was no evidence to back up such outlandish claims. A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud – and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility. A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud. "Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere," joked Stephen Colbert. A 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading advocate for voting rights at the New York University School of Law, quantified the problem in stark terms. "It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning," the report calculated, "than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

GOP outcries over the phantom menace of voter fraud escalated after 2008, when Obama's candidacy attracted historic numbers of first-time voters. In the 29 states that record party affiliation, roughly two-thirds of new voters registered as Democrats in 2007 and 2008 – and Obama won nearly 70 percent of their votes. In Florida alone, Democrats added more than 600,000 new voters in the run-up to the 2008 election, and those who went to the polls favored Obama over John McCain by 19 points. "This latest flood of attacks on voting rights is a direct shot at the communities that came out in historic numbers for the first time in 2008 and put Obama over the top," says Tova Wang, an elections-reform expert at Demos, a progressive think tank.

No one has done more to stir up fears about the manufactured threat of voter fraud than Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a top adviser in the Bush Justice Department who has become a rising star in the GOP. "We need a Kris Kobach in every state," declared Michelle Malkin, the conservative pundit. This year, Kobach successfully fought for a law requiring every Kansan to show proof of citizenship in order to vote – even though the state prosecuted only one case of voter fraud in the past five years. The new restriction fused anti-immigrant hysteria with voter-fraud paranoia. "In Kansas, the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive," Kobach claimed, offering no substantiating evidence.

Kobach also asserted that dead people were casting ballots, singling out a deceased Kansan named Alfred K. Brewer as one such zombie voter. There was only one problem: Brewer was still very much alive. The Wichita Eagle found him working in his front yard. "I don't think this is heaven," Brewer told the paper. "Not when I'm raking leaves."

obach might be the gop's most outspoken crusader working to prevent citizens from voting, but he's far from the only one. "Voting rights are under attack in America," Rep. John Lewis, who was brutally beaten in Alabama while marching during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, observed during an impassioned speech on the House floor in July. "There's a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process."

The Republican effort, coordinated and funded at the national level, has focused on disenfranchising voters in four key areas:

Barriers to Registration Since January, six states have introduced legislation to impose new restrictions on voter registration drives run by groups like Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters. In May, the GOP-controlled legislature in Florida passed a law requiring anyone who signs up new voters to hand in registration forms to the state board of elections within 48 hours of collecting them, and to comply with a barrage of onerous, bureaucratic requirements. Those found to have submitted late forms would face a $1,000 fine, as well as possible felony prosecution.

As a result, the law threatens to turn civic-minded volunteers into inadvertent criminals. Denouncing the legislation as "good old-fashioned voter suppression," the League of Women Voters announced that it was ending its registration efforts in Florida, where it has been signing up new voters for the past 70 years. Rock the Vote, which helped 2.5 million voters to register in 2008, could soon follow suit. "We're hoping not to shut down," says Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote, "but I can't say with any certainty that we'll be able to continue the work we're doing."

The registration law took effect one day after it passed, under an emergency statute designed for "an immediate danger to the public health, safety or welfare." In reality, though, there's no evidence that registering fake voters is a significant problem in the state. Over the past three years, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has received just 31 cases of suspected voter fraud, resulting in only three arrests statewide. "No one could give me an example of all this fraud they speak about," said Mike Fasano, a Republican state senator who bucked his party and voted against the registration law. What's more, the law serves no useful purpose: Under the Help America Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002, all new voters must show identity before registering to vote.

Cuts to Early Voting After the recount debacle in Florida in 2000, allowing voters to cast their ballots early emerged as a popular bipartisan reform. Early voting not only meant shorter lines on Election Day, it has helped boost turnout in a number of states – the true measure of a successful democracy. "I think it's great," Jeb Bush said in 2004. "It's another reform we added that has helped provide access to the polls and provide a convenience. And we're going to have a high voter turnout here, and I think that's wonderful."

But Republican support for early voting vanished after Obama utilized it as a key part of his strategy in 2008. Nearly 30 percent of the electorate voted early that year, and they favored Obama over McCain by 10 points. The strategy proved especially effective in Florida, where blacks outnumbered whites by two to one among early voters, and in Ohio, where Obama received fewer votes than McCain on Election Day but ended up winning by 263,000 ballots, thanks to his advantage among early voters in urban areas like Cleveland and Columbus.

That may explain why both Florida and Ohio – which now have conservative Republican governors – have dramatically curtailed early voting for 2012. Next year, early voting will be cut from 14 to eight days in Florida and from 35 to 11 days in Ohio, with limited hours on weekends. In addition, both states banned voting on the Sunday before the election – a day when black churches historically mobilize their constituents. Once again, there appears to be nothing to justify the changes other than pure politics. "There is no evidence that any form of convenience voting has led to higher levels of fraud," reports the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College.

Photo IDs By far the biggest change in election rules for 2012 is the number of states requiring a government-issued photo ID, the most important tactic in the Republican war on voting. In April 2008, the Supreme Court upheld a photo-ID law in Indiana, even though state GOP officials couldn't provide a single instance of a voter committing the type of fraud the new ID law was supposed to stop. Emboldened by the ruling, Republicans launched a nationwide effort to implement similar barriers to voting in dozens of states.

The campaign was coordinated by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which provided GOP legislators with draft legislation based on Indiana's ID requirement. In five states that passed such laws in the past year – Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – the measures were sponsored by legislators who are members of ALEC. "We're seeing the same legislation being proposed state by state by state," says Smith of Rock the Vote. "And they're not being shy in any of these places about clearly and blatantly targeting specific demographic groups, including students."

In Texas, under "emergency" legislation passed by the GOP-dominated legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Perry, a concealed-weapon permit is considered an acceptable ID but a student ID is not. Republicans in Wisconsin, meanwhile, mandated that students can only vote if their IDs include a current address, birth date, signature and two-year expiration date – requirements that no college or university ID in the state currently meets. As a result, 242,000 students in Wisconsin may lack the documentation required to vote next year. "It's like creating a second class of citizens in terms of who gets to vote," says Analiese Eicher, a Dane County board supervisor.

The barriers erected in Texas and Wisconsin go beyond what the Supreme Court upheld in Indiana, where 99 percent of state voters possess the requisite IDs and can turn to full-time DMVs in every county to obtain the proper documentation. By contrast, roughly half of all black and Hispanic residents in Wisconsin do not have a driver's license, and the state staffs barely half as many DMVs as Indiana – a quarter of which are open less than one day a month. To make matters worse, Gov. Scott Walker tried to shut down 16 more DMVs – many of them located in Democratic-leaning areas. In one case, Walker planned to close a DMV in Fort Atkinson, a liberal stronghold, while opening a new office 30 minutes away in the conservative district of Watertown.

Although new ID laws have been approved in seven states, the battle over such barriers to voting has been far more widespread. Since January, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina have all vetoed ID laws. Voters in Mississippi and Missouri are slated to consider ballot initiatives requiring voter IDs, and legislation is currently pending in Pennsylvania.

One of the most restrictive laws requiring voter IDs was passed in South Carolina. To obtain the free state ID now required to vote, the 178,000 South Carolinians who currently lack one must pay for a passport or a birth certificate. "It's the stepsister of the poll tax," says Browne-Dianis of the Advancement Project. Under the new law, many elderly black residents – who were born at home in the segregated South and never had a birth certificate – must now go to family court to prove their identity. Given that obtaining fake birth certificates is one of the country's biggest sources of fraud, the new law may actually prompt some voters to illegally procure a birth certificate in order to legally vote – all in the name of combating voter fraud.

For those voters who manage to get a legitimate birth certificate, obtaining a voter ID from the DMV is likely to be hellishly time-consuming. A reporter for the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, Tennessee – another state now mandating voter IDs – recently waited for four hours on a sweltering July day just to see a DMV clerk. The paper found that the longest lines occur in urban precincts, a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act, which bars states from erecting hurdles to voting in minority jurisdictions.

Disenfranchising Ex-Felons The most sweeping tactic in the GOP campaign against voting is simply to make it illegal for certain voters to cast ballots in any election. As the Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist restored the voting rights of 154,000 former prisoners who had been convicted of nonviolent crimes. But in March, after only 30 minutes of public debate, Gov. Rick Scott overturned his predecessor's decision, instantly disenfranchising 97,491 ex-felons and prohibiting another 1.1 million prisoners from being allowed to vote after serving their time.

"Why should we disenfranchise people forever once they've paid their price?" Bill Clinton asked during his speech in July. "Because most of them in Florida were African-Americans and Hispanics and would tend to vote for Democrats – that's why."

A similar reversal by a Republican governor recently took place in Iowa, where Gov. Terry Branstad overturned his predecessor's decision to restore voting rights to 100,000 ex-felons. The move threatens to return Iowa to the recent past, when more than five percent of all residents were denied the right to vote – including a third of the state's black residents. In addition, Florida and Iowa join Kentucky and Virginia as the only states that require all former felons to apply for the right to vote after finishing their prison sentences.

In response to the GOP campaign, voting-rights advocates are scrambling to blunt the impact of the new barriers to voting. The ACLU and other groups are challenging the new laws in court, and congressional Democrats have asked the Justice Department to use its authority to block or modify any of the measures that discriminate against minority voters. "The Justice Department should be much more aggressive in areas covered by the Voting Rights Act," says Rep. Lewis.

But beyond waging battles at the state and federal level, voting-rights advocates must figure out how to reframe the broader debate. The real problem in American elections is not the myth of voter fraud, but how few people actually participate. Even in 2008, which saw the highest voter turnout in four decades, fewer than two-thirds of eligible voters went to the polls. And according to a study by MIT, 9 million voters were denied an opportunity to cast ballots that year because of problems with their voter registration (13 percent), long lines at the polls (11 percent), uncertainty about the location of their polling place (nine percent) or lack of proper ID (seven percent).

Come Election Day 2012, such problems will only be exacerbated by the flood of new laws implemented by Republicans. Instead of a single fiasco in Florida, experts warn, there could be chaos in a dozen states as voters find themselves barred from the polls. "Our democracy is supposed to be a government by, of and for the people," says Browne-Dianis. "It doesn't matter how much money you have, what race you are or where you live in the country – we all get to have the same amount of power by going into the voting booth on Election Day. But those who passed these laws believe that only some people should participate. The restrictions undermine democracy by cutting off the voices of the people."

This story is from the September 15, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.