Voter Supression

Aside from the way the Electoral College skews the "will of the people", most of us, until recently, had a reasonable expectation that our votes would be counted. This reasonable expectation fed the assumption that the way to get things done the way you wanted them done was to elect people who held the same views as you did. 

Ha! How naïve.  

Unless you've been living under the metaphorical rock you know that there has been an upsurge in efforts to ensure that your vote doesn't count, or to ensure that you just don't get to vote at all. One of the more insidious, yet perfectly legal, vote rigging strategies is gerrymandering. This is a method of drawing Congressional and other political boundaries so that one party remains in power, even when they receive a minority of votes. There are many examples of this, one local example is how the County Board district lines were redrawn after the 2010 census. At one time the districts resembled jagged pie slices. Each district included a portion of Lincoln, which is in the center of Lancaster County, as well as a slice of small town and farming parts of the county. When the district boundaries were changed, most of Lincoln, which voted primarily for Democrats, was contained within one district while the other six were made up of primarily small town and rural areas, where the people tended to vote for Republicans. The result was a 6-1 Republican-Democrat split, where previously it might be 4-3 or 5-2. You can see the results of this most clearly in Midwest states with populous urban areas. The majority vote in Democrats to statewide offices while the gerrymandered legislature remains majority Republican. 

In several of these states the Republican legislature, immediately after a Democrat was elected as Governor or other statewide office voted to restrict or limit the Democrat's powers. In one state, the limitation in the Secretary of State's authority would  expire at the end of her term, presumably so that a Republican successor would have all of the former power. 

Republican-dominated states, in the wake of the Big Lie of a stolen election, have, in the dubious name of election integrity, imposed restrictions, roadblocks and hurdles to make it more difficult to register to vote, or even to get to the polls. They have set up a multitude of new rules expanding the ways that ballots can be thrown out, with most of the restrictions unsurprisingly affecting areas that historically vote for Democrats. Non-partisan local election officials in some states can be overruled by the legislature, which in some cases has the authority to declare an election invalid. And to rub salt in the wound, the Supreme Court just ruled that there is nothing unconstitutional about these laws. Of course it was a 6-3 decision - along ideological lines. Surprise! (It didn't have to be that way, but no, we couldn't bring ourselves to elect the email lady). And the Voting Rights Act 2.0 has been smothered in its crib by the Republicans and the moderate Democrats in the Senate. Surprise! 

Our Democracy is in jeopardy (you reply that "we're a republic, not a democracy and I will slap you through the screen!) - and it's getting more and more difficult to overcome this undemocratic takeover by the minority. You may not like the Democratic Party platform - you may think it's socialistic, or any other Fox News generated bogeyman, but they at least are trying to implement their programs by getting the most votes! They are trying to enact change by the will of the majority, not in spite of it.