Electoral Shenanigans

We are careening down the highway to minority rule. It's not a good look for democracy.

Why, in the longed for peace and quiet of an off-year, would I disturb that peace and talk about elections? Because it is in these off-years, while we’re exhausted from the perpetual campaigning, that the nefarious work of the anti-majoritarians is done.

They know there are only two ways to win elections. One is to get the most votes. The other is to restrict voting to favor your party. Having given up on the former, Republicans concentrate on the latter.

Despite a complete and total lack of evidence that voter fraud exists at anything like the scale needed to affect election results, Republican state legislatures, recognizing that a big turnout is hazardous to their gerrymandered health, have passed a plethora of laws restricting mail-in balloting and drop-box collections for early voters, as well as early voting itself, and absentee ballots—shockingly, including deployed active military, once a staple of Republican support. Willis Gordon, a Navy vet and NAACP official in Ohio wondered, “What kind of society do we call ourselves if we are disenfranchising people from the rights that they are over there protecting?”

We need to go back in time a bit to put the pieces together. A good place to land is in 1979, with the Heritage Foundation founder, Paul Weyrich, a religious conservative who partnered with the reverend Jerry Falwell to create “The Moral Majority.” He knew even then that our premise was true: more voters mean problems for Republicans. He famously said the quiet thing out loud: “I don’t want everybody to vote, and neither should you.”

Recognizing that their policies, like defanging the EPA, lowering taxes on the wealthiest, and restricting rights for entire communities like LGBTQ and women, were nonstarters nationally, they needed a way to ensure control of state legislatures. This they accomplished by pulling out a trick created by Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry in 1812, it’s called the “gerrymander.” The term refers to corruptly drawing districts to unfairly favor certain candidates.

To be clear, historically, Democrats gerrymander too, but to suggest they do it to the degree, or with the new-found surgical precision and zeal, of Republicans, is a false equivalence.

It went slowly at first, but over time, with the help of increasingly high-powered computers and software, they redrew state and federal legislative districts, “cracking and packing” them without regard for the social, economic, or geographical continuity that existed before things got so contentious. They districts they created in order to win their state’s legislatures look like tortured Rorschach tests. The original one in 1812 went from a square shape to something resembling a malformed salamander, hence the term, gerrymander. Thanks, Gerry.

Today, more than at any time in the past, representatives are picking their voters instead of voters picking their representatives.

As a corrective intended to fight partisan gerrymanders, nine states, including California, Colorado, and Michigan, have taken the task away from their legislatures, establishing completely independent redistricting commissions, while another twenty or so play around the edges with various compositions of independents, politicians, electeds, and party hacks.

As damaging to majority-rules democracy as partisan redistricting and restricting the vote are, Weyrich also invented a way to circumvent Congress, by creating uniform laws at the state level. He called it ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Far from the glare of the spotlight, policy wonks quietly write laws that favor ALEC’s point of view, then syndicate them—word-for-word—to multiple states. Their goals include hamstringing regulatory agencies, chipping away at women’s reproductive rights, weakening labor unions, and of course, restricting the right to vote.

This is, to a great extent, a symptom of the way partisan media has driven us all into tribal silos. As John Dick, CEO of the respected consumer research firm, Civic Science, says, “We’re all creatures of our tribes.

Except me. 

At least that’s what I’d like to believe, but nope. Humans have always been pack animals. Biologically, it was a function of survival – the larger and stronger my pack, the safer I’ll be.

“But social media has taught us that our need to belong is more nuanced. Having a worldwide web at my disposal allows me to find people like me. A ‘block’ button allows me to refine my pack until it’s the closest reflection of how I see myself.

“The size of my pack matters less than its uniformity. There are certainly negative, even hideous, byproducts of this phenomenon. Social media’s ability to connect people with thousands of others who share their likes and beliefs – however outlying or depraved they might be – gives even the most extreme among us an outsized sense of normalization. See: ‘Silent Majority.’

“And as my tribe becomes more configured to my liking (nearly half of all U.S. adults have unfriended someone because of their political views), I define myself increasingly by what I’m NOT. Being anti-MAGA or anti-Woke is as central to our identity, perhaps more so, than anything we are for.”

So we align in our packs, and use our uniquely human ingenuity to get our way, the majority be damned.

©2023 Jon Sinton