freedom

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Cheaters!

When I first read about gerrymandering in eleventh grade U.S. History, my sense of injustice was inflamed.  What could this be called but “cheating,” pretending to give everyone a vote, but fixing the outcome? Mr. Smith calmed me down by explaining the practice had been controlled in the present era, which would have been the 1960’s.

Yet in the past year the re-drawing of voting districts for political advantage has again emerged under the guise of representing shifting populations following the 2010 census.  At the end of the current election cycle we can see the skullduggery active again: Republicans dominate state and Congressional elections despite being a distinct minority in the popular vote.

The gerrymandering of voting districts is a subtle form of voter fraud. The party currently in power in each state gets to draw the lines of the voting districts, pushing voters into districts that will be lopsided for one party, so that more of the other districts can be commanded by the other party. In a February 2 article in the N.Y. Times Sam Wang reported how he used statistical probability to show how re-drawn districts compared to those created by an unbiased computer simulation of the voting map. He particularly noticed gerrymandering in swing states controlled by Republican legislatures:

Confounding conventional wisdom, partisan redistricting is not symmetrical between the political parties. By my seat-discrepancy criterion, 10 states are out of whack: the five I have mentioned, plus Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Arizona was redistricted by an independent commission, Texas was a combination of Republican and federal court efforts, and Illinois was controlled by Democrats. Republicans designed the other seven maps. Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.

Wang accused the state legislatures of changing the distribution of Republican voters in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In North Carolina Republicans changed a 7-6 disadvantage to a 9-4 advantage. In other words they gained three seats in the legislature merely by changing the district boundaries.

CHEATERS! my high school id cried out. While savvy politicians smiled and shook their heads, my heart churned with indignation. How can this be anything but manipulation of an ethical voting system, one that promises government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”? Why should cheaters prevail?

Yet many politicians of the Republican persuasion believe if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying,

The N.Y. Times (February 5) documented how inequities in the voting process are achieved in outrageously long waits to vote and overly complex ballots, which slow the voting process to a crawl.  A study by the Orlando Sentinel and an Ohio State professor estimated that 200,000 Floridians were denied their right to vote by the length of lines at the polls.  The Florida legislature had previously reduced the days for early voting from fourteen to eight, and the ballot was a jungle of initiatives that would make a lawyer blink.  No one can tell me that this was not a premeditated strategy to keep less privileged voters from exercising their Constitutional rights. Florida’s problems with voter irregularities have been documented in 2000 and 2008, as well as in the past election year.

In contrast the Times article cited California as a paragon of enabling voting with smaller voting districts resulting in average wait times of six minutes. Florida’s average wait was 45 minutes.  Is it a coincidence that California has a  Democratic legislature, while Florida, a perennial swing state, has a Republican legislature? Even suffering the humiliation of questionable election practices in the 2000 presidential election has not humbled the Florida legislature to facilitate voting, because it is not in the political interests of Republicans to encourage voting.

This is not shrewd strategy, it is unethical voter suppression.  Of all the political shenanigans that tamper with fairness and equity, this is the most despicable, because it threatens a fundamental right of American citizens.  It approaches the manipulative practices of pseudo-democratic nations, which record landslides of 90% or more for the party in power.  Republicans supporting such schemes should blush with embarrassment when they speak of defending the U.S. Constitution and our precious freedoms.

Now I understand why Republicans were so astonished at losing the Presidential election, plus a handful of Congressional seats. They had rigged the election! They had predetermined its outcome!

Ah, but the Democrats registered and drove their supporters to the polls, winning an election by increasing voter registration and participation, of all things. Justice smiled in Florida, where President Obama won a close tally of votes, but it could have easily gone the other way. The ballot and the voting lines were mercilessly long.

Instead of improving their political appeal, Republicans tossed us a banana peel, and we slipped headlong into making them the majority party wherever representatives are elected by red-tainted voting districts and where voting regulations favor the shrewd and privileged.

Is politics so grimy that we can’t call “Cheater!” anymore? Is no one else outraged that one party consistently undermines democracy by scheming so only their kind gets to vote or gets represented? Is this not the most un-American scheme allowed by law?

Don’t tell me I’m a sore loser. My guys won, despite Republican dirty tricks. So there, CHEATERS!

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Rights and Wrongs

Rights are not sacred. They are precious, but they are also insidious, as the week’s events will testify. The right to free speech can lead to indoctrination or hate speech. The right to privacy can lead to the elimination of human life. The right to bear arms can lead to carnage.  Rights can be perverted to wrongs.

Indignation comes naturally to our lips, because we think our rights are sacred. We are obsessed with defending them to the detriment of those they harm and offend.   We don’t assume a point of view, we establish it. We don’t contend with the opposition, we batter it.  We don’t elect representatives, we purchase them and seal their allegiance.

The problem is, it is all based on good intentions.  We have every right to be proud of our democracy, our freedom to speak and assemble, and our right to arm ourselves. We are a model for emerging democracies, not to copy, but to study and learn from. We have struggled to clarify these rights over years of elections and judicial decisions, and we have come a long way.

But we are also arrogant in our rights, and it takes unspeakable tragedy to shake us loose from them.  This is not to make us responsible for the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Only one man can be faulted for that. But we have a problem with rights like the Gollum has with its “preciousss” ring.  We don’t respect our rights, we enshrine them.

To this date, December 18, 2012, no one has tried to make political fodder of the Newtown tragedy. It proves we have restraint and a sense of the sacred.  It proves we can make a moral treaty.

Someone will shortly violate that treaty, because someone always does.  When that happens, we should remember our rights, especially free speech, but we should also remember our wrongs: arrogance, privilege,  and presumption.  We should not tolerate political gamesmanship in the face of tragedy or indulge those with an ax to grind.

We may have inalienable rights, but they are not incorruptible.