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How can we survive without the D and R?
mrdobalina
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
From the Washington Times:
The article goes on to say that the city is 2/3 black.
More:
Emphasis mine.
This strikes me as not only patently absurd, but insulting on a deep level to black voters. It's a well known fact that the Republican party has not done even remotely well with black voters for some time (ever?!), and "no one among more than a half-dozen city officials and local residents was able to recall a Republican winning office here. "
So how deep and how much effort should be spent in maintaining a strict political identity in local affairs? And why does the Justice Department feel it needs to override a local law enacted by a majority minority. In fact:
So this is a case of black residents enacting a law that they favor, only to be told that they are harmed by not knowing who is a Democrat.
Incredulous.
Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.
The article goes on to say that the city is 2/3 black.
More:
Justice Department spokesman Alejandro Miyar denied that the decision was intended to help the Democratic Party. He said the ruling was based on "what the facts are in a particular jurisdiction" and how it affects blacks' ability to elect the candidates they favor.
Emphasis mine.
This strikes me as not only patently absurd, but insulting on a deep level to black voters. It's a well known fact that the Republican party has not done even remotely well with black voters for some time (ever?!), and "no one among more than a half-dozen city officials and local residents was able to recall a Republican winning office here. "
So how deep and how much effort should be spent in maintaining a strict political identity in local affairs? And why does the Justice Department feel it needs to override a local law enacted by a majority minority. In fact:
In November's election - one in which "hope" emerged as a central theme - the city had uncommonly high voter turnout, with more than 11,000 of the city's 15,000 voters casting ballots. Kinston's blacks voted in greater numbers than whites.
Whites typically cast the majority of votes in Kinston's general elections. Kinston residents contributed to Barack Obama's victory as America's first black president and voted by a margin of nearly 2-to-1 to eliminate partisan elections in the city.
The measure appeared to have broad support among both white and black voters, as it won a majority in seven of the city's nine black-majority voting precincts and both of its white-majority precincts.
So this is a case of black residents enacting a law that they favor, only to be told that they are harmed by not knowing who is a Democrat.
Incredulous.
mrdobalina on
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That is seriously stupid and terribly racist.
edit: I see this comes from the same person who basically dismissed the Black Panther voter intimidation stuff.
Blance in the universe folks. Even's things out for the racist JP unwilling to marry interacial couples...
edit: From further in the article
If dudes don't show up to vote, their "candidate" (who they didn't vote for) doesn't win. That is what happens.
History. And this is hardly the first time DOJ has ruled against local communities. It's rare but not unusual, this would be the 3rd or 4th time this decade.
Is that supposed to actually pass for a good reason?
Yeah, I'm not seeing it.
It's hard to say that people deciding who to vote for on the merits of their ideas is a bad thing.
If your usual identifiers are removed in something as important as an election- how is that fair? We have some people who ONLY vote for the D or the R- removing those- without going the extra mile to help those people out- is pretty undue pressure on those voters.
Pressure? Like instead of looking for the D or R they'd have to figure out what he's really about? That's undue pressure?
It seems more to rest on the idea that people aren't going to know the merits of candidate's ideas or even what the ideas themselves are.
The local populace obviously feels that it's fair.
My guess would be that they want the elections to be about their local issues and local solutions and to remove national party affiliation from the process, so candidates can't automatically win based on their affiliation.
That sounds to me like progress.
Anecdote: Up until the elections last year, I lived in a neighborhood that was mostly black. I went to my local caucus and saw about 80% white people. Same thing at the voting booth in November. Just because a voting district is majority black doesn't mean that a majority of people who actually show up to vote are.
Of course, that doesn't excuse the overturning of something voted into law.
Nor does it warrant legislating against voter apathy.
I'm in favor of compulsory voting, even if there is no real enforcement.
It kind of does, depending on the particulars. There's a reason that certain towns are listed as needing DOJ approval in order to change their voting laws. You can certainly argue that this community doesn't seem to warrant being on the watch list anymore and that this specific decision is wrongheaded, but in general it doesn't seem like an unwarranted capability.
4,977 for
2,819 against
That's a total of 7700+ for this issue. Is there anyone better at internets that can link the full election results. Im curious what % of the electorate undervoted this line.
Only the practical truth is that if you need a cue as to the party affiliation of the candidate on the actual ballot then odds are overwhelming that you don't know a goddamned thing about their ideas in the first place.
There is a reason that we have a party structure in our politics. Mostly it's because parties align behind principles, and allow for voters to make more informed choices than they would otherwise. Trying to eliminate party designations on ballots is an old old game that's been played by both sides in many states and always by whatever political party is in the minority. That the Washington Times is pretending as though this has some basis in principle or is a new development betrays either their ignorance or their bias or, likely, both.
Would they whine, for instance, that white people in Texas or Georgia or South Carolina are condescended to by that all-important (R) next to the names on the ballot?
I'm concerned that the DOJ feels compelled to tell a town that has its shit together that it better get its shit not-together in order to be legally compliant.
I'm kind of curious as to how Nebraska's 'new' system has worked out. I rather like the unicameral idea for state politics in general. Having them be non-partisan elections is just kinda meh, but I've never really seen how that's impacted the setup and if it has resulted in better governance or just the same shit under a different name.
I'm confused by this. Are you suggesting that the only useful metric in order to determine whether or not a city's voting laws are discriminatory are whether or not they permit partisanship in local elections?
Erring on the side of "not rigging elections against black folks" in North Carolina is a good thing. Giving over the conduct of elections to the "local populace" has been nothing but trouble South of the Mason-Dixon line for centuries now.
I don't know much about it. Unicameralism seems like a good development. Making elections nonpartisan would seem to require a very strong local civic ethic and probably a very settled population. I'm not sure it's really geared well to modern America outside of, say, Nebraska and Maine.
How would removing party affiliations reduce this or really do much of anything beneficial, really?
With a population as willfully ignorant and heterogenous as ours is, and a political system that rewards graft and conflict-of-interest as strongly as ours does, party affiliation and having two well-defined and relatively well-understood parties is the only thing that is keeping us from being fucking Greece.
I was responding more to the comment above that the town has its shit together. It was a very broad generalization.
Except that this was a majority black town, with a majority of black voters during this election that is currently run completely by Democrats.
edit: It also presupposes that Blacks will exclusively vote Democrat in perpetuity, which is racist to suggest.
The unicam seems to function a lot better than what I've seen in my home state (Minnesota) and Minnesota doesn't even have a particularly disfunctional state government. Most of the friction in Nebraska that I've seen comes from the conflicts between rural senators (everyone is a senator in the unicam) and senators from Lincoln/Omaha, particularly since one group is growing and the other shrinking. Other than Ernie Chambers, who done got termed out, most Nebraska senators aren't going to be terribly extreme, so that probably makes nonpartisan elections less polarizing. I mean, we sent both Nelson and Hagel to DC.
Having become pretty familiar with the unicam, I don't really see a compelling reason to have dual legislative houses in any small to moderate sized state. Large states may benefit from the checks and balances provided by two houses, but even then I'm not really convinced.
Well, it supposes that they will vote in the majority for Democrats. I don't think that's racist to suggest, at least until party dynamics change a whole lot.
So the DOJ regulates the conduct of elections to the degree that they won't let a locality unintentionally destroy the integrity of their elections in a region especially known for doing this? Gosh it's tyranny.
Also, I'm not sure what your definition of "racism" is but it seems to be different from mine.
Yes let's start our effort to revolutionize party dynamics in a black town in South Carolina. Surely allowing small-town Southern black Folks to be tricked into voting Republican is the lynchpin that will revolutionize the civic dynamic in this country.
This is... a really bad understanding of US politics. The most important people politically right now are moderate Democratic Senators. In terms of the populace, it's those disillusioned with both parties for whatever reason. The fringe whackos are basically guaranteed votes for whichever fringe and only have power if they're allowed to (hi Republicans!). Fortunately, this is a self correcting problem as the extreme wings of the two parties don't appeal at all to the people who hate both parties and will end up either not showing up or voting for the lesser of two evils.
It certainly is racist because it implies that they are incapable of being elected to public office even though they are the majority.
That's a mighty cynical viewpoint. If a locality can overcome party dynamics and institutionalized racial attitudes of pre-determined voting patterns, why stop it?
The History of the United States would like to have a word with you. Unless you're of the opinion that the problems that caused the creation of the Voting Rights Act are gone?