I'm in VA, we don't have any other primary races outside of the Senate and the House or Representatives where I'm at. State stuff is odd years and I live in a shitty locality that doesn't do elections in the fall, but the spring and it's pretty much for anti-democratic reasons.
VA's election procedures are byzantine as fuck (basically an election every year?) and I feel like that really needs to be cleaned up as part of election reform. Make it as easy as possible to vote in as many races as much as possible.
Annual elections make more sense to me than basically whenever.
So it is election day here, but from checking the website it seems like the only thing that would be on the ballot would be the Republican primary for US Senate. So I should be able to pretty safely ignore this one, right? There's no way I'm voting for any of the three people on the ballot come November, and the Democratic primary for US Senate is uncontested (because incumbent) while the Republican primary for US House is uncontested (because incumbent) and the Democratic primary for US House is . . . selecting a candidate through a method other than a primary? I have no idea what is going on with that one, honestly.
Vote the leftmost you can at every chance you can.
Otherwise you end up with extremely insular parties that only represent the most hardcore of their voters who WILL vote every chance they have.
Remember, no matter what you think of them, someone will win every election, so you may as well have your say in it.
Booker's suing to keep Louisville's polling place open because of a traffic jam near the location during rush hour. The major way Kentucky disenfranchises people is closing the polls at 6 PM. Campaign is asking for 9 PM instead.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Because of the data load and complexity added, a selection list for street is far HARDER to create than just a text box. USPS has a free online tool that's very script friendly (and there's free scripts with no license so you don't even need to script it yourself) to authenticate addresses, which even catches oddball things like North Center vs West Center and figures out the second half of the zip code that nobody remembers for themselves. In my area where a bunch of zip codes changed in the early 00's it can even tell if you're using an old one and correct you. It's an impressive system and it's fucking free.
That doesn't mean it's not incompetence necessarily. I've seen people do 2 hours of work to avoid doing 30 minutes of their job. But it does put some big arrows at malice.
I assume that elderly voters would find the system even harder to use, so are Republicans gaining anything?
The elderly are already registered to vote and they will not be purged from the voter rolls (thus requiring re-registration) if they live in white-majority areas.
I assume that elderly voters would find the system even harder to use, so are Republicans gaining anything?
I mean, I think that old republican voters aren't getting registered for the first time + have never been culled from the voting records for inexplicable reasons
"and the morning stars I have seen
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
I assume that elderly voters would find the system even harder to use, so are Republicans gaining anything?
The elderly are already registered to vote and they will not be purged from the voter rolls (thus requiring re-registration) if they live in white-majority areas.
I can see an attrition problem happening after a few such elections.
I assume that elderly voters would find the system even harder to use, so are Republicans gaining anything?
The elderly are already registered to vote and they will not be purged from the voter rolls (thus requiring re-registration) if they live in white-majority areas.
I can see an attrition problem happening after a few such elections.
Yeah the republican base is shrinking, hence why they make voting for everyone else hard as shit
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
For a current full list of known Trumpists who vote by mail (while railing against vote by mail as being fraudulent, and usually voting by mail in fraudulent ways):
Members of Team Trump who have voted by mail in recent years:
Donald Trump
William Barr
Mike Pence
Kayleigh McEnany
Brad Parscale
Ivanka Trump
Melania Trump
Alex Azar
Ronna McDaniel
Kellyanne Conway
Jared Kushner
Kyle Griffin is a senior producer at MSNBC
I'm sure the list is longer. Hypocrisy is a way of life with them.
"There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." - Frank Wilhoit
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Because of the data load and complexity added, a selection list for street is far HARDER to create than just a text box. USPS has a free online tool that's very script friendly (and there's free scripts with no license so you don't even need to script it yourself) to authenticate addresses, which even catches oddball things like North Center vs West Center and figures out the second half of the zip code that nobody remembers for themselves. In my area where a bunch of zip codes changed in the early 00's it can even tell if you're using an old one and correct you. It's an impressive system and it's fucking free.
That doesn't mean it's not incompetence necessarily. I've seen people do 2 hours of work to avoid doing 30 minutes of their job. But it does put some big arrows at malice.
I've seen similarly impenetrable systems used for various local and municipal taxes I've had to pay; like, drop down selections for zones and counties without any built in lookup tools at all, not even bad ones--wtf numbered school zone out of 15 is my address under? I guess I have to google it? I recall Pittsburgh being particularly egregious in going through a third-party contractor, Jordan Tax Service, whose weird communications led me and many others to wonder if they were literally scammers (best response to this question: "It’s real - no scammer would think they could fool anyone with such a terrible website"). And those are systems where the people designing them absolutely do not want to suppress responses. No local government wants people to just not pay their $20 worth of weird fees because it's too annoying. Yet that ends up happening anyway, because they're bad at what they do. Similarly to how the infamous butterfly ballot which cost Al Gore the 2000 election was designed by a democratic Florida election official who just happened to be really bad at ballots.
It's pretty clear that the Republican party leadership doesn't want to make it easier to vote, but without a smoking gun, in any individual instance of shitty hard to use systems like this it is extremely hard to rule out incompetence as the driving factor. There is so, so much incompetence in locally produced government service platforms.
Of course, the fact that incompetence is such an issue is at least partly a product of leaving voting local, and hence having thousands of under resourced local officials reduplicate each other's work--often incompetently. It seems to me like it would be a worthwhile reform to have actually well-resourced federal agencies develop best practice systems and roll them out for free to local officials. Idk if that's part of the big D bill; I know it does at least include a fair amount of federal financing, yeah?
Because of the data load and complexity added, a selection list for street is far HARDER to create than just a text box. USPS has a free online tool that's very script friendly (and there's free scripts with no license so you don't even need to script it yourself) to authenticate addresses, which even catches oddball things like North Center vs West Center and figures out the second half of the zip code that nobody remembers for themselves. In my area where a bunch of zip codes changed in the early 00's it can even tell if you're using an old one and correct you. It's an impressive system and it's fucking free.
That doesn't mean it's not incompetence necessarily. I've seen people do 2 hours of work to avoid doing 30 minutes of their job. But it does put some big arrows at malice.
I've seen similarly impenetrable systems used for various local and municipal taxes I've had to pay; like, drop down selections for zones and counties without any built in lookup tools at all, not even bad ones--wtf numbered school zone out of 15 is my address under? I guess I have to google it? I recall Pittsburgh being particularly egregious in going through a third-party contractor, Jordan Tax Service, whose weird communications led me and many others to wonder if they were literally scammers (best response to this question: "It’s real - no scammer would think they could fool anyone with such a terrible website"). And those are systems where the people designing them absolutely do not want to suppress responses. No local government wants people to just not pay their $20 worth of weird fees because it's too annoying. Yet that ends up happening anyway, because they're bad at what they do. Similarly to how the infamous butterfly ballot which cost Al Gore the 2000 election was designed by a democratic Florida election official who just happened to be really bad at ballots.
It's pretty clear that the Republican party leadership doesn't want to make it easier to vote, but without a smoking gun, in any individual instance of shitty hard to use systems like this it is extremely hard to rule out incompetence as the driving factor. There is so, so much incompetence in locally produced government service platforms.
Of course, the fact that incompetence is such an issue is at least partly a product of leaving voting local, and hence having thousands of under resourced local officials reduplicate each other's work--often incompetently. It seems to me like it would be a worthwhile reform to have actually well-resourced federal agencies develop best practice systems and roll them out for free to local officials. Idk if that's part of the big D bill; I know it does at least include a fair amount of federal financing, yeah?
Yes, a lot of local online systems are crap because the people in charge of them (say your treasurers and auditors or clerks of xyz, etc) pay their relatives or family friends to build them
States should have statutes about how they select contractors for this though
And I give Georgia, and Brian Kemp, ZERO benefit of the doubt here
Captain Inertia on
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Because of the data load and complexity added, a selection list for street is far HARDER to create than just a text box. USPS has a free online tool that's very script friendly (and there's free scripts with no license so you don't even need to script it yourself) to authenticate addresses, which even catches oddball things like North Center vs West Center and figures out the second half of the zip code that nobody remembers for themselves. In my area where a bunch of zip codes changed in the early 00's it can even tell if you're using an old one and correct you. It's an impressive system and it's fucking free.
That doesn't mean it's not incompetence necessarily. I've seen people do 2 hours of work to avoid doing 30 minutes of their job. But it does put some big arrows at malice.
I've seen similarly impenetrable systems used for various local and municipal taxes I've had to pay; like, drop down selections for zones and counties without any built in lookup tools at all, not even bad ones--wtf numbered school zone out of 15 is my address under? I guess I have to google it? I recall Pittsburgh being particularly egregious in going through a third-party contractor, Jordan Tax Service, whose weird communications led me and many others to wonder if they were literally scammers (best response to this question: "It’s real - no scammer would think they could fool anyone with such a terrible website"). And those are systems where the people designing them absolutely do not want to suppress responses. No local government wants people to just not pay their $20 worth of weird fees because it's too annoying. Yet that ends up happening anyway, because they're bad at what they do. Similarly to how the infamous butterfly ballot which cost Al Gore the 2000 election was designed by a democratic Florida election official who just happened to be really bad at ballots.
It's pretty clear that the Republican party leadership doesn't want to make it easier to vote, but without a smoking gun, in any individual instance of shitty hard to use systems like this it is extremely hard to rule out incompetence as the driving factor. There is so, so much incompetence in locally produced government service platforms.
Of course, the fact that incompetence is such an issue is at least partly a product of leaving voting local, and hence having thousands of under resourced local officials reduplicate each other's work--often incompetently. It seems to me like it would be a worthwhile reform to have actually well-resourced federal agencies develop best practice systems and roll them out for free to local officials. Idk if that's part of the big D bill; I know it does at least include a fair amount of federal financing, yeah?
Yes, a lot of local online systems are crap because the people in charge of them (say your treasurers and auditors or clerks of xyz, etc) pay their relatives or family friends to build them
States should have statutes about how they select contractors for this though
And I give Georgia, and Brian Kemp, ZERO benefit of the doubt here
I think the framing of "the benefit of the doubt" is somewhat unhelpful; it implies that unless you believe that this website is an attempt at voter suppression, you are benefiting Brian Kemp somehow (most of us do not want to benefit Brian Kemp).
I would more just frame it as a point about evidence. In general, a piece of evidence supports a hypothesis insofar as that hypothesis strongly predicts the evidence and other hypotheses don't. It's true that voter suppression efforts predict bad websites, but so does the already robust and well-confirmed claim that local governments produce shitty web systems. So the individual piece of evidence that consists in finding a shitty web system just doesn't tell you that much.
Granted, the state of Georgia has more resources and fewer excuses than a random municipality; so even if it doesn't tell you that much, it can still be something.
Having used a bunch of other state-level websites in Georgia, this is not that surprising. Graft + lowest bidder means you end up with shitty work. Now that there's publicity about it, it will probably get updated.
Because of the data load and complexity added, a selection list for street is far HARDER to create than just a text box. USPS has a free online tool that's very script friendly (and there's free scripts with no license so you don't even need to script it yourself) to authenticate addresses, which even catches oddball things like North Center vs West Center and figures out the second half of the zip code that nobody remembers for themselves. In my area where a bunch of zip codes changed in the early 00's it can even tell if you're using an old one and correct you. It's an impressive system and it's fucking free.
That doesn't mean it's not incompetence necessarily. I've seen people do 2 hours of work to avoid doing 30 minutes of their job. But it does put some big arrows at malice.
I've seen similarly impenetrable systems used for various local and municipal taxes I've had to pay; like, drop down selections for zones and counties without any built in lookup tools at all, not even bad ones--wtf numbered school zone out of 15 is my address under? I guess I have to google it? I recall Pittsburgh being particularly egregious in going through a third-party contractor, Jordan Tax Service, whose weird communications led me and many others to wonder if they were literally scammers (best response to this question: "It’s real - no scammer would think they could fool anyone with such a terrible website"). And those are systems where the people designing them absolutely do not want to suppress responses. No local government wants people to just not pay their $20 worth of weird fees because it's too annoying. Yet that ends up happening anyway, because they're bad at what they do. Similarly to how the infamous butterfly ballot which cost Al Gore the 2000 election was designed by a democratic Florida election official who just happened to be really bad at ballots.
It's pretty clear that the Republican party leadership doesn't want to make it easier to vote, but without a smoking gun, in any individual instance of shitty hard to use systems like this it is extremely hard to rule out incompetence as the driving factor. There is so, so much incompetence in locally produced government service platforms.
Of course, the fact that incompetence is such an issue is at least partly a product of leaving voting local, and hence having thousands of under resourced local officials reduplicate each other's work--often incompetently. It seems to me like it would be a worthwhile reform to have actually well-resourced federal agencies develop best practice systems and roll them out for free to local officials. Idk if that's part of the big D bill; I know it does at least include a fair amount of federal financing, yeah?
Yes, a lot of local online systems are crap because the people in charge of them (say your treasurers and auditors or clerks of xyz, etc) pay their relatives or family friends to build them
States should have statutes about how they select contractors for this though
And I give Georgia, and Brian Kemp, ZERO benefit of the doubt here
I think the framing of "the benefit of the doubt" is somewhat unhelpful; it implies that unless you believe that this website is an attempt at voter suppression, you are benefiting Brian Kemp somehow (most of us do not want to benefit Brian Kemp).
I would more just frame it as a point about evidence. In general, a piece of evidence supports a hypothesis insofar as that hypothesis strongly predicts the evidence and other hypotheses don't. It's true that voter suppression efforts predict bad websites, but so does the already robust and well-confirmed claim that local governments produce shitty web systems. So the individual piece of evidence that consists in finding a shitty web system just doesn't tell you that much.
Granted, the state of Georgia has more resources and fewer excuses than a random municipality; so even if it doesn't tell you that much, it can still be something.
Fair I was using the idiom without much thought
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Having used a bunch of other state-level websites in Georgia, this is not that surprising. Graft + lowest bidder means you end up with shitty work. Now that there's publicity about it, it will probably get updated.
That's not shitty work. That's a deliberate choice to make the website harder to use.
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Hi I'm Vee!Formerly VH; She/Her; Is an E X P E R I E N C ERegistered Userregular
As someone who lives in Kentucky and is pretty familiar with the political situation here, and additionally as someone who was trying to find a way to explain all this concisely in a forum post and ended up giving up, I heartily endorse this blog post.
House is currently voting to approve DC statehood. They have the votes, straight party line except Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who represents the reddest district with a Democratic member.
Obviously McConnell would never allow two automatically Democratic Senators. But next time Dems have the House, Senate, and the presidency, that's a thing that will happen. (presuming they don't decide to handcuff themselves with the filibuster)
Also will incidentally change the name of DC to the "Douglass Commonwealth" in honor of Frederick.
EDIT: 232-180. 19 non-voting GOPers, Amash a no vote. For I'm sure "constitutionally principled" reasons that have nothing to do with race.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I think expecting the Dems to eliminate the filibuster is wishful thinking. I also don't trust Biden to sign off on anything that would upset the Republicans to much.
I think expecting the Dems to eliminate the filibuster is wishful thinking. I also don't trust Biden to sign off on anything that would upset the Republicans to much.
I think expecting the Dems to eliminate the filibuster is wishful thinking. I also don't trust Biden to sign off on anything that would upset the Republicans to much.
Eliminating the filibuster is both a good idea on its face and also a politically expedient way for Senate Dems to gain a lot of power both within and without the party.
I think people are used to just predicting that the worst idea will happen and you know fair, but I don't think I can see a reason why the Senate would not eliminate the filibuster if they get a trifecta. People like Warren/Markey/Sanders will want it eliminated to advance a more progressive governing agenda, and people like Manchin will want it eliminated so that they can leverage their vote for more concessions. No one has interests that are served by being a less important person.
Also I don't understand why you would expect Biden to work to avoid upsetting Republicans, having gained the office.
His campaign trail rhetoric has been pretty standard "we're all... in this together really, aren't we?" pablum, but he's not going to waste time vetoing popular shit in office.
eh, it remains unclear that that's what Puerto Ricans actually want
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Biden literally said he'd veto Medicare for All. That is the message he's actively handing out ot the public. He's also literally talked about not wanting Democrats to win too many seats because no party should have too much power.
His pro-Republican comments extend a lot farther than "We're all in this together" but this isn't the thread for that.
Undead Scottsman on
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Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
I think expecting the Dems to eliminate the filibuster is wishful thinking. I also don't trust Biden to sign off on anything that would upset the Republicans to much.
I love the gop whining about if it was a state it would have as much electoral power as some other states. Ignoring the fact that DC has population bigger than I think 3 states and almost as much as alaska and a couple others.
eh, it remains unclear that that's what Puerto Ricans actually want
I agree it probably should be a state but it is a LOT less clear if that is what they want. DC WANTS to be a state so that should be the one that gets the nod first.
Should be a single bill guaranteeing statehood or otherwise equal status/representation to every remaining permanent territory of the US. I won't say no to piecemeal deals to elevate them one at a time, but each such deal just solidifies the wrongs the other territories and their people have suffered by their half-ass status.
eh, it remains unclear that that's what Puerto Ricans actually want
I agree it probably should be a state but it is a LOT less clear if that is what they want. DC WANTS to be a state so that should be the one that gets the nod first.
The last four years may have changed things but they've had multiple refferendums demanding statehood. The 2017 one was boycotted because of Trump, and it's unclear what they may do under a new president.
What about a bill that "preloads" statehood? Basically saying if, say, PR ever votes for statehood, it just happens, becuase the US half of that process has already been done. That way if a territory doesn't want to be a state, they don't become one, but the moment they do, they don't have to wait around for Congress to push it through.
I thought there was a specific constitutional process for admitting states but nope!
Just "New states may be admitted by the congress into this union".
So yeah I guess anything goes and you could probably do a "these territories will become states as soon as they vote for it" law.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Posts
Annual elections make more sense to me than basically whenever.
Otherwise you end up with extremely insular parties that only represent the most hardcore of their voters who WILL vote every chance they have.
Remember, no matter what you think of them, someone will win every election, so you may as well have your say in it.
MWO: Adamski
This is some of the dumbest shit I've seen.
Working as intended.
What, you think that kind of incompetence comes naturally? *pause* Yeah, OK, maybe.
But the incompetence definitely is cultivated, even if it's not directly intentional.
Cause it's our favorite game regarding Republican governance. ""Incompetence, Corruption, or Evil?".
In this case, I'm putting my money down on the last two, with the first being an excuse.
That doesn't mean it's not incompetence necessarily. I've seen people do 2 hours of work to avoid doing 30 minutes of their job. But it does put some big arrows at malice.
The elderly are already registered to vote and they will not be purged from the voter rolls (thus requiring re-registration) if they live in white-majority areas.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I mean, I think that old republican voters aren't getting registered for the first time + have never been culled from the voting records for inexplicable reasons
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
I can see an attrition problem happening after a few such elections.
Yeah the republican base is shrinking, hence why they make voting for everyone else hard as shit
Kyle Griffin is a senior producer at MSNBC
I'm sure the list is longer. Hypocrisy is a way of life with them.
"There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." - Frank Wilhoit
I've seen similarly impenetrable systems used for various local and municipal taxes I've had to pay; like, drop down selections for zones and counties without any built in lookup tools at all, not even bad ones--wtf numbered school zone out of 15 is my address under? I guess I have to google it? I recall Pittsburgh being particularly egregious in going through a third-party contractor, Jordan Tax Service, whose weird communications led me and many others to wonder if they were literally scammers (best response to this question: "It’s real - no scammer would think they could fool anyone with such a terrible website"). And those are systems where the people designing them absolutely do not want to suppress responses. No local government wants people to just not pay their $20 worth of weird fees because it's too annoying. Yet that ends up happening anyway, because they're bad at what they do. Similarly to how the infamous butterfly ballot which cost Al Gore the 2000 election was designed by a democratic Florida election official who just happened to be really bad at ballots.
It's pretty clear that the Republican party leadership doesn't want to make it easier to vote, but without a smoking gun, in any individual instance of shitty hard to use systems like this it is extremely hard to rule out incompetence as the driving factor. There is so, so much incompetence in locally produced government service platforms.
Of course, the fact that incompetence is such an issue is at least partly a product of leaving voting local, and hence having thousands of under resourced local officials reduplicate each other's work--often incompetently. It seems to me like it would be a worthwhile reform to have actually well-resourced federal agencies develop best practice systems and roll them out for free to local officials. Idk if that's part of the big D bill; I know it does at least include a fair amount of federal financing, yeah?
Yes, a lot of local online systems are crap because the people in charge of them (say your treasurers and auditors or clerks of xyz, etc) pay their relatives or family friends to build them
States should have statutes about how they select contractors for this though
And I give Georgia, and Brian Kemp, ZERO benefit of the doubt here
I think the framing of "the benefit of the doubt" is somewhat unhelpful; it implies that unless you believe that this website is an attempt at voter suppression, you are benefiting Brian Kemp somehow (most of us do not want to benefit Brian Kemp).
I would more just frame it as a point about evidence. In general, a piece of evidence supports a hypothesis insofar as that hypothesis strongly predicts the evidence and other hypotheses don't. It's true that voter suppression efforts predict bad websites, but so does the already robust and well-confirmed claim that local governments produce shitty web systems. So the individual piece of evidence that consists in finding a shitty web system just doesn't tell you that much.
Granted, the state of Georgia has more resources and fewer excuses than a random municipality; so even if it doesn't tell you that much, it can still be something.
Fair I was using the idiom without much thought
That's not shitty work. That's a deliberate choice to make the website harder to use.
As someone who lives in Kentucky and is pretty familiar with the political situation here, and additionally as someone who was trying to find a way to explain all this concisely in a forum post and ended up giving up, I heartily endorse this blog post.
This feels almost too early, but that is sooooooo much better than too late, of course.
Obviously McConnell would never allow two automatically Democratic Senators. But next time Dems have the House, Senate, and the presidency, that's a thing that will happen. (presuming they don't decide to handcuff themselves with the filibuster)
Also will incidentally change the name of DC to the "Douglass Commonwealth" in honor of Frederick.
EDIT: 232-180. 19 non-voting GOPers, Amash a no vote. For I'm sure "constitutionally principled" reasons that have nothing to do with race.
Biden explicitly endorsed it yesterday:
Would love to see it in my lifetime.
Eliminating the filibuster is both a good idea on its face and also a politically expedient way for Senate Dems to gain a lot of power both within and without the party.
I think people are used to just predicting that the worst idea will happen and you know fair, but I don't think I can see a reason why the Senate would not eliminate the filibuster if they get a trifecta. People like Warren/Markey/Sanders will want it eliminated to advance a more progressive governing agenda, and people like Manchin will want it eliminated so that they can leverage their vote for more concessions. No one has interests that are served by being a less important person.
Also I don't understand why you would expect Biden to work to avoid upsetting Republicans, having gained the office.
His campaign trail rhetoric has been pretty standard "we're all... in this together really, aren't we?" pablum, but he's not going to waste time vetoing popular shit in office.
eh, it remains unclear that that's what Puerto Ricans actually want
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
His pro-Republican comments extend a lot farther than "We're all in this together" but this isn't the thread for that.
Also Guam, and American Samoa, and anyone else I'm missing.
Puerto Rico too please while we are at it.
I love the gop whining about if it was a state it would have as much electoral power as some other states. Ignoring the fact that DC has population bigger than I think 3 states and almost as much as alaska and a couple others.
I agree it probably should be a state but it is a LOT less clear if that is what they want. DC WANTS to be a state so that should be the one that gets the nod first.
The last four years may have changed things but they've had multiple refferendums demanding statehood. The 2017 one was boycotted because of Trump, and it's unclear what they may do under a new president.
Virgin Islands and Mariana Islands. All our other colonies are uninhabited aside from military or scientific personnel.
Just "New states may be admitted by the congress into this union".
So yeah I guess anything goes and you could probably do a "these territories will become states as soon as they vote for it" law.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies