I remember when Mitt Romney ran for some office by claiming residence in one of his kids unfinished basements. That was okay, as I recall.
The BS move was the GOP redrawing the lines to exclude her house, which had been in that district for a long time.
That was the first BS move, I was referring to the second.
There were enough of them to go around.
So, so many bs moves. One article I read a couple hours ago explained the 5-4 vote. The board has 4 Democrats, 4 Republicans, and 1 independent. All Democrats and the independent voted in favor of Mangrum; all the Republicans voted against.
There was a lot of pushback earlier in this thread because, I think, people just couldn’t believe I was representing the situation accurately. Surely, they thought, SURELY there must be a better reason to deny Mangrum’s residency; surely even in NC this bald a power play wouldn’t fly.
Hope folks are disillusioned. Shit down here is real.
I forget how things are there because I’m mostly just flying into RDU and dealing with people with PhDs in the immediate vicinity.
Why does a partisan panel get to decide election criteria? Why doesn’t it go straight to the courts?
Any reason to think partisan courts are better than partisan panels?
The higher panel produced the rational result only because the cheaters were outnumbered 5-4, not because it wasn’t also partisan. Recall that the U.S. Supreme Court, faced with Florida shenanigans in 2000, prevented further ballot counting by a 5-4 margin, on exact partisan lines. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the SCOTUS “swing vote” much in the news recently, was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and voted for Bush-Cheney in the case that decided the 2000 election.
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And don’t forget that in 2000, Dick Cheney suddenly pretended to be a resident of Wyoming even though he lived in Texas, and his only driver’s license was from Texas.
Let’s stipulate that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were both residents of Texas. Even after cheating in Florida, they won the 2000 Presidential election by a scant 2 electoral votes. None of Texas’ 32 electoral votes could have been legally cast for both Bush and Cheney (and thus Bush or Cheney could have been elected but not both); in fact they all were.
North Carolina’s Republican legislature has passed a bill to prohibit a candidate from running with a party affiliation if the candidate was not registered with that party for at least 90 days. The move is apparently intended to prevent Chris Anglin from running for the state supreme court as a Republican. Mr. Anglin only recently changed his registration from Democrat. Republicans are concerned that having two Republicans on the ballot will split the Republican vote while the sole Democrat in the race will consolidate that party’s support.
I’m no expert but in many cases it’s not legal to have a law change something that happened in the past. Ex post facto laws are not allowed. No doubt this will be challenged in court.
The NC GA has a really bad track record of losing in court.
I have mixed feelings.
On the one hand, AFAICT, Anglin was totally engaging in dirty politics. He shows no sign of being an ally of Republicans; he switched to Republican as a way to split the vote and to hand a win to Democrats. And I’m not a fan of dirty politics.
On the other hand, he was only able to do this because Republicans recently changed the supreme court races to make them partisan, in an effort to gain more Republican-friendly judges. They’re engaging in dirty politics, and it looks in a way like Anglin neatly returned the serve.
Also, it sounds like their new law is retroactive, which is AFAIK super unconstitutional.
and, so, the result of all the state elections was that not much changed, at all. The courts ruled that even though the Republican drawn districts were clearly illegally gerrymandered, there remained not enough time before the election to redraw and represent to the court the new plan. Leastways, that is what I got from the news reports. Anti gerrymandering people still have to be careful about what they ask for. Perfectly allocated districts according to race and party will make it possible for white Republicans to win every race in many states. Sometimes the token district or two drawn to isolate minority or democrat votes away from other purple districts will wind up being the only seats you can win, but you might not have any seats if everything is drawn completely equitably.
I’d like to see the result of drawing lines without respect to race or party, taking a state like North Carolina and if, say, it has 16 congressional districts, divide the state into first, 4 divisions, west to east, containing each 1/4 of the total population. Then, take each of those sections and divide it again, by population, north to south into 4 pieces. The result will be random pieces that all will probably contain some urban, suburban and country voters. One would do that on a computer and see what the result would have been. Naturally, in some places, today, people just don’t bother to vote because the result is almost always pre-ordained. This might help.
That’s actually not a bad algorithm to use, if your goal is to create gerrymandered districts. If the dividing lines are based on population, then they’re probably going to pass through the places where the population is most concentrated, i.e., cities. Which means that each of your cities is going to be cut into multiple districts, and each district will have a mixture of city and country. If the cities represents 55% of the state’s population, then they’ll also be 55% of each district, and every district will elect a representative of the urban party. If, by contrast, the cities are 45% of the population, then every district will elect a representative of the rural party. When what you should be getting, in either of those cases, is about half each from the urban and rural parties.
The NC State Board of Elections is refusing to certify the 9th district race
The story didn’t give any clue about what ‘unfortunate activities’ he was referring to, that hadn’t been ‘cleaned up.’ Any of our NC residents got more info?
Too many Democrats voting?
I found 3 other news stories about the 9th and they all say the same thing as the one you quoted: “no clarification”. I did find this in one of the stories tho:
Probably not that:
According to the story I read, it’s not just that district that was refused certification; several state legislator districts were also refused certification.
Maybe LHoD has more info…
This Twitter thread by Joe Bruno of WSOC-TV is very informative. DSY mentioned that several state legislator districts were also refused certification; the thread lists them. Also mentions that the NC State Board of Elections is composed of 4 Dems, 4 Republicans, and 1 unaffiliated person, and that the decision to not certify these races was unanimous.
By that definition of “ex post facto,” does that mean that if somebody makes money during 2018, and then income taxes are raised later in the year that affect 2018 income, then that law is ex post facto?
I don’t think so. I am under the impression that all “ex post facto” means is, you cannot retroactively make something illegal. That isn’t happening in this case.
Somebody might have a case of overturning it on “bill of attainder” grounds (which I think pretty much means “a law that singles someone out for punishment Because We Said So, That’s Why”); it depends on how many people it affects.
Short version: it looks like some folks were going to black neighborhoods and telling folks their registration had been dropped. They were encouraged to register for an absentee ballot. Then someone came by the neighborhood to pick up the absentee ballots and turn them in, offering to finish filling the ballots out for them.
I mean, holy shit.
The elections board is getting ready to be dissolved, due to Republican shenanigans; and the board, which unanimously chose not to certify the race, is being accused of partisan bias by the head of the state’s GOP, despite being 4/4/1 Democratic/Republican/Independent.
Holy shit.