In addition to the voting rights laws, the section in the constitution that gives the states the power to run their elections gives the exception for federal law:
This technically applies only to congressional elections, but (at least in the past) it’s been understood that any election where something on the ballot is a congressional race can be regulated by the feds, regardless of if other voting rights law comes into play.
I agree that the current system of federal law gives the federal govt. no proactive power and forces them to fight things in court after the fact which has limited utility (partially due to the SCOTUS neutering the VRA).
My wife and I are Canadians and disagree somewhat on this issue. She’s sick of watching it and tries to avoid it and I’m hooked on CNN. But I believe that this election is the most important and critical thing to happen on this planet in my lifetime (61 yrs so far so maybe with the exception of the Cuban missile crisis) with potentially catastrophic consequences including:
climate change;
continuing breakdown and deconstruction of a rules-based international order (I’ll toss NATO and the EU into this as well); and
I think this is a great little list of the issues that are most important for people in the rest of the world and why this is probably an election that countless non-Americans are following very closely.
I’d rather there wasn’t the wholly unwarranted degree of coverage that our media seems to give to it nowadays, which is largely a function of ‘because they can’. In the 1960/70s satellite time was expensive, the bandwidth was limited, and the NTSC-standard picture quality was poor, film had to be flown across the sea, developed and edited, so the story was out of date by a day or two or three even before it aired, compared with press reports which were cabled across quickly. So it was limited to angles with a fairly long shelf life. Alistair Cooke’s ‘Letter From America’ used to be almost the only thing you heard about the elections. Now it seems to be permanent and immediate.
Okay so I’m watching CNN reporting on its results of their exit poll. They have asked some very comprehensive questions but one key question that seems to be missing is “who did you vote for?”
I can’t imagine they are not allowed to ask this since I saw coverage of people from actually inside voting locations being asked.
In the UK we have exit polls that are released 5 mins after the polls are closed which usually nail the result, as the only question that is asked is “who did you vote for?”. The rest of the night is about the details.
Despite what conspiracy theorists will tell you, most European countries don’t have government run media (at least not the major countries). I worked for the BBC for several years and the journalists do not get told what to say by the government; if the government tried that sort of thing those journalists would be more appalled by it than the public and would be very loud in their protests.
In fact there was an almighty stink when the Blair government tried to pressure the BBC into outputting less negative coverage of the Iraq War argument.
I’m watching CNN at the moment and there was evidently some cock-up with ballots in Madison, Wisconsin. I’m sorry southern neighbours, but why is this so difficult? Where else in the world did they ever worry about pregnant and hanging chads?
It’s not rocket science, and you folks are the gods of rocket science. However, best of luck and please get well soon.
Exit polls aren’t even reliable measures of just the voters on that day. They’re notoriously prone to unexpected biases. What time of day did you conduct the poll? That can have a big impact.
Quite bluntly your psephological processes have been dysfunctional for decades.
And the greater populace blithely accepts that so why would any political party burn it’s electoral capital to change
Byzantinely gerrymandered districts.
Unconscionable suppression of voting rights.
Culpable negligence in providing the basic infrastructure of voting
Deplorably cack-handed, inconsistent and opaque means of counting the votes
et al
And whilst fixing all the above would be rather good, it doesn’t necessarily matter that much because the aim is good governance.
It doesn’t need to be inclusive,
It doesn’t need to be unbiased,
It doesn’t need to be about money rather than policy,
… provided the process delivers a choice between capable people with a touch of statesmanship who in turn appoint the capable people needed to run the show.
Why would they?
Do you think our stuff needs to be hidden and “the media” is in Cahoots with politicians?
And what gives you the idea we have “government media”?
this strikes me as a remarkably ignorant and insulting post. Extraordinally shallow and poorly informed…
But given the name and tenor of past posting it doesn’t surprise me
We have other media besides our “government media”, and they all cover our own politics quite thoroughly. I mostly follow US politics through US and British media anyway.
Your presumption that “governments media” = “propaganda office” doesn’t hold water.
In Aust the relationship between the centre-right federal government and the centre-left public broadcaster they fund is not particularly cordial. In any case, the majority of Australians get their news from the commercial networks. None of the state governments have their own media outlets.
US news gets the attention because it’s the biggest reality TV show going round.