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from the non-voting-person-OR-non-person-voter dept.
The LA Times and just about every news outlet has a story about a Supreme Court case which could change how election districts are drawn up.
At issue before the court was the basic question of who gets counted when election districts are drawn: Is it all people, including children, prisoners and immigrants who are not eligible to vote? Or is it only adult citizens who are eligible voters?
The case centers around districts with heavy concentrations of people not eligible to vote (generally illegal aliens). These are counted by the census, and that district gets legislative representation based on their presence, even when there are fewer actual voters in those districts. The plaintiffs claim this give more weight to voters in such district, over an equal number of voters in other districts.
The challengers cited the example of two Texas state Senate districts, both of which have about 800,000 residents. One rural district in east Texas, where plaintiff Sue Evenwel resides, had about 574,000 citizens who are eligible to vote; the other district in the Rio Grande valley had only 372,000 people who are eligible to vote. The lawsuit in Evenwel vs. Abbott argues this is unconstitutional.
Do Soylentils see the allocation of election districts as a process to distribute legislative seats equally over the number of voters, or equally over the number of people (regardless of whether those people can vote or not)? (Or is this where we launch off on the usual discussions of a total redesign of the US Voting system to some totally different mathematical model?)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @01:46PM
To me, the answer is straightforward: We all pay taxes - be it income, sales, property, etc - therefore our elected officials represent all of us. Not just registered voters, not just landowners, not just the people who voted for them, not just the people who funded their campaigns, but everyone. I know that in practice that ideal is rarely achieved but we don't need to add yet another reason to sideline the disenfranchised.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @02:16PM
I disagree. Only registered voters should count, and if registered voters don't vote they should be dropped from the registry. Since 1900 the voter turnout has only been 50%-60% of those registered (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections) If taxpayers really cared, they would register to vote AND participate in the voting process. Otherwise, you get more Obamas and Clintons running the country into chaos.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:01PM
Only registered voters should count
The thing is only registered voters DO count. It is already this way. The other people by definition do not vote. I being a registered votes vote basically some fraction of my vote for them. If they like it or not. I am the one who gets more power. Because I registered and vote. My voice is small but at least I get to squeek something out.
Excluding children is only a problem for about 17 years for most people. At which point you can vote and have a say. In effect children in an area are *already* excluded. They are not the ones making the decisions. The school boards typically do that. Who do you think those people are elected by? Voters.
This comes down to one of two things someone is trying to do. Either gerrymander more districts (which is not necessarily a bad thing if you want proportional voting, but it is easily abused), or money, or both.
Also some people seem to think voting only happens every 4 years. That is not true. It usually happens at least once a year (twice if you count the political group ones). I have seen officials elected on less than 100 total votes to rule over 200k of people.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:09PM
I'm a registered voter. I'm even a '1' (in voter registration terms, that means I vote in every election, including run-off elections, judicial races, and the like. The shorthand is that I am among those who follow politics most closely, know the issues, etc). I still don't count. Why? Because what the politicians promise and what they do once elected have nothing to do with each other. It's the latter that is the only thing that counts, and that is 98% determined by the wealthy.
There are masses and mountains of data showing that's true, but much more importantly, we all know it in our gut. The 1% get everything they want, the 99% get nothing, even the most urgent of needs.
Even now, today, we have the idealists bleating that "If you don't vote, you're part of the problem," or, "Your basic problem is you voted for X party; Y party is the ANSWER." No, guys, the wealthy own both parties lock, stock, and barrel. There is no recourse for the 99% of the population through the electoral system. It is rigged. More and more people know that. Only the young and the clueless believe anymore that the system can be fixed from the inside. Hint: It can't.
This morning among the headlines was that the Middle Class in America is no longer the majority. Hard fact. We've all known it for 20 years, but now it's a fact even by the fudged and fiddled numbers the Masters of the Universe have used to cloak their theft.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:34PM
You have low political efficacy (look it up). The fact is that real power is more distributed in the USA than it ever has been in the last 120 years or more. People don't read newspapers anymore, they get their news from the Internet and TV - and the latter is rapidly declining in share as people cut their cable contracts.
How much money did it take to launch Soylentnews? This site can be viewed worldwide, with decent bandwidth. Granted, this is (mostly) a tech site, but there are thousands of other sites that are more political and economic in focus.
(Score: 2) by Nollij on Friday December 11 2015, @04:46AM
I'm not sure your premise is valid.
Even the peak of any newspaper in recent years was only about 2 million. [theawl.com] That's the peak for the last 20 years.
"The O’Reilly Factor averaged 3.381 million viewers" [deadline.com] (per night)
I couldn't find reliable numbers for web news, but I bet most people simply switched out the NY Times for nytimes.com, Fox News for foxnews.com, etc. Soylent augments, but doesn't replace traditional media. Unless you count the green site as traditional media. (They're less than a year younger than Fox, after all)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:30PM
There is no such thing as the Middle Class.
It's an invention of Lamestream Media.
It's just 2 marks arbitrarily drawn on a graph.
No 2 people agree where the marks go.
The term is useless.
There are only 2 classes:
1) People who have to supply labor to earn a living
2) People who make money from money.
The 1st is called The Working Class; Marx called them The Proletariat.
The 2nd is called The Idle Rich or The Elite or The Ruling Class; Marx called them The Bourgeoisie.
...and the income of the Working Class flattened starting right after Nixon's trip to China in 1972.
(The wage graph actually shows the inflection point at 1968.)
We've been going negative for 4 decades.
If worker pay had kept up with worker productivity or inflation, the minimum wage would be over $22.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday December 11 2015, @08:08AM
And to which class do you count those who make money both through labour and through money?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @12:27AM
For those who missed it the 1st time:
People who have to supply labor to earn a living [are] called The Working Class.
If you can sit on your ass and just wait for the dividend checks to arrive then, for you, doing labor is clearly not a necessity, it is a pastime.
...and if the elective labor you do consists of figuring out more ways to screw over people who do have to work for a living, an additional descriptor for your bunch is The Oppressor Class.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:02PM
Taxes are not citizenship. I've paid minor amounts of taxes to several countries this year, but that doesn't make me a citizen of these countries, it doesn't give me an interest in their well-being, and it certainly didn't accord me any of the benefits or other responsibilities of citizenship. Citizenship is about more than paying taxes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:41PM
Yes, Taxes are not citizenship. But citizenship doesn't have to be a requirement. If you are in the US you are covered by US laws and taxes, and should therefore be represented.
Living in the US, paying taxes, being a citizen. If you can tick two of those you should be allowed to vote.