Hacker News

points by monkeywork 15 hours ago | 0 comments

I'm asking something that specifically targets black Americans as a group - the VRA doesn't target them (at least as my understanding goes) but rather as you said is allowing gerrymandering which more divides down political lines than racial ones unless you are suggesting that every person of a racial group thinks and votes the same.

I guess to put it more directly if we took a hypothetical black male named Steven and a hypothetical white female named Sally who have the same job, live in the same neighborhood, etc - what rights has been rolled back on Steven that were not on Sally.

[–] YesThatTom2 14 hours ago

One example would be a black neighborhood having 1 voting machine so that the line is so long there isn’t time for everyone to vote.

Meanwhile a white neighborhood has dozens of polling places, each with many machines.

[–] 0xDEAFBEAD 14 hours ago

Here's NPR, a notoriously left-wing news source in the US

"Although we often talk in a partisan context about voter fraud and voter suppression and whether voters have access to the ballot, the reality is, over the past 25 years, we've greatly increased the convenience of voting for almost all Americans," said David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which authored the new report."

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/19/1238646047/voting-options-ear...

[–] teachrdan 14 hours ago

Your own source disagrees with you.

If you actually read the article, you'll see that the argument is that, since the year 2000, it has (as of 2024) broadly become easier to vote. But:

"The South, with its history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, has long lagged behind when it comes to voting access. The CEIR data shows that, although some states have slowly started expanding options for voters, generally it is still the most difficult region for voters to cast a ballot."

And it's only gotten worse since. I strongly suggest you do some cursory research in the future before making comments like this.

(Also from NPR: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/05/1235521824/voter-turnout-race... )

[–] jfengel 14 hours ago

Did you read the rest of the article?

* real efforts by some Republican-led legislatures to restrict access at the margins*

The lies about early voting, the lies about voting machines and efforts in some state legislatures to roll back some of the election integrity and convenience measures

He says that they "almost all" failed -- meaning some are succeeding, and they're always disenfranchising the same people. The average is better, but that doesn't tell you anything about those worst affected.

He's also not talking about gerrymandering, which has gotten worse and worse over time.

[–] ZeroGravitas 14 hours ago

Let's hope no one starts an ill informed and hypocritical conspiracy theory about the mail-in voting that has made it so much easier to vote.

[–] Arainach 11 hours ago

This DOES intentionally target black people. It's an intentional strategy to have "plausible" deniability dating back decades:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...

> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N$, n$, n$.” By 1968 you can’t say “n$”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N$, n$.”

[–] josh-sematic 14 hours ago

The only reason gerrymandering works as a tactic in the first place is that neighborhoods DON’T have a statistically uniform distribution of the population. So “Steven and Sally live in the same neighborhood” is not a very good way to look at issues like these.

[–] micromacrofoot 14 hours ago

That's the problem, none of the legislation says "black people can't be allowed to vote" but we know based on statistics that things like voter ID disproportionately harm people in lower income brackets, which are disproportionately minorities. So we get these wheedling "not racism actually" rulings. There's a massive compounding effect that the restriction of economic opportunity has had over generations.

One of the more direct actions was the dismantling of affirmative action, which was an intentional set of rules set to undo some of this historical aggregated harm.

[–] YesThatTom2 14 hours ago

And yet… there have been lawsuits that surfaced memos and audio clips where GOP strategists were blatant about developing proxies for “is black”.

[–] KerrAvon 14 hours ago

Yes, in aggregate -- the whole group, not cherry-picked individuals -- racial groups vote differently from each other. In 2024, if only Black people had voted, we'd have President Harris now. This is beyond dispute.

[–] Danox 13 hours ago

It will be interesting to see what happens in the midterms, because the current administration, have been going after Hispanics and Asians without hesitation. Maybe those groups will finally learn something. If you’re black or American Indian, you know the score.

The Republicans lost California because Pete Wilson and the Republican Party in California (late 1980’s) could not shut their mouths up, demonizing Hispanics at every turn, it turned the whole state around to the Democrats, and the same group is slowly but surely turning Texas blue with every year that goes by. And the same is also true of Arizona and New Mexico, just keep demonizing Hispanics. It’s not going work out in the long term.

The next governor of California will be a democrat of Hispanic dissent the Republicans had better be nice/respectful to him because they are losing the Southwest slowly but surely, every year, and being respectful also includes Mexico.

[–] expedition32 13 hours ago

The Republicans just don't want to campaign in urban centers. Barely any major city in America has a Republican mayor. It's frankly insane for a mainstream party to just basically give up.