Election 2014, Election 2016, Law, Politicians Behaving Badly, Politics

Stealing Elections: One Simple Graph Illustrates How The GOP Stole America (IMAGE)

Liberals know the outlandish “issues” conservatives come up with to keep themselves hating everything good about our country. We see the posts, we hear the stupidity, we roll our eyes.

When it comes to the big picture, however, it just doesn’t make sense. Surely there aren’t enough people who dimwitted to actually keep the numbskulls they vote for in office. How many times can they shame the poor, verbally abuse women, disrespect minorities and scream “BENGHAZI!” before the sane people of our nation catch on and vote them out?

The truth can be seen in the latest Presidential election. President Obama won by an electoral landslide. Surely a party can’t go into an election with 256 electoral votes in its back pocket and still fail to regain the House of Representatives.

Presidential elections work quite a bit different from Congressional elections. States are broken down by districts, and when the last redistricting came about, Republicans were riding the wave of fear left by 9/11 and campaigning on the War on Terror.

To keep themselves in power they used one of the oldest dirty tricks in the book, but to an extent we’ve never witnessed before: The gerrymander.

Gerrymandering is when a district is redrawn to encompass a specific block of voters, and this simple Tumblr graphic, which is floating around cyberspace un-credited, explains it best:

liberalsarecool:#gerrymanderVia teabonics-fb

 

That pretty much sums it up. If it seems hard to believe that this kind of thing actually happens, take a look at some of these ridiculous gerrymandered districts:

 

There have been cases where federal judges rule a district violates the Voter’s Rights Act and orders it redrawn, but since the Supreme Court gutted the Act, it seems little will be done to take the power from the corrupt congressmen and give it back to the people.

With gerrymandered districts and a strong push to keep their base full of lies and hate, Republicans will hardly need the billion dollars the Koch Brothers are reportedly ready to spend to buy the White House in 2016.

Democrats have only one choice, and luckily it’s fairly simple: Get out and vote. When blue voting percentages are high, Republicans lose.

Featured Image: Tumblr

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Charles Topher

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Photo Credit: By Pete Souza, Official White House Photographer (White House Flickr Feed) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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  • Timothy Weston

    In the simple examples, I think the center districting is as equally unfair as the one on the right as the red group has no representation. In the gerrymandered example, the blue has some representation. It is a poor example as to what gerrymandering does.

    • Chris Drudge

      It’s an illustration. It’s not showing how it should be drawn, it’s showing how lines can be drawn in such a way to be deliberately advantageous to one side. Ideally districts are drawn so that people with are equally represented without consideration to political affiliation, but with consideration to keeping the similar needs and concerns of the people and communities together.

      • grgreene

        @Chris Drudge, DAMN, you’re STUPID. “Ideally districts are drawn so that people with are equally represented without consideration to political affiliation”?? People CAN ONLY be represented by representatives WHO MATCH their political affiliation. Living in a district “represented” by someone of THE OPPOSITE affiliation leaves you WORSE than UNrepresented — it leaves you proactively OPPRESSED by somebody who was SUPPOSED to be HELPING you!

        • cowboyinbrla

          Actually, grgreene, before computers made partisan districting so easy, people were fairly well represented by people of an opposing party on a regular basis. When districts are drawn in a more balanced manner, the folks in the middle can steer the ship, avoiding either the radical right or the loony left. And candidates ignore that middle, in such districts, to their peril - so a lot more moderates were elected who could find common ground to get things done.

          When districts are drawn so that the winner’s party is a foregone conclusion, there’s no value in appealing to swing voters. Instead, the only reasonable tactic is to motivate your base - which is usually at one extreme or the other - to win the primary for your party, which becomes the only race that really counts.

        • rushisavietnamwarhero

          grgreene: I have no idea what is stupid about what Chris Drudge’s comment. In regard to your comment, I say this: If you live in a district represented by someone of the opposite party, you can a) write them, petition them, etc. to request they change the way they legislate and b) vote against them in the next election. If you are unrepresented, you can do neither. The point of the graphic, and the drunkard on an etch-a-sketch shaped actual districts in IL, GA, LA & NC are to show how people of one political affiliation can be jammed into as few districts as possible. And this is being done to a point that the interests/political affiliation of the people and who they vote for OVERALL (state and country wide) is being misrepresented, because the district maps are being drawn to guarantee an overall majority by the party that got an overall minority of the votes.

    • Arrnea Stormbringer

      The best solution would be simply to have a PR House of Reps. 40% of the votes gets you 40% of the seats. End of story.

      • grgreene

        Even if you don’t have PR, THE EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE ALREADY SAYS that no state shall deny to any person under its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. If the laws (the districts are enacted BY LAW) make 10 out of 13 of my state’s congressmen Republicans, even though the state splits 49-47 almost all the time in seriously-contested statewide elections, then obviously the group of people that is getting 3 congressmen with 47% of the voters is only getting HALF of “equal” protection. My point is EXISTING LAW ALREADY COVERS THIS, *if* you didn’t have a Supreme Court majority that was just a bunch of LYING RACIST conservatives. Very much INcluding Clarence Thomas.

    • Philip Fortuna

      It’s not unfair at all…. it depicts a blue NATION. Blue nation, blue congress. Blue nation, redistrictied to favor red votes, red congress. The article implies that the majority of American voters are democrats, yet republicans cheated the system to get a republican majority elected. Make sense?

  • grgreene

    The shapes of the districts on the maps have nothing to do with it. The simple rectangular districts ARE ALSO EVIL in the example because they give the Red team 0% of the seats even though it has 40% of the votes.

    • Joel Christen

      Umm, I believe that is the point? If your ideas are bad enough to only garner 40% of the vote, then perhaps the party should start to reconsider stances.

    • cowboyinbrla

      grgreene: you have a point, but the reality is that you could never draw such districts in real life, given the way people tend to be distributed in terms of income, social status, race, etc. in a given area.

      But if the pictures bother you, consider it from a strictly numbers perspective. In the last three or four presidential elections, the three states that everyone watches, because they’re swing states, are Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. In the last two presidential elections, all three went for Obama, meaning he got a majority of the votes, statewide, in those states. Any reasonable reading of that would suggest that these three states are at most closely divided but clearly lean Democratic overall.

      But of Ohio’s 16 House seats, 12 are drawn to ensure Republicans win. Of Pennsylvania’s 18 House seats, 13 are drawn to ensure Republican victories. And of Florida’s 27 seats, 17 are drawn to guarantee a Republican winner. If those three states alone were apportioned more in line with the statewide balance of votes, instead of there being 42 Republicans to 19 Democrats, there would be more like 34 Democrats and 27 Republicans. With just those three states more balanced, the Republican hold on the House would be cut in half.

      Other problem states: North Carolina, which Romney barely carried (50-48) but which has 11 of 13 Republican congressmen; Virginia, which Obama carried 51-47 but which has 8 of 11 Republican congressmen; and Indiana, which Romney won 54-44 but which has 7 of 9 Republican congressmen. Add those to the mix, and the current House Republican majority of 247 would shrink to 222 - four more than a bare majority and enough that with absences, some Democratic votes would be necessary to pass almost anything.

      Reapportion Texas to match its electoral proclivities and you’d be looking at a Democratic House.

      That’s the problem with partisan gerrymandering. It’s not that any one party should be shut out of the process. It’s that a party with substantially less than 50% of the national vote manages to control a significant majority of congressional seats.

  • Bryon Wackwitz

    We live in a nation with a outdated electoral process. We are no longer in the 1800’s. We need to get rid off the party system and/or have representational government. This winner take all system leaves allot to be desired. However none of this matters as long as the very rich and corporations are able to buy our government.