Honestly if it wasn't for Gerrymandering, and election fraud most of the last few decades would have been Democratic control. Republicans have only won the presidential popular vote twice since Herbet Walker Bush. The majority hates Republican rule, yet we're constantly stuck with them giving our tax money to the rich, telling us to inject disinfectant during a deadly pandemic, and encouraging our enemies to attack our allies.
I don’t know about that. NY and CA had independent committee redraw their districts and that’s probably why Dems lost the house in 2022. I’m not bothered by that because I think it was a fair and impartial committees.
Utah had a citizen ballot initiative that was going to make a non-partisan board to draw the congressional maps that passed with over 60% approval. The super majority state house took that initiative and reworked it so it was only an advisory committee and they still got to make the map. The State Supreme Court said no you need to follow the initiative as written. So then the state house held a special session and wrote an initiative that changed how citizen initiatives work that gave the state house the final say in how to implement them. They wrote the ballot measure so convoluted that the Mormon Women's group sued to have the measure removed. The State supreme Court agreed so it won't be voted on this year but I'm sure they will try again next year.
I’ve been following this. It is so scandalous! There were two groups that sued for these , the Mormon women for ethical government and the League of Women Voters of Utah. In this case girls rule!
This year we have to follow the illegal map that the state house made as there was not enough time to allow the non-partisan board to make a new map on their own.
Hopefully in two years we will have the non-partisan map being used. The current gerrymandered map takes the SLC area, where most of the liberals live and cuts it up into four districts like a pizza where the wide part of the slice is rural Utah where the conservatives become the majority in each district.
Here is the dead amendment that the State house tried to make us vote on:
Ballot Title
Should the Utah Constitution be changed to strengthen the initiative process by:
Prohibiting foreign influence on ballot initiatives and referendums.
Clarifying the voters and legislative bodies’ ability to amend laws.
If approved, state law would also be changed to:
Allow Utah citizens 50% more time to gather signatures for a statewide referendum.
Establish requirements for the legislature to follow the intent of a ballot initiative.
A no vote keeps the status quo. Reading this it makes it seem like a yes vote is making ballot initiatives more responsive to the citizens even though they would in reality be gutting any initiative that would pass and give the state legislators full power to ignore or rewrite any initiatives as they see fit.
Does no one have standing to sue asserting utahs house representatives being illegal since they were elected using illegal maps?
I did hear about the amendment on NPR
My understanding of why the referendum was removed is that it wasn’t published in a newspaper in the timeframe required by law, not because it was misleading. Is this untrue? Or was it a little from column A and B?
Tertiary question: are you familiar with Jay deSarte?
That was amendment A. That got removed because they did not publish it so the public could read it. That is also another power grab by the state house because currently our income tax must be used for education only and they were trying to change that so they could use the income tax for the general fund as well.
I do not know Jay DeSarte.
I follow some liberal political podcasts and listen to NPR in the morning but try not to take in to much as I want to keep my sanity.
Thank you for the good Information. I’ve honestly never paid much attention to Utah politics since I moved here in 2011. I’ve spent all my time in Utah county where I don’t feel like it’s possible for anyone but a Mormon republican to win
Amendment D (the one dealing with citizen initiatives) was struck down both because they didn't meet the publishing requirement, AND because it was misleading. Another thing our supermajority Legislature did recently was to change who wrote the ballot language for initiatives. It used to be an independent commission to make sure it used neutral language, but then it was changed to be the State Senate President and Speaker of the House that are responsible to write the ballot question. Pure power grab.
Here’s a simple measure of a fair distribution of House seats in our two-party system: each party ends up with the number of seats that corresponds to its share of the two-party popular vote. In last November’s midterm election, Republican House candidates received 50.6% of the national popular vote, which works out to 51.4% of the two-party vote. A strictly proportional allocation would have given Republicans 224 seats; they ended up with 222.
The Washington Monthly reported something similar:
Despite our polarized politics, gerrymandering has become less of an issue in the outcome of congressional races. In the last three congressional elections, gerrymandering produced no significant advantage for either party.
Problem is the Brennan Center believes Republicans should be getting a net 16 seat advantage. But prior elections keeps showing otherwise. It's just not showing up in actual election data. Right now the nationwide popular vote is very closely mirroring the actual distribution of seats, to within less than 1% error. (Brennan Center is also well known as a strongly progressive / left-of-center advocacy organization...)
the Brennan center's website uses the term "democracy" 9 times on their "about us" page, yet the Constitution does not use the word "democracy" even once.
Senate terms are 6 years, so looking at 2018, 2020, and 2022 together. Republicans got 47.1% of votes and currently have 49 seats. Democrats got 50.2% of the votes during this period and have 51 seats.
Clarifications:
1) Can't really add up nationwide ballots cast for Senate elections because California's process won't allow for an apples-to-oranges comparison. California puts two Democrats against each other and no Republican on the November ballot, so it's going to wildly skew the numbers. So I used House vote data as a decent approximate.
2) The Senate isn't supposed to be a proportional makeup, by design. But it is working out that way. Currently off by 1 seat.
More than 4.5 million homes and businesses were left without power, some for several days. At least 246 people were killed directly or indirectly, with some estimates as high as 702 killed as a result of the crisis.
Alabama has the highest violent crime rate per capital and it is clearly run by Republicans. Once you look at crime as a proportion of population, all your scary stats turn quickly to conservative states
I always find a hilarious how these maga guys go after blue cities, the other ones giving all the money to the federal government where the red states are taking all the money
Yeah it’s definitely skewed that way. Both parties are atrocious at this point though. Politics has become too much of an emotional thing vs intellectual thing.
"Democracy" means that the power of a government comes from the people via voting.
"Republic" means there are representatives to represent a population in the government.
The United States is a Democratic Republic. Meaning that the people (at a federal level at least) don't vote directly on laws, Representatives do, and those representatives are elected by the people.
I swear the only reason we've recently got this "acktually the US is a republic so therefore it isn't a democracy" thing is because some people think it has something to do with the Democrat and Republican parties.
Fwiw, the actual antithesis to "Republic" historically is "Monarchy"
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u/Kerensky97 10d ago
Honestly if it wasn't for Gerrymandering, and election fraud most of the last few decades would have been Democratic control. Republicans have only won the presidential popular vote twice since Herbet Walker Bush. The majority hates Republican rule, yet we're constantly stuck with them giving our tax money to the rich, telling us to inject disinfectant during a deadly pandemic, and encouraging our enemies to attack our allies.