Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 130, No. 247, Ed. 1 Friday, August 14, 2020 Page: 4 of 8
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4 - FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 2020
GAINESVILLE DAILY REGISTER
Opinion
EDITORIAL BOARD: Lisa Chappell, publisher; Sarah Einselen, editor
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YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS
NATIONAL/STATE
President
Donald Trump
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.,
Washington, D.C. 20500
www.whitehouse.gov/contact
Vice President
Mike Pence
Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C.
20501
vice_president@whitehouse.gov
FIRST AMENDMENT: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or
the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of
grievances.
r/VCAA I
RWMU
LOCAL
Cooke County Judge
Jason Brinkley
Cooke County Courthouse, Gainesville,TX,
76240
940-668-5435
jason.brinkley@co.cooke.tx.us
Gainesville Mayor
Jim Goldsworthy
Gainesville City Hall, 200 S. Rusk,
Gainesville, TX 76240
940-665-7777
512-463-2000
http://gov.texas.gov
State Senator
Pat Fallon
P.O. Box 12068, Capitol Station
Austin, TX 78711
940-898-0331
State Representative
Drew Springer
P.O. Box 2910, Austin,TX 78769
512-463-0526, Gainesville: 940-580-1770
www.house.state.tx.us/members/
BIG DIFFERENCES IN VOTING POWER
I divided the pledged delegates assigned to each
state by the Democratic National Committee and
the Republican National Committee by the states’
populations, and found some staggering disparities.
For the Democratic Party, the District of Columbia
received 28.34 delegates for each million residents,
while Texas had 7.86 delegates per million people. A
D.C. Democrat’s voice has 3.6 times the power of a
Texas Democrat, which is the widest disparity in that
party.
But that’s nothing compared to the situation in the
Republican Party. Wyoming received 50.1 delegates
per million residents, compared to 2.66 delegates per
million residents for Pennsylvania. The GOP’s widest
disparity gives a Wyoming Republican a voice that is
a whopping 18.9 times as powerful as a Pennsylvania
Republican.
That’s far more even than the Electoral College
disparity, in which Wyoming gets four times more
electoral votes per person than Florida.
WHY SUCH A DIFFERENCE?
The parties’ rule books for delegate selection are
quite extensive. The RNC book is 40 pages long, while
the DNC rules go on for 165 pages.
It comes down to more than just population.
Democrats have a formula for delegates that includes
how the state voted in the last three presidential
elections, the state’s number of Electoral College votes
and when the state holds its primary.
The Republican system gives each state three
delegates per congressional district, 10 at-large
delegates, and three more delegate spots - to be
A FAIRER FUTURE?
There may be improvement on the horizon:
Democrats are debating their delegate system for
the 2024 primary. They are considering whether
to continue limiting the power of superdelegates,
determining what should happen to the delegates of
candidates who drop out and encouraging diversity
among party leaders.
And GOP state conventions like the one this year
in Texas are having a conflict over who will represent
the party at the national convention and in the
Electoral College. The question specifically is about
whether rank-and-file party members will dominate,
or whether the process will be opened up more to
independents, libertarians and other nonmembers.
So long as their most loyally partisan states have
such disproportionate influence over candidate
choices, party platforms and even the rules for
delegate allocation, neither party will be at its best for
reaching swing states or independent voters.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in Georgia.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons
license.
EFFECTS ON THE PUBLIC
Of course, the political parties can argue that they
are private groups who can determine their own
governance however they wish. But that power is not
absolute.
In the early 20th century, the Texas Democratic
Party sought to exclude Blacks from voting in its
primaries. A series of Supreme Court decisions over
two decades culminated in a 1944 ruling declaring
that state laws establishing party primaries made the
Texas primary more than just a function of a private
organization. Instead, those laws made the party’s
primary a key component of the electoral process,
and therefore the party could not exclude Blacks from
participating.
Beyond being unequal, these systems hurt parties’
ability to reach moderates. When New Jersey
Democrats get more delegates than Georgians, despite
having a smaller population, the party is less likely
to select candidates who appeal beyond the die-hard
faithful, who are more likely to be found among New
Jersey’s delegates. It’s the same for Republicans,
where the Alaska GOP has more than 10 times the
delegates, proportionally speaking, as California’s
GOP.
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Steven V.
Roberts
John A.Tures
taken by party leaders from that state. The GOP also
gives states “bonus” delegates if they voted for the
Republican nominee in the previous presidential
election, and if they have Republican governors and
U.S. senators, and if there are Republican majorities
in state legislatures and U.S. House of Representatives
delegations.
Both of these systems, in different ways,
reward states where the party is strong, at the
expense of party members in states that are
more evenly divided or could be stronger.
If your state votes solidly blue or bright
red, you’ll have more power over that national
party. Perhaps that’s why parties are becoming
more extreme; the delegate allocations mean
the Democratic Party is dominated by the most
liberal states, while conservative states own
the Republican Party. That leaves even less
of a voice for states that are ideologically moderate,
hurting party outreach efforts.
U.S. Senator Texas Governor
John Cornyn Greg Abbott
517 Hart Senate Office Bldg., Washington, D.C. 20510 P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX 78711
Main: 202-224-2934, Fax: 202-228-2856
www.co rnyn .senate.gov
U.S. Senator
Ted Cruz
404 Russell, Washington, D.C. 20510
Main: 202-224-5922, Fax: 202-228-3398
www.cruz.senate.gov
U.S. Representative
Mac M. Thornberry
2525 Kell Blvd., Wichita Falls,TX, 76308
Main: 202-225-3706, Fax: 202-225-3486
thornberry.house.gov
Parties both play favorites
with convention delegates
As the Democratic and Republican parties pick
their nominees for the presidency, they’ll do so
under a delegate system that rewards states for their
partisan loyalty - and ignores the common principle of
everyone having an equal say.
Consider these examples: Texas, home to 28.9 million
people, will have 228 pledged delegates at the
Democratic National Convention. New York,
with two-thirds the number of people, at 19.5
million, will have more pledged delegates -
274. This inequality extends to less-populous
states as well: Arizona’s 7.3 million residents
will be represented by 67 pledged delegates,
while Maryland’s 6 million people will have 96
pledged delegates.
It’s similar with the Republican National
Convention. Ohio, with a population of
11.7 million, will have 82 delegates, while
Pennsylvania - home to 12.8 million people - has just
34. Oregon’s 4.2 million people have 28 Republican
delegates, one fewer than either of the Dakotas, which
each has well under a million residents.
Only delegates can vote on party decisions at the
conventions. This situation makes it harder for either
party to attract independents, who make up about one-
third of U.S. voters. If leaders in especially blue states
get a disproportionately higher number of delegates
than those in purple or red states, they will have more
power to control which Democratic Party member is
nominated, what the platform will be and what the
rules will be for awarding states delegates the next
time. It’s a similar story in the GOP for particularly
red states, whose leaders will get more power over
Republican decisions than people from swing states or
states that tend to vote for the Democratic Party.
Vote early. Read the instructions carefully. Make
sure your ballot counts.
This year, 76% of Americans in 42 states, plus the
District of Columbia, will be eligible to vote by mail
the highest rate in history. The Trump
campaign is mounting a massive
effort to discourage these voters,
because they fear that if more people
participate, Democratic chances will
increase. The president justifies his
effort by arguing that absentee voting
is riddled with fraud, but there is no
evidence — none — to back up that
claim.
The best answer to this insidious
plot is more democracy: more
Americans determined to exercise their franchise,
and exercise it in ways that Republicans cannot deter.
Trump’s intentions are not guesswork or
Democratic propaganda. The president himself
admitted his strategy back in March, when he
opposed a Democratic bill allotting $4 billion to help
states process mail-in ballots: “They had levels of
voting, that if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have
a Republican elected in this country again.”
Justin Clark, a top Trump campaign official,
promised a private gathering of Republicans an
enhanced suppression effort: “It’s going to be a much
bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a
much better-funded program.”
Evidence of that “much bigger program” is
everywhere. Rolling Stone cited just two examples:
“In Pennsylvania, for instance, the RNC is suing
the state government and election boards in all
67 counties to ban the use of secure drop boxes
for submitting take-home ballots... In Florida,
Republicans have sued to block efforts that would
make the state pay for postage on mail-in ballots.”
“It’s a pattern of voter suppression, and I just think
it’s really reprehensible,” Jena Griswold, Colorado’s
secretary of state, told The New York Times.
It’s a pattern, though, that can be foiled. As the
Times editorialized: “Especially in the midst of a
raging pandemic, voting by mail is the surest path
to a more inclusive, more accurate and more secure
election.”
Simply utilizing the mail is no guarantee, however.
You have to do it right. If you wait too long to request
a ballot, or return it late — or if you mess up the
signature or use the wrong envelope — your vote
could be challenged by GOP enforcers, who will be
trying to disqualify every possible vote.
And even following the rules won’t solve the whole
problem. As election expert David Wasserman writes
for NBC: “The real danger is a perfect catastrophe of
administrative overload, postal delays and voter error
that could lead to millions of absentee ballots not
counting. And this year, unlike the past, those ballots
are likely to be overwhelmingly Democratic.”
Here’s the nightmare scenario: Trump leads on
election night because his supporters are likely to
show up in person, and those votes are counted first.
As absentee ballots are tallied, Joe Biden takes the
lead, the president denounces the whole election as
“rigged,” challenges the vote count and refuses to
accept the results.
“The stormy once-in-a-lifetime Florida recount
battle that polarized the nation in 2000 and left the
Supreme Court to decide the presidency may soon
look like a high school student council election
compared with what could be coming after this
November’s election,” reports the Times.
Fortunately, there is still time to mitigate the
possibility of a catastrophe. Congress could still
appropriate funds to help local officials cope with
the barrage of absentee ballots we know is coming.
States could take steps to make absentee voting
easier, from expanding the drop boxes challenged in
Pennsylvania to providing prepaid envelopes for folks
using the mail.
One key flashpoint will be which mail-in ballots get
counted. The new head of the U.S. Postal Service, a
big GOP giver named Louis DeJoy, has actually cut
back and slowed down mail delivery. So it’s important
that states loosen the rules slightly and accept ballots
that were mailed before Election Day but delivered
later.
Democrats also worry that the Justice Department,
headed by Trumpster William Barr, will tilt the legal
process against them, so they see a growing need for
an independent nonpartisan presence to guarantee
a fair count. The Post suggests creation of a “highly
visible, authoritative commission” that can “lower
the temperature” by being “ready to observe and
evaluate alleged irregularities.”
But the main bulwark against Trump’s attempts to
undermine the election has to be individual voters.
As Barack Obama said in his eulogy of Rep. John
Lewis, “the central strategy of voter suppression (is)
to make you discouraged, to stop believing in your
own power.”
Don’t let that happen.
Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington
University and is a syndicated columnist. Reach him at stevecokie@gmail.
com.
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Einselen, Sarah. Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 130, No. 247, Ed. 1 Friday, August 14, 2020, newspaper, August 14, 2020; Gainesville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1324807/m1/4/: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Cooke County Library.