Pay attention

Cruz is gonna be with Texas until he makes a failed presidential campaign just like Perry, isn’t he.

Well, it was a close race with a good heaping amount of voter suppression, let’s not forget that. Then there’s the gerrymandering that divided Austin into six districts. I mean…

Look at this fucking shit right here. Austin is super left and it got so gerrymandered that it looks red. (btw I’m using the House race since it shows the districts)

And then there’s San Antonio.

Take a look at how Houston is divided.

Lucky it’s mostly blue with a flipped district, but notice how a specific district wraps around Houston and slivers right into its heart, making a conservative district. Methinks this isn’t a good representation of the populations that district covers nor the most convenient for the locals there. (must be confusing as all hell to find out where your polling booth is for that district)

And then there’s Dallas/Fort Worth.

Notice how the biggest cities in Texas are divided up, with the fringes of the cities sliced up and devoured by the rural and much more conservative areas. This is what gerrymandering looks like. It’s not representative of the rural people living in those districts and it’s not representative of the people in the cities themselves. It benefits no one but Republicans in office.

If Democrats get any wins in Texas, this is what they had to fight against.

Senate races are determined by pure popular vote.

Gerrymandering, while certainly a prevalent issue, has nothing to do with Beto’s loss, and in fact Democrats had a net gain in Texas officeholders.

(Also Democrats gerrymander too — welcome to the state of Massachusetts and the state House.)

Gerryman ering does have an effect on turnout, though. If you live in a district gerrymandered to be very blue, you might be inclined to stay home, since it’ll be 80% Blue anyway, but if in drawing that very safe blue seat (TX-35 for example) you created 3 very close 55 Red/45 Blue districts, you can increase turnout of those tight races. It can also depresses votes of Blue voters in Red areas who think it’s hopeless. Couple that with strict ID laws that harm the poor and students (student ID’s don’t count, Concealed Carry does though), and you have mix that great favors Republicans.

Also Blue gerrymandering is not anywhere close to as bad as it is in Red states. You mention Massachusetts, so let’s look at that. Mass has 9 districts, all Democratic, but when I plugged them into 3 super-districts designed to allott 3 seats proportionally to the vote (bringing the threshold for a seat down to 33% instead of 50%), you end up with 8-1 (MA-6th would flip), which is about right for a state that votes about 70%-75% Democratic.

Texas though? When I put our 36 districts into 9 super-districts, you go from 25-11* in favor of Republicans to 20-16 in favor of Republicans. A +5 seat swing for the Democrats.

*(based on 2016 numbers, 2018 hasn’t been totally called yet so it hasn’t been plugged in).

California, when plugged in comes out at a net 0, so this problem doesn’t scale. It’s that bad down here in Texas.

Ever since the Supreme Court ordered the nation’s voting authorities to get their act together in 2002 in the wake of Bush v Gore, tech companies have been flogging touchscreen voting machines to willing buyers across the country, while a cadre computer scientists trained in Ed Felten’s labs at Princeton have shown again and again and again and again that these machines are absolutely unfit for purpose, are trivial to hack, and endanger the US election system.

Felten has moved on to the White House, where he’s deputy CTO, while his grad students have fanned out across the country to take positions at some of America’s top universities, where they and their students continue to mercilessly attack the unsound computers that America has put its democracy inside of.

Ben Wofford’s comprehensive account of the war on shitty voting machines in Politico is by turns frightening and enraging, and even though the touchscreen voting era appears to finally be drawing to its inevitable close, the remaining machines in the field are, if anything, even more vulnerable to remote attacks, and, worryingly, many are clustered in hotly disputed districts in key battleground states for the 2016 presidential race.

It’s not for lack of trying to raise alarms. Felten’s team and proteges have gone to far as to meet mysterious whistleblowers in dark New York alleys to take receipt of smuggled-out voting machines to run tests on, and then produced some of the most mediagenic, easy-to-understand videos and articles detailing their findings that you could ask for.

Combine this indifference with North Korea’s attack on Sony, China’s attack on the Office of Personnel Management, and Russia’s (presumptive) attack on the DNC, and you’ve got a situation where it’s all-too-plausible that the coming election will be hacked, and where it’s certain that any irregularities will be blamed on hackers, domestic and foreign.

After all, Virgina took 13 years to ditch its wifi-connected Winvote machines, whose crypto key is now known to be “abcde,” and which runs a version of Windows that hasn’t been updated since 2005. Jeremy Epstein, the whistleblower who fought for the machines’ removal for all that time, says of the elections that were balloted on Winvote systems, “If these machines and elections weren’t hacked, it was only because no one tried.”

To make things worse, many of the same vendors who denied, threatened, and obfuscated when caught selling defective voting machines are now trying to sell online voting systems that will have every problem of the worst voting machines, times a thousand.

http://boingboing.net/2016/08/12/if-the-2016-election-is-hacked.html