You’ve probably heard them all by now. Voter IDs required to vote, which hits urban residents who do not drive the hardest – where minority voters live en masse. Alternative IDs are bureaucratic nightmares, especially for people born “at home.” Also likely to be minority voters. Have to vote in-person rules with voter IDs. Then locate the polls far from minority neighborhoods in areas that are notoriously “lily white.” Make sure there are limited ways for minorities to cast a ballot, sometimes having only one official receptacle in an entire large city (not anywhere near minority neighborhoods). Make sure that “voting by mail” is severely limited. Let unelected political appointees unilaterally disqualify voters and ballots, oddly only an issue where Republican officials hold control. Scream and yell when all these measures fail that the vote was rigged, without any significant evidence and after over 60 judicial rulings to the contrary.
But wait, there’s more. Keep expanding laws to limit minority voters. Make voters travel far to vote, and when they are in line, make sure no one can even give them a drink of water. Don’t allow anyone to furnish transportation for people heading to vote. Limit voting hours and days to maximize inconvenience for targeted minority voters. Design voting districts to concentrate minority voters to one district while diluting the balance of minority voters with geographically distorted voting districts, designed to dominate minority communities with unrelated masses of white residents in other areas (gerrymandering). But what if you don’t even count the minority voters at all? Brilliant.
Slammed by the pandemic, budget slashed and burned by the Trump administration heavily focused on cutting back on field workers reaching into minority neighborhoods (there was a sharp cutback – by 200,000! – of such workers in the 2020 when compared even to 2010), and a clear hostility in identifying and tracking people of color, governors and mayors (mostly in blue areas) feared that the 2020 Census would reduce their access to federal funds (based on Census results) and contract the number of representatives that they send to the House. Funny, that appears to be precisely what happened.
We can start with the hard fact that 86+% of Americans live in urban areas. Fewer than 5% live or work on traditional farms. In 1789, when our Forefathers configured our federal legislature to assure farm states that they would never be outvoted by city slickers, they gave each state two U.S. Senators regardless of population. After all, back then, the United States was 94% agricultural. That anomaly translates today that 30% of American voters literally elect 50% of the Senate, a reality that makes the filibuster rule that much more difficult to justify. Since urban voters, including big cities in red states, skew Democrat, this allows rural voters in red states to hold the “trump” card; a single rural vote seems to have the voting power of 1.8 urban votes.
This distortion is further amplified by the constitutional right for states, not the federal government, to define House voting districts for federal elections. No wonder that we are viewed as a flawed, unrepresentative democracy by most of Europe (the label “flawed democracy” was created by the prestigious journal, The Economist, and it stuck). But back to the undercounting of minority voters, one that reduced both New York’s and California’s delegate count to the U.S. House of Representatives for the coming elections.
Minorities often are mistrustful of governmental representatives. Since the latest Census was heavily focused on getting people counted, safely during a pandemic, via the Internet. But combined with the above skepticism and the relative dearth of computers and online skills by minorities, particularly non-English-speaking and people of color, this mechanism fell way short of eliciting the mandatory compliance required by the U.S. Census. That’s where the outreach field workers were supposed to kick in. But timelines were distorted by the pandemic and the number of field staffers, despite a significant increase in the U.S. population since 2010, was woefully short of what was required to secure accurate information. The minorities were further dissuaded to cooperate by a momentary distraction as the Trump administration tried unsuccessfully to add a question about citizenship (courts stopped this attempt).
Latino, African American and even some Native American communities that were visibly growing all over the United States (but mostly in urban areas) were recorded as contracting. The lack of follow-up resulted in numbers that were obviously and visibly incorrect. Business districts and property rentals that catered to such minorities, which should have declined if the relevant minority populations were contracting, were in mega-expansion mode.
Even in major cities, like Los Angeles where efforts were mounted by the local government, the participation rate among minorities was abysmal. Among Latinos, clearly a growing demographic, the consequences are disappointingly inaccurate. Writing for the August 30th Los Angeles Times, David Zahniser explains: “‘Our worst fears have been realized, in a sense, with a poor-quality count primarily in Latino-majority areas in the Eastside of the city,’ said David Ely, a demographic consultant with the [Los Angeles] Redistricting Commission.
“That disparity — declining population numbers on the Eastside and major increases in the West Valley — will present challenges for the redistricting panel, which will devote the next two months to creating new maps for the City Council’s 15 districts. Each district must have roughly the same number of people, which means some will need to add population, and others will need to shed… The process will have implications for the type of representation residents receive at City Hall… Changes to district boundary lines could cause some neighborhoods to wind up with a different council member. And if one council district is redrawn, the domino effect would ensure that the boundaries of nearby districts are reworked as well.
“The process also could have consequences for people running in the June 2022 council election, when eight seats will be up for grabs. If boundary lines change dramatically, any number of candidates could find themselves living in a different council district — one that does not have an election scheduled for next year.
“The Redistricting Commission, made up of political appointees at City Hall, must submit its proposed maps to the City Council on Oct. 29. Under the law, each district must have about 260,000 residents or hew relatively close to that figure… In an interview, Mayor Eric Garcetti defended the city’s work in getting residents to turn in their forms, saying outreach workers did ‘a hell of a job,’ given the pandemic and other challenges. Garcetti said the Trump administration provided few resources and pushed repeatedly for census forms to include a question about residents’ citizenship status — a move the mayor called ‘reprehensible.’… ‘We never faced this sort of hostile headwinds, the politicization of what has traditionally been the most nonpartisan obligation of government: to count its people,’ he said…
“Paul Ong, a research professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said the undercount in Los Angeles County affected not just Latinos but also Asian and Black Americans; it generally also affected renters and low-income households. An undercount was most likely in neighborhoods that have a high percentage of people living in poverty and a large share of Latinos who are not citizens, he said… Ong, who co-wrote an analysis of the undercount, attributed the phenomenon partly to the disruption caused by the pandemic. He also drew a connection between the lower numbers and Trump’s push for a citizenship question...
“[LA City Councilman Mitch] O’Farrell attributed the decrease to Trump’s ‘reign of terror’ against residents in the country illegally. [Councilman Gil] Cedillo took a similar stance, saying the weak response to the census was due to the former president’s push to make immigration status a part of the survey and to deportation fears among some of his constituents…” In the end, a GOP administration, knowing that minorities tend to favor Democrats, did its best to marginalize the count of such individuals… with obvious success. All over the United States!
I’m Peter Dekom, where democracy increasingly appears to be on life support in this country.
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