From The Dispatch: My conservative attachment to those institutions—most obviously the Bill of Rights—doesn’t make me anti-democratic. It makes me committed to the things that work to ensure the survival of both democracy and individual liberty over time.Think about… Continue reading

I have been reading Erik J. Engstrom’s book, Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy, which is a tour de force on the history of partisan gerrymandering. I decided to put this post together to convey a sense of… Continue reading

From the Chicago Tribune (note that the one-person, one-vote doctrine does not apply to election districts for elected state supreme courts): In addition to the legislature, Democrats doubled-down on their cartography skills, passing the first redrawing of Illinois Supreme Court… Continue reading

A disturbing story about the just-completed race for Mayor in Anchorage: For Anchorage election workers, this month’s mayoral runoff was like no other. Citizen observers crowded outside the Election Center, photographing workers and writing down their license plate numbers. Inside,… Continue reading

From David Frum (@davidfrum), at The Atlantic (sub-titled: An overambitious faction of the activist left is standing in the way of voting-rights reform): Here are two leading examples. Republican gerrymandering works by stuffing as many as possible of a state’s… Continue reading

Wonder what to make of this. Some more results: Outside Europe, some 75% of people surveyed in China supported the idea of replacing parliamentarians with AI, while 60% of American respondents opposed it.

With New York City’s ranked-choice voting primaries coming up on June 22, it’s good news that the state has now approved the technology needed to manage the vote tabulation process. Story here.

Apparently the state has to approve the software NYC wants to use. Let’s hope the various governmental actors do not screw this up. In four special elections for city council, the Board of Elections had to tally all the votes… Continue reading

From The National Review. I had not been aware of these facts: Like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, Stefanik pointed to the doubts on the part of some Americans about the election’s legitimacy as a reason to reject… Continue reading

I hadn’t been aware of this 2019 paper in Legislative Studies Quarterly by David Cotrell. The piece itself is behind a paywall. Here’s the abstract: Recent research has leveraged computer simulations to identify the effect of gerrymandering on partisan… Continue reading

From Fair Vote: A record 23 cities in Utah passed ranked choice voting ordinances for elections in 2021, more than doubling the number of elections that will allow voters to rank mayoral candidates. Altogether, with these added cities, 53 jurisdictions… Continue reading