Tag: North Carolina

These 4 states could decide control of Congress in 2022

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Watch Georgia, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona

ANALYSIS — More than 16 months before Election Day, new House district lines haven’t even been drawn, and yet the fight for Congress is likely to hinge on the outcomes in four critical states.

On a basic level, every state matters in the Senate, considering Republicans need to gain just a single seat to get to the majority. Each significant recruitment development (such as if GOP Gov. Chris Sununu challenges Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire) would instantly affect the handicapping of a race and the fight for control. But there are other states less dependent on a single candidate.

Every seat also matters in the House, where Republicans need a net gain of five seats for a majority — a paltry number in a body of 435 members and in the face of the midterm history, which favors the party out of the White House. And some states, such as Texas, are of particular importance to one of the chambers. But a handful of states are hosting competitive races that will affect control of both the House and the Senate. Continue reading.

In two political battlegrounds, thousands of mail-in ballots are on the verge of being rejected

Tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots for the 2020 election by mail, building on a historic shift in voting methods that started with primary elections held during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mail-in ballots, however, aren’t automatically accepted as in-person ballots are. Rather, they can be rejected if they have signature defects on their return envelopes. Unless cured by voters – which means that voters fix the signature errors on them – these submitted ballots will be rejected. 

Thanks to ongoing reporting of voter turnout in two battleground states, Florida and North Carolina, we can identify the number of mail-in ballots at risk of being rejected. So far, we can tell that there are thousands of ballots flagged for rejection in these two states. In addition, racial minorities and Democrats are disproportionately more likely to have cast mail ballots this election that face rejection. Continue reading.

GOP silent on election fraud scheme to steal North Carolina House seat

Republicans have nothing to say about evidence that shows one of their nominees benefited from election fraud.

The entire Republican Party machine — from Trump to Congress to Fox News — is refusing to acknowledge evidence of rampant election fraud in a North Carolina congressional race.

There are serious and credible reports that in at least one county, an operative working for Republican Mark Harris’ campaign ran a systemic fraud campaign in which absentee ballots belonging to real voters were either filled in with fake votes for Harris, or thrown away if they had already been filled in for Democrat Dan McCready.

The evidence of this fraud is so strong that the North Carolina State Board of Elections is refusing to certify results that would give Harris a victory over McCready in the 9th Congressional District. House Democrats are even considering refusing to seat Harris in the new Congress unless the controversy is resolved.

View the complete December 5 article by Oliver WIllis on the ShareBlue.com website here.

A Case for Math, Not ‘Gobbledygook,’ in Judging Partisan Voting Maps

The following article by Adam Liptak was posted on the New York Times website January 15, 2018:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that statistical evidence said to show that Wisconsin’s voting districts had been warped by political gerrymandering struck him as “sociological gobbledygook.” Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — In October, when the Supreme Court heard argumentsin a case that could reshape American politics, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. registered an objection. There was math in the case, he said, and it was complicated.

“It may be simply my educational background,” the chief justice said, presumably referring to his Harvard degrees in history and law. But he said that statistical evidence said to show that Wisconsin’s voting districts had been warped by political gerrymandering struck him as “sociological gobbledygook.”

Last week, Judge James A. Wynn Jr. came to the defense of math. “It makes no sense for courts to close their eyes to new scientific or statistical methods,” he wrote in a decision striking down North Carolina’s congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

Judge Wynn directed his criticism to Republican state lawmakers, who had urged his three-judge Federal District Court to ignore what they called “a smorgasbord of alleged ‘social science’ theories,” and not to Chief Justice Roberts. But Judge Wynn did use one of Chief Justice Roberts’s most prominent opinions to make the point that numbers can have a role to play in judicial decision making. Continue reading “A Case for Math, Not ‘Gobbledygook,’ in Judging Partisan Voting Maps”