Vote Polling Quotes

When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners--and wished them well--nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation... Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.

Since the topic is science, the non scientists don't get a vote. We shouldn't decide everything by polling the masses. This is the fallacy called Argumentum Ad Numerum, the idea that something is true because great number believe it, as in EAT SHIT, twenty trillions flies can't be wrong!

We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom. ...Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.

I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote.

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.

The laws that took the vote away from blacks—poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications—also often ensured that poor whites would not vote. And the political leaders of the South knew this.

We cannot, of course, expect every leader to possess the wisdom of Lincoln or Mandela’s largeness of soul. But when we think about what questions might be most useful to ask, perhaps we should begin by discerning what our prospective leaders believe it worthwhile for us to hear. Do they cater to our prejudices by suggesting that we treat people outside our ethnicity, race, creed or party as unworthy of dignity and respect? Do they want us to nurture our anger toward those who we believe have done us wrong, rub raw our grievances and set our sights on revenge? Do they encourage us to have contempt for our governing institutions and the electoral process? Do they seek to destroy our faith in essential contributors to democracy, such as an independent press, and a professional judiciary? Do they exploit the symbols of patriotism, the flag, the pledge in a conscious effort to turn us against one another? If defeated at the polls, will they accept the verdict, or insist without evidence they have won? Do they go beyond asking about our votes to brag about their ability to solve all problems put to rest all anxieties and satisfy every desire? Do they solicit our cheers by speaking casually and with pumped up machismo about using violence to blow enemies away? Do they echo the attitude of Musolini: “The crowd doesn’t have to know, all they have to do is believe and submit to being shaped.”? Or do they invite us to join with them in building and maintaining a healthy center for our society, a place where rights and duties are apportioned fairly, the social contract is honored, and all have room to dream and grow. The answers to these questions will not tell us whether a prospective leader is left or right-wing, conservative or liberal, or, in the American context, a Democrat or a Republican. However, they will us much that we need to know about those wanting to lead us, and much also about ourselves. For those who cherish freedom, the answers will provide grounds for reassurance, or, a warning we dare not ignore.

I think when it comes to females in the media you’ll see something that kind of upsets me which is that females are pinned up against each other more so than men. You know, for example like you never see online “vote for who has the better butt - this actor or this actor.” It’s always like this female singer and this female singer. And you get to vote. I mean, it’s daily I see these things and these polls like “let us know who’s sexier, who’s the hotter momma” and I just don’t see it like “who’s the hotter dad” you know? I think that one thing that I do believe as a feminist is that in order for us to have gender equality we have to stop making it a girl fight and we have to stop being so interested in seeing girls trying to tear each other down, it has to be more about cheering each other on as women. That’s just kind of how I feel about it.

When considering a candidate for office, almost right up until they enter the polling booth and sometimes even in the booth itself, most voters rely more on what they see and hear themselves in real time than on facts, history, logic, or learned experience.

Talk is cheap, voting is free; take it to the polls...

Although few people will remember 3 June 1993, it was a landmark in South African history. On that day, after months of negotiations at the World Trade Centre, the multiparty forum voted to set a date for the country’s first national, nonracial, one-person-one-vote election: 27 April 1994. For the first time in South African history, the black majority would go to the polls to elect their own leaders.

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the state and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible. It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan's Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take places at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory. An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is 'just the same as' or 'just as bad as' totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct,national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the caster oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig,whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe,is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

Important decisions that will affect a nation’s fate or humanity’s fate cannot be left to the referendums! Because such decisions require good knowledge of history; they require a sound reason and a powerful logic and masses often do not have such characteristics!

Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, "My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war.

because it is a very elegant feeling to wake up in the morning and go down to your neighborhood polling place and come away feeling proud of the way you voted.

And I say to you today that we need more folks in this country who are a good crazy….You can’t tell what will happen when you get folks with some good crazy…going to the polls to vote!

I have divided politicians into two categories: the Signposts and the Weathercocks. The Signpost says: 'This is the way we should go.' And you don't have to follow them but if you come back in ten years time the Signpost is still there. The Weathercock hasn’t got an opinion until they've looked at the polls, talked to the focus groups, discussed it with the spin doctors. And I've no time for Weathercocks, I'm a Signpost man. And in fairness, although I disagreed with everything she did, Mrs Thatcher was a Signpost. She said what she meant. Meant what she said. Did what she said she’d do if you voted for her. So everybody who voted for her shared responsibility for what happened. And I think that we do need a few more Signposts and few fewer Weathercocks.

They walked, some of them for miles, from rural villages deep in the bush. They came in wheelbarrows, in wheelchairs. They came with babies on their back. They came the night before, some of them sleeping on the hard ground outside the polling booths so they could vote when morning came. The

In politics, the connection between what you pay for and what you actually get is problematic at best... This is another way of asserting that your vote in the marketplace counts for so much more than your vote in the polling booth. Cast your dollars for the washing machine of your choice and that is what you get--nothing more and nothing less. Pull the lever for the politician of your choice and, most of the time (if you're lucky), you will get some of what you do want and much of what you don't. The votes of a special interest lobby may ultimately cancel out yours. As someone much wiser than me once said, "Politics may not be the oldest profession, but the results are often the same.

They all followed Mississippi’s example, instituting race-veiled voting restrictions, from literacy tests to poll taxes, that would purge their voting rolls of the remaining Black (and many poor White) voters without saying a racial word.

During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.

After Obama’s victory, 395 new voting restrictions were introduced in 49 states from 2011 to 2015. Following the Tea Party’s triumph in the 2010 elections, half the states in the country, nearly all of them under Republican control—from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania—passed laws making it harder to vote. The sudden escalation of efforts to curb voting rights most closely resembled the Redemption period that ended Reconstruction, when every southern state adopted devices like literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African-American voters.

They worried third-party ballot harvesting would encourage voter fraud. Some states had called for unsupervised drop boxes to replace or supplement ordinary polling stations. What would stop those boxes from being tampered with, or, worse still, from being filled with fraudulent votes by bad actors?

The key idea here is “negative partisanship”: partisan behavior driven not by positive feelings toward the party you support but negative feelings toward the party you oppose. If you’ve ever voted in an election feeling a bit bleh about the candidate you backed, but fearful of the troglodyte or socialist running against her, you’ve been a negative partisan. It turns out a lot of us have been negative partisans. A 2016 Pew poll found that self-described independents who tended to vote for one party or the other were driven more by negative motivations. Majorities of both Republican- and Democratic-leaning independents said a major reason for their lean was the other party’s policies were bad for the country; by contrast, only a third of each group said they were driven by support for the policies of the party they were voting for.

Society doesn't evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meetings, academic conferences, tea and cucumber sandwiches, or polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere—and someone with soul in the game. And asymmetry is present in about everything.

Wait a minute,” Billy said. “What about elections?” “What elections?” I asked. “Its easy for them to rig votes with the electronic ballets. If third world countries used archaic methods of voting, we sent in representatives from the US to ‘oversee them.’ Everybody I knew in politics didn’t give elections a thought. They knew that people would believe in the corrupted, controlled polls, and that those appointed to office in accordance with the New World Order were secure.” “So people are misled by their leaders to believe they chose them?” “Not only that,” I answered, “but figureheads are placed while the real power works behind the scenes. For example, when Salinas was Vice President of Mexico, he ran the country while dela Madrid was only a Presidential figurehead. Vice President Bush ran this country while Reagan was acting President.

It is worthy of note, however, that the exclusion of black voters from polling booths is not the only way in which black political power has been suppressed. Another dimension of disenfranchisement echoes not so much Jim Crow as slavery. Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come.35 This has enormous consequences for the redistricting process. White rural communities that house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote.

Even where the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference to this obligation of citizenship. In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.

Cat, this is America, they let anybody vote. Crooks, wigs, even cookies like us. Dogs and cats, probably. Don't take Fido to the polls, he might cancel you out.

The young do all the dying and the old go to the polls to vote for other old fucks to tell the young what to do.

One of the best ways to get an individual voter out to the polls is through a personal appeal. In this sense, a personal appeal means an appeal to a specific person and not people in general.

This is pretty much what the Democratic party has come to: getting to the polls the maximum number possible of the least-informed and most easily swayed voters, and constantly trawling for more.

Media bias is no longer news. Poll after poll has shown that the vast majority of journalists vote for Democrats, even though the country as a whole is pretty evenly split between the two major parties.

Just as women fought for the vote, and that very achievement compels us to the polling stations, so women have fought for the right to exercise and participate in sport, and we cannot throw that away. From the women of ancient Greece putting their lives on the line just by watching sport, and the women in Iran who continue to risk imprisonment today by doing the same, to the likes of Kathrine Switzer who campaigned for women to be allowed to run any distance they liked, or Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand who demand the right to participate in sport as women, without being told what their labia should look like. We

The blackest chapter in the history of this State will be the Indian guardianship over these estates,” an Osage leader said, adding, “There has been millions—not thousands—but millions of dollars of many of the Osages dissipated and spent by the guardians themselves.” This so-called Indian business, as White discovered, was an elaborate criminal operation, in which various sectors of society were complicit. The crooked guardians and administrators of Osage estates were typically among the most prominent white citizens: businessmen and ranchers and lawyers and politicians. So were the lawmen and prosecutors and judges who facilitated and concealed the swindling (and, sometimes, acted as guardians and administrators themselves). In 1924, the Indian Rights Association, which defended the interests of indigenous communities, conducted an investigation into what it described as “an orgy of graft and exploitation.” The group documented how rich Indians in Oklahoma were being “shamelessly and openly robbed in a scientific and ruthless manner” and how guardianships were “the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls.” Judges were known to say to citizens, “You vote for me, and I will see that you get a good guardianship.” A white woman married to an Osage man described to a reporter how the locals would plot: “A group of traders and lawyers sprung up who selected certain Indians as their prey. They owned all the officials…. These men had an understanding with each other. They cold-bloodedly said, ‘You take So-and-So, So-and-So and So-and-So and I’ll take these.’ They selected Indians who had full headrights and large farms.

Voter suppression no longer announces itself with a document clearly labeled LITERACY TEST or POLL TAX. Instead, the attacks on voting rights feel like user error—and that’s intentional. When the system fails us, we can rail and try to force change. But if the problem is individual, we are trained to hide our mistakes and ignore the concerns. The fight to defend the right to vote begins with understanding where we’ve been and knowing where we are now.

* Even though the restriction couldn’t be enforced under federal law, the state ban on interracial marriage in Alabama continued into the twenty-first century. In 2000, reformers finally had enough votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it. A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent support a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent oppose such a ban, and 14 percent are undecided.

Moreover, the fact that more than a third of the electorate voted Nazi in 1932 was a hugely significant factor in the Republic’s fall and in the rise of Hitler. But most of those voters were not motivated by a broad discontent with the Republic, including with its sexual politics, as some studies have asserted.54 Rather, voters were radicalized, driven to the extreme parties, and drawn to the polls by specific issues, such as the economic crisis, the fear of communism, and the trauma of unemployment.55

As he spoke, he opened his clothes, and showed his breast with an incredible number of scars upon it; then turning to Galba, who had made some remarks not very decent "You laugh," said he, "at these other marks: but I glory in them before my countrymen, for I got them by riding, night and day, in their service. But come, bring them to vote; I will go amongst them and follow them all to the poll, that I may know those who are cowardly and ungrateful, and like rather to be ruled by a demagogue than by a true general.

Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes—an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler.

To comply with the letter of the law as stipulated in the Fifteenth Amendment, no mention of race could be made in efforts to restrict voting rights, so states introduced purportedly “neutral” poll taxes, property requirements, literacy tests, and complex written ballots.

A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against their will, instead of by fraud and against the will of all the rest of us, as now... ...that the names of all the men eligible in each assembly district be put into a hat (or, if no hat can be found that is large enough, into a bathtub), and that a blind moron, preferably of tender years, be delegated to draw out one... The advantages that this system would offer are so vast and obvious that I hesitate to venture into the banality of rehearsing them. It would in the first place, save the commonwealth the present excessive cost of elections, and make political campaigns unnecessary. It would in the second place, get rid of all the heart-burnings that now flow out of every contest at the polls, and block the reprisals and charges of fraud that now issue from the heart-burnings. It would, in the third place, fill all the State Legislatures with men of a peculiar and unprecedented cast of mind – men actually convinced that public service is a public burden, and not merely a private snap. And it would, in the fourth and most important place, completely dispose of the present degrading knee-bending and trading in votes, for nine-tenths of the legislators, having got into office unwillingly, would be eager only to finish their duties and go home, and even those who acquired a taste for the life would be unable to increase the probability, even by one chance in a million, of their reelection. The disadvantages of the plan are very few, and most of them, I believe, yield readily to analysis. Do I hear argument that a miscellaneous gang of tin-roofers, delicatessen dealers and retired bookkeepers, chosen by hazard, would lack the vast knowledge of public affairs needed by makers of laws? Then I can only answer (a) that no such knowledge is actually necessary, and (b) that few, if any, of the existing legislators possess it... Would that be a disservice to the state? Certainly not. On the contrary, it would be a service of the first magnitude, for the worst curse of democracy, as we suffer under it today, is that it makes public office a monopoly of a palpably inferior and ignoble group of men. They have to abase themselves to get it, and they have to keep on abasing themselves in order to hold it. The fact reflects in their general character, which is obviously low. They are men congenitally capable of cringing and dishonorable acts, else they would not have got into public life at all. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule among them, but how many? What I contend is simply that the number of such exceptions is bound to be smaller in the class of professional job-seekers than it is in any other class, or in the population in general. What I contend, second, is that choosing legislators from that populations, by chance, would reduce immensely the proportion of such slimy men in the halls of legislation, and that the effects would be instantly visible in a great improvement in the justice and reasonableness of the laws.

Maybe what stopped people from voting wasn't a lack of information about the candidates or a feeling that the outcomes of races didn't matter or a sense that a trip to the polls was inconvenient. What if voting wasn't only a political act, but a social one that took place in a liminal space between the public and private that had never been well-defined to citizens? What if toying with those expectations was key to turning a person into a voter? What if elections were simply less about shaping people's opinions than changing their behaviors?

He had developed a deep disdain of Donald Trump, whom he considered a con man, but he wasn’t impressed by Joe Biden. “When he was vice president, I went to lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over.” Nonetheless, he says he would have voted for Biden in 2020, but he decided that going to the polls in California, where he was then registered, was a waste of time because it was not a contested state.

Fats knew the playbook and was adept at the dirty tricks: stuffing ballot boxes, raising large sums of unreported money, buying blocks of votes, spreading lies, intimidating voters, harassing poll workers, bribing election officials, and voting dead people with absentee ballots.

If you believe in the eighteenth century view of the mind, you will look and act wimpy. You will think that all you need to do is give people the facts and the figures and they will reach the right conclusion. You will think that all you need to do is point out where their interests lie, and they will act politically to maximize them. You will believe in polling and focus groups: you will believe that if you ask people what their interests are, they will be aware of them and will tell you, and will vote on it. You will not have any need to appeal to emotion---indeed, to do so would be wrong! You will not have to speak of values; facts and figures will suffice. You will not have to change people's brains; their reason should be enough. You will not have to frame the facts; they will speak for themselves. You just have to get the facts to them...

There were four white cops in the polling place where I went to vote. Right in the middle of Harlem, four white cops. Everybody else there were colored, voters all colored, officials all colored registering the books, only the cops white--to remind me of which color is the law. I went inside that voting booth and shut the door and stood there all by myself and put the biggest black mark I could make in front of every black name on the ballot. At least up North I can vote black. If enough of us votes black in Harlem, maybe someday we can change the color of the law.

It is as if a woman has a right to vote, but the polling place is across the state and casting a ballot costs two weeks’ pay, and as if she has a right to be a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist, but her place of worship is a four-hour bus ride away, and before she can go to services she has to listen to a fundamentalist Christian sermon warning her that if she doesn’t accept Jesus as her personal savior she’s going straight to hell. We would never accept the kinds of restrictions on our other constitutional rights that we have allowed to hamper the right to end a pregnancy.

Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote. Black sharecroppers would be degraded to the level of debt-ridden serfs, bound to their former plantation owners. After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in The Communist Manifesto, declared: “In bourgeois society . . . the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.”13 This view is shared by contemporary statists, including the current occupants of the White House. On May 14, 2008, the future First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, while campaigning for her husband, Barack Obama, proclaimed: “We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history. We’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.”14 On October 30, 2008, when the polls showed him the likely winner of the upcoming presidential election, Barack Obama shouted during a campaign stop days before the vote: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”15

A Gallup poll taken in 1999 asked Americans whether they would vote for an otherwise well-qualified person who was a woman (95 per cent would), Roman Catholic (94 per cent would), Jew (92 per cent), black (92 per cent), Mormon (79 per cent), homosexual (79 per cent) or atheist (49 per cent).

And the German people? On August 19, some 95 per cent of those who had registered went to the polls, and 90 per cent, more than thirty-eight million of them, voted approval of Hitler’s usurpation of complete power. Only four and a quarter million Germans had the courage—or the desire—to vote “No.

After nine days of turmoil—nine days in which millions of Americans went to the polls to vote early—and just thirty-six hours before Election Day, Comey sent another letter announcing that the “new” batch of emails wasn’t really new and contained nothing to cause him to alter his months-old decision not to seek charges. Well, great. Too little, too

Mostly, this was the fault of white, Rust Belt, out-of-work Democrats. They had voted twice for Barack Obama, but now they were being told that they were racists or white supremacists for voting for Trump and giving him an Electoral College edge. The contrarian liberal genius Michael Moore had been a lonely prophet who had seen it coming, but the Clinton team had ignored him, just as they had ignored their own patriarch, Bill Clinton, who sounded the same warning. In a live performance, Moore had teased voters in Wilmington, Ohio, months before the election, telling them that he knew what they were planning to do. And they laughed with him, like guilty children caught in the act by a bemused cousin. He knew they were going to vote for Trump. He didn’t like it, but at least he was one person who could not be fooled. People who had been overlooked, despised, stomped on, used, taken for granted. This was their moment to speak. They had been shamed into telling the pollsters what they wanted to hear, but in the privacy of their polling booths, they had struck a blow. This

Polls are one of the most dishonest things,” President Trump said, reflecting on the matter later from his Mar-a-Lago home. “I have never seen dishonesty like this. They’re dishonest with polls. You know it’s suppression to keep people home. Do you know how many people didn’t vote because of that poll and Wisconsin? And probably other places too, that poll got so much publicity.

According to a 2015 Reason-Rupe survey, 53 percent of Americans under 30 admit to having a favorable view of socialism. Likewise, a 2016 Gallup poll found that an astounding 69 percent of Millennials say they would be willing to vote for a “socialist” presidential candidate. For comparison’s sake, roughly a third of their parents’ generation confess positive views toward socialism.

Counting polls required assembling—all in favor of the Federalist stand here, all in favor of the Republican over there—and in places where voting was done by ballot, casting a ballot generally meant tossing a ball into a box. The word “ballot” comes from the Italian ballota, meaning a little ball—and early Americans who used ballots cast pea or pebbles, or, not uncommonly, bullets.

the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.” By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before.

Liberalism sanctifies the narrating self, and allows it to vote in the polling stations, in the supermarket and in the marriage market. For centuries this made good sense, because though the narrating self believed in all kinds of fictions and fantasies, no alternative system knew me better. Yet once we have a system that really does know me better, it will be foolhardy to leave authority in the hands of the narrating self.

Arizona state law permits mail-in votes to be counted up to two weeks prior to Election Day. Those votes, which leaned Democratic, were some of the first to be posted when the polls closed. The state has a reputation for counting accurately and running elections cleanly, but it’s inordinately slow. It took the counters in Arizona days to count their ballots, which meant that the Election Day results that were posted were largely based on absentee ballots.

America had spent decades building an entire class of people who were made comfortable in poverty. They were taught that the government would always take care of them through welfare programs. They learned from previous generations to milk the system and attain a standard of living that surpassed most of the rest of the world. Their only required task to sustain that standard of living was to show up to the polls every few years and vote for the gravy train candidates.

Even though the restriction couldn’t be enforced under federal law, the state ban on interracial marriage in Alabama continued into the twenty-first century. In 2000, reformers finally had enough votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it. A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent support a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent oppose such a ban, and 14 percent are undecided.

The accusation rankled. She would never cheat. He and his fellow Fox News zombies were the cheaters, gerrymandering districts and fixing the Supreme Court to do the bidding of the minority, storming the Capitol when they lost. She took pride in treating everyone who voted--Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, or Independent--equally. She cared about fairness and representation. He didn't care about any of that. All he cared about was winning. Now she did too, viciously, and it felt like a loss.

The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman’s soul. History tells us that every oppressed class gained true liberation from its masters through its own efforts. It is necessary that woman learn that lesson, that she realize that her freedom will reach as far as her power to achieve her freedom reaches. It is, therefore, far more important for her to begin with her inner regeneration, to cut loose from the weight of prejudices, traditions, and customs. The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved. Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate. It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds. Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big. Let us not overlook vital things because of the bulk of trifles confronting us. A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing: to give of one’s self boundlessly, in order to find one’s self richer, deeper, better. That alone can fill the emptiness, and transform the tragedy of woman’s emancipation into joy, limitless joy.

A Politico article in November 2020 claimed that Biden’s eventual win in Georgia was related to Democrats’ massive efforts to fight so-called “voter suppression tactics,” the left’s terminology for ensuring that election fraud is limited by removing ineligible voters from polling books, having voters submit identification, and limiting the participation of outside parties in the secret voting process.56 Democrats did invest in the project, spending tens of millions of dollars to challenge and change voter integrity laws.

statistics should be substituted for truth, vote-counting for principles, numbers for rights, and public polls for morality—that pragmatic, range-of-the-moment expediency should be the criterion of a country’s interests, and that the number of its adherents should be the criterion of an idea’s truth or falsehood—that any desire of any nature whatsoever should be accepted as a valid claim, provided it is held by a sufficient number of people—that a majority may do anything it pleases to a minority—in short, gang rule and mob rule

That’s just the way life is. It can be exquisite, cruel, frequently wacky, but above all utterly, utterly random. Those twin imposters in the bell-fringed jester hats, Justice and Fairness—they aren’t constants of the natural order like entropy or the periodic table. They’re completely alien notions to the way things happen out there in the human rain forest. Justice and Fairness are the things we’re supposed to contribute back to the world for giving us the gift of life—not birthrights we should expect and demand every second of the day. What do you say we drop the intellectual cowardice? There is no fate, and there is no safety net. I’m not saying God doesn’t exist. I believe in God. But he’s not a micromanager, so stop asking Him to drop the crisis in Rwanda and help you find your wallet. Life is a long, lonely journey down a day-in-day-out lard-trail of dropped tacos. Mop it up, not for yourself, but for the guy behind you who’s too busy trying not to drop his own tacos to make sure he doesn’t slip and fall on your mistakes. So don’t speed and weave in traffic; other people have babies in their cars. Don’t litter. Don’t begrudge the poor because they have a fucking food stamp. Don’t be rude to overwhelmed minimum-wage sales clerks, especially teenagers—they have that job because they don’t have a clue. You didn’t either at that age. Be understanding with them. Share your clues. Remember that your sense of humor is inversely proportional to your intolerance. Stop and think on Veterans Day. And don’t forget to vote. That is, unless you send money to TV preachers, have more than a passing interest in alien abduction or recentlypurchased a fish on a wall plaque that sings ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’ In that case, the polls are a scary place! Under every ballot box is a trapdoor chute to an extraterrestrial escape pod filled with dental tools and squeaking, masturbating little green men from the Devil Star. In conclusion, Class of Ninety-seven, keep your chins up, grab your mops and get in the game. You don’t have to make a pile of money or change society. Just clean up after yourselves without complaining. And, above all, please stop and appreciate the days when the tacos don’t fall, and give heartfelt thanks to whomever you pray to….

Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes. The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.” Beyond the utility that calling everything racism had for both party establishments, it was good for that other sector, the news media.

This is not a small matter. According to a recent poll conducted by the Freedom Forum, a liberal foundation in Tennessee, 89 percent of American political journalists covering Washington politics voted for Bill Clinton, and only 7 percent identified themselves as conservatives. The journalism profession in America has undergone a sea change in recent years. Previously, beat reporters were just that, reporters. They often did not have undergraduate college degrees, not to mention degrees from journalism schools. But now they do, and notoriously they write editorial content into their reporting.

In reality, though, almost all voters now had their minds made up. You didn’t need to persuade them of whom to vote for — indeed, you couldn’t persuade them of whom to vote for. What you needed to do was excite the group of them who, if they were going to vote, were going to vote for you. Those people had to register, they had to remember where their polling place was, they had to take time out of their day to go cast a ballot. America isn’t like Australia, where voting is compulsory. We make it both optional and, in many places, difficult, so a winning campaign needs not just supporters but motivated supporters.

We have been weathering this hurricane wall of doubt and violence for so long, and now, more crystalline than ever, we have an enemy and a mandate. We have the smirking apotheosis of our oppression sliming, paw-first, toward our genitals. We have the popular vote. We have proof, in exit polls, that white women will pawn their humanity for the safety of white supremacy. We have abortion pills to stockpile and neighbors to protect and children to teach. We have the right woman to find. We have local elections in a year. The fact that we lost doesn’t make us wrong; the fact that they don’t believe in us doesn’t make us disappear. Progress

the feeling that they are. Psychologists have a name for our tendency to confuse our own perspective with something more universal: it’s called “naive realism,” the sense that we are seeing reality as it truly is, without filters or errors.9 Naive realism can lead us badly astray when we confuse our personal perspective on the world with some universal truth. We are surprised when an election goes against us: Everyone in our social circle agreed with us, so why did the nation vote otherwise? Opinion polls don’t always get it right, but I can assure you they have a better track record of predicting elections than simply talking to your friends.

Opinion polls showed that two-thirds of Greeks rejected the conditions attached to the bailout, but wanted to stay in the eurozone. Demonstrations spread throughout Greece advocating a “No” vote. So the Germans and French tried to frame the issue in a narrow way designed to get a “Yes” answer: Did voters want to be part of Europe? The aim was to avoid asking the really important question: Did Greek voters want to impose a decade of depression on themselves, cut public services, impose anti-union labor “reforms,” and sell off the Athenian water supply, its port, their beautiful islands and their gas rights in the Aegean to Germans and other creditors?

...Subordination of the state to Christian values is precisely what the early Puritans, even those in the tradition of the Mayflower Pilgrims, aimed to do. The First Amendment notwithstanding, large numbers of the American public (especially churchgoing Protestant Christians) have embodied this Puritan way of thinking, viewing America as a "Christan nation." Relatively recent poll data bear out the enduring character of these Puritan convictions. According to a Pew Forum poll held just prior to the 2004 election, over one-half of the public would have reservations voting for a candidate with no religious affiliation (31 percent refusing to vote for a Muslim and 15 percent for a Catholic).

Reconstruction prompted a vicious white backlash, which gained traction following the disputed election of 1876, when the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes pulled federal troops out of the South in return for the electoral votes of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Segregationist whites, known as Redeemers, regained power and quickly targeted black voters, first through violence and fraud and then via devices like literacy and good character tests, poll taxes, and stringent residency requirements. Mississippi became the first state to change its constitution to disenfranchise black voters in 1890. Every other southern state quickly followed. Black voters disappeared seemingly overnight.

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.

He decided to poll the room on that question. “He pulled off this clever maneuver,” Jobs recalled, still smarting twenty-five years later. “It was at the executive committee meeting, and he said, ‘It’s me or Steve, who do you vote for?’ He set the whole thing up so that you’d kind of have to be an idiot to vote for me.” Suddenly the frozen onlookers began to squirm. Del Yocam had to go first. He said he loved Jobs, wanted him to continue to play some role in the company, but he worked up the nerve to conclude, with Jobs staring at him, that he “respected” Sculley and would support him to run the company. Eisenstat faced Jobs directly and said much the same thing: He liked Jobs but was supporting Sculley.

How are we going to bring about these transformations? Politics as usual—debate and argument, even voting—are no longer sufficient. Our system of representative democracy, created by a great revolution, must now itself become the target of revolutionary change. For too many years counting, vast numbers of people stopped going to the polls, either because they did not care what happened to the country or the world or because they did not believe that voting would make a difference on the profound and interconnected issues that really matter. Now, with a surge of new political interest having give rise to the Obama presidency, we need to inject new meaning into the concept of the “will of the people.” The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country. As a result, we have left the job of governing to our elected representatives, even though we know that they serve corporate interests and therefore make decisions that threaten our biosphere and widen the gulf between the rich and poor both in our country and throughout the world. In other words, even though it is readily apparent that our lifestyle choices and the decisions of our representatives are increasing social injustice and endangering our planet, too many of us have wanted to continue going our merry and not-so-merry ways, periodically voting politicians in and out of office but leaving the responsibility for policy decisions to them. Our will has been to act like consumers, not like responsible citizens. Historians may one day look back at the 2000 election, marked by the Supreme Court’s decision to award the presidency to George W. Bush, as a decisive turning point in the death of representative democracy in the United States. National Public Radio analyst Daniel Schorr called it “a junta.” Jack Lessenberry, columnist for the MetroTimes in Detroit, called it “a right-wing judicial coup.” Although more restrained, the language of dissenting justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Souter, and Stevens was equally clear. They said that there was no legal or moral justification for deciding the presidency in this way.3 That’s why Al Gore didn’t speak for me in his concession speech. You don’t just “strongly disagree” with a right-wing coup or a junta. You expose it as illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, and you start building a movement to challenge and change the system that created it. The crisis brought on by the fraud of 2000 and aggravated by the Bush administration’s constant and callous disregard for the Constitution exposed so many defects that we now have an unprecedented opportunity not only to improve voting procedures but to turn U.S. democracy into “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” instead of government of, by, and for corporate power.

However, across the country, we witnessed a “power grab” from the minority desperate to hold on to power. The examples of this abound: Native Americans living on reservations in North Dakota were told that in order to vote, they had to have street addresses—where none existed. In Mississippi, impoverished elderly folks who needed an absentee ballot had to pay for a notary public to submit the ballot—resulting in a new-fashioned poll tax. In Georgia, tens of thousands of people of color had their applications for registration held up because of typographical errors in government databases and a failed system called “exact match.” Of the 53,000 applications blocked by this process, 80 percent were from people of color. Voter

I’ve always thought the pre-Revolutionary system was more elegant, but it did concentrate too much power in the hands of one person. Keyes says that at least you knew who the man was then. The person who represents a Lobby in Congress is never the one who makes the real decisions; the real leaders are rarely identifiable and are never held responsible for their actions. If a puppet gets in trouble they sacrifice him and haul out another. I don’t doubt that that’s true, at least some of the time, but it’s certainly not the whole story. If a Lobby consistently acts against the public interest, its voting power dwindles away. Keyes says that’s a cynical illusion: all the polls reflect is how much money a Lobby has put into advertising.

But where Lincoln’s absent hand was felt most keenly was in race relations. Black codes were passed in state after state across the South—as restrictive as the antebellum laws governing free blacks (Richmond’s old laws had even regulated the carrying of canes). These codes propounded segregation, banned intermarriage, provided for special punishments for blacks, and, in one state, Mississippi, also prevented the ownership of land. Not even a congressional civil rights bill, passed over Johnson’s veto, could undo them. For their part, the Northern states were little better. During Reconstruction, employing a deadly brew of poll taxes, literacy requirements, and property qualifications, they abridged the right to vote more extensively than did their Southern counterparts.

Republicans are far more likely to walk in to a polling boot than democrats and democrats are far more likely to use mail-in ballots. So what could very well happen on in election night, you’re sitting there moderating show, it appears that Trump is winning in Michigan and Wisconsin and Florida. People say it, oh my goodness trump is ahead and then in ten a clock in a night Trump announces, “I won the election and by the way my attorney general has told me there is massive fraud with the mail in ballots, and we got a stop counting those ballots. Thank you America , I won, have a good night!” And then the mail in-ballots keep coming in and Trumps lead disappears and Biden becomes the leader. And then you have a massive chaos and conspiracy theory and that is the nightmare I’m worried about.

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton's family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

It was rather a choice between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and feel only indifference and contempt.

The potential for manipulation here is enormous. Here’s one example. During the 2012 election, Facebook users had the opportunity to post an “I Voted” icon, much like the real stickers many of us get at polling places after voting. There is a documented bandwagon effect with respect to voting; you are more likely to vote if you believe your friends are voting, too. This manipulation had the effect of increasing voter turnout 0.4% nationwide. So far, so good. But now imagine if Facebook manipulated the visibility of the “I Voted” icon on the basis of either party affiliation or some decent proxy of it: ZIP code of residence, blogs linked to, URLs liked, and so on. It didn’t, but if it had, it would have had the effect of increasing voter turnout in one direction. It would be hard to detect, and it wouldn’t even be illegal. Facebook could easily tilt a close election by selectively manipulating what posts its users see. Google might do something similar with its search results.

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.” By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before.

A poll produced by Birzeit University in the West Bank at the time confirmed Hamas’s fears, showing that 77 percent of Palestinians favored recognition of Israel, less than five months after voting Hamas into the legislature.120 Under Haniyeh’s leadership, Hamas’s cabinet sought to limit the fallout as it worked with president Abbas’s office to reach a compromise.121 Haniyeh’s pragmatic efforts faced significant obstruction as both Israel and Palestinian factions, as well as internal Hamas forces, sought to prevent a rapprochement from emerging.122 In early June 2006, Prime Minister Olmert leaked information that Israel had approved three presidential trucks with approximately three thousand arms to be delivered to Fatah across the Allenby Bridge from Jordan, further inflaming tension among factions.123 From the Gaza Strip, rocket fire increased. This raised suspicions that Hamas’s external leadership, along with leaders within Gaza who were committed to Hamas’s project, were encouraging al-Qassam to prevent Haniyeh from adopting a moderate position in discussions with Abbas.124 On June 9, Israel carried out an air strike that killed a family of seven in Beit Lahiya, Gaza, who were picnicking on the beach. Officially breaking the ceasefire that had lasted since the Cairo Declaration the previous summer, al-Qassam promised “earthquakes.”125

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia prohibit inmates from voting while incarcerated for a felony offense. Only two states - Maine and Vermont - permit inmates to vote. The vast majority of states continue to withhold the right to vote when prisoners are released on parole. Even after the term of punishment expires, some states deny the right to vote for a period ranging from a number of years to the rest of one's life. This is far from the norm in other countries - like Germany, for instance, which allows (and even encourages) prisoners to vote. In fact, about half of European countries allow all incarcerated people to vote, while others disqualify only a small number of prisoners from the polls. Prisoners vote either in their correctional facilities or by some version of absentee ballot in their town of previous residence. Almost all of the countries that place some restrictions on voting in prison are in Eastern Europe, part of the former Communist bloc. No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law. In those few European countries that permit limited postprison disqualification, the sanction is very narrowly tailored and the number of people disenfranchised is probably in the dozens or hundreds. In the United States, by contrast, voting disqualification upon release from prison is automatic, with no legitimate purpose, and affects millions.

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th

My mother, who somehow managed to stay politically active while raising four children, roped me into canvassing door-to-door for Tom Bradley, Sam Yorty’s opponent for mayor, in our precinct in Woodland Hills. Bradley would be, if he won, the first black mayor of L.A., so it felt like a historic election. Bradley polled well in our precinct, and we were optimistic. Then Yorty won the election, and the precinct breakdowns showed that our neighbors had evidently been lying when they told us canvassers that they would vote for Bradley. It was a well-known phenomenon, apparently, among white voters, these voting-booth reversals. Still, I was outraged, and my cynicism about organized politics and the broad mass of what I was learning to call the bourgeoisie deepened. Robert Kennedy was assassinated, as everyone knows, on the night of the 1968 California primary. I watched the news on a small black-and-white TV, sitting cross-legged on the foot of my girlfriend’s bed. Her name was Charlene. We were fifteen. She was asleep, believing I had left after our evening’s usual heated, inconclusive cuddle. I had stopped, however, to watch the TV after I saw that Kennedy had been shot. It was after midnight and Charlene’s parents were out watching the voting results with friends. They were Republican Party activists. I heard them pull in the driveway and come in the house. I knew that Charlene’s father, who was an older man, always came in to kiss her good night, and I knew, well, the way out her window and how to catfoot it down to the street. Still, I sat there, unthinking yet cruelly resolved, until the bedroom door opened. Her father did not have a heart attack at the sight of me, calmly watching TV in my underwear, though he could have. I snatched up my clothes and dived out the window before he said a word. Charlene’s mother called my mother, and my mother gave me a serious talk about different types of girls, emphasizing the sanctity of “good girls,” such as Charlene, who belonged to some debutante club. I was embarrassed but unrepentant. Charlene and I had never had much to talk about.

Who and How? Pakistani media only highlights the security system around the polling stations, referring foreign officials view, which has nothing to do with the concerns and rejected votes that hide the reality since the returning (presiding) officers' neutrality falls in the question; whereas, it seems that establishment may have approached and succeeded to place presiding officers that maybe the fans of PTI. However, what was the reason to reject hundreds of thousands of votes in various constituencies; voters damaged that in costing or officials during the vote counting? One might not ignore that PTI fans supported by Establishment's involvement to gain success in this way?

These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, good-hearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation. Many whites who supported Jim Crow justified it on paternalist grounds, actually believing they were doing blacks a favor or believing the time was not yet “right” for equality. The disturbing images from the Jim Crow era also make it easy to forget that many African Americans were complicit in the Jim Crow system, profiting from it directly or indirectly or keeping their objections quiet out of fear of the repercussions. Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.” By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before. As soon as he was sworn in as chancellor, the Nazis unfurled their swastikas, a Sanskrit symbol linking them to their Aryan “roots,” and began to close in on

The vast majority of states continue to withhold the right to vote when prisoners are released on parole. Even after the term of punishment expires, some states deny the right to vote for a period ranging from a number of years to the rest of one’s life. This is far from the norm in other countries—like Germany, for instance, which allows (and even encourages) prisoners to vote. In fact, about half of European countries allow all incarcerated people to vote, while others disqualify only a small number of prisoners from the polls. Prisoners vote either in their correctional facilities or by some version of absentee ballot in their town of previous residence. Almost all of the countries that place some restrictions on voting in prison are in Eastern Europe, part of the former Communist. No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law.

but more important than the details is the simple principle that voting should be easy, not hard. The harder you make it to vote, the surer it is that only the most polarized Americans end up at the polls.

And, yes, now you have a new problem. At the 95 percent confidence level, you cannot reject the possibility that the two candidates may be tied with 49 percent of the vote each. This is an inevitable trade-off; the only way to become more certain that your polling results will be consistent with the election outcome without new data is to become more timid in your prediction. Think about a nonstatistical context. Suppose you tell a friend that you are “pretty sure” that Thomas Jefferson was the third or fourth president. How can you become more confident of your historical knowledge? By being less specific. You are “absolutely positive” that Thomas Jefferson was one of the first five presidents.

At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign.

This is why, if you’re looking for a compromise solution, then yes—take a poll, conduct some research, survey the people. But if you’re looking for a unique solution, the last thing you should do is ask for a vote.

It is pointless and stupid to protest, if you don’t vote. The only way you can fight corruption, unemployment, equal and human rights . Making sure that you have a good future and good service delivery is through the poll. Make sure you register to vote and make sure that you vote. For a change to happen, it starts by you.

Against all expectations, including its own, Hamas won the elections by a handsome margin. It took 74 seats to Fatah’s 45 in a 132-member assembly (although with the peculiarities of the electoral system, it had won only 44 percent of the vote to Fatah’s 41 percent). Exit polls after the vote showed that the result owed more to the voters’ great desire for change in the Occupied Territories than to a call for Islamist governance or heightened armed resistance to Israel.22 Even in some predominantly Christian neighborhoods, the vote went heavily for Hamas. This is evidence that many voters simply wanted to throw out the Fatah incumbents, whose strategy had failed and who were seen as corrupt and unresponsive to popular demands.

His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests.

At a workshop attended by expert researchers in quantum mechanichs in 1997, Max Tegmark took an admittedly highly unscienfific poll of the participants' favored interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation came in first with thirteen votes, while the many-worlds interpretation came in second with eight. Another nine votes were scattered among other alternatives. Most interesting, eighteen votes were cast for "None of the above/undecided." And these are the experts.

Incentivizing government service, though, would be altogether different. Why should we want young Americans to perform one or two years of government service? One reason is that a common experience would help break down some of the barriers that have arisen owing to geography, class, race, religion, education, language, and more. World War II did precisely this for millions of Americans. Today, however, there is simply too little common experience in this society and too much that reinforces differences and divisions. It is revealing that according to a recent poll, almost half of second-year college students report they wouldn’t choose to room with someone who supported a different presidential candidate than they did in 2020, while a majority say they wouldn’t go on a date with someone who voted differently and nearly two-thirds couldn’t envision marrying someone who supported a different candidate.

Discrimination did not stop in 1965, nor in 1975, nor in 2005. Since 2011, nine out of the twelve states of the old Confederacy, according to the NAACP, have adopted or proposed two or more requirements to tighten access to the polls, such as placing restrictions on voter registration drives and requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote.52 The only thing keeping the wolves at bay during that time was the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provision. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, however, turned the dogs loose.

rejected as discriminatory took effect just two hours after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Shelby County, affecting hundreds of thousands of eligible voters. Other states previously subject to preclearance redrew district lines, tightened voter-ID requirements, purged voter rolls, canceled same-day registration, restricted early voting, and closed polling places—all in ways that made voting more difficult for minority voters

King and others expected Kennedy to remember his debt to the Black voters. Yet there was one Black voter who had not cast a ballot: Georgia officials said Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t lived in Atlanta long enough to gain eligibility to vote, and Alabama officials said he was too late to pay the $1.50 poll tax required to file an absentee ballot in Montgomery.

J&K, why refugees can vote in the Lok Sabha but not in state polls,

Just because a woman is strong, successful or powerful doesn’t mean she is a feminist. It means she utilizes and enjoys the road that feminists paved for her, and if she uses that road to degrade and minimize the hard work it took to build, she is not a feminist.

On June 13, 2012, Michigan State Representative Lisa Brown was banned from the House floor because she pissed off House Republicans when she was defending the right to choose. She used the word “vagina” and that is what got most of the attention, but what she said about her religion is very important and should not be discounted or ignored. She said, "Yesterday we heard the representative from Holland speak about freedom of religion. I'm Jewish. I keep Kosher in my home. I have two sets of dishes, one for meat and one for dairy and another two sets of dishes on top of that for Passover. "Judaism believes that therapeutic abortions, namely abortions performed to save the life of the mother, are not only permissible but mandatory. The stage of pregnancy does not matter. Wherever there is a question of the life of the mother or that of the unborn child, Jewish law rules in favor of preserving the life of the mother. The status of the fetus as human life does not equal that of the mother. I have not asked you to adopt and adhere to my religious beliefs. Why are you asking me to adopt yours?

The misunderstanding is not surprising. As a society, our collective understanding of racism has been powerfully influenced by the shocking images of the Jim Crow era and the struggle for civil rights. When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and “whites only” signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation. Many

As a society, our collective understanding of racism has been powerfully influenced by the shocking images of the Jim Crow era and the struggle for civil rights. When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and “whites only” signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, good-hearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation.

The thousands of blacks who were either purged from the voting rolls or falsely told the polls had closed were seen by many conservatives as not having been disciplined enough to make sure they voted. Metaphor

also get why people aren’t beating down the doors of the polling places. For one, we can’t keep track of whether we’re supposed to bring a DNA sample or a urine sample this time to prove our identity and residency. It keeps changing. For another, the hours and polling locations in poorer neighborhoods keep getting cut for some reason. It is definitely not at all a conscious effort to repress the poor (read likely Democrat) vote. At all. Ever. (Dear GOP: You guys might want to police your people. They keep openly saying that your goal is to repress the vote of the poor.) Additionally,

On August 19, 1934, the great majority of Germany’s registered voters went to the polls and handed Hitler 38 million votes, thereby demonstrating overwhelming approval. With this strong mandate, Adolf Hitler claimed that he was the undisputed Führer of the German people. It was in this way that the German Worker’s Party, GPW, started by Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart in 1919, in the beer gardens of Munich, came to power. The next day, on August 20, 1934, mandatory oaths swearing loyalty to Adolph Hitler were introduced throughout the Reich.... Soldiers of the Armed Forces, including the German Officers’ Corps, swore the following oath of loyalty: “I swear by God this sacred oath: I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time in the fulfillment of this oath.” The following is the Oath of loyalty for Public Officials: “I swear: I shall be loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, respect the laws, and fulfill my official duties conscientiously, so help me God.” It is interesting to note that these oaths were pledged to Hitler himself, and not to the Constitution or the German state. Oaths were very seriously taken by members of the German armed forces and were considered to be part of their own code of honor. This put the entire military in a position of servitude, making them the personal instrument of Hitler. In September 1934, at the annual Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies, Hitler proclaimed that the German way of life would continue on for the next thousand years.

FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS, people from every corner of the planet have flocked to New York City for the reason Frank Sinatra immortalized: to prove they could “make it.” The allure, the prestige, the struggle to survive, breeds a brand, an image of the city that ripples out to the rest of the world. Sinatra sang about proving himself to himself. “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” New York was the yardstick. New York has indeed become a global yardstick—for artists, businesspeople, and dreamers of all stripes. He was a lawyer in New York? He must be good. Doesn’t matter if he was the worst lawyer in the city. If you can make it in New York, people assume that you can make it anywhere. The yardstick the public uses when judging a presidential candidate, it turns out, is not how much time the candidate has in politics. “It’s leadership qualities,” explains the presidential historian Doug Wead, a former adviser to George H. W. Bush and the author of 30 books on the presidents. Indeed, polls indicate that being “a strong and decisive leader” is the number one characteristic a presidential candidate can have. The fastest-climbing presidents, it turns out, used the Sinatra Principle to convey their leadership cred. What shows leadership like commanding an army (Washington), running a university (Wilson), governing a state for a few years—even if you started out as an actor (Reagan)—or building a new political party and having the humility to put aside your own interests for the good of the whole (Lincoln)? Dwight D. Eisenhower led the United States and its allies to victory against Hitler. He had never held an elected office. He won by a landslide with five times the electoral votes of his rival. “If he can make it there, he can make it anywhere,” US voters decided.

Felon disenfranchisement laws have been more effective in eliminating black voters in the age of mass incarceration than they were during Jim Crow. Less than two decades after the War on Drugs began, one in seven black men nationally had lost the right to vote, and as many as one in four in those states with the highest African American disenfranchisement rate. These figures may understate the impact of felony disenfranchisement, because they do not take into account the millions of ex-felons who cannot vote in states that require ex-felons to pay fines or fees before their voting rights can be restored - the new poll tax. As legal scholar Pamela Karlan has observed, 'Felony disenfranchisement has decimated the potential black electorate.

My feeling of not wanting to leave mixed with my sense of urgency for the campaign. That mood in Brooklyn was one of self-satisfaction and inevitability. The polls were showing Hillary holding steady, between five and eight points ahead of Trump and with a clear path to 270 electoral college votes. The mood I was gathering on the ground, however, was much more restless.

For example, take George McGovern [1972 Presidential candidate who campaigned on an anti-war platform]. George McGovern did not support the invasion of Panama―in fact, about two months afterwards he wrote an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post saying he had opposed it from the very moment Bush did it. But he also said that he had refrained from saying so at the time. So if he'd been asked about it in a poll, he probably would have answered that he did support the invasion. And the reason is, if you're a red-blooded patriotic American, then when the government is conducting a violent act you're supposed to rally around the flag. That's part of our brainwashing, you know―to have that concept of patriotism drilled into our heads. And people really do feel it, even people like George McGovern, somebody who surely would have been in the 20 percent, but if he'd been polled about it would have voted with the 80 percent. We don't want to be "anti-American," to use the standard term―which in itself is a pretty startling propaganda triumph, actually. Like, go to Italy and try using the word "anti-Italianism," call somebody there "anti-Italian" and just see what happens―they'd crack up in ridicule. But here those totalitarian values really do mean something to people, because there have been very extensive and systematic efforts to control the population in ways like that, and they have been highly successful. I mean, there's a huge public relations industry in the United States, and it doesn't spend billions of dollars a year for nothing, you know. So you really have to be a little bit more careful and nuanced when you interpret these kinds of poll results, in my view.

One example of how closely the two work together was revealed during the British Parliamentary or local Northern Ireland elections.  During the years, I would become involved in helping the Sinn Fein cause, along with many other young men and women, many of whom were members of the IRA. From their headquarters in Connolly House, Belfast, Sinn Fein organisers would try, with the assistance of the IRA, to do everything in their power to rig the elections.  The plan would be to distribute false identification papers to IRA men and women and other republican sympathisers, and send them around to a number of polling stations so that they could cast votes in perhaps six to ten different places. The

Less than two decades after the War on Drugs began, one in seven black men nationally had lost the right to vote, and as many as one in four in those states with the highest African American disenfranchisement rate.33 These figures may understate the impact of felony disenfranchisement, because they do not take into account the millions of ex-felons who cannot vote in states that require ex-felons to pay fines or fees before their voting rights can be restored—the new poll tax. As

Why didn't the Democrats accomplish more right after the 2006 elections that gave them control of Congress? It wasn't just that they didn't have votes to override a presidential veto or block a filibuster. They didn't use their mandate to substantially change how the public--and the media-- thought about issues. They just tried to be rational, to devise programs to fit people's interests and the polls. Because there was little understanding of the brain, there was no campaign to change brains. Indeed, the very idea of "changing brains" sounds a little sinister to progressives-- a kind of Frankenstein image comes to mind. It sounds Machiavellian to liberals, like what the Republicans do. But "changing minds" in any deep way always requires changing brains. Once you understand a bit more about how brains work, you will understand that politics is very much about changing brains-- and that it can be highly moral and not the least bit sinister or underhanded.

As I’ve said, there are left-wing believers in nonexistent conspiracies and other fantasies, but they’re not nearly as numerous or influential. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, after Bernie Sanders did better in some election-day exit polls than he did in the voting, some of his supporters were convinced a conspiracy had falsified the results. (In fact, exit polls always tend to oversample younger voters.) And while you might have considered Sanders’s leftism unrealistic or its campaign rhetoric hyperbolic (“the business model of Wall Street is fraud”), the campaign wasn’t based on outright fantasies. You may not want democratic socialism, but Denmark is a real country.

As a society, our collective understanding of racism has been powerfully influenced by the shocking images of the Jim Crow era and the struggle for civil rights. When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, good-hearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation. Many whites who supported Jim Crow justified it on paternalist grounds, actually believing they were doing blacks a favor or believing the time was not yet "right" for equality. The disturbing images from the Jim Crow era also make it easy to forget that many African Americans were complicit in the Jim Crow system, profiting from it directly or indirectly or keeping their objections quiet out of fear of the repercussions. Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.

On October 18, before the numbers had been re-weighted, the campaign’s internal election simulator, dubbed the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” gave Trump a 7.8 percent chance of winning the 270 electoral votes he needed. His long odds were mainly due to the fact that he trailed (albeit narrowly) in most of the states that looked like they would decide the election, including the all-important state of Florida. Re-weighting the model to reflect an older, whiter electorate changed the polls by only a couple of percentage points in most of the major battleground states. But it shifted the odds of victory substantially in Trump’s direction because it either put him ahead or made him

Trump’s data analysts gave them a nickname: “double haters.” These were people who disliked both candidates but traditionally showed up at the polls to vote.

Atal also answered the charge that his party should not have tried to form the government since the BJP got only a minority of votes. He pointed out that the first-past-the-post Westminster system that was followed in the country counted only the seats that a party won and not the percentage of votes polled. By implication, the BJP could not be blamed for jumping in to try and form a government.

Thus, the PTI fared relatively well in a number of constituencies that until now were considered impregnable fiefdoms of the MQM. This was the case, for instance, of NA-245 (National Assembly constituency covering North Nazimabad), where it registered 54,937 votes against 115,776 for the MQM. This was also the case—and even more remarkably, considering that this is the ‘home’ constituency of the MQM—in NA-246 (Azizabad), where Amir Sharjeel registered 31,875 votes against Nabeel Gabol (who won with 137,874 votes). If the PTI won the same number of seats as the PPP (one National Assembly seat and three Provincial Assembly seats) in 2013, it registered more than twice its number of votes in the National Assembly election and 230,000 more votes in the Provincial Assembly election. The MQM has reasons to worry: not only did the PTI become Karachi’s second party in terms of vote share (and a party which, adding insult to injury, garnered a significant number of votes from MQM traditional constituencies, unlike the PPP), but its candidates polled in second position in twenty-two provincial constituencies (out of forty-two) and fifteen (out of twenty) national constituencies.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.

Shock new poll says Scots set to vote yes to independence 'No' campaign to offer radical deal as latest figures show 51-49% backing for end of the union

Pennsylvanians cast their votes at 41 polling places, compared with 11 before the Revolution. James T. Mitchell and Henry Flanders, comps., The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania from 1682 to 1809 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1896-1915) (hereafter Statute, 9:114-23.

Opinion polls suggested the Scottish referendum on independence on September 18th was now too close to call. The three leaders of Britain’s main political parties rushed to Scotland to urge voters to say no, and offered the promise of new tax and spending powers. Many big companies, including Royal Bank of Scotland, warned that they would move their operations to England if Scots vote to secede from the United Kingdom. Jean-Claude Juncker, the new president of the European Commission, announced

On Election Day, to the surprise of Romney and his backers, Democratic voters turned out in far bigger numbers than the Republicans expected. The Koch network had spent an astounding $407 million at a minimum, most of it from invisible donors. The operatives running the enterprise believed they were able to accurately anticipate how the vote would go, and right until the polls closed on November 6, they, like the Romney team, were convinced victory was at hand.

There are various tactics interfering with voting which include eliminating early voting, implementation of literacy tests, poll taxes, registration process, grandfather clauses, requiring proper voting IDs and restricting” (McEachern 163).

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.1 Cotton’s story illustrates, in many respects, the old adage “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union. Hundreds of years later, America is still not an egalitarian democracy. The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same. An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were. What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Might white voters lie to pollsters, claiming they will vote for the black candidate in order to appear more color-blind than they actually are? Apparently so. In New York City’s 1989 mayoral race between David Dinkins (a black candidate) and Rudolph Giuliani (who is white), Dinkins won by only a few points. Although Dinkins became the city’s first black mayor, his slender margin of victory came as a surprise, for preelection polls showed Dinkins winning by nearly 15 points. When the white supremacist David Duke ran for the U.S. Senate in 1990, he garnered nearly 20 percent more of the vote than pre-election polls had projected, an indication that thousands of Louisiana voters did not want to admit their preference for a candidate with racist views.

look guys, we still have to replace the Veep, and Hilde gets me more votes than anybody else we polled, by a large number. Don’t forget Alinsky’s main rule – never voluntarily give it up once you get into power.”  Vivian looked over at the First Lady. She could tell from the body language and lack of eye contact of her friend of twenty plus years that the First Lady was probably, reluctantly, willing to agree with her husband. Vivian instantly regretted her comment arguing that the Calhoun enemy destruction conspiracy theory was hokum. Her words had made it appear that she could swallow Hilde as Vice President, when she had no such intention. She knew it was time to erase the impression that she would agree to Hilde’s selection. 

the pre-cast votes could be caught before the voting started was by the employees who worked in his office, the very persons who had exclusive access to the machines. The voting machines would be delivered to the various polling locations, and then checked by his fellow election officials to be sure the machines were ready for votes to be cast. The election officials merely had to initial a one page form attesting that the machines bore no votes at the beginning of voting, and were thus ready to vote. No one else would, or could, look at the total vote counter on the machine to confirm a clear machine, with all counters set at zero, before voting started. Classic vote fraud. Right before his eyes.

I want to ask each of you to imagine, imagine millions of courageous conservatives, all across America, rising up together to say in unison “we demand our liberty.” Today, roughly half of born again Christians aren’t voting. They’re staying home. Imagine instead millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values. Today

Sir Richard Branson Sir Richard Branson is the founder and chairman of the Virgin Group of companies. An immensely successful entrepreneur, philanthropist, and television star, Sir Richard was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999. In 2002, Sir Richard was voted one of the “100 Greatest Britons” in a poll sponsored by the BBC. I was fortunate enough to know Diana for most of her adult life. For most of those years, I saw the sunny side of her personality. She was great fun, she was very caring, she did much for charity, and yet she was no saint and certainly wouldn’t have wished to be portrayed as one. On her death, the outpouring of grief was understandable, but she would have smiled wryly if she had seen the deference paid to her in the weeks following it.

Sir Richard Branson Sir Richard Branson is the founder and chairman of the Virgin Group of companies. An immensely successful entrepreneur, philanthropist, and television star, Sir Richard was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999. In 2002, Sir Richard was voted one of the “100 Greatest Britons” in a poll sponsored by the BBC. She was a very loyal friend. When British Airways tried to drive Virgin out of business, I took them to court and won a celebrated victory. Lord King, BA’s chairman, stepped down, and later a handwritten note from Diana was delivered to me. It was just three words: “Hurray! Love, Diana.” She also named one of our planes Lady in Red. We took a flight in Lady in Red with Diana commentating from the cockpit with William on her lap. As we flew past Windsor Castle, her voice came over the loudspeaker: “On our right, you have Grandma’s house!” Everyone on the plane fell about laughing.

Sir Richard Branson Sir Richard Branson is the founder and chairman of the Virgin Group of companies. An immensely successful entrepreneur, philanthropist, and television star, Sir Richard was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999. In 2002, Sir Richard was voted one of the “100 Greatest Britons” in a poll sponsored by the BBC. Eighteen years later, my daughter Holly was enjoying Prince William’s twenty-first birthday party at “Grandma’s house.” A giant elephant had been constructed out of ice, and “shots” were being poured down its trunk and young ladies were drinking from it. Holly found herself kneeling with her mouth around it, glancing upward to see the Queen looking down at her disapprovingly. If Diana had still been alive, she would have laughed until she cried.

A prime example of intimidation at the polls that reveals the Obama administration’s disappointing attitude toward election crimes occurred in the 2008 federal election when two members of the New Black Panther Party stood in a doorway of a polling place in Philadelphia. They were in black paramilitary uniforms and one of them carried and brandished a nightstick. They argued with passersby and shouted racial insults at poll watchers. They attempted to block a poll watcher from entering the polling place and were recorded by a poll watcher with his video camera. At the time, Robert Popper was a deputy chief in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department. He was assigned to prosecute a civil action against these men for intimidation and attempted intimidation under the relevant federal statute, Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act. The case against the defendants was strong, and they subsequently defaulted by refusing even to answer the charges against them. But the case was abruptly curtailed and all but shut down by the newly appointed officials of the Obama administration. In the end, they ordered Popper to settle the case for a short, limited, and toothless injunction against only one of the four defendants. There was never a convincing explanation from Eric Holder or the administration as to why the case was cut short. Popper believes that it was a partisan abuse of what are supposed to be neutral law enforcement efforts to enforce the Voting Rights Act. This was only the beginning of the Obama administration’s abuse of its power over elections. The damage to the reputation of the Justice Department was enormous and enduring, and the damage to the public’s perception of the integrity of elections was incalculable.

I was about to head out of one polling site when a Black man my father’s age approached me. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.” He was ushering an old woman dressed in her Sunday best, complete with a lavender hat, by the elbow. She pressed her cane into the ground as she repositioned her leg between strides. She trained her eyes on mine as she walked. I walked to meet her where she was. “Hello, ma’am. How are you?” I said, smiling, as she extended her warm, soft hand, contorted by arthritis. I clasped it between both of mine. She released her cane to the man who had introduced us, who must have been her son, placing her other hand on top of mine and squeezing. She shuffled closer, and I could instantly smell my own grandmother’s hair cream. I wondered how old she was. “You tell President Obama”—her words fired like a slow cannon as she patted the top of my hand with each syllable, lingering on the final word with a swallow—“that I voted for him and that he is making us proud. You tell him that I lived to see the day.” I indulged her willingly. “I sure will, ma’am.” “You tell him and those babies that we are prayerful. A Black man in the Oval Office. My God. We are prayerful.” “Yes, ma’am,” I said, still holding her hands. “My grandson brought me down here to vote today.” I was dying to ask her age now. “And he told me that we had a Black woman, a sister, making sure no one messed with our votes.” I nodded. “God bless you for coming. God bless President Obama for making it so. I always vote now. I always come out. Rain or shine. I’m here, isn’t that right?” she said, turning to her grandson. She must have been in her nineties if he was her grandson. “Yes. She wouldn’t miss it. Means too much. She was on the front lines. Been on the front lines,” he explained.

We will not be passive in the face of injustice and allow every generation to fight the same battles. We will drive our communities to the polls and vote like the lives of our children depend on it because it does.

After Reconstruction ended, and when the federal troops who had stayed behind to protect newly freed black slaves went home, Democrats came back into power in the South. They quickly reestablished white supremacy across the region with measures like black codes --- laws that restricted the ability of blacks to own property and start businesses. They imposed poll taxes and literacy tests used to subvert black citizens' voting rights. These laws were enforced by terror, much of it instigated by the KKK, which was founded by Democrat Nathan Bedford Forrest.

so I’m off to the polls before homeroom.

Workers who campaigned for Populist tickets were blacklisted and could not find jobs. Barriers to voting, such as the poll tax or education requirements, were stiffened. Press aligned with one party or the other “systematically played on racial, sectional, and class fears to alert readers to the Populist menace.

At the same time, however, many of the new civil rights laws were proving largely symbolic.16 Notably absent from the Fifteenth Amendment, for example, was language prohibiting the states from imposing educational, residential, or other qualifications for voting, thus leaving the door open to the states to impose poll taxes,

Paul Gronke, the Oregon-based professor, is straightforward with his students about politicians being nonresponsive to constituents who don’t go to the polls. You have problems getting your student loan concerns addressed, he explains, yet his social security and tax deductions are always a priority for politicians. Guess why? he asks. “Because I vote all the time and you don’t.

This is far from the norm in other countries—like Germany, for instance, which allows (and even encourages) people to vote in prison. In fact, about half of European countries allow all people behind bars to vote, while others disqualify only a small number from the polls.51 People in prison vote either in their correctional facilities or by some version of absentee ballot in their town of previous residence. Almost all of the countries that place some restrictions on voting in prison are in Eastern Europe, part of the former Communist bloc.52 No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law.

The most dramatic consequence of the new constitution [of 1901] was the one most desired by its drafters, the sudden and dramatic decline in voting. [...] What makes the 1901 suffrage provisions even more significant is comparison with the state's first constitution. Otherwise one might assume that the operative principle in Alabama public policy had always been anti-democratic. Actually, the opposite was true. The 1819 constitution, which ushered Alabama into the Union, was a projection of the towering presence of Thomas Jefferson and the democratic aspirations of the American Revolution. Delegates to that convention had pointedly refused to restrict suffrage based on literacy, ownership of property, or even church affiliation. Any white male 21 years of age or older could vote, whether or not he could read, write, owned property, belonged to a church or even believed in God. But the democratic assumptions of that first gathering of founding fathers at Huntsville in July 1819 were not shared by their successors in Montgomery in the summer of 1901. Nor was the democratic assumption of Alabama's own past the only principle violated in 1901. So was the dominant democratic thrust of the 20th century both in America and throughout the world. It was the federal government and not the state of Alabama that enfranchised women in 1919. It was the Supreme Court that demanded that every vote count the same by compelling reapportionment after the Alabama legislature refused to do so for six decades. It was Congress in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that finally enfranchised Alabama blacks. And it was the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966 that ensured the right to vote for all the state's poor of whatever color when it struck down the poll tax. If the century-long wail for states' rights by Alabama's white elite struck many Americans as hollow and hypocritical, perhaps it was because that otherwise noble ideal for restricting tyranny was so often employed in Alabama on behalf of tyranny. For in Alabama, the constitution did not empower the people; it empowered the legislature. Without recall, initiative, referendum, or home rule, power was vested was vested in government, not in citizens. Democracy was forfeited to the federal Congress and to federal courts.

Nor is it a trivial matter that whites and men do so strongly feel themselves beleaguered by cultural change. In January 2019, South Carolina’s Winthrop poll conducted a fascinating experiment. Winthrop polled people of all races across eleven Southern states. One question was phrased in two slightly different ways. Half of the people surveyed were asked whether they agreed that “whites have privileges that non-whites do not have.” The other half were asked whether they agreed that “non-whites face barriers that whites do not face.” Logically, of course the two questions mean exactly the same thing. But they yielded very different answers. When asked whether they enjoyed special “privilege,” only 50 percent of whites agreed. Among the most conservative whites, only 36 percent agreed. But when asked whether nonwhites faced extra “barriers,” 70 percent of all whites and a majority even of the most conservative whites agreed.18 People do not like being negatively judged. When they feel negatively judged, they hunker down. On the other hand, people do have a sense of fairness. When that is appealed to, they respond more generously. The parlor games that permit people in public forums to speak of whites and men in terms they would never use to speak of other groups exact an important real-world price from American society. They provoke a truculent reaction that otherwise would have lain quiet. Progressive politicians may feel that provoking this reaction is worthwhile if it can mobilize a progressive populist surge. This vision of politics bumps into some inhospitable realities. Of those Americans who did not vote in 2016, the majority—52 percent—were white. Among those who did not vote despite being registered (and those are the nonvoters most likely to show up in 2020) the white majority was even bigger. Nate Cohn of the New York Times estimates that in the industrial Midwest, the population that was registered to vote in 2016 but that did not cast a ballot was 68 percent noncollege white.19 In other words, the most accessible pool of nonvoters in the most decisive region of the country are precisely the group least likely to respond to “Woke” messaging on immigration, race, and gender.

These bureaucratic minefields are the modern-day equivalent of poll taxes and literacy tests—“colorblind” rules designed to make voting a practical impossibility for a group defined largely by race.

Suppose, let’s say, you’ve got a candidate who says polls are bullshit and totally refuses to tailor his campaign style to polls, and suppose then that new polls start showing that people really like this candidate’s polls-are-bullshit stance and are thinking about voting for him because of it, and suppose the candidate reads these polls (who wouldn’t?) and then starts saying even more loudly and often that polls are bullshit and that he won’t use them to decide what to say, maybe turning “Polls are bullshit” into a campaign line and repeating it in every speech and even painting Polls Are Bullshit on the side of his bus… . Is he a hypocrite? Is

Leaders who forget the masses after they are voted into power should not be voted in the next polls.

Although it is common to think of Jim Crow as an explicitly race-based system, in fact a number of the key policies were officially colorblind. As previously noted, poll taxes, literacy tests, and felon disenfranchisement laws were all formally race-neutral practices that were employed in order to avoid the prohibition on race discrimination in voting contained in the Fifteenth Amendment.

states were purging tens of thousands of voters for missing a single election, shutting down polling stations at the last minute in Democratic-leaning precincts. They were now requiring state ID just to vote, but were rejecting IDs that didn’t match the voter list to the letter or that were missing a single apostrophe. Since 2010, twenty-four states had passed one or all of these restrictions.

The former Sabbath school leader among slaves seized upon his liberty and his new calling like a miner finding gold. At least by 1840, and perhaps as early as 1839, he registered to vote by paying his $1.50 poll tax. In Massachusetts in the late 1830s, men, including blacks, registered to vote by paying this small annual tax. In the sweep of America’s racist and discriminatory history with voting rights, it is remarkable that the most famous black man of the nineteenth century, shortly after escaping from slavery, while living with a new, assumed name, with no other identification and certainly no proof of birth in the United States, and while still “illegal” as a fugitive from Southern justice and the property rights of his owner, could instantly become a voter by paying $1.50 and having his name placed on the tax rolls.14 Approximately

Because of the coronavirus, states had liberalized mail-in and early voting, and millions of Americans had voted before Trump’s last-minute comeback. The exit polls suggested that Trump won late deciders. But late deciders matter less when most ballots are cast early.

to produce. As John Adams wrote, “Property monopolized or in the Possession of a few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality.—this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.”1 Here are ten steps that I think might help put us more on the course intended by the Revolutionary generation, to help us move beyond where we are stuck and instead toward what we ought to be: 1. Don’t panic Did the founders anticipate a Donald Trump? I would say yes. As James Madison wrote in the most prominent of his contributions to the Federalist Papers, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”2 Just after Aaron Burr nearly became president, Jefferson wrote that “bad men will sometimes get in, & with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind & principles. This is a subject with which wisdom & patriotism should be occupied.”3 Fortunately the founders built a durable system, one that often in recent years has stymied Trump. He has tried to introduce a retrogressive personal form of rule, but repeatedly has run into a Constitution built instead to foster the rule of law.4 Over the last several years we have seen Madison’s checks and balances operate robustly. Madison designed a structure that could accommodate people acting unethically and venally. Again, our national political gridlock sometimes is not a bug but a feature. It shows our system is working. The key task is to do our best to make sure the machinery of the system works. This begins with ensuring that eligible citizens are able to vote. This ballot box is the basic building block of our system. We should appreciate how strong and flexible our Constitution is. It is all too easy, as one watches the follies and failings of humanity, to conclude that we live in a particularly wicked time. In a poll taken just as I was writing the first part of this book, the majority of Americans surveyed said they think they are living at the lowest point in American history.5 So it is instructive to be reminded that Jefferson held similar beliefs about his own era. He wrote that there were “three epochs in history signalized by the total extinction of national morality.” The first two were in ancient times, following the deaths of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, he thought, and the third was his own age.6 As an aside, Trump’s attacks on immigrants might raise a few eyebrows among the founders. Seven of the thirty-nine people who signed the Constitution were themselves born abroad, most notably Hamilton and James Wilson.7

On November 28, 2000, while the Bush and Gore campaigns were still arguing over hanging chads in Florida, Sailer wrote a blog post. Citing exit-poll data, he demonstrated that if Bush had increased his share of the white vote by just 3 percent—if 57 percent of white Americans had voted for him, rather than 54 percent—he would have won in a landslide. Sailer then expanded his hypothetical: what if, in order to win those additional white votes, Bush had embraced a platform so caustic, so openly hostile to racial minorities, that he lost every nonwhite vote? “Incredibly,” Sailer found, “he still would have won.

As expected, the Democrats won in Brooklyn, but by only a slim margin. They were immediately charged with bringing hired goons over from New York, with buying votes, with using repeaters, fictitious names, all the customary devices. Most of the charges were probably true. That there was fraud at the polls there is no doubt whatever. Later examinations would show that a minimum of six thousand illegal votes were cast. But only five men would be convicted in subsequent trials, all of them quite unknown and unimportant, largely because the Democrats had in their possession some damaging information concerning the prosecuting district attorney.

At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.” By the time they recognized their

Q: What can ordinary people with busy lives and not a lot of political access do to address this stuff? You can try to address it in your own life. You can try to set up your life so you have to drive as little as possible. In so doing, you vote with your feet and your wallet. When more people bike, walk and use public transit, there is greater pressure on elected officials and government agencies to improve these modes of transportation. It thus increases the profitability of public transit and makes cities more desirable places to live. It also helps reduce your carbon footprint and reduces the amount of money going to automobile manufacturers, oil companies and highway agencies. In a globally connected capitalist world, cities and countries are competing for highly skilled labor—programmers, engineers, scientists, etc. To some degree, these people can live anywhere they want. So San Francisco or my current city in Minnesota aren’t just competing with other U.S. cities but are competing with cities in Europe for the best and brightest talent. Polls and statistics show that more and more skilled people want to live in cities that are walkable, bikeable and have good public transit. Also our population is aging and realizing that they don’t want to be trapped in automobile-oriented retirement communities in Florida or the southwest USA. They also want improved walkability and transit. Finally, there’s been an explosion of obesity in the USA with resulting increases in healthcare costs. Many factors contribute to this but increased amounts of driving and a lack of daily exercise are major factors. City, state and business leaders in the US are increasingly aware of all this. It is part of Gil Peñalosa’s “8-80” message (the former parks commissioner of Bogotá, Colombia) and many other leaders. (2015 interview with Microcosm Publishing)

On December 1, 1991, Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds went to the polls to decide their fate. The results were mind-boggling for even the most optimistic proponents of independence. The turnout reached 84 percent, with more than 90 percent of voters supporting independence. Western Ukraine led the way, with 99 percent in favor in the Ternopil oblast of Galicia. But the center, south, and even the east were not far behind. In Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine, 95 percent voted for independence; in Odesa, in the south, 85 percent; and in the Donetsk region, in the east, 83 percent. Even in the Crimea, more than half the voters supported independence: 57 percent in Sevastopol and 54 percent in the peninsula as a whole. (At that time, Russians constituted 66 percent of the Crimean population, Ukrainians 25 percent, and the Crimean Tatars, who had just begun to return to their ancestral homeland, only 1.5 percent.) In the center and east of the country, many voted for independence while supporting Leonid Kravchuk’s bid for the presidency. He won 61 percent of the popular vote, obtaining a majority in all regions of Ukraine except Galicia. There, victory went to the longtime Gulag prisoner and head of the Lviv regional administration Viacheslav Chornovil. Ukraine voted for independence and entrusted its future to a presidential candidate who, many believed, could strike a balance between Ukraine’s various regions and nationalities, as well as between the republic’s communist past and its independent future.

The media, polling, and Big Tech rigging alone would have been enough to cause Republicans to doubt any election loss, but what Democrats did to the manner in which people vote was further destabilizing to the country... Long-standing historical concerns about the integrity of elections led to the development of a single Election Day, a secret ballot, and governmental running of elections--all developments that went a long way toward building up trust in America's electoral process. In recent years, Democrats have lobbied to move away from each of those things, saying that efforts to stop them from doing so were 'voter suppression.' In the months leading up to 2020, Democrats were able to convince legislators, courts, and election officials to open elections up to ballot trafficking, voting without showing identification, voting without following state laws or guidelines, and counting ballots without oversight from independent observers. Meager checks on fraud, such as signature matching, were watered down to the point of meaninglessness...And then Democrats tried to make permanent all of the radical changes they had made by passing legislation to ban voter ID, legalize vote trafficking weaken absentee voter verifications, and make it more difficult to keep updated lists of voters.

my polling place. I will travel by train from a theological seminary in Michigan to this police station right off the highway. The projects will be long gone by then. I will vote for Barack Obama with hope in my chest, but terrible thoughts of this night in my head. I will remember how cold the police station was, and I will bring a jacket.

Politico poll, 47 percent of Republicans believed that Trump won the popular vote, compared to 40 percent who believed Hillary Clinton won. In other words, about half of self-identified Republicans said they believe that American elections are massively rigged. Such beliefs may be consequential. A survey conducted in June 2017 asked, “If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed

Is a national election really an important issue? Does it really matter very much who wins? The platforms of the two parties are carefully made as much alike as possible. And when the election is over, we're all advised to accept the result like good sports... Voting is a device for blaming conditions on the people. The people aren't rulers, they're scapegoats. And they file to the polls every so often to renew their right to the title.

To the eternal glory of American democracy, when we go to the polls we do not vote on whether we shall have a regime of Justice or a regime of Injustice;

In Alabama, for instance, in 1900 fourteen Black Belt counties had 79,311 voters on the rolls; by June 1, 1903, after the new constitution was passed, registration had dropped to just 1,081. Statewide Alabama in 1900 had 181,315 blacks eligible to vote. By 1903 only 2,980 were registered, although at least 74,000 were literate. From 1900 to 1903, white registered voters fell by more than 40,000, although their population grew in overall number. By 1941, more poor whites than blacks had been disfranchised in Alabama, mostly due to effects of the cumulative poll tax. Estimates were that 600,000 whites and 500,000 blacks had been disfranchised.

Federal intervention to change the institutions in the South started with the decision of the Supreme Court in 1944 that primary elections where only white people could stand were unconstitutional. As we have seen, blacks had been politically disenfranchised in the 1890s with the use of poll taxes and literacy tests (pages 351–357). These tests were routinely manipulated to discriminate against black people, while still allowing poor and illiterate whites to vote. In a famous example from the early 1960s, in Louisiana a white applicant was judged literate after giving the answer “FRDUM FOOF SPETGH” to a question about the state constitution. The Supreme Court decision in 1944 was the opening salvo in the longer battle to open up the political system to blacks, and the Court understood the importance of loosening white control of political parties.

Errors in Sampling Frames: The 1936 Presidential Election Our discussion of errors in sampling frames would not be complete without mentioning a classic example of sampling failure, the 1936 Reader’s Digest presidential poll. In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, completing his first term of office as president of the United States, was running against Alf Landon of Kansas, the Republican candidate. Reader’s Digest magazine, in a poll consisting of about 2.4 million individuals, the largest in history, predicted a victory for Landon, forecasting that he would receive 57% of the vote to Roosevelt’s 43%. Contrary to the poll’s prediction, Roosevelt won the election by a landslide—62% to Landon’s 38%. 8 Despite the extremely large sample size, the error was enormous, the largest ever made by any polling organization. The major reason for the error was found in the sampling frame. The Digest had mailed questionnaires to 10 million people whose names and addresses were taken from sources such as telephone directories and club membership lists. In 1936, however, few poor people had telephones, nor were they likely to belong to clubs. Thus the sampling frame was incomplete, as it systematically excluded the poor. That is, the sampling frame did not reflect accurately the actual voter population. This omission was particularly significant because in that year, 1936, the poor voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt and the well-to-do voted mainly for Landon. 9

In 1919, the year women were first able to vote in Austria, Weininger's ideas on the "emancipation question" were being newly debated; the Christian Socials feared that the polls would be overrun with radicals, while less activist women, more likely to vote conservative, would stay away (they proposed that voting should be obligatory). Weininger thought that women were passive, purely sexual beings - even though they weren't fully conscious of their sexuality - who longed to be dominated. They were therefore not fully in possession of their reason, and not worthy of the vote. He believed that only men were capable of rationality and genius. By transcending sexuality and the body, exercising sexual restraint that women were incapable, men were able to allow these energies to be sublimated into the disinterested realms of art and politics. "Man possesses the penis," Weininger explained, in an aphorism that was to become popular, "but the vagina possesses the woman".

They also discussed the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort's strategy for winning Democratic votes in Midwestern states. Months before that meeting, Manafort had caused internal polling data to be shared with Kilimnik, and the sharing continued for some period of time after their August meeting.

Separately, on August 2, 2016, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met in New York City with his long-time business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence. Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a “backdoor” way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine; both men believed the plan would require candidate Trump’s assent to succeed (were he to be elected President). They also discussed the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s strategy for winning Democratic votes in Midwestern states. Months before that meeting, Manafort had caused internal polling data to be shared with Kilimnik, and the sharing continued for some period of time after their August meeting.

Although political representation by racial quota is the effect of government policy, it is not yet respectable to call for it explicitly. When President Bill Clinton tried to appoint Lani Guinier as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights her appointment failed, in part because of Miss Guinier’s advocacy of representation by race. In her view, if blacks were 13 percent of the US population, 13 percent of seats in Congress should be set aside for them. It does not cause much comment, however, when the Democratic Party applies this thinking to its selection of delegates to presidential conventions. Each state party files an affirmative action plan with the national party, and many states set quotas. For the 2008 Democratic Convention, California mandated an over-representation of non-white delegates. Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics were only 4.6, 5.2, and 21.1 percent, respectively, of the Democratic electorate, but had to be 16, 9, and 26 percent of the delegates. Other states had similar quotas. Procedures of this kind do lead to diversity of delegates but suggest that race is more important than policy. Perhaps it is. In Cincinnati, where blacks are 40 to 45 percent of the population, Mayor Charlie Luken complained that the interests of blacks and whites seemed so permanently in conflict that “race gets injected into every discussion as a result.” In other words, any issue can become racial. In 2004, the Georgia legislature passed a bill to stop fraud by requiring voters to show a state-issued ID at the polls. People without drivers’ licenses could apply for an ID for a nominal fee. Black legislators felt so strongly that this was an attempt to limit the black vote that they did not merely vote against the law; practically the entire black delegation stormed out of the Capitol when the measure passed over their objections. In 2009, when Congress voted a stimulus bill to get the economy out of recession, some governors considered refusing some federal funds because there were too many strings attached. Jim Clyburn, a black South Carolina congressman and House Majority Whip, complained that rejecting any funding would be a “slap in the face of African-Americans.” Race divides Cook County, Illinois, which contains Chicago. In 2007, when the black president of the county board, Todd Stroger, could not get his budget passed, his floor leader William Beavers-also black—complained that it was “because he’s black.” He said there was only one real question: 'Who’s gonna control the county—white or black—that’s all this is.

Voting, for me, was a habit, a healthy ritual to be done conscientiously and at every opportunity. My parents had taken me to the polls as a kid, and I’d made a practice of bringing Sasha and Malia with me anytime I could, hoping to reinforce both the ease and the importance of the act.

We have inherited a tradition which has associated religion and politics in a way that has excluded some of our fellow citizens … When we become legislators, though, as we do when we vote in referendums, we legislate for all our fellow citizens. We do not vote as members of this or that church or faith. Of course we cannot leave our religiously based moral convictions outside the polling station, but we do need to remember the difference between civil and religious law. We also need to remember that it is possible to have deep and passionately held convictions without seeking to have those convictions imposed by the state on fellow citizens who do not share them and may have opposite convictions which are equally deep and passionately held.

Today most Puerto Ricans are unhappy with their current political status, and the most popular alternative is statehood, while a minority prefer more autonomy. The most recent poll, just three months before the hurricane, showed a 97 percent majority for statehood, although opponents said the vote was rigged and refused to take part in the poll. Five years earlier, statehood won 61 percent of the vote. 10 Yet Congress will not grant statehood to the island in the foreseeable future because, as with the District of Columbia, Republicans oppose what they see as the creation of two new Senate votes aligned firmly with the Democrats.

Most people are terrified of throwing their vote away, so they'll steer clear of any candidate the press tells them has no chance. Particularly when the incumbent is odious, voters won't vote their own interest and conscience. They actually think it's their civic duty not to. The trick works best with political minority groups, who've been trained to vote according to how they're told a larger plurality thinks. Until pretty recently, if you were nonwhite, female, single, childless, or gay, you were typically told you had to choose between a slew of straight white candidates who "polls said" had an actual chance.

These young data warriors, most of whom had grown up in politics during the Obama era, behaved as though the Democratic Party had come up with an inviolable formula for winning presidential elections. It started with the “blue wall”—eighteen states, plus the District of Columbia, that had voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992. They accounted for 242 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. From there, you expanded the playing field of battleground states to provide as many “paths” as possible to get the remaining 28 electoral votes. Adding to their perceived advantage, Democrats believed they’d demonstrated in Obama’s two elections that they were much more sophisticated in bringing data to bear to get their voters to the polls. For all the talk of models and algorithms, the basic thrust of campaign analytics was pretty straightforward when it came to figuring out how to move voters to the polls.

Mook, always attentive to cash flow, knew that it was much more costly to try to persuade undecided voters to back Hillary than it was to register her supporters or to make sure they went to the polls. The analytics team could also conduct less expensive surveys than the pollsters to get a snapshot of the horse race in a given state. Separate from the three scores, the analytics experts would do quick surveys with a small universe of voters and then extrapolate how many other voters with similar demographic profiles were likely to vote and for whom they would cast their ballots. The same methods had been used in the primaries, when adjustments could be made based on the outcome of a string of contests. The general election was different, in part, because there was only one Election Day. The analytics were also thought to be more precise at predicting general-election outcomes in each state than primary outcomes because the exact shape of the electorate could be harder to project in lower-turnout contests. But in both cases, Mook relied heavily on the data to figure out where the campaign could get the most bang for its buck. Like a baseball executive in the Moneyball era, Mook looked at the data as the means for taking the least costly route to victory.

Consequently, an easy way for candidates to get more of their supporters to the polls is to have volunteers call these self-proclaimed supporters, ask them if they’ll vote in the next election, and wait for the “yes.” If the caller then adds, “We’ll mark you down as a ‘yes’ and I’ll let the others know as well,” the commitment has three components that potentially cement that potential voter’s commitment: The commitment becomes voluntary, active, and publicly declared to others.

Jimmy may well have read the front-page banner in late August exhorting readers to “Go and Register.” The accompanying article extolled the dual power of the franchise: “When we register and go to the polls in large numbers … we not only perform thereby a duty which is obligatory upon good citizens, but our votes make public officials more obligated to give us the recognition and consideration to which we are entitled.” 109 This paper and others sought to whip up excitement about the recent passage of a civil rights bill championed by Democratic state senator Charles C. Diggs. Declaring with some hyperbole that the bill would be the “New Emancipation,” the black Democratic organization Michigan Federated Democratic Clubs sought to use the bill to both galvanize the community and shore up support for Diggs with the “First Annual Emancipation Picnic and Dance” in his honor on August 1, 1937. Attendees received “a small pocket-size souvenir-copy of Senator Diggs Civil Rights Bill” along with “a statement of what to do if the Bill is violated.” 110 More than a decade later, Jimmy would be among a group of activists associated with the Detroit NAACP and the United Auto Workers (UAW) who mounted an effort to enforce this law by “breaking down” restaurants that discriminated against African Americans. By that time, black Detroiters had made important inroads into the UAW, and a strong coalition emerged between labor and civil rights organizations.

Stewart polled the crew. What did they want to do? Should they try to make it home, knowing they might have to ditch in the open sea if they ran out of gas or developed more mechanical problems? They knew that in open water, B-24s tended to break apart and sink fast, sometimes before the crew could get out. Before anyone could answer Stewart’s question, Richard Bartlett, a waist gunner, spoke up. Before they all voted on a course of action, Bartlett said, he wanted to make a speech.“You call this an ocean?” he said, referring to the Mediterranean.“We got rivers in Montana wider than this. Let’s go! Our skipper can set this thing down in the middle of the Med just like a kitten.

As late as 1942, for instance, only 3 percent of the voting-age population cast a ballot in seven poll tax states.116 Just 3 percent of an electorate in these states decided who would sit in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to shape federal policy.

By the grace of God, my kinfolks and I are Carolinians. Our Grandmother Bowen always told us we had the honor to be born in Carolina. She said we and all of our kissing kin were Carolinians, and after that we were Carolinians we were Southerners, and after we were Southerners, we were citizens of the United States. We were older than the Union in Carolina, and our grandmother told us never to forget that fact. Our kinfolks had given their personal consent to the forming of the Union, we had voted for it at the polls, and what we had voted to form we had had the right to vote to unform.

In Britain, after the shock of the Brexit vote, many said they felt as though they’d woken up in a new, unrecognizable country. It was in that context that the UK’s Conservative government began floating a range of regressive reforms, including the idea that the only way for Britain to regain its competitiveness is by slashing regulations and taxes on the wealthy so much that it would effectively become a tax haven for all of Europe. It was also in this context that Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap election against her low-polling rival, clearly in the hope of securing another term in office before the public has a chance to rebel against new austerity measures that are the antithesis of how Brexit was originally sold to voters.

We won’t have negro rule. Republicans and Democrats alike would take their muskets and go to the polls to prevent it.” Todd was, unfortunately, correct about that.

An oft-cited Gallup poll taken just after the 2016 election showed just 20 percent of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers. An 80 percent no-confidence vote would be cause for concern in most professions.

These bureaucratic minefields are the modern-day equivalent of poll taxes and literacy tests - 'colorblind' rules designed to make voting a practical impossibility for a group defined largely by race.

The ACLU and NAACP went right after the core of the issue—there was no voter fraud. Therefore, there was no state interest at stake—certainly nothing that could warrant this assault on the Fifteenth Amendment. It "bear[s] repeating," they asserted, that Indiana had "not identified even a single instance of voter impersonation fraud occurring at the polls in the history of Indiana" and no one in the state has "ever been charged" with that crime. Ever. Moreover, when the bill was being drafted, "no evidence of in-person impersonation fraud was presented to the legislature," making SEA 483, at best, a solution in search of a problem.

In 1890...the Magnolia State passed the Mississippi Plan, a dizzying array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled voter registration rules, and "good character" clauses—all intentionally racially discriminatory but dressed up in the genteel garb of bringing "integrity" to the voting booth.

Arkansas, for example, raised "only 5 percent of [its] total school budget by the poll tax, a tax that [kept] a good 80 percent of [the state's] adult citizens from voting.

As late as November 9, 1963, Texas saw the enormous value of the poll tax and voted to maintain this tool of disfranchisement because "removing the poll tax requirement...would 'allow' minorities to 'flood the polls.

Even the monarchist newspaper, ABC, wrote on 17 February that the poll had taken place ‘without strikes, without threats and without any scandals. Everybody voted as they wanted to, in absolute liberty.

According to Pew Research and Edison exit polling data in Florida, Cubans were about twice as likely as non-Cuban Latinos to vote for Donald Trump in 2016.

In a matter of months, their campaign had intimidated and terrified thousands of black men into staying home from the polls; of the state’s roughly one hundred thousand eligible black voters, fewer than half had voted.

When the poll closed the next day, more than 15 million users had voted. The tally was close: 51.8 percent to 48.2 percent in favor of reinstating Trump. “The people have spoken,” Musk declared. “Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” I asked him right afterward whether he had a sense in advance of how the poll would turn out. No, he said. And if it had gone the other way, would he have kept Trump banned? Yes. “I’m not Trump’s fan. He’s disruptive. He’s the world’s champion of bullshit.