It was another Fourth of July weekend in Portsmouth-Norfolk, so there were editions of The Virginian-Pilot to read. In a letter written to respond to another letter, a gentleman named Ed Harvey defended the Electoral College’s antidemocratic bent. Mr. Harvey seemingly suffers existential dread of being ruled by California and was unconcerned with the distorting effects of the Electoral College on the heft of the individual ballot from state to state. One must wonder whether Mr. Harvey would feel the same if Ronald Reagan were still ensconced in the Golden State’s executive mansion. Cue the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles.” The Virginian-Pilot didn’t print my explication of the Electoral College’s perverse math.
Ed Harvey, “Thank Founders for Electoral College,” The Virginian-Pilot, 4 July 2019, 12 (www.pilotonline.com/opinion/letters/article_aed183e8-9d08-11e9-9483-7bd082037a0b.html).
Behind Ed Harvey’s support for the Electoral College’s anointing of Donald Trump as president in 2016 lurks a morass of undemocratic assumptions. Mr. Harvey blithely casts aside the ideal of one person, one vote without explaining why a vote cast in California should have only one third the value of one cast in Wyoming, the product of the Electoral College’s distorting impact on democracy. Is Mr. Harvey pleased that a vote cast in our own Commonwealth likewise had only a third of the weight of a Wyoming vote? (“Population vs. Electoral Votes,” FairVote [https://www.fairvote.org/population_vs_electoral_votes]).
Mr. Harvey’s apparent embrace of minority rule is troubling in an age of efforts to distort yet further electoral outcomes through high-tech gerrymandering, voter suppression, manipulation of social media, and meddling by malign foreign powers.
Mr. Harvey should bear in mind that the arc of the nation’s history bends toward the forging of a more inclusive democracy, whether through the Thirteenth Amendment (abolition of slavery), the Fourteenth (Black suffrage), the Seventeenth (direct election of Senators), the Nineteenth (women’s suffrage), or the Twenty-Sixth (suffrage for eighteen-year-olds). The Electoral College has subverted the will of the majority twice in the past two decades. Wouldn’t any thinking citizen want every voter to have an equal say in the outcome of the democratic process? Or are we to assume that Mr. Harvey’s attitude toward the Electoral College would be less sanguine if it had yielded a different result in 2016?
In the beforetimes, when the coronavirus was just a gleam in a pangolin’s eye, I took in the odd concert. Richmond has a wonderful venue, the National, where I’ve attended many shows. The National has a sister venue – the NorVa – and I found myself in Portsmouth-Norfolk in May 2019 for a double bill: The Last Internationale (awesome!) and Tom Morello (transcendent!). It was an evening of music to move my pale white booty along with politics to take to the street. Check both out, if you haven’t.
While in town, I sampled the region’s local paper, The Virginian-Pilot. A letter in it defended the inclusion of a citizenship question in the 2020 census. The newspaper took a pass on the letter I sent. The census remains vexing. The worst efforts to skew it – the citizenship question, President Id Personified’s call to purge the undocumented from the numbers used for reapportionment of legislative seats – were thwarted; nevertheless, the pandemic likely ensured a flawed count that will serve right-wing interests.
Maurice F. Conner, “Citizenship Status Is Needed,” The Virginian-Pilot, 16 May 2019, 12 (www.pilotonline.com/opinion/letters/article_6b097382-772e-11e9-bb92-cbbec9217c7c.html).
Maurice Connor (The Virginian-Pilot, 16 May 2019, 12) rightly calls for Congress to address immigration reform and decries President Trump’s divisive rhetoric but he misreads the reasons why the citizenship question will potentially reappear in the 2020 Census after having been deemed unnecessary and counterproductive more than a half century ago.
There is no legal requirement that the census ask about citizenship. The Constitution mandates that the census count people, not citizens, because the nation has always been home to multitudes of non-citizens, documented and undocumented. The Census Bureau estimates that the question will reduce participation by non-citizens by 5.1 percent and cause an undercount of 6.5 million.[1]
Far more troubling is the probability that the resurrection of the citizenship question was politically motivated. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who initially asserted that the question arose from a Justice Department request, conceded last October that he had discussed the matter with then Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who encouraged Ross to contact Kris Kobach, [2] the Kansas secretary of state infamous for efforts to disqualify voters and for leadership of Trump’s farcical voter fraud commission. Beyond any dishonesty by Ross in congressional testimony, the question’s origin smacks at best of an attempt at demographic gerrymandering and at worst of the pursuit of alt-right, anti-immigrant policies through the vehicle of the census.
The Supreme Court should not permit Trump and his minions to corrupt yet another institution by politically weaponizing it.
[1] Dana Milbank, “Saving White Hegemony in Four Little Steps,” The Washington Post, 24 April 2019, A21 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-census-case-presents-how-to-preserve-white-hegemony-in-four-easy-steps/2019/04/23/ef2b6712-660b-11e9-82ba-fcfeff232e8f_story.html).
[2] Glenn Thrush and Adam Liptack, “Wilbur Ross Changes Story on Discussion of Citizenship Question in Census,” The New York Times, 12 October 2018 (www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/us/politics/wilbur-ross-commerce-census-citizenship.html).