Fergusons election turnout is terrible by design. Heres how to fix it. ::posted Mon, 18 Aug 2014 17:42:39 +0000:: ift.tt/1pWzHY5 rss@dailykos (Steve Singiser) Fergusons voting precincts in St. Louis County. These precincts went 83 percent for Obama in 2008. A consistent subplot to the horrors in Ferguson over the past week has been a consistent sense of wonder at how a city that has, over the past two decades, become a majority-black community could have a white mayor, a majority-white city council, and an almost universally white police force. That wonder emanates from two simple facts: the citys population is more than two-thirds African American, and the voting precincts that make up the greater Ferguson area are overwhelmingly black and Democratic. And yet the political power structure in the city is white, and the mayor is not only white, he is a Republican. As two must-read articles (one by Ian Millhiser of Think Progress, the other by Jeff Smith in the New York Times) affirm, the answer, in part, is electoral politics. It would not be a stretch to say that municipal elections, in no small part, are rigged. Not in the classic stolen election sense, of course, but rigged in the sense that a number of factors, chief among them their scheduling, of all things, ensure that political change comes to communities at a snails pace, if at all. Please read more on this story below the fold. [Forwarded by the MyLeftBlogosphere news engine. Link to original post below:]
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 05:55:23 +0000