North Carolina GOP says voters have no right to fair elections

[boingboing]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/14/north-carolina-gop-says-voters-have-no-right-to-fair-elections.html

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[Mindysan33]

[docosc]

No Constitutional right to fair elections?!?!?!

Well, we keep pointing out that they are saying the quiet part out loud. They cannot get much plainer than that.

[Mindysan33]

@docosc

They cannot get much plainer than that.

Yet some people are gonna continue to believe that they’re just saying shit for the clicks or whatever…

[angusm]

“We believe strongly in democracy as long as people’s votes can’t actually change anything.”

[MadLibrarian]

I’m’a just going to leave this here:

[Hanglyman]

As WRAL reports, the GOP-led legislature is arguing that "no such right exists, since it’s impossible to define what ‘fair’ means

Um, no? No, it isn’t. Yes, defining what “fair” means is work (work that you have a vested interest making sure isn’t accomplished), but you being lazy obstructionists does not an unsolvable conundrum make.

[docosc]

If this holds, you can bet your ass that this argument will be used to invalidate the outcome of any election that doesn’t toe the MAGAt line.

[Mindysan33]

[carlcrossgrove]

Sure, no dissonance here with the MAGA/GOP overexertions nationwide to disadvantage blue voters at every turn. Don’t they have hundreds of active cases desperately trying to gerrymander libruls out of votes? Purging rolls, banning mail-in, closing polling places? Every one of their arguments and rationalizations sounds like boilerplate spoiled 7-year-old trying to weasel out of consequences. That whole chain of “it didn’t happen, but if it did,…."

[gracchus]

The honesty would be refreshing if we hadn’t known about their antipathy toward democracy for decades now.

[Elmer]

As WRAL reports, the GOP-led legislature is arguing that "no such right exists, since it’s impossible to define what ‘fair’ means

Bullshit, of course:

Using Mathematics to Combat Gerrymandering 

[MerelyGifted]

[AnthonyC]

Do you think, in the privacy of their own heads, they ever stop to ask whose shoes they’re standing in?

We believe we are already within a democratic system. Some factors are still missing, like the expression of the people’s will, but nevertheless we still think we are within a democracy.

[danimagoo]

Coming on the heels of Kansas deciding that people don’t even have a right to vote at all, this is a disturbing trend.

The Kansas Supreme Court ruled that voting is not a fundamental right. Here's...

[fuzzyfungus]

@boingboing

GOP-led legislature is arguing that “no such right exists, since it’s impossible to define what ‘fair’ means.”

It’s…totally mysterious…why the GOP is suddenly turning into the stoner epistemologist of a first year philosophy survey course only for this particular item. If you were actually serious about grappling with how words are, like, irreducibly intersubjective, man there’s more or less no area of law that it would be possible to maintain(perhaps with a few scattered exceptions from the especially rigidly technical areas that are basically just “the electrical code is that you follow ANSI/NFPA 70, which is incorporated by reference”). A lawyer acting like law isn’t more or less entirely dependent on definitions that can be a bit tricky about the edges(with the judiciary constantly coming up with new ‘tests’ to try to provide cogent rules of assignment) is either acting in egregious(I’d say shocking; but it really isn’t) bad faith; or a truly intellectually stunted specimen suited only to the most routine and well characterized paperwork; not anything that goes outside very well trodden procedural box ticking.

The bad faith seems particularly evident when, in the same breath, they are appealing to the legal authority and certainty of the most recent state supreme court decision in favor of gerrymandering(which, because reasons, ignored the precedent of the previous state supreme court decision against gerrymandering) as an argument against a renewed legal challenge: because obviously the legal challenge that sought to overturn the previous supreme court decision was just and necessary; but now that we have this supreme court decision the gravity of a supreme court decision must be respected and any new challenges should know their place…

[pbasch]

I think the GOP is (maybe inadvertently) acknowledging that people believe that “fair” means that majority wins. Since the GOP has worked hard to insure that a minority can rule at every level of government, they want to jettison any expectation of fairness.

[Antijoe]

Apropos to nothing, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants”.

[vernonbird]

@boingboing

North Carolina GOP lawmakers are asking the courts to throw out a gerrymandering lawsuit because they claim voters have no constitutional right to fair elections.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

These (and other) ratfuckers love to claim ‘if it’s not in the Constitution, it’s not allowedf’.
And they always forget about the 9th Amendment.