The US election is rigged, but not necessarily in the ways people would think it to be. Many people see election rigging as things that occur instantly, like hacking, or voter fraud, but election rigging is built into the way we decided to write the constitution, starting from local politics, and almost always never immediately noticeable unless one was looking for the problem. Election rigging starts with smaller factors, like social media and press coverage, the way the country chooses to conduct its polls, the very structure of the electoral college, and the way we choose our political districts years in advance.
According the Pew Research center (Gottfried and Shierer 2013), “A majority of U.S. adults – 62% – get news on social media, …show more content…
From Wired (Lapowsky), “In 2012, black voters waited in line twice as long as white voters to cast a ballot. In key swing states like Florida, the largest polling place delays occurred in districts with larger minority populations. Districts with more Spanish speakers also experienced longer lines. And research shows that in 2012, somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 eligible voters decided not to vote because of problems at their polling places, including wait times.” Although, it may be true that a couple of people getting impatient with the polls may not have much of and impact, the fact is that this is not just a random sample of people getting frustrated, this is an entire community of people who individually may not have changed much, but collectively may have changed some outcomes. Part of the reason this may affect minority communities so disproportionately is due to the gaps in income, and therefore the polling places may be understaffed. People would not be volunteering, as they must go to work for actual money. The election is predetermined by the way people handle polling in places that are less fortunate than other parts of the country, or may have a higher minority population than other …show more content…
In an excerpt from Fox News (2017), talking about the opinion of Justice Felix Frankfurter on the supreme court’s involvement in city redistricting, “In Colegrove v. Green, [Justice Felix Frankfurter] said that the court should not get into the business of drawing political maps. But starting in the early 1960s, the Supreme Court ignored that warning. It has since handed down a series of decisions regarding redistricting. Unfortunately, the rules established in these decisions are very confusing, which is why there are more redistricting cases before the Supreme Court almost every term.” Gerrymandering is when a district is redrawn in such an odd way in order to tilt the majority of the population from one party affiliation to another. It had been outlawed, and yet it is still something that occurs to this day. The supreme court is dealing with a substantial amount of cases having to do with redistricting and the unfair practices that may lie within. Some people would argue that trying to make districts as partisan as possible would cause even weirder and more suspicious-looking shapes that make Gerrymandering so recognizable. Others just accept the districts as they are, acknowledging that sometimes, in order to make any sort of political headway, there needs to be compromise. The way these districts are drawn and redrawn can actively shift the outcomes of