More Cold Water Thrown on Some Alarmist Election Claims

This article is the first to tackle this important question. We examine all states’ district plans before and after th e 2020 round of redistricting at the congressional, state senate, and state house levels. Our primary finding is that there was little retrogression in formerly covered states. In sum, the number of minority ability districts in these states actually rose slightly. We also show that formerly covered states were largely indistinguishable from formerly uncovered states in terms of retrogression. If anything, states unaffected by Shelby County retrogressed marginally more than did states impacted by the ruling.…* Meanwhile, on the other side, groups claiming fraud in the 2020 election convinced authorities in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania to conduct a full hand recount of all 59,000 ballots cast in the county. The results: only a handful of votes werechanged and the outcome remained virtually identical to the 2020 machine tabulation. (Because of inescapable judgment calls involving ambiguously marked ballots and the like, hand recount results themselves will inevitably differ one from the next; for reasons of this sort, it is not at all clear that hand tabulation would offer any edge in either consistency or accuracy over current methods of machine tabulation.)The scholarly findings concerning voter ID and retrogression at least have the merit of being somewhat counterintuitive. There is nothing at all counterintuitive in bouncing the rubble one mo...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs