Op-Ed: A big reason the South goes red? Gerrymandering and voter suppression
A few days after the elections in Virginia, I spent some time reading through the newly posted results. As I scrolled through the results, it became clear that I was surprised by what I saw. I felt the most important thing to mention is not the fact that Virginia voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates, but my shock at what I found by flipping to the results in the other states. It was quite stunning. The data is presented by the AP and as you read it you will notice that the top three states voted for the Democratic candidate in most races, even at the presidential level.
I found no way to make sense of this. That’s because the numbers are wildly inaccurate and it was always the case, even before the 2016 election. In most of these races, there were many more undecided voters than there were voters for one of the two major parties, thereby making it impossible to predict the result in any of these races.
In Virginia, for instance, you had the two candidates with the highest number of votes but with only about a third of the vote split between them, and one of them got only 14% of the vote! This is not about “a few dozen voter suppression cases” or about “a few election officials”, it is a basic error and one that has plagued political pundits and political analysts for years.
The Virginia results, like the 2016 presidential election have been so flawed that the national media and political pundits have been reduced to speculating over hypothetical, partisan situations — the “what if” scenario, which allows the political parties to win election after election. The fact is, it would be impossible to get elected if the voters did not agree with you. The reason the voters agree with you is that they know you will be able to work for them.
When I heard that Virginia had voted overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney and Donald Trump, I was flabbergasted. I think this is due to the common sense of Americans and the fact that Trump and Romney were both known to be good on most issues, and voters thought there was no way that Romney would win against this known
