My point was that it is obviously untrue that trying to get people to vote is "just as cynical" as trying to suppress the vote. Attempts to suppress the vote are obviously partisan cynical attempts to win by technicality when you can't win normally. Attempts to get out the vote are obviously not "just as cynical", you're just mad that conservatives don't tend to win in the US when more people vote.
I'm saying that equating the existence of an electoral college to gerrymandering is cynical. You can say that rural republican support is based in gerrymandering or voter suppression, or you could say that it's a typical outcome for rural areas which tend to be more conservative. I believe the truth lies in the middle and it's dangerous to muddy the waters.
Whew, good thing I didn't equate them! I implied that Republicans benefit from
both from gerrymandering and the unequal advantage granted to rural voters though the Senate and the Electoral College (and through Republican voter suppression efforts and through corrupt partisan legal mechanizations). Not that they're the same thing, but that unfair competitions are the only way Republicans can win. Which they know. Which is why they constantly seek to suppress the vote and gerrymander more and make the competition more unfair.
No, obviously rural areas to be more conservative and that's not based on gerrymandering and voter suppression, doubly so when the Republicans are straight up buying votes with deficit-funded farmer subsidies. That doesn't somehow magically mean that Republicans aren't also gerrymandering, and suppressing the vote, and doing everything they can this side of the law (or sometimes not on this side of the law, looking at you Georgia and NC-9) to steal elections and destroy true democracy in every way they can. Which they are, if you'd bother to look. And you can't falsely equate being for democracy with being against rural conservative voters.
Also, I'm not so sure the dems are benevolent when it comes to voter shenanigans; it's my understanding that removing ID requirements to vote(for instance) would increase dem support--is this shenanigans or is it benevolent? Same problem exists here and that's why I'm not using it as an argument.
Okay, let's take an example. Local to me, since I'm actually here and you're in Canada. Here's how it played out in NC, where I live:
1. In 2013, the Republican Supreme Court
struck down the portion of the Voter Rights Act that specified which States have to get approval before changing election law (the former Confederate States), claiming it was out of date.
2. The very next day the Republican legislature in North Carolina requested statistics on how people vote by race, and started working on and eventually passed a "voter ID" bill to cut out all of the forms that
black people use (cut early voting, don't accept forms of ID that black people are more likely to have, eliminating same-day voter registration which black people are more likely to use, etc.).
3. It was eventually unanimously struck down by a 3-judge panel as being intentionally racist and therefore unconstitutional, ruling that
"it targeted African-Americans with almost surgical precision" and that the state's defence of "we're not targeting black voters because they're black, we're targeting black voters because they're more likely to be Democrats" was not good enough. No seriously, that was the defense.
4. Not to mention that our state's district map has
also been thrown out as an
unconstitutional racial gerrymander, but Republicans have managed to slow-walk the process of justice so well that we've been voting under it for the entire decade
anyway.
5. And the Republican's best attempt at a new map for 2020 which is
supposed to just be regular-old partisan gerrymandered (thanks again Supreme Court) after the courts ordered the legislature to redraw the maps without using race data,
once again were drawn with race data. We only found out about that because the Republican's map-drawer died and his daughter inherited his computer, they straight-out lied several times in court and claimed the weren't using racial distribution data.
This is what the Democrats (and all who value equality and democracy and the bedrock principles this country was founded upon) are fighting against. So sure, once you undo a few of the Republican's racist voting restrictions and gerrymanders and wowee, the support for Democrats does indeed rise! "Shenanigans!" says you. "Good riddance, evil racist democracy-killing bastards" says I.
Not to mention that in general literally every time the "voter fraud" that you are alleging the Democrats participate in has been investigated, it hasn't been found. Even by the Republicans who have been desperate to find it. Like say Trump's own Voter Integrity Commission, which was
quietly dismissed after not finding anything. Or literally any other time it's been investigated by any Republican witch hunt in any Republican State. Got anything besides disproven conspiracy theories and open propaganda to back your side up?
