Ask any football or basketball coach. It's a lot easier to win if you can write your own rules. Today the shrinking base of the Republican Party holds onto power by writing rules giving it a built-in advantage in elections. And it works.
Michigan Democrats received more votes for Congress and more votes for the state House of Representatives than Republicans. But Republicans, thanks to the aftermath of 2010, changed the rules sufficiently so that they maintained their stranglehold on Michigan government.
The minority party is running the show, and Democrats can't do much about it. Even a petition drive is fraught with challenges, because Republicans in the Legislature have become masters at gaming the system to prevent citizens from forcing a referendum.
Gerrymandering. One word that describes why Michigan no longer has a government that is representative of the electorate.
The 2001 reapportionment had given the GOP the votes it needed to gerrymander Michigan. They have repeatedly lost the popular vote for the Legislature only to win anyway thanks to favorable districts.
The advantage was doubled in 2011 after another GOP wave election. The results:
Democrats actually got plenty of votes, but Republicans made sure that most of them had no impact.lots of finger pointing most of it points like voter fraud in the wrong direction, the republicans are only able to create fail safe voting because those who are affected by these ploys as represented on the news are poor and Black and Hispanic we know that poor Whites are their targets too that they never look at, is that so they can reconcile not doing it to their race? but I digress the real culprits are in this election the two thirds who elected to keep it just as it is with the dwindling right wing doing s much damage as they can before they find themselves in the barrel they put us in, will we show them mercy I hope so i'd hate to think we lowered ourselves to their level, after all our platform is built on caring for our fellow Americans regardless to who they are.
you would thing all the Bible waving they do they would adopt that philosophy too, but then again most of what's said by them is not what they actually believe in. remember the 2012 elections Dems got over a million more votes to control the house then they did but gerrymandering deprived those million plus of their vote and their voice being heard, you have to be a really special person to vote for persons that would do that just to control those and the ones who voted to be their partners in crime.
