[hunglee2]

An interesting dilemma for media owners - the subscription model is the future of news, yet the self suppression of reach that this necessarily entails means that media owners now have far less influence over politics than they did during the ad-funded era, hence this unsatisfactory half-way house of 'its free when we want to influence your voting behaviour'

Also: democracy isn't dying just because media stops have the reach it once did. People will still vote, that is not being suppressed

[macintux]

> People will still vote, that is not being suppressed

Some would vehemently disagree with the second part of that sentence. Voter suppression is practically a plank of one of the two U.S. major parties.

And is voting still meaningful if most people are ignorant of what's happening in the shadows?

[hunglee2]

how is voter suppression operating (genuine question!) - what are the key techniques?

>And is voting still meaningful if most people are ignorant of what's happening in the shadows?<

Democracy is simply people voting for representatives, we have never measured ignorance of the population, hence no qualitative difference today than any time in the history of this system of governance

[macintux]

> how is voter suppression operating

Well, one egregious example would be sending a SWAT team to arrest someone in the early morning because they were erroneously allowed to register but not to vote.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/florida-voter-fr...

Or aggressively purging voter rolls in minority districts.

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lawsuit-alleges-ohio-illegally-p...

Or closing voting sites in minority areas.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/19/politics/poll-closures-rural-...

Or outlawing handing out water to people waiting in line to vote.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/29/josh-holme...

And early/absentee voting has been on the firing line.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/vot...

[hunglee2]

thanks. This is outrageous. How is it possible for these actions to occur, especially closing voting sites? Surely there should be federal mandate that there should be X number of voting sites per Y number of residents

[macintux]

Like much else in the U.S. system of government, responsibility for managing elections is distributed between the federal and local governments, and most of the laws are local, not federal.

For decades much of the south was under federal oversight because the suppression of black voting rights was so flagrant that Congress passed a law to impose some sanity, but the law was significantly hamstrung by the Supreme Court in 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965

[adgjlsfhk1]

the most obvious is by closing poling places in regions where your opponents live. Lots of Republican states have dramatically reduced the number of poling places in cities leading, predictably to hour long lines to vote. in addition, some have made giving food or water to people in line illegal.

[hunglee2]

this is terrible. How are they able to get away with this?