The way elections are supposed to run — the way they were set up to operate — is that the voters elect the office holders, not the other way around. This is the basic premise that supports the challenges against Texas’ redistricting schemes and more recently the state’s voter ID law. What’s happened is that the basic electoral premise has been turned on its head. It’s a layering of two things: some politicians have decided that the end justifies the means, and at the same time they think no one is looking. And that’s only one-fourth correct.
Half of that reasoning is right, politics is an end game. A politician either wins an election or not. It really is that simple. So a candidate, or a campaign manager, will begin with the end in mind: how many votes do I need to win? The rest is work and organization to hit a “magic” number. This natural electoral process works best where the voting process is unimpeded.
It’s like an equation where registered voters and turnout are the variables. But what if you can affect those variables? What if you can draw maps and filter voters to skew the outcome? It’s still an end game, still done with the end in mind, but it assumes that no one is paying attention. It’s reverse engineering, political engineering, and it’s very harmful because the intent is to create an artificial landscape to produce an un-natural result.
Full Article: Voter ID law filters specific groups from electoral process – San Antonio Express-News.