12 Ways To Rig An Election

Concentrating like-minded voters into one district can help decrease their power in surrounding districts. “Majority-minority” districts often result from packing, to “bleach” minority voters out of voting elsewhere.

When non-white voters are packed into one district, the surrounding districts become “bleached.”

The opposite of “packing,” breaking up a solidly partisan district in order to spread an opposing party’s voters among multiple districts can help dilute the influence of their votes.

A district that is composed of a majority of racial and ethnic minorities. Usually a result of cracking and packing by the map-drawers.

Jim Crow era electioneers liked to keep poor minorities away from polls by requiring a payment to vote. Descendants of pre-Civil War voters were usually exempted from paying the tax, hint hint. The 24th Amendment bans the practice… in 1964.

Another Jim Crow-era measure that lasted into the 1960s, literacy tests were a series of so-called civic questions that voters needed to answer correctly in order to cast a ballot. They were typically random, confusing, subjective, and graded by a white registrar.

The Constitution originally gave individual states the power to define who could vote, and most states gave the franchise to white property-owning men — provided they weren’t Catholics, Jews, or Quakers. (Maryland became the last state to remove religious restrictions on voting in 1828.)

When you draw up districts to favor your party, you’re gerrymandering. First used in 1812 to describe Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry’s salamander-like district plan to pack the state Senate with his allies.

If you can, try to redraw two of your rival party’s districts into one, so their two incumbents have to duke it out in a primary. One gets eliminated, and the other is potentially more vulnerable to your candidate in a general election.

Congress made Tuesday election day back in 1845, when it was the only day farmers could spend away from the fields, market, or church. Today, limiting voting to Tuesdays (without a work holiday or early-voting provision) is a great way to depress election turnout.

The 21st century poll tax. Conservative-run states, looking for ways to keep poor and minority turnout low, require voters to produce forms of ID that cost money to get and are less common among targeted minority populations.

Three states — Florida, Virginia, and Iowa — permanently bar convicted felons from voting, even after they’ve done their time. It’s an exclusion that falls disproportionately on minorities in those states’ prison systems.