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One of the gravest structural problems in American democracy is gerrymandering, the practice of drawing voting districts in a way that creates unfair advantages to whoever happens to be drawing the line, says John Oliver.

The British comedian was referring specifically to partisan gerrymandering, which, unlike racial gerrymandering, is not illegal according to US laws. It is partly responsible for giving Republicans such an edge in the House of Representatives, says Oliver in yesterdays (April 9) episode of Last Week Tonight.

He notes, for example, that the number of Republicans elected in the states of Pennsylvania and Ohio are way out of proportion to popular-vote percentages. You wouldnt expect Neapolitan ice cream thats 70% strawberry. Thats not okay, he says.

In most US states, the drawing of congressional districts is essentially controlled by the legislators themselves. It means, as Oliver explains, a majority party can either cram as many as opposition voters as possible into just few districts, or spread them out thinly over a bunch of districts to dilute their impact. The so-called cracking and packing technique is more or less the same as table assignments at a wedding, Oliver says.

You can either break up your eight awful relatives and spread them out over different tables, or you can pack them all together in one insuperable table of the damned.

Congressional gerrymandering is a not-so-secret weapon for both Republicans and Democrats. As Oliver notes, when Republicans won the majority of state houses in 2010, they redrew the map in those states to ensure they could send more members to the House in 2012; in 2001 Democrats did the same after taking control of the states of Maryland and Illinois.

In a democracy, the question of who gets to draw the map should not have as much significance as it currently does, Oliver says. He notes that the US Supreme Court may limit for the first time (paywall) partisan gerrymandering in an upcoming ruling this year, and that there are calls for the establishment of independent commissions to draw legislative maps.

The foundation of democracy is built on the idea that everybodys vote should count equally whoever we are, however poor our decisions, says Oliver in an inspiring speech toward the end of his show, while inviting people including a Quidditch player, a Scientologist, a unicyclist, a baker of erotic pastries, and everyones racist grandma onto the stage.

Election results should not be the results of politicians crazy lines, he says. They should be the result of our own crazy decisions.

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John Oliver explains how gerrymandering, or politicians' crazy lines, hurts democracy - Quartz

Going nuclear to confirm Neil Gorsuch is the latest example of how Republicans are thwarting the will of the people.

Supreme Court justice nominee Neil Gorsuch testifies on the second day of his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation on March 21, 2017. (AP Images / Tom Williams)

Many in the media are portraying the Republicans move to invoke the nuclear option to confirm Neil Gorsuch as a mere squabble over Senate rules, the latest example of hyper-partisanship in Washington that both parties are equally responsible for.

The both sides do it narrative is the worst kind of false equivalence. In fact, the GOPs use of the nuclear option highlights in stark terms the Republican Partys unique hostility to democracy, which has come to define the party in recent years through efforts like voter suppression, gerrymandering, and a stolen Supreme Court seat.(Not to mention Donald Trumps attacks on the core pillars of democracylike fair elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary.)

Following President Obamas election, when Republicans took control of many state legislative chambers after the 2010 election, 22states passed new restrictions on voting. Through challenging the Voting Rights Act, voter-ID laws, cutbacks to early voting, limits on voter registration drives, closing down polling places, purging the voting rolls, and disenfranchising ex-offenders, Republicans attempted to manufacture an electorate that was more advantageous to their party. So far this year, 87 bills to restrict access to voting have been introduced in 29 states.

In addition, Republicans controlled the redistricting process in 20states after the 2010 election, compared to only 11for Democrats, and aggressively gerrymandered state legislative seats and US House districts to retain power for the next decade. In 2012, for example, Democratic candidates for the US House of Representatives won 1.4 million more votes, but Republicans won 33 more seats. Courts have found that Republican-drafted redistricting maps in states like North Carolina and Texas intentionally discriminated against minority voters.

Republicans in North Carolina took their hostility to the democratic process to the extreme degree after the 2016 election when Democrat Roy Cooper was elected governor, passing a series of bills in the lame-duck state legislative session to reduce or eliminate the governors essential powers. The bills prevented the governor from appointing a majority of members to the state Board of Elections or 100 county boards of elections; reduced the number of public employees the governor could appoint from 1,500 to 425 and prevented the governor from appointing members to boards of state universities; and made it harder for the state Supreme Court, which has a 43 Democratic majority, to review future challenges to election-law changes. It was nothing less than a legislative coup. The courts blocked the changes to the boards of elections, but Republicans are still trying to change the rules.

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When Republicans didnt like the fact that President Obama would get to fill Antonin Scalias Supreme Court seat in 2016, they simply invented a new argumentthat a president in the last year of his term or during an election year couldnt make a new appointmentto avoid giving Merrick Garland a hearing, let alone a vote. In fact, on seven different occasions since 1912, a president in the last year of his term or during an election year was able to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. All vacancies in an election year in the last 116 years were filled, reports Factcheck.org.

Im no great fan of the filibuster, but its stunningly hypocritical for Republicans to deny Garland a hearing and a vote and then change the Senate rules to confirm Gorsuch. The very things they demanded for Gorsuch, they denied to Garland. Yes, Democrats did invoke the nuclear option for lower-court nominees in 2013, but Republicans have been far more obstructionist toward judicial nominations than Democrats have, as David Leonhardt of The New York Times wrote recently.

The pattern is clearwhen Republicans dont like the legislative rules or an outcome of an election, they change the rules or try to nullify the election. The story isnt that both sides are to blame for hyper-partisanship in Washington. Its that one party believes in democracy and the other does not.

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The GOP Has Declared War on Democracy - The Nation.

There was no immediate comment from the government. Leaders in the ruling socialist party had accused Mr Capriles in recent days of stoking violence through his leadership of a week of near-daily protests, many of which have ended in tear gas and rubber bullets.

President Nicolas Maduro called out Mr Capriles on his television show on Thursday night, after tens of thousands of Venezuelans shut down Caracas with a march against the socialist administration. He said followers of "little Capriles" were seeking a bloodbath.

Mr Capriles responded to the ban on Thursday, saying, "The only one who is disqualified here is you, Nicolas Maduro. You and your circle of corrupt drug traffickers."

The move against Mr Capriles is part of a broader government crackdown this week that included detentions at marches and threats against party leaders.

"They are trying to raise the costs of protest, plain and simple," said Michael McCarthy, a research fellow focused on Venezuela at American University.

"But this move may well backfire, as Capriles is likely to harness this smear campaign to place himself front and center in the push to hold transition elections."

Authorities have been investigating Mr Capriles since the beginning of the year for what they say are a half dozen administrative irregularities, including taking suspicious donations from abroad.

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Venezuelan government further stifles democracy as Henrique Capriles banned from running for office - Telegraph.co.uk

Quora Questions are part of a partnership between NewsweekandQuora, through which we'll be posting relevant and interesting answers from Quora contributors throughout the week. Read more about the partnershiphere.

Answer from Francis Fukuyama, author & professor of Political Science at Stanford:

I have been involved in the discussion about whether our current president is a threat to democracybecause many people on the left believe he is an incipient dictator or tyrant, and I understand where that view comes from. If you look at his career, he really doesn't like being constrained by rules. When he was running his real estate business, he didn't pay his contractors like he was supposed to, forcing them to sue him. When he hit a law he didn't like, he tried to get it changed or would work around it. I think he's brought that mentality to the White House; he would like to do everything by executive order. He'd like to use his democratic mandateI realize he didn't get the majority of the popular votebut he sees it's important to use the mandate to enact his agenda.

The U.S. Capitol Building is lit at sunset in Washington, U.S., December 20, 2016. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

I think he sees a lot of the checks and balances in our political system as inconveniences which, if he had his way, he'd get rid of. It's my opinion that those checks and balances are pretty deeply rooted in this country and he's not going to be able to do this. The failure of the Republican party to get rid of Obamacare is a good example of how limited he is. Donald Trump said during the campaign that on the first day in office he was going to get rid of Obamacare, replace it with something wonderful and cheaper and nobody was going to lose coverage. Another few weeks go by, and he says No one knew how complicated healthcare is, and you can translate that to I didn't understand how complicated it is. And sure enough, he wasn't able to do what he had been promising since day one. I think this is going to continue to happen with things like tax reform; you've got even bigger interest groups involved there, and in legislation on infrastructure, and he's going to run up against the same Tea Party block that doesn't want to spend on government. He's going to be constantly testing the limits of the system, but he's not going to fundamentally alter it.

The thing that really worries me is not that he's really going to do something that violates the Constitution, but that we'll see a gradual erosion of norms. You see this in all of the conflicts of interest that he faces. We've never had a president who continues to run a big business, or the situation we had with the Kushner family closing a deal with a Chinese company, ahead of an official visit. As far as I know, it's unprecedented for a president or his family to have all of these conflicts of interest. This wipes away civil society's precedents and you get more people who don't care about what happened before and don't see corruption as a potential problem in American government.

What is the biggest threat to the American democracy? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

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Quora: Trump Erodes Norms But is No Threat to Democracy - Newsweek

The United States-based group Freedom House says democracy dropped in more than half of the countries it studied last year.

Freedom House rated the health of democracy in 29 countries in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in Central Asia. All 29 were once under Communist Party rule.

The findings are part of a new report called Nations in Transit 2017.

This is the second-largest drop in democracy ratings in the 22-years Freedom House has produced the report. The group blames the drop on the rise of populism. It noted that leaders in some countries are openly attacking democracy.

FILE: A man holds a poster of Hungarian Premier Viktor Orban that reads "What have I done again" during a protest by opposition parties against Orban's policies on migrants in Budapest, Hungary, Oct. 2, 2016.

Concerns about Hungary and Poland

The report says Hungary, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbn, now has the lowest rating of any country in Central Europe.

Nate Schenkkan works for Freedom House in New York. He spoke to VOA on Skype.

When we talk about populism in Central Europe, Orbn is the first name. He has created a kind of model for member states, even of the European Union, to reject democracy.

There were pro-democracy protests in Hungary last Sunday.

Two days later, Hungarys government press office reacted to the Freedom House report. It said freedom of the press fully prevails in Hungary. Every political opinion can find room and be published in the Hungarian press. And it said, Hungarian citizens can exercise their democratic rights in free elections.

The report also criticized the leader of Polands ruling Law and Justice Party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. It said that populist leaders in both Poland and Hungary had attacked constitutional courts and sought to weaken the system of checks and balances.

The Freedom House said the spectacular breakdown of democracy in these countries should serve as a warning about the fragility of the institutions that are necessary for liberal democracy."

Health of democracy in Russia

Russia had one of the reports lowest ratings. Yet Freedom House says a highly developed civil society continues to exist there, along with some independent media.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, lays flowers at a place near the subway station in St.Petersburg, Russia, Monday, April 3, 2017. A bomb blast tore through a subway train deep under Russia's second-largest city, killing more than 10 people.

But a former Russian central bank official disagrees. Sergey Aleksashenko now works at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. He spoke to VOA on Skype.

We say that there was some freedom of Internet. But if you move that 80 percent of (the) Russian population that receives news from television, and there is no, any television news station that is not controlled by the government, then OK, you may argue there is some freedom. Of course, there is. But its not the freedom, its not the freedom of information and in my personal view, its a serious misjudgment of whats going on in Russia.

Democracy in other areas

In the Balkans, the democracy scores for four countries dropped over the past year. Two improved: Montenegro and Croatia.

Sergey Aleksashenko said Balkan countries should not be compared to Western Europe. He noted they have had to create systems, governmental and state cultures since the end of Communist rule. He said that is not an easy process.

FILE: Supporters of detained opposition politician Omurbek Tekebayev, the leader of the Ata Meken (Fatherland) party, hold a rally in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Feb. 26, 2017.

Freedom House once again described Kyrgyzstan as a Consolidated Authoritarian Regime. The country had been removed from the classification after competitive parliamentary elections in 2011.

The report said corruption in Eurasia dropped in five of the 12 countries, but reached new lows in Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Freedom House pointed to progress in Ukraine, Romania and Kosovo. It said the Romanian government dealt with problems in the voting process during its 2015 elections. And it said both Ukraine and Kosovo enacted minor structural reforms. But the group said the two countries face obstacles that could stop the progress.

Im Anne Ball.

VOAs Mariama Diallo reported this story from Washington. Christopher Jones-Cruise adapted her report for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

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prevail v. to be or become effective

checks and balances n. a system that prevents one part of the government from controlling too much power

spectacular adj. causing wonder or excitement

fragility adj. something easily broken or destroyed

norms n. average; normal value

shallow adj. having little depth

tap into v. to use something in a way that leads to good results

obstacle n. barrier

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Freedom House: Democracy Ratings Drop in Many Countries - Voice of America