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Step 1: Refuse to confirm a SCOTUS judge for a year.
Step 2: Install a judge you prefer.
Step 3: Get a SCOTUS ruling upholding a voter purge law that disproportionately impacts people who are more likely to vote for your opponents.

Voter purges aren’t about getting rid of invalid registrations. They’re about suppressing votes. The US, unfortunately, has a long history of finding ways to disenfranchise a group without explicitly identifying them. Look up where “grandfather clause” came from.

The modern version is subtler, but it works like this:

You want more people from group A to be able to vote than group B. Find some classification that applies to more members of group B than group A. Target that classification, and you change the balance of the electorate.

What Ohio did was notice that members of one major party tend to vote in every election, while members of the other tend to skip elections where they don’t feel they have a good choice.

Technically they targeted occasional voters.
Effectively they targeted a political party.

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A family member was incorrectly removed from the voting rolls. She hasn’t moved in about 7 years, hasn’t done anything to lose eligibility, and has been active in every election during that time. Even the local ones.

She cast a provisional ballot and is trying to sort out what the hell happened to her registration.

Lessons learned:

  1. Just because you HAVE registered to vote doesn’t mean the state or county hasn’t lost your info since then through a screw-up (or malice).
  2. California has a process for this on election day, but it’s better to check first.

What happened?

It’s not clear what caused her case, but she was far from the only one with similar problems in this election.

Santa Clara county dropped voters from the rolls through a broken de-duplication effort. And in Los Angeles County, over 100,000 registered voters are missing from the rosters due to a “printing glitch.”

I don’t like to be paranoid, but one of the two major political parties in the US loves suppressing voter participation in areas and demographics that lean toward the other party.

And San Jose and Los Angeles do lean toward that other party.

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Imagine a dangerous road curve. Do you blame the drivers and call it a day? After all, not everyone crashes over the edge or into oncoming traffic.

Or do you bank the turn, calculate a safe speed limit and add a railing?

It won’t stop all crashes, but it’ll reduce them.

Re-engineering the road doesn’t ignore the driver’s decisions, but it acknowledges that they don’t happen in isolation. Change the circumstances, and you change how many drivers crash and burn.

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Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (movie): New tech leads to an economic boom, but politics and greed conspire to ignore warnings from a scientist about the long-term dangers of this man-made climate change until disaster strikes.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2: A tech company without ethics is run by a nerd who grew up to become the bully he despised. He ruthlessly exploits a fragile ecosystem for profit, regardless of the damage done to endangered species or what remains of the island’s society.

Plus, you know, Jurassic Park with food instead of dinosaurs.

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People are still arguing over whether the Lost castaways were “in purgatory the whole time?” The finale was very clear on that: everything on the island happened. The afterlife didn’t come into play until the final season.

That last season featured glimpses of what looked at first like an alternate timeline in which the plane didn’t crash. It turned out to be a shared afterlife experienced by everyone who had ever been to the island, once they had all died –- some of them during the show, some years later, as Ben and Hurley acknowledged when they regained their memories. And that wasn’t a state of purification so much as a gathering point, so they could all meet again before moving on, because what they’d done and experienced on the island had been so important.

Everything on the island, before the island, and after the island, for all six years of the show, was in the “real” timeline.

The finale may not have answered every question, but it spelled that one out pretty clearly.