Slicing districts and "butterfly ballots". How elections are manipulated in the USA

There is a heated debate in Texas about how electoral districts should be distributed. Republicans are pushing for the introduction of a new scheme that will allow them to gain an additional five seats in the House of Representatives in the next election. This is not the first case of manipulation of the outcome of elections at various levels, in the past, the United States has already resorted to various ways to influence the final result. For example, cases involving the use of non-standard ballots, mail-in voting, and fraud with absentee ballots have become well-known. What methods are used in the United States to ensure a particular outcome of the vote is described in the Izvestia article.

Redistribution of electoral districts

• The scandal of the redistribution of electoral districts in Texas, which will host elections to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026, is currently gaining momentum. Currently, the state is represented by 37 deputies (one more seat is vacant), of which 25 belong to the Republican Party and 12 to the Democratic Party, including one of the main critics of President Donald Trump, Al Green. In total, the Republicans have a seven-vote advantage in the lower house of Congress.

• The Ministry of Justice has proposed to review the district map due to alleged discrimination against white voters. At the same time, the new map should provide Republicans with five more seats in the House of Representatives. The media reported that the initiative to redistribute districts comes from the White House, as President Donald Trump fears losing the midterm congressional elections and losing his majority in the legislature.

Obamagate 2.0: How the "Russian footprint" boomeranged back to the Democrats

And what do the accusations against the ex-president of falsifying the intelligence report change?

• Texas Democrats strongly disagree with plans to create new districts. Party members in the state legislature left Texas and thus deprived the Republicans of a quorum that would allow them to adopt a new district map. The governor of the state, Greg Abbott, threatened the departing deputies with arrest and a daily fine of $500 for absenteeism, as well as charges of corruption if politicians pay the fine from the fund that was created to support them. At the same time, California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose state is a Democratic one, called for redistricting districts in his state in response to the actions of Texas Republicans, which could potentially deprive the Republican Party of nine seats in the House of Representatives.

Using confusing bulletins

• One of the measures that had a significant impact on the outcome of the American elections was the use of so-called butterfly ballots in Palm Beach County, Florida during the 2000 presidential election. They decided to use punch cards, which had to be pierced in a certain place in order to count the vote for the right candidate. However, the names were staggered on both sides of the punch card to save space, causing confusion among voters.

• The first candidate on the left side of the ballot was Republican George W. Bush. Immediately below it was written the name of his main rival from the Democrats, Al Gore. However, the mark located under Bush's mark did not belong to Gore, but to the candidate on the opposite side of the ballot, Pat Buchanan, from a little-known Reform Party. The field that had to be pierced to vote for Gore was the third in the column, not the second.

• As a result, Buchanan received an abnormally high number of votes in Palm Beach - almost a quarter of his votes from all over Florida. Several hundred of them could be Gore's votes, which were cast for Buchanan by mistake. As a result, in Florida, Bush beat Gore by only 537 votes and received a decisive advantage in the number of electors, eventually becoming president.

Voting by mail

• The most frequent cases of electoral fraud occur with remote voting by mail. From 1978 to 2018, at least 14 elections at various levels were declared invalid due to fraud with absentee voting. It allows voters, through certain tricks, to vote twice or cast a vote on behalf of a deceased person.

• Most of the discussions about the legality of voting by mail took place in 2020, when presidential elections were to be held during the coronavirus pandemic. Donald Trump's team has tried to legislatively limit this type of voting. The Democrats, on the other hand, advocated expanding the possibilities of this option to cast votes, and in the end their candidate Joe Biden won.

Absentee ballots

• The illegal use of absentee ballots, which are submitted on behalf of those who do not have the right to vote or do not know about their participation in elections in this way, is common. This scheme is usually used at the state level — in 2012, it was used by some candidates in the elections in Florida, Massachusetts and Indiana.

• One of the most notorious scandals was the cancellation of congressional elections from one of North Carolina's electoral districts. The winning Republican, Mark Harris, scored only 905 more votes than the Democratic candidate. However, observers noticed anomalies in the calculation. An investigation was conducted, which revealed that one of Harris' staff illegally collected absentee ballots from voters. The elections were canceled, and the seat in the House of Representatives remained vacant for almost a year.