Electoral Fairness Quotes

We cannot always count on a severely gerrymandered legislature itself to find and implement a remedy [to gerrymandering.]

We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our Liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, the Government may be the choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good.

[Proportional representation is a] device for defeating democracy, the principle of which was that the majority should rule, and for bringing faddists of all kinds into Parliament, and establishing groups and disintegrating parties.

An election is supposed to be about our whole country - we can't just concentrate on those areas where people, for the most part, already agree with us.

Florida is one of the first states that sort of gives the legislature a very clear criteria for re-drawing electoral district maps. Basically, all the criteria do is tell the legislators that you can't draw a seat that helps yourself or a political party. That's really critical.

Just like it would be wrong to have a player referee a game, it's wrong for election officials to participate in federal campaigns.

In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.

A few states have taken redistricting out of the hands of partisans and put them in the hands of fair-minded committees. Every state should do the same.

They believe the less votes the better. Republicans like to suppress votes because they believe they do better in small turnouts. Characteristically, Democrats would rather lose an election with a huge turnout than win one with a small turnout because we think that the values of democracy have to be placed above the interests of the party. The reason that Republicans are such failures at governing is because they place the interests of their party ahead of the interests of the country.

On the one hand, to suggest that white poll watchers are going to black communities threatening and provocative. On the other hand is to suggest that if that same line of vote is he also resists making a commitment to honor the winner of the campaign, that there is another agenda.

Organising free and fair elections is more important than the result itself.

It is un-American, it is unjust to target any group of folks whether they are African-American, Hispanic, poor or elderly when it comes to access to the vote.

You cannot say we are a healthy, dynamic democracy when one party wins almost two-thirds of the vote.

Another way in which our system is unfair. Why do Iowans get so much of a bigger voice every four years than everybody else? Ditto for New Hampshire. There are proposals and it could well happen that we could have a rotating calendar where different years different states went first. I would endorse that.

It's time to override this fraud being committed on the American voter of the two-party tyranny of this private corporation of the Commission on Presidential Debates.

THERE'S NO MONKEY BUSINESS ABOUT THIS ELECTION,' he told the voters. 'IF YOU'RE ENOUGH OF AN ASSHOLE TO VOTE FOR NIXON, YOUR DUMB VOTE WILL BE COUNTED––JUST LIKE ANYBODY ELSE!

The animosities of elections should have no place in our Government, for government must concern itself alone with the common weal.

I think that the voters should choose the elected officials, not the elected officials choose the voters.

Voters are more than Catholics, Protestants or Jews. They make up their minds for many diverse reasons, good and bad. To submit the candidates to a religious test is unfair enough - to apply it to the voters is divisive, degrading and wholly unwarranted.

Under the principle of equality, we should get as close to respecting equal votes of every citizen as we can, given our constitutional structure. And I think if we did that, then the will of the people would not be overturned.