Missouri Form For Request For Letter Ruling: Fill & Download for Free

First, understand the process your letter or email correspondence will go through (and I’m only writing about the U.S. House and Senate, but I’m sure state legislators use roughly the same process): The letter/email is opened by a receptionist or mail clerk, and is logged in immediately. The date, time, your address and other pertinent contact information will be part of the log. The letter may or may not be copied for filing purposes.Depending on the subject matter of the letter (Veterans issues, environment, budget, military, national parks, maritime, state department, etc), it will be given to a caseworker specializing in that area. If you are asking for some personal help (VA benefits, for example), there is a caseworker who handles that kind of request; if you are supporting, or complaining about some legislation, there are legislative staffers who specialize in those matters, and they will have a chance to see your letter.If you are seeking an appointment with the Representative or Senator, there is a staffer who will handle that. If you are seeking an an appointment to a military academy, there is someone who considers those requests. My point is, within a Congressional office, there are staffers who wear a variety of hats, and most staffers are assigned multiple hats to wear and they are busy all the time trying to stay on top of the mail.Not all initial correspondence makes it to the Representative or Senator—the staff has to do sort of mail triage when it comes to incoming correspondence—but most legislators will eventually be made aware of either your specific issue, or issues that are similar. And, you will almost always receive some reply on official letterhead (and, yes, the chances are good that it will be signed by a machine).Your correspondence will always be read, but how you approach the writing of your letter can make a big difference in how timely a response you will receive. Every office I worked for, in the House and the Senate, required staff to respond to mail within a few days at the most, but not all responses are complete—sometimes the staffer will have to work on your issues over time, and the first letter you get from your Representative or Senator may be a brief acknowledgment of your initial letter. You will be given the name and title of the person in the congressional office who is working on your matter in the event you have written about something that takes time to research and reply to.So…here are a few tips about what to put in, and not to put in, your letter to your Representative or Senator (or both, as is often the case).Rude and foul language will not help. If you begin with anything like, “Dear Stupidface asswipe, your latest attempt at being our state’s senator sucks,” it is likely your letter will not make it past the front desk (it may be properly filed, as per rule, but it won’t be seen by the Senator or Representative.Politeness counts. Really. You don’t have to kowtow, but do try to write in complete sentences, with thoughtful or helpful comments.Proper address, as in, Dear Representative/Senator ________. You can get the first and last name spelling on the House or Senate website, and on the Representative’s or Senator’s websites through https://www.house.gov and https://www.senate.gov.Neatness counts. Sending a message with pasted-in letters and words in different colors and fonts (or snipped from a newspaper or magazine), will not be helpful. Also, never, ever, send anything that could possibly look like powder. Please don’t use a small, single-spaced font in your message; congressional staffers may read hundreds of letters per day, and they need all the help they can get with a nice 12 pt font (no fancy typefaces, please), that is double spaced, or at least 1.5 line spacing.Clearly state the issue right up front. “Dear Senator ______, I don’t/do support your bill (S. 123, or HR-1234) to reduce nighttime glare from city lights.” Or, “Because you sit on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, I am writing to ask for your help in getting a new VA hospital built here in Okaankoke, Missouri.” Or, “I don’t support the president’s budget proposal which appears to reduce benefits to dependent families.”If you have a personal request, don’t beat around the bush and tell a long, drawn-out story. Keep it simple and on point: “My husband, Frank G. Merryweather, a combat Vietnam Veteran who served from 1967–69, is in need of help from the VA for a new prosthetic leg that is not currently covered under his VHA benefits. We have been in contact with ____________, of the local VA hospital, and with ____________ from the Veterans Benefit’s Administration, and they have not been able to help Frank.” Personal requests also include asking for a U.S. flag to be flown over the Capitol, and requests for White House tours.Whenever you are writing to complain about some government employee or agency you’ve been in touch with, try to give as much information about the people you’ve contacted (or tried to contact): names, titles, addresses, phone numbers, dates of contact, copies of your correspondence, etc. Also, if you’ve been assigned some sort of case number by the agency, or if you have received any phone calls from a person at the agency, include that information as well.Be sure to give your best contact information—home phone, cell phone, email address on the first page of your letter or email, and repeat it on subsequent pages. It’s important for a congressional caseworker to be able to reference the original letter and all your contact information will help that process.These are just simple steps to take…pretty sensible and logical.

Short answer: Yes, and no, respectively. Two things right off the top: First, this information is specific to the United States and is based on my experience as a police officer in the State of Missouri. Second, I'm a cop turned preacher and not an expert in constitutional law, so this is FWIW and FYI and YMMV and any other expectation-limiting acronym you want to toss into the mix. This issue involves reams of case law, but I'm going to try to distill the discussion down into something digestible in this format. Please bear with me and forgive any unintentional (and assuredly inevitable) glosses along the way.Let's start with the house. If I walk up to your house and smell the distinct odor of marijuana coming from within, can I then search your house without first obtaining a search warrant? Not likely. The threshold for searching the interior of your home is extremely high, as it should be - courts have affirmed over the years that there is a "high expectation of privacy" in one's residence. In order for me to investigate the odor, I'm going to have to get into the house by some other means. No judge is going to sign a warrant based on a whiff of reefer, so unless exigent circumstances exist in conjunction with the odor for some odd reason, there is really only one other way I'm getting in: Consent. Permission obviously takes away any unreasonableness regarding entry.In my scenario, I might knock and simply ask if I can come inside. If you let me in, I can visually scan the room I enter, but I cannot manipulate anything in the room - that constitutes a search. Contrary to seemingly widespread belief, permission to enter a dwelling does not automatically constitute permission to conduct a search.A quick caveat to this idea. If there is a question about how the house is occupied (for instance, if you say you're home alone but I hear voices or footsteps, or any number of other articulable factors), officers are permitted to do an 'officer safety sweep' (quickly going through the structure to ensure there are no threats to our safety) - but even during this sweep, no active search can be made. I can only eliminate the possibility of ambush, which means that I can enter spaces large enough to conceal a human being (walk-in closets, shower enclosures, deep cabinets), but nothing smaller (dresser drawers, file cabinets). Also, I cannot manipulate anything in a room unnecessary to my intent of clearing the structure of possible hostiles during this sweep, or it turns into a search.If I want to search, I have to specifically ask for consent for this. Some people will insist that the word "search" is magic and must be uttered in my request for it to be valid, but I'm fairly certain this isn't the case. Me asking, "Would you mind if I took a look around" has functionally held as much constitutional weight as, "Do you hereby consent to a search of your residence?" If you consent to a search, I now have legal access to any part of the residence, including those smaller areas, unless you specifically exclude access to a particular area (Pro Tip: Doing so is a huge flaming red flag billowing atop a pole which is itself on fire). If you decline a search, I'm pretty much at the end of my rope on the investigation, unless I see something in plain view. This is the legal basis for your question about detecting an odor, so we need to discuss it first.Plain view is a long-supported exception to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement. In the above scenario, if I am granted permission to walk into the living room and see marijuana pipes on top of the coffee table, I can immediately seize them as evidence without obtaining a warrant. Plain view requires three things to withstand judicial scrutiny:The officer has lawful access to a constitutionally protected area. If you consented to my entry, I have a search warrant, or I had exigent circumstances compelling me to enter without either (assault in progress, destruction of evidence, etc.), I have such access. This is an important step - even if I saw a trafficking-level grow operation through an open window, I couldn't barge in and secure it without consent or a warrant (I'm getting the latter, by the way).The item in question is in 'plain view,' and requires no manipulation to observe. Going to the living room scenario, if I see the outline of what looks to be drug paraphernalia under fabric (or any number of other situations), I cannot move the fabric to make sure and then seize it based on plain view. Legally, even though I saw evidence of it, it required a search to directly observe.The officer immediately recognizes the item in question as contraband. I'm not required to have certainty - I can't carry a forensics lab around with me. At the same time, though, I can't be uncertain - I can't seize something because I think there's an off chance it might be black tar heroin. If I seize something, I have to do it in good faith.Only when all three of those requirements are met can I effect a seizure. Now, let's tie that into the "odor of marijuana" issue. We've established that I cannot enter your house based on odor alone. But let's assume that you allowed me into the residence, and I there smelled such an odor. Can I search then? Still no. I need probable cause to search, and odor in a residence does not give it to me. Maybe the tenant before you smoked marijuana so often the smell permeated the drapes. Maybe a guest smoked a roach while you were in the backyard and took his stash with him. Maybe any number of things - but odor can only give me a hunch, which does not give me license to search. See also my answer on Does matching the description of a suspect amount to probable cause for detainment and/or arrest?.Now let's move to the car. If I conduct a traffic stop on a vehicle you are driving, and I smell the odor of marijuana in or about the cabin, can I then search your vehicle? In most jurisdictions in the United States, yes. Operators of motor vehicles enjoy a much lower expectation of privacy than those in their homes, due to their being both inherently mobile and perpetually open to outside view (if your tint is so dark as to exclude all outside view, I can almost guarantee it is illegal). Let's walk through why "plain smell" allows a warrantless search of a vehicle.To conduct a traffic stop on your vehicle, I must first have probable cause to do so. This legitimizes my detaining you, but does not automatically give me access to the interior of your vehicle. Seeing contraband in your vehicle, however, would - due to the Plain View exception to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement. As long as the second (visible without manipulation) and third (immediate recognition) requirements for Plain View exist, the Supreme Court has ruled that a vehicle's inherent mobility creates "an exigency sufficient to excuse failure to obtain a search warrant once probable cause to conduct the search is clear" (see Pennsylvania v. Labron, which can be found at http://laws.findlaw.com/us/518/938.html). This exigency completes my requirements for seizure and search of the cabin area (which gets into other case law that I'll defer discussion on for the time being; if you're interested, the applicable United States Supreme Court case is Chimel v. California). The mobility separates this from the house discussion - your car could be two states over by the time I got a warrant. Your house isn't going anywhere.How does that relate to smell? Well, the USSC has largely avoided adjudicating the issue of Plain Smell. Some believe that the USSC endorsed the doctrine in their decision in United States v. Johns, but see Michael A. Sprow's opinion in footnote #38 of "Wake Up and Smell the Contraband: Why Courts that do not Find Probable Cause Based on Odor Alone Are Wrong" (accessible via http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol42/iss1/7/. Circuit courts, however, have overwhelmingly supported the doctrine, essentially asserting that, given requisite training and experience necessary to detect distinctive odors associated with contraband, there is no reason an officer's sense of sight should hold more evidentiary weight than his or her sense of smell. For rulings in this regard, reference footnote #41 in Sprow's article. From my research, the only jurisdiction I can find which has failed to uphold this doctrine is Massachusetts - seemingly because possession of less than an ounce of marijuana is not a criminal offense (Michigan did not recognize the doctrine at one time, but has since reversed).Thus, most courts of jurisdiction in the United States recognize that the plain smell of contraband creates probable cause for a search, and that the inherent mobility of a vehicle creates an exigent circumstance which removes the need for consent or a search warrant. So, in those places, if I approach your vehicle during a vehicle stop and smell the odor of marijuana (or the odor of another type of contraband, if I can articulate my experience in recognizing it) in or about the cabin, I can order you out of the vehicle and search the cabin without consent or a warrant.In closing, a couple of thoughts. First, there is no freshness requirement in the Plain Smell doctrine. It doesn't have to be a scene cut from a Cheech and Chong movie, with smoke boiling out of the driver's window, for the doctrine to apply - if it can be smelled, to any degree, from the driver's window, you're probably going to get your cabin tossed. Thus, if you let your friends smoke weed in your car, expect a vehicle search upon every police contact. Second, the phrasing of the question suggests a suspicion that an officer would feign Plain Smell to get a free search. Rest assured, no officer with two brain cells to rub together is going to put their career in a guillotine over misdemeanor weed. Conscious initiation of an unlawful search will result in either a Letter of Reprimand or a resignation letter to sign; if an officer commits perjury on the stand, their career is over and they're looking at possible jail time. If it's a choice between falsifying information or someone skating on a dime bag, they can toke away to their heart's content.Hopefully that addressed the scope of your question; the constitutional law folk among our ranks might have corrections or other considerations to kick into the conversation.

Do you think the “Hoefeller Files,” now available online, exposing North Carolina’s Republican gerrymandering, will result in equitable nationwide American redistricting?The back story is that Thomas Hofeller's daughter found the files on her father's computer and USB drives.While looking for an attorney to represent her mother in 2018, Stephanie says she connected with the North Carolina chapter of Common Cause, an advocacy group that had brought a lawsuit against Republican state officials to overturn political maps Thomas Hofeller helped draw. After mentioning the hard drives to Common Cause, Stephanie received a court order to turn them over as potential evidence for the lawsuit. She did so in March after making a copy of some of the files for herself.Since then, the Hofeller files have led to bombshell developments in two major legal battles in the political world.Her decision to put the files online herself is just the latest twist in a series of one astonishing event after another.Deceased GOP Strategist's Daughter Makes Files Public That Republicans Wanted SealedThe Hofeller FilesEvidence obtained by Common Cause confirms how political operatives spent years plotting to rig our democracy with a Census citizenship question. GOP’s chief gerrymandering mastermind Thomas Hofeller laid out a plan to add the citizenship question to the Census. The purpose? Manipulating our Census and redistricting process to be, in Hofeller’s words, “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites."Common Cause has obtained evidence confirming how political operatives have spent years plotting to rig our democracy with a Census citizenship question.First, the New York Times publicized this shocking study, written by the GOP’s chief gerrymandering mastermind Thomas Hofeller, that laid out a plan to add the citizenship question to the Census. The purpose? Manipulating our Census and redistricting process to be, in Hofeller’s words, “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”Then we found evidence that Hofeller communicated with a top Census official about citizenship when the department was preparing to re-engineer the 2020 census.Together, the documents undermined the Trump Administration’s explanation for why it wanted to add the citizenship question to the 2020 census. In July, the administration abandoned its attempt to add the question, after being blocked by the Supreme Court.Now the Hofeller files could reveal the extent of the gerrymandering schemes that Hofeller was involved in across the country.In early September, a Wake County Superior Court ruling in Common Cause v. Lewis stated the Hofeller files provided direct evidence of his interest in maximizing Republicans’ advantage in the 2017 legislative maps in North Carolina. The three-judge panel gave the state legislature two weeks to redraw new maps and mandated a fully transparent process.On November 4, the court lifted a confidentiality designation on more than 100,000 of the Hofeller files pertaining to Arizona, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Nassau County in New York, and Nueces County and Galveston in Texas. The court gave Hofeller’s former company, Geographic Strategies, more time to substantiate a claim on other files that it has said are proprietary.We know from our national redistricting advocacy that Hofeller orchestrated gerrymandering in multiple states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. We believe that there is additional evidence that needs to come forward about the partisan motives and vote-stealing conducted in other states. A decision on whether to lift confidentiality on additional Hofeller documents to the public is expected this winter.The Hofeller Files - Common CauseDeceased G.O.P. Strategist’s Hard Drives Reveal New Details on the Census Citizenship QuestionMay 30, 2019WASHINGTON — Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday [1][1][1][1] by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question. Critics say adding the question would deter many immigrants from being counted and shift political power to Republican areas.The disclosures represent the most explicit evidence to date that the Trump administration added the question to the 2020 census to advance Republican Party interests.[Inside the Trump administration’s fight to add a citizenship question to the census]In a statement issued on Thursday evening, the Justice Department said the accusations in the filing were baseless and amounted to “a last-ditch effort to derail the Supreme Court’s consideration of this case.” It said Mr. Hofeller’s 2015 study had “played no role in the department’s December 2017 request to reinstate a citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census.”In Supreme Court arguments in April over the legality of the decision, the Trump administration argued that the benefits of obtaining more accurate citizenship data offset any damage stemming from the likely depressed response to the census by minority groups and noncitizens. And it dismissed charges that the Commerce Department had simply invented a justification for adding the question to the census as unsupported by the evidence.Opponents said that the Justice Department’s rationale for seeking to add a citizenship question to the census was baldly contrived, a conclusion shared by federal judges in all three lawsuits opposing the administration’s action.But a majority of the Supreme Court justices seemed inclined to accept the department’s explanation the question was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, and appeared ready to uphold the administration’s authority to alter census questions as it sees fit. The justices are expected to issue a final ruling before the court’s term ends in late June.The filing on Thursday sought sanctions against the defendants in the lawsuit, led by Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr., who were accused of misrepresentations “on the central issues of this case.” Judge Jesse M. Furman of United States District Court in Manhattan set a hearing on the issue for Wednesday.In nearly 230 years, the census has never asked all respondents whether they are American citizens. But while adding such a question might appear uncontroversial on its face, opponents have argued that it is actually central to a Republican strategy to skew political boundaries to their advantage when redistricting begins in 2021.[How the Supreme Court’s decision on the census could alter American politics.]Until now, Mr. Hofeller seemed a bystander in the citizenship-question debate, mentioned but once in thousands of pages of lawsuit depositions and evidence. Proof of his deeper involvement surfaced only recently, and only after a remarkable string of events beginning after his death in August at age 75.Mr. Hofeller was survived by a daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, from whom he had been estranged since 2014. In an interview, Ms. Hofeller said she learned of her father’s death by accident after searching for his name on the internet, and returned to her parents’ retirement home in Raleigh, N.C., to see her mother, Kathleen Hofeller.Sorting through Mr. Hofeller’s personal effects, looking for items she had asked her father to save for her, Stephanie Hofeller came across a clear plastic bag holding four external hard drives and 18 thumb drives, backups of data on Mr. Hofeller’s Toshiba laptop. Her mother gave Ms. Hofeller the backups, which turned out to hold some 75,000 files — family photographs and other personal data, but also a huge trove of documents related to Mr. Hofeller’s work as a Republican consultant.Late last year, Ms. Hofeller said, she contacted the Raleigh office of the advocacy group Common Cause, seeking its help in finding a lawyer unconnected to her father to help settle his estate. Only after several conversations with a staff member there did she mention the hard drives in passing, she said, remarking almost jokingly that an expert on gerrymanders might find a lot in them that was of interest.“My understanding was that anything that would be on these hard drives was duplicative of things that had already been hashed out” in court challenges to Mr. Hofeller’s maps, she said.In fact, Common Cause had recently filed a new lawsuit in state court, challenging gerrymandered maps of North Carolina’s legislative districts drawn by Mr. Hofeller himself. When the staff member told her of the lawsuit, Ms. Hofeller said, she thought, “Wow — this might be of use.”Lawyers for Arnold & Porter, the law firm representing Common Cause in the North Carolina suit, subpoenaed the drives in February. By happenstance, the same firm was representing private plaintiffs pro bono in the principal lawsuit opposing the citizenship question, in Federal District Court in Manhattan.The documents cited in the Thursday court filing include an unpublished August 2015 analysis by Mr. Hofeller, who was hired by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet financially backed by Paul Singer, a billionaire New York hedge fund manager and major Republican donor. Mr. Hofeller’s charge was to assess the impact of drawing political maps that were not based on a state’s total population — the current practice virtually everywhere in the nation — but on a slice of that population: American citizens of voting age.At the time, the study’s sponsor was considering whether to finance a lawsuit by conservative legal advocates [2][2][2][2] that argued that counting voting-age citizens was not merely acceptable, but required by the Constitution.Mr. Hofeller’s exhaustive analysis of Texas state legislative districts concluded that such maps “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” and would dilute the political power of the state’s Hispanics.The reason, he wrote, was that the maps would exclude traditionally Democratic Hispanics and their children from the population count. That would force Democratic districts to expand to meet the Constitution’s one person, one vote requirement. In turn, that would translate into fewer districts in traditionally Democratic areas, and a new opportunity for Republican mapmakers to create even stronger gerrymanders.The strategy carried a fatal flaw, however: The detailed citizenship data that was needed to draw the maps did not exist. The only existing tally of voting-age citizens, Mr. Hofeller's study stated, came from a statistical sample of the population largely used by the Justice Department to verify that the 1965 Voting Rights Act was ensuring the voting rights of minority groups.“Without a question on citizenship being included on the 2020 Decennial Census questionnaire,” Mr. Hofeller wrote, “the use of citizen voting age population is functionally unworkable.”Roughly 16 months later, as President-elect Trump prepared to take office, Mr. Hofeller urged Mr. Trump’s transition team to consider adding a citizenship question to the census, the transition official responsible for census issues, Mark Neuman, said last year in a deposition in the Manhattan census lawsuit.Activists rallied outside the Supreme Court in April. The justices are expected to issue a final ruling on the census citizenship question before the court’s term ends in late June.Credit...J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressMr. Neuman testified that Mr. Hofeller told him that using citizenship data from the census to enforce the Voting Rights Act would increase Latino political representation — the opposite of what Mr. Hofeller’s study had concluded months earlier.Court records show that Mr. Neuman, a decades-long friend of Mr. Hofeller’s, later became an informal adviser on census issues to Mr. Ross, the commerce secretary. By that summer, a top aide to Mr. Ross was pressing the Justice Department to say that it required detailed data from a census citizenship question to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.The court filing on Thursday describes two instances in which Mr. Hofeller’s digital fingerprints are clearly visible on Justice Department actions.The first involves a document from the Hofeller hard drives created on Aug. 30, 2017, as Mr. Ross’s wooing of the Justice Department was nearing a crescendo. The document’s single paragraph cited two court decisions supporting the premise that more detailed citizenship data would assist enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.That paragraph later appeared word for word in a draft letter from the Justice Department to the Census Bureau that sought a citizenship question on the 2020 census. In closed congressional testimony in March, John M. Gore, the assistant attorney general for civil rights and the Justice Department’s chief overseer of voting rights issues, said Mr. Neuman gave him the draft in an October 2017 meeting.The second instance involves the official version of the Justice Department’s request for a citizenship question, a longer and more detailed letter sent to the Census Bureau in December 2017. That letter presents nuanced and technical arguments that current citizenship data falls short of Voting Rights Act requirements — arguments that the plaintiffs say are presented in exactly the same order, and sometimes with identical descriptions like “building blocks” — as in Mr. Hofeller’s 2015 study.In their court filing on Thursday, lawyers for the plaintiffs said that “many striking similarities” between Mr. Hofeller’s study and the department’s request for a citizenship question indicated that the study was an important source document for the Justice Department’s request.The filing also says flatly that Mr. Gore and Mr. Neuman “falsely testified” under oath about the Justice Department’s actions on the citizenship question.In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Neuman denied the charge, and said he had worked for years to increase Hispanic representation in public office. “I gave complete and truthful testimony in my deposition,” he said. “My mother immigrated to this country from Central America. Any reference that I would advocate actions that harm the interests of the Latino community is wrong and deeply offensive.”The Departments of Justice and Commerce had no immediate comment on the filings. Common Cause, which first obtained the hard drives, said the revelations on them were a wake-up call to supporters of the American system. “Now that the plan has been revealed, it’s important for all of us — the courts, leaders and the people — to stand up for a democracy that includes every voice,” said Kathay Feng, the group’s national redistricting director.Ms. Hofeller said her decision to open her father’s files to his opponents was a bid for transparency, devoid of personal or political animus. Although she believed he was undermining American democracy, she said, their estrangement stemmed not from partisan differences, but a family dispute that ended up in court. Ms. Hofeller described herself as a political progressive who despises Republican partisanship, but also has scant respect for Democrats.Her father, she said, was a brilliant cartographer who was deeply committed to traditional conservative principles like free will and limited government. As a child, she said, she was schooled in those same principles, but every successive gerrymandered map he created only solidified her conviction that he had abandoned them in a quest to entrench his party in permanent control.“He had me with the idea that we are made to be free,” she said. “And then he lost me.”Deceased G.O.P. Strategist’s Hard Drives Reveal New Details on the Census Citizenship QuestionI think that both parties are guilty of gerrymandering, although The Republican party has gotten cheating down to perfection and are even more guilty than the Democrats, not that it excuses the Democrats of doing the same thing. Cheating is cheating no matter which party does it.I would love to see a panel of the least biased, able to compromise, people to redraw districts for each state and have it federally mandated as a federal law that cannot be changed unless a request by a state, to have their districts redrawn due to radical population change. Anything that involves federal elections, there needs to be a law that effects all states.I would also like to see, and I know some would agree, that we need a way to either notify voters that they are in danger of being purged from voter rolls. I imagine it would take a nationwide database but it could be done since the need to get a driver’s license after a move. Purging should be made long before an election. After all, the Constitution says that every person at the legal age has the right to vote and purging has taken place denying some people, usually minorities or opposite parties, their right to vote.Some states do not allow online registration, some allow same day registration, etc. By making it uniform across all 50 states it eliminates cheating by either party.I don’t know about any one else, but in my years of being of voting age and I am 80 now (21 back in my day, so voted for the first time in 1964), I am really tired of all the cheating that goes on in our federal and states government.Now we have some states denying their registered party voters to choose between two candidates of the same party by only allowing the parties choice on the ballot. This is taking away a voters choice and doesn’t seem legal to me.The constitution gives every legal voter the right to make their choice. That is another reason for a law that encompasses all states and take the ability to cheat out of the states hands. Enough is enough as it is only getting worse, especially when there are solutions to each cheating problem.Thank you Edward to let me post my rant in answer to your question.PatriciaA2AFootnotes[1] New Evidence Exposes GOP Census Rigging - Common Cause[1] New Evidence Exposes GOP Census Rigging - Common Cause[1] New Evidence Exposes GOP Census Rigging - Common Cause[1] New Evidence Exposes GOP Census Rigging - Common Cause[2] {{meta.pageTitle}}[2] {{meta.pageTitle}}[2] {{meta.pageTitle}}[2] {{meta.pageTitle}}