On the news that President Obama will likely use his upcoming State of the Union address to again push for better voting conditions, the New York Times today runs the graph above about how long people are waiting, and who waits more. If you're not white, if you're a Democrat and if you live in a city, you're likely to face a longer wait. The more money you make, the less you stand to wait.

With the exception of Maryland and the District of Columbia, the states with the longest waits are under Republican control (adding: Montana has a Democratic governor). In one of those states, Virginia, Republicans in the Senate have put a new bill to limit wait times to an hour on indefinite hold.

To the extent that our problems with voting are pragmatic and not partisan, it's worth noting that early voting comes with longer wait times. Some of that is plainly partisan, in that Republicans in Florida cut the time for early voting (and Republicans in Ohio tried). To the extent that we, as a nation, can consider this a practical problem, we've got a growing number of practical solutions to consider -- including upgrades to voter registration, offering enough places and machines for voting, and setting a national standard for early voting. 

(Image: New York Times)

National Conference on State Legislatures

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In Morning Maddow today, Tricia points to new Republican hopes for restrictions on abortion, in Arkansas and Wisconsin. Those headlines are the direct result of what happened in the states' legislative races, where Republicans now control both chambers. It may be that our national experiment with bipartisan government is over, or at least on hold, with one party having full control in a minimum of 37 states. That includes 24 states under GOP control and 13 states under Democrats.

We got here partly because of gerrymandering. Republicans got to draw most state legislative maps after 2010, including the twisted one now in place in Pennsylvania. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

In Pennsylvania, Republicans took hold of 13 of 18 congressional seats while being outpaced by 75,000 total votes. Mr. Obama won 53 percent of the state's vote, but Democratic candidates won 28 percent of the seats. . . .

The same kind of results were repeated in the Obama states of Ohio (where Democrats won 25 percent of seats), Michigan (36 percent) and Wisconsin (38 percent), where the GOP also controlled redistricting. But in states where Democrats controlled the maps (such as Illinois and Massachusetts), Democrats didn't win congressional seats at the same rates as in GOP-run states, nor did they run up the score in states where maps are drawn by nonpartisan commissions or courts, such as New Jersey or Colorado.

Democrats benefit less from gerrymandering because their voters live in densely populated cities (see Mother Jones' charts on this), so they're much harder to divide into favorable districts. Now we get to see what Democrats will try to do in the fewer states they control (like Maryland and California) and what Republicans will try to do in theirs. This morning in Maine, where voters gave Democrats control of the legislature, incoming Democratic leaders are reconsidering Republican policies like tax cuts that drained the treasury and cuts to Medicaid. In Wisconsin, an Obama state with a Republican government, lawmakers are talking about forcing women to view ultrasounds. Elections have consequences, sometimes far down the road.

This thing in Maine where people are asking voters for same-sex couples' right to marry strikes me as wholly different from what we usually see. Instead of arguing against voting on rights, they're asking for a vote on rights. If beautiful ads alone led to victory, they'd already be there.

The news-news is that, lovely ads or no, they appear to be winning, not just with the direct referendum in Maine but also in Maryland and Washington, where the legislatures passed laws for marriage-equality that got put up for repeal.

(H/t America Blog)