Category Archives: voting

Voting as a Teaching Tool

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The Boston City Council has approved a petition to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in city elections. The city council’s next move is to submit its petition to the Massachusetts legislature for enactment. It’s the council’s rationalization for the move that’s instructive.

Progressive members of the City Council argued that lowering the voting age would help young people build a habit of voting and make them more likely to continue being politically engaged later in life.

And this:

When it comes to making a decision as to who’s going to represent them [16- and 17-year-olds], that has been denied to them.

This, especially, is egregiously misleading. Those children have parents representing them. Those parents vote. Those parents are the source of instruction.

Never mind, though. Voting isn’t important in choosing our political leaders. Nobody teaches American history in grade school anymore, apparently, or Civics in junior high, or Western Civilization at any age. No, voting has no importance beyond teaching children a measure of responsibility, because schools also seem to lack any other tools for teaching them ethics (Aristotle, anyone?) or morality (Aesop, or religion, maybe?).

Sure.

A Deliberate Move by the Progressive-Democratic Party

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…against American citizenship and American citizens.

The Progressive-Democratic Party-backed Washington, DC, city council voted 12-1 (!) to allow anyone resident in the city for at least 30 days to vote in city elections. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) didn’t have the courage to take an open position, one way or the other, on the bill; she allowed it to become the law of the city by simply not signing it. The new city law is so broadly written that illegal aliens and foreign college students would be able to vote, and

There’s nothing in this measure to prevent employees at embassies of governments that are openly hostile to the United States from casting ballots.

Now, courtesy of Bowser and her city council, anyone in the Russian, or the PRC, or the Venezuelan, or the… embassies can vote to choose the city’s elected officials up to and including the Mayor. To hell with what American citizen voters resident in the city want or vote for (or against).

Now the matter goes to Congress—the city being a Federal enclave—and those worthies have 30 days to vote it down. It’ll be instructive to see whether there are enough Party politicians in each house of Congress with enough understanding of the meaning of patriotism, and especially of the meaning of “American citizen,” to strike down this bill. As The Wall Street Journal editors put it, Let’s see the roll call.

Some Corporate Values

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Recall Major League Baseball’s, Coca Cola’s, and Delta Airlines’ reactions to Georgia’s voter integrity protection law, SB202, passed last year. That law, after all, created such nasty things as

  • signature matching
  • voter ID
  • restrictions on drop boxes
  • ban on the mass mailing of absentee ballot request forms to those who did not ask for them,
  • mandatory citizenship checks

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said baseball’s decision to pull the All Star Game out of Atlanta that year, causing the loss of upwards of $70 million of revenue to Atlanta’s small and medium businesses, was the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport.

Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey said Georgia’s law is unacceptable and a step backwards.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said that Georgia’s law is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.

Here’s what that law, wholly unacceptable to these corporations’ values, did.

  • total turnout of early voters—both in-person and absentee—was 2,504,956, an all-time record
  • 2,288,889 total early in-person voters this year, compared to 1,890,364 early in-person voters in the 2018 midterm elections, a 17% increase
  • average wait time in [voting] lines was about two minutes in the afternoon, when a day’s voting really starts getting going
  • tracking at three minutes
  • longest on the leader board 14 minutes
  • check-in time, when you got to the front line, 47 seconds

Now we know clearly what those corporate values are: low voter turnout, great difficulty getting to a voting booth for those who are allowed to vote, voting by illegal aliens and other non-citizens.

In fine, those corporations have shown their values to be suppression of citizens’ ability to vote and diminution of the value of citizens’ votes through promotion of non-citizens’ votes.

Why would any American citizen want to do business with this kind of corporation, a corporation that so blatantly disparages what it means to be an American citizen?

Two Things

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Former President Donald Trump’s candidates won their primaries—and they lost in the general election. The Republican Party needs to move on from Trump: he was an effective President, and for the most part, his policies were sound. However, his post-2020 election behavior and rhetoric have been nakedly divisive, and his attacks have been directed more at Republicans than at Progressive-Democrats. Trump has made himself counterproductive to Republican and to national interests, and the Republican Party needs to render him irrelevant.

The other thing is that the Progressive-Democratic Party heavily influenced the Republican Party’s primary nominees, getting Progressive-Democrat-favored Republicans nominated on seven occasions. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s general election candidates then defeated all seven.

Republicans need to do two things about this, one of which has a broader, necessarily critical, application. The one is that Republicans need to call out the Progressive-Democratic Party’s interference, identify the campaign ads, and then emphasize their intrinsically (if strictly legal) dishonest nature and the desperate ploys that they are.

The other, broader thing is Republican messaging. Every Republican candidate individually, needs to talk heavily about what his policies—concrete, measurable policies—will be if he’s elected. It’s not enough to speak only about the other guy’s failures, though that does need to be a part of the messaging. It’s watery gruel, indeed, too, to speak only in glittering generalities about the Republican candidate’s own policies and goals. More than that: all of the individual candidate policies need to come from a wholly unified party set of policies so that each of the candidates is fighting for the same thing at a national scale, as well as a local one, rather than irrelevantly of each other or outright at cross purposes with each other.

Bonus thing: as long as early voting is going to be a thing in our general elections, Republicans need to work to get their voters out early, also, if only to mitigate the traditional advantage Progressive-Democrats have in early voting numbers and late counting of in-person voting. This would mitigate the opportunities for shenanigans regarding those early voting and late counting numbers.

This brings up an additional bonus thing: our Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, says this:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

That ability of Congress to change or alter States’ election prescriptions is key here. States have, in my not so humble opinion, early voting periods that are far too long and mail-in balloting rules that are too loose. The former encourages voting to occur before candidates have developed their campaigns very much, even before the candidates have debated each other at all. It also gets too many voters committed before any late- or moderately late-breaking events that otherwise would affect a candidate’s viability. The latter is too vulnerable to ballot harvesting, misplaced/misbehaved-on ballots, ballots pushed to voters whether they ask for them or not, and other failures, both honest mistakes and nefariously done ones.

Congress—more likely, We the People—need to consider a Congressional alteration that limits early voting period to a much shorter period, say, one week. Congress—more likely, We the People—need also to consider limiting mail-in ballots to absentee ballots positively requested by a voter and with those ballots requested only with a reasonable excuse for not voting in person (e.g., a military member stationed outside his voting precinct).

Ranked Choice Voting

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In a Sunday letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, a correspondent had this, in part, in supporting Alaska’s ranked choice voting system:

In Alaska’s old system, like the current one in Pennsylvania, the general-election candidates are decided in partisan primaries by a small number of extreme voters.

This is a disingenuous rationale for RCV. No one kept the rest of the partisan primary voters from coming out to vote, in Alaska, Pennsylvania, or any other State. In actuality, those stay-at-homes cast their votes by abstention. The outcomes are their choice as much as they are the choice of those who cared enough to come out and vote.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) won her primary contest against a long-standing incumbent by collecting the majority of a very small number of primary votes cast. She then won her seat in the House by collecting the majority of an almost as small number of general election votes cast.

RCV does nothing to correct that laziness.