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Category Archives: voting
Voter Suppression
Early voting is under way, and Georgia’s Jim Crow 2.0 Law® is in full swing.
Georgia has seen 539,297 people cast ballots as of Tuesday, far outpacing the 182,684 by this point in the 2018 midterm primary elections, according to data compiled by Georgia Votes.
The numbers have even outpaced those posted during the 2020 presidential election by 156%….
Tuesday was Day Two for those Leftists and Progressive-Democratic Party members keeping score at home.
These numbers are for a mid-term election, which typically has a much lower voter turnout than during a Presidential election year.
But wait….
The first day of early voting in Georgia set a new midterm turnout record, with nearly 123,000 in-person voters casting their ballots.
That’s how much voters are being suppressed; that’s how hard it is for them even to get to a voting booth—they’re voting in person in record numbers.
This is voter suppression in the minds of those Wonders who style themselves so much smarter and…better…than us average Americans.
Go figure.
Election Cheating
Pennsylvania’s legislature has made clear that undated mail-in ballots are invalid ballots and cannot be counted.
Even so, Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democratic Party governor Tom Wolf has ordered counties to continue counting undated ballots.
His move comes even after a ruling in a related Pennsylvania case:
Last week the US Supreme Court sided with another Republican politician in the state and invalidated hundreds of mail-in ballots that the state had previously counted even though they lacked a date along with the voter signature.
As the Progressive-Democrat Wolf knows full well, he has no such authority. Here’s our Constitution’s Article I, Section 4:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof….
The State’s legislature makes that decision, not anyone in the State’s Executive Branch—or in the State’s Judicial Branch. Pennsylvania’s legislature has spoken on the matter very clearly: undated ballots are invalid and uncountable. Full stop.
Americans shouldn’t have to go into court as a matter of course to enforce any law, including an election law. The matter of course should be following the law, with resorting to court the exception.
We Americans need to remember this, and remember who thinks laws can be disregarded at convenience, in the elections coming up.
In Which a Judge Gets It Right
The Wisconsin Election Commission had issued guidance that voters who cast primary election ballots and who had voted for candidates subsequently dropped from the election campaign, but too late for them to be removed from the ballots, could “spoil” their ballots, get a replacement ballot, and vote again.
This guidance is illegal: under Wisconsin law, a voter can do that only before he’s cast his ballot—casting it is final and irrevocable. A Wisconsin judge recognized that, and said, “No.”
It may be useful for a voter, having cast his ballot, to be able to “spoil” that ballot and vote again—after all, corporations, with their mailed-out shareholder ballots know how to handle that as a matter of routine. However, Wisconsin law does not allow for that.
Further, Article I, Section 4, of our Constitution makes crystalline who is allowed to change a State’s election law. It’s a short list, consisting of one entity, and that list does not include election commissions.
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof….
Nor does that short list include judges. The judge absolutely was correct to overrule the WEC, which was violating the law. The judge applied Wisconsin’s law as it exists rather than rewriting it and applying the rewrite.
Redrawing Districts
The Supreme Court is hearing a case, Merrill v Milligan, that concerns whether Congressional districts will be drawn in accordance with census outcomes concerning the distribution of American citizens in a State, or whether they will (continue to) be drawn to favor race in a State.
Alabama, the State in question in Merrill, redrew its Congressional districts as a result of the 2020 census outcome and kept substantially the same districts with substantially the same population distributions as the prior district map, making tweaks at district boundaries to account for minor population moves. The plaintiffs in the case, though,
argue the map should be redrawn so that Alabama has two majority-Black districts instead of just one….
Alabama, on the other hand, is arguing
that should the lawsuit prevail, the state will be forced into an unconstitutional practice of prioritizing race in creating election rules….
Alabama also would be forced to violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which explicitly bars (re)districting on the basis of race. There is only one legitimately correct outcome to this case, and it favors Alabama. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has the right of it, having written in other venues that Section 2 of the VRA, the center of the present case, has
involved the federal courts, and indeed the Nation, in the enterprise of systematically dividing the country into electoral districts along racial lines—an enterprise of segregating the races into political homelands that amounts, in truth, to nothing short of a system of political apartheid.
Absolutely. Under law, all American citizens are equal. All American voters are the same: we’re Americans. There are no white Americans and black Americans and Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans—under law there are only American Americans.
Requiring us to be set apart by race in our interactions with our government is nothing but racism written into our laws. And that’s contrary to our Constitution, which is supreme over Congressional statutes like the VRA and its Section 2. Here’s the relevant clause of our 1st Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Voting is at the core of assembly, and it’s at the center of redressing our grievances with Government: it’s where we come together to fire those Government persons with whom we are most dissatisfied and to hire replacements for them.
It’s time for the Court to rule, decisively, in favor of drawing Congressional district boundaries according to the distribution of American voters, and to stop drawing them to favor one group of Americans while disfavoring other groups of Americans.