Category Archives: voting

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.

Voter Suppression

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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

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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

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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.