Tag Archives: freedom

Two Serious Errors

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These particular two have occurred in the just concluded (sort of) Progressive-Democratic Party primary election for Party’s nominee for Mayor of New York City.

The first error is this: more than 920,000 votes were counted in that primary election, out of some 800,000 votes cast in person—and the count does not yet include 124,000+ absentee ballots cast.

But votes counted included 135,000 test votes—votes used to check procedures in and to practice for the ranked choice vote counting that would be used in the “live” election. Those test votes were supposed to have been purged before the actual live election and not counted in the results.

How does that happen, exactly? Most likely, it’s from the sloppiness and outright incompetence of the city’s Board of elections persons.

The second error is more of a failure and is even more serious, and it goes to the heart of ranked choice voting.

[V]oters…list their top five candidates in order. Since no candidate was the first choice of more than 50% of voters, a computer on Tuesday tabulated ballots in a series of rounds that worked like instant run-offs.
In each round, the candidate in last place was eliminated. Votes cast for that person were then redistributed to the surviving candidates, based on whoever voters put next on their ranking list. That process repeated until only two candidates were left.

A computerized process that uses cast and in-hand ballots to resolve the question from the bottom up. Computerized should take a few hours (I’m being pessimistic here; we’re long past the days of card-punch UNIVACs—and if you don’t recognize what those are, that’s my point) to complete.

However.

The final result is not expected until mid-July.

Wait—the Progressive-Democrats’ primary election was held ‘way back on 22 June. It’ll take weeks, not hours, for the computers to run this process to completion?

How does that work, exactly?

I see two factors in play here that could slow the computerized process. One is that all the absentee ballots have yet(!) to be included. Why weren’t they included in the count from the start? Because they weren’t available at the start. A State law enacted just last year allows absentee ballots arriving as late as a week after primary day to be counted, so long as they’re postmarked by primary day.

Another is that the test ballots weren’t marked in any serious way, so they have to be hand-identified and hand-removed from the pile of ballots cast.

Wow.

Compelling Interest and Racism

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors correctly decry President Joe Biden’s (D) race-based “equity” programs and diktats as taking our nation back to an ugly past.

By equity, Mr Biden means preferences for some racial groups over others to achieve equal outcomes.

And

Mr Biden sells his agenda as taking America into the future. But allocating government funds or privileges by race is a step back to an uglier past. … If applied on the scale Mr Biden hopes, America would become a nation of groups competing for racial spoils and defined outcomes rather than seeking equal opportunity for everyone.

The editors added this near the end of their piece, and here I demur from them.

Strict scrutiny requires that the government have a compelling interest for discriminating by race, and that it must use the least restrictive means to achieve that interest. If less restrictive ways can achieve the same purpose, the policy fails.

There shouldn’t be any strict scrutiny on such matters; the policies should fail on their face. There’s nothing in the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protections clause that permits Government-determined “compelling interest” to override our Constitution [emphasis added].

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

All of that plainly applies to our Federal government every bit as much as it does to each of the governments of the several States.

The Strict Scrutiny standard, as applied here, has been unconstitutional from the start and was an earlier Supreme Court attempt to duck its responsibility in applying our Constitution rather than seeking out excuses and methodologies for getting outside of it.

Government’s compelling interest is to defend and uphold our Constitution.

Full stop.

Congressman Colin Allred (D, TX) Makes the Case

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The good Congressman tried to make the case for HR1 in his Letter to the Thursday Wall Street Journal

What HR1 does is simple: it sets national standards for access to vote by mail, early voting, and voter registration so that our democracy isn’t radically different from state to state.

HR1 also nationalizes a number of other aspects of voting currently set by the individual States (as well as giving the Federal government veto authority over any moves a State might make in contradiction, but that’s an extra little fillip).

Unwittingly, though, the Progressive-Democratic Party Representative from Texas has made a critical aspect of the case against HR1.

Our 50 States do not exist merely as counties to the central government, existing solely for the convenience of enforcing laws handed down from the center. They are, instead, 50 different, enthusiastic, ongoing experiments in democracy. The good citizens of Maine have different imperatives than those of Illinois or Texas, and those citizens have different imperatives than those of California or Oregon.

And that’s a core strength of our nation.

An Oxymoron Constitutional Amendment

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That’s what the Illinois State legislature wants to inflict on the State’s citizens. That body has passed a State Constitution amendment proposal, at union behest, that would

guarantee a ““fundamental right to organize and to bargain collectively,” including for better wages, hours, working conditions….

Never mind that that right already exists in our nation’s Constitution via the 1st Amendment’s Freedom of Assembly clause and the Supreme Court’s NAACP v Alabama ruling, which extended “speech” to include association and extended both to the State level.

That’s not the end of it, though. The legislature’s proposed amendment also says that

no law would be allowed to block labor agreements from “requiring membership in an organization as a condition of employment.”

That is a blatant violation of citizens’, and of a citizen’s, freedom of association—and of their speech rights by requiring them to associate with others in order to speak of certain things.

The thing will go to the citizens of Illinois in 2022, and it’s one more illustration of Illinois’ governmental dysfunction.

Race as a Discriminant of Merit

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A Wall Street Journal editorial gets at this as the editors urge the Supreme Court to take up Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, a case in which Harvard uses race explicitly as a meritorious discriminant for admission.

Harvard personnel actually insist they aren’t discriminating against Americans of Asian descent; they’re merely favoring Americans with black or brown skin. Anyone not chewing the halls’ ivy can see the obvious disingenuousness of that claim; the WSJ‘s editors are entirely correct to push the Court to take up the case.

The larger stakes are whether the Supreme Court will wink as America divides in ways that have proved so destructive in the past.

And

In America today the principle that drove the civil-rights movement—equality for all—is fast giving way to the view that race must be a dominant factor in every decision from college admission to eligibility for a federal farm program to the makeup of corporate boards to who gets priority for a Covid vaccine.

But then the editors wander astray.

It is true that the racial discrimination alleged in Harvard isn’t the same as that of the Jim Crow South. In that era federal government intervention was required to break the state-enforced discrimination against black Americans. Race preferences were rooted then in the false claim of African-American inferiority.
No one thinks Harvard is discriminating because of animosity toward Asian-Americans, much less because it believes they are inferior.

The discrimination is so closely related, though, as to be a conjoined Siamese twin of Jim Crow. Harvard management personnel are setting race-based preference in favor of blacks, rather than against them, precisely because those school managers still believe the claim of African-American inferiority; the school’s management personnel still believe[] [blacks] are inferior.