Tag Archives: voting

Cowards Flee

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Texas’ Progressive-Democrats have done it again. Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) called a special session of the Texas legislature because Texas’ Progressive-Democrats cravenly ran away from the last days of the legislature’s regular session explicitly to deny a quorum and prevent debate and votes to pass or reject a number of critical bills, including a couple of voting bills that would increase ballot security while facilitating voter access to ballots.

These wonders of Progressivism were too cowardly and too arrogant (with all the overlap between the two) to debate and vote—even to allow debate and voting. So much for their pious pretense of favoring voting.

Now, those same Progressive-Democrats have blown up the special session, wasting all the Texas taxpayer money spent on that special session, and run away again.

And they bragged about their cowardice. James Talarico (D, 52nd District), among the Progressive-Democrats who jetted out of the state on a chartered jet:

Just landed in Memphis on our way to DC. Thank y’all for your well wishes.

They showed their privilege again, too: they chartered private jets in which to flee to DC; they couldn’t even be bothered to fly commercial, or to take the train, or (gasp!) drive themselves.

Rich cowards fleeing.

Some did jump on a bus, though.

Others were reportedly pictured on a DC-bound bus with packs of Miller Lite.

Not even a Texas beer, even if it is a Dallas Cowboys sponsor; that just shows the Precious Ones’ virtue signaling. Miller is sold by Chicago, IL, headquartered Molson Coors. These wonders couldn’t even be bothered to bring packs of Shiner Bock or Texas Red.

Party down, guys. In every sense of that phrase.

Oh, and one more thing. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s leadership has already termed the filibuster a relic of Jim Crow. Here is that party–the Party that invented Jim Crow–by running away, reviving this relic. And they’re proud of it.

Today’s Attorney General

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The Progressive-Democrat appointee to Attorney General, Merrick Garland, is showing his overtly political bent as our nation’s chief prosecutor. One characterization of The Wall Street Journal‘s editors especially stands out, a characterization of Garland’s suit against Georgia and its new, more expansive voter law.

…a fair guess is that Mr Garland succumbed to White House and progressive pressure to make a political statement to support Democratic efforts in Congress to federalize state election laws in HR1.

Garland—especially with his willingness to surrender to White House political pressure—is demonstrating the wisdom of not confirming him to the Supreme Court. Imagine the destruction he’d have wreaked from the Court as the tool of a President that he’s demonstrating himself to be, given the damage he’s attempting to wreak as AG.

I Dissent

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…from the dissenter.

The Supreme Court ruled that Arizona’s voter law is entirely legitimate. That law, you’ll remember, among other things limited who is allowed to return early voting ballots for another person—banned ballot harvesting—and barred counting ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

Among the reasons for upholding Arizona’s law is this:

The court rejected the idea that showing that a state law disproportionately affects minority voters is enough to prove a violation of the law.

Writing in dissent (it was a 6-3 majority), Justice Elena Kagan claimed in part

What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute [the 56-yr-old Voting Rights Act] designed to bring about “the end of discrimination in voting.” I respectfully dissent[.]

The irony in Kagan’s dissent is breathtaking in its depth. She complains of damaging the “end of discrimination in voting” even as the Arizona law treats all voters equally rather than giving special treatment to some. Reducing special treatment somehow increases discrimination.

The rejection of the concept that disproportionality is by itself, regardless of whether it’s a mere side effect, discriminatory also represents a great reduction in special treatment for particular groups—but this, too, is somehow an increase in discrimination in Kagan’s world view.

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.

The Manchin Alternative

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Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) claims he never liked HR1, even though he voted for cloture on the Senate Progressive-Democrats’ effort bring that Federal election deform law to the Senate floor for party-line passage.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors rightly called out his sham of a compromise, to be substituted for that HR1…nonsense.

I’ve picked out just a couple of the items in Manchin’s offering to illustrate the sham. The first is a repeat example of Manchin’s personal fundamental dishonesty.

The [compromise’s] preamble insists that any voting bill “must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together.”

We’ve already seen how worthless Manchin’s word is. On that “coming together” bit, in particular, Manchin late last fall piously intoned, often, that he would support no bill that didn’t have input from “his friends across the aisle.” Then he voted, twice, for a unilaterally done reconciliation bill that spent nearly $2 trillion of our taxpayer money.

“ban partisan gerrymandering and use computer models.”

Here is an example of Party’s intrinsic dishonesty, and that of the DC politicians in general, for generations and across parties.

The only legitimate way to get rid of gerrymandering, and computers would be helpful here, but they’re far from critical, is to subdivide each State into rectangular districts of substantially equal numbers of citizens, and with no regard to geography other than State borders.

After all, in the eyes of our Constitution, there are no black voters or brown voters or Asian voters or white voters. There are no male voters or female voters. There are only American voters.