Tag Archives: voting

Danger from In-Person Voting

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It’s quite minimal, regardless of the hysterical panic-mongering of the NLMSM and the Progressive-Democrats. Dr Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator:

“Well, I can tell you it has been safe for me to go to Starbucks and pick up my order,” Dr Deborah Birx told Just The News in an interview when asked about in-person voting.
…
“If you go into Starbucks in the middle of Texas and Alabama and Mississippi that have very high case rates, then I can’t say that it would be different waiting in line in the polls[.]”

Voters just need to pay attention to what they’re doing.

Voter Fraud

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…which the NLMSM and Progressive-Democrats so vociferously deny exists. Here are some data, via The Heritage Foundation and Jim Simpson, Republican candidate for Congress in Maryland’s District 2 (whom I, from my perch in Texas, wholeheartedly endorse). The Heritage‘s full, State by State report can be seen and downloaded from here.

The report covers a long history and a broad range of fraud forms. I’ve picked out three election years—2016, 2018, and 2020. I’ve not bothered to break them out by fraud type, State, or political party; the existence of the fraud is what’s bad.

  • 2020: 9 cases—even though almost no general elections have been held yet—spread across 5 States
  • 2018: 65 cases, spread across 21 States
  • 2016: 62 cases, spread across 21 States

Hmm….

Ranked Voting?

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There is a growing push from the Left to move our elections to ranked choice voting. RCV is a technique whereby voters rank all the candidates on a ballot by that voter’s preference, and in the event the first preference candidate doesn’t get a majority, bottom candidates get stricken from the ballot, those votes reallocated in some fashion—or dropped altogether—and the counting redone. The process is repeated until a winner is manufactured out of the æther of preferences.

We already do all the ranked voting we need, and it doesn’t precisely ape the foolishness and unnecessary complexity of RCV. They’re called run-off elections in the primaries. And when there’s no majority in the Electoral College, the House and Senate do ranked voting: more run-offs.

If jurisdictions are dissatisfied with pluralities winning rather than majorities, they can switch to run-offs.

No Voter Fraud?

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Here’s one case—a single incident, but much too large a case to be dismissed for that.

Paterson, NJ, with a population of 145,000, last month held—rather, is holding, since the city isn’t done counting votes—an election for City Council, among other positions. The election was done by mail-in voting since the Powers that Be considered the city’s Wuhan Virus situation that serious.

16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but only 13,557 votes were counted. More than 3,190 votes, 19% of the total ballots cast, were disqualified by the board of elections.

Nineteen per cent of the votes have been tossed.

Why?

Over 800 ballots in Paterson were invalidated for appearing in mailboxes improperly bundled together—including a one mailbox where hundreds of ballots were in a single packet. The bundles were turned over to law enforcement to investigate potential criminal activity related to the collection of the ballots.
The board of elections disqualified another 2,300 ballots after concluding that the signatures on them did not match the signatures on voter records.

There’s more:

Reporting by NBC further uncovered citizens of Paterson who are listed as having voted, but who told the news outlet they never received a ballot and did not vote. One woman, Ramona Javier, after being shown the list of people on her block who allegedly voted, told the outlet she knew of eight family members and neighbors who were wrongly listed. “We did not receive vote-by-mail ballots and thus we did not vote,” she said. “This is corruption. This is fraud.”

And

There were multiple reports that large numbers of mail-in ballots were left on the lobby floors of apartment buildings and not delivered to residents’ individual mailboxes, further casting doubt on the integrity of the election.

But who cares, right? It’s only 3,200 votes that were…wrong.

In a single ward of one council seat race, 24% of the votes cast were tossed by the State’s Board of Elections.

One case? Not so much. Statewide, across all of its 31 elections, the Elections Board had to “disqualify” 9.6% of the mail-in ballots cast. Even with Paterson’s failures discounted, the Statewide failure rate is over 8%.

Mail-in ballots, which have none of the controls of absentee ballots, are a petri dish for the voter fraud that Progressive-Democrats insist is a right-wing conspiracy.

A Bit on the Citizenship Question

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The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued Commerce and the Census Bureau in Federal court over the inclusion of a citizenship question in the upcoming census.  EPIC centered its case on the premise that these agencies must explain the impact on privacy of such a question prior to

initiating a collection of new information

when that collection involves electronically stored, personally identifiable information.

The DC Circuit correctly tossed the case on the grounds that EPIC had suffered no harm, so it had no standing to sue.

That’s too bad, though, because EPIC also was wrong on the facts.  Between 1970 and 2010, the Census Bureau, in addition to a short-form census form sent to everyone present in the US, sent a long-form census form to a significant subset of that population, and that long-form version contained the citizenship question.  As recently as 1950, the census included the citizenship question on every form sent out.  As recently as 1960, the census asked after place of birth—which clearly is a citizenship question, since being born under US jurisdiction (vis., in the US, on a US military installation on foreign soil, etc) makes one a citizen.

The conclusion is obvious.  Nor Commerce nor the Census Bureau have any obligation to conduct a “privacy impact” assessment and publish any statement of that impact: Census isn’t collecting new information; it’s merely attempting to resume collecting information it routinely had collected in the recent past.

Separately, I won’t go far into how the 14th Amendment makes the question an absolute necessity, except to point out the following.  Section 2 of the 14th says this [emphasis added]:

But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

While representation is apportioned according to the number of persons present in each State, the sanction for abridging the right to vote is based on citizenship, not mere presence.  (Lest anyone get their panties in a bunch over that “male citizens” part, the 19th Amendment cleared that.)  It’s impossible to carry out that sanction without knowing the number of actual citizens in each State.

And with Progressive-Democrats constantly bleating about voter suppression, the ability to apply that sanction clearly is necessary.