Tag Archives: voting

Foolishness

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Or sore, childish losers.  Or outright dishonesty.  That’s the behavior of a couple of Colorado Presidential Electors who are members, also, of the Democratic Party.  These two have filed a federal suit challenging the constitutionality of the State’s law that requires them to vote for the State’s choice in the just concluded Presidential election.  The State’s law is a winner-take-all requirement: Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won Colorado, they’re required to cast their Electoral votes for Clinton—but they’re so desperate to block President-Elect Donald Trump, they don’t want to; they want to vote for a third party candidate if they can get enough other Electoral College voters to similarly turn their coats and vote for a common third party candidate to deny Trump 270 Electoral College votes.  (Never mind that that would just move the election to the Republican House of Representatives.  Logic has never been much of a player for the Left.)

These two persons are basing their suit’s claim on Article II and the 12th Amendment of the Constitution.

Though Hillary Clinton and Timothy Kaine won the majority vote in Colorado and are qualified for office, plaintiffs cannot be constitutionally compelled to vote for them.  Plaintiffs are entitled to exercise their judgment and free will to vote for whomever they believe to be the most qualified and fit for the offices of president and vice president, whether those candidates are Democrats, Republicans or from a third-party.

And from the complaint itself:

Many states, including Colorado, require their Presidential Electors to vote consistent with the popular vote in the state. Thus, despite the plain language of Article II of the US Constitution, as amended by the Twelfth Amendment, and the Founders’ intent that the Presidential Electors be a deliberative and independent body free to cast votes for whomever they deem to be the most fit and qualified candidates, Messrs Trump and Pence—if the state statutes are enforced—may “win” the election while also losing, by historical margins, the nationwide popular vote.

Since these persons mention the plain language of Article II and the 12th, they—and their lawyers—might want actually to review that plain language.  Here’s the relevant part of Article II:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress….

All the 12th Amendment does is fix the mechanics of voting and the number of still-eligible candidates if the contest must go to the Federal House and Senate.

[I]n such Manner as the Legislature…may direct: which plainly includes for whom and under what State-wide vote outcome as a State might choose to direct.  The Electors are representatives of the State, not of themselves.  No, they are not entitled (such a popular term for the denizens of the Left [/snark]) to exercise their judgment and free will.  They are required to reflect the collective will of their State.

The suit should be tossed, and the lawyers complicit in bringing it should be sanctioned by the Federal court whose time they wasted with this cynical frivolity.

Gerrymandering, Politics, and Race

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The (eight Justice) Supreme Court is going to take up the question of gerrymandering and Congressional districts in Virginia and North Carolina.  In fact, the case the Court is hearing is narrower than that:

drawing legislative districts based on race.

Never mind that the Democrats’ Voting Rights Act of 1965 mandates race-based districting: the VRA

generally prohibits reducing minority-voting power through redistricting[]

which, of course, explicitly requires race-based districting in order to “protect” that “power.”

Indeed, the whole divide[] between white and minority voters nonsense with which Jess Bravin opened his piece at the link is just a tacit summary of the Left’s racism.  We’re all Americans.  Full stop.  Any “divide” is nothing but an artificiality, fueled by the Left’s fundamental identity policies that end up masking real abuses.

Were the Left, and now the courts, serious about how bad gerrymandering is, they’d agree to its elimination altogether.  Congressional districts should be squares enclosing substantially equal sized populations, differing from those straight-line boundaries only at the borders between states, and drawn without regard to the Left’s identity politics concerning which special groups of Americans are resident in which districts.

Projecting

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The Democrats are at it again.

Projection is an unconscious defense mechanism by which a person attributes to someone else unacknowledged ideas, thoughts, feelings, and impulses that they cannot accept as their own. Or, as the Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health puts it,

It’s often called the “blaming” mechanism because in using it the person seeks to place the blame for personal inadequacies upon someone else.

It’s also a broader, more innocent thing: the attribution of one’s own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others. Which is to say, in the latter case in particular, the assumption that everyone else is just like the one making the attribution.

Here’s Hillary Clinton, with that in mind.

Clinton said that laws requiring voters to show identification at polls were part of “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.”

And

Clinton even made it personal, saying potential general election foes Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rick Perry were “deliberately trying to stop” minority voters from participating.

It takes a racist to manufacture a racism beef where there plainly is no racism involved (for the particular record, black voter turnout is the same or higher in those states with relatively stringent voter-ID laws than in those states without, and it’s the same or higher in those states with them than it was before those laws were enacted in those states). But then she’s a leader in the party of the racist KKK, she’s a leader in the party of racist Jim Crow, she’s a leader in the party of racist and sexist affirmative action.

She’s projecting.

Voter Suppression

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Critics of voter ID laws always cry, “Voter suppression!” and they especially cry, “Black voter suppression!”

Here are some actual facts from North Carolina’s 2014 mid-term elections—an especially stern test since voter turnout typically is lower than in Presidential elections:

  • the percentage of age-eligible, non-Hispanic black residents who turned out to vote in North Carolina rose to 41.1% in November 2014 from 38.5% in November 2010
  • [t]he percentage of black registrants voting increased to 42.2% from 40.3% in the same period
  • the black share of votes cast increased to 21.4% from 20.1%
  • [t]he absolute number of black voters increased 16%, to 628,004 from 539,646

And in another state, according to Census Bureau surveys

  • turnout among blacks of voting age in Tennessee in 2012 remained stable within the margin of error
  • [turnout] was around 4% higher than white turnout
  • [t]urnout among Hispanic voters rose.

With suppression like this, who needs get out the vote programs?

Vote!

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Today’s the day. It’s not only your right, it’s your duty, to vote for your choices to represent you in Congress (and in 2016 for your choice for President, too) and for your choices in any other question on your particular ballot. Keep in mind, too, that if you don’t vote, you give increased weight to another’s vote—and he may not be voting for your interests.

As our Declaration of Independence says,

[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

And

…it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

This is your chance to do so.