Tag Archives: voting

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.

Democrats’ Myths

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The Wall Street Journal published a list of 10 Democratic Party myths that they’ve been pushing during recent campaign seasons. Here are a couple of their dog-whistle myths to keep in mind as you go to the polls tomorrow.

Raising the minimum wage helps the poor. The president wants to increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10 from $7.25, with the tagline “Let’s give America a raise.” The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the hike would cost 500,000 jobs, one blow to the low-wage earners it claims to help. Employment aside, only 18% of the earnings benefits of a $10.10 hike would flow to people living below the poverty line, according to analysis from University of California-Irvine economist David Neumark. Nearly 30% of the benefits would go to families three times above the poverty line or higher, in part because half of America’s poor families have no wage earners. Minimum-wage increases help some poor families—at the expense of other poor families.

And

Voter ID laws suppress minority turnout. More than 30 states have voter-ID laws, which the left decries as an attempt to disenfranchise minorities who don’t have identification and can’t pay for it. Yet of the 17 states with the strictest requirements, 16 offer free IDs. The Government Accountability Office this month released an analysis of 10 voter-ID studies: five showed the laws had no statistically significant effect on turnout, four suggested a decrease in turnout (generally among all ethnic groups, though percentages varied), and one found an increase in turnout with voter ID laws in place.

And again: go vote.

No Voter Fraud?

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From Hans von Spakovsky, of the Heritage Foundation, via The Wall Street Journal, comes this.

In the past few months, a former police chief in Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to voter fraud in a town-council election. That fraud had flipped the outcome of a primary election. Former Connecticut legislator Christina Ayala has been indicted on 19 charges of voter fraud, including voting in districts where she didn’t reside. (She hasn’t entered a plea.) A Mississippi grand jury indicted seven individuals for voter fraud in the 2013 Hattiesburg mayoral contest, which featured voting by ineligible felons and impersonation fraud. A woman in Polk County, Tenn., was indicted on a charge of vote-buying—a practice that the local district attorney said had too long “been accepted as part of life” there.

Don’t look for recourse—or even for these cases to survive IMNSHO—from the Barack Obama/Eric Holder Justice Department.

Look to your voting next week. And check your ballots before you push that last CAST or ENTER button.