Tag Archives: voting

In Which a Judge Gets It Right

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The Wisconsin Election Commission had issued guidance that voters who cast primary election ballots and who had voted for candidates subsequently dropped from the election campaign, but too late for them to be removed from the ballots, could “spoil” their ballots, get a replacement ballot, and vote again.

This guidance is illegal: under Wisconsin law, a voter can do that only before he’s cast his ballot—casting it is final and irrevocable. A Wisconsin judge recognized that, and said, “No.”

It may be useful for a voter, having cast his ballot, to be able to “spoil” that ballot and vote again—after all, corporations, with their mailed-out shareholder ballots know how to handle that as a matter of routine. However, Wisconsin law does not allow for that.

Further, Article I, Section 4, of our Constitution makes crystalline who is allowed to change a State’s election law. It’s a short list, consisting of one entity, and that list does not include election commissions.

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof….

Nor does that short list include judges. The judge absolutely was correct to overrule the WEC, which was violating the law. The judge applied Wisconsin’s law as it exists rather than rewriting it and applying the rewrite.

Redrawing Districts

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The Supreme Court is hearing a case, Merrill v Milligan, that concerns whether Congressional districts will be drawn in accordance with census outcomes concerning the distribution of American citizens in a State, or whether they will (continue to) be drawn to favor race in a State.

Alabama, the State in question in Merrill, redrew its Congressional districts as a result of the 2020 census outcome and kept substantially the same districts with substantially the same population distributions as the prior district map, making tweaks at district boundaries to account for minor population moves. The plaintiffs in the case, though,

argue the map should be redrawn so that Alabama has two majority-Black districts instead of just one….

Alabama, on the other hand, is arguing

that should the lawsuit prevail, the state will be forced into an unconstitutional practice of prioritizing race in creating election rules….

Alabama also would be forced to violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which explicitly bars (re)districting on the basis of race. There is only one legitimately correct outcome to this case, and it favors Alabama. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has the right of it, having written in other venues that Section 2 of the VRA, the center of the present case, has

involved the federal courts, and indeed the Nation, in the enterprise of systematically dividing the country into electoral districts along racial lines—an enterprise of segregating the races into political homelands that amounts, in truth, to nothing short of a system of political apartheid.

Absolutely. Under law, all American citizens are equal. All American voters are the same: we’re Americans. There are no white Americans and black Americans and Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans—under law there are only American Americans.

Requiring us to be set apart by race in our interactions with our government is nothing but racism written into our laws. And that’s contrary to our Constitution, which is supreme over Congressional statutes like the VRA and its Section 2. Here’s the relevant clause of our 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Voting is at the core of assembly, and it’s at the center of redressing our grievances with Government: it’s where we come together to fire those Government persons with whom we are most dissatisfied and to hire replacements for them.

It’s time for the Court to rule, decisively, in favor of drawing Congressional district boundaries according to the distribution of American voters, and to stop drawing them to favor one group of Americans while disfavoring other groups of Americans.

Well, Of Course

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Given the vasty numbers of mail-in ballots expected in the Progressive-Democratic Party stronghold of Illinois, State officials are predicting delays of as much as two-weeks post-election before results from the current mid-terms will be known.

The bulk of these mail-ins will be coming from Chicago and Cook County—Party fortresses within that stronghold.

Of course it’ll take those two weeks to get the mail-ins counted. Party will need the time to get the numbers from downstate (i.e., from outside Cook County) and so the numbers from Cook County and Chicago that are needed, and so how those mail-in ballots should be counted.

Party’s machine politics in action.

Facts Don’t Matter

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Especially when they contradict settled conclusions drawn beforehand. Here’s Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Georgia’s governorship, Stacey Abrams:

We know that increased turnout has nothing to do with suppression.

And

Suppression is about whether you make it difficult for voters to access the ballot. And in Georgia we know difficulty has been put in place for too many Georgians[.]

Never mind that voter suppression is so strong that not only Republican voter turnout exploded in the just concluded Georgia primaries, so has Democratic voter turnout:

Democratic turnout increased 30% over the last midterm in 2018 [which is pre-Wuhan Virus situation]….

The pre-set conclusion is all that matters.

Nothing to See Here

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No need for signature verification on mailed-in ballots. Never mind what the law requires.

A study of Maricopa County’s mail ballots in Arizona’s 2020 presidential election estimates that more than 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures were counted without being reviewed, or “cured”—more than eight times the 25,000 signature mismatches requiring curing acknowledged by the county.

And

Of the 1,911,918 early voting mail ballots that Maricopa County received and counted in the 2020 presidential election, the county reported that 25,000, or 1.3%, had signature mismatches that required curing, but only 587 (2.3%) of those were confirmed mismatched signatures.

What the county’s nominal rules require:

Under Maricopa County election rules, a reviewer first compares a signature on an envelope with the signature on file for the voter, which takes about 4-30 seconds. If the signature does not appear to match, the ballot is cured, which takes three or more minutes and includes attempts to contact the voter to determine whether or not the signature is a match.

But taking that time would have been…inconvenient.

The existence of such a failure by the Maricopa County’s election monitors contributes heavily to the county’s motivation for fighting so strenuously against any sort of investigation of their performance.

It’s unlikely that such “laziness” was widespread enough to change an election outcome, but the existence of error and outright fraud is well established; Maricopa County’s failure to perform provides a particularly dramatic example of that. Beyond that, whether or not the failures are widespread, the errors need to be corrected, loopholes and enforcement procedures that facilitate such errors need to be corrected, those committing fraud need to spend time in jail contemplating their sins.

But the Progressive-Democratic Party; their communications arm, the press; and the Left in general want this sort of thing covered up. They want the possibilities such things create for Party.