Daily Archives: 14 August 2025

“Materiality”

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Texas voting law requires voters voting by mail-in ballots to verify identity via a state ID number or the last four digits of a Social Security number (SSN4). A Federal district judge ruled in 2023 against the law using the fictive logic that

It is self-evident that a voter’s ID number is not material….

Judge James Ho, writing for a unanimous 5th Circuit, articulated how clearly the appellate court saw through that district judge’s…argument.

The number-matching requirements are obviously designed to confirm that every mail-in voter is indeed who he claims he is. And that is plainly material to determining whether an individual is qualified to vote.

He expanded on that [citations omitted]:

The number-matching requirements are obviously designed to confirm that every mail-in voter is indeed who he claims he is. And that is plainly material to determining whether an individual is qualified to vote.
So there is no “disconnect between the State’s announced interests and the statute enacted.” And the ID number requirement “meaningfully corresponds” to the State’s legitimate interests in preventing the scourge of mail-in ballot fraud.

It seems to me the district judge slept through his high school logic class, and his law school provided no training in logic at all.

The 5th Circuit ruling can be read here.

School Choice and a Teachers Union

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In Wyoming, the State’s legislature passed and the governor signed legislation to create school choice for the State’s parents and children.

Wyoming lawmakers created the state’s first K-12 education savings account (ESA) program in 2024, effective in the coming school year. This spring they expanded eligibility to families of any income. The $7,000 accounts can be used for private-school tuition, tutors, homeschooling, or other education expenses. Nearly 4,000 students applied for them this fall.

In the first year, those 4,000 students amount to about 3.5% of the State’s K-12 population (some arithmetic involved), a pretty rapid start to the take-up. The main teachers union in the State, the Wyoming Education Association, is busily objecting and hailing the State into court to get that legislation overturned. The union is claiming that the State’s constitution requires the Legislature to maintain a “complete and uniform” public school system, the State cannot fund “private education that is not uniform.”

This is a distortion of the facts, including of what the State’s constitution says. This is that constitution’s Art 7, Sect 1, in its entirety:

Legislature to provide for public schools. The legislature shall provide for the establishment and maintenance of a complete and uniform system of public instruction, embracing free elementary schools of every needed kind and grade, a university with such technical and professional departments as the public good may require and the means of the state allow, and such other institutions as may be necessary.

That’s the short and sweet of it. There’s nothing in there that would preclude the State from establishing, supporting, or merely funding alternative means of education. Indeed, that last clause, and such other institutions as may be necessary, being separate from the clause mandating a system of public instruction, explicitly authorizes alternative means of education structured entirely differently from, or the same as, the public system.

This is just another example of a teachers union trying to deny parents their right to see to their children’s education in their own way. It’s the union way or nothing. That’s just union abuse of education and of the students in it out of its own greed: those alternative means would not be controlled by the union.

The Wyoming constitution can be read here.