Category Archives: regulation

Voter Fraud

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Let’s collect some data; although, it’ll take State by State legislation to set the capability.

There’s concern about late-arriving ballots, especially in close elections, and their meaning—actual votes cast and why they were late to be found or delivered to the counting facility.

This occurs with in-person voting as voting stations are delayed in producing their results, but it’s mostly a problem with mailed ballots, whether absentee ballots that must be explicitly requested by the voter—who must also prove he is who he says he is and that he’s eligible to vote in that jurisdiction—or universally mailed-out ballots to a voter registration list that is often inaccurate or that has no longer current or deliverable addresses. In both of these cases, ballots must be mailed back to the jurisdiction’s counting facility.

Here are the data to be collected and how they should be collected.

Set a State-wide deadline for State or national elections, or a local deadline for strictly local elections, by which cast ballots must be counted. The vote tally as of that deadline would constitute the official tally that the State’s election official must certify.

Continue receiving and counting ballots after that date, but don’t include them in the official results. Instead, publicize their lateness, why they’re late—or the reasons offered by those who delivered the ballots too late—what the vote count is for each of the candidates in these too-late ballots, and whether any of those ballots would have been disqualified anyway, had they arrived on time (signature mismatch, ineligibility of the voter, incorrectly filled out ballot, etc), and who delivered the ballots—vote harvesters, post office, etc.

These data would be illuminating.

Suicide Pact

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The Thomas More Society has filed suit in Federal court against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) edict barring gatherings of more than 10 people indoors and more than 100 people outdoors.

[T]he nonprofits Election Integrity Fund and One Nation Michigan [plaintiffs in the Thomas More case] argue that Whitmer’s order functions as an abridgment of their right to free speech and assembly under the US Constitution.
Whitmer’s orders “constitute direct restrictions on [the groups’] right to engage in protected speech and assembly and therefore violate the First Amendment,” the suit argues, stating that any restrictions on constitutional rights “must be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest.”

Lower (State) courts have ruled that the Wuhan Virus situation is sufficiently important and dangerous that Government restrictions on Constitutional freedoms and rights must be overruled.

However, there is no clause in our Constitution that allows the Government to restrict individual liberties whenever it thinks something is more important than those liberties. In particular, the 1st Amendment says this in pertinent part:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…or the right of the people peaceably to assemble….

Hence the need for narrow tailoring of any intended restriction and the need even then—especially then—for that restriction to achieve a compelling government interest, not just one convenient to it. The Government has no interest, compelling or otherwise, in restricting these basic freedoms because of the virus, especially since it’s increasingly apparent that such restrictions cause more medical and economic harm than the virus itself.

Along these lines, Supreme Court Justices Robert Jackson (Terminiello v City of Chicago) and Arthur Goldberg (Kennedy v Mendoza-Martinez) have argued that our Constitution “is not a suicide pact.” Indeed, it is not. However, deviation from our Constitution would lead quickly to national suicide.

The Thomas More case would be a slam-dunk were it not for a collection of self-serving politicians and a similar collection of activist judges.

An “Apology”

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Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney (D), after having been caught dining indoors in a restaurant in violation of Wuhan Virus restrictions in the restaurant’s city, has pretended to apologize.

Let’s look at his words of apology as quoted at the link.

“I’m sorry if my decision hurt those who’ve worked to keep their businesses going under difficult circumstances,” he wrote on Twitter. “Looking forward to reopening indoor dining soon and visiting my favorite spots.”

“If my decision hurt those….” Kenney doesn’t even believe his decision, his behavior, necessarily caused harm. It plainly did; his equivocating is a plain lie.

It gets worse, though. Kenney expressed regret for an outcome of his misbehavior—an outcome, mind you, he’s not even convinced actually occurred—but he had not a syllable of apology for his actual misbehavior.

Masquerading those words as an apology is a very large lie.

A Bilateral Trade Agreement

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Antony Phillipson, Great Britain’s Trade Commissioner for North America, offered an assessment of the current state of the trade negotiations occurring between the US and the UK in a recent Wall Street Journal Letter.

Among other things, Phillipson had this:

US tariffs on UK steel, aluminium, and significant exports like Scotch whisky raise prices for US consumers and are an unhelpful backdrop to negotiations. We are pushing for a settlement to the Airbus-Boeing disputes and removal of all retaliatory tariffs.

The Brits, along with the EU at large when they still were a member state, the OECD, and the G-7, were offered a completely tariff-free regime, years ago, by President Donald Trump.

The Brits, along with the rump EU, the OECD, and the G-7, have yet to respond to that offer.

So, Commissioner Phillipson, what is your answer?

Safety and Efficacy

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Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan had some thoughts on drug trials in the context of the current Wuhan Virus (my term, not theirs) situation. For the most part, they’re right. There’s one aspect of their op-ed, though, that I want to comment on.

…if we don’t know what works, and what doesn’t, we’ll waste time and money on treatments that won’t help and may harm. Even if a vaccine is discovered and approved, the pandemic won’t end unless most Americans get vaccinated, which will require confidence in the product’s safety and efficacy.

The FDA currently must determine both safety and efficacy. That’s misplaced, though, and it misuses both time and money, and it misidentifies the money involved.

The FDA should be intimately involved in determining a drug’s or vaccine’s safety; we don’t need a market of snake oil salesmen claiming the safety of their wares.

But we don’t need Government involved in free markets. The free market here is that of patients and their doctors; they should be free to use—an extension of the Right to Try concept—drugs to mitigate the virus’ infection or likelihood of infection, and they should be free to use vaccines to achieve longer-term protection from the virus as soon as those chemicals have been shown safe.

The right to try given safety also would answer one of Gottlieb’s and McClellan’s concerns about numbers of trials and trial size: there are lots more patients and doctors in the market than would be participating in FDA-supervised trials, every one of those patients and doctors would be volunteers, and their data would be both more broadly based and available much faster than via an FDA-supervised trial or the series of them that might be necessitated by questions arising from a given trial.

Another of Gottlieb’s and McClellan’s concerns is that waste of money. Their concern proceeds from the assumption that it’s the government’s and pharmaceutical companies’ money being wasted. In Gottlieb’s and McClellan’s paradigm, that’s true. But in a free market—those patients and doctors—it’s the patients’ money being spent; it’s their assessment of whether their money is being wasted. Pharmaceutical companies will recoup much, if not all, of their expenses through their sales, and Government need not be involved at all.