Category Archives: voting

A Premium on Acting

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In their house editorial regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) Thursday speech and his remarks about the SAVE Act, the WSJ‘s editors cited Senator Thom Tillis (R, NC):

By his reckoning, the US has about 10,000 county clerks or municipal entities that carry out America’s decentralized elections. The midterms are barely 100 days away, early voting sooner. “The math doesn’t work,” he said. “It can’t be done.”

Leave aside the all too typical Republican timidity inherent in that “can’t.” Most Conservatives intuitively understand that “can’t” is just a copout for something that might be deucedly hard. Most of us also understand that “hard” means “doable.”

Instead, consider that the SAVE Act is necessary to secure our election system (or to further secure it, if skeptics are close to accurate and our elections already are quite secure). If implementing SAVE really would take the time the Tillises of the Republican Party think, that just makes it all the more imperative for Republicans in the Senate to screw their courage to the sticking post and pass what the House—via House Republicans—already has passed twice.

The bill wouldn’t enhance election security, as the editors claim? It won’t reduce election security, either; a worst it would have no effect. Senate Republicans need to stop hiding under their desks whenever Progressive-Democrats or their Leftist supporters say mean things to them.

“Black Democrats Fight for Political Survival”

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The lede identifies the source of this political…confusion.

The Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate Alabama’s congressional map has split the political future for many Black Democratic voters.

Black Democratic voters. Not American voters favoring the Democratic Party who happen to be black.

And this:

In Montgomery, Democrats believe they still have a shot at keeping their seat….

Their seat. No. As Scott Brown nearly put it a few years ago, with all due respect, it’s not the black voters’ seat, it’s the voters’ seat. Nor is very much respect at all due the racist trope that the seat belongs to black voters exclusively.

Maybe these Progressive-Democrats should consider no longer running on their race, and instead run on their Party’s domestic, foreign, and economic policies instead. The rest of us, along with our courts (finally), have figured out that the critical opening phrases of our Declaration of Independence and the opening Article of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution really do mean what they say.

A Solution to “Rigging” Elections

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California’s election process provides the canonical example of the problem. “Rigging” is in euphemism quotes (not the press’ over- and mis-used scare quotes) because the perception of rigging an election is as important as any actual rigging. The problem with California’s election procedure is this:

California sends mail-in ballots to all registered voters who have until Election Day to send them back. Many ballots don’t arrive at county election offices until days later. … The result is a large number of provisional ballots are cast that require more scrutiny. All of this prolongs vote-counting.
The state also lets third parties including unions, campaigns and political parties collect and return an unlimited number of ballots on voters’ behalf—a practice known as ballot harvesting.

And

An ID isn’t strictly required to register to vote. Those who don’t furnish one to register are supposed to present one when they vote for the first time in a federal election, though this requirement isn’t strictly enforced. The state lists a gym card, drug prescription and even a sample ballot as acceptable forms of ID. …
County election officials aren’t required to check whether a voter is a citizen or, well, even a person.

And

State regulations also allow late-arriving ballots to be counted even if they lack a post-mark as long as they include a handwritten date on the envelope.

None of that is fraudulent per se, but it sure makes fraud possible—there are no checks that assess the legitimacy of any ballot.

The solution is straightforward, even if politically difficult with timid Republicans and self-interested Progressive-Democrats rife in each house of Congress. Nevertheless, Article I, Section 4, of our Constitution

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations….

allows this solution. Congress can easily specify a nation-wide election rule that mandates these criteria:

  • only American citizens can vote in a Federal election
  • proof of citizenship must be provided at registration
  • mail-in ballots are available only when a voter requests one
  • the only voters eligible to request one are military personnel stationed outside their voting precinct or business persons on business travel outside their precinct on Election Day
  • mail-in ballots must be received by the end of Election Day in order to be counted. Ballots received after then cannot be counted
  • early voting cannot start before the second weekend before Election Day and can run through the Monday immediately preceding Election Day
  • there can be no third-party collection of ballots; each must be cast in person during early voting or on Election Day; mail-in ballots must be put into a mail receptacle for delivery. Unpostmarked ballots cannot be counted

Keeping the voting process universal across American citizens and simple not only is eminently possible, it would vastly reduce both election fraud and the perception of election fraud.

Lawlessness Back in the Courts

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Last fall, California voters passed Proposition 50, which authorized the California legislature, in a one-time good deal, to bypass the State’s voter referendum-mandated independent commission that was created for the purpose of drawing Congressional district boundaries in as politically neutral fashion as could be. Proposition 50 was passed though, based explicitly on this premise:

…the move was a political necessity: California, [supporters] said, could not unilaterally adhere to neutral redistricting standards while Republican-controlled states entrenched their own power through aggressive gerrymandering.

Prop 50 is now likely headed to the Supreme Court after the case wends its way through lower courts. Its opponents are centering their argument on the premise that the redrawn map relies too heavily on racial gerrymandering, which the Court has virtually outlawed with its Louisiana v Callais ruling.

There’s another reason, though, that the Court should overrule Prop 50, albeit it would be a more difficult case to make. That reason flows from the backers’ basic premise. The law creating the commission—at those voters’ demand and approval—says what it says, and there is no place in the text for setting aside neutrality whenever one or another political party does something the State’s legislature or governor doesn’t like.

The State should be held to what the law says, not what politicians want it to say. What makes this argument difficult to make in the Court, though, is that voters are allowed to change their minds, and this may be what California’s voters did last fall. The question would hinge on the underlying premise’s intrinsic disregard for then-extant law.

The racial gerrymandering beef itself will be hard enough to prove with the Court in Callais having also said that actual racial animus must be shown; relying on a racial component that’s merely a statistical byproduct of a move wouldn’t fly.

Racism of the NAACP

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Against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v Callais, in which the Court virtually barred racial gerrymandering, and Tennessee’s subsequent realigning its Congressional district boundaries to eliminate just that racism in its districts, the NAACP has sued the State for having done so.

The core of the NAACP’s suit is that the redraw didn’t preserve the racially done district.

This is the intrinsic racism of the NAACP: it demands special treatment of black voters (which can come only at the direct expense of all of Tennessee’s non-black voters) with the provision of a special Congressional district into which they can be segregated.

The NAACP with this suit also has demonstrated its utter contempt for the same black citizens it claims to protect, insisting as its suit tacitly does, that blacks are inherently inferior and cannot compete effectively with other groups of American citizens without that special protection.  Woodrow Wilson, in a bygone era, insisted that black Americans should be grateful for the protections of segregation. This is today’s NAACP.