A Sanction of New York over its Board of Elections

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New York’s State Board of Elections has inadequate safeguards regarding its elections and appears to be refusing to correct that.

Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), a nonpartisan organization focused on election security, alleges the New York State Board of Elections (NYSBOE) stonewalled a request to fix the state’s voter registration form to comply with federal voting law.

Absent those corrections, the State-dominating Progressive-Democratic Party could register loads of voters of whom Party approves, thereby cementing Party’s reign over the State for generations.

If RITE’s allegations are true, and the NYSBOE continues to refuse to correct its errors, there is a sanction that would have strong and sharp teeth. Here’s Article 2 of our 14th Amendment:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

The 19th and 26th Amendments modify this Article only to the extent of extending the right to vote to women and lowering the minimum age of eligibility to 18 years old.

Allowing ineligible persons to vote dilutes the votes of eligible, legitimate voters, and that is a functional, even if not direct, denial of those eligible voters’ right to vote. That dilution means their votes no longer count as whole votes, but only as reduced, fractional votes. In our system of elections, any reduction in the value of a vote to less than that of the entire vote is a denial of that vote.

The sanction, then, should be a reduction of New York’s representation in Congress according to the proportion of registered ineligible voters to registered eligible voters plus the proportion of eligible voters denied registration to the whole number of voters in the State.

Progressive-Democratic Party and Religious Freedom

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Consider the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who operate a 42-bed nursing facility in New York that gives free palliative care to poor people with cancer. The State of New York is trying to force this Catholic institution to deliberately violate their religious beliefs. The New York State Department of Health requires the Sisters to begin

  • assigning patients to rooms by self-identified sex
  • [stop] segregating restrooms by biological sex
  • use…patients’ preferred pronouns even when the patient is not present
  • allow patients to cross-dress

The Department is threatening the Sisters with fines, injunctions, potential loss of licensing, and imprisonment if they do not repudiate their religious beliefs and commit these egregious to them acts.

The Sisters have applied for a religious exemption, and the State has ignored their application.

The Sisters are just the tip of a monstrous iceberg. This is Party’s attitude toward the 1st Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. Party already badly wants to disarm us and deny us our right to speak as we see fit. Now we’re to have no conscience, as well.

Misreading

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In his letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, the Reverand Carmen Mele decried the deaths of more than 100 children at an Iranian school that occurred as a result of our country’s armed forces‘ bombing as a violation of just war principles.

This is a misreading of the situation. What the highly intelligent and learned man of the cloth chose to omit is that the school was adjacent to the military target, an adjacency that the Iranian regime deliberately chose in an effort to use those children as shields for its military, a common practice by terrorists.

The deaths of those children are deeply regrettable, but the responsibility for those deaths lies on the backs of those terrorists who so badly abused those children. This is well understood by any serious student of just war concepts.

Regulating Reputational Risk

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Progressive-Democrat ex-Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden used their banking regulators to “encourage” banks to do no businesses that might inflict “reputational risk” on the bank’s soundness and to end existing business relationships with such enities. Those reputation-damaging businesses—according to those administration men—centered on such Nasties as payday lenders, gun retailers, and crypto.

By focusing on reputation risk, supervisors attempt to understand and anticipate public opinion regarding issues and events and then to attempt to directly connect this public opinion regarding issues and events to an institution’s condition in ways that have proven nearly impossible to assess or quantify with accuracy[.]

Those are the words of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Comptroller of the Currency bosses as they work on a rule that would bar regulators from “reputational risk” evaluations. If regulators can’t quantify what it is they want to regulate, they have no business trying to regulate it—that’s on top of regulators need to be limiting on their regulatory activities in the first place.

Reputational risk assessments in particular are entirely subjective, and that just excuses and enables administrations of whatever stripe to regulate out of business any enterprise of which the regulators or their political bosses disapprove.

The market is fully capable of assessing reputational risk, and it should be left free to do so without government “assistance.”

That’s One Spin

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The DC Circuit Court has denied Anthropic’s appeal of a DoD decision to cut the company out of Defense contracts as a security risk to Defense supply chains. Meanwhile a Northern District of California Federal court judge has upheld Anthropic’s appeal on free speech grounds. This, of course, creates a split of sorts that, ultimately, the Supreme Court will need to resolve, unless the 9th Circuit overrules the District judge wih a ruling that substantially aligns with the DC Circuit.

What’s interesting, though, is Computer & Communications Industry Association CEO Matt Schruers’ characterization of the split.

The DC Circuit’s denial will prolong ambiguities regarding whether political considerations can drive federal procurement[.]

This is Schruers’ conclusory characterization centered on his preferred outcome. It couldn’t possibly be the California district judge’s ruling that is prolonging ambiguities.