Tag Archives: voting

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.

The Judge is Mistaken

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Federal Judge Lee Rudofsky, of the Eastern District of Arkansas says he’ll toss an ACLU suit against that State’s new voter redistricting law unless Biden-Harris’ DoJ joins the suit.

His rationale is this:

After a thorough analysis of the text and structure of the Voting Rights Act, and a painstaking journey through relevant caselaw, the Court has concluded that this case may be brought only by the Attorney General of the United States[.]

Rudofsky is sort of correct to make his threat—the suit should be dismissed. There is no advantage or disadvantage to any race in the new voter map, only to this or that political party. All voters, after all, look alike under law, including voter law.

However, the judge has made a number of errors in this. First, there’s no need to delay a dismissal of the case. DoJ has already communicated its decision to not be a party through its current non-participation.

Second, State districting for Federal elections is an internal State matter per Art I, Sect 4:

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, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

DoJ is not Congress, and Congress has not asked—nor is it likely to—DoJ to make a case. It’s more basic than that, though. Congress can intervene in a State’s voting law only to make changes to existing law; it cannot rewrite State law, or originate State law for that State.

Voter Discrimination

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Alabama, pursuant to the latest decennial census, has drawn its electoral map, and the outcome supposedly yields a House delegation of six white Republicans and one Black Democrat for the Federal Congress.

Opponents of the map say it disadvantages black voters. So far, the map stands, as the Supreme Court ruled that the map mustn’t be changed this close to an upcoming Federal election, but it’s a temporary ruling: the Court said it will hear the full case in its next term, starting in October. Thus the map will be the one in effect for next November’s midterms.

The “disadvantages black voters” bit rings hollow to me. There’s no doubt that the map is gerrymandered to favor one group of Americans over another, but that’s what gerrymandering does, and both parties have been doing it, for good or ill, ever since there were two dominant parties in our Republic.

What makes the beef ring hollow though, it the bit about disadvantaging one group of Americans over another. That suggests, strongly, that it would be OK to advantage that group of Americans over the other, currently advantaged. Or even merely to seek some version of “equity” or “equality.”

Either way—explicitly targeting one group of Americans separately from another, regardless of purpose—is nothing but rank identity politics. While there remains bigotry afoot in our republic, this is no longer the 1950s. We have come far closer today to realizing our ideal—as carved into the Supreme Court building—of all Americans being equal under law, just as we are—as acknowledged in the opening sentences of our Declaration of Independence—equal under God.

There is no need, any longer, to explicitly carve out districts to favor any race or ethnicity over any other: we’re all the same voters; we’re all American voters.

The answer, of course, for all that it’ll be easier written than done, is to do away with gerrymandering altogether. Divide each State up into squares of substantially equal populations of citizens, beginning at the State’s geographic center, and deviating from straight-line district boundaries only at the State’s boundary with an adjoining State.

Irrationality

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The Harris half of Biden-Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris (D) has made an impressive claim. She said—and she was serious—that

legislators standing in the way of passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act are failing to uphold their oath to defend the Constitution.

She added

I’m not going to absolve—nor should any of us—absolve any member of the United States Senate from taking on a responsibility to follow through on the oath that they all took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

The Right Reverend Progressive-Democrat Kamala Harris presumes to withhold absolution.

That’s just Progressive-Democratic arrogance.

The Constitution—Art I, Section 4—assigns in clear, certain terms primary responsibility for determining [t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives to each State’s legislature. The changes to those Times, Places, and Manner that are demanded by Party’s Federal level Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act require an Amendment to our Constitution, altering that Art I, Sect 4.

Senators upholding our Constitution when they stand[] in the way of passing those bills being castigated by Harris for not uphold[ing] their oath to defend the Constitution? That’s broad irrationality.

That’s what passes for Party’s politics.

Clyburn Misleads

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Congressman Jim Clyburn (D, SC), in an interview on Fox News Sunday, made the below claim in defense of his Progressive-Democratic Party’s Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which together are intended to take the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives of Federal elections away from the States and to entirely Federalize those election procedures. In citing Alexander Hamilton’s (as alleged by Clyburn) statements that elections “cannot” and “should not be left up to the states,” he made this claim:

That’s why the voting rights act was necessary and that’s why the fifth amendment to the constitution, why the 18th amendment to the constitution are necessary—all because it had to go beyond the states to determine.

It’s impossible to determine what “amendments” Clyburn was referencing here: the 5th Amendment is concerned with trials, punishments, and takings; it has nothing to do with voting or elections. The 18th Amendment was the Prohibition Amendment attempting to outlaw liquor; it, also, has nothing to do with voting or elections, and it was rescinded a few years later with the 21st Amendment.

It’s clear, though, that Clyburn, far from misspeaking on the Amendments, was badly misinterpreting Hamilton’s views on elections to Federal office and the relationship between the States and the Federal government regarding those elections.

This is what Hamilton wrote in his Federalist No. 59 essay [emphasis added]:

[I]t will therefore not be denied, that a discretionary power over elections ought to exist somewhere. It will, I presume, be as readily conceded, that there were only three ways in which this power could have been reasonably modified and disposed: that it must either have been lodged wholly in the national legislature, or wholly in the State legislatures, or primarily in the latter and ultimately in the former. The last mode has, with reason, been preferred by the convention. They have submitted the regulation of elections for the federal government, in the first instance, to the local administrations; which, in ordinary cases, and when no improper views prevail, may be both more convenient and more satisfactory; but they have reserved to the national authority a right to interpose, whenever extraordinary circumstances might render that interposition necessary to its safety.

He introduced that discussion with this, in his lede [emphasis added]:

The natural order of the subject leads us to consider, in this place, that provision of the Constitution which authorizes the national legislature to regulate, in the last resort, the election of its own members.

The States, according to Hamilton, are to set their own rules for how their own representatives and those of their citizens in the Federal government will be elected, and the Federal government is to act in the last resort and only under extraordinary circumstances, most assuredly not in the first, or even merely default, resort. Clyburn’s touted bills would go beyond that, and make the Federal government the only serious determiner of how each State will determine its representation.

The Federal government, according to the Progressive-Democrats, will tell us citizens who it will permit to speak for us to it. We average Americans, after all, are, in the words of Herbert Croly, one of the modern Progressive movement’s founders,

morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of [our] responsibilities as a democrat.