Tag Archives: voting

I Dissent

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…from the dissenter.

The Supreme Court ruled that Arizona’s voter law is entirely legitimate. That law, you’ll remember, among other things limited who is allowed to return early voting ballots for another person—banned ballot harvesting—and barred counting ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

Among the reasons for upholding Arizona’s law is this:

The court rejected the idea that showing that a state law disproportionately affects minority voters is enough to prove a violation of the law.

Writing in dissent (it was a 6-3 majority), Justice Elena Kagan claimed in part

What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute [the 56-yr-old Voting Rights Act] designed to bring about “the end of discrimination in voting.” I respectfully dissent[.]

The irony in Kagan’s dissent is breathtaking in its depth. She complains of damaging the “end of discrimination in voting” even as the Arizona law treats all voters equally rather than giving special treatment to some. Reducing special treatment somehow increases discrimination.

The rejection of the concept that disproportionality is by itself, regardless of whether it’s a mere side effect, discriminatory also represents a great reduction in special treatment for particular groups—but this, too, is somehow an increase in discrimination in Kagan’s world view.

Two Serious Errors

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These particular two have occurred in the just concluded (sort of) Progressive-Democratic Party primary election for Party’s nominee for Mayor of New York City.

The first error is this: more than 920,000 votes were counted in that primary election, out of some 800,000 votes cast in person—and the count does not yet include 124,000+ absentee ballots cast.

But votes counted included 135,000 test votes—votes used to check procedures in and to practice for the ranked choice vote counting that would be used in the “live” election. Those test votes were supposed to have been purged before the actual live election and not counted in the results.

How does that happen, exactly? Most likely, it’s from the sloppiness and outright incompetence of the city’s Board of elections persons.

The second error is more of a failure and is even more serious, and it goes to the heart of ranked choice voting.

[V]oters…list their top five candidates in order. Since no candidate was the first choice of more than 50% of voters, a computer on Tuesday tabulated ballots in a series of rounds that worked like instant run-offs.
In each round, the candidate in last place was eliminated. Votes cast for that person were then redistributed to the surviving candidates, based on whoever voters put next on their ranking list. That process repeated until only two candidates were left.

A computerized process that uses cast and in-hand ballots to resolve the question from the bottom up. Computerized should take a few hours (I’m being pessimistic here; we’re long past the days of card-punch UNIVACs—and if you don’t recognize what those are, that’s my point) to complete.

However.

The final result is not expected until mid-July.

Wait—the Progressive-Democrats’ primary election was held ‘way back on 22 June. It’ll take weeks, not hours, for the computers to run this process to completion?

How does that work, exactly?

I see two factors in play here that could slow the computerized process. One is that all the absentee ballots have yet(!) to be included. Why weren’t they included in the count from the start? Because they weren’t available at the start. A State law enacted just last year allows absentee ballots arriving as late as a week after primary day to be counted, so long as they’re postmarked by primary day.

Another is that the test ballots weren’t marked in any serious way, so they have to be hand-identified and hand-removed from the pile of ballots cast.

Wow.

The Manchin Alternative

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Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) claims he never liked HR1, even though he voted for cloture on the Senate Progressive-Democrats’ effort bring that Federal election deform law to the Senate floor for party-line passage.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors rightly called out his sham of a compromise, to be substituted for that HR1…nonsense.

I’ve picked out just a couple of the items in Manchin’s offering to illustrate the sham. The first is a repeat example of Manchin’s personal fundamental dishonesty.

The [compromise’s] preamble insists that any voting bill “must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together.”

We’ve already seen how worthless Manchin’s word is. On that “coming together” bit, in particular, Manchin late last fall piously intoned, often, that he would support no bill that didn’t have input from “his friends across the aisle.” Then he voted, twice, for a unilaterally done reconciliation bill that spent nearly $2 trillion of our taxpayer money.

“ban partisan gerrymandering and use computer models.”

Here is an example of Party’s intrinsic dishonesty, and that of the DC politicians in general, for generations and across parties.

The only legitimate way to get rid of gerrymandering, and computers would be helpful here, but they’re far from critical, is to subdivide each State into rectangular districts of substantially equal numbers of citizens, and with no regard to geography other than State borders.

After all, in the eyes of our Constitution, there are no black voters or brown voters or Asian voters or white voters. There are no male voters or female voters. There are only American voters.

Illegal Voting

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An Illinois Progressive-Democrat wants to legalize it. Celina Villanueva (D-Chicago) is sponsoring a bill that would let illegal immigrants vote in school board elections.

The proposal could require the State Board of Education to create an affidavit helping non-citizens register for school board elections.
“For too long, these families have been systematically excluded from participating in our democracy even at the most basic level,” Villanueva said.

There are two key items here. One is that non-citizens are not part of our democracy, they are guests here, and so it’s entirely correct that they should have no say in how we citizens choose to govern ourselves. If they wish to become citizens, we should welcome them with open arms.

The other key is that illegal immigrants aren’t even here legally; they’re not guests, they’re interlopers.

That should be obvious even to a Progressive-Democrat.

Disingenuosity in Wisconsin’s Legislature

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A bill that would prevent election workers from correcting mistakes a voter makes on his absentee ballot is making its way through the State’s legislature. The bill would

would clarify that only voters or their witnesses can correct a mistake on an absentee ballot.

After all, as Congresswoman Donna Rozar (R-Marshfield) put it:

Because [absentee voting] is a privilege, there’s got to be some responsibility that the voter has to exercise that privilege. And I think that responsibility is to do it right and legally.

The disingenuosity is illustrated by Congresswoman Lisa Subek (D-Madison):

I don’t care if absentee voting is a privilege. That doesn’t mean you should have to pass a test, or make sure that you dot every I and cross every T. If someone makes an innocent, honest mistake, it is appalling that we’re not going to then let their ballot count.

Subek cynically exaggerates what the bill does. There’s no test (other than the implied one of being able to read well enough to read the ballot—but witnesses and others approved by the voter can help with that—and every uncrossed i or undotted t do not disqualify the ballot.

The biggest bit of dishonesty (here, not mere disingenuousness) is her claim of not letting the ballot count. The bill explicitly allows the voter in question, or his witness, to correct the error, thereby making the ballot count.

It’s only invalid ballots that wouldn’t count, especially were the bill to pass.