Americans for Citizen Voting had a super successful Election Day. I swear!
But you wouldn’t know it for the news coverage.
Throughout 2023 and 2024, we worked to place constitutional amendments on the ballot in eight states, which, if passed, would specifically ban noncitizens from voting in state and local elections. Then, this November, every one of the measures swept to victory. By roughly a 2 – 1 margin in Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, and Wisconsin; 3 – 1 in Iowa and North Carolina; 4 – 1 in Oklahoma; and by a whopping 6 – 1 margin in South Carolina.
Of course, don’t be shocked if folks dispute my claims of victory. Especially if they read The Hill, which published two articles the day after the election declaring that Citizen Only Voting Amendments were defeated — in South Carolina and in Wisconsin.
“Voters in Wisconsin have rejected a ballot measure amending the state’s constitution to explicitly prohibit foreign nationals from voting in any election in the state,” The Hill informed its audience.
Even though 71 percent of Badger State voters actually pulled the lever for the constitutional amendment, not against it.
“South Carolina defeats noncitizen voting ban,” boasted the headline on another Hill article. Since an incredible 86 percent of Palmetto State voters said yes to the amendment, how did The Hill manage to report that the referendum failed? The very opposite of the truth.
Oh, The Hill was kind enough to take down their false news stories once alerted to them. But the paper refused to do what I asked: place a note on the corrected story acknowledging their mistake.
Readers who had seen the erroneous articles should be notified that they had been misinformed — and not left thinking they had been hallucinating.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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6 replies on “The Hill as Hallucinogen”
Embarrassment often explains why a person or group resists making a correction and wants any correction to be made quietly. But the initial error in this case also needs explanation. Any rejection of such measures by a general public would have been surprising, rather than being a matter of course, so that a misreading of should have provoked a re-reading of results. And, with two connected things — a misreporting and a resistance of acknowledgment — needing explanation, a unified explanation would be appealing.
So: What the Devil…?
Maybe this is a West Wing situation, in which the political left finds reality so utterly unbearable that they retreat into fantasies about political outcomes and about their own behavior.
Well, look on the bright side:
The fewer people who notice how hard you’re working to run every community in America to your liking and forbid them all to decide for themselves who their members are and who gets a voice now, the less embarrassed you’ll be about it later when you realize what you’ve been doing and knock it off.
Thanks for giving me so much credit, but my political muscles must look a lot bigger to you than to me, when I glance in the mirror.
From your statement above, uneducated folks might conclude that these eight measures went into effect by my personal decree. Instead, in reality, voters enacted every single one of them and the results were not close.
If you object to states, the political entities that create cities, determining what cities can or cannot do with the power so granted, I suggest you follow in our footsteps and amend your state constitution changing the way city-state power and authority is prescribed. Or perhaps 14 state constitutions as we have done … or more!
Paul,
If you think states create cities, that thing you’re doing that you think is thinking isn’t.
Cities generally exist in unincorporated form before they politically organize themselves, and politically organize themselves before they’re recognized by states (and then there’s timeline itself — the city of St. Louis existed before Missouri, and for that matter before the United States).
There’s no particular reason federalism shouldn’t be the principle at the city to state level, just as it supposedly is at the state to federal level.
As for your muscle, you were quite clear that “we” (which includes you) “worked” to ensurethe opposite — that states, rather than cities, get to decide who runs cities.
Communities have not decided to extend the franchise to non-citizens. Instead, council-members and the like have done so, often despite polling that shows that a majority of the local community want no such thing.
A dirty open secret of those who self-identify as “left-libertarian” for a state-less society is that, when push comes to shove, these pseudo-libertarians fall in line with the willful confusion of state with society in the peculiar form advanced by the corporate left.
No libertarian would want, rather than to reduce such intrusions by anyone, to expand the pool of people who can claim some legal right of intrusion into the lives of others.
Take off your ill-fitting liberty cap, and put on your red beret.
Never let the truth stand in the way of the narrative. The entrenched special interests are likely not going to go quietly.