Category: ballot access

Alien National Capital

Joe Biden, democracy, voting, illegal immigrants

While the 58th anniversary of the Selma, Alabama, Bloody Sunday seemed an apt occasion to address the right of all citizens to participate democratically in their government, leaving the job to President Joe Biden was … awkward. He said nothing of consequence.

But back in 2020, candidate Biden said this: “In order to be able to vote, it’s important that you be a U.S. citizen.” That’s consequential.

In 2021, however, when the New York City Council extended suffrage to foreign nationals living legally in the Big Apple, against the will of the majority of New Yorkers, I don’t recall hearing even the slightest peep from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Now the wackos in Washington, D.C., have enacted a non-citizen voting measure that goes further. It allows Russian nationals working for Mr. Putin at their embassy in our nation’s capital to vote on city candidates and ballot issues and welcomes onto Washington’s voter rolls Chinese citizens here promoting Xi Jinping and the interests of his genocidal regime.

The District of Columbia’s ordinance extends the franchise even to people here illegally, allowing anyone from anywhere in the world able to avoid deportation to cast a ballot. Legally.

Thankfully, House Joint Resolution 24, which seeks to block the D.C. non-citizen voting ordinance passed the U.S. House last month, garnering support from every Republican present as well as roughly one in five Democrats. Action now moves to the Senate.

“After years of lamenting so-called ‘foreign interference’ in our elections,” argues Sen. Tom Cotton (R‑Ark.), “every single Democrat ought to join in invalidating this insane policy.”

But will they?

Congressional Democrats might claim that their support for local control in D.C. excuses them for allowing this non-citizen voting measure to become law. But it’s not even a fig-leaf after Biden declared he would sign the congressional Republicans’ repeal of another D.C. council enactment, a controversial crime “reform” law, which District officials then hurriedly withdrew to placate nervous national Dems.

Talk about awkward!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Biden certainly has a cavernous credibility gap on election integrity. After he attacked Republicans as “un-American” and the 2021 election reform legislation enacted in Georgia as “Jim Crow in the 21st Century,” the Peach State saw “record breaking turnout” in last year’s election. Sadly, much of the media merely ignored reality; CBS News headlined one report, “Effect of Georgia’s voting law unclear, despite high turnout.”

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Tags democracy, immigration, Joe Biden, voting

ballot access national politics & policies partisanship

Launch a Thousand Lawsuits

In the last couple of years, the Republican National Committee has launched 73 lawsuits in twenty states to challenge slack, lax, state-law-defying election rules and prepare for further lawsuits if the elections in November are afflicted by any shenanigans. A good start.

The litigation pertains to things like treatment of poll watchers, how absentee ballots should be counted, and whether noncitizens may be allowed to vote. The RNC has achieved some important successes.

In June, a New York court ruled that a new law giving almost a million noncitizens the right to vote in New York City is unconstitutional. The RNC has also sued to block noncitizen voting in two Vermont towns.
A court ruled that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson violated the law when imposing new restrictions on poll watchers.
Nevada and Arizona must now provide poll-worker data to ensure that both major political parties are represented at voting sites.

A lot of electoral hanky-panky in 2020 was never adequately investigated. Many of us were blindsided by the brazenness with which foes of one-citizen-one-honest-vote exploited COVID-19 fears to undermine election integrity. (It was an emergency. Safeguards just had to be scuttled, supposedly.)

Until the time machine gets invented, though, we’re stuck with the electoral results of that year. We can no longer contest the 2020 election.

But we can darn well contest the 2022 election if and when we espy dubious electoral doings.

And the 2024 election too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags citizenship, democracy, voting

ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Sketchiest Etching

State legislators placed Proposal 1 on the Michigan ballot to weaken their own term limits. It would let current incumbents stay up to twice as long in a single office and allow termed-out former legislators to return.

Nonetheless, its elite backers insist that it makes term limits tougher.

To give proponents something to talk about other than this term limits scam, Proposal 1 also adds weak financial disclosure requirements for legislators — similar to (but weaker than) the rules that keep the U.S. Congress … so clean and honest.

“Never have so few applied so much lipstick to such a pig,” is how one Michigan term limits activist describes it.

That’s big lie #1 on the Great Lakes State ballot.

Big lie #2 is Proposal 2, leftists’ feel-good voting rights measure funded by $10 million (and counting) in outside dark money (which I thought they abhorred). It guarantees stuff like a ballot dropbox on every corner and free postage for mailing back absentee ballots, etc., etc., etc.

Its real purpose is to place a new right into the Michigan Constitution: The right to vote WITHOUT showing any official photo identification. In fact, no ID whatsoever. Instead, the amendment establishes that simply signing a statement that, aw shucks, you are who you say you are, is all that can be required.

With Proposal 2 making any actual voter ID requirement unconstitutional, what’s their pitch to Michiganders?

“Proposal 2 etches voter ID into our state constitution,” declares one television spot.

Another proclaims Proposal 2 puts “voter ID requirements” into “our constitution” to make elections “safe and secure.”

Michigan’s Etch-a-Sketchiest insiders are actually promoting a prohibition of voter I.D. as a demand for that very thing. That’s the audacity of … fraud.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access judiciary

Zombie Vote Protected

A few weeks before the election, a federal judge has blocked Arizona legislation to combat voter fraud.

Opponents routinely characterize efforts such as this Arizona measure to ensure election integrity as “voter suppression.” Charges of racial discrimination often get tossed in to allow for the customary level of hysterical partisan denunciation.

According to Jon Sherman of the Fair Elections Center, even if HB2243 is “not discriminatory on its face . . . it is an open invitation. It declares open season for discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, dress, English proficiency, anything else.”

Of course,HB2243 extends no such invitation.

The legislation states that registration forms shall contain such things as a statement “that if the registrant permanently moves to another state after registering to vote in this state, the registrant’s voter registration shall be canceled.”

It also authorizes the county reorder to cancel a registration when he “is informed and confirms that the person registered is dead.”

Sounds like it could certainly suppress the zombie vote.

Legislation should be as carefully worded as possible. But no degree of precision in a law designed to prevent persons from voting who are not entitled to vote will prevent opponents from charging that it’s really, deep down inside, about “declaring open season for discrimination.”

Had the Arizona legislature passed the new law in plenty of time to grapple with legal challenges, the reformmighthave been in place for the mid-terms. Let’s hope HB2243 is in place and free of judicial encumbrance by 2024.

Enacting this kind of legislation is of many things that need to be done to safeguard elections.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ballot access, elections, law, voting

Accountability ballot access First Amendment rights

Zuckerbuck Sucker Punch

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, elections, democracy

Who should fund our public elections?

Partisan billionaires?

Last election, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, “gave $419 million to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed grants in 2020 to more than 2,500 election departments,” reports The New York Times.

The idea was to help officials deal with holding an election during a pandemic. No laws were necessarily broken. Apparently, private individuals and groups can give money to government election offices — even “with strings attached.”

“Some conservatives see this largesse of ‘Zuckerbucks,’” informs a Wall Street Journal editorial, “as a clever plot to help Democrats win.” In fact, a Capital Research Center (CRC) analysis found the liberal non-profit “consistently gave bigger grants and more money per capita to counties that voted for Biden.”

“[A] deep dive into the available data shows that the funds were largely requested for get-out-the-vote efforts, influenced voter turnout in favor of Democrats, and may have impacted the results of the election in some states,” explains the Foundation for Government Accountability. “According to currently available information, less than one percent of the funds were actually spent on PPE nationwide.”

Can you imagine the outcry if a group with “conservative ties” funded by Charles Koch was giving grants to help Republican-rich jurisdictions rock the vote?

“[E]ven under the purest motives,” the Journal’s editorial offers, “private election funding is inappropriate and sows distrust.”

That’s why 16 states have since passed laws to restrict private funding of election programs.

Mr. Zuckerberg himself sees the danger in Zuckerbucks: “To be clear, I agree with those who say that government should have provided these funds, not private citizens.” Last week, he announced he would not be providing such funding in the 2022 elections.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags democracy, Democratic Party, elections, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg

ballot access partisanship Voting

Are You Suppressed Yet?

Texas, voting, suppression, elections, democracy

Last August, the Texas Legislature considered changes to the state’s election process. Republicans called these changes “election integrity” while Democrats … well, they fled the Lone Star State for six weeks — even hanging out in the Washington swamp — to deny the majority party the quorum it needed to conduct legislative business.

Democratic Rep. Chris Turner said he left “because we are in a fight to save our democracy” against what he dubbed “nationwide Republican vote suppression efforts.”

Eventually, however, Democrats returned home and legislation was passed that The New York Times reported would “cement Texas as one of the most difficult states in the country in which to vote.”

Fast-forward to this year’s March 1 Primary Election, which The Hill reminds us “came amid the state’s new, more restrictive voting laws.”

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to democracy’s grand destruction … Democratic turnout went not down but up! On the Republican side, the number of votes increased dramatically — by roughly 33 percent — “nearly 400,000 more than were cast in the 2018 primary, and more votes than had ever been cast in a midterm GOP primary.”

But there’s more.

In Harris County, the new voting law triggered an audit, which just so happened to find approximately 10,000 “mail ballots” that “were tabulated but not counted,” informs The Associated Press.

Oops! Those Houston-area Democrats and Republicans (roughly 6,000 and 4,000 respectively) would have had their votes obliterated … save for the legislation roundly attacked as “anti-voter.”

So much for suppression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: A week after the election, Harris County Election Administrator Isabel Longoria announced her resignation.

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voter suppression

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