Category: ballot access

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ballot access partisanship

Fear & Its Peddlers

fear, panic, democracy, Joe Biden

“We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War,” President Joe Biden hyperbolically orated on Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

“That’s not hyperbole,” he insisted, repeating, for emphasis, “Since the Civil War.”

Referring to state legislation passed or proposed by Republicans regarding various election procedures, Mr. Biden must remember the Jim Crow Era with its “literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems, and eventually whites-​only Democratic Party primaries to exclude black voters,” since he also smeared these current Republican polices as a “21st-​century Jim Crow assault.”* 

President Joe painted a picture of “unprecedented voter suppression” and “raw and sustained election subversion” and more.

Somehow, the media chorus line just repeats this nonsense.

Ignore the years of prominent Democrats’ straight-​faced berating of Republican support for voter ID laws as nothing more than a purposely racist suppression tactic … immediately followed the Democrats’ recent about-​face claim that they had always supported voter ID.

Even as they continue to push federal legislation that would effectively obliterate such ID laws in 35 states.**

Then contrast the bill passed in Georgia or being considered in Texas with the process in Biden’s home state of Delaware, which “doesn’t allow 24-​hour or no-​excuse drive-​through voting,” as Karl Rove explains in The Wall Street Journal. 

“It won’t begin early voting until 2022 and then for … fewer days than Texas,” which has had early voting for more than three decades.

Somehow, Mr. Biden has never denigrated Delaware for Jim Crow-ism. 

Yet he may be right that “bullies and merchants of fear and peddlers of lies are threatening the very foundation of our country.”

Peddler of lies, know thyself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Not to mention that a certain “Biden crime bill” passed decades ago may have led to more disenfranchisement of voters — especially voters of color — than any single piece of legislation since … the Civil War.

** This HR1 would also allow partisan control of the Federal Election Commission, for the first time ever — the most potentially speech-​suppressing provision of any state or federal legislation.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Initiative-​Crippling Law Clobbered

constitution, voting, speech, initiative, freedom

The right of citizen initiative is the right of voters to petition to get a measure on the ballot; then, if that happens, to vote on it and pass it. 

Many politicians hate this right and work to weaken it.

A few years ago, Florida’s Constitution Revision Commission considered sending a measure to the state ballot to treat voters who abstain from voting on a ballot question as having voted No. The proposal died on the vine, thankfully. But this is the kind of encroachment politicians fantasize about.

The latest attack on Floridians’ right of citizen initiative — a law to cap donations to such campaigns at $3,000 during the signature-​gathering phase — has just suffered a less definitive setback.

Federal Judge Allen Winsor in the Northern District of Florida halted the new law from going into effect on the very day it was scheduled to do so. (Cutting it a little close, aren’t you, judge?) He ruled that contributions to an initiative campaign are obviously a form of political expression and that the law would inflict irreparable harm if even briefly in force.

True. 

If petition organizers can’t raise the funds needed to collect the required 891,589 signatures, it becomes enormously harder to get a measure on the ballot and let voters have their say. A say that foes of citizen initiative rights certainly do not want voters to have.

The ruling blocks the law only until the court reaches a final resolution on its constitutionality, so this legal battle isn’t over yet. 

What is most certainly determined, however, is that Florida legislators don’t care about the Constitution. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Amazing Vanished Rights

Governor, Brad Little, Idaho

Suppose you have the right to walk across a room.

Yet you’re legally chained to a chair. 

By your rights, you may get up and walk across the room. But you can’t, because of the chains. You could if only you could. Why, there’s even a document specifying your right to do so. You physically can’t exercise this right; that’s the only problem. 

But your right to walk across the room is enshrined and protected.

Or is it?

In fact, we have no right in the sense of a legal ability to do a certain thing if its exercise is, by law, thwarted. 

Recently, Idaho lawmakers passed and Governor Little signed a law making it almost impossible for citizens to place a question onto the ballot. Until now, Idaho required that 6 percent of registered voters in 18 of 35 legislative districts sign the petition to send a question to ballot. Gratuitously onerous, but at least possible to comply with.

That possibility was a big problem for opponents of citizen initiative rights, however. Hence the new law, requiring signatures from 6 percent of registered voters in each of 35 districts.

Reclaim Idaho challenged the law. The Idaho Supreme Court is currently hearing the case.

According to Reclaim Idaho co-​founder Luke Mayville: “If you claim that the people ought to have a right to put something on the ballot [but] make it impossible to exercise that right, it’s not really much of a right at all.”

Do justice, justices.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access national politics & policies

Hypocrisy ID’d

voting rights, democracy, race

“Prominent Democrats have increasingly softened their opposition to voter identification requirements in recent days,” informs The Washington Post, “signaling a new openness to measures that activists have long vilified as an insidious method of keeping minorities from the ballot box.”

Yesterday, when Republicans backed the idea, it was racist and supposedly so were they for supporting it. Not anymore. Now, Democrats favor Voter ID.

What changed? 

Not racism. And certainly not racially exploitative demagoguery. 

The catalyst may be a new Monmouth University poll showing fully 80 percent of Americans favor a photo ID requirement for voting, with support “at 62% among Democrats, 87% among independents, and 91% among Republicans.”

These progressive mutations take place as Senate Bill 1, the companion to H.R. 1, the so-​called “For the People Act,” failed to break the GOP filibuster yesterday, blocked 50 votes to 50 votes along strictly partisan lines.

While Democrats scramble for a way out, some — Stacy Abrams, notably — suggest they have always been for voter ID. 

Funny, the Democrats’ legislation would have effectively gutted the 35 state voter ID laws now on the books. “But HR‑1 does not ‘ban’ voter identification laws,” lectures Newsweek’s fact-​checker. “Instead, it offers a workaround” — that does not require showing an ID.

Just the sort of requirement Democrats now insist upon? 

Hypocrisy notwithstanding, the real problem with Democrats dictating election policy from Washington is the rottenness of those policies, which include: 

  • Partisan capture of the Federal Election Commission by Democrats through 2027*
  • Taxpayer financing of congressional campaigns
  • Increased regulation of speech aimed at influencing congressmen (i.e. mobilizing citizens)

Congressional Democrats have plenty more bad policies where those came from.

And a legislative majority.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* If you can’t pack the Supreme Court, packing the FEC is the next best thing.

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ballot access national politics & policies

The Incumbency Fraud

election integrity, voter suppression

“There’s nothing that shortening the period by which people can vote early does to combat any perceived fraud,” Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s really just a cover for what they’re really trying to do, which is to make it harder to vote.”

At issue is a new law courtesy of Iowa Republicans, along with numerous bills pending in other states, addressing what Republicans call “election integrity” and Democrats call “voter suppression.”

Host Chuck Todd informed viewers that a poll found two-​thirds of Floridians wanted more early voting days. Not fewer.

Hardly surprising, since that’s easiest for voters. And while voting should be easy, ease is not the only consideration.

The Iowa “law shortens the early voting period to 20 days from the current 29,” the Associated Press reported, “just three years after Republicans reduced the period from 40 days.”

Here’s why I support that change, though it would be better even shorter*:

  • We should vote together. Not weeks apart. With three, four, six weeks of early voting, election day ballots can be cast with a different set of facts than those cast so many weeks earlier. 
  • The longer the time during which ballots are cast, the greater the expense in running for office. Candidates must be in touch when voters make their decisions. Since incumbents hold an average four-​to-​one spending advantage over challengers, more expensive campaigns give incumbents an even greater advantage. 

So, while early voting doesn’t cause fraud, by making elections more expensive it fosters what we might call “the incumbency fraud.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* One provision in H.R. 1, which passed the U.S. House on a party-​line vote, requires that states allow at least 15 days of early voting. The overall bill is terrible; plus, we are better off with the states as laboratories of democracy, rather than marionettes of Washington. But my preference would be not more than 15 days.

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ballot access crime and punishment

Harvest Season

election, cheating, Texas, ballot harvesting,

Democrats say Trump is going to steal the election. But what if they are “projecting”? Politics has gotten so nasty that you wouldn’t be a cynic to express no surprise at stories like these: 

  1. Project Veritas uncovered a “ballot harvesting” scam in Representative Ilhan Omar’s Minneapolis district, implicating, it seems, Omar (D‑Minn.) herself; and 
  2. Formal accusations against a Biden campaign official, and others, for a similar scheme in Texas.

The Minnesota story is juicy; the Project Veritas video speaks for itself.

But in Texas? “Two private investigators, including a former FBI agent and former police officer, testify under oath that they have video evidence, documentation and witnesses to prove that Biden’s Texas Political Director Dallas Jones and his cohorts are currently hoarding mail-​in and absentee ballots and ordering operatives to fill the ballots out for people illegally, including for dead people, homeless people, and nursing home residents in the 2020 presidential election.” That, courtesy of the industrious Patrick Howley, in the thick of the investigation.

“Witnesses have shown me,” the former FBI agent testifies, “how the ballot harvesters take absentee ballots from the elderly in nursing homes, from the homeless, and from unsuspecting residences’ mailboxes. The ballot harvesters then complete the ballots for their preferred candidate and forge the signature of the ‘voter.’” 

Several Biden campaign workers and two Harris County bureaucrats are implicated. It will be interesting to see if these accusations lead to charges.

And how many similar stories will emerge elsewhere.

Folks can argue about how much voter fraud happens, but when we find it, let’s act.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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