Category: Voting

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election law Voting

Following the Law

mail in ballots, cheating, counting

It’s official.

Well, it was already official because it was Pennsylvania law. And because the U.S. Supreme Court had confirmed it.

What is it? Election officials may not count mail-​in ballots that are undated or incorrectly dated.

Official, yes, but now even more official.

On November 1, a week before the election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that yes, election officials must follow Pennsylvania election law that says you can’t count undated or incorrectly dated ballots.

A voter who mails in a ballot is obliged to sign and date the outer envelope before sending it off. The court orders election officials to “refrain from counting any absentee and mail-​in ballots received for the November 8, 2022, general election that are contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes.”

The ruling was issued in response to litigation initiated by the Republican Party, which has launched a slew of lawsuits around the country to combat shady election practices.

The court’s clarification is important. A problem loomed over the upcoming election. Pennsylvania’s secretary of state had been giving the go-​ahead for officials to count ballots whether they’re dated properly or not … and to heck with election law and the SCOTUS. Until the ruling, county officials throughout Pennsylvania lacked consistent policies about how to handle bungled ballots.

Of course, when reasonable election rules are ignored, it’s easier to commit election fraud — notwithstanding the disingenuous claim advanced by some proponents of lackadaisical election procedures that fraud is either a vanishingly small problem or does not exist at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers Voting

Good Night, Mr. Fetterman

US Capitol Building, brain damage

In popular political culture, it’s the Republican Party that’s historically been fettered with the moniker of “The Stupid Party.” 

That’s what liberal philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill called Britain’s Tories, and affixing the “stupid” label to conservatives has been important for intellectuals ever since: it’s one way they feel good about themselves. 

We can argue about the (in)justice of the accusation till the cows come home and go out to pasture again, but it’s the Democrats who are pushing brain-​damaged leaders, not Republicans.

I’m not just referring to President Joseph Robinette Biden’s many out-​of-​mind moments. I’m also talking about Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s run for the U.S. Senate.

The man suffered a stroke last spring, and has mostly been hiding out in the proverbial Biden Basement ever since. But on Tuesday he appeared on stage to debate his Republican opponent Dr. Mehmet Oz. 

Fetterman’s mental impairment? Obvious.

He began with the immortal clumsiness of “Good Night” rather than “Good Evening,” and stumbled through question after question. His handling of the minimum wage issue was slow-​witted, and his awkward and robotic — and so obviously deceptive — repetitions regarding fracking sent shivers down my spine.

It’s not my purpose to make fun of people with brain injuries. But it is my role to call attention to the apologetics by Democrats (and the center-​left/​far-​left news media) for their candidate, and their pretense that Fetterman’s just fine. 

He isn’t. Biden isn’t. 

And this says something about where Democrats are — intellectually; spiritually.

Very not fine.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

US Capitol Building, brain damage

On Rumble: 

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general freedom ideological culture Voting

Thoughts on Nothingness

Liberty playing cards with Aristotle by DALL-E

“Democracy has nothing to do with liberty,” the Libertarian Party announced on Facebook, “just as so many of the world’s greatest minds have warned.”

Huh? Just exactly which “greatest minds” are we talking about?

Not Aristotle!

The party’s statement introduced a meme quoting Hans-​Hermann Hoppe, the “Austrian school economist and libertarian/​anarcho-​capitalist philosopher,” Professor Emeritus of Economics at UNLV and Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It read: “Democracy allows for A and B to band together to rip off C. This is not justice, but a moral outrage.”

Dr. Hoppe has a point, of course. The ‘will of the people’ can be just plain wrong … even, at times, malevolent.  A democratic vote can lead to the tyranny of the majority and even to a tyranny of the minority, as those politicians promising to serve ‘We the People’ end up serving themselves and their cronies.

I’ve not read Professor Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, where he sort of argues for monarchy over democracy, but I offer two points: (1) no one in their right mind talks of democracy without including the protections of basic individual rights, which have become the hallmark of democratic countries across the globe, and (2) no one in the real world thinks democracy is God.

Still, we won’t trade it for monarchy. 

My issue with this social media post, however, is really with the Libertarian Party’s comment that “democracy” — including the democratic means the party has purportedly been employing across the country for decades — has provided no past benefit and offers no future hope for sustaining or expanding our freedom.

So, don’t vote Libertarian this November?

I’ll take that under advisement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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“Liberty Playing Cards with Aristotle” by DALL‑E (note that the AI has chosen to show Lady Liberty as bruised and beaten. Her torch appears to be made of tissue.-)

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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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partisanship Voting

Gerrymandering Proceeds Apace

Gerrymandering, voting, democracy, elections, New York

An “independent” redistricting commission established in New York State by constitutional amendment has failed. That means state lawmakers get to draw political districts after all.

And boy, are they drawing them. 

The maps just proposed by the dominantly Democratic legislature may reduce the number of GOP congressional districts from eight to three. But as Adele Malpass explains, these maps “are filled with districts that are shaped like snakes [and] cross multiple bodies of water.”

Although the failed New York State Independent Redistricting Commission sports that imposing moniker, it is really just a bipartisan commission. Not so independent. The commission was set up in such a way allowing either group of partisan members to obstruct things until there is no alternative but to let state lawmakers draw the districts.

That’s what happened here.

Both Republican and Democratic commission members argue that a legislature-​mandated compromise to reconcile clashing sets of maps — a GOP-​preferred set and a Democrat-​preferred set — was thwarted by the other partisan team. The Republican claim is more plausible; they had nothing to gain by letting districts be squiggled by Democrats in the legislature.

Last November, the commission survived a Democrat-​favored ballot measure to kill it, but that victory wasn’t enough to prevent the commission from collapsing.

Perhaps this grotesque gerrymandering will be stymied by courts. It would be great if Empire State voters had the power to enact a more robust district-​drawing commission. But sadly, New Yorkers have no statewide right of citizen initiative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access Voting

Our Elections — How Broken?

ballot fraud, democracy, cheating, elections, finger, ink

Election fraud didn’t suddenly disappear during the 2020 presidential election.

Or so observes John Fund, co-​author of Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote, in a wide-​ranging interview with Jan Jekielek, Wall Street Journal reporter and elections expert.

The list of problems is long. One example is what happened in New York City during the last days of the Bloomberg administration.

Testing the election system, the Department of Investigations sent 63 inspectors to try their hand at fraudulent voting. The inspectors used names of dead people, jailed people, people who had moved out of state. All they had to do to immediately get a ballot was supply a name and address. There was no double-checking.

In almost every case, the inspectors had no problem putting over the fraud. (Fake fraud; they didn’t follow through.)

In one case, an inspector was merely sent from one precinct to another precinct, only a temporary delay.

In another case, an inspector was rebuffed only because he had used the name and address of an imprisoned person who happened to be the son of the poll worker the inspector was trying to con.

In response to an exhaustive and damning report, furious Board of Elections officials demanded that the inspectors be criminally prosecuted for impersonating people. The officials testing the system were so widely savaged for this temerity that they backed off.

We must not back off, though. Ballot fraud is an insidious enemy of democracy. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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