The story led with an assurance, an oddly worded one: “None of the Oregon residents who were automatically registered to vote without demonstrating citizenship voted in an election where they could have cast the deciding ballot, the state’s elections director told lawmakers on Wednesday.”
The Oregon Capital Chronicle assured us that the automatically registered voters who were not eligible to vote participated in elections where, in the number investigated, they couldn’t’ve made a difference.
In Oregon, as in every state except for Arizona, voters only need to swear under penalty of perjury that they’re citizens and eligible to vote when they proactively register to vote. Since 2016, the state has automatically registered people to vote when they obtain or renew driver’s licenses and state-issued identification cards if they present documents that prove citizenship, like a U.S. passport or U.S. birth certificate.
But an audit completed this week found that DMV staff had erroneously marked 1,259 people who didn’t provide those documents as U.S. citizens and forwarded their information to the Secretary of State’s Office, resulting in them being registered to vote. Ten of those individuals voted, though election officials learned that one of those 10 is a citizen who has voted for decades and just didn’t bring documentation to prove citizenship when renewing a license.
Julia Shumway, “Suspect votes didn’t affect election results, state officials say,” September 25, 2024.
A pattern can be observed. They used to tell us that “no illegals vote in our elections, which are pristine.” Now they say “sure some undocumented aliens vote, but their votes do not change elections.”
Next? “Undocumented aliens voting for our candidates ‘saved our democracy.’”
Paul Jacob has been writing about noncitizen voting for some time.
By far the most important of all the conditions, under which the production of material commodities goes broadly forward, is liberty of action on the part of the individual; because, wherever such liberty is conceded, association and invention and all other needful conditions follow right along by laws of natural sequence.
Arthur Latham Perry, Principles of Political Economy, 1891.
On September 29, 1789, the first Congress of the United States under the new Constitution adjourned.
On the same date in 1881, economist Ludwig von Mises was born in Lemberg, Galicia, of the Austria-Hungary Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine).
California’s commission on reparations — covered by Paul Jacob here in the past — recommended a huge reparations bill. But of course the State cannot afford it. So Governor Newsome made some hoopla over the issue of slavery, intoning the least sincere apology in recent history. “As part of a California reparations package, Gov. Newsom signs a bill to officially apologize for slavery,” explains CalMatters. “But he vetoed others sought by reparations supporters.”
“This signing event marks a significant milestone in California’s ongoing efforts to promote healing and advance justice,” explains a document from the governor’s office. “The legislation includes critical measures that tackle a wide range of issues affecting Black Californians, from criminal justice reforms to civil rights and education.”
But a less deceptive appraisal can be found from Scott Adams:
“To be an American,” it has been declared, “is to be a radical.” That statement needs qualification. Intellectually the American is inclined to radical views; he is willing to push certain social theories very far; he will found a new religion, a new philosophy, a new socialistic community, at the slightest notice or provocation; but he has at bottom a fund of moral and political conservatism. Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest of our radical idealists, had a good deal of the English squire in him after all. Jeffersonianism endures, not merely because it is a radical theory of human nature, but because it expresses certain facts of human nature. The American mind looks forward, not back; but in practical details of land, taxes, and governmental machinery we are instinctively cautious of change.
Bliss Perry, The American Mind (1912), p. 77.