Tag: ballot

Words for Jersey Insiders

New Jersey, ballots, design, voters, partisans

Effrontery. Chutzpah. Impudence.

I’m of course talking about partisan politics.

The case at hand is covered by Matthew Petti at Reason, “Are New Jersey Voters Too Dumb for Normal Ballots?” In this April 3rd report, Petti explains that a “federal judge has ordered Democrats in New Jersey to draw up ballots fairly instead of putting their favorite candidates at the front. But state Democratic bosses think that voters can’t be trusted to figure out how to think for themselves.”

This is a dispute about ballot design. Remember the notorious “butterfly” ballots that so confused Palm Beach County, Florida voters in 2000? You know, even Pat Buchanan acknowledged that thousands in the liberal county voted for him by mistake.

Well, this is similar, though here the case is not so much a confusing ballot but a simple ballot with favored candidates getting the easiest-to-spot slots. “All but two of the state’s counties endorse candidates for the primary and then place their endorsed candidates all in one line,” explains NPR’s Nancy Solomon. “It’s called the ‘county line’ or ‘the party line’ and it includes candidates for various positions. . . . The other candidates for the same seat are placed in what’s known as ballot Siberia – way off to the right on the ballot and all alone.”

But when the party machine tried to replace the serially indicted Senator Bob Menendez with the governor’s wife, a challenger complained. And sued. And won.

County clerks are appealing the decision — but the court still requires them to design a new ballot.

“New” . . . meaning like ballots nearly everywhere.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ballot, democracy, New Jersey, voting

Accountability election law

Democracy by Tortoise

It may take three weeks!

The counting of ballots for 2022’s General Election was pretty much wrapped up on election night. In most states. Yet, a week after election day, California election officials have barely counted half the ballots cast in a number of very close congressional districts as well as other state races.

“I anticipate it’s going to take at least a couple of weeks,” offered a Sacramento County Elections spokesperson, “if not three weeks, to process the bulk of the ballots that have come in.”

Why the tortoise pace?

“In short,” KTLA-TV in Los Angeles reports, “it’s a product of the state’s massive population and laws that make it easier and more convenient for every eligible voter to be heard.”

The Big Population argument falls flat. California has more votes to count but likewise more people available to count them. Nor does California have higher voter turnout or rules so different from other states that count much faster.

California law allows ballots to be mailed as late as election day, which does indeed slow the counting. That could of course be tightened up. But it seems the main thing California might do differently is work harder at getting the votes counted. State law only requires that county election offices have folks working six hours a day, with weekends and holidays off.

“We’d rather get it right,” says Secretary of State Alex Padilla (D), “than get it fast.”

Mr. Secretary, the problem is that the longer the election drags on without a winner being declared, the less confidence the public has in the process.

Get it right. And fast.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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election law Voting

Following the Law

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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ballot access Voting

Our Elections — How Broken?

Post author By Redactor
Post date December 13, 2021
4 Comments on 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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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

The Rest of the News

Matt Pitsch, Arkansas, initiative, citizen, ballot,

Reid Wilson’s very welcome reporting in The Hill, recently, was headlined, “GOP legislators clamping down on voter initiatives.”

This disrespect for the people and their basic, democratic check on legislative power is far too common, and something about which people need to know.

For instance, ballot measures in Florida already must garner a supermajority of 60 percent to win, but politicians are now proposing that threshold be hiked still higher to 67 percent. Not to mention bills to burden petitioners with unconstitutional restrictions.

Though most of the attacks are coming from Republican-dominated legislatures, the article also made clear that Democratic Party legislators in several liberal states — California, Oregon, Washington — are also trying to “take power away from voters.”

But the article lacked some very pertinent information, allowing politicians to make some terribly misleading charges against direct democracy.

“In the last seven elections, we’ve actually changed our constitution 20 times,” complains Arkansas State Sen. Mat Pitsch, the sponsor of legislation making petitioning for citizen-initiated ballot measures more onerous. “We’re averaging three changes every other year. Things that normally are voted on by elected representatives were making their way through constitutional ballot measures.”

Sen. Pitsch thinks legislators should make these decisions, instead of voters. How convenient.

But the state’s motto is “The People Rule.”

Honest people can disagree about how often state constitutions should be amended, but 20 amendments in 14 years does not make Arkansas one of the more prolific states. Moreover, consider the genesis of those 20 amendments. Only three were citizen-sponsored measures; the other 17, the vast majority, were placed on the ballot by . . . legislators!

A fact the reader should have been told.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Holding All the Trumps

Idaho, initiative, ballot, Senate Bill 1159, democracy, voting,

Last week, Idaho’s Senate Bill 1159 — “the bill to make it much harder to qualify a voter initiative or referendum for the Idaho ballot,” as the Idaho Press summarized it — passed the Senate on the narrowest 18–17 vote.

Now headed to the House, the legislation would

nearly double the number of voter-signed petitions to place an initiative onto the ballot
reduce the time to gather those signatures by a whopping two-thirds
throw up numerous additional hurdles

What’s the point?

The state already has one of the most arduous petition processes in the nation for qualifying a citizen initiative for the ballot. Moreover, without passing any new law, Idaho legislators currently have and have always had a 100 percent veto on any citizen-initiated measure enacted by voters.

Idahoans cannot place constitutional amendments on the ballot through their citizen initiative, only statutes. And any statute voters pass can then immediately be repealed by a simple majority of legislators. Or amended any which way those solons so desire.

So, again, why the need for politicians to pull up the ladders?

Senate Republicans claim — in a news release headlined, “Setting the record straight on initiative bill” — to be “concerned about the integrity, transparency and fairness of the initiative process.”

What does heightening all the hurdles to trip up citizens have to do with integrity, transparency or fairness?*

Voting on an issue is “unfair” to whom . . . legislators?

Holding all the trump cards, Idaho senators still didn’t want the people to have a say. The politicians are scared to death of democracy.

Which is why we need more, not less.

Certainly not none.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* I do acknowledge that the bill is transparently awful.

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