Tag: democracy

Categories
ballot access election law

More Is Less

citizen voting, democracy, elections, immigration, illegal

Jose Barrios was “quite happy to hear we’re going to have more democracy, not less in the District of Columbia.”

Barrios, the president of D.C. Latino Caucus, was reacting to a federal judge’s ruling to toss out the legal challenge, brought by several city voters, to the D.C. Noncitizen Voting Act.

That underlying law, passed by the DC City Council in 2022, certainly puts the “more” into democracy, allowing anyone residing in our nation’s capital for 30 days, even if in the country illegally, to legally vote for mayor, city council and local ballot measures. 

And I do mean “anyone.” China’s ambassador to the U.S. and other Chinese nationals working at their embassy are today eligible voters in Washington. Same for the FSB agents and other Russian nationals working out of their embassy. 

Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that plaintiffs “were simply raising a generalized grievance.” She elaborated: “They may object as a matter of policy to the fact that immigrants get to vote at all, but their votes will not receive less weight or be treated differently than noncitizens’ votes.”

I object to her poor choice of terms. “Immigrants” have been voting in this country for the last century and hopefully always will: By becoming citizens. 

The judge’s ruling also highlights that who votes is a pretty fundamental constitutional question, one that voters should decide. 

Yesterday, Idaho’s legislature voted to place a Citizen Only Voting Amendment on this November’s ballot — joining Wisconsin, Iowa, and Kentucky, which have similar amendments on the ballot. 

Certainly, yes, bestowing the vote on foreign citizens residing in the city for 30 days is an expansion of democracy. But sometimes more is less.

So, let’s ask voters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
ballot access election law ideological culture

The Colorado Gambit Crushed

Colorado, Trump, election, democracy

The Supreme Court unanimously nixed the clever scheme to keep Donald Trump off the Colorado ballot. The court explained its actions in the second paragraph of its anonymously written March 4th ruling: “Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse.”

That’s it. The 14th Amendment, which the Colorado gambit relied upon, does make Congress the instrument for preventing “an insurrectionist” from serving in office.

So Colorado’s ploy to rig the 2024 election out in the open has been stopped. And good thing, too, since the political repercussions could have been . . . harrowing. 

A lot of commentary and reporting on the ruling has been devoted to pushing what was not covered. Take the CNN article by John Fritz and Marshall Cohen, “Trump’s on the ballot, but the Supreme Court left key constitutional questions unanswered.” It is hard not to interpret such headlines as providing excuses to partisan Democrats — in this case those at CNN — who had put so much hope in Colorado’s (and other states’) taking of the Trump matter into their own hands. 

“But while the unsigned, 13-page opinion the Supreme Court handed down Monday decisively resolved the uncertainty around Trump’s eligibility for a second term,” the article explains, “it left unsettled questions that could some day boomerang back to the justices.”

True enough, but so what? Take the first mentioned: “Could Democratic lawmakers, for instance, disqualify Trump next January when the electoral votes are counted if he wins the November election?”

Well, no. 

The 14th’s third section does not list presidents as barred by insurrection: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President,” it says. Electors of. But not the President and VP.

I’m sure the Supreme Court would be happy to expedite an opinion to that effect should the Democrats attempt anything that stupid.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
folly political challengers

Pied Pipers, Again

Adam Schiff

In 2015, the Hillary Clinton campaign exhibited the hubris for which politicians have been associated since the dawn of civilization. 

Instead of relying on a strategy of promoting Hillary herself, Clinton insiders plied what they called “Pied Piper candidates,” Republican hopefuls who, they theorized, would shift mainstream candidates further “right,” thus making the ultimate winners unpalatable to enough general election voters to win Hillary the election. There were three they identified: Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump. 

We know how this worked out.

In California, Democrats are returning to hubristic form.

The serpentine Adam Schiff, who is running to fill the slot formerly occupied by Senator Diane Feinstein, has directed $11 million in the primary “to elevate a GOP candidate,” according to The Washington Post. 

“The ads argue that Republican Steve Garvey — a congenial former pro baseball player for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres who voted twice for Donald Trump but won’t say if he will do so again — is too conservative for California and highlight his recent surge, in an apparent effort to consolidate support for him on the right.”

The idea is to boost Garvey with Republican primary voters in hopes that Garvey takes the second of two spots available for the November election under California’s Top Two system, becauseSchiff’s people think Garveyis easier to defeat than liberal Democrat “Rep. Katie Porter, whom Schiff and his backers would prefer to avoid facing come November in this left-leaning state.”

But can this strategy really work in California? The ads portray Garvey as more Trumpian than he probably is, and recent polling suggests that Schiff and Garvey are now neck-and-neck.

A review of the Clinton metaphor, “Pied Piper,” shows how slippery the strategy can be. The “Pied Piper of Hamelin” is a cautionary tale. 

The Democrats’support may go the way of rats and children.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
ballot access election law partisanship political challengers

Parties Demoted

voting, elections, primary, democracy, rules

Though “[s]everal left-leaning groups have sued to block the former president from the state’s ballot on 14th Amendment grounds,” Tom Ozimek of The Epoch Times reported in November, “Trump Listed on Michigan Primary Ballot,” as the headline states.

The primary was yesterday. Trump won. As expected.

But he appeared on the primary ballot only with legal wrangling. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, was under a lot of pressure to keep Trump off the ballot. Which she resisted, explicitly stating that she thought the maneuver to allow state officials to prohibit Trump from appearing on ballots because of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection” clause was a bad idea.

Michigan’s voting system is now quite complicated. First, it’s an open primary state, so there will always be strategic voting, where partisans will cross lines to sabotage opponent parties. Though in the case of Trump, there is some irony here, since Trump benefitted in 2016 from such voting by Democrats, thinking he was the candidate easiest to beat in the general election.

Michigan sports a hybrid system for selecting partisan candidates to appear on the general election ballot. “More of Michigan’s 55 delegates to the Republican National Convention (RNC) will be awarded,” explains Nathan Worcester, also of The Epoch Times, “through the caucus process than through the primary vote — 39 as opposed to just 16.” But there are dueling conventions for caucusing, and it’s quite a mess.*

Michigan also now offers early voting at special voting sites. Is it a sign of a healthy democracy that there are so many ways to vote?

It sure doesn’t seem healthy that national partisan politics almost kept a Republican candidate off a primary ballot. Could the solution be to take parties’ candidate selection entirely out of state balloting?

Demote major parties from their current favored position to paying their own way.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* In the Democratic Primary, President Biden won big against Dean Phillips, a largely unknown congressman from Minnesota, and author Marianne Williamson. But, with roughly half the vote counted, a not insignificant 14 percent of Democrats snubbed the president (and the field) by voting “Uncommitted.” Many were no doubt protesting the president’s policies concerning the Israel-Hamas War; in the county containing the University of Michigan, 20 percent voted uncommitted. Yet, even in rural counties across Michigan, more than 10 percent of Democrats opted for uncommitted.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
election law Voting

Voting Unbound, Democracy Unhinged

voting, democracy, elections, corruption, power

In our nation’s capital, local voting rights are expanding and metastasizing so fast it is hard to keep up.

Exhibit A, a 12-1 vote of the City Council last year, telling the world: It is absolutely crucial to our democracy that China’s ambassador to the United States be given the same vote on who should be mayor, council member, or decide ballot measures, that any American citizen living in the District of Columbia would be entitled. 

Hey, let’s not disenfranchise the spies working out of the Russian embassy, either. Let ’em all vote! 

After all, they pay taxes. Might have their kids in the schools. 

In the country illegally? Fuhgeddaboudit! You can vote in DC. In fact, if an invading army took Washington by military force, and then held it for 30 days, the enemy soldiers could legally vote themselves into office. 

If only this were hyperbole!

A year ago, all the Republicans — along with 1 in 5 Democrats — in the U.S. House voted to nix the District’s crazy foreign citizen voting plan, as is Congress’s constitutional authority. But the Democrat-controlled Senate refuses to act.

Last week, Abel Amene, whose Ethiopian family was granted asylum more than 20 years ago, became the first non-citizen to be elected to a D.C. office. Abel won one of nearly 300 seats on the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, where the average district contains roughly 2,000 residents. 

My only question: why hasn’t he become a citizen? 

While the ANC has absolutely no power whatsoever, it is likely that its commissioner, Vanessa Rubio, lusts for more power and authority. Earlier this week she was fined $500 for voting twice in the 2020 election — once in Maryland and another time in Washington, D.C. 

She originally told authorities she did not recall voting twice. Later she suggested that because D.C. isn’t a state, voting there didn’t count . . . as if everyone gets one vote in Washington and another where they actually live.

Rubio’s 2020 fraud reminds us that not every vote should count.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
ballot access crime and punishment election law

Elections Overturned & Undermined

elections, democracy, cheating, voting, trust

Sure, democracy is a messy affair. But it does require several fine balances. One of them is that elections must be trustworthy: neither rigged nor gamed.

In recent years, many elections have been charged to be somehow “stolen.” Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of “stealing” the 2016 presidential election; Donald Trump, in turn, accused the Democrats of stealing the 2020 election, in which he was given his walking papers.

Now reports by Roman Balmakov, at Epoch TV, show that election irregularities at the local level can not only be contested, but elections overturned. 

Sans “insurrection.”

“In a shocking turn of events,” explains Balmakov, “a judge in Connecticut overturned a primary election because the evidence of fraud was just so overwhelming.” Video captured late-night ballot box stuffing, with identifiable government-employee perps. The judge overturned Bridgeport’s Democratic primary race for mayor.

In a sheriff’s race in a Louisiana parish an even more extraordinary set of events occurred. An election wherein a candidate lost by one vote was challenged; a recount adjusted the figures but the single-vote spread remained. Another challenge led the state Supreme Court to appoint a judge to look into the mess, and he found one: clear evidence of massive voting irregularities. He demanded a new election.

But Roman Balmakov’s report from yesterday may spark wider interest. It was about a thorough Rasmussen poll of 2020 voters: “1-in-5 people who voted by mail committed some type of voter fraud.” You might say they confessed as much in how they answered the poll. 

All three stories cast a dark light on the state of American democracy. But the poll may be the most troubling. 

If not how little interest the Rasmussen survey has garnered from major media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

Memester to the Pokey

vote, garbage can, dumpster

It was a joke. For which he’s been sent to prison.

A political joke online.

Admittedly, it wasn’t very funny. It certainly wasn’t new. That is, the general idea has been floating around for as long as there have been ballot boxes. 

The ur-form of the joke is “Hey, [political opponent], why don’t you deposit that ballot right here in this handy receptacle [trash can]?”

The specific joke that got Douglass Mackey into big trouble sported an image of a smiling black woman in front of a white-on-blue “African Americans for Hillary/President” sign, along with the message: “Avoid the line. Vote from home. ¶ Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925 ¶ Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.”

It arguably flirted with dirty tricks of the sort honest people don’t engage in. But a lot of partisans do that sort of thing, not just Mr. Mackey, who posted the joke to his now-defunct “Ricky Vaughn” Twitter account. A better version of the joke about the same time was not only never prosecuted, the link to it’s still on Twitter (X). It just so happens, however, to have been made by a Democrat . . . against Trump voters.

Trolls flirting with Dirty Trick status are not criminals; there is the First Amendment. But what Mackey was successfully prosecuted for (he was sentenced last week to seven months) was “Election Interference.”

Tellingly, ZERO is the number of voters stepping up to testify that they were tricked into texting 59925 and then not voting by his lame meme. If there were any, they might understandably be too humiliated to bear witness.

Curiously, the law he violated does not mention misinforming a person as a criterion for criminality.

A country that selectively prosecutes this sort of thing — can it be said to be free?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Picfinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability ballot access Voting

Time and Money

voting, democracy, elections

The Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, expects the state government to automate voter registration by the 2024 election. This will “save taxpayers time and money.”

Unless they opt out, prospective voters are to be enrolled when they get a state ID or a driver’s license at the DMV.

According to the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania, it will also make it easier for “uninterested, uninformed people to wield political power.” And perhaps also make it easier for ineligible noncitizens to vote — folks whom most Democrats, at least, strongly suspect would be more likely to vote Democrat were they somehow enabled.

It’s not fair to noncitizens, however, to register them without their consent and to send them the instruments of casting a ballot, when doing so is illegal and could ruin their chance to become citizens.

And registering and confusing immigrants has been happening in Pennsylvania — under a less lax system.

Shapiro pretends that security will be improved thereby, too. Automating voter registration adds “important levels of verification to the voter registration process.” But Pennsylvania doesn’t need to register people automatically to require a photo ID for registration or voting. (Which it doesn’t, currently; a paycheck or utility bill suffices.)

Political figures often complain about the expenses involved in special elections, recall elections, citizen initiatives, and other paraphernalia of democracy that cater to motivated, informed, active citizens — it is almost as if they regard this kind of voting as coming at their expense. It does not take long dealing with incumbent politicians to intuit that they would rather we just accept everything that they do without demur.

Freedom, democratic institutions and their safeguards, sound electoral procedures, voting machines, getting to the voting booth — even acquiring, filling out and mailing absentee ballots — all such things cost time and money.

We’d save time and money by not eating, too. But that’s hardly a triumph of economy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment election law partisanship

Election Challenge Criminalized?

Trump, election, indictment, votes, legitimacy

Another day, another indictment of former President Trump. This one, out of Georgia, would criminalize election challenges.

Jonathan Turley observes that in this fourth indictment, “every call, speech, and tweet appears a criminal step in the conspiracy. District Attorney Fani Willis appears to have elected to charge everything and everyone and let God sort them out.”

This is the kitchen-sink, banana-republic approach to “justice.” Facts? Plausibility? Irrelevant when the would-be one-party regime has a target in view.

In masterful understatement or point-missing, Turley writes that the “greatest challenge for Georgia is to offer a discernible limiting principle on when challenges in close elections are permissible and when they are criminal.”

But how can it ever be criminal simply to challenge election results or call for a recount or plead for further investigation of the flimsiest of allegations, even via imperfect phone call?

The “limiting principle” operative here is obvious. Is the challenger on our side or the other side? Our side, the challenge is legal. Other side, it’s illegal, prosecutable. This is Willis’s “principle.”

Per Turley, it’s important for campaigns to seek judicial review of an election “without fear of prosecution.” Yes, important. But from the perspective of those who want to prevent other-side campaigns from seeking recourse when an election is close or seems pockmarked by fraud, what’s important is making sure other-side campaigns do fully feel this fear.

The bad guys already understand what’s at stake, what Mr. Turley is so carefully explaining as if they are perhaps only a little confused.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture

Violence on the Rise

political violence

In a fascinating if vexing article courtesy of Reuters, we learn that political violence has risen in recent years. 

Not shocking news, to those paying attention, but still worth thinking about.

The article focuses on a few stories of politically motivated violence by individuals against individuals since the fateful day of January 6, 2021. This conveniently stacks the deck of partisanship, ruling out of consideration 2020’s mass violence and multiple deaths during the riots following George Floyd’s death. With this limitation, the majority of violence is from “the right” against “the left.”

But the article’s most interesting passage regards a recent poll about the acceptability of violence. There the breakdown evens out: “In a Reuters/Ipsos poll of nearly 4,500 registered voters in May, roughly 20% of both Democratic and Republican respondents called violence ‘acceptable’ if committed ‘to achieve my idea of a better society.’” 

A similar poll last year shows that these acceptability-of-violence levels are on the rise.

Why?

One thing is perception of news media and thrust of the media. 

On the right, folks have noticed that the news regularly lies and spins in favor of the center-left establishment — demonstrated repeatedly in the article with what Reuters considers accepted facts. On the left, folks who trust their news sources and party follow the repeated narratives painting Trump and his supporters as wholly evil.

Of course you can fight evil with violence! — so a logic runs.

Also, the suppression of online social media stories and accounts that are perceived as “anti-left” has bred much distrust and disgust. Democracy only works in a context of free speech and open debate. 

Dysfunctional democracy makes violence more likely. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created Midjourney

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts