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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. 

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crime and punishment election law general freedom

Free to Petition

Georgia, voting, elections, verification, eligibility

In December 2020, True the Vote helped Georgians to file elector challenges “based on data showing over 364,000 voters appeared to be ineligible to vote due to change in residency.”

Section 21-2-230 of Georgia Code Title 21 states that any elector “of the county or municipality may challenge the right of any other elector of the county or municipality, whose name appears on the list of electors, to vote in an election.”

Nevertheless, Fair Fight Action, the group founded by Stacey Abrams, sued True the Vote for allegedly intimidating voters.

That suit has now been thrown out.

In a 145-page ruling, Judge Steve Jones questioned aspects of TTV’s strategy. But he concluded that “there is no evidence that Defendants’ actions caused (or attempted to cause) any voter to be intimidated, coerced, or threatened in voting.”

According to True the Vote attorney Jake Evans, the decision “establishes that eligibility challenges under Section 230 are a proper method to ensure voter rolls are accurate.”

In a formal statement, True the Vote said that the court has “affirmed that citizens have the right to lawfully petition their government in support of election integrity without fear of persecution or prosecution.”

Critics of the decision bemoan the encouragement that it will give to organizations seeking to expose voter fraud. And the problem is . . . ? 

It’s not as if filing a challenge under 230 guarantees success; a board of registrars must still determine whether the challenge is valid. Besides, fighting actual ballot fraud is not an attack upon democracy, but a shoring up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Internet controversy national politics & policies political challengers

A Simulacrum of Solace

AI, politics, democracy, photography, fake

If you had thought about it at all, you may likely have hoped that artificial intelligence’s spread of popularity this last year would halt its “viral” spread short of politics. In a June 25 New York Times article, Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers dash your hopes.

Regular readers of this column are familiar with one use of AI: images constructed to arrest your attention and ease you into an old-fashioned presentation of news and opinion, written without benefit of AI. 

But our images are obviously fictional, fanciful — caricatures. 

One advantage of AI-made images is that they are not copyrighted. Using them reduces expenses, and they look pretty good — though sometimes they are a bit “off,” as in the case of a Toronto mayoral candidate’s use of “a synthetic portrait of a seated woman with two arms crossed and a third arm touching her chin.”

But don’t dismiss it because it’s Canada. Examples in the article include New Zealand and Chicago and . . . the Republican National Committee, the DeSantis campaign, and the Democratic Party. 

Indeed, the Democrats produced fund-raising efforts “drafted by artificial intelligence in the spring — and found that they were often more effective at encouraging engagement and donations than copy written entirely by humans.”

Yet, here we are not dealing with fakery except maybe in some philosophical sense. Think of it as the true miracle of artificial intelligence, where heuristics grab the “wisdom of crowds” and apply it almost instantaneously to specific rhetorical requirements. Astounding.

There’s a lot of talk about regulating and even prohibiting AI — in as well as out of politics. After all, science fictional scenarios featuring AI becoming sentient and attacking the human race precede The Terminator franchise by decades. 

I see no way of putting the genie back in the bottle. 

The AI will only get better, and if outlawed will go underground. It would be a lot like gun control, only outlaws would have AI.

We cannot leave deep fakery to the Deep State.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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