Tag: elections

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election law general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall

O, to Oust!

Santos

Everyone seems to agree: newly-​minted U.S. Rep. George Santos (R‑NY) — if that’s even his real name — is a cheat and a scammer who doesn’t belong in Congress.

Except, of course, Congress is exactly where you’d expect to find such a person!

Especially when voters don’t discover the truth about said candidate until it is too late.

“The constituents in NY‑3 elected Representative Santos in part due to his biographical exaggerations and apparent deceptions,” complains Congressman Brandon Williams (R‑NY).

Still, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R‑Calif.) isn’t comfortable pushing to oust the fraudster — which would require a two-​thirds vote of the House of Representatives — without the Ethics Committee first finding sufficient official wrongdoing. Even given the fantastical pre-​election fibbing, the Speaker points out that “the voters have elected George Santos” and “they have a voice in this process.”

Only that’s the problem. Voters don’t have a voice.

“There is no way for constituents to recall a member of Congress,” informs The Washington Examiner, “though they can be expelled in the House by a two-​thirds vote. This action has only been taken five times in history, only against members convicted of crimes and only twice for crimes other than the treason of joining the Confederacy during the Civil War.”

Speaker McCarthy doesn’t speak for the voters in NY‑3. Neither can two-​thirds (or even ninety-​nine percent) of Congress.

But Congress can and should let voters speak for themselves. 

And not just this once with Serial Liar Santos. Let voters conduct the official ouster whenever those citizens realize they’ve been had, whenever they determine that they have a turkey representing them.

Every member of Congress — Republican, Democrat or independent — should stop virtue-​signaling with press statement pronouncements to the effect that Congressman Santos “should” resign. 

Instead, legislate for the people; give us the power of recall.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access judiciary

Zombie Vote Protected

zombies, voting

A few weeks before the election, a federal judge has blocked Arizona legislation to combat voter fraud.

Opponents routinely characterize efforts such as this Arizona measure to ensure election integrity as “voter suppression.” Charges of racial discrimination often get tossed in to allow for the customary level of hysterical partisan denunciation.

According to Jon Sherman of the Fair Elections Center, even if  HB2243 is “not discriminatory on its face . . . it is an open invitation. It declares open season for discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, dress, English proficiency, anything else.”

Of course,HB2243 extends no such invitation.

The legislation states that registration forms shall contain such things as a statement “that if the registrant permanently moves to another state after registering to vote in this state, the registrant’s voter registration shall be canceled.”

It also authorizes the county reorder to cancel a registration when he “is informed and confirms that the person registered is dead.”

Sounds like it could certainly suppress the zombie vote.

Legislation should be as carefully worded as possible. But no degree of precision in a law designed to prevent persons from voting who are not entitled to vote will prevent opponents from charging that it’s really, deep down inside, about “declaring open season for discrimination.”

Had the Arizona legislature passed the new law in plenty of time to grapple with legal challenges, the reformmighthave been in place for the mid-​terms. Let’s hope HB2243 is in place and free of judicial encumbrance by 2024. 

Enacting this kind of legislation is of many things that need to be done to safeguard elections.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Homeland Censorship Board

Elon Musk, Twitter, free speech, censorship, First Amendment

We’re in a twilight zone beyond mere “mission creep” now. 

Two months ago, creeps at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created a new censorship board, secret until its existence was revealed in congressional testimony.

This disinformatively named Disinformation Governance Board is headed by an open critic of the First Amendment, Nina Jankowicz. The purpose of the amendment being to protect freedom of speech and other rights from governmental assault, the new board and its director are especially alarming.

The DHS was formed after 9/​11 to protect national security and combat terrorism, a form of politically motivated violence. And whatever the exact definition of “terrorism” should be, we can at least agree that arguing about the origins and issues of elections, pandemics, or Russian invasions doesn’t qualify. The bitterest clashing over facts is just speech, unless part and parcel of criminal acts.

But the purpose of the Disinformation Board is to combat and “address this threat” of election disinformation.

Merriam-​Webster defines “disinformation” as “false information deliberately and often covertly spread” to “influence public opinion or obscure the truth.”

The First Amendment protects dishonest and mistaken honest speech, not just infallible honest speech. But by “disinformation,” foes of freedom of speech often mean “any speech we dispute.”

If the government can repress any speech that it chooses to label “disinformation,” that portends the end of freedom of speech. 

The very existence of the Disinformation Board warrants a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.

And since disinformation was coined to designate, specifically, government-​concocted and distributed misinformation — a term of art in the “intelligence” and propaganda biz, called dezinformatsiya by Stalin  — it is especially rich to see the current administration apply it directly against the people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability ballot access First Amendment rights

Zuckerbuck Sucker Punch

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, elections, democracy

Who should fund our public elections? 

Partisan billionaires? 

Last election, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, “gave $419 million to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed grants in 2020 to more than 2,500 election departments,” reports The New York Times.

The idea was to help officials deal with holding an election during a pandemic. No laws were necessarily broken. Apparently, private individuals and groups can give money to government election offices — even “with strings attached.” 

“Some conservatives see this largesse of ‘Zuckerbucks,’” informs a Wall Street Journal editorial, “as a clever plot to help Democrats win.” In fact, a Capital Research Center (CRC) analysis found the liberal non-​profit “consistently gave bigger grants and more money per capita to counties that voted for Biden.” 

“[A] deep dive into the available data shows that the funds were largely requested for get-​out-​the-​vote efforts, influenced voter turnout in favor of Democrats, and may have impacted the results of the election in some states,” explains the Foundation for Government Accountability. “According to currently available information, less than one percent of the funds were actually spent on PPE nationwide.”

Can you imagine the outcry if a group with “conservative ties” funded by Charles Koch was giving grants to help Republican-​rich jurisdictions rock the vote?

“[E]ven under the purest motives,” the Journal’s editorial offers, “private election funding is inappropriate and sows distrust.”

That’s why 16 states have since passed laws to restrict private funding of election programs.

Mr. Zuckerberg himself sees the danger in Zuckerbucks: “To be clear, I agree with those who say that government should have provided these funds, not private citizens.” Last week, he announced he would not be providing such funding in the 2022 elections.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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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voter suppression

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initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Michigan Voters: Alert!

Michigan, elections, term limits, democracy

Michigan voters: Beware of a petition by the group Voters for Transparency and Term Limits, a nontransparent group working deceitfully against term limits.

Currently, Michigan state senators are limited to two four-​year terms; state representatives to three two-​year terms. The VTTL people want to bloat maximum tenure in a legislative seat to twelve years, which they call a “reduction” because the twelve years would nominally cap total service in both chambers.

A now-​familiar gambit. The old, stock propaganda against term limits just doesn’t cut it anymore: arguments about how “term limits give lobbyist ginormous power, and, uh, we already have term limits and they’re called elections” are a nonstarter these days. Term limits are too popular and have been too effective.

So enemies of term limits now pretend that they’re the best friends term limits ever had. Indeed, they wish to strengthen term limits … we’re just not supposed to notice that by “reducing” the two-​chamber overall limit by two years generally politicians will stay longer in office.

With 110 House seats and only 38 Senators, it is merely mathematics that few politicians successfully switch chambers to serve the current 14 year maximum. But, rest assured, this amendment means virtually every politician will stay in the same legislative seat for 12 years. 

Greg Schmid, author of the definitive commentary on this hoax, predicts that VTTL will pretend to conduct a petition drive for a while, then invite incumbent politicians in the Michigan legislature to refer the measure to the ballot, skipping the initiative’s expense and hard work.

If you see the petition, don’t sign. If the amendment gets to ballot, vote No.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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