Tag: voter ID

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election law Voting

Logic Suppression

Georgia, election law, race, consequences, voter ID

“In any other area of life — boarding a plane at DSM, picking up Cyclone tickets at will-call, or even buying Sudafed — showing a photo ID is a non-event,” Luke Martz writes in the Des Moines Register. “It is the baseline of participation in a modern society.”

The Republican political consultant, who has “served as an international election observer in Europe and the Middle East,” compares Iowa’s election system with “the mess currently unfolding in Minnesota,” where “Gov. Tim Walz signed a law authorizing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.”

Mr. Martz points out the “logical fallacy,” which he says has “effectively undermined their own arguments against voter ID.” How so? “If activists believe requiring a document to drive is reasonable,” he argues, “then their claim that requiring a document to vote is a ‘racist barrier’ collapses.”

Indeed. He notes that the idea “that certain Iowans are somehow incapable of obtaining a free state ID” is precisely the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” highlighted by President George W. Bush decades ago.

Lastly, Martz addresses the “‘voter suppression’ narrative,” which “has always had one major flaw: reality.” 

Remember the hullabaloo over Georgia’s 2021 election law? Former President Sleepy Joe Biden called it “Jim Crow 2.0” and the politicians running Major League Baseball canceled the All-Star Game in Atlanta as punishment, only to see voter turnout in Georgia’s next election “more than 50% higher than in the previous midterm election of 2018.” 

Martz shares Iowa’s story, where “doomsayers predicted a collapse in participation” after passage of voter ID. “Instead, we saw the exact opposite. In 2018, the first general election with the law, Iowa saw its highest midterm turnout in decades. In 2020, we shattered records with over 1.7 million ballots cast.”

Let’s not suppress reality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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election law national politics & policies

The Impossible Dream ID

SAVE, voting, voter ID, citizenship

The SAVE America Act, formerly known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, may get a vote this week on the floor of the U.S. House.

I like the bill’s two key provisions: Voter ID and proof of citizenship.

But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has already announced the bill “dead on arrival,” even with House passage, as Democrats will filibuster to block a Senate vote. 

“According to an August 2025 Pew Poll, 95 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats favor voter ID,” reported CNBC. “A 2024 Gallup poll found that 84 percent of Americans support voter ID and 83 percent support proof of citizenship to register to vote.”

Sunday, on ABC’s This Week with[out] George Stephanopoulos, co-anchor Jonathan Karl detailed the public polling before asking Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.): “What about the idea of voter I.D., a photo I.D. being required to vote?”

“It’s still going to be something that disenfranchises people,” replied Schiff, those “that don’t have the proper real I.D., driver’s license I.D., that don’t have the I.D. necessary to vote, even though they are citizens. This is another way to simply try to suppress the vote.”

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) opposes voter ID, too . . . yet he requires government-issued photo identification to attend his campaign events. 

Years back, then-Vice-President Kamala Harris warned that “in some people’s mind [voter ID] means you’re gonna have to Xerox or photocopy your ID to send it in to prove you are who you are. Well, there’re a whole lot of people, especially people who live in rural communities, who don’t — there’s no Kinko’s, there’s no Office Max near them. Of course, people have to prove who they are. But not in a way that makes it almost impossible for them to prove who they are.”

Seems Democrat leaders cannot imagine any possible system of checking ID or determining citizenship. Even though the rest of the democratic world does it without a hitch. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The key action is in the states, as this headline in Michigan last week attests: “While Washington Argues Over Proof-of-Citizenship Voting Rules, Michigan Grabs the Wheel.”

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crime and punishment Voting

The Dog That Didn’t Vote

dog, voter ID, elections, democracy, cheating

“Ruff! Ruff ruff ruff! Ruff ruff! Ruff ruff ruff! Growl!”

Translation: “I’m just a dog! I was framed! I had nothing to do with it! I oppose fraudulent voting on principle! Growl!”

The culprit is the dog’s owner, an Orange County, California woman, Laura Lee Yourex.

In 2021, Yourex mailed in a ballot in the name of her dog — not Lucky or Fluffy but “Maya Jean Yourex,” which cognomen the canine, no longer with us, is also on record as disavowing. We’ll call the dog MJ for short and leave your ex out of it.

In 2021, the MJ ballot was accepted. When Laura Lee tried the same thing in 2022, the ballot was rejected. The 2021 election was state level. For state elections, California eschews the voter-verification requirements of federal elections.

According to a local official: “Proof of residence or identification is not required for citizens to register to vote in California elections nor is it required to cast a ballot in state elections. However, proof of residence and registration is required for first-time voters to vote in a federal election.”

You see the problem.

Laura Lee Yourex faces up to six years in prison.

Voter fraud doesn’t exist, we’re told whenever there’s another report of such fraud — except maybe just a little. 

But if we keep adding up documented instances, we’ll come up with a bigger number than “just a little” (I’ll let mathematicians notate that in symbols) — and that’s not counting legalized voter fraud and fraud that people got away with.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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election law Voting

California’s Electoral Saboteurs

voter ID, immigration, election fraud, citizenship

Thou shalt not check the ID of a person showing up to vote.

California lawmakers — apparently eager to help noncitizens vote — have banned local voter ID laws like that of Huntington Beach.

Attorney General Rob Bonta says that requiring ID to vote “flies in the face” of the principle that “the right to cast your vote is the foundation of our democracy.”

But Huntington Beach didn’t impair “the right to cast your vote.”

Opponents of ID requirements say that the problem is the terrible hardship of presenting a valid ID or perhaps of obtaining one. These may be chores, but they’re hardly ventures into the unknown. If you’re a citizen, you can get ID showing you are. And almost everyone is capable of pulling an ID out of a pocket and displaying it.

Here’s a tell: “An amendment to Senate Bill 1174 that would have explicitly banned illegal migrants from voting was rejected.”

Is there evidence of fraud in American elections? 

Is it major — not a marginal issue having to do with one or two wayward ballots per decade?

Could lawmakers like California State Senator Dave Min, who asserts that “voter ID laws only subvert voter turnout,” be wrong?

Yes. 

The evidence can be found in John Fund’s books, such as Our Broken Elections, Stealing Elections, and Who’s Counting? A more recent report of attempts to undermine the vote and prevent the same is Elizabeth Nickson’s article “The 2024 Cheat and What’s Being Done About It.”

Voter IDs don’t subvert voter turnout, they subvert fraudulent voter turnout.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access national politics & policies

The Other Big Lie

Joe Biden

“Let me be clear,” President Joe Biden told a Georgia crowd yesterday, addressing changes proposed by the Democrats to election laws nationally, “this is not about me or Vice-President Harris or our party.”

Of course not. Who would even suggest such a thing? 

On this same “voting rights” subject six months ago, Biden called Republicans “bullies and merchants of fear and peddlers of lies” who “are threatening the very foundation of our country.” Though less colorful, yesterday’s address was merely more of the same. 

“Pass the Freedom to Vote Act! Pass it now!” the president shouted, arguing that it “would prevent voter suppression.”  

How? Well, that’s less than clear. 

For years, Democrats slammed laws requiring voters to show photo identification as “racist,” contending the requirement disproportionately suppressed black voters. But then, when polls demonstrated that voters “of color” are even more supportive of Voter ID laws than are whites, Democrats quickly insisted they had always been for such laws.

Now — keep up! — voter ID laws are back to being suppressive. And the very purpose of the Dems’ Freedom to Vote Act is to strike down all such state laws.

When Georgia’s Secretary of State called for photo ID requirements last Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, host Margaret Brennan offered, “The Freedom to Vote Act actually does promote a national standard for states that have an ID requirement for in-person voting,” adding, “You could use a bank statement or utility bill.”

Neither of which constitutes a photo ID, as the secretary pointed out.

Democrats battling former President Trump’s so-called Big Lie have concocted one of their very own.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Sore Losers Lumped

Stacey Abrams, voter fraud, elections, democracy, power

“[R]ight now,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger expressed to Margaret Brennan, host of CBS’s Face the Nation, last Sunday, “we need to restore trust wherever we can.”

Having “stood up to” pressure from President Trump after the 2020 election, and now persona-non-grata in his own party, Raffensperger has become a popular guest on progressives’ legacy media . . . though, not always providing the soundbites they crave.  

“In Georgia, we’ve been fighting this — this theme of, you know, stolen election claims — from Stacey Abrams about voter suppression [in 2018], and then 2020 it was about voter fraud,” explained the secretary. 

“Both of them undermine voter trust.”

“They may both undermine voter trust,” Brennan quickly countered, “but I’m sure you draw a distinction between someone who doesn’t hold any kind of office and the president of the United States actively putting pressure on you to find and manufacture votes. They’re not equivalent,” she added.

Raffensperger acknowledged that the president’s “positional power is just much higher than a candidate running for governor. But be that as it may,” he continued, “when people lose races, I think the proper thing to do is admit that you lose. And if you want to run again, by all means do so.”

Partisans will debate whether Abrams’ claims of voter suppression are more right or wrong, defensible or incredible, honest or dishonest than Trump’s charges of vote fraud. But both have been blindly accepted not only by their own political side, but by the rah-rah crowd in the respective partisan corners — er, halves — of the media as well.

Leaving other elected officials to grab their midnight trains to somewhere else, the lonely Georgia Secretary of State stands his ground, making a non-partisan, principled point.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Hypocrisy ID’d

voting rights, democracy, race

“Prominent Democrats have increasingly softened their opposition to voter identification requirements in recent days,” informs The Washington Post, “signaling a new openness to measures that activists have long vilified as an insidious method of keeping minorities from the ballot box.”

Yesterday, when Republicans backed the idea, it was racist and supposedly so were they for supporting it. Not anymore. Now, Democrats favor Voter ID.

What changed? 

Not racism. And certainly not racially exploitative demagoguery. 

The catalyst may be a new Monmouth University poll showing fully 80 percent of Americans favor a photo ID requirement for voting, with support “at 62% among Democrats, 87% among independents, and 91% among Republicans.”

These progressive mutations take place as Senate Bill 1, the companion to H.R. 1, the so-called “For the People Act,” failed to break the GOP filibuster yesterday, blocked 50 votes to 50 votes along strictly partisan lines.

While Democrats scramble for a way out, some — Stacy Abrams, notably — suggest they have always been for voter ID. 

Funny, the Democrats’ legislation would have effectively gutted the 35 state voter ID laws now on the books. “But HR-1 does not ‘ban’ voter identification laws,” lectures Newsweek’s fact-checker. “Instead, it offers a workaround” — that does not require showing an ID.

Just the sort of requirement Democrats now insist upon? 

Hypocrisy notwithstanding, the real problem with Democrats dictating election policy from Washington is the rottenness of those policies, which include: 

  • Partisan capture of the Federal Election Commission by Democrats through 2027*
  • Taxpayer financing of congressional campaigns
  • Increased regulation of speech aimed at influencing congressmen (i.e. mobilizing citizens)

Congressional Democrats have plenty more bad policies where those came from.

And a legislative majority.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* If you can’t pack the Supreme Court, packing the FEC is the next best thing.

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