Tag: voting

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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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Illustration created with DALL‑E

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ideological culture national politics & policies

The 7 Percenters

voting machine, term limits, democracy, voters, voting

Forget “the one percent.” I want to know about the seven percent.

Last month, the Gallup polling outfit asked Americans about our confidence level in Congress. Did we have “a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little”?

Unlike the 93 percent of us with firing brain synapses, there appeared an enigmatic seven percent, folks who actually confessed to harboring “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of faith in that cabal of corrupt careerists legislating loquaciously in our nation’s Capitol.

It takes all kinds, I guess. The shadowy, slow-​witted, and ill-​informed must show up in statistics somewhere, right?

Granted, only five percent of Republicans expressed that much cockeyed confidence; it was six percent a year ago. Trusting Democrats hit double-​digits, with ten percent believing congressional bull, a fall from the 17 percent hornswoggled in 2021.

Gullible independents came in at the overall average — seven percent — a decrease of five percentage points from last year, when 12 percent clutched a false sense of security regarding our federal legislature.

Among a long list of American institutions, Congress roused the absolute least confidence. Odd that we feel worse about the people we elect to represent us than those we have little if any direct responsibility for or control over.

This must change.

We desperately need term limits. And the competitive elections brought by creating smaller districts where grassroots campaigns employing shoe-​leather can compete with the big money and special interest power behind professional politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture Voting

Thoughts on Nothingness

Liberty playing cards with Aristotle by DALL-E

“Democracy has nothing to do with liberty,” the Libertarian Party announced on Facebook, “just as so many of the world’s greatest minds have warned.”

Huh? Just exactly which “greatest minds” are we talking about?

Not Aristotle!

The party’s statement introduced a meme quoting Hans-​Hermann Hoppe, the “Austrian school economist and libertarian/​anarcho-​capitalist philosopher,” Professor Emeritus of Economics at UNLV and Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It read: “Democracy allows for A and B to band together to rip off C. This is not justice, but a moral outrage.”

Dr. Hoppe has a point, of course. The ‘will of the people’ can be just plain wrong … even, at times, malevolent.  A democratic vote can lead to the tyranny of the majority and even to a tyranny of the minority, as those politicians promising to serve ‘We the People’ end up serving themselves and their cronies.

I’ve not read Professor Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, where he sort of argues for monarchy over democracy, but I offer two points: (1) no one in their right mind talks of democracy without including the protections of basic individual rights, which have become the hallmark of democratic countries across the globe, and (2) no one in the real world thinks democracy is God.

Still, we won’t trade it for monarchy. 

My issue with this social media post, however, is really with the Libertarian Party’s comment that “democracy” — including the democratic means the party has purportedly been employing across the country for decades — has provided no past benefit and offers no future hope for sustaining or expanding our freedom.

So, don’t vote Libertarian this November?

I’ll take that under advisement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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“Liberty Playing Cards with Aristotle” by DALL‑E (note that the AI has chosen to show Lady Liberty as bruised and beaten. Her torch appears to be made of tissue.-)

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government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption term limits

Pucker Up

term limits, lipstick, pig, Michigan

“Never have so few applied so much lipstick to such a pig.”

That’s what term limits activist Kurt O’Keefe told the Michigan Board of Canvassers last week, as it considered the official title for a citizen initiative that he argues is anything but.

The Detroit attorney points out that the proposed ballot measure — sponsored by a group named Voters for Transparency and Term Limits — actually comes from “current and future politicians” and “current and future lobbyists.”

These insiders, who’ve “never been in favor” of term limits, seek to replace the 6- and 8‑year cap now in place in the House and Senate, respectively, with a 12-​year overall limit in both houses. At the hearing, proponents argued that the ballot title should declare simply that their measure reduces the current term limits — even though it would double terms in the House and up the Senate cap by 50 percent.

The initiative would also allow former Speakers and previously termed-​out legislators to return like the undead to their former capitol haunts. 

“This is a trick,” warned U.S. Term Limits National Field Director Scott Tillman. “We know it is a trick. They know it is a trick. They had to sweeten it up with transparency.”

That’s the lipstick.

Yet, the transparency fix, instead of simply enacting a financial disclosure system, orders the legislature to do so. Of course, the legislature cannot be forced to legislate, so the measure encourages endless lawsuits against the legislature. 

As if to further show just how sincere these politicians are, their “voters” front-​group has raked in $5 million from “unknown sources,” according to the Michigan Information & Research Service. 

They are transparent only in their self-​serving insincerity.

Oink oink.

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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partisanship Voting

Gerrymandering Proceeds Apace

Gerrymandering, voting, democracy, elections, New York

An “independent” redistricting commission established in New York State by constitutional amendment has failed. That means state lawmakers get to draw political districts after all.

And boy, are they drawing them. 

The maps just proposed by the dominantly Democratic legislature may reduce the number of GOP congressional districts from eight to three. But as Adele Malpass explains, these maps “are filled with districts that are shaped like snakes [and] cross multiple bodies of water.”

Although the failed New York State Independent Redistricting Commission sports that imposing moniker, it is really just a bipartisan commission. Not so independent. The commission was set up in such a way allowing either group of partisan members to obstruct things until there is no alternative but to let state lawmakers draw the districts.

That’s what happened here.

Both Republican and Democratic commission members argue that a legislature-​mandated compromise to reconcile clashing sets of maps — a GOP-​preferred set and a Democrat-​preferred set — was thwarted by the other partisan team. The Republican claim is more plausible; they had nothing to gain by letting districts be squiggled by Democrats in the legislature.

Last November, the commission survived a Democrat-​favored ballot measure to kill it, but that victory wasn’t enough to prevent the commission from collapsing.

Perhaps this grotesque gerrymandering will be stymied by courts. It would be great if Empire State voters had the power to enact a more robust district-​drawing commission. But sadly, New Yorkers have no statewide right of citizen initiative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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