Category: ballot access

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Amazing Vanished Rights

Governor, Brad Little, Idaho

Suppose you have the right to walk across a room.

Yet you’re legally chained to a chair. 

By your rights, you may get up and walk across the room. But you can’t, because of the chains. You could if only you could. Why, there’s even a document specifying your right to do so. You physically can’t exercise this right; that’s the only problem. 

But your right to walk across the room is enshrined and protected.

Or is it?

In fact, we have no right in the sense of a legal ability to do a certain thing if its exercise is, by law, thwarted. 

Recently, Idaho lawmakers passed and Governor Little signed a law making it almost impossible for citizens to place a question onto the ballot. Until now, Idaho required that 6 percent of registered voters in 18 of 35 legislative districts sign the petition to send a question to ballot. Gratuitously onerous, but at least possible to comply with.

That possibility was a big problem for opponents of citizen initiative rights, however. Hence the new law, requiring signatures from 6 percent of registered voters in each of 35 districts.

Reclaim Idaho challenged the law. The Idaho Supreme Court is currently hearing the case.

According to Reclaim Idaho co-founder Luke Mayville: “If you claim that the people ought to have a right to put something on the ballot [but] make it impossible to exercise that right, it’s not really much of a right at all.”

Do justice, justices.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access national politics & policies

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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The Incumbency Fraud

election integrity, voter suppression

“There’s nothing that shortening the period by which people can vote early does to combat any perceived fraud,” Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s really just a cover for what they’re really trying to do, which is to make it harder to vote.”

At issue is a new law courtesy of Iowa Republicans, along with numerous bills pending in other states, addressing what Republicans call “election integrity” and Democrats call “voter suppression.”

Host Chuck Todd informed viewers that a poll found two-thirds of Floridians wanted more early voting days. Not fewer.

Hardly surprising, since that’s easiest for voters. And while voting should be easy, ease is not the only consideration.

The Iowa “law shortens the early voting period to 20 days from the current 29,” the Associated Press reported, “just three years after Republicans reduced the period from 40 days.”

Here’s why I support that change, though it would be better even shorter*:

  • We should vote together. Not weeks apart. With three, four, six weeks of early voting, election day ballots can be cast with a different set of facts than those cast so many weeks earlier. 
  • The longer the time during which ballots are cast, the greater the expense in running for office. Candidates must be in touch when voters make their decisions. Since incumbents hold an average four-to-one spending advantage over challengers, more expensive campaigns give incumbents an even greater advantage.  

So, while early voting doesn’t cause fraud, by making elections more expensive it fosters what we might call “the incumbency fraud.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* One provision in H.R. 1, which passed the U.S. House on a party-line vote, requires that states allow at least 15 days of early voting. The overall bill is terrible; plus, we are better off with the states as laboratories of democracy, rather than marionettes of Washington. But my preference would be not more than 15 days.

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ballot access crime and punishment

Harvest Season

election, cheating, Texas, ballot harvesting,

Democrats say Trump is going to steal the election. But what if they are “projecting”? Politics has gotten so nasty that you wouldn’t be a cynic to express no surprise at stories like these: 

  1. Project Veritas uncovered a “ballot harvesting” scam in Representative Ilhan Omar’s Minneapolis district, implicating, it seems, Omar (D-Minn.) herself; and 
  2. Formal accusations against a Biden campaign official, and others, for a similar scheme in Texas.

The Minnesota story is juicy; the Project Veritas video speaks for itself.

But in Texas? “Two private investigators, including a former FBI agent and former police officer, testify under oath that they have video evidence, documentation and witnesses to prove that Biden’s Texas Political Director Dallas Jones and his cohorts are currently hoarding mail-in and absentee ballots and ordering operatives to fill the ballots out for people illegally, including for dead people, homeless people, and nursing home residents in the 2020 presidential election.” That, courtesy of the industrious Patrick Howley, in the thick of the investigation.

“Witnesses have shown me,” the former FBI agent testifies, “how the ballot harvesters take absentee ballots from the elderly in nursing homes, from the homeless, and from unsuspecting residences’ mailboxes. The ballot harvesters then complete the ballots for their preferred candidate and forge the signature of the ‘voter.’” 

Several Biden campaign workers and two Harris County bureaucrats are implicated. It will be interesting to see if these accusations lead to charges.

And how many similar stories will emerge elsewhere.

Folks can argue about how much voter fraud happens, but when we find it, let’s act.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall Voting

Worms for Early Bird Voting?

ballot box, voting, democracy, money, pandemic

Election Day is six weeks away. Yet, in my home state of Virginia, voting began last week.

Is it responsible to cast a ballot so early? 

You may know with metaphysical certainty how you’re voting for president — even in the event of some major cataclysm — but have all the state rep and city council and ballot measure campaigns also played out fully enough for you?

Here in Virginia, we get few candidate races in our split-up state and federal elections, much less ballot issues to decide. I could have made all my (very few) choices months ago. But I trust that in a more competitive and healthy representative democracy we would more want to hear out the candidates.

A lot can happen in six weeks. And you cannot change your vote once it’s cast.*

The new Democratic-controlled Legislature — in reaction to the pandemic, to prevent crowding at the polls — expanded the early voting period this year. It started September 18 and ends October 31.** 

There are costs to expanding early voting — including making campaigns more expensive to run and win. Disabled from marshaling advertising into a two-or-three-week period before the vote, campaigns are forced to sustain publicity for a month. Or longer. 

While better-funded incumbents have little difficulty with the added cost, it cripples challengers. It especially handicaps grassroots ballot initiative proponents battling public employee unions or the Chamber of Commerce. 

Make the voting process comfortable and easy for citizens. But let’s be certain not to make it comfortable and easy for incumbents and special interests.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* In Sweden, you can change your early vote, informs my friend Bruno Kaufmann, a journalist and direct democracy advocate. They call it “second voting.” 

** Though several other states routinely allow more than six weeks of early voting.

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ballot access insider corruption

Corruption, an Opportunity

Orange Man, Trump,

The president’s July 30 tweet reminded us he can still manipulate the news cycle.

“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

Reactions ranged from dismissal to outrage — and assurances of no schedule change — but the most obvious thing about the tweet was the “made-you-look” aspect. By focusing on the rapid deployment of new-old technology (the mail-in ballots) to handle the public’s panic over the now–waning pandemic, Trump does several things at once: 

  • shows a danger posed by lockdowns and social distancing;
  • calls attention to an under-investigated phenomena, voter fraud and vote-count rigging; and
  • provides an excuse for his possible failure in November.

The Democrats think this latter is the biggest danger. But they’ve a funny way of raising the alarm, considering their recurrent expressions of fear that President Trump “wouldn’t step down” if defeated.*

Apparently, calling into question the election mechanisms of the states is considered ‘going too far’ — not because it isn’t worth being vigilant about, but because questioning election integrity might undermine regime legitimacy.

The bipartisan regime.

The Epoch Times’s article on the president’s tweet concludes this way: “Attorney General William Barr said last week that there is ‘no reason’ to believe any election rigging is afoot.”

Well, Trump himself provided the reason: it is an obvious opportunity. 

An opportunity that some unscrupulous partisans no doubt have little compunction about trying. Making the subject not worth discussing — a ‘third rail’ — actually makes election corruption more likely by removing some of the risk.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Hillary Clinton came out with this again, in July. This sort of thing does not help Democrats much, for it was they who, last time, could not accept defeat: antifa violence at the inauguration, followed by fake scandal-mongering and a failed impeachment made them look worse than their target.

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