Category: Voting

Voting Unbound, Democracy Unhinged

Post author By Redactor
Post date December 21, 2023
3 Comments on 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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Tags corruption, democracy, elections, power, voting

Accountability ballot access Voting

Time and Money

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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Tags democracy, elections, reform, voting

initiative, referendum, and recall Voting

Sticking It to the People

democracy, representation, Memphis, term limits

Nashville’s Metro Council? I’m no fan. But I do like the people of Nashville.

That’s where I differ from Tennessee’s Republican-dominated state legislature.

My beef with the Metro Council (discussed in this Wall Street Journal op-ed) is the fact that, after term limits were passed back in 1994, the council has forced voters to say “No” to five different ballot measures referred by the council (1996, 1998, 2002, 2015, 2018) to weaken or abolish their own limits.

“No” is a tough concept for them to grasp.

One of those failed council-sponsored measures even offered to reduce the size of the council from 40 to 27 in hopes voters might see that provision as positive — “give the public something,” said one pol — to divert from the council’s self-servingly unpopular attack on term limits.

The GOP-controlled state legislature, on the other hand, is very angry at Nashville’s liberal Democratic politicians for blocking the Republican National Convention from being held next year in Music City. It sure seems a vindictively partisan move, costing people who own Nashville restaurants and hotels a sizeable bit of income.

So, back in March, the Tennessee Legislature passed a new law cutting Nashville’s council from 40 to 20 members.

That’ll teach ’em, eh?

Were only the tender feelings of Nashville’s dishonorable honorables in jeopardy, I wouldn’t complain. But the ratio of us citizens to our elected representatives is critical.

As Citizens Rising head Stephen Erickson aptly put it, “The state government of Tennessee recently decided that the people of Nashville should be less well represented.”

For the moment, thankfully, a three-judge panel in Tennessee has paused the legislature’s anti-representation scheme pending the outcome of a legal challenge.

But our representatives should be working to improve representation, not hobble it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall term limits Voting

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 2, 2023
2 Comments on They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Citizen Initiatives, term limits, North Dakota

North Dakota state representatives (and I use that term loosely) are unhappy.

Very unhappy.

They have no use for the Ethics Commission that voters established back in 2018 by passing a constitutional amendment initiated by citizen petition. State legislators reacted by trying to — ahem — “fix” the horse the ethics measure “rode in on.”

That is, wreck the state’s ballot initiative process, to prevent citizens from making such reforms happen . . . without any “help” from politicians.

Legislators placed a constitutional amendment on the ballot to require that any citizen-initiated amendment be approved not merely by North Dakota voters, but then by both chambers of the state legislature. Their amendment, amid uproar, was finally amended so that if legislators voted the initiative down, voters would get a second vote on it.

Still, 62 percent of voters said, “No, thanks!”

Then, in 2022, the state Chamber of Commerce and other special interests attempted to use the citizen petition process, which they always say is way too easy. Yet, these insiders failed to gather enough signatures to qualify their measure requiring a 60 percent supermajority to pass an initiative.

Meanwhile, term limits supporters gathered enough signatures* and, last November, North Dakotans said, “Yes!”

Seems politicians in Bismarck, the state capital, are even less fond of term limits. They’ve introduced a raft of bills designed to kill the citizen petition process:

House Bill 1452 would slap a 90 percent tax on contributions to ballot measures by any American living outside North Dakota.
House Bill 1230 would fine a campaign committee $10,000 and each of committee member $1,000 each if the petitions they turn in fail to have enough valid signatures to qualify the initiative.
Senate Concurrent Resolution 4013 would amend the state constitution to (a) require 25 percent more voter signatures, (b) outlaw any payment to signature gatherers (something the U.S. Supreme Court has already unanimously ruled state governments cannot do), (c) block new residents from petitioning in the state for in some cases over a year, and (d) mandate a 67 percent vote to pass a citizen-initiated ballot measure.

North Dakota legislators prove the case for term limits. And the horse it rode in on: citizen initiative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Though term limits supporters had to fight the 30-year incumbent Secretary of State’s attempt to block the petition all the way to the state’s highest court, which ruled unanimously to place term limits before the voters.

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Tags citizen's initiative, democracy, North Dakota, term limits

election law Voting

Following the Law

It’s official.

Well, it was already official because it was Pennsylvania law. And because the U.S. Supreme Court had confirmed it.

What is it? Election officials may not count mail-in ballots that are undated or incorrectly dated.

Official, yes, but now even more official.

On November 1, a week before the election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that yes, election officials must follow Pennsylvania election law that says you can’t count undated or incorrectly dated ballots.

A voter who mails in a ballot is obliged to sign and date the outer envelope before sending it off. The court orders election officials to “refrain from counting any absentee and mail-in ballots received for the November 8, 2022, general election that are contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes.”

The ruling was issued in response to litigation initiated by the Republican Party, which has launched a slew of lawsuits around the country to combat shady election practices.

The court’s clarification is important. A problem loomed over the upcoming election. Pennsylvania’s secretary of state had been giving the go-ahead for officials to count ballots whether they’re dated properly or not . . . and to heck with election law and the SCOTUS. Until the ruling, county officials throughout Pennsylvania lacked consistent policies about how to handle bungled ballots.

Of course, when reasonable election rules are ignored, it’s easier to commit election fraud — notwithstanding the disingenuous claim advanced by some proponents of lackadaisical election procedures that fraud is either a vanishingly small problem or does not exist at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ballot, democracy, election, rules

ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers Voting

Good Night, Mr. Fetterman

In popular political culture, it’s the Republican Party that’s historically been fettered with the moniker of “The Stupid Party.”

That’s what liberal philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill called Britain’s Tories, and affixing the “stupid” label to conservatives has been important for intellectuals ever since: it’s one way they feel good about themselves.

We can argue about the (in)justice of the accusation till the cows come home and go out to pasture again, but it’s the Democrats who are pushing brain-damaged leaders, not Republicans.

I’m not just referring to President Joseph Robinette Biden’s many out-of-mind moments. I’m also talking about Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s run for the U.S. Senate.

The man suffered a stroke last spring, and has mostly been hiding out in the proverbial Biden Basement ever since. But on Tuesday he appeared on stage to debate his Republican opponent Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Fetterman’s mental impairment? Obvious.

He began with the immortal clumsiness of “Good Night” rather than “Good Evening,” and stumbled through question after question. His handling of the minimum wage issue was slow-witted, and his awkward and robotic — and so obviously deceptive — repetitions regarding fracking sent shivers down my spine.

It’s not my purpose to make fun of people with brain injuries. But it is my role to call attention to the apologetics by Democrats (and the center-left/far-left news media) for their candidate, and their pretense that Fetterman’s just fine.

He isn’t. Biden isn’t.

And this says something about where Democrats are — intellectually; spiritually.

Very not fine.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.