Category: Elections

Stopping The Slide

Elections, Politics

We’re all familiar with the “slippery slide’ argument when it comes to laws and social policies (a.k.a. the “camel’s nose under the tent” expression).

Yesterday in Texas we went to the polls to vote on a series of propositions that either change or underline the Texas constitution.

The one proposition was that in order to vote in the state of Texas, you have to be a U.S. citizen.  Now one might think that that is understood to be the case — except of course when shit-holes like Boston or San Francisco allow non-citizens to vote on “local “matters.

Well, that ain’t gonna happen in the Lone Star State, should our local shit-holes (like Austin) start getting any ideas.  Best of all, of course, is that by making it a constitutional issue, Texas has the right to demand that voters show proof of citizenship before being allowed to vote.  (With my very non-Texas accent, I always take my passport with me to the polls, just in case.  Of course, I do have my voter’s card and driver’s license, and I’m on the voting roll anyway, but I have absolutely no problem with producing my U.S. passport if anyone wants to see it.)  This is not an issue to mess around with, and I’m glad we’re going all hardass on the topic. [Update:  it passed, 75-%25%.]

All the other propositions / amendments had to do with taxes, and when doing my research on each of them, I grinned broadly because they seemed to fall into two camps:  “This tax is bullshit and it needs to be whacked” — e.g. that farmers have to pay a tax on animal feed.  There were a few like that.

The other group of propositions are all preventative in nature, because unlike the U.S. Constitution, a product of the Enlightenment, the Texas constitution is very much proscriptive as well, i.e. we’re not going to trust the government to abide by goodwill alone:  the damn government isn’t allowed to do this or that specific thing — in fact, a whole lot of specific things.

My favorite?  The one that bans any kind of estate tax — okay, a “death” tax.

“But Kim… Texas doesn’t have a death tax.”

Quite right.  And now that it’s expressly forbidden by our state constitution, there’s never going to be a death tax in Texas.

I voted in favor of all the propositions.

And by the way, I thought that the polls weren’t going to be too busy.  In fact, the line of waiting voters was well over 200 yards long, and it never fell below that in all the time I was there.  [Update:  all the results are here.  The margins are about what you expect.]

We take this “restricting government” thing very seriously here, deep in the heart of

Chamber Of Horrors

Elections, Feminazis, Freaks & Loonies, Marxists

Good grief.  Imagine being a centrist Democrat (if such a beast exists anymore), and being presented with this list of presidential candidates at the polling booth:

I would demand a pistol with a single cartridge in the chamber, just to avoid making a choice out of that lot.

Too bad that even the most centrist of Democrats hate all guns, so that option wouldn’t be on the table, so to speak.

But for the typical raving loony Democrat voter of today, that list is an embarrassment of riches.

More Like This, Please

Crime, Elections

It seems as though some people — quite a lot, really — have been Very Naughty and fraudulently voted in more than one election and on more than one occasion in each election.

Ohio Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose on Tuesday announced that he has referred more than 1,200 criminal cases related to election integrity to the Department of Justice for consideration of federal prosecution.

The state election official’s recommendations include 1,084 noncitizens who appear to have registered to vote unlawfully in Ohio, including 167 noncitizens who appear to have voted in a federal election in the past four election cycles.

LaRose said nearly 100 other people also appeared to have voted in a federal election twice in two separate states, and 16 people who allegedly voted twice in Ohio in the same election.

And if this has happened in Ohio, I’d suggest that it’s happened more often and for a longer time in garden spots like California, Illinois and New York, to name just the most likely suspects off the top of my head.

Of course, voting fraud is an actual felony, but if you think that anyone is going to see the inside of a jail cell for this crime, I would suggest that it’s time for you to go and clean out your unicorn’s stable.

As to which party might have benefited from all this skulduggery… let’s just say that I’m not accepting bets.

Lottery Odds

Elections, Foreign Affairs, Politics

No, not the lottery;  the odds against this happening by pure coincidence:

Several candidates for the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) have died in the lead-up to this month’s local elections in the country’s most populous state.

According to the German paper of record Die Welt, at least seven AfD candidates have died ahead of the September 14th elections in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Germany’s Deutsche Presse-Agentur wire service noted that a total of 16 candidates have died before the upcoming vote. Yet, no other party besides the Eurosceptic right-wing party has suffered more than one death..

And then this:

Authorities have stressed that there is so far no evidence of foul play in any of the deaths.

Considering that there’s a non-zero chance that the “authorities” may have been behind at least some of these deaths… well, okay.

Let’s look at it more closely:

Police have already confirmed natural causes in four of the AfD candidate deaths and said there are so far no indications of foul play in the others.

So (counting on fingers) that leaves a dozen or so “non-natural” causes.

Then there’s the “it happens all the time” rationale:

A North Rhine-Westphalia election commission spokesman told the DPA that the number of deaths was “not significantly higher” than in past elections, with tens of thousands of people running for seats in the state.

Speaking as a one-time analyst of data, though, I’d love to see a per-thousand number of deaths by party affiliation.

I’m not by nature a conspiracy theorist, but when I’m confronted by a low-probability / massively-coincidental series of events, I do become suspicious.  The scale of untimely pre-election and party-specific deaths here is positively Clintonian.

Let me go out on a limb and suggest that the high mortality of AfD candidates is extremely suspicious.

Back To Basics

Elections

I always like it when a sports team has completely screwed up and lost the plot — Dallas Cowboys and Manchester United, take a bow — and then when the new coach/manager joins the organization, the statement is pretty much always the same:  “We’re going to go back to the basics”, as in the wisdom in the words of the old manager in baseball’s Bull Durham:  “You hit the ball, you catch the ball, you throw the ball.”

So given that our current method of voting in the United States is a hopelessly corrupted process, completely open to fake voters, system hacking and the outright fraud made so easy in “mail-in voting”, anyone with a brain should welcome this pronouncement from POTUS:

“Voter I.D. Must Be Part of Every Single Vote. NO EXCEPTIONS!  Will Be Doing An Executive Order To That End!!!  Also, No Mail-In Voting, Except For Those That Are Very Ill, And The Far Away Military.  USE PAPER BALLOTS ONLY!!!”

So who could possibly object to so simple, basic and open system?  Don’t be silly.

Critics of Trump’s election plans (take a wild guess who they are – K.) argue that such decisions should be left up to the states.

Yes of course.  By all means let’s leave federal elections in the hands of such honest and decent states like Illinois, Michigan and all the Usual Suspects.

I find it interesting that when the United States sets up a system in foreign countries to ensure that the process is free, open and not easy to corrupt, it involves such artifacts as paper ballots and dyed fingers (to prevent repeat voting) in one-day elections conducted only in official, supervised polling places for registered and verified voters only, with ballots tabulated by hand and all results published by the following morning.

Yet when it comes to the United States itself… oh no, let’s use vulnerable and corruptible machines to collate and tabulate votes electronically, let’s allow the process to take place over weeks and months, and let’s likewise drag out the actual reporting of results over weeks and months, with no controls as to who was qualified to vote, and no guarantee of the integrity of the ballot papers trickling in from unprotected collection boxes.

Let’s just ask ourselves:  who could possibly object to simplifying and protecting the integrity of the voting process for the most consequential elections in the whole world?  Silly rabbit:

To ask the question is to answer it:  it would be those groups and parties whose policies are unpopular, clearly destructive (to the country, its economy and its institutions) and cannot pass even the most simple and casual scrutiny for efficacy and common sense.

By the way, the only thing I don’t like about DJT’s announcement (apart from all those stupid exclamation marks) is that he made no mention of dyed fingers.

We need them too.  And I don’t care how “primitive” it looks.

As with sports teams, the basics are critical — and none so critical as our elections.