Election law
May 3, 2023 — Steven Hayward
John wrote here Sunday about the “National Vote Compact” (NVC), the proposal of the goo-goo (“good government”) reformers to get around the electoral college by having a majority of states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. I agree with John that it is a loopy idea, though I’d love the spectacle of California someday having to cast its electoral votes for a
»
April 30, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Liberals love to talk about threats to “our democracy,” which just means threats to Democrats winning elections. Voting is a threat to “our democracy” when it doesn’t go their way. But there is a very real threat to our democracy making its way through state legislatures. It is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. I wrote about it as far back as 2019. The “compact” is legislation, adopted state by
»
February 26, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Via Kevin Roche, we come across this NBER paper, titled “Cross-State Strategic Voting,” which is embedded below. This is the paper’s Abstract: We estimate 3% of the U.S. voter population is registered to vote in two states. Which state these double-registrants choose to vote in reflects incentives and costs, being more prevalent in swing states (higher incentive) and states which automatically send out mail-in ballots (lower cost). We call this
»
February 20, 2023 — John Hinderaker
When you get to your stop, you get off. This famously cynical pronouncement by Turkey’s Recep Erdogan has been taken to heart by American Democrats. Just win once, and we never have to worry about losing again! Here in Minnesota, the Democrats now control the House, Senate (by a single vote) and the governorship, and their radical agenda extends to remaking the state’s election laws to their advantage. In his
»
November 14, 2022 — John Hinderaker
It all started with Holocaust deniers. That phrase has a clear meaning: it refers to someone who denies that the Holocaust took place. But liberals saw potential in the locution, an opportunity to disqualify their opponents without actually making an argument. Thus, they started labeling people as “climate deniers.” What does that mean? Someone who denies that we have a climate? There is no such person. Someone who denies that
»
July 8, 2022 — John Hinderaker
In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, President Trump and his allies brought numerous lawsuits, seeking to overturn the reported result in various states. Those efforts all failed, not necessarily because the cases’ arguments were not meritorious, and certainly not because voter fraud didn’t occur, but because there was no time to litigate the necessary factual issues between the election and Joe Biden’s inauguration. Wisconsin is a case in
»
May 24, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Brad Smith, the Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault Professor of Law at Capital University Law School in Ohio, is an expert on federal election law (having served as chairman of the Federal Election Commission at one point), and moreover a certified Power Line reader. He has a good Twitter thread up today on the matter of early- and mail-in voting that is sober and sensible: I believe that we should have
»
January 11, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
Of course not. Yet Democrats and their media allies insist that it is. Take for example, the lead article in the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section. It’s by Sam Rosenfeld, an associate professor at Colgate University. Rosenfeld claims that democracy is “on the brink of disaster” in America. As evidence, he moans that “in 2021, Republican state legislatures passed new restrictions on voting access.” But these restrictions tend to ensure
»
October 21, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Tuesday evening my organization hosted Mollie Hemingway at our annual Fall Briefing, where in past years we have featured speakers ranging from Benjamin Netanyahu to Mark Steyn. The subject of the event was Mollie’s hot-off-the-press book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Mollie’s book is important, I think, because it casts a sober eye on what really happened in 2020. What took place was
»
October 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
As I survey the current scene, I’m inclined to take the long view, which goes all the way back to Watergate. One of the ignored subtexts of Watergate is that a part of the fury behind the drive to get Nixon is that Nixon had made clear after his 1972 landslide his determination to challenge directly the power of the permanent bureaucracy, and thereby the power base of the Democratic
»
July 15, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The prominent historian C. Vann Woodward saw The Strange Career of Jim Crow through three editions. Originally published in 1955, the book was last updated in a third revised edition published in 1974. I believe it remains a useful book for anyone seeking to understand the phenomenon and its legacy. Indeed, as Woodward sought to keep the book current, I think that each of the three editions of the book
»
July 14, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Election integrity is a critically important issue. In Minnesota, we have an administration and particularly a Secretary of State whose object seems to be maximizing opportunities for fraud. We have same-day registration, but no provisional balloting. This means people vote first, and we try to find out whether they are actually qualified after it is too late. Counties send post cards to same-day registrants who can’t verify their names and
»
July 1, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
On the last day before its summer recess, the Supreme Court upheld two Arizona voting provisions that Democrats and civil rights groups challenged as disproportionately burdening minority voters. The vote was 6-3, with only the three hardcore liberals dissenting. Justice Alito wrote the opinion. That’s always a great sign. Amy Howe at Scotusblog observes that the decision “will make it more difficult to contest election regulations under the Voting Rights
»
June 25, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Biden Justice Department announced yesterday that it is suing Georgia over the voting procedures the state recently adopted. The suit alleges civil rights violations under Section 2 of he Voting Rights Act. It will be prosecuted by Kristen Clarke, the racist head of the Civil Rights Division, with the help, presumably, of her brainy principal deputy, Pam Karlan. On the merits, the lawsuit is a joke. As Andy McCarthy
»
June 2, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Rich Lowry notes this inconsistency in the Democrats’ position on filibusters: In Washington, D.C., where Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress, the Senate filibuster is portrayed as a Jim Crow relic that is profoundly undemocratic. In Austin, Texas, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the legislature, House Democrats’ walking out to prevent the passage of a bill with majority support is portrayed
»
April 11, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I have said several times that I don’t know whether the Democrats stole the 2020 election, but I do know that they tried hard to steal it. Their efforts included relaxation of voting standards, especially relating to mail-in voting, wherever they had Democratic Secretaries of State. Typically these changes to voting procedures, not enacted by state legislatures–likely in violation of the Constitution–involved waiving a statutory requirement of witness signatures to
»
April 6, 2021 — John Hinderaker
The Democrats, in their seemingly endless quest to profit from race hatred, have lied repeatedly about Georgia’s election reform law. Their lies were too bald-faced even for their own captive press, earning Joe Biden the maximum Four Pinocchios from the Washington Post. Now the push-back is under way in earnest. It turns out that Joe Biden’s own state, Delaware, has voting laws that are more restrictive (i.e., do a better
»
