Election law

Settler State

Featured image The Associated Press refers to GOP fears of “unauthorized migrants” voting in American elections. As readers should understand, “unauthorized” is code for “illegal,” and the latest replacement for “undocumented,” which needs some explanation. At some point, all illegals must use fake or stolen documents, so “false-documented” illegals is the more accurate designation. “Migrants” are people who come and go, working for a time then returning to place of origin. The »

Illegals are Already Voting

Featured image By some counts, the Biden Junta has allowed more than eight million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally. Donald Trump and others contend that Democrats are “signing them up” to vote. As legal immigrants and legitimate citizens should know, illegals have been voting for a long time in California, the model Democrats now seek for the entire country. In 1996, illegals cast 784 votes against Republican Robert Dornan in a »

California Copies Colorado

Featured image Following Colorado’s lead, California Lt. Gov Eleni Kounalakis is exploring “every legal option” to remove former President Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot.” According to Kounalakis, the move is “not a matter of political gamesmanship. This is a dire matter that puts at stake the sanctity of our constitution and our democracy.” As Sir Bedivere (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways »

Postscript on the National Vote Compact

Featured image 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 »

A Looming Threat to Our Democracy

Featured image 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 »

Six Million Americans Are Registered to Vote In Two States

Featured image 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 »

Democracy Is Like a Streetcar

Featured image 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 »

About “Deniers”

Featured image 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 »

Election Integrity In Wisconsin

Featured image 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 »

Brad Smith on Early Voting—UPDATED

Featured image 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 »

Is ensuring election integrity anti-democratic?

Featured image 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 »

Buy This Book!

Featured image 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 »

The Terrors of “Justice,” In Re: J. Eastman

Featured image 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 »

The strange career of Jim Crow, Joe Biden edition

Featured image 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 »

Election Integrity: An Experiment

Featured image 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 »

Supreme Court delivers major blow to Dems’ campaign against state election laws

Featured image 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 »

DOJ sues Georgia over its voting law

Featured image 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 »