Make Elections Great Again

 

Ballot boxPresident Trump, in delivering on the 2016 Republican Party platform, on his promises, actually produced the legitimate change in voter behavior that Republicans, including Reagan, had long dismissed as pie in the sky. Black and Hispanic voters apparently turned out for President Trump, outperforming previous Republican presidential campaigns, because of what he actually delivered for them. They were apparently met with a brazen level of organized ballot box stuffing fraud never seen before in this country. So, now we have an entire electorate, a full citizenry that is either saying “voter suppression” or “election fraud.” We must make elections great again, for the sake of our republic and the possibility of preserving a civil society.

Every state legislature under Republican majority control must immediately vote out a petition to the Congress for a Convention of the States to consider an amendment re-establishing real security and legitimacy for all federal elections. They will need at least one more state legislature, not entirely under Republican control, to put this must-accept/must-pass proposal before the Congress, triggering a meeting of the 50 states to agree on language and then send it back out to the states for possible ratification.

Because a change that increases ballot security is always opposed by Democrats, Republicans must sweeten the pot a great deal.

  • Make the federal election every two years a mandatory paid federal holiday. Then give a 100% refundable tax credit for this cost to employers, including the self-employed. Don’t like this? Kiss your country goodbye. This is a piece of the price of preserving our constitutional republic.
  • Mandate real verification of citizenship and issuance of voter registration identification on that basis. Again, fully fund this with federal mandatory spending. This answers the voter suppression claim that poor people don’t have ID. The leftist claim is a lie, but you absolutely must answer the lie by embracing the premise and then answering it with a showy flashing of federal cash. If conservatives and constitutionalists are concerned about cheating now, this is another piece of the answer.
  • Mandate verified in-person voting over a four day period, the last day being the designated federal holiday date, with strict exceptions. Fully federally fund, through grants to the states, the election workers, and election logistics. Provide funding for transportation to the polling places. This again gets directly at the “voter suppression” claim, while also answering the “cheating” claim.
  • Federally fund and apply federal court oversight to verifying voter roles before each federal election. Federal courts have overseen states and localities with histories of segregation, so there is precedent for court oversight of election processes when equal protection claims can be invoked.

Call it the Real Voter Protection Amendment, get it rolling, and see if Democrat states are not pressed into getting on board.

Published in Elections
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There are 36 comments.

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  1. namlliT noD Member
    namlliT noD
    @DonTillman

    Stina (View Comment):

    He’s using the existence of decimal conversion to whole numbers as evidence that there is something fishy going on in the code. Because why would a vote tallying software require any decimal conversions? It only need tallies.

    And most software specifies types for values (integer, floating point, string, boolean, …) both for reliability and because the internal representations are different.  So you’d have to go into some secret mode to be able to enter decimal values.  But if you’re going into a secret mode, well hey, you’re free to do anything.

    So this makes no sense at all.

    • #31
  2. David Coolidge
    David
    @dwlewis

    please correct me if this is wrong, but at one point Tuesday night, with Trump well ahead in the rust belt swing states, bookies stopped accepting bets against Trump. Was I hearing things?

    • #32
  3. Instugator Thatcher
    Instugator
    @Instugator

    Zafar (View Comment):
    What do they mandate?

    Well, for one thing, once a majority minority district is created it can’t be uncreated.

    So, a state has a district where a group, traditionally seen as a minority has a majority of the votes. The next time redistricting occurs, the state cannot lose that minority majority district. So it redraws that district to include minorities that were in other districts and it has to do that first. Then the other districts get drawn around it.

    Say the district was named 9 in a state that is going to 8 districts because of reapportionment. So it becomes district 8 and the other districts get shuffled too.

    There is no procedure for when the minority majority district is one of the remaining 2 in a state going to a Statewide representative.

    • #33
  4. Goldwaterwoman Thatcher
    Goldwaterwoman
    @goldwaterwoman

    Clifford A. Brown: Mandate real verification of citizenship

    That’s the hard part. How do I verify my citizenship? Birth certificate is the only thing I can think of but what if you were born in a foreign country when your parents were abroad?

    • #34
  5. Instugator Thatcher
    Instugator
    @Instugator

    Goldwaterwoman (View Comment):

    Clifford A. Brown: Mandate real verification of citizenship

    That’s the hard part. How do I verify my citizenship? Birth certificate is the only thing I can think of but what if you were born in a foreign country when your parents were abroad?

    They should have notified the embassy and gotten a BC from them. BC or Passport is how you verify citizenship.

    • #35
  6. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Goldwaterwoman (View Comment):

    Clifford A. Brown: Mandate real verification of citizenship

    That’s the hard part. How do I verify my citizenship? Birth certificate is the only thing I can think of but what if you were born in a foreign country when your parents were abroad?

    I think Brian or Doug has some experience with this. Doug… he’s the missionary to Georgia, right?

    • #36
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