The Republican Party is frequently accused of voter suppression. While some of such claims are debatable, it appears that the shoe fits for legislation regulating Voter Registration drives that was recently passed in Florida. Joshua Douglas wrote an article in Washington Monthly:
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2023/05/31/floridas-new-law-takes-aim-at-voter-registration/
and has written a very interesting history of Third Party Voter Registration drives, by which he means not just minor parties but also other “good government” groups (7,649 words):
https://responsivegoverning.org/research/a-history-of-third-party-voter-registration-drives/
Thanks to Richard Pildes for blogging about this at Election Law Blog.
As an aside that has nothing to do with the two links above, to clarify what I think is the proper vernacular that is not, but should be, universally followed, “Ballot Access” should refer to the ability of political parties and candidates to appear on ballots, while “Voting Rights” should refer to the ability of eligible voters to actually cast votes.
Thank you for the clarification of the difference between voting rights and ballot access. There are people who believe that they are the same thing when yet they’re not. Ballot access, specifically for third party and independent candidates, plays a very crucial role into changing the nation in a better direction.
Suppression? FAKE NEWS! Richard thinks illegals and felons should be allowed to vote, multiple times in fact. He has openly supported fraud.
Voter suppression starts with candidate suppression. If candidates are kept from running thru ballot access restrictions, excessive filing requirements, and voluminous campaign finance reporting requirements, then voters end up with fewer choices.
Fraud suppression would be more accurate here.
Here’s a question Richard. Which is more important to obtain first? Easier ballot access or easier voting laws?
The responsivegovernment link has at least some interesting information (will need to read more of it and research the source later). Particularly, the part about early election administrators personally knowing all the voters in their area and later registration by personal appearance rather than mail in or electronic form confirms my suspicions about some of the ways the American experiment went wrong over time.
It would be far preferable for voting to be conducted in a way where everyone present knows each other well, and their families have known each other for generations, as I said before confirmation here that American voting once took place in a way where at least the administrators knew everyone voting in their area.
Clearly, mail in voter registration, mail in votes, and electronic registrations and votes have greatly worsened left wing vote fraud, culminating in the stolen presidential election of 2020 and the Chinese Communist quisling puppet regime currently occupying the once White House.
Registration harvesting and vote harvesting operations clearly have their roots in the Tammany Hall and other such operations as described in the article, and have not changed in substance, only in style, in the years since.
Vote counting, tabulations and reporting face similar challenges. I’ve proposed a number of ways those problems could potentially be solved, but perhaps there are better ways. It’s very hard to say with the lack of intelligent open minded consideration of various possible alternatives. I ask, as usual, where some places where that can be found more easily regarding different systems of government would be, if not here. Suggestions, anyone?
In Florida, “third party” refers to groups other than political parties.
Registering a group every two years is a burden? How do they keep up with changes in the law. What happens if the officers of the group have died or moved?
Based on the ResponsiveGoverning article, I think voting registration drives are intended for people who:
1) Have difficulty registering themselves
2) Can but won’t register unless they are peer-pressured
With DMV registering, same-day registering, and online registering, I don’t think #1 applies to very many people at all these days. But, it must apply to some people. Those people need others to help them register. Making it “difficult” to help those people is discriminatory.
Systems that allow for fraud are systems that encourage fraud. But the presence of fraud does not allow you to discriminate against those of good faith. Find a system that works.
Reason #2 does not warrant legal protection because there is no hardship. It’s OK if people do it, though.
What part of the form do they want to pre-fill?
Party affiliation?
Address? How do they know who their targets are?
Why do they have to hang on to registration cards for two weeks? So they can lift the signatures, or trash registrations of undesirables?
The idea that everyone should vote is the biggest part of the problem.
Bigdaddy, Bill Redpath wrote this post but we haven’t yet managed to get the bylaw accurate for his posts.
There are so many different types of voting laws and voting problems, it’s tough to answer your question. But I always go back to knowing that when objective lists of the ten or twenty best countries in the world are listed (using objective criteria) virtually all of them use proportional representation. If I had a magic wand and could make just one change, it would be to convert the US to proportional representation, where virtually every vote counts.
““Ballot Access” should refer to the ability of political parties and candidates to appear on ballots, while “Voting Rights” should refer to the ability of eligible voters to actually cast votes.”
Exactly.
A censored ballot is a corrupt fascist ballot.
Censorship, the suppression of sharing information among individuals, has always been and remains just grounds for revolution.
@Max,
North Dakota does not have voter registration. With a largely rural population, everyone may have actually known everyone. If Fred didn’t show up to vote people might go check to see if he was OK.
When Ohio first instituted voter registration, it was only in larger cities. Registration day would be some weeks before election day. A voter would go to the polling place and register.
The reason for instituting a uniform election date for presidential elections (in the 1840s) was to curb the practice of pipelining, where voters could cross state lines to vote in two states on different days.
REALITY CHECK–
IN NEW AGE URBAN GHETTO CITIES —
EVEN TRYING TO KNOW A NEXT DOOR PERSON CAN BE FATAL.
TOO MANY URBAN GHETTO FELONS TO COUNT – KILLERS, HOME INVADERS, ARMED ROBBERS, ETC.
—
PR
APPV
TOTSOP
—-
WOULD HAVE SMALLER JUDIC DISTS AND MORE ELECTED CHIEF COPS –
WITH OVERALL STATE REGIME ASSIGNING MORE STATE COPS IN HIGH UN-SOLVED CRIME JUDIC DISTS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Spanish_general_election
1936-1939 FRANCO FOLKS COMING BAAACK INTO POWER ???
REMINDER-
A—L—L MAJOR GOVTS IN THE USA ARE A–N–T–I DEMOCRACY MINORITY RULE GERRYMANDER OLIGARCHIES –
SINCE 1776/1789.
—
USA H REPS/ SENATE
ALL 50 STATE LEGIS
MANY LOCAL LARGER POP COUNTIES/ CITIES/ ETC.
1/2 OR LESS VOTES X 1/2 RIGGED CRACKED/PACKED GERRYMANDER AREAS = 1/4 OR LESS CONTROL-
WITH SUPER-WORSE EXTREMIST PRIMARY MATH
ALL NOW TRYING TO GET A KILLER TYRANT USA PREZ VIA THE RIGGED MINORITY RULE USA 12 AMDT EC.
P–A–T
Thank you Richard. I agree with you 100% on proportional representation.
The vast majority of ghetto dwellers should not be qualified to vote. The remaining few who would still be qualified would be community leaders who would in fact know each other. It’s also false to presume that just because some people live in large cities it’s a given that they won’t know their neighbors. That’s a more recent development than urbanization, due to a number of factors such as the dramatic rise in crime for a variety of reasons such as mass importation of third world savages, liberal drug and crime policies, lack of prayer in public schools, easy divorce, and mass nonemergency government welfare distorting the social fabric for generations on end, among other things.
For many decades and even centuries before that, people in cities of every size usually lived in tight knit neighborhoods where people knew each other, just as they would in a small town or rural farming community. The only difference was these urban “villages” were right next to each other. Even the spread of multistory tenements didn’t change this basic social order. It took several generations of “progressive” government substitution of its own bureaucratic “solutions” for the vast variety of voluntary associations (extended families, churches, guilds, professional associations, fraternal societies, neighborhood associations, charities, and many others) that used to do a much better job and maintain a traditional social order, even in large and densely packed cities.
Of course, there were always criminal and semi-criminal elements, largely illiterate idiots, drifters, lunatics, paupers, unassimilated immigrants, etc. But they were a smaller portion of the population because government policies didn’t encourage their continuous proliferation and festering multigenerational social pathology metastasizing, and there were barriers which have since been unwisely done away with which kept such people from voting and electing politicians who pass policies which run counter to the interests of native born, law abiding, church going, property owning citizens.
This is why it’s a terrible idea to have every or nearly every adult being qualified to vote just by virtue of having lived to an age where nowadays most people have the mental attitudes and habits of children or adolescents, which a significant portion of them never outgrow no matter what age they survive to. Voting qualification should be much more discriminatory. Weeding out the people who can’t be bothered to show up in person to the courthouse to register and to the election place on election day is one of many good places to start.
AZ, catastrophizing nonsense as usual. Franco in 1936-9 had to take some stern measures to prevent Spain from becoming another Stalinist Russia, and perhaps all of Europe falling to the communist scum. His regime eventually liberalized to a very large extent, although quite possibly too slowly. It would be an exaggeration to even compare today’s Spanish conservatives to 1970s Franco, much less 1930s. But then that’s coming from the guy who thinks Trump is just like Hitler.
AZ is hitting the bottle way too early.
GHB bottle, I presume?
RWP makes sense on a lot of issues. It doesn’t make much sense to have easy ballot access and easy voting if you have lazy and illeterate voters. lol
Ever since the ancient Greeks, there has been a political tension between the people, and the elites. The constitutions of the Greek states had various methods of resolving this: some tending toward aristocracy, and others toward democracy, and some with mixed systems. In general, those who were able to provide military service constituted the popular assemblies, and those who could contribute more because they possessed horses and/or ships, became the officer corps of the military, and the chief candidates for the councils and magistrates. This continued into the Roman period, with the people who could be foot soldiers were represented in the plebian assemblies, and the elites dominated the Senate and the magistrates. Interestingly, there was an intermediate body called the Comitia Centuria, in which people were expressly divided by wealth classes, with those who possessed more wealth having more heavily weighted votes; this body appropriately was the body that voted on taxes.
In the Middle Ages, once the chaos of the barbarian invasions was over, there continued the division between the people and the elites, altho it was somewhat muted because a large mass of the population had been reduced to serfdom. However, freeman townsfolk were able to elect representatives to the Third Estate assemblies, such as the House of Commons, and the aristocrats were represented in elite bodies such as the House of Lords.
This actually continued into the US, with the writing of the Constitution. The House of Representatives was conceived as the popular assembly, and the Senate, which was indirectly elected by state legislatures, as the elite body. This was mirrored in the state constitutions, thru bicameralism, with the upper body of most state legislatures being chosen on a different, and more exclusive basis, than the lower body. But the passage of the 17th amendment mandated the popular election of Senators, and court rulings have gradually removed the distinctions between the lower and upper bodies of the state legislatures.
Show me a country and a time when a large portion of the population isn’t or wasn’t lazy and illiterate. There were times when elected governments did better, but they excluded large portions of the population from voting. In “direct democracy” Greek city states the voting citizens were a minority. Women, children, slaves, and foreigners (Greek men from other cities included) were not citizens and did not vote. Their legal status was well below that of citizens. These city states were also much smaller in population and physical size than modern nations.
Switzerland has been cited as an example by some, but there are many aspects of the Swiss system which may be more responsible for its relative success than the national initiative. The strong level of canton self government is one. Switzerland also made it more difficult for foreigners to permanently move to Switzerland and become citizens or even permanent residents for many years than other countries in Europe (much less the USA) and what especially discriminatory against undesirable types of immigrants. Also, not coincidentally, Switzerland was relatively late in giving women voting rights, with some cantons not doing so until 1960s/70s.
The early united States was another example. There were perhaps 3 million people between 13 colonies/states. Most of those saw their state rather than the US in the role which the US occupies in people’s minds now; the US has something closer to the role the EU has in the minds of Europeans in the EU nations today. The vast majority of the population were not voters – women, slaves, indentured servants, paupers and other non property owners, Indians not taxed, aliens, anyone under 21 at a time when the average life span was maybe 40.
The voting population was 100% or very close to it White and Christian, many things currently considered government matters were handled in other ways, and most government being at the local level by elite men who personally knew each other and voted by in person voice vote. The idea that the US could have achieved equal or greater greatness with everyone voting that is allowed to vote there today, or that it could be restored to greatness that way, should be much more vigorously examined. What is the so called scientific basis for this belief? It begs for peer review at the very least.
Science is the opposite of continuously dogmatic and unexamined assumptions. The fact that many things were far from perfect even in the 18th century US doesn’t tell us whether the political and government system changes there since then have been on balance for the better or worse. It would be very interesting to see what would gave happened if such changes as did take place had been averted, or even made in the opposite direction.
Are there any other examples of governments that were closer to the ideals of people here that we ought to examine in consideration, at any time and place in world history? Please put them into evidence so they can be taken into consideration here.
Walter Ziobro, exactly. The Greek and Roman system you describe had even more in common with my proposals than I realized. You pointed out several elements which I already had in my proposals, notably the ability to provide military service as a basis for voting, and the possession of property and wealth as a basis for greater status or voting representation, especially to votes on financial matters.
Some people here may think the systems of government you describe above would have done better with women, serfs, and even invading barbarians being allowed to vote. To me, this seems idiotic beyond my ability to describe, but I would be interested if even one person can rationally and logically defend such a belief, regardless of whether they hold it themselves or not.
MONARCH/OLIGARCH ELITE TYRANTS LOVE HAVING SLAVES / SERFS / — NOW TAX SLAVES – FOR 6,000 PLUS YEARS.
A-N-Y THING LEARNED FROM HAVING THE MULTIPLE INTERNATIONAL/CIVIL WARS STARTED BY MONARCH/OLIGARCH KILLER/ENSLAVER TYRANTS – ???
KG III 19 APR 1775 MASS COLONY, NAPOLEON, 1861 USA SLAVERS SHOT AT FT SUMPTER, LUNATIC KAISER BILL 1914, LUNATICS HITLER / MUSSOLINI / HIROHITO 1939-1941, ETC ETC ETC.
NOW USA TOO MANY LURKING WANNABEE TYRANTS TO COUNT —
COMMIE WOKE GANGSTERS / FASCIST GANGSTERS
MONARCH SUPER KILLERS / ENSLAVERS NOW OPEN IN RUSSIA, RED CHINA, N KOREA, IRAN, SYRIA, ETC.
THE MORE SMASHED FLAT MONARCH/OLIGARCH REGIMES THE FASTER AND THE BETTER.
—-
P
A
T
AZ said blah, blah, blah. How do we know what would be better or what would be worse, or indeed if there’s any way to know? Specious claims of “because science” are laughable if you begin with a rudimentary definition of science and work your way back.
Science is a method of inquiry based on reproducible experiments, peer review, and the active debate of opposing views and theories with the burden of proof of rigorously testing their claims. The false claims of unexamined authority are faith, not science. Faith certainly has its place, and a largely underappreciated one these days, but it requires a great deal of theological context which the AZ pronouncements lack. Even theology has church councils which hash it out over the years.
History has any number of horrible events and tyranny of a wide variety of sorts. This simple fact doesn’t tell us what would make things better and what would make them worse. Maybe nothing will make them better. Maybe technology or space aliens or divine intervention will solve our problems. Maybe Max proposal or AZ Proposal or one of a million others will make things better. How do we know?
You can jump from the kettle into the flame. The Cambodian monarchy before pol pot and the killing fields was doubtless tyrannical, but the Khmer Rouge took things from bad to dramatically worse. The Russian czars were notoriously repressive, but Lenin and Stalin and even the lesser communist tyrants who came after them made things far, far worse than any czars ever dreamed of doing, all in the name of ill thought out idealism and the refusal to properly weigh counterarguments and evidence that theory didn’t match reality.
If you’re going to make a case that something would be better rather than worse, make your case, and engage arguments about why you might be wrong as opportunities rather than threats. Alleged pronouncements from mount Olympus deserve only laughter and derision at best.