On December 15, the Kansas Supreme Court unanimously reinstated a lawsuit against a 2021 law that makes it a crime if someone gives someone the impression that he or she is an election official. League of Women Voters of Kansas v Schwab, 124,378. Here is the opinion. The lower court had said the plaintiffs don’t have standing, but the Supreme Court disagreed.
NO KS GENERAL LAW AGAINST IMPERSONATION OF ANY BODY ???
To what, extent are such impressions, at least potentially in the eye of the beholder? Is it possible to be criminalized for perhaps inadvertently creating an impression to some other people?
I could be in a lot of trouble if I was held liable for what other people may think of me. I have no control over other people’s thoughts, even when I’m their subject. Thus , it’s a dangerous precedent to criminalize what impressions one might leave with others.
I suppose gives someone the impression can be interpreted to mean , consciously and purposely in a provable way attempting to mislead. On the other hand it could just be that the person left with an impression is the source of the misunderstanding. In many cases the truth is somewhere in between.
For example, in the past I’ve helped with voter registration drives, a sin I should atone by conducting voter deregistration drives now. At the time I naively believed, as many people still do, That more people should be eligible to vote, that as many eligible voters as possible should be registered, and that all registered voters should be encouraged to exercise That option at every possible opportunity to do so.
Only continued exposure to massively prevalent utter ignorance and stupidity among most actual voters, worse on average among registered voters who rarely if ever actually vote, worse still among eligible voters who are not registered, and even worse than That about those not eligible but deemed by many to be unjustly deprived of That tight – disabused me of such widely held fallacies.
Now, I tend to see it the other way around: as a general rule of thumb * the more barriers to entry to the voting booth, the fewer people registered or eligible, the more stringent the registration criteria, the more frequently the rolls are purged , the better the results on average are of elections actually conducted.
* I’ve read That the expression rule of thumb originally referred to how thick a stick a man could beat his wife with without it being illegal domestic abuse. I don’t know whether this was an actual law, but it seems like an excellent idea. It should be resurrected, or implemented finally at last, depending on whether it ever previously actually had been before.
Regardless , at one time I did participate in ostensibly civic minded efforts to save the souls of unvoting sinners by bringing them to the voting communion and confessional. Invariably, at least some nontrivial percentage of the public seemed to be under the mistaken impression that I and others involved in such efforts were elections bureaucrats, perhaps because they were unaware that anyone else was allowed to assist with voter registration.
Was it my fault these people held such erroneous impressions, theirs, or a mix of both? Certainly, having become aware of this phenomenon, I could have been more proactive in disabusing anyone and everyone I encountered from even potentially making such an error. However, it would have cut into my time and made me less effective in the mission at hand.
I never, to my knowledge, encouraged such misunderstanding either, but perhaps may have somehow done so without intent. If anyone actually asked, I answered honestly and explained That becoming qualified to assist in voter registration was an easy process available to ordinary citizens regardless of where if any place at all they drew their checks from.
Since then, at least in most places, it’s been made even easier than That by getting rid of the requirement to at least take a one day short education course to become a deputy registrar. Needless to say that change has only had a deleterious effect on average election results. Even more disastrous has been the cutting edge innovation of making registration opt out rather than opt in. This evil and pernicious growing practice in blew states is making them blow even more.
All that however is besides the point. The pertinent question to this specific discussion is whether someone today in the position I was then is perhaps criminally mistakenly creating an impression due to an error on the part of the impressed.
If such a precedent is permitted, one can envision all sorts of less than pleasant criminalizations to follow : for example, that one leaves an impression of posing a threat, regardless of lack of basis for the view, any actual attempt to create it, or perhaps even awareness that it had been created inadvertently.
It would follow then that an entirely innocuous use, say of a term such as niggardly, might lead to criminal prosecution for using a slur with the intent to provoke violence, even though no actual slur was uttered an no intent to provoke violence was actually in place, but merely due to the ignorant and ill informed impressions of others.
Or, for example, it could lead to display or utterance of the slogan White Lives Matter criminalized, because in the impressions of some who are exposed to it it’s meant to offend and oppress an allegedly already oppressed minority – even though nothing is said or implied that nonWhite lives don’t matter, no actual violence or property destruction is associated with the White Lives Matter movement (unlike black lives matter, closely associated with many riots, disturbances, massive property damage, and violent attacks in law enforcement) or the fact that black on White homicide, and violent and property crimes in general, are far more prevalent than the other way around, or the fact that in the real world today the White race is at far more risk of extinction through genocide than other races are.
Despite all this, one could then be charged with therapeutically threatening and provoking negroes and other non Whites to violence because in their erroneous impression it conveys an unstated position that only White lives matter, when that is in fact neither states nor implied, and even if it were,should remain a matter of free speech, regardless of how offended or provoked some overly educated, very precious special little snowflakes might feel.
Terroristically , not therapeutically. Damn Google and all its evil works to hell for all eternity!
Equally, however actually threatened or offended I perhaps ought feel feel by the Black Lives Matter slogan – far more justifiably so, given the aforementioned large scale actual violence, property damage, and actual terrorist threats associated closely with that slogan – nevertheless I don’t see justification of criminalizing the mere use or display of the slogan alone without any additional actions to actually provoke violence or threaten anyone.
AMERICA FOR AMERICANS — SUPER-DANGEROUS FOR BRITS IN 1775-1776 ???
America First doesn’t mean the other countries have to be wiped off the face of the other. They just need to publicly acknowledge their inferiority .
Face of the earth
Google should have its buildings demolished and the land they stood on turned into nuclear waste dumps and all its employees and shareholders publicly executed in the most painful and humiliating ways imaginable with their body’s left up for vultures to feast inn