Tag Archives: voting laws

Moving Toward More Honest Elections

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Periodically I post articles that I do not understand. This is one of them. I am posting it because I think it is an important step to end some of the problems that we have had in recent elections.

On Tuesday, The Epoch Times reported:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday vacated an appeals court decision that required Pennsylvania to count mail-in ballots even if there is no date on the envelope.

“The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit with instructions to dismiss the case as moot,” wrote Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson (pdf), siding with David Ritter, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for a judgeship.

They also threw out a U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling that allowed the counting of mail-in ballots in the race that Ritter had sought to remove because voters did not write the date on the ballots. Ritter lost his 2021 bid to serve on the Lehigh County Court of Common Pleas after 257 mail-in ballots that didn’t have dates were counted.

Pennsylvania Republican legislators and conservatives filed amicus briefs saying the 3rd Circuit’s ruling threatened the integrity of the 2022 midterm elections.

But the Supreme Court’s action on Tuesday means that the 3rd Circuit ruling cannot be used as a precedent in the three states covered by this regional federal appellate court—Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware—to allow the counting of ballots with minor flaws such as the voter failing to fill in the date. Vacating the ruling does not change Ritter’s loss in his race.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article.

In the months preceding the 2020 election, many states altered their voting laws because of the fear generated during the Covid pandemic. Many of those laws were changed in ways that were not in compliance with the constitutions of their state. A number of court cases since the election (and some before the election) have reversed those changes and required the states involved to follow their own constitutions.

UPDATE:  Pennsylvania says it will ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling (article here).

The Media Spin On Voter Fraud

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If you really listen closely to what the media is saying about the changes in voting laws some states are making to prevent fraud, you would think that any measure that disenfranchises fraudulent voters is anti-democratic.

CNS News posted an article today about the changes some states are making to their voting laws and the Democrat party’s reaction to those changes.

The article reports:

“We’re moving ahead on two very important issues, voting rights and Build Back Better,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told a news conference on Tuesday.

“Before the end of the month, the Senate will vote on crucial voting rights legislation. Republican state legislatures across the country are passing the most draconian voting restrictions since the beginning of Jim Crow, potentially disenfranchising tens of millions of Americans,” Schumer claimed:

So lets take a closer look at this disenfranchising idea. The article includes a list of some of these ‘draconian measures’ included in the Texas reform bill:

— Death certificates would be filed monthly with the voter registrar and secretary of state so fraudsters can’t vote in a dead person’s name.

— The bill protects poll watchers who must be close enough to “observe the conduct of an election and call to the attention of an election officer any observed or suspected irregularity or violation of law in the conduct of the election.”

— A voter may deliver a marked ballot in person to the early voting clerk’s office only while the polls are open on Election Day. A voter who delivers a marked ballot in person must present an acceptable form of identification. (In-person voting in Texas already requires ID, such as a Texas driver’s license, a government-issued identification card, a Texas handgun license, an election identification certificate, a U.S. military ID card, a U.S. citizenship certificate, or a U.S. passport.)

— A person, other than an election officer, who assists a voter at the polls — or who helps with mail-in ballots — must prove who they say they are, why they are helping, and their relationship to the voter. In-person assistants must take an oath, swearing that “I will not suggest, by word, sign, or gesture, how the voter should vote…” People who assist with mail-in ballots must say whether they received or accepted any form of compensation from a candidate, campaign, or political committee in exchange for providing assistance, which would be illegal.

— The bill makes it an offense to vote or attempt to vote in an election in which the person is ineligible to vote; knowingly votes or attempts to vote twice; votes a ballot belonging to another person or impersonates another person; votes or attempts to vote in Texas after voting for the same federal nominee in another state;

— The bill makes it an offense to alter ballots cast by someone else; cast a ballot under false pretenses; fail to count valid votes; count invalid votes; and mislead an election official.

— The bill bars compensation or any other benefit for vote harvesting and it bars solicitation and distribution of applications to vote by mail. Eligible voters wishing to vote by mail must request their own ballot applications.

That doesn’t sound like draconian voting restrictions to me–it sounds like common-sense measures to prevent voter fraud.

The Fat Lady Hasn’t Sung Yet, Despite What The Media Is Telling You

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Wisconsin is one of the battleground states in the 2020 presidential election. It seems that all is not well in counting votes in Wisconsin.

Just the News posted the following today:

The Constitution allows only for state legislatures to change the ways elections are conducted, but memos show Wisconsin election supervisors made three substantial changes in 2020 that impact potentially tens of thousands of ballots in a battleground state that Joe Biden won by just 20,000.

Records reviewed by Just the News show that an executive branch agency called the Wisconsin Election Commission:

    • permitted local county election clerks to cure spoiled ballots by filling in missing addresses for witnesses even though state law invalidates any ballot without a witness address.
    • exempted as many as 200,000 citizens from voter ID rules by allowing them to claim the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to be “indefinitely confined.”
    • failed to purge 130,000 names from outdated voter rolls as required by law.

The question now is whether those changes — in particular the instructions allowing clerks to cure ballots with missing information — will open the door for the courts to intervene as President Trump looks to contest ballot practices in multiple battleground states. The Trump campaign is seeking a recount in Wisconsin.

“This is a complication thing about elections like this,” said Derek Muller, a professor of law at the Iowa School of Law and an expert in legal election matters. “I’ve seen it in a lot of jurisdictions, what might be sort of a technical violation of the statute, in this case encouragement to county clerks about how to use their judgment on whether or not to cure a ballot.”

The law was changed by the Wisconsin Elections Commission with a directive in October. Their directive was contrary to state law.

There are also some other questions:

Earlier in the fall, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard arguments from a conservative group arguing that around 130,000 voters should be purged from the voter rolls due to their having moved in between elections. 

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty had argued that the Wisconsin Elections Commission was bound by law to remove the voters whose addresses it could not verify. The commission had asked to delay the removal until after the election, citing concerns that some voters might be improperly removed from the rolls. 

A circuit court judge had ruled last year that the elections commission was required to remove the tens of thousands of voters that had been targeted for removal. The commission at the time refused to do so, leading to their being held in contempt of court. 

I think we need a do-over in some states.