Our senior correspondent and resident Bigfoot expert Audre Myers reached out to me with a request: could I, she wondered, give a shout-out (my term, not hers) to a friend’s blog?
The friend is Scoop, a regular commenter over at Nebraska Energy Observer. Unbeknownst to yours portly, dear old Scoop has a blog with the somewhat unwieldy title Smoke of Satan & the Open Windows of Vatican II.
The fun of Halloween has passed. Now it’s on to the election, which is just two days away. The joyful gatherings of Halloween weekend might be the last bit of fun and togetherness for some time, depending on how things shake out this Tuesday.
I am praying fervently for a Trump victory, and for Republicans to maintain their control of the Senate and to retake the House. Such an outcome would mark a major repudiation of the Democrats’ radicalism. More importantly, it could save the Republic—or, at the very least, forestall its demise for another few years.
For this Lazy Sunday, then, I decided to look back at posts about elections from years past:
That’s it for this Sunday. Please, please go out and vote for Trump on Tuesday, especially if you’re in any of the swing States.
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
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It’s Election Day 2019! I’m sure there are all sorts of interesting elections happening all over the country, but for me, the big election is right in my backyard, in little Lamar, South Carolina (which just got a website!).
Lamar is holding elections for two at-large Town Council seats. There are two incumbents and two challengers, and the election is non-partisan (for what it’s worth, I cast my two votes for the challengers, in the Jacksonian spirit of rotation in office).
I like to vote early (though not often—that’s a federal crime, and since I’m not a Democrat or an illegal alien, I’d get in trouble for doing so), because I never know if I’ll be home by the time polls close. Polling in South Carolina always runs from 7 AM to 7 PM, which is a pretty substantial window. So, I was there right at 7 AM, and was the fifth person from my precinct to cast a ballot.
What was really surprising were the new voting machines, about which I have mixed feelings.
Blogger jonolan at Reflections from a Murky Pond has a post about Bernie Sanders’s recent suggestion that convicted, incarcerated prisoners should be able to vote. The piece, “Bernie’s Folsom Pledge,” points out not just the absurdity of such a position, but the devastating political outcomes it would have.
We all understand the former implicitly: incarcerated felons are paying their debt to society, so their usual rights—freedom of movement (now “arrested”), the ability to vote, etc.—are forfeit. There is a fruitful discussion to be had about when, and under what circumstances, former convicts might be restored their right to vote, but the notion that inmates should be able to cast ballots undermines the very concept of punitive imprisonment.
The latter point—what would the political impact be if we allowed prisoners to vote—is not considered as frequently. In part, that’s because the idea was, until relatively recently, completely ridiculous. But we live in an age in which what was once decent, traditional, and commonsensical (and, therefore, never seriously questioned or in need of articulate defense) is challenged constantly, if not already destroyed utterly, so we have to engage in mental exercises that were once entirely abstract and academic.
jonolan does a great service here in a very succinct post way. Here he details the terrifying impact a prison population could have on local elections:
Focus on the State, County, and Local elections.
Imagine, if you will, the great harm that incarcerated felons could do in those elections, especially ones for: Police Chiefs, Sheriffs, District Attorneys, Prosecutors, and/or Judges. Remember, these are elections with a much smaller electorate and, hence, the population of a prison there could and likely would greatly impact the outcome(s).
Convicted felons voting for their jailers and captors: only slightly removed from the old cliche of the insane running the asylum. Turnout in these county elections (as sheriffs are usually elected at the county level) is so low that sometimes even a dozen (or fewer) votes can swing the outcome.
According to World Prison Brief, the prison population in the United States is around 2,121,600. I couldn’t find the average population of a typical American prison—perhaps a more patient and enterprising reader can—but imagine in a rural, low-population county what impact the prison population could have. Granted, prisoners might not even be registered to vote in the county in which they find themselves incarcerated (opening up another question: where, how, and in what precinct would prisoners be registered to vote?), but if they were, they could easily elect ne’er-do-wells to key law enforcement positions.
jonolan also points out the constitutional error implicit in extending voting rights to criminals:
Voting, be it for offices within each state or for elected federal offices is a matter that is wholly within the purview of each state. The federal government can only step in to prevent certain broad abuses, e.g., denying the “right” to vote based on race (15th Amendment), sex (19th Amendment), or advanced age (26th Amendment). As such, it is grossly inappropriate for any Presidential candidate to weigh in on this matter and to use it as a plank in his campaign’s platform.
As such, Bernie’s pro-prisoner proposal would require a constitutional amendment. That would mean proposal by 2/3rds of both chambers of Congress, then ratification by 3/4ths of the States. Of course, that’s Bernie’s shield: he knows it’s insane (and, as jonolan argues, it’s probably an attempt to shore up his iffy support among black voters), but he can call for it, virtually risk-free, while gaining some brownie points with progressives.
The whole proposal is yet another tiresome example of the destructive ideology of progressivism. In its endless thirst for new “rights” to grant and extend—always at the behest of government, of course—the Left forever pushes beyond any semblance of an orderly, sane society. It would be humorous if they weren’t so effective.
Today in South Carolina, hundreds of thousands of voters will head to the polls to vote in either the Democratic or Republican primaries. In the spirit of this time-honored and precious American right, I’d like to explore the Republican Party’s history of defending and expanding the franchise.
Democrats are fond of accusing Republicans of a “war on women” and of attempting to “silence minority voters.” But a brief glance at the historical record suggests otherwise.
Republicans were key in pushing for the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which granted all men, regardless of race, the right to vote. Ratified in 1870, the amendment immediately faced resistance in the heavily-Democratic South of the Reconstruction era. Both white and black Republicans in the South faced persistent repression at the hands of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Redeemers, who used intimidation and even violence to prevent Republicans from voting.
In response, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Enforcement Acts, which included the Ku Klux Klan Act, in 1870-1871. These acts made it a federal offense to suppress voters through violence or intimidation, and ensured Republican victories in a number of States in the post-bellum Deep South.
Fifty years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment, Republicans once again pushed to expand this franchise, this time through the longsuffering women’s suffrage movement. The Republican-controlled government of Wyoming first extended the right to vote to women in all elections in 1869, and a number of States—mostly in the Old West—followed suit, but Democratic recalcitrance had stalled further efforts towards women’s suffrage in other States.
While progressive Democratic President Woodrow Wilson reluctantly came to support women’s suffrage as a wartime measure—after initially opposing giving women the right to vote—the major push for women’s suffrage was a Republican one. The vote over ratification came down to a single Tennessee State legislator, Harry T. Burn, who cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of ratification—making Tennessee the required 36th State to ratify and, therefore, amend the Constitution—after his mother wrote to admonish him to “Hurray and vote for suffrage. Don’t forget to be a good boy.” The son dutifully complied, and women all over the nation gained the right to vote.
Democrats deride sensible voter ID laws and other attempts to clean up elections as insidious attempts to suppress minority voters, while steadfastly ignoring their own checkered past of overt, often violent, suppression.
Fortunately, the Republican Party has consistently stood firm against such suppression, expanding and protecting the franchise for millions more Americans.
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