The View from Right Field

Voting Rights Bills: Democrats Should Be Careful What They Wish For. They Might Get It.

Joe Biden and Democrats are pushing the Senate to kill the filibuster for their voting rights bills, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, and allow the bills to be passed by a majority vote; i.e., 50 Democrats plus Vice President Kamala Harris.

But I wonder if they have thought this through.  If they abolish the filibuster and pass their bills setting up national rules for presidential elections and elections to Congress by a majority vote, what is going to stop Republicans from passing their national election rules in 2025 if Republicans win Congress and the presidency in 2024?

President Biden: Just Because I Disagree With You Doesn’t Mean I Am on Jefferson Davis’s Side.

In a speech in Atlanta on Tuesday, Joe Biden said, in urging the passage of various election law bills in the Senate: “Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?" 

I have news for President Biden.  Just because I don’t agree with him on those bills, doesn’t mean I am on Jefferson Davis’s side.  When I was taking American history classes in high school in the mid-1960s, my heroes were Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.  When I toured Tennessee in 1977, I went to the Shiloh and Chattanooga battlefields.  In Virginia in 1997, I went to the Wilderness and Appomattox.  When I returned to Virginia in 2002, I was appalled that streets and roads were still named after Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.  When other people were telling me how noble Robert E. Lee was, I saw a man who had abandoned his country and committed treason.

Supreme Court or Supreme Election Board?

Three weeks ago, I asked “Will Courts Be Changing Voting Rules Right Up to Election Day?”  Since then, some of the more extreme examples I mentioned in that post have been walked back.  On Monday night, the Supreme Court upheld, by a 5 to 3 vote, a decision by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals that overturned a federal district court decision in Wisconsin to extend the period for getting absentee ballots back to the election board until six days after Election Day.  (Wisconsin law provided that absentee ballots had to be received by Election Day.)   

What I wanted to talk about here are a couple of things Justice Elena Kagan said in her dissent in that decision.  Justice Kagan said: “As the COVID pandemic rages, the Court has failed to adequately protect the Nation's voters." and "[T]he Court's decision will disenfranchise large numbers of responsible voters in the midst of hazardous pandemic condition.”

Will Courts Be Changing Voting Rules Right Up to Election Day?

Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal had an editorial listing what I assume are just some of the lawsuits going on across the country to change voting rules for this November.  In some of these lawsuits, judges have extended the date by which ballots that are postmarked as of election day can arrive at the election authority and still be counted.  In others, courts have held that ballots received by some new court-set deadline are to be counted even if they don’t have a postmark.  The deadline for receiving ballots has been extended a few days in some states.  In Michigan, it has been extended until two weeks after the election. 

Which raises the question: Who is supposed to decide the rules for elections these days?  It used to be that legislatures would pass laws setting rules for voting; i.e., when ballots needed to be postmarked; when they had to be received; etc.  But things have changed.  Now it seems like courts are doing the deciding in a lot of states.  The question is: Why?

Vote By Mail Is Easy. Just Do It Early.

According to Democrats and some of the media, Donald Trump is going to use the Postal Service to mess up vote-by-mail this year.  In fact, last month the House Democrats tried to give the Postal Service $25 billion to make sure they had enough money for the election.  Of course, that was pretty much political optics, as opposed to really trying to help, and fix, the Postal Service.  But throwing money at the bureaucracy (or at least phony attempts to do so) is one way to make yourself feel good – and maybe look good.

But, in any case, if President Trump is trying to get the Postal Service to mess up voting by mail this year, it looks like he is about as good on that as he has been at lots of other things he does – or doesn’t do.  Just this past weekend I received this notice from the Postal Service giving me suggestions on getting my vote-by-mail ballot back in on time (and including a link to find out what the rules are in my state):

I’m Hoping for a Landslide Come November

I hope the election in November is a landslide.  In saying that, I’m not saying who I want to win (you can find that elsewhere).  I’m just saying I just hope it’s not close because I’m not sure we, as a nation, can handle another close election.

I am especially worried because the pandemic means voting is going to be very different this year.  There’s going to be a lot more vote-by-mail.  In person voting will probably be different, too (who knows how many polling places we’ll have open).  I’m afraid there will be a lot of confusion, among voters and among election workers.  Plus who knows if the election authorities are ready for an election as different as this one will be.

Where Did All This Partisanship Come From?

I will assume most people will not say that it started with Donald Trump.  He certainly is bad, partisanship-wise,¹ but it didn’t start with him.  Some people might go back to Joe McCarthy or Richard Nixon,² but I’m thinking of something more recent.  Republicans might point to Ted Kennedy’s attacks on Robert Bork in 1986, when President Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court.³  Democrats might point to attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s (the “vast right-wing conspiracy”).  And so on.  But I am going to suggest something else.

Sometimes it is hard to remember how you felt about a particular event at the time because things that happened afterwards color your recollection of how you felt then.  Even reading contemporaneous news articles about something in the past will sometimes surprise you because you know what has happened since and the article doesn’t. 

Now Is the Time to Get Ready for the Election in November

Last weekend The Wall Street Journal had an article by Nicholas Persily, “It’s Not Too Late to Save the 2020 Election,” on things we need to do to avoid (minimize-?) problems next November.  Professor Persily listed nine things:

1. Provide more federal funding and support.
2. Ensure that schools remain open as polling places.
3. Keep voters from having to wait in line.
4. Bolster confidence in voting by mail.
5. Encourage election and postal officials to coordinate their efforts as soon as possible.
6. Insist that the big tech companies do their part.
7. Deploy tools to help predict voter turnout.
8. Anticipate problems with disinformation and cybersecurity.
9. Refrain from declaring a winner on election night.

Here are the key things I got from the article, with an Illinois perspective.

George Marshall on Character

In a speech on “Marshall and His Generals” at the George Marshall Foundation on July 20, 2017, Dr. Stephen Taaffe talked about the four criteria that Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall used to pick the high-ranking officers¹ for the U.S. Army during World War II.²  Let me mention them, in reverse order:

1. General Marshall wanted to know them personally or know somebody who knew them personally.

2. Age.  (Sorry.  I realize it is politically incorrect today, but General Marshall didn’t want older generals.)

Three Cheers for Virginia: They’re Dumping Touch-Screen Voting Machines

Three cheers for Virginia because the Virginia Board of Elections has ordered that electronic, touch-screen voting machines cannot be used in the statewide elections coming up in November.¹  Earlier this year, in a demonstration at DEF CON in Las Vegas, a touch-screen voting machine previously used in Virginia was hacked in less than two hours.  Instead of touch-screen voting, Virginia will use paper ballots counted by scanning machines in November.

This seems so logical, even before the reports of Russian hacking attempts in last year’s election, that the decision is an obvious one.  Touch-screen electronic voting has no paper backup.  You touch the screen, your vote is counted, and poof, any evidence of how you voted disappears.²  There is no way to recount the votes.  There is no way to know for sure that when you touch Candidate A, your vote wasn’t counted for Candidate B.