They are:
- Vote-by-mail and Early Voting have to be stopped, dead in their tracks, by a federal law if nothing else. The only way to properly record a vote is for an individual to appear on Election Day before his precinct election committee, be properly identified, and then cast a ballot in person. And then get their thumb dipped in indelible purple ink for good measure. Trust, but verify, as President Reagan used to say.
- The infusion of national money into state races needs to be stopped, dead in its tracks, ditto. If you can’t raise enough money in your own state to run a decent election campaign, that may be a subtle hint that people in your state aren’t interested in having you represent them. For instance, let me name three failed Dem candidates who relied on out-of-state money for their campaigns, AND LOST BIGLY: Wendy “Pink Sneakers” Davis, in TX-21, who got soundly trounced by Chip Roy (6 points); Jamie Harrison, Senate candidate in South Carolina, who got trounced even worse by Lindsey Graham 2.0 (15 points); and Amy McGrath in Kentucky, who got handed a 20-point walloping by Cocaine Mitch McConnell, who handily won a seventh term in the Senate. As Graham put it in a speech last night, “And to all the liberals in California and New York, you wasted a lot of money. This is the worst return on investment in the history of American politics,” McConnell could say much the same; I think I read that between the two races, Graham’s and McConnell’s, nearly $200 million was spent by the challengers for what amounted to little more than a mess of pottage and a “nice try, fool”.
- The repeal of Motor Voter, viz., the parts of 52 U.S.C. §§ 20501–20511 which relate to what constitutes a voter registration agency. There are plenty of ways to register to vote without being handed a registration form at the BMV. I registered to vote in my high school commons when I turned 18.
- Finally, anyone who commits vote fraud of any kind should be lined up against the wall and shot as a traitor — after a scrupulously fair trial and guilty verdict, of course.
Maybe we could all work together on that.
ADDENDUM: Just looked at PJ and apparently Susan Collins (eh…) eked out a 9-point win against her challenger Sara Gideon, another Democrat who benefited from millions in out-of-state cash that in the end was wasted.
TO BE CLEAR, I’m not saying the GOP didn’t benefit from national money, too; what I AM saying is that out-of-state donations should be banned outright, no matter where they come from or to whom they are directed. The big national super-PACs need to be broken up and burned to the ground. I’ve written on this in the past, and it’s no less true today than it was then.
Give a politician money and you merely empower him to put you in chains.
ANOTHER ADDENDUM, 11/5: According to the Washington Free Beacon, the “Democrats spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars in a futile bid to pick up longshot Senate seats in Kentucky, South Carolina, and Texas.” Hubris, I’d like to introduce you to Nemesis.