The Republican party is on the brink of dealing a major blow to Iowa’s traditional caucus system, with the process’ critics pointing to recent battles over military voting rights to make the case for ending traditional nominating contest. Chris Brown, Chairman of the Young Republican Federation of Alabama and a member of the Republican Convention’s Rules Committee, is expected introduce a measure tomorrow requiring states to use “every means practicable” to ensure that military voters can cast ballots in any process used in the Republican presidential nominating process, according to a person involved in the effort. The measure will be seconded by influential Ohio GOP chair Bob Bennett, who has been a member of the RNC for more than two decades, the source said. Caucuses — by definition in-person voting systems — would not satisfy the proposed rule, requiring dramatic changes to the process in Iowa and other caucus states, if not their outright abandonment. “The Rule will simply guarantee the right of military voters and wounded warriors to vote in the process of selecting the delegates who will choose our party’s presidential nominee,” wrote former RNC Chairman and former VA Secretary Jim Nicholson in an email to members of the Rules Committee, which was obtained by BuzzFeed, asking that they end “the inexcusable practice of disenfranchising military voters in our party’s presidential delegate selection process.” More fascinating details at BuzzFeed.
Author Archives: J Christian Adams
Washington Times on DOJ Civil Rights Division Hiring Policy
“Holder’s ‘severe mental deficiency'”
“You don’t have to have a severe intellectual disability to work at the Justice Department. But it helps. . . But the policy states that the Cabinet department run by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. must “achieve a work force from all segments of society,” which includes those who are teetering on the edge of sanity.”
Logan Churchill of True the Vote KO’s the Nation
Makes you wonder what sort of juicy general liability policy the Nation carries against defamation. Ouch:
Logan Churchwell, Public Relations Director for True the Vote fired back at the comments made by the liberal reporters [at the Nation]. “This is yet another futile attempt to stereotype a movement made up of thousands of Americans, many of whom are retired teachers and veterans, as something to be afraid of,” Churchwell told Red Alert. “Our national network of volunteer poll watchers are armed with notepads and smiles, not nightsticks and snarls. Accusations of intimidation have proven to be illogical and without any objective evidence. Although repetition of falsehoods in the press has a tendency to shape conventional wisdom, the attempts by Mr. Berman and his ilk are only showing a diminishing rate of return. A growing majority of Americans demand election integrity through a variety of measures. True the Vote stands ready to help deliver, despite the needless nail-biting of 50 people chatting on a webcam.
Former Voting Section Chief Reviews Who’s Counting (and errors in another election book)
Read the review of Who’s Counting by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky by a former chief of the Voting Section at the Department of Justice here at Amazon. Also see what he has to say about errors in another election law book published by an academic press regarding overlapping issues:
“Readers who wish to obtain information about enforcement of voting laws in the United States have two recently published choices: Who’s Counting by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky and Voting Wars by Rick Hasen. Who’s Counting gives an accurate depiction of the serious enforcement problems that have arisen because Liberal /Left ideologues in the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ have chosen not to enforce voting laws in a race-neutral manner. In addition, Who’s Counting explores and explains the voting processes that will influence and may play a decisive role in this year’s presidential election. The authors’ descriptions of voting fraud expose the shallowness of voting fraud deniers’s claims and make clear how voting fraud both diminishes voter confidence in the voting process and dilutes the votes of legal voters.
Because of personal experiences, I know that Hasen’s Voting Wars is not a reliable discussion of issues “
Virginia Voter Fraud?
“Military set to log worst voting participation ever”
The Washington Examiner explores how low military voter participation can go.
You can forget about the impact of the military vote in the 2012 presidential elections. The reason: servicemembers aren’t applying for absentee ballots and the Pentagon isn’t doing much to help them. “This is immensely disappointing,” said Eric Eversole, founder of the Military Voter Protection Project. “Election Day 2012 could result in an all-time historic low for military voter participation.” Eversole’s group Tuesday released a report showing that applications by service members in states with high numbers of military residents is in the very low percentages. In Virginia, just 1,746 of 126,251 active military and their spouses, or 1.4 percent, have requested absentee ballots. In North Carolina, the percentage is 1.7 percent, in Alaska 5.9 percent, Ohio 3.3 percent. And it’s a continuation of a bad trend. Eversole told Secrets that in 2008, 30 percent of the military voted. That dropped to 15 percent in 2010. By comparison, 60 percent of the general population voted in 2008 and 40 percent two years later
PA Gov to DOJ: Fish or Cut Bait
Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Last week, Commonwealth Court upheld the new law that requires photo IDs. And last week, too, Corbett administration General Counsel James D. Schultz fired off a letter to Justice telling it in no uncertain terms that its behavior is out of legal bounds if not politically motivated. . . . The AG’s words and deeds give every impression that, on behalf of the Obama re-election campaign, he wants to preserve a loosey-goosey system that invites fraud and turns a blind eye to it. As Mr. Schultz might have preferred to have written: “Bring it on.”
“Attorney General Eric Holder’s race-baiting Department of Justice has been rattling the chains of the Ghost of Jim Crow Past ever since the Keystone State passed its voter identification measure. The intimation is — and one reinforced with the cudgel of a possible federal civil rights lawsuit held high — that the new law is designed to suppress minority voting.
DOJ “Recruits Dwarfs, Schizophrenics, and the ‘Intellectually Disabled’”
PJ Tatler. Seriously.
Virginia Senator: “DOJ Supports Voter Suppression”
Ooops. This wasn’t supposed to happen. DOJ’s opposition to Voter ID stoked the civil rights base. We heard from the Attorney General how it was a poll tax, 9th Circuit caselaw notwithstanding. We heard how it was the second coming of Jim Crow. That the Justice Department exists to remove barriers to the ballot box – on and on and on. The base loved it.
Then Virginia happened, and soon so will New Hampshire. In Virginia the DOJ approved a voter ID law that the Washington Post opposed. The base is suddenly concerned.
Consider Virginia Senator Locke. He says DOJ is aiding voter suppression. More to come. New Hampshire is next. Once you decide to ride a tiger, it can be a wild unpredictable, high risk ride.
New study shows military voting participation rates plummeting to all-time lows
Link to a Military Voter Participation Project study here.
This report reveals a bleak picture for military voters for the upcoming 2012 election as rates of participation are a fraction of that in 2008. This study is a wealth of information on military voting participation rates in the battleground states and some of the causes of that sharp drop. Some of the drop is directly related to a lack of implementation of key parts of the MOVE Act by the Department of Defense and a failure to fully enforce the MOVE Act by the Department of Justice.
In the coming days, ELC will provide some analysis of the different parts of the study.