We recently discussed a federal court upholding the Georgia election law as constitutional, rejecting challenges based on voter suppression by a group associated with Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. President Biden has denounced pre-2020 and post-2020 changes to the state election laws as not just “Jim Crow on steroids” but “Jim Eagle,” an awkward effort to suggest something more scary than Jim Crow. However, some of us pointed out that provisions criticized by the President are found in many blue states, including his own state of Delaware. Now, the Delaware Supreme Court has rejected a Democratic universal mail-in voting law as unconstitutional.
The Delaware Supreme Court ruled on Friday that a state law enacting universal mail-in voting violated the state’s constitution. At issue was the Vote-by-Mail statute under which Democrats sought to expand the categories of absentee voters. However, Article V, Section 4A of the Delaware Constitution is explicit on those categories. The provision states with specificity the grounds for such absentee voting:
§4A. General laws for absentee voting.
Section 4A. The General Assembly shall enact general laws providing that any qualified elector of this State, duly registered, who shall be unable to appear to cast his or her ballot at any general election at the regular polling place of the Election District in which he or she is registered, either because of being in the public service of the United States or of this State, or his or her spouse or dependents when residing with or accompanying him or her, because of the nature of his or her business or occupation, because of his or her sickness or physical disability, because of his or her absence from the district while on vacation, or because of the tenets or teachings of his or her religion, may cast a ballot at such general election to be counted in such election district.
The legislature decided to simply ignore the constitutional provision. It is a standard canon of construction that “the expression of one thing is the exclusion of the other” (“Expressio unius est exclusio alterius”).
President Biden’s claims about the Georgia law have been refuted, including by the Washington Post. Indeed, not only has the President misrepresented the law but Delaware has some provisions more restrictive than Georgia’s law.
Now it appears that universal mail-in voting is barred in the state. Does that mean that “Jim Eagle” has landed in Delaware? No. The Supreme Court is clearly correct and the legislature knowingly violated the Constitution. Indeed, the Governor John Carney and Democratic sponsors were warned at the time that it was unconstitutional. If they want universal mail-in voting, they will have to change, not simply ignore, their constitution.
“Again, you do not seem to live in the real world.
If you want you can look up the track record and CV of all of Trump’s lawyers – nearly all are significantly more qualified than those at DOJ or FBI.”
LOL!! You seem to be out of the loop.
“Everyone’s saying no”: Trump hires Florida insurance lawyer as top attorneys refuse to work for him”
https://www.salon.com/2022/08/17/everyones-saying-no-hires-florida-insurance-lawyer-as-top-attorneys-refuse-to-work-for-him/
Trump’s lawyers handling the NARA and DOJ document case are incompetent and have zero experience in dealing with classified documents or national defense issues
“Trump’s lawyers handling the NARA and DOJ document case are incompetent and have zero experience in dealing with classified documents or national defense issues”
You know this? How?
There is a history of lawyers taking unpopular cases, political or otherwise. The case occurring is that lawyers are now afraid of being “canceled”. That is the only major reason for a lawyer not to represent Trump. The only other significant reasons are their own animosity or exposure to their lack of abilities, both historical reasons.
Everything else that you say is relatively unimportant and mentioned not because they are valid assumptions. You say anything that comes to your head, even if it conflicts with something that came before.
https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/109375/documents/HHRG-116-GO02-20190501-SD015.pdf
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud-print/search?state=TX
Pretty good.
Those on the left who wish to pretend that election fraud is rare or nonexistent are ignorant of history and human nature.
In the US 19th century election fraud was very large scale and commonplace. In 2001 when the HAV act resulted in decommissioning all mechanical voting machines, very few were found that did not have a gear or two filed off to alter the vote in some long past election, and they had been randomly altering elections ever since. It is well known that Lyndon Johnson won his first Senate election by stuffing 80,000 ballots. Throughout the world most of us are aware that election fraud is common place.
Yet the left beleives that some how magically today election fraud has just disappeared.
The very laws – even state constitutional provisions that were violated in 2020 were put in place to end the massive fraud that took place in the 19th century.
All that said election fraud today is not actually that commonplace. But unlike the belief of the left – that is not the result of magic.
It is the consequence of laws, incentives, and circumstances.
People do not engage in election fraud if they are likely to be caught.
They do not do so if the fraud is likely to be found out – even if they are not caught.
They do not do so typically in elections where there is a clear leader before the election.
They do not tend to do so when the fraud involves large numbers of people who are aware of the fraud.
Small scale fraud may occur in narrow elections in rural areas, but large scale fraud is only possible in urban areas.
Fraud in primaries tends to be more common than in general elections.
Fraud is less common the better laws are enforced and the simpler the election is.
My interest in election fraud started with the 2000 election.
The presidential election was decided by a few hundred votes in Florida.
I do not directly know the extent of fraud in Florida in 2000.
But I would be completely shocked if there were not atleast 1000 fraudulent votes from EACH party.
Further it was obvious after the election that operatives within each party were kicking themselves for not pushing a few more fraudulent votes.
Subsequent to 2000, I noted that more and more elections were being won by very narrow margins.
Elections that the political aparatus are fairly certain will come down to very small numbers of votes a
are gigantic billboards screaming invitations to engage in fraud.
I would further note that Fraud can involve the candidates and parties. But so much is at stake even in minor elections today that there are incentives to engage in fraud for people and groups weakly affiliated with politics. It does not have to be about who is president or Representative, but who will win a contract.
For the most part inperson election fraud – a person showing up at a poll claiming to be someone else is quite rare.
But all frauds are intertwined. The tighter you make the law and processes to thwart inperson fraud, the harder it is to hide other forms of fraud.
Contra the left scanning the same ballots over and over or stuffing hundreds even thousands of ballots in an election is not that hard for election officials. The big deal is whether that fraud will be detected.
This is like the antitheft measures that places like Costco and Sam’s club have. The people who check you are the door and on the way out are partly their to make sure that customers do not shoplift. But they are also there to stop employees from taking goods out the back door.
The less likely shoplifting is the less likely good being taken by employees is. Because if you can stop shoplifiting then you know all losses are from employees.
Most inperson antifraud measures are as much to stop unrelated forms of fraud.
In PA (and many other states) the number of people who voted is about 275K less than the number of ballots that were counted.
In an inperson election this would be a huge indicator of fraud. There is little possibilty that the number of inperson voters was miscounted by 275K. But mailing voting substantially complicates things. There is much greater opportunity to inject large number of ballots and attribute discrepancies to errors. In PA, GA, AZ, and MI there are hundreds of thousands of ballots EACH that do not have complete chain of custody.
We have no idea where hundreds of thousands of ballots come from. Election officials attribute this to errors. But if we can make chain of custody errors that large – then why should we trust the vote count ? No one expects perfection. But the allowable error in any part of an election MUST be smaller than the margin of victory or the results are untrustworthy. It does not matter whether the source of the discrpancy is fraud or something else. Every single error or discrepancy in any part of the election undermines the credibility of the result to the size of the error. And if that is greater than the margin of victory – the election results are in doubt.
Conducting elections with minimal errors is itself a major antifraud measure.
These errors, discrepancies are the indicators of fraud. If the these counts procedures, etc are sloppy without fraud – that send a message to those who would engage in fraud that in the future they can engage in fraud without likely getting caught.
The more complicated you make an election the more difficult it is to have laws and processes that detect and thwart fraud.
The only thing between americans today and the large scale fraud of the 19th century is our election laws and the degree to which they are enforced.