I assume that not what you really mean, and that shouldn’t be the measure of the reasonableness of the solution. The legistature represents the people, a coin represents only chance.
To quote Justice Jackson in WEST VIRGINIA STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION v. BARNETTE:
The right to vote itself should be an unalienable right, not subject to a simple popular vote. I can’t fathom how anybody could disagree with this.
With all the proposed amendments floating around lately that would take away rights (the anti-gay marriage and anti-flag burning amendments namely) a new amendment that actually gives new rights would be a refreshing development.
I don’t find the “states rights” argument very persuasive. What about human rights? You know, humans, the individuals who live under the social contract of government and should have a say in how the government that lords over them is run?
No, John, the way I conceive the system the Tribunate would decide – that is, the Tribunate would be the agency that would count the ballots and certify the results; but in case of any doubt – or a deadlock on its ten-member board (I chose an even number on purpose) – its decision would be subject to judicial review.
There would be a Federal Tribunate and state tribunates. The state tribunates would run, and count votes for, all elections to state and local offices. The Federal Tribunate would run, and count votes for, all elections to federal offices, including the House, the Senate, and the presidency.
I guess I just don’t understand the problem that this constitutional amendment is intended to fix. begbert2 brought it up in his third post, but apparently the question has been dodged.
Are there adults who are being denied the vote because of some constitutional loophole? (I’m excepting felons for the moment – let’s just keep this on law abiding folks for a minute.)
In other words, who is getting screwed by the Constitution when it comes to voting rights?
Justice Jackson mentions liberty as a fundamental right, yet you acknowledge (I presume) that conviction of a felony may deprive a person of liberty. Yet you seem oblivious to this concept when addressing the right to vote. In fact, even fundamental rights may be denied or abridged by the government as long as due process is observed. I have a right to property, but if I owe money to a creditor, the government may, after observing due process in its finding, come in and seize and sell my property to satisfy my debt. I have a right to life, but after due process is observed in finding me guilty of a sufficiently heinous crime, I may be put to death. No right, not even the ones on that list, are absolute.
- Rick
Oh please.
These crocodile tears being shed for poor felons makes me laugh. You’d allow vicious unthinking scum to vote only because you think they’d vote for your party.
I’m thrilled that felons are denied the vote; hell I’d like to see them permanently denied the vote in every state. Why? To be able to vote is a most precious commodity and people who prey on society shouldn’t be allowed to have a say in how this nation is run, or what laws are enacted. The fact that people knowingly commit felonies, despite the risk of losing their voter privileges, shows that they cannot make a rational decision. I don’t want them voting. Do institutionalized people vote? I’d strike them from the voter lists too.
The vast majority of felons are non-violent. Argue as you wish, but describing someone busted for selling nickel bags of pot to his roommates as “vicious unthinking scum” seems a bit over the top.
BG, I still have no idea what an “election performance standard” is. Does it have to do with turnout? With accuracy of the vote-counting (measured how and by whom)? Please be concrete.
You say that
Does this not invite a lawsuit after every close election?
If the time frame goes like this:
1 Election
2 Loser claims that the “standards” were not met
3 Winner defends process
4 Court or some other body investigates: soliciting testimony, investigating equpment, etc.
5 Court renders decision
The above would take, at a minimum, weeks, possibly months, in which government is paralyzed (in general, not a bad thing IMO, but sometimes you have things like wars going on).
If the tribunal rules in favor of the winner, I suppose we’re done. But if they rule that the “standards” were indeed violated, we now either have:
A) A whole new election
B) The “Tribunal” will declare a new winner.
If B, we can expect the winner-now-loser’s suppporters to insist that the Tribunal was politically motivated, that they were disenfranchised when the initial results were ignored, etc. All the same stuff that happened after 2000. If the Tribunal’s decison can be appealed, it will be, every time, going as far as the supreme court. All of this takes more and more time.
It all comes down to two obvious truths:
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When you’re talking about millions of votes, there is no 100% foolproof system. None. We can improve it, yes, but it will never be perfect, and if you recount a hundred times, you’ll get a hundred different totals. Most of the time, the margin of victory is not within the margin of error.
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When the vote is excruciatingly close, someone – be it the courts, the state legislature, congress or your tribunal – has to be empowered to decide which tally to choose from.
That someone will have a partisan interest: thinking it will ever be otherwise, especially in a presidential election, is simply naive in the extreme. If your tribunal is “bipartisan” it will be tied 5-5 more often than not. If its decison can be appealed, it will be. At the end of the day, people will want whichever tiebreaker – be it the state or federal SC, the legislatures or the executive branch – works to their advantage.
And if the positions had been reversed in Florida 2000, that would be Rick Santorum’s legislation, not Jesse Jr’s.
I don’t see the advantage of this over the courts deciding. You claim the “Tribunate” is supposed to be non-political, but I can’t see how it will be any less political than the Supreme court.
Well, for one thing, some people think they have registered but when they go to the polls they find their names aren’t on the lost. For another, there are a lot of people who are allowed to vote but whose votes are not counted. In both cases, most of them are black. From “Vanishing Votes” by Greg Palast, The Nation, April 29, 2004 (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040517&s=palast):
I’m not saying federal oversight of the registration, voting, and ballot-counting processes, would produce a perfect system, but I’m certain it would be more nearly perfect, and just, and accurate, than what we’ve got now.
On the other hand, the government can’t castrate me. No amount of “process” can be “due” to permit ball cutting. It’s simply not done. It’s not even contemplated. Your right to bodily integrity is that sacred. So too should the right to vote.
Adhering to my view that the death penalty is under all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment and therefore a due process violation, I respectfully disagree.
I for one know an ex-convict, and let me say that although she may be an obnoxious bitch, she is not vicious unthinking scum.
Let me further add that the value of a citizen should not be predicated upon the worse actions that they have committed. It may be tempting for some to freeze frame someone at the moment after they committed a bad act and refuse to see them as anything else other than unfeeling and unthinking scum. That rarely encapsulates the totality of any individual. Such black and white thinking is seldom accurate.
Read my thread – I do not conceive of the Tribunate as being or even pretending to be non-political; to the contrary it would be openly and aggressively political. I envision a ten-member College of Tribunes elected on a partisan basis, in a national (or statewide) election using the party-list form of proportional representation. That might (conceivably) produce a College with three Republicans, three Democrats, a Libertarian, a Green, an America Firster (populist-isolationist conservative), a Constitutioner (religious conservative). The point of this is that each Tribune would have independent investigative and authority and, according to party alignment, each would have a rather different idea of what constitutes “abuse” or “misbehavior” on the part of government. Which means nothing that might possibly be abuse or misbehavior would go uninvestigated. A decision to actually prosecute or indict a government official, on the other hand, would have to be made by majority vote of the whole College.
Applying this to elections: The point is not that the Tribunes are non-political but that they are a specialized branch that handles “metagovernmental” functions such as government-policing, the Census, and elections, and nothing else. Being separated from the public-policy-formation concerns of the legislative and executive branches, the Tribunes could focus their attention more clearly on questions of electoral law and procedure. And, as I said, their decisions would be subject to judicial review – meaning that, in the event of a very close count or some evidence of vote-rigging, an aggrieved losing party would have the option of challenging the Tribunate’s decision in the courts, which are (supposed to be) non-political. Checks and balances.
What’s the alternative? In Florida in 2000, each county elections office was under the control of one elected Supervisor of Elections, either Democrat or Republican; and the whole statewide system was under the supervision of the elected Secretary of State – in that year, Katherine Harris, a Republican. And we saw how that turned out . . . Since then the office of Secretary of State has been made an appointed one – appointed by the Governor, which means she is even more likely to be of the Governor’s party than when she was an elected official. No improvement, in my view. Putting the whole thing under the control of a multimember and multipartisan body is, in my view, a better way to go.
I consider felons “unthinking” because they commit the crime despite risking losing their ability to vote. It has nothing to do with whether the crime is marginally a felony or not. One must deal with the laws as they stand. Selling a pound of pot to friends is a felony. If you have a brain you have to realize that doing this and being caught has dire consequences.
And as an aside, I get bent out of shape at so called citizens who only vote every
four years and then complain there’s some irregularity vis-a-vis their registration.
If you care about your community or country you should vote in EVERY election.
Do that, and chances are your registration will stay on good standing.
I’d allow them to vote regardless. I’m pretty sure folks like Ken Lay aren’t going to vote Democratic. 
I disagree. Every citizen who’s expected to obey the law must be given a say in which laws are enacted. That’s the only way for the laws to have any legitimacy.
Let’s see… felons should lose the right to vote because they’re unthinking, and they’re unthinking because they lose the right to vote. Fantastic!
Right. I know there’s problems with vote counting. But what has that got to do with the Constitution? Does the Constitution allow for such racist actions? If so, where?
Put another way, what is the problem with the Constitution that needs to be fixed, as opposed to what is the problem with how votes are counted that needs to be fixed?
The problem is that the Constitution leaves the whole business up to the states, and that produces the results we see. Any instance of throwing out a black’s vote because he/she is black would be unconstitutional and a violation of the Voting Rights Act – if it could be both identified and proven. Reread that excerpt from Palast’s article and try to imagine how you, if you were a black resident of one of those predominantly black counties where for some reason an extraordinarily large number of ballots are discarded as “spoiled,” would even begin to try to address the problem.
Many times in the past 40 years, we’ve been faced with situations where the Supreme Court said this or that state-level segregation practice was unconstitutional but the Southern states continued to get away with ignoring that – e.g., most Southern schools remained segregated long after the Brown decision. Nothing really got fixed until the federal government decided to step in.
A voting-rights amendment could, among other things, clearly and explicitly make the vote-counting process the federal government’s business. I think a federal election agency could do the job better – even if it were not actually running the polls but just acting in a supervisory role over the county and state elections officials.