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Posts Tagged elections
Electoral College Explainer
From The American Mind:
We must remember that presidential elections are not a thing apart from the rest of our constitutional and political system. Our major political parties came into being, and exist today, for the primary purpose of capturing the presidency. Their structure follows the structure of the Constitution because the Constitution apportions electoral votes to the states and requires a majority of electoral votes to win. Each state has a minimum of three electoral votes, with the larger states having more in proportion to the number of seats to which they are entitled in the House of Representatives. The Electoral College, in short, is organized on precisely the same principle as the United States Congress, and for precisely the same reason. Neither institution recognizes population alone as the exclusive measuring rod for democratic legitimacy.
Gun Views Are The Most Reliable Voting Predictor
From The New York Times:
Over all, gun-owning households (roughly a third in America) backed Mr. Trump by 63 percent to 31 percent, while households without guns backed Mrs. Clinton, 65 percent to 30 percent, according to SurveyMonkey data.
No other demographic characteristic created such a consistent geographic split.
Possible Backlash In Virginia After Anti-Gun Bills
As the Augusta Free Press‘s Chris Graham notes, Staunton voters backed Barack Obama twice as well as Hillary Clinton in 2016. Voters in the Shenandoah Valley city also backed Democrat governors Terry McAuliffe in 2013 and Ralph Northam in 2017, but this year gun owners and Second Amendment supporters were energized by the gun control bills approved by the Democrat-controlled legislature and signed by Northam just a few weeks ago.
Organizing For Gun Rights
From Ammoland:
Over the next three months, we will ask each of you to step up. There will be articles on how to form a local program. What groups we like for local political support. I know in my heart we can turn this around. In order to do that, however, we need to reach out to other gun owners, explain to them what is at risk.
The People Are Stopping Gun Control
From The Federalist:
Speculations about defeating “the NRA†may titillate the mob, but even if NRA disappeared overnight, there are still 100 million gun owners, their family members, and their friends. Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election because he won “swing states†Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida, all of which have large populations of gun owners. If gun control supporters achieve their goals, it will be because gun owners are complacent or don’t understand the details and ramifications of what Democrats are demanding, not because of rumors about the NRA.
Activist Wants Police Called On Lawful Carriers In Polling Places
From USA Today:
Gun-control groups are launching a “voter protection campaign†to keep guns out of the polling booths this Election Day.
The social media campaign is encouraging voters who see people with firearms to text “Guns down†to 91990. Reports will be sent to nonpartisan election protection experts, who may contact authorities or send a lawyer to the polling place.
Texas AG Allows Armed Election Judges
From Bearing Arms:
Two things tell us that we live in a free society: elections and private firearm ownership. Neither of those things really takes place in despotic societies. Some might create the trappings of democracy, but it’s funny how often the party in power wins those elections despite widespread opposition. None, however, are big on guns.
DHS Probed Georgia’s Voting System
From The Daily Caller:
Georgian IT specialists traced 10 such scans back to a DHS IP address. DHS officials confirmed the attacks came from an unnamed contractor attached to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, a part of DHS.
FLETCO officials have refuse to identify the contractor and the agency did not respond to a DCNF inquiry about the intrusions.
Wendy Davis Only Said She Supported Gun Rights to Get Elected
From The Washington Examiner:
“There is one thing that I would do differently in that campaign, and it relates to the position that I took on open-carry,†Davis told the San Antonio Express-News on Monday. “I made a quick decision on that with a very short conversation with my team and it wasn’t really in keeping with what I think is the correct position on that issue.â€
Davis added that she does support “people’s right to own and to bear arms in appropriate situations,†but fears that open carry would be used “to intimidate and cause fear.â€
Study Shows Foreign Nationals Voted in 2008 and 2010
From Judicial Watch:
Now the CCES confirms this, specifically that large numbers of foreign nationals vote in U.S. elections. The “participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections,†according to a mainstream newspaper article written by two of the political science college professors that conducted the study. “Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress,†the researchers write. “Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.â€
Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races, the professors confirm. More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote and some actually voted. Based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010. This is outrageous, to say that least, and illustrates the need to clean up voter rolls in this country.
Nigeria: Opting Out of an Insurgency
Posted by Brian in Opinion, Threat Watch on 22/Jul/2014 12:51
“Nigeria: Opting Out of an Insurgency is republished with permission of Stratfor.”
Summary
Editor’s Note:Â This is the third installment in a three-part series on militant activity in Nigeria.Â
In some ways, the future of northern Nigeria’s counterinsurgency rests in the hands of Nigerian voters. If President Goodluck Jonathan is elected for another term, the Boko Haram campaign will intensify. If Jonathan loses, the presidency would go to a northerner, who would be better suited to developing the political, social and economic relationships needed to wage an effective counterinsurgency.
Analysis
Of course, the presidential election is a national contest, not a regional one, and so the consequences stretch far beyond northern Nigeria. Though Boko Haram has captured the attention of international media, it is not the only militant group with which Abuja contends, nor is it the only group that has a vested interest in the election’s outcome. If Jonathan is not re-elected and Niger Delta militants lose their political patronage, they will probably attack oil infrastructure in the country’s southwest, as they did in the mid-2000s. Nigeria conceivably could see two active insurgencies, depending on how the election plays out.
However, it is still possible to placate Niger Delta militants even if Jonathan loses. If Niger Delta officials are appointed to senior posts in the new administration, they could keep their patronage networks intact. Read the rest of this entry »
Elections Don’t Matter, Institutions Do
“Elections Don’t Matter, Institutions Do is republished with permission of Stratfor.”
Many years ago, I visited Four Corners in the American Southwest. This is a small stone monument on a polished metal platform where four states meet. You can walk around the monument in the space of a few seconds and stand in four states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. People lined up to do this and have their pictures taken by excited relatives. To walk around the monument is indeed a thrill, because each of these four states has a richly developed tradition and identity that gives these borders real meaning. And yet no passports or customs police are required to go from one state to the other.
Well, of course that’s true, they’re only states, not countries, you might say. But the fact that my observation is a dull commonplace doesn’t make it any less amazing. To be sure, it makes it more amazing. For as the late Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington once remarked, the genius of the American system lies less in its democracy per se than in its institutions. The federal and state system featuring 50 separate identities and bureaucracies, each with definitive land borders — that nevertheless do not conflict with each other — is unique in political history. And this is not to mention the thousands of counties and municipalities in America with their own sovereign jurisdictions. Many of the countries I have covered as a reporter in the troubled and war-torn developing world would be envious of such an original institutional arrangement for governing an entire continent. Read the rest of this entry »
Both Colorado Senators Recalled!
The New York Times has the story:
The recall elections ousted two Democratic state senators, John Morse and Angela Giron, and replaced them with Republicans. Both defeats were painful for Democrats – Mr. Morse’s because he had been Senate president, and Ms. Giron’s because she represented a heavily Democratic, working-class slice of southern Colorado.
U.S. Presidential Elections in Perspective
“U.S. Presidential Elections in Perspective is republished with permission of Stratfor.”
By George Friedman
The U.S. presidential election will be held a week from today, and if the polls are correct, the outcome will be extraordinarily close. Many say that the country has never been as deeply divided. In discussing the debates last week, I noted how this year’s campaign is far from the most bitter and vitriolic. It might therefore be useful also to consider that while the electorate at the moment appears evenly and deeply divided, unlike what many say, that does not reveal deep divisions in our society — unless our society has always been deeply divided.
Since 1820, the last year an uncontested election was held, most presidential elections have been extremely close. Lyndon B. Johnson received the largest percentage of votes any president has ever had in 1964, taking 61.5 percent of the vote. Three other presidents broke the 60 percent mark: Warren G. Harding in 1920, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 and Richard Nixon in 1972.
Nine elections saw a candidate win between 55 and 60 percent of the vote: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Only Eisenhower broke 55 percent twice. Candidates who received less than 50 percent of the vote won 18 presidential elections. These included Lincoln in his first election, Woodrow Wilson in both elections, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Nixon in his first election and Bill Clinton in both his elections. Read the rest of this entry »