When Republicans take back Congress, they need to take seriously the issue of federal judges being impeached. Just the other week, a federal judge in Washington ordered the government to act in a way the Supreme Court had already said could not be ordered.
Now, a federal judge in New York has thrown out the American standard of one man – one vote. Federal judge Stephen Robinson has given people the right to vote six times each.
Arthur Furano voted early — five days before Election Day. And he voted often, flipping the lever six times for his favorite candidate. Furano cast multiple votes on the instructions of a federal judge and the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a new election system crafted to help boost Hispanic representation.
Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. The election ends Tuesday and results are expected late Tuesday.
Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional at-large election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.
The federal government requested a solution to divide up the municipality into six voting districts so that voters could vote in their local neighborhood, including areas of high hispanic population. This is the American way of handling the solution and is familiar to most people living in the Southern United States.
Judge Robinson, however, went with the European cumulative voting system that gives people the right to vote six times. He overstepped his bounds to impose a solution that not even Barack Obama’s Justice Department wanted.
He should be impeached.
Moe Lane
Steve Maley
KnightsofMalta
Dan Spencer
Dan McLaughlin
I don't get this
partyof1 Wednesday, June 16th at 9:31AM EST (link)if everyone’s vote is multiplied by 6, then what’s the point?
pretty easy
streiff (Diary) Wednesday, June 16th at 10:00AM EST (link)suppose you have 10 candidates running at-large, one of them Hispanic, but only the top 5 vote getters are elected. If the Hispanic population is only about 20%, and you believe in identity politics, then it might be impossible for a Hispanic to be elected using one vote.
If you multiply that by 6 and you assume that the non-Hispanics will vote for their favorite 5 candidates once and the Hispanics will all vote for the Hispanic 6 times then the Hispanic will be one of the top 5 candidates.
“What keeps me here is the reek of beer, the ladies and the craic”
Because
Erick Erickson (Diary) Wednesday, June 16th at 10:00AM EST (link)You can vote for one person six times, six people one time, three people two times — your choice.
Who will stand on either hand and keep this bridge with me?Follow @EWErickson
Another idea that doesn't account for people...
acat (Diary) Wednesday, June 16th at 10:11AM EST (link)There’s a couple problems.
Vote totals are no longer “number of people who signed in at the polling place”, it’s now that times six less those who under-voted … and any time we make that less clear, we encourage fraud.
Partisans get a louder voice than the fence-sitters. Someone who goes “all in” for Candidate X would sway the election far more than someone who thinks Candidate X and Candidate Y are both valid choices. This helps the Ron Paul fringe of both parties (Lyndon LaRouche fringe?) more than the party itself.
Mew
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“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost”. –Tolkein
1 Hispanic got voted in
tngal (Diary) Wednesday, June 16th at 9:50AM EST (link)Today the results show 1 Hispanic got in. There were 13 candidates vieing for 6 slots and he came in fourth. So….even with six votes per, what does that truly mean in the grand scheme.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iuYztkfrDc_f76DaA40jU-IXWS9AD9GC6DQO0
When the story came out yesterday, I thought it odd but not out of the realm of possibility that no Hispanic had ever been elected to fill a seat. But figured maybe they were just apathetic or not legal residents of the US.
What does it mean?
mbecker908 (Diary) Wednesday, June 16th at 10:22AM EST (link)It means that next time they’ll be prepared and organized. And five Hispanics will get elected.
And why hadn’t one been elected before? Maybe because they can find one that represents the values of the area at large or maybe because ACORN didn’t consider it a priority.
Do we still have a constitution?
Heffalump Wednesday, June 16th at 10:38AM EST (link)How exactly does this get past the constitution?
Cumulative voting? Had that for years in Illinois
rocketeer (Diary) Wednesday, June 16th at 10:43AM EST (link)In the early 1970s, Illinois had such a system. You had three representatives for each state district. Nominally, two from one party and one from another.
Each party could nominate three candidates for each district. You had three votes to spread. You could vote all three on one, split 1.5 on two or vote for three.
So the judge is newsworthy but novel. Or, you have to declare Illinois’ old scheme to also be unconstitutional for .
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Never buy a dog and bark for yourself: ‘Slippery’ Jim DiGriz
Typo -- judge is "not novel"
rocketeer (Diary) Wednesday, June 16th at 10:45AM EST (link)Repeat after me:
Preview is your friend.
Preview is your friend.
…
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Never buy a dog and bark for yourself: ‘Slippery’ Jim DiGriz
Rocketeer- So what happened....
jeepingeoff Wednesday, June 16th at 12:44PM EST (link)to this system? Did the courts strike it down? Did the people vote it out (if so, how many times did each voter get to vote to dump it? /sarc)
Seriously, I must profess total ignorance as to how this could even be remotely legal……..
“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys” – P.J. O’Rourke
“So what’s Copenhagen Syndrome? It is a belief in your own miracles. It is thinking that those who crowned you king actually knew what they were doing. It is buying into your own tulip bulb mania. It is the floating evanescent bubble of self. God help you when it bursts.” – Bret Stephens, WSJ
Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15. – Ronald Reagan
System was replaced by the voters
rocketeer (Diary) Wednesday, June 16th at 1:06PM EST (link)Every now and then we have a constitutional convention. The districts were replaced by another system of individual-person representatives. We still have that system.
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Never buy a dog and bark for yourself: ‘Slippery’ Jim DiGriz
Wiki reference to Illinois cumulative voting
rocketeer (Diary) Wednesday, June 16th at 3:50PM EST (link)This link to the ever-reliable Wikipedia /sarc refers to how Illinois elected its state reps in the time period:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting
FTA: Cumulative voting is used frequently in corporate governance, where it is mandated by many U.S. states. It was used to elect the Illinois House of Representatives from 1870 until its repeal in 1980 …
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Never buy a dog and bark for yourself: ‘Slippery’ Jim DiGriz
Nothing unconstitutional about this.
Rhymes With Right Thursday, June 17th at 1:08AM EST (link)Indeed, for many years it was precisely how the state of Illinois elected the lower house of its legislature. Everybody had three votes. On election day you could vote for 1, 2, or 3 candidates. If you voted for three candidates, each got one vote. If you voted for two, each got 1 1/2 votes. If you “voted the bullet”, your candidate got three votes.
What was the result? Well for one, Republicans got elected from Chicago. That was eliminated when political gadfly Pat Quinn (yes, that Pat Quinn, now the Governor) got the “Cutback Amendment” passed by the people of Illinois in 1980. But as long as every voter had the same number of votes to cast for state House of Representatives, there was no violation of constitutional principle that each voter be able to cast the same number of votes in the election.
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