This perhaps obscure 4th Circuit Appeals court loss for the GOP I found interesting as a reflection of their strategy of straight ticket voting – a strategy which I’ve discussed before and have concluded that it is damaging to the American polity. From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
A federal appeals court has dismissed a challenge to a Virginia law prohibiting partisan labels on ballots in local elections.
In an opinion published Tuesday, the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the case brought by a group of Powhatan County Republicans and found the state has a legitimate interest in minimizing political partisanship in local races.
“While party identifiers do not appear on the official ballot for Virginia’s local candidates, the candidates still have every other avenue by which to inform voters of this information,” Judge Paul Niemeyer wrote in the three-judge panel’s unanimous opinion affirming a lower court’s earlier ruling. “Political parties and their nominees are entirely free to publicize their association with each other.”
The plaintiffs argued the ballot rules serve little real purpose because, in many cases, local races are nonpartisan in name only and nothing in state law prevents political parties from nominating local candidates or making informal endorsements. The lack of party information on the ballot, they argued, only sows confusion.
The plaintiffs, the Powhatan County Republican Committee and four candidates it endorsed in a 2015 Board of Supervisors election, claimed the ballot rule violates constitutional rights to freedom of association and equal protection.
By making the party affiliations apparent, this reminds forgetful GOP voters not of the identity of the GOP endorsed candidates – but that they’re supposed to be voting single ticket, rather than actually employing their critical faculties concerning the candidates themselves. Another tool in the box of tactics for the GOP which benefits them, but damages the nation as it makes it easier for gross incompetents to win elections and start wielding power.
To be perfectly clear, a competent, moderate Republican is just fine with me. I might vote for such a candidate, particularly if the opposition candidates strike me as incompetent, lustful for power, or have some other hidden agenda. But the straight ticket voting stratagem is a morally bankrupt notion, an assertion which has been brutally illustrated by the incompetence and ideological extremism we’re seeing in the current Administration in just the first month; I shudder at how much more down the rabbit hole they’re going to go before either Trump figures out his “legacy” won’t be something to relish – or the GOP impeaches and convicts him.
For the theoretical (a word I use loosely) discussion of the moral bankruptcy of straight ticket voting, click here.
