A Personal Impact of the Cost of Gasoline
Leah and I made a quick trip to Brighton over the last two days. With the additional driving while we were there, I had to fill my gas tank twice.
A year ago, I rarely put more than $40 at a time into my tank. On this trip, I was close to $60 each time.
That got me thinking about something we hear discussed every day in terms of oil prices, inflation and geopolitics but experience much more personally when we pull into a gas station.
What has the war in Iran cost the average American family?
Gasoline prices have increased by more than $1 per gallon since before the war began.
Leah and I drive about 31,000 miles a year. Our two cars average roughly 20 miles per gallon, which means we buy approximately 1,550 gallons of gasoline annually. A $1-per-gallon increase therefore costs us about $1,550 more per year.
For Leah and me, that’s an inconvenience. For a young working family already struggling with groceries, housing, childcare and other expenses, another $100 or more a month for gasoline can require real lifestyle changes.
The war isn’t the only factor affecting gasoline prices. Oil prices are influenced by global supply, refinery capacity, other conflicts and market expectations.
But the war in Iran and the resulting disruption of Middle Eastern oil supplies have clearly contributed to the increase.
I have been critical of President Trump’s decision to enter this war and of how the administration has conducted it. I continue to question whether the war was necessary and whether its consequences were adequately considered before it began.
Those consequences aren’t confined to Iran or the Pentagon. Americans encounter one of them every time they pull up to the gas pump.
Protecting Elections Without Preventing People From Voting
I’ve written several times recently about voting, election security and what I believe should be a simple principle:
Make it difficult to vote illegally. Make it easy for every eligible American to vote legally.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that brings us back to that question. The Court refused to allow the U.S. Postal Service to implement new restrictions on mail-in ballots before the November midterm elections.
The restrictions grew out of an executive order President Trump issued in March intended, according to the administration, to strengthen the integrity of federal elections.
On the surface, that sounds reasonable. Who doesn’t want secure elections?
But the details matter.
Under the new Postal Service rules, state and local election officials would have been required to use specially approved ballot envelopes containing unique barcodes. Election officials also would have been required to upload information about mail-ballot voters into a new federal portal.
Before accepting batches of ballots for delivery, the Postal Service would verify that the ballots and voter information met the new requirements.
The problem was that these weren’t minor administrative changes. They were being imposed shortly before an election in which millions of Americans will vote by mail, and the infrastructure necessary to implement some of the requirements wasn’t yet fully operational.
Federal judges blocked the requirements from taking effect. The administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
Yesterday, the Court said no.
An Important Distinction
The Supreme Court did not issue a final ruling declaring President Trump’s executive order unconstitutional. Nor did it finally determine whether the Postal Service could ever adopt some version of these requirements. The underlying litigation will continue.
The question before the Supreme Court was whether the government should be allowed to implement the new requirements while those cases proceed.
The Court declined to do so.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas disagreed.
So this isn’t the final chapter.
But it is an important one.
We’ve Been Here Before
This debate should sound familiar to regular readers of Thoughts for the Day.
We’ve talked about the SAVE Act, claims of widespread noncitizen voting, voter identification and mail-in voting.
And I’ve repeatedly made the same argument. Voter fraud exists. It should be investigated. When someone votes illegally that person should be prosecuted.
But the existence of some illegal voting doesn’t automatically justify every restriction proposed in the name of preventing it.
The proper question is one of proportionality: How much burden should we place on millions of legitimate voters to prevent illegal votes?
That’s the question I keep coming back to.
Consider What Was at Stake
Millions of Americans vote by mail. They include elderly voters, disabled voters, military personnel, people living in rural communities, people traveling for work and ordinary Americans who simply choose to vote by mail when their state allows them to do so.
The government’s objective—making sure ballots are legitimate—is reasonable.
But suppose a new system designed to prevent an illegal ballot also prevents perfectly legal ballots from reaching legitimate voters or being counted.
Have we strengthened election integrity? Or weakened it?
A secure election isn’t one in which nobody can cheat because we’ve made it too difficult for legitimate voters to participate.
A secure election is one in which eligible voters can vote, ineligible people cannot, and every legally cast ballot is counted accurately.
There’s Also a Constitutional Question
Who gets to make the rules?
The Constitution doesn’t give the president general authority to run federal elections.
States have primary responsibility for administering elections, while the Constitution gives Congress authority to regulate the times, places and manner of congressional elections.
That doesn’t mean the federal executive branch has no role.
The Postal Service obviously has an enormous responsibility when states choose to conduct voting through the mail. But delivering election mail and determining the conditions under which Americans may receive and return their ballots are very different things.
That’s why this dispute is about more than mail-in voting. It is also about separation of powers.
This Is What Checks and Balances Look Like
I’ve written a lot lately about our constitutional system of checks and balances.
Sometimes the phrase sounds like something from a high-school civics textbook.
This case shows what it means in practice.
The president issued an executive order.
An executive agency developed regulations to carry it out.
States and voting-rights organizations challenged those regulations.
Federal judges stopped them from taking effect.
The administration appealed.
And the Supreme Court refused to allow the requirements to be implemented while the litigation continues.
That’s the system working.
It doesn’t mean the courts are always right.
It doesn’t mean the president is always wrong.
And it doesn’t tell us how the litigation ultimately will end.
It means presidential power has limits and another branch of government gets to decide whether those limits have been crossed.
That principle matters regardless of which political party occupies the White House.
Election Integrity and Voting Rights
I sometimes think we’ve allowed these two ideas to become political opposites.
They shouldn’t be. Americans should demand both.
We should have accurate voter rolls. We should verify that voters are eligible. We should investigate fraud. We should protect ballots from tampering. We should count votes accurately. And we should make certain government doesn’t create unnecessary obstacles preventing eligible citizens from exercising their right to vote.
Those aren’t contradictory goals. They’re the foundation of a trustworthy election.
The objective isn’t to make voting harder. The objective is to make illegal voting harder while making sure every eligible American can cast a ballot—and have it counted.
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When Protecting the Vote Can Threaten the Voter
Here’s another election story that caught my attention. And once again, it involves noncitizen voting.
According to a whistleblower disclosure reported by The Guardian and the Associated Press, the Department of Homeland Security has launched an effort called the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” to identify noncitizens who may be registered to vote or voting illegally.
Let me begin where I have begun before. Noncitizens shouldn’t be voting in American elections. If someone who isn’t legally entitled to vote knowingly casts a ballot, investigate it and, when the evidence supports it, prosecute it.
What concerns me is what reportedly is being done in the name of finding those voters.
Forty Investigations a Day
According to the whistleblower, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees were pulled from their regular duties in late August, given less than two hours of training and assigned to investigate people DHS believed might be unlawfully registered to vote.
The reported goal was 40 people per employee per day.
Think about that.
Roughly 12 minutes to investigate someone, compare federal information with state voter-registration records, determine whether there is a problem and potentially create a federal law-enforcement record about that person.
This isn’t checking whether someone’s Costco membership has expired.
We’re potentially putting an American citizen into a federal law-enforcement database as someone suspected of illegally voting.
I’d like the government to take more than 12 minutes before doing that.
Then There Is the Data
Perhaps more troubling are questions about the accuracy of the information being used.
According to the whistleblower, DHS data sometimes didn’t match information contained in state voter systems. That matters because immigration and citizenship records aren’t necessarily designed to determine someone’s current voting eligibility.
Someone, for example, could have become a naturalized American citizen after information in another government database was created. Bad data plus a rushed investigation seems like a pretty good formula for bad conclusions.
And once incorrect information enters a government law-enforcement database, how easy is it to get it removed?
How Were They Accessing the Records?
This may be the strangest part.
According to the whistleblower, employees sometimes were instructed to use state voter-registration lookup systems intended for individual voters checking their own registrations. The whistleblower alleges employees questioned whether using those systems to investigate other people might violate state law and were told to continue.
These are allegations, and DHS disputes the whistleblower’s characterization. The department says it is comparing publicly available state voter information with federal records of known noncitizens as part of a legitimate effort to protect elections.
That explanation deserves to be heard. But so do the concerns raised by the people being asked to perform the work.
Different Programs. Same Question.
This is where today’s two election stories connect.
In the Postal Service case, the Trump administration wanted new federal requirements imposed on mail ballots shortly before the November election.
Now we have another federal initiative intended to address noncitizen voting, with a whistleblower raising questions about unreliable information, inadequate training and potentially improper methods.
Different programs. Same fundamental question:
Is the remedy proportional to the problem?
Show Me the Problem
President Trump and his administration repeatedly describe noncitizen voting as a serious threat to American elections, even though the facts do not support this threat. That doesn’t mean illegal voting never occurs.
It does mean we should establish the magnitude of the problem before constructing an enormous federal apparatus to solve it. Government shouldn’t begin with the assumption that widespread fraud exists and then build increasingly intrusive systems hoping to find evidence supporting that assumption.
If DHS identifies noncitizens who knowingly voted illegally, prosecute them. And if DHS discovers evidence that the problem is widespread, show us the evidence.
The evidence should determine the response.
There’s a Bigger Issue Here
The Constitution largely places election administration with the states, subject to Congress’s constitutional authority over federal elections. Yet we’re increasingly seeing the federal executive branch become involved in areas traditionally administered by state and local election officials.
The Justice Department has sought detailed voter information from numerous states. The Postal Service developed new ballot-verification requirements.
Now DHS reportedly is searching state voter-registration systems for suspected noncitizen voters.
Perhaps each initiative can be defended individually. But taken together, they raise a question worth asking: Is the administration creating a federal election-enforcement system that Congress never created?
That question should concern us regardless of whether the president directing it is a Republican or Democrat.
Election Integrity Requires Accuracy Too
Election integrity matters. But integrity has to apply to the government’s conduct as well.
If we’re going to accuse someone of voting illegally, we’d better be right.
If we’re going to place someone’s name into a federal law-enforcement database, we’d better be right.
If we’re going to access state voter records, we’d better do it legally.
And if we’re going to impose new restrictions affecting millions of voters, we’d better demonstrate that the problem we’re solving justifies the burden we’re creating.
That’s not being soft on voter fraud. That’s due process.
It brings me back to the principle I’ve been arguing throughout these recent discussions about voting: Make it difficult to vote illegally. Make it easy to vote legally.
And before government treats an American citizen like a criminal, make damn sure you’ve got the right person.
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Ironic Honesty
Yesterday I played in the Ann Arbor Rotary Golf Outing, an outstanding event that is worth the down-and-back drive from Petoskey.
At the start of the round, I asked one of my teammates in the other cart if he would keep track of how many of the 20 mulligans we used throughout the round so we didn’t use more than we purchased.
I got a response I never expected.
Which brings me to my...
Quote of the Day
“Honestly, no, because I will cheat.”
Sometimes honesty comes from the most unexpected places.
Orchid of the Day
The federal courts doing what our constitutional system asks them to do: review the exercise of government power.
The Supreme Court’s action doesn’t determine the ultimate legality of the Postal Service rules.
It means the rules won’t take effect while the litigation continues.
Courts aren’t supposed to decide whether a policy is politically popular.
They’re supposed to decide whether government acted within the law.
Onion of the Day
A government investigation that reportedly expects an employee with less than two hours of training to investigate 40 potential illegal voters in a day.
If we’re serious about election integrity, accuracy ought to be at least as important as speed.
Twelve minutes seems awfully quick when the person on the other end of the investigation may be a perfectly legal American voter.
Questions of the Day
Can we protect election integrity without making it unnecessarily difficult for eligible Americans to vote?
And:
Before government creates new voting restrictions, should it first have to demonstrate—with evidence—the size of the problem those restrictions are intended to solve?
Lyrics of the Day
“You can’t always get what you want.”
If you know the song and artist, please leave your answer in the comments below.
Answer to Friday’s Lyrics of the Day
“The Rising” — Bruce Springsteen
Video of the Day:
(2699) Calls of the Game: Detroit stops New Orleans' 2-point attempt to secure 31-30 win | Lions vs Saints - YouTube