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Thursday, February 19, 2026

Post #7570 M: Zoning Retaliation, Official Immunity, and a Shocking 72‑Hour Lock Up; California’s Billionaire Tax and State-to-State Flight; Congress should get rid of the GSEs

 Quote of the Day

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, 
but in deserving them.
Aristotle  

Zoning Retaliation, Official Immunity, and a Shocking 72‑Hour Lock Up

California’s Billionaire Tax and State-to-State Flight

Congress should get rid of the GSEs

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Political Cartoon

Courtesy of KAL via Politico

Musical Interlude: 1963 Top 100 Hits

Martha Reeves & The Vandellas ~ Heat Wave

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Wednesday, February 18, 2026

Post #7569 Rant of the Day: The Phony Voter ID Kerfuffle

I have voted or at least registered to vote in 9 states sequentially (I may have moved from Florida before a general election). I don't recall deregistering; I assumed it occurred automatically when I filed a change of address with USPS or the DMV or surrendered my old driver's license, or registered to vote at my new state address. I never tried to vote at a former address. That's why I was confused when Arizona sent me a couple of mailings suggesting how to cast an out-of-state ballot after I had moved back to Maryland.

Elon Musk, who is obsessed with this issue, puts up all the usual arguments: voting should require at least a secure ID, as it might take to cash a check at a bank or to verify a minimum drinking age at a bar, or to access a porn site. (Never mind the notorious issues with IDs. For example, when I took my first MIS class. I learned that some Social Security numbers were not as unique. One particular number had been associated with over 1000 identities.) Via Google AI:

When I was a 16-year-old college student, there were fake IDs. (Paying my own way through college, I was never tempted to drink alcoholic beverages. I am not a teetotaler; I may occasionally have a beer or glass of wine at a social event or visiting relatives, but the last time I can recall it was at a company Xmas party in 2023). A final example is my driver's ID. When I renewed after 8 years with the usual vision certification, they used my old picture, which showed me looking younger and weighing 70+ lbs. more. There are other issues with IDs; they can get lost or misplaced, and marital status/name may have changed. You really don't want your vote being cancelled by bureaucrats raising issues with your credentials, versus the fact that you are a USC by birth or naturalization.

I have written numerous tweets/posts on this issue (many in response to Musk's obsession with the topic), and you can access them at my feed (@raguillemette), However, I'll try to summarize the basic discussion and motivation. Federal law (1996) restricts voters for federal offices to US citizens. The 1993 NVRA requires attestation (signing one is a USC under the risk of perjury by birth, parents' status{e.g., a nephew was born while my baby brother (accompanied with family) was stationed at a West German AFB), or naturalization) for federal office voting (state/local office voting may be subject to different restrictions). Note that legal foreign workers. students, visitors or immigrants, short of naturalization, are ineligible. to vote federal races; neither are unauthorized aliens. [There are state waivers from NVRA for certain states that do not register voters or allow same-day registration.]

"At the federal level, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 requires a voter ID for all new voters in federal elections who registered by mail and who did not provide a driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number that was matched against government records."

Via Google AI:
For naturalized citizens and legal residents, there are alternative requirements, but only the former can vote. Some states (e.g., California) will issue licenses without immigration status, but these are ineligible for voter registration.

Part of my distaste for government photo IDs in general dealt with WV's DMV, which was a stickler for evidence of local residency, and I published an earlier rant on that. They really wanted to review my apartment lease. which I didn't bring with me, and when I retrieved it they wouldn't accept it because it didn't have the landlady's contact information on it. (I had contact information, but that wasn't good enough.)  The landlady was usually at another property, so it was a hassle getting a new lease copy generated to satisfy the DMV.

I think for military brats like me, the folks kept good records because it was not unusual for military personnel to be assigned in one or more accompanied tours overseas; my dad was assigned to France and later to Germany while I was in college. My baby brother was assigned to Italy and Germany. So we all had child passports. And of course, my folks applied for my SSN with my birth certificate paperwork.

Here's the basic issue: according to some surveys, up to 10% of American citizens do not have readily available citizenship documentation:
  
Why do American citizens lack proof of citizenship? Via Google AI:

It's not an issue for me. I've got original copies of my birth certificate, SSN card, and passport in a safe, plus encrypted copies on disk and online; I've had multiple federal background checks as a naval officer and as a federal contractor for agencies and the defense sector. I've tweeted that I may have set a record for most I-9s completed during my work career. I remember being nervous about a REAL ID deadline, not realizing my MD driver's license already had the marking. The issue isn't whether I will be personally affected by the certification requirement (although I oppose Trump's hypocritical attempt to ban mail-in voting by states). In theory, federal race voting should be restricted to US citizens, who should be authenticated..

First, let's provide Ballotpedia's summary of the argument:

 
SCOTUS in 2013 denied AZ and KS to unilaterally require documentary evidence of citizenship. This blocked over 30K voters from registering in KS. It creates disparate problems in registration among certain less mobile low-income, rural, racial or ethnic groups; for example, 
The Department of Justice blocked over 700 voting changes they found to be discriminatory from 1982 through the VRA’s 2006 reauthorization. Since the Shelby County v. Holder decision, many states have enacted new voting restrictions centered around voter photo IDs.

For example, Texas didn’t even sleep on it — they moved to introduce a strict voter ID law at midnight after the Supreme Court decision was handed down in 2013. That law resulted in the ineligibility of an estimated 608,470 registered voters in Texas, representing a total of about 4.5% of registered voters in the state at the time. 
7% lack suitable picture ID, never mind the budget to secure a no-cost right to vote. ACLU  points out only 31 errors detected via voter ID check over 12 years, most involving user error, including election officials with enforcement costs in the millions of dollars.  As the League of Women Voters points out:
Voter fraud is so extremely rare. Out of 250,000,000 votes cast by mail between 2000 and 2020, there were 193 criminal convictions. By those numbers, a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than they are to commit voter fraud. 
Via Google AI:
  • We found that nearly 21 million Americans do not have a driver’s license. 2.6 million Americans lack government issued photo ID of any kind
  • 34.5 million Americans do not have a any license or state ID card or do not have one with their current address or name. Even more are confused about what ID they need to vote.
  • Over half of Americans are at risk of being disenfranchised as a result of confusion about voter ID laws.
  • Support for Voter ID laws is not the same thing as support for ID based disenfranchisement. We found supermajority support for policies that address this problem.
From the Revolving Door Project:
The idea that these suppressive laws would prevent supposedly widespread voter fraud is so off-base. Here’s the reality: widespread voter fraud in the United States is as close to a non-issue as possible. As the Brennan Center notes, the amount of in-person voter impersonation is  so infinitesimally small and as such, likely to have zero impact on  national  elections. To put a number on it, between 2000 and 2020, there were only 193 convictions of voter fraud. In the 2020 presidential election there were only 475 potential cases out of the 158,481,688 that turned out to the polls. 

Now let’s talk about the actual process of obtaining an ID. In 2012, the Brennan Center looked at 10 states (Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin) with rigid voter ID requirements. To the credit of these state governments, these IDs were at least free to obtain. However, there were other major logistical issues. These included but were not limited to: not owning a vehicle to be able to travel to an ID issue office, being more than 10 miles away from an ID issuing office, and not being able to come during the office hours of these issuing offices. This leads to the disenfranchisement of predominantly low income voters, voters of color, and rural voters. There’s no reason for Democrats or any true believers of the promise of American democracy to support these laws.  
From PolitiFact, on the allegation that opposition to voter ID is motivated by fraud:
Research shows that voter fraud is uncommon in American elections. An investigation conducted by Loyola Law School, Los Angeles professor Justin Levitt found 31 credible incidents of voter fraud in over 1 billion ballots cast during general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014.
In 2006, the Brennan Center commissioned a survey that found that an estimated 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens didn’t have government-issued photo IDs. Of those 21 million, 15% of citizens who earned less than $35,000 a year, 18% age 65 or older, and 25% of African Americans didn’t have a current government-issued photo ID.
Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, for example, in describing her effort to re-establish the Voting Rights Act earlier this year, noted in an interview with The Atlantic that before her father, who was wheelchair-bound, died in 2017, he "didn’t have a driver’s license but he had been voting — until Alabama changed its law in 2014 — with a validly issued federal ID called a Social Security card."
From Vox:
But a new study suggests that the laws, which require certain IDs to vote, may do neither.The study, from Enrico Cantoni at the University of Bologna and Vincent Pons at Harvard Business School, found that voter ID laws don’t decrease voter turnout, including that of minority voters. Nor do they have a detectable effect on voter fraud — which is extremely rare in the US, anyway.
What do those 68 cases tell us? First, it demonstrates that proven cases of noncitizen voting are incredibly rare. Even an organization engaged in a major effort to document voter fraud produced fewer than 70 proven cases of noncitizens who voted in elections in the last 40 years. Given that over one billion votes have been cast over that period in thousands of elections, the incidence of proven noncitizen voting is below 0.0001%.

This is in line with other analysis carried out following recent elections. For example, a 2017 Brennan Center analysis of 42 jurisdictions which tabulated 23.5 million votes in the 2016 election found that noncitizens were referred for investigation in just 30 cases—or 0.0001% of votes.

Second, the data also tells us that proven cases of undocumented immigrants voting in elections are even rarer. Just 10 undocumented immigrants in total appear in the Heritage database for unlawful voting. Further investigation outside the database has uncovered one other instance; an elderly Cuban man with a work permit but no permanent lawful status, who was encouraged to vote by a poll worker in 2016. Several of the other 10 cases involve a person living under an assumed name and identity of a U.S. citizen or obtaining citizenship through fraudulent documentation. In those circumstances, the person voted under the identity of U.S. citizen with valid evidence of status—even though they were not the person they claimed to be.

Third, the data tells us that most cases of noncitizen voting involve lawful permanent residents—people with green cards who have been in the community for years, many who end up voting due to bad information given by government officials themselves.

The most common scenario in the cases included in Heritage’s database includes a lawful permanent resident who was encouraged by a government official to vote or falsely told that they were eligible.


Let me summarize here:

As a libertarian, I oppose federal IDs. I don't like tracking of citizens. This is consistent with the Fourth Amendment over due process.
I don't want anything to do with any centralized or Trump's unconstitutional wet dream of a nationalized election system. GOP voter ID reforms make it difficult for many naturally born voters to qualify, something they have a right to do as much as me. If you look at what it takes,  e,g., for someone with documentation issues to qualify for a social security card or to procure a delayed certificate, e.g., after getting a notice of no birth record by the state, substantiating evidence from personal sources (Bible, family announcements or correspondence, medical. payment history, church, school, government (tax forms, exemptions. census data), etc), it can take weeks to a couple of months to over a year depending on the quality of evidence. It is technically illegal in modern America not to register a child's birth.


What I find is unacceptable is denying voting rights because of a birth certificate, passport, or government document that does not specify a marital surname. It's hard for me to imagine someone who has gone through life without knowing their birthday, when I routinely am asked for birth dates by pharmacies or doctors/nurses, paying payroll taxes while working, or my driver's license, but no voter should be deprived of their rights, because of poor recordkeeping by adults at the time of birth. 
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Post #7568 M: Stossel on Uncomfortable Topics with Heather Mac Donald; Trump's History with Epstein Pt. 6; McClanahan on How Should We Rank the Presidents?

 Quote of the Day

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, 
something that no one ever knew before. 
But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
Paul Dirac  

Stossel on Uncomfortable Topics with Heather Mac Donald

Trump's History with Epstein Pt. 6

McClanahan on How Should We Rank the Presidents?

Choose Life

Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Bill Bramhall via Politico

Musical Interlude: 1963 Top 100 Hits

You Can’t Sit Down - Dovells

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Tuesday, February 17, 2026

Post #7567 M: The Holocaust's youngest survivors; Donald Trump Is Nothing To Smile About; McClanahan on They Also Ran

Quote of the Day

If you want to tell people the truth, 
make them laugh, 
otherwise they'll kill you.
Oscar Wilde  

The Holocaust's youngest survivors

Donald Trump Is Nothing To Smile About

McClanahan on They Also Ran

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Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Matt Davies via Politico

Musical Interlude: 1963 Top 100 

Eydie Gormie - Blame It On The Bossa Nova

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Monday, February 16, 2026

Post #7566 M: DHS Is Attacking the Constitution and the Rights of Citizens; McClanahan on Shut Up and Dribble?; Trump's Desperate to Destroy the Planet

 Quote of the Day

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. 
I can assure you mine are still greater.
Albert Einstein  

David Bier: “DHS Is Attacking the Constitution and the Rights of Citizens”

McClanahan on Shut Up and Dribble?

Trump's Desperate to Destroy the Planet

Choose Life

Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Nick Anderson via Politico

Musical Interlude: 1963 Top 100 Hits

 It’s My Party - Lesley Gore

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Sunday, February 15, 2026

Post #7565 Social Media Digest

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Post #7564 M: Immigrants Are Not the Cause of Welfare Fraud; Trump Gets Made-Up “Champion of Coal” Award & Guts EPA Regulations; World War II Debate: Libertarian Vs Mainstream Historian

 Quote of the Day

What people get admired and appreciated for in community are 
their soft skills: 
their sense of humor and timing, 
their ability to listen, 
their courage and honesty, 
their capacity for empathy.
M. Scott Peck  

Immigrants Are Not the Cause of Welfare Fraud

Trump Gets Made-Up “Champion of Coal” Award & Guts EPA Regulations

World War II Debate: Libertarian Vs Mainstream Historian

Choose Life

Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Steve Breen via smerconish

Musical Interlude: 1963 Top 100 Hits

Surf City - Jan & Dean

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