The Iowa state legislature has passed a sweeping program of ballot integrity measures that is now headed to the desk of Republican Governor Kim Reynolds who will sign it into law. This is what the bill does according to the pro-vote-fraud website democracydocket.com.

The two companion bills—HF 590 and SF 413—would shorten the state’s early vote period by nine days, shorten Election Day hours and would limit each Iowa county to one ballot drop box. The bill would also prohibit counties from mailing voters absentee ballot request forms unless they are explicitly requested and requires mail ballots be received by Election Day. Currently, ballots mailed before Election Day can be counted if they are received by the following Monday.

This is being framed as “voter suppression” because these measures ensure that the only voters on Election Day are actual human beings who are entitled to vote in Iowa.

I’m very much a traditionalist when it comes to voting. If voting is not important enough to you to show up at your designated polling place on Election Day, with picture identification you probably shouldn’t have a say in who gets elected. If you know you won’t be able to make it to the polling place, you need to request, in writing, with a verified signature, an absentee ballot.

My personal view is that “early voting” is a travesty that serves no real purpose but to destroy the impact of Election Day as a civic duty and tell fraudsters how many absentee votes they need to harvest. Mailing unsolicited absentee ballots should be a federal felony. If you drop off an absentee ballot, you should have to show a photo ID to do so and only be allowed to drop off one ballot. If you can’t get your sh** together enough to mail your absentee ballot so it arrives by election day or get up the energy to drop it off (or have a friend drop it off for you), you don’t need to be voting.

I don’t care if your feelings are hurt, voting is the means by which we choose people to run government at all levels and we deserve at least the same safeguards for voting that we have for cashing a check or buying a fifth of bad whiskey.

Does this make any difference?

There were three huge takeaways from the 2020 election. The first is that our voting processes were deliberately corrupted so as to not be reliable at all. While I’m not going to argue that Donald Trump won the election, I will argue that nothing at all that happened in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin that should give you any confidence that the fix was not in before the first ballot was cast.

The second lesson was that our elites, of both parties, were fine with the corruption of the voting system. In state after state, ad hoc rules were established without even acknowledging the Constitutional supremacy of the state legislatures, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof[.]” In some cases, even the farcical rules imposed by people not empowered to make them were not deemed loose enough to allow for enough fraud by federal judges who insinuated themselves into a process where they have no role. If the rules for an election were licit two years ago, a virus does not provide a reason for a federal judge to rewrite them on a whim. I contend that the blatant, in-your-face nature of the malfeasance was calculated in much the same way as the fascistic reaction to a new virus to be a message to the populace that you will do what you are told and shut up, This Isn’t Just the Theft of an Election, This Is a Message to All of Us.

The final lesson is that there is no judicial backstop. Court after court refused to crack down on the illegal meddling in election procedures by activist judges. Cases were not heard on the merits, they were dismissed in a wholesale fashion as “lacking standing” or, after the election was decided, moot. Even the Supreme Court, when given the opportunity to chart a clear course for future elections in what I predict will be a non-stop series of “public health emergencies”, took a hard pass, see BREAKING — Supreme Court Declines To Hear Pennsylvania Election Dispute Cases. Justice Thomas correctly observed:

One wonders what this court waits for. We failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules. Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections. The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling. By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence. Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us.

My suspicion is that on the eve of the next election an activist judge will rewrite the rules making this bill an exercise in futility. No higher court will intervene. Another election will be corrupted. And all because that the message that elections are just too damned important to be left to the voters must be hammered home at every opportunity.