Your Right To Vote Doesn’t Include A Right To Vote From Your Couch

[Kamaji]

Your Right To Vote Doesn’t Include A Right To Vote From Your Couch

By Margot Cleveland
January 24, 2022

There is a right to vote. There is no right to sloth.

There is no right to sit on your hands all year and then have a ballot automatically appear in your mailbox. There is no right to mark your ballot at your leisure up to two weeks before the election and then hand it off to someone else to turn in to election officials.

There is no right to wait until the afternoon of election day and then saunter into any random precinct, register to vote, then immediately cast a ballot without bothering to bring a photo identification. And there is no right to commit armed robbery, distribute drugs, or steal millions from hedge funds, and then the moment you step outside of prison demand society allow you a say in governance equal to that of law-abiding citizens.

Yet in pushing for passage of the so-called Freedom to Vote Act, Democrats and the left-leaning press framed the bill as protecting the “right to vote.” When the Senate failed to eliminate the filibuster last week—needed to pass the voting bill—liberals bemoaned it as an attack on voting rights and democracy itself.

Every member of the U.S. Senate holds a “duty to safeguard our democracy and secure the freedom to vote. Yet tonight, Senators voted to preserve an arcane Senate rule rather than secure that fundamental freedom,” Vice President Kamala Harris wrote in a statement condemning the Senate’s failure to eliminate the filibuster. That failure, Harris claimed, means that it will be more difficult for Americans to vote because of purported “anti-voter laws” pushed by Republican legislatures.

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In pushing this narrative, the Biden administration continued with the marketing sleight of hand it has deployed in pushing the bill, that there is an “unfettered” right to vote. We saw this the morning after the Freedom to Vote Act failed to advance in the Senate, with Harris appearing on “The Today Show” and claiming it was a “blatant erosion of our democracy” and an attack “on the right of all Americans who are eligible to vote to have access to the ballot unfettered.”

There is no such thing, however, as an “unfettered” right to vote. That right is “fettered” by many things, as the Constitution assumed it would be, in providing state legislatures the power to prescribe “the times, places, and manner” of holding federal elections.

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Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/24/your-right-to-vote-doesnt-include-a-right-to-vote-from-your-couch/