What could possibly have gone wrong?

Appeals Court Upholds Tennessee Voter Fraud Law Restricting Absentee Ballot Application Distribution

In a 2–1 decision, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that Tennessee’s ban on “distributing a government form” was “conduct, not speech,” and that the law did not keep the plaintiffs from “expressing [their] political message.”

The court acknowledged “the First Amendment provides some protection to ‘expressive conduct,'” however, but found the ban on distributing applications did “not target or impose costs on the Plaintiffs’ actual political speech.”

So to be clear, Tennessee law is prohibiting political groups from going door to door with absentee ballots, restricting the distributions of absentee ballots to either the voter (who can choose to download on line) or actual election officials who would provide them upon request. The challengers wanted to distribute both the absentee ballots "and" their political message at the same time.

There is a reason why almost every state prohibits political campaigning at the polling stations. The idea is that we allow the individual to make his or her own choice without being pressured by a campaign. The same would especially hold true for absentee ballots where a door to door campaigner could pressure someone to vote a particular way and literally watch them fill out a ballot in front of them.

Herein lies the underlying principal to our democracy. One person, one vote. If you allow people to go around harassing others into voting a particular way while simultaneously providing them when the means to have those people fill out ballots, then that defeats the purpose of one person one vote.

The entire concept of our democracy already seems to be moving from gathering the most support to gathering the largest team of people to go drum up votes. We are already seeing much of this in states that allow ballot harvesting. Ballot harvesting (for the same principles of one person one vote) had previously been deemed illegal everywhere up until a few years ago.

But in liberal states, where they would like to upend the concept of one person one vote and turn it into anything but, you see them change laws to make it easier for small groups of people to be able to have a huge effect on our election results. They do so knowing full well that liberals seem much more able and willing to put this sort of effort into things. Conservatives seem resistant to the idea and there seems to be an internal debate between those who want to put an end to it and those who would are more inclined to suggest that they must attempt to compete by playing the same games.