The founders recognized that it is in man’s nature to become seduced by the siren songs of power and privilege. The founders also understood that if government is to be virtuous and just, no man or government entity can be allowed to wield power without strict restraints granted by the people.
The Founder’s also recognized that power in the hands of elected officials needed to be limited and controlled and that the power of unelected bureaucracies needed absolute limitations and control. The strongest check against the instinct to build power bases in government is the fact that our Constitution is written and not “Living.”
The brilliance of our Constitution is that it gives government enough power to protect the unalienable rights of individual American citizens, but no more than that. However, with the advent of progressive, socialist, marxist theories into our body politic, power has been taken from the people and absorbed into a centralized, all powerful government, totally ignoring Constitutional limits on the government’s powers. This perversion of the Founder’s intent is justified by the fraudulent concept that the Constitution is a “Living” document and can be modified at will by a majority of the Legislature, or by administrative fiat, or by judges according to their view of penumbras, emanations and social predilections of the moment.
These are such gross violations of American legitimacy; such unconstitutional usurpations of power; and such intellectual dishonesty that it is almost impossible to believe that it has actually happened.
The written Constitution of the Founders’ states that the individual citizen has the power to use, control and dispose of the property they have produced. The “living” constitution of the Progressives’ states that property rights don’t and ought not exist; that government has the power to use, control, and dispose of the property that the American people produce. The sanctity of property rights has been replaced by the dictates of unelected, unseen administrators, bureaucrats and judges.
Everything Progressives are doing to thwart the decision of the American people violates the Constitution or the spirit of the great American experiment. Ranked-choice voting is is one example; a blatant attack on Maine citizens’ property and voting rights. Ranked-choice voting completely eliminates some voters’ votes. Some may participate in ranked-choice voting and have their ballot exhausted, meaning it is no longer counted toward the “majority” a winner is required to obtain to win.
The people whose votes are negated through this system will have lost their right to vote without due process. James Madison said: “As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.” A person’s vote is his property, therefore, anything that diminishes the value of a person’s vote diminishes that person’s property.
Ranked-choice voting also violates a person’s voting rights. Ranked-choice voting diminishes the Constitution’s “one man, one vote” dictum. In 1964, SCOTUS in Wesberry v. Sanders extended the “one man, one vote” principle to Congressional elections. In Reynolds v. Sims, SCOTUS applied “one man, one vote” to state legislatures.
The conclusion that can be drawn about ranked-choice voting’s negative effect on people’s property and voting rights is that it is dangerous, unconstitutional and an incredibly complicated way to perform an otherwise straight forward civic function.
