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Of course I’m appalled. The states are thought by some to be “the laboratory of democracy.” There have been attempts to standardize laws across all states, to varying degrees.of success, because in many areas—geographical, social, economic—one size won’t fit all. And that’s how it should be.

Election of the President, though, must have a greater degree of uniformity among all states (and the District of Columbia, in recent elections) in order to be in compliance with the U.S. Constitution. Remember what happened in Florida after the 2000 election and imagine the turmoil that would result if, for example, the Democrats’ scheme to bypass the Electoral College were to achieve the requisite number of States before next year’s election and was left unchallenged ahead of the federal election.

Look out below!

Democrats are cagey about using federal laws, resources and funds to maintain power in big cities, eastern states and poverty pockets elsewhere. They will always advocate local control when it’s their folks in office locally, but it’s a rare Democrat that will turn down federal money to do things that perhaps don’t really have to be done, not now or on the scale the feds are proposing.

IMHO, it was Nixon and his “revenue sharing” scheme that opened the door to the U.S. Treasury and made possible otherwise uneconomic “investments” in cities, states and tax districts that Democrats, and even some Republicans, controlled. None of these appropriations were about forts or post roads, either. It was all about health and welfare for politicians to brag about.

At the same time these appropriations did more than anything since the Roosevelt era to strengthen and expand the role of the federal government, intruding in traditional functions of state and local governments from speed limits to zoning laws.

As not just a few state legislators have come to realize when they make occasional but futile efforts to shrink government, the states have become essentially administrative divisions of the federal government.

We’re both on the same side on this, believe me. We need to put much more effort into election security, though (voter authentication, honest ballot counts, no more ballot harvesting), or the next election could very well be our last.