Trego's Mountain Ear

Elections don’t have to offer a choice between two crap sandwiches – but if you have voted for the lesser of two evils, you have voted in a crap sandwich election.  In 2016, I voted in a crap sandwich election – the Democrat candidate was Hillary Clinton, the Republican was Donald Trump, and the Libertarian was Gary Johnson.  Johnson never met a government program he didn’t like except for making marijuana illegal – a single topic libertarian, I guess.

I knew what Hillary Clinton offered.  I knew Johnson didn’t make my standards as a libertarian.  My choice was to hope Trump would be better – it wouldn’t take much.  Well, he did well on the Supreme Court and Second Amendment – but he led us into Covid with some awful government controls.  He asked BATF for a bump-stock ban that was recently found unconstitutional.  Still, I’m sure he was better for my preferences than Hillary. 

Then came 2020 – I had thought Mike Dukakis took Biden out of the running for president.  Obviously I was wrong . . . and there were a lot of people who regarded Trump like I did Hillary.  As 2024 comes up, it looks like we will have a choice between Trump and Biden again.  Too old – entirely too old.  Both of them.  Another crap sandwich election.

Montana has, in many districts, created elections that don’t even offer a choice.  As our regular readers will recall, during the last election, we noted MCA 13-10-211. Declaration of intent for write-in candidates. (1) Except as provided in subsection (7), a person seeking to become a write-in candidate for an office in any election shall file a declaration of intent.   The neat thing about section 7 was that in unopposed elections, write-in votes did not have to file a declaration of intent.  We saw it as a way to keep elections contested – in 2022, out of 100 state representative districts, 31 representatives were elected without opposition in the general election.  Seven of the 25 candidates for state senate were elected without opposition in the general election.  This is definitely a crap sandwich election – and you don’t even get a choice of crap sandwiches.

Obviously, we had some effect – Our legislature passed HB 536 on April 20th – eliminating voters’ ability to write in a candidate when there was no opposition.  That’s not quite right – you can still write in a candidate, your vote just won’t be counted.  Interestingly enough, only 3 representatives and one senator voted against HB 536 – all of the unopposed bastards, from both parties, voted to eliminate section 7.  The three representatives who voted against this legislation that removed the voters last chance of competitive elections were Frank J. Smith, Katie Sullivan and Zooey Zephyr (all Democrats).  The only Senator to vote against HB 536 was Brad Molnar (Republican).

As I calculate it, 97% of our House of Representatives voted to strengthen laws mandating crap sandwich elections, and 98% of our state senate.