Rep. Drew Dennert (R-3/Aberdeen) isn’t winning over his home newspaper on Senate Bill 7, the campaigning-at-the-polls measure he’s co-sponsoring with Sen. Stace Nelson (R-19/Fulton). The Aberdeen American News made it to my unplowed street to tell my neighbors and me that we should vote down Dennert’s bill and keep polling places neutral:
In line waiting for a ballot — waiting to complete the ultimate civic duty we have in our nation — is not where we need to be bombarded by a last-minute political ad in the form of a shirt or button or sticker or cap.
We should not be divided in that room.
…Campaign to your heart’s content within our established laws. And wear your favorite politician’s shirt or pin the remaining 23 hours and 45 minutes on Election Day.
Our real freedom of speech doesn’t have anything to do with what we wear when we go to cast that ballot. It has everything to do with the actual act of voting.
Let’s keep our polling places welcoming, peaceful and, most of all, neutral [editorial, Aberdeen American News, 2018.12.26].
AAN’s critique of SB 7 remains within the safe harbor of Chief Justice John Roberts’s “island of calm” argument for banning campaigning in polling places, an argument he upheld even while overturning Minnesota’s too-vague polling-place restrictions on message-apparel last summer. AAN does not mention the repeal of petition-circulation restrictions that SB 7 offers, a repeal I wholeheartedly support.
“Freedom,” it clearly doesn’t mean what those on the Left think it means..
Freedom:
1 : the quality or state of being free: such as. a : the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action. b : liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another : independence. c : the quality or state of being exempt or released usually from something onerous freedom from care.
“Those on the Left”—what the heck, Stace? Where is this a Right/Left issue? Chief Justice Roberts isn’t on the Left, and he’s the one who enunciated the “island of calm” doctrine that would oppose SB 7.
Freedom
Being able to make choices. Performing an action of your own choosing. Freedom will always be relative to the environment/situation which you inhabit.
Freedom is choosing to use this definition and disregard bullies.
“Get yourself an outfit and be a cowboy, too” goes the song by the Kingston Trio. The freedom of little boys dressing up, in exactly the same way, for play. FREEDOM!!!
Yeah, it’s kind of cute when I see a little girl, for example, wearing her tutu to the grocery store, or a boy wearing his dad’s googles while sledding. What are they thinking? And you think back and realize you, too, did that when you were a tike.
That’s kind of the way I feel about these men in MAGA hats. I guess they have the “freedom” to wear those things, but I’ll tell you, bring that into a polling place and that only makes people want to vote against the whole MAGA agenda. It shows a kind of insecurity in themselves that is, quite frankly, unmanly. If your candidate requires a posse to show colors, it is more like Storm Trooper and gangland tactics than real confidence in a candidate.
a solution in search of a problem
@CAH Duly noted that you cannot refute the salient point that it is absolutely a 1st Amendment right for someone to wear whatever they so desire. A t-shirt of President Obama does nothing to violate the “calm” of a polling place.
@Owen maybe to someone who prescribes to more and more government; however, protecting South Dakotans explicit rights is the #1 duty requirement of a legislator. Even in the face of a SCOTUS ruling, you folks seek to split hairs to subvert the rights of South Dakotans..
Max boot conservative CFR author of Corrosion of Conservatism advocates no island of calm but for complete destruction of Republican Party as penance for enabling trump
Again Stace, this a solution to no problem. Might want to check history and see how this came to be.
Stace, would that include the freedom to keep you out of my daughter’s doctor’s office?
Owen … Stace conveniently forgets when I busted him for wearing his Marine uniform in one of his campaign brochures, which is a violation of campaign regulations. Perhaps, this bill is in response to that regulation and the Senator just wants to stand outside the polls dressed in the uniform that doesn’t fit over his “chislic container”, anymore?
Remember that Stace? So, there is no 1st Amendment right for someone to wear “whatever” they so desire, is there?
Stace, does freedom extend to a First Amendment freedom of speech at the polling place? Would you also see it as OK if there is active, vocal campaigning going on inside the polls? If campaign clothing is OK — what is NOT?
Nelson’s claim that the left doesn’t understand freedom the way the wingnuts do is as weak as Trump’s claim that more federal employees are Democrat then republican. How does he know that, he doesn’t.
Nelson further falsely claims that Democrats want big government while failing to mention that every bit of South Dakota government growth in the past 40 years was done by republicans, that includes every tax and fee increase on government services.
I’m now waiting for Nelson to tell us that republican men understand freedom better than republican women.
Here is a history lesson on why polling places are supposed to be neutral.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-are-there-laws-restrict-what-people-can-wear-polls-180969381/
Also Grudgenutz brings out a valid point. Stace says I’m for bigger government but he puts up a bill to put the government in a women’s doctors office. Typical right-wing hypocrisy.
Decorating the polling places with more partisan advertising is just what we don’t need. In SD, the Republicans have all the power and they know it. Who needs more at the polls? They don’t need to be throwing more weight around at the polls or anywhere nearby, which is all I see in this repulsive idea.
It reminds me of Trump and his wretched military parade.
No, Stace, you fail to note that Chief Justice Roberts prefuted your point in Minnesota Voters Alliance v Mansky: the state has an interested in restricting certain electioneering speech in order to preserve an “island of clam” at polling places.
I actually think the AAN argument is kinda squishy, and I think the 100-foot rule is kinda silly when, here in Brown County, Al and I can buy a billboard 450 feet away from the polls putting our smiling faces and names up bigger than life in easy sight of every person entering the polls.
I’m just saying that the Minnesota case that Stace says sparked SB 7 doesn’t actually support Stace’s effort to repeal the campaign apparel ban completely.
The Minnesota case is silent on the petitioning issue. Stick with that one, Stace!
And remember, this isn’t “the Left” trying to keep MAGA hats out of the polls. The statute SB 7 would revise was almost surely passed by a Republican Legislature and signed by a Republican Governor.
The dictionary definitions of freedom fail to provide guidance about what should happen when freedoms conflict.
When I was younger conservatives proclaimed that those who believed freedoms were absolute confused liberty, the responsible use of freedom, with license. According to them, freedoms survived only when exercised with wisdom and civility.
The populism that has supplanted conservatism over the past dozen or so years has replaced wisdom and civility with volume and vehemence. It no longer recognizes that freedoms can conflict nor does it seek to find ways to determine how to deal with conflicting freedoms. If merely asserts its own desired freedoms repeatedly and vociferously without regard to any consequence or impact on others’ freedoms.
What bills like this indicate is a breakdown in norms, partly as a result of poor parenting. People who would do this must not have had parents savvy enough to drum into their children how important voting is. My parents would take me along and teach me the ettiquette of casting a ballot. It did not include campaigning or wearing buutons. Yes, there were political signs, placed across the street from the polling place on private property. That’s freedom. What is not freedom is having some fatass pol inflicting his vast insecurities on the voting public storage a public polling station.
Sounds like Trump is the natural outcome and affirmation of the world Kal Lis describes, elections won and policy made by those who must audaciously and unapologetically assert their privilege over any other interest.
Civics education by parents—good idea, Donald! Say, you get me wondering: does absentee voting undermine the sanctity of voting? In a small gesture toward preserving the sanctity of the polling place, should we prohibit county auditors from releasing information about who has requested absentee ballots, in order to stop jammers like the GOP operatives in NC who apparently collected, tampered with, and destroyed absentee ballots?
Again, Owen, the government infringing freedom of speech is a problem always worth addressing.
@Porter Lansing No, its not and I continue to have numerous photos only my personal and legislative FB pages, my website, and in tens of thousands of campaign pamphlets that I have disseminated over the years. 🙄
@O Big difference between what you wear and vocal demonstration at a polling place to disrupt it. No is your answer
@Owen I am okay with you, and every other proabortion person, not liking my defense of the innocent babies you advocate ripping apart to kill. I Look forward to you, Colorado Porter, etc., testifying against both bills. Please let me know if you need assistance getting your testimony scheduled.
@CAH You appropriately distance yourself from supporting the current infringements. While this is a Libertarian type issue, the Left used to strongly defend the 1st Amendment (until they started losing the political debate).. 😉
Nelson, how do you know libs don’t advocate ripping apart only guilty babies?
First of all Stace I haven’t heard of anyone ever complaining about not being able to wear a campaign button or shirt or whatever. In other words this bill is a waste of time. Maybe read the link I posted.
Second, I’ve never said I was pro-abortion. Just that I don’t any right to tell a woman what to do with their body. The only thing I said was you keep saying your for small government but don’t have a problem with having the government involved in somebodies very personal decision. In other words, in this case, you’re a hypocrite.
Stace, does your idea of freedom include allowing women to have unwanted growths removed from their abdomens? If not, then shut your face.
As usual, I’m with my good friend Bob on this one.
Stace’s bill will let me walk into the polling place in my birthday suit, it seems. If this becomes law, I can tape a Trump sticker on my massive member and go around saying, “Don’t get screwed again!” Watch out. This bill might make me move back to South Dakota.
I noticed Sen. Nelson didn’t actually address the hypocrisy of inserting politics into a woman’s conversation with her doctor v. absolute freedom for him at the polls.
So tell me Senator, what are your plans for the impregnators without whom there would never be an unplanned pregnancy? Apparently they should not have unlimited freedom of sexual behavior due to the outcomes they are responsible for. Wouldn’t you agree?
Or is your desire really to control women, especially their sexual behavior?
Now, now, Ms. Geelsdottir, let us try to not be too hard on the impregnators, many of whom were no doubt tricked into the impregnating. However, I would be OK with creating a panel of the legislatures, headed up by Mr. Nelson, who would interrogate all of the suspected impregnators in a public forum.
grudzie , you tricky impregnator 🐐
Grudz, that’s one dumb comment.
Debbo
I’ve been searching my brain for the last time I recall an impregnator being tricked into impregnating anyone. Usual and most commonly it is the hormones that rule the impregnator.
That’s what I’ve heard Roger. One gentleman referred to it as thinking with the brain below his belt. That’s quite tricky indeed.
I generally don’t put up or wear campaign paraphernalia. I hate the stuff as I see it as a waste of resources. I do own an Obama 2012 t-shirt that I wear a lot in summertime. I wear it because it’s a good quality t-shirt, but I also have found it’s an instant conversation starter with black folks. They see a bald geezer of the kind they might see wearing MAGA hats, and they get an instant smile, and I get a thumbs up and a conversation about how good it was to have an intelligent and competent President for eight years.
Another thought. Yesterday I found a cell phone lying in the grass by the sidewalk near my house. Most of the info in the phone was in Spanish, and there were two numbers listed in favorites: Mamacita and Casa. He also had a number for ICE. Casa had a picture of his wife and daughter, I assumed. I called the numbers for Casa and Mamacita, and finally got to talk to the phone’s owner, who spoke broken English. He had been out working all day. We decided to meet at a neighborhood Walgreens, so I could give him back his phone. He said he has a housecleaning business and he needed his phone to make appointments. It turned out he lives on a nearby street and had been out walking his dog. He does have a wife and daughter, he said. I am so thankful for people like him, whose values are shown by the favorites in his phone list.
“Casa” and “Mamacita”—more proof of universal values. :-)
Voting should be something one can do in peace. Keeping the polls a calm area so people can vote peacefully and make good choices without being intimidated is key to our democracy! If you haven’t decided who you’re voting for before you get to the polls, you are indeed ill prepared!