(Chuck Muth) – According to the Nevada Secretary of State’s website, there were 1,334,967 registered voters in Nevada – active and inactive combined – as of the end of March, 2010. Now unless my government-school math is wrong, that means any statewide candidate who garners 667,484 votes automatically wins, right?
Now here’s the problem.
It costs the government a lot of money to hold one of these elections, even in good times. And let’s face it, the Great Recession we’re in right now isn’t going to go away by next November. So this election stuff is going to cost us a lot of money that could better be used buying diapers for old people.
And what about voter intimidation?
Every election, the voters of Nevada get bombarded with mail, newspaper, radio and television advertisements scaring the crappola out of us if we vote for this candidate or that. Republicans will spend a ton of money trying to intimidate us into voting for Republicans while the Democrats will spend a ton of money trying to intimidate us into voting for Democrats.
There has to be a better way. And thanks to a brilliant idea from organized labor, there is. Here’s what we do….
We get rid of these old-fashioned, expensive secret ballot elections. Instead, immediately after the primary in June, we cut the candidates and their campaigns loose through, say, Labor Day to gather enough signatures on a “card” stating they support a certain candidate.
Then, if a statewide candidate collects 667,484 signatures on these “cards,” that candidate would automatically be declared the winner and the secret-ballot election for that race is cancelled. What a time-saver and money-saver that would be!
And can you just imagine what this new-and-improved system would do for voter participation?
Citizens would no longer be inconvenienced with the need to waste sometimes up to five minutes going through a ballot in the privacy of a voting booth. Instead, burly men with no necks and maybe a little brass on their knuckles will just come to your door and say, “You wanna vote for Harry, right? RIGHT?!! Well, just sign this ‘card’ and nobody gets hurt.”
I mean, isn’t that FAR better than all those intimidating mailers and TV ads we get bombarded with every election cycle?
Now, if you’re a business owner or manager in Nevada and you think the above scenario is absurd….stop laughing. Because this is the exact process organized labor wants to use to organize your workforce.
A proposed federal law misnamed the Employee Free Choice Act – otherwise known as EFCA, otherwise known as “card check,” otherwise known as Sticking It Up Corporate America’s Wazoo Act – would force employers to recognize a labor union if union agitators are able to successfully force…er, intimidate….er, persuade (yeah, that’s the ticket) a majority of your workforce into signing a “card” saying they want union representation.
No….more….secret….ballots.
And now that Congress has passed, and the president has signed, ObamaCare – otherwise known as the Sticking It Up the Health Insurance Industry’s Wazoo Act – Big Labor is about to put on a full-court press to pass EFCA before President Obama & the Democrats lose their super-majorities in the House and Senate this coming November.
Indeed, don’t forget these words by Richard Trumka, the new leg-breaker…er, arm-twister…er, president of the AFL-CIO last November: “I feel very confident that in the wake of health care, you’ll see that we’ll get the Employee Free Choice Act done.”
You better believe it. If Obama and Reid were able to strong arm something as massive as a government take-over of our health insurance industry despite overwhelming opposition by a majority of American citizens, do you really think they can be stopped from paying back their most generous and ardent (and potentially lethal, politically speaking) supporters?
I’m just guessing here, but when push comes to shove, my bet is that Harry Reid, Shelley Berkley and Dina Titus will all vote for EFCA if it comes to a vote. So Nevada business owners who don’t want to risk being forced into wearing the union label a year from now ought to take that into consideration when writing their political contribution checks this fall.
