There should be a page limit
I see Nick Kristof's lawyers have filed 100 pages of stuff with the Oregon secretary of state, trying to prove that he was an Oregon resident in 2019, even though he voted in New York through November of 2020. That's up quite a bit from their original 15-page legal memo on the subject. You wonder how much of Diane von Fürstenberg's money the lawyers are vacuuming up.
They keep making a big deal out of the fact that under New York's loosey-goosey voter registration system, if you have two residences in New York, you can vote at either one. Swell, but it's hard to see how that is relevant to the question at hand, which is whether the man was a resident of Oregon in 2019, as required by the state constitution.
The facts remain as follows:
1. It is illegal to vote in New York if you claim that you are eligible to vote in another state.
2. If you vote in another state, you are no longer a resident of Oregon for voting purposes.
And so Kristof, by voting in New York in November 2020, effectively admitted that he was not an Oregon resident for voter eligibility purposes at that time. If he voted in New York knowing that he was really an Oregon resident, that would have been a felony under New York law.
Because he voted in New York so recently, the only way he could run for governor of Oregon is if somehow the candidate eligibility rules in the Oregon Constitution and the voter eligibility rules in the Oregon statutes assign different meanings to the word "resident." That seems quite a dubious proposition. In fact, interestingly, the courts in New York have ruled that residency for election purposes should be judged by the same criteria regardless of whether voter eligibility or candidate eligibilty is at issue.
Regardless of how the spineless denizens of Salem rule on the legal matter, Kristof has a lot of nerve pushing his candidacy despite his obvious faux pas. If you need 100 pages to establish that you're eligible to run for an office, you shouldn't be running.
He might make a better governor than any of the alternatives – maybe – but there's this thing called the rule of law, and we ought to try to live by it.
And I still would love to see his tax returns.
Rule of law is for the little people.
ReplyDeleteOh wait, no it isn't, if you're little enough and stay in the correct neighborhoods, you can fire off a hundred rounds a night at each other without consequence. (Strangely, that never happens in the west hills.)
That's our rule of law now.