Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worries that Republicans may ignore state election results and do whatever suits them best.
She complained that Republican electoral reforms that they say are to ensure election integrity are actually voter suppression. She also says that in the future, if Republicans don’t like election results, they won’t honor them.
“Republicans are already laying the groundwork in installing state-level attorney generals and beyond to overturn the results of any state election that they frankly do not like in states where they have taken power,” she told CNN over the weekend. “And so even if you are successful in out-organizing, they’re laying the groundwork to not even certify the results of the election.”
Sorry to break it to Ocasio-Cortez: Lawmakers are already ignoring the wishes of voters. It’s been happening in one of the bluest parts of the country, Massachusetts, for years.
Just last week, the Democratic supermajority of the Massachusetts Legislature overwhelmingly voted as a bloc to override Gov. Charlie Baker’s line-item veto when it comes to charitable deductions in the state. Nearly every Democrat in both chambers of the Legislature voted once again to delay the implementation of a state-level charity tax deduction one more year. That’s a measure that 72% of Bay State voters approved at the ballot box in 2000. It has yet to take effect, and now, it’s set to take effect in 2023 — if Democrats don’t vote to delay it yet again.
In the early 2000s, lawmakers decided to implement the state income tax that voters approved at the ballot that same year gradually. They approved a measure to lower the tax from 5.9% to 5%. But the 5% rate didn’t go into effect until 2020 because lawmakers set certain thresholds, including balanced budgets, that the state needed to meet for it to decline by 0.05 points per year until it hit the 5% mark. They also decided that after that happened, the charitable deduction could take effect the following year. Keep in mind, voters didn’t agree to this. No one asked for a tax cut 20 years later or a tax deduction 23 (or more) years later.
And in 2012, the pro-life cause scored a huge win in the commonwealth as it defeated a physician-assisted suicide ballot question, 51% to 49%. The pro-life side garnered support from traditional Republican voters as well as conservative minorities in diverse cities such as Lawrence, Brockton, and Springfield. That should’ve been the end of that issue in the state because the voters said “no” on this issue.
Yet this marks the third-straight legislative session in which there has been a bill introduced to legalize physician-assisted suicide in the state. In all, 72 of the 200 members of the Legislature support the bill in this session, including three Republicans. So instead of respecting voters’ wishes on that issue, many lawmakers want to make it cheap, legal, and convenient for the old, the poor, and the sick to die.
If a deep-red state were to deny its voters something they wanted on the ballot or tried to overturn the measure a few years later, that would be bad, too. However, Ocasio-Cortez should worry not about hypotheticals and instead worry about what’s going on in the real world. There is a problem in Massachusetts when it comes to accepting election results, but she won’t touch it.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
