The great voter migration of 2024

Now I would like to introduce the following idea:

I can find no basis in American law, federal or state, for the proposition that it’s illegal to move to a state for the purpose of voting there. To legally vote in a state, you must be a resident of that state. But what legal “residency” means appears to be a fairly loose and fuzzy concept. For example, can college students who maintain a permanent residency in the state from which they traveled to go to college in another state vote in their home state? Yes they can. Can they vote in the state in which, for the time being, they plan to reside only for as long as they are attending college there? The answer, as far as I can tell, seems to be “yes” pretty much everywhere.

Now what about someone who resides currently in state A, but becomes a resident of state B for the purpose of voting there in a particular election, with no permanent intention of remaining there? Is this legal? I can’t find any solid basis for the claim it isn’t. I’ve run this little brainstorm past a prominent election law expert — and while it just “seemed” to this person this isn’t or shouldn’t be legal — he couldn’t point to any statute or case that actually barred the practice.

You can probably anticipate where this is going. Because of the Wisdom of the Framers, the 2024 presidential election is going to come down to swing votes in a half dozen states. It happens that almost all these states border a large state or two where the election is not going to be close at all. It should be possible, in theory, to construct a temporary migration of Biden voters to these swing states that will prove decisive. Using the Internet, for example, one could set up several week residences (in no state does one have to wait more than 30 days after establishing residency there to vote in that state, and the time period is usually less) for migratory voters — young people without children and with mobile employment would be the ideal Freedom Riders in this case, and there are millions of them at the moment. It would be possible to coordinate host residences, where a family or individual would take someone into their home for a few weeks, thereby allowing the visitor to establish residency at that address for voting purposes.

Move voters from New York and New Jersey to Pennsylvania, from Ohio and Indiana to Michigan, from Minnesota (you betcha) to Wisconsin, from California to Nevada, and turn the perversity of the Electoral College to the advantage of democracy for once.

This is going to be the ninth time in the last TEN presidential elections that the Democratic candidate is going to get more votes than the Republican. And if by chance it should be the one time that the Republican candidate gets more votes than the Democrat but loses because of the EC, well turnabout is fair play and more important fascism is bad, m’kay?

Why not? Why not do this? Because the Republicans will scream that the election was “stolen?” Newsflash: They’re ALREADY going to do that! They’ve said, from Donald Trump down through the Hillbilly Mouth of Sauron etc., that no presidential election that includes a loss for Donald Trump is legitimate in any way, and such an outcome should be resisted violently. Why would anyone think it was a good idea to play by Marquess of Queensbury rules with such people?

Because it’s “wrong?” Why would it be wrong? The truth is the whole system is wrong from top to bottom, and just because David Broder and Cokie Roberts and Merrick Garland can’t handle that truth doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, because it is.

I say we try to figure out how to do this. Somebody who is a lot better at organizing things that I am (a global list that includes roughly seven billion people) can take the lead, but I’m happy to present this idea, which is so crazy it just might work, as Tom Cruise probably told some lawyer in a script sometime.