When one of our cars became unusable last year, my family had to buy another, which we did at a dealer in Massachusetts that a friend had recommended.  We’ve bought cars in Massachusetts, before, but it appears that something has changed.  Registering the car took about a month, during which time we were short a vehicle.

I’m happy to speculate that the State of Rhode Island made our experience so unpleasant deliberately, in order to encourage residents to shop only with special interests within the Ocean State, but at the moment what most interests me about this experience is the comparison to a recent initiative to allow same-day registration for voting.  Advocates want people to be able to register to vote in Rhode Island and cast their votes that very day, in contrast to the 30-day delay currently in currently law.

Specifically, the proposal is to ask Rhode Islanders to change our state constitution to remove the provision that people must live in the state for 30 days prior to an election and register to vote in no less time.  Given other realities of Rhode Island’s civic life, it’s hard not to see this as an invitation to fraud and as another step in the direction of a government plantation.

By that term, I mean the system that I first observed in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in which government becomes the central economic force in an area, much like the businesses that once ran “company towns.”  Because it doesn’t produce anything, however, when government is central, the model is to increase the number of people in need of government services and then to find other people to fund them, whether local taxpayers or a higher-level government, like the United States.  In this model, the sooner new people can vote for more services, and the more diluted taxpayers’ votes can be made, the better.

Now, put this in context of three other factors affecting Rhode Island government and elections:

• Unlimited ballot harvesting, whereby insiders with plenty of volunteers or paid staffers can simply go out and collect votes for the candidate.
• Unprecedented illegal immigration encouraged by a Democrat White House, with the migrants being shipped around the country.
• Driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants in Rhode Island that are “identical” to the licenses of citizens.

Government officials who stand to benefit from new voters who are likely to depend on government services — and who stand to benefit from election fraud among the same constituency — may insist on the innocence of each of these proposals, but taking them all together paints a convincing picture.  For their own personal benefit and the advance of their political ideology, they are undermining the legitimacy of our elections.

Featured image from Shutterstock.