Electoral Control Quotes

If Christians should vote their duty to God at the polls, they would carry every election, and do it with ease. They would elect every clean candidate in the United States, and defeat every soiled one. Their prodigious power would be quickly realized and recognized, and afterward there would be no unclean candidates upon any ticket, and graft would cease.

I thought that that was an effort to inject a popular element, a democratic element into the selection of a person who, once he is selected and confirmed, is beyond electoral control.

...the priority of the Democrats and Republicans...is to preserve...power when [they have] it, and to gain power when [they do not]. [Their] collective priority...is to make sure that, together, they control the electoral process and under no circumstances allow an independent or third party to infringe on their exclusive franchise.

There are Americans will find it difficult to believe that the Prime Minister can simply impose candidates on ridings, and can so efficiently move individuals out of private life and into the Cabinet with virtually no resort to the electorate.

About forty percent of the people vote Democrat. About forty percent vote Republican. Of those eighty percent, most wouldn't change their votes if Adolf Hitler was running against Abe Lincoln - or against FDR. . . . That leaves twenty percent of the people who swing back one way or another . . . the true independents. . . . That twenty percent controls the destiny of the country.

Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

Roosevelt knew never to lose control of the majority of American opinion, unlike his greatest democratic contemporaries, Churchill and De Gaulle, who at times suffered spectacular rejections by their electorates.

If the right wing has their way and state's rights control voting rights, they would remove protections that make it difficult for seniors to vote. It would be harder for students to vote on campus. These are attempts to suppress acts of voting.