Jeopardy Champion Wears Progressiveness With Pride

Sometimes I wish I wasn’t such a contrarian, always going against the grain of popular thought and political narratives. But here I go again.

Recent 31-time Jeopardy champion Jamie Ding was a model of brilliant efficiency, humility, and good sportsmanship throughout his magnificent run on the popular game show. By and large, the show’s many fans loved him for those reasons. However, when he was introduced as a “bureaucrat and law student,” to me, that raised a red flag. Who in these days and times wants to be known as a “bureaucrat?” That label alone connotes bad images regarding government inefficiency, regulatory overreach, waste, and yes, downright fraud. 

Since he was on the show for so long, we learned a lot about Ding, and among those tidbits was his alignment with a young progressives group and his affiliation with the Democratic Party in his adopted home state of New Jersey. In his role as a bureaucrat, Ding has apparently crossed swords with the Trump Administration over the latter’s alleged interference in managing the state’s voter rolls. Of course, the usual media suspects paint this as a heroic standoff of a courageous state employee against the big, bad, "wannabe dictator" Trump. So, let’s step back for a moment and take a closer look.

First, a bit about Trump’s frenetic daily pace, with his fingers in a hundred figurative pies as he tries to stamp out years of Obama-Biden intransigence in a single presidential term. This helps explain his headlong dive into imposing tariffs without waiting for Congress to approve them, and now the ever-lengthening military-economic-political conflict with Iran, among others. But it must also be understood that Trump has a near-obsession with getting the voting process right in America, as evidenced by his strong support of the SAVE America Act and his concerns about mail-in ballots and inaccurate voter rolls. 

Much of this stems from the frustration he still has from losing an election in 2020 that he felt was stolen from him, with millions of allegedly illicit votes counted for his opponent. He will undoubtedly go to his grave believing he was the rightful winner of that election, and certainly many of his supporters went to bed that election night believing he was well on his way to a second term. I won’t belabor this any further than to say that, in my opinion, the most compelling piece of evidence (granted, circumstantial) to support Trump’s position is the 85-plus million votes Biden received, far in excess of either total that the more popular Obama garnered in his election victories. Trump’s amazing comeback in 2024 makes dubious the claim that Biden’s colossal total reflected anti-Trump sentiment more so than pro-Biden.

Second, there is the matter of blue states allegedly doing little if anything over the years to cleanse their voting rolls of ineligible voters (for instance, the deceased, convicted felons, and, of course, non-citizens of the U.S.). At what point does the federal government need to step in with a threat of action if the states continue to let their voting rolls fester with these inaccuracies that invariably help Democrat candidates get elected and reelected?

New Jersey, as a reliably blue state, certainly has the potential for bloated voter rolls that have not been adequately addressed over recent decades. Apparently, Republican influence to do anything about this problem, whether in New Jersey or other blue states, is little to nil. Such states, if not yet where California is with virtually one-party rule, are getting there fast. Make no mistake, that is their goal, and why they are caterwauling so much about the recent Supreme Court ruling on race-based redistricting. That ruling could be a massive impediment to Dem plans, or merely a speed bump in the road. We shall see. In the meantime, how can the federal government, while under Trump’s executive control and with a Republican majority in Congress, influence the cleanup of voter rolls?

The obvious answer lies not in trying to micromanage the states' efforts (or lack thereof), but to hit them where it will hurt the most – freezing or withholding federal funding. And, once the withholding or freeze was put in motion, the affected state would not get the funds released until (1) they had completed the cleansing of their voter rolls, and (2) an independent audit from a nationally-recognized firm validated the results. Clearly, this would take a lot of time, but I’ll bet that if enough bureaucrats were put on the project, and they all had even half the intelligence of Jamie Ding, they could finish expeditiously. And it’s well past time that the Republicans who are supposed to be in charge of this Congress start acting like it.