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That Crazy Election

Mail-in ballots in Chicago, Ill., waiting for postal delivery for the November 3 election.

One way to perpetuate the politically useful cause of combatting racism is to proclaim its existence in such a manner as to make the charge unable to be disproven by announcing it to be abstract or systematic. Leaving aside the patent illogic of it all, our political practitioners of irrationality have hit upon something. The form of something, take our election system for instance, is just as important as the content of it. It’s just that the woke crowd’s preferred use of “system” is pure nonsense.

Break the election system into two parts: the distribution and the processing of the ballots. First, the distribution. Thanks to COVID-hysteria, across the country we went on a binge of early voting, voting by mail, ballot harvesting, and essentially eliminating the measures to ensure ballot integrity and validity. In other words, we legalized what in another era used to be called fraud or cheating. Slipping ballots in early used to be one tactic to game an election. Another was to grab a handful of ballots and hand them to God knows who to do God knows what, like in our own time mailing the things to addresses across the universe. In another time, it was considered the fraudulent abuse of the absentee ballot procedure. This set the stage for the party of one-party fiefdoms and urban political machines – Remember Missouri’s Pendergast ring or Gotham’s Tammany Hall? – to legally do overtly what they used to do covertly.

I’m reminded of Robert Caro’s The Means of Ascent, the second volume of his series on the life of the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). Of particular note is LBJ’s successful and dubious elevation to Texas senator in 1948. Much that he did to steal the election from Gov. Coke Stevenson was legalized for today by the “crisis too good to waste”. Late registrations, new ballots mysteriously showing up, the whole mail-in shebang of today making it possible for one person to manufacture unknown multiples of votes, ballot harvesters hunting down warm bodies who can be cajoled to vote – and vote the “right” way – and legally diluted verification measures turned past crimes into permissible election procedures.

No wonder there’s little evidence of widespread fraud. Much of what fell under criminal fraud became, all of a sudden, statutorily permissible, or at least, with a wink and a nod, excusable. There was little fraud because fraud was legitimized by the pandemic.

You don’t need to resort to nefarious activities in processing, or counting, the ballots to manufacture the desired result. The whole system of distribution was fenagled to make a predetermined end more likely.

So, you will hunt in vain for old-style fraud like stuffing the ballot boxes because we’ve made it easy to do the same thing under cover of law in the distribution of the pieces of paper. Try and do the same thing with larceny, murder, and rape and see how far you get. This election was systematically a sham, period.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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Why Vote?

As of now, I see no good reason to vote, especially if you live in one of those deep blue one-party states such as Chicago, California, the Acela Corridor, LA to Seattle, almost any metropolis, any burg with a 40,000-student college campus, or battleground state with Philadelphias crammed within it. What’s the point? The human capital to stay informed, tromping down to the polling place, or spending an hour filling out the thing is wasted when boxes of ballots are filled out by civic illiterates at the conniving of party activists or ballot harvesters reaping unused ballots and filling them out on the side of a van. Again, what’s the point in doing your duty only to have it canceled by the election equivalent of gangland enforcers?

I do have one caveat, though. It’s that the down ballot races, or maybe the mid-terms, retain some legitimacy because they lack a “Gone with the Wind” marquee status of the race for federal head honcho. Those races aren’t likely to attract the sinister gaze of our election system’s villains and therefore we benefit from their inattention. It’s like in a riot when one store is unexpectedly spared while the rest go up in flames. In such races, the pride in voting is replaced by the relief in knowing it will probably count because it won’t be aborted by the 3,000 empty ballots with the exception of one marked bubble next to one presidential candidate dropped in one heave at the registrar.

Undelivered Election Ballots Discarded on Arizona Farm, Nov. 4, 2020.

I was thinking today about the huge vote totals for both presidential candidates in this election. As of now, we have about 145 million ballots cast for president out of a US voting-age population of around 255 million. Of that number, about 169 million were registered to vote. Does each one of those 145 million represent one person above room temperature? Call me skeptical. The closer the vote percentage approaches the full mark, the greater the likelihood that many of those votes are reflecting the wishes of non-souls and the functionally illiterate. You can’t help but scrape more of the muck in the bottom of the pond as it is emptied.

The fix was in when people were allowed to vote a month early, sometimes after election day, and the spray of ballots across the country through the mail. In other words, the muck was thicker than usual this time around. And it ended up in the water supply.

Now the candidate that benefitted the most from this afterbirth of an election will have all the executive power to go COVID crazy. Get prepared, he’s going to go all Gretchen Whitmer on us. The Wuhan virus was used by power-hungry Democrats to destroy nearly everything in our public and private life. Authoritarianism is an addictive drug, and, once used, it will be easier the next time. Watch out every flu season for the mutilation of our social and economic life. Intoxicated with power, nothing will escape the gaze of our new Caesars. This virus, and any others that may befall us in the next four years, will be milked to essentially repeal the Constitution and turn an industrious people into a cowed and subservient one.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

Our political ethos will not be spared. Supportive riots will be quietly approved through official silence as dissent against the rulers will be quashed. The right of association to protest will go out the window with the rest of the First Amendment. Forget about faith and fellowship. The equal protection of the laws will suffer a similar fate as children in chaotic homes won’t fare as well with Zoom education when compared to those well-heeled enough to form learning pods, tutors, and close parental supervision. It’s a social catastrophe. Watch other issues get thrown into the vortex such as gun control and AOC’s adolescent musings in her Green New Deal. COVID is robust enough for Schumer’s “change America”. This highly dubious election put the fox in the henhouse.

Let’s not look under that rock called the economy once these clowns get their hands around its neck. That important part of our lives involved with making a livelihood will be destroyed under the auspices of a hysteria about a vulnerable few, very few. The vulnerable should stay home and Biden’s efforts should focus on assisting and protecting them. A Sherman’s March through all of American life is a moral monstrosity and hardly justified, but we’re likely to get it anyway. That mound of pieces of paper said so.

One of the things that is lost on the civically illiterate – as they were made kicking and screaming to contribute to the rancid pile – is subtle and not so subtle distinctions. Biden and his crew wallow in a muddled fog between “experts” and policy-making. It works on the easily befuddled. In reality, experts provide advice; policy-making incorporates different points of view alongside an analysis of cost-benefit ramifications. For God’s sake, policy-making isn’t being led around by the nose by a select few “experts” who appeal to your authoritarian instincts. Different actions carry with them huge costs in a people’s social, economic, and political lives. Biden’s selected cabal of “experts” shouldn’t have the first and final say in what is to be done. There are too many in the class of “expert” who disagree. Plus, other experts in affected fields should have a say. That is what is meant by the art of statesmanship. Bringing all this together is the stuff of policy-making, not an act of waiting for Anthony Fauci to emerge from his lair like Punxsutawney Phil to issue his garbled pronouncements.

Punxsutawney Phil
Anthony Fauci

Collecting 50%+1 of these pieces of paper in enough states is just what the doctored ordered to resurrect the divine right of kings, or Rousseau’s “general will”, or Lenin’s “vanguard elite”, or whatever you want to call the emasculation of our citizen’s republic. After the Democrats mangled the vote by making the process a farce, there is little that the single citizen can do. It matters not if scant skullduggery can be proven. Follow your nose. You may not be able to identify the source of the stink in the pile, but that won’t stop it from stinking.

RogerG

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Is an Election the Voice of the People?

South Floridians stood in long lines Sunday during the last day of early voting in Miami, Oct. 31, 2020. (photo: Alan Diaz/AP)

The direct answer to the question is “no”, but it’s what we’re stuck with. All the other governance choices are even more dangerously spurious. Autocracy, aristocracy, and oligarchy take the powers of a mob and put them in the hands of one or a few egos. Still, to admit that a broad franchise is the only remaining sensible option is a far cry from it filling the role of the holy grail. Our world is flawed and so are the people in it. All we can say with certainty after an election is that one candidate was first past the post, that one person got more of the little pieces of paper than the others. Any attempt to tease out of the result something more significant is a recourse to divination. You know, like trying to uncover the will of the gods from haruspicy (inspection of animal entrails) or ornithomancy (interpretation of bird actions).

This man in Rhumsiki, Cameroon, attempts to tell the future by interpreting the changes in position of various objects as caused by a freshwater crab through the practice of nggàm. Does he have better accuracy than our pollsters?

It looks like Biden is our president for the next four years. What does it mean? It’s simple: Biden got more of the little pieces of paper than the other guy. That’s it! It was just as true in 2016 as it is today.

The possible reasons for an electoral outcome are as numerous as the number of hair follicles on a silverback ape. Back in 2016, Trump got more of the slips in key states than Hillary, but was it mostly because a sufficient bulk of voters in those places didn’t like Hillary or was it due to love for the orange man? Was it an outrage vote against suffocating political correctness? Was it a rebellion of the middle of the income spectrum without college degrees? Was it a cry from flyover country? Was it an uprising against halfwit elites awash in money, influence, social status, and discreditable educations from Ivy League schools? Was it because the other side was simply caught off guard? Can’t say, but that won’t stop the crystal ball gazers at Fox News and the leftist cabal at MSNBC/CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC/WaPo/NYT/Newsweek/Time /Slate/Politico. There’s no shortage of seers (pundits, talking heads) when dollars-for-mouth is dangled before some with past or present clout. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it.

MSNBC host and former Bush-Cheney Communications Director Nicole Wallace speaks to John McCain 2008 campaign strategist Steve Schmidt.

2020 offered some intriguing results. Biden pulled out a squeaker. But how? Let’s start with a few things that are objectively true. First, we are in the midst of a virus-panic. The hysteria contorted nearly everything from livelihoods to educating the young to Thanksgiving to elections to romance. How can anyone get a date while marring the face with the look of a bank robber? It’s hard to even get started with a stranger when eyes meet but the rest is a mystery. As for the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas are to be relegated to computer screens. Ugh!

Back to elections, they were deformed by throwing caution to the wind, just what Democrats have been trying to achieve for decades. For them, many deep blue jurisdictions functioning as one-party states tossed ballots to every addressee on the voter rolls. Please, if you will, compare that to going to the old tried-and-true voting booth. The ballot is accounted from poll worker to voter to the secrecy of the booth to the observed placement of the ballot in the box in front of the poll worker. Surely, chicanery is still possible but it becomes viral in massive vote-by-mail schemes when ballots are thrown about like supermarket ads into mail boxes or on the ground next to them. The only real stopgap for integrity is the Boy Scout oath. Ugh!

Check out this scenario: party activist is alerted to the date of the mailing, is assigned a voter registrar list to visit addresses, helps persons answering the door to fill it out, assists them in getting a replacement if they threw the thing out with the supermarket ads, helps those delinquents in filling it out, and reaps the ballots from any leftovers, and all the while getting paid for it. Some of this is illegal, but how can you prove it? It all happened before anyone was alerted and ends up in the vote count. And then it’s off to the microphones after the things have been counted to admit the presence of fraud but claim it’s inconsequential. The reliance on the moral integrity of political activists is a sorry basis for an election system.

Secondly, all the pieces of paper are treated equal by the counters, as they should be. But are they in reality? Do they truly reflect an equal mental comportment for voting? Some people don’t care. Some people don’t care enough to devote the mental energy to be informed, or even vote if left to themselves. An election might be reduced to the success either side experiences in galvanizing the non-informed and uncaring. Under these auspices, an election is a race to collect pieces of paper from both sides’ dunces.

Where’s the buy-in on the part of voter? I don’t think it’s asking too much of the citizen to sacrifice a portion of their lunch hour to fulfill their chief civic responsibility. It says much about you if you’ll only do your duty if the ballot is delivered to you, someone helps you fill it out, get it to the registrar, or worse, bribes you into voting with holidays, free rides, and free lunches. Still, that vote from a blank slate has the same weight as the one from a person who understands that a ban on fracking will destroy their livelihoods and children’s future while doing nothing to mitigate “climate change”.

Democrats are the main instigators of a loosey-goosey election system. COVID gave them the prime opportunity to saddle us with choices of their multitudinous uncaring and ill-informed.

True, both sides have ample minions in the dunce category, but ample doesn’t mean equal. The Democrats seem to incorporate a bumper crop of dolts who are all-too-willing to believe in bunkum. The absurdities aren’t limited to the person who can’t break away from The View or the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Profound inanities proliferate from Democrat head honchos on down. The vagina-head protests at the time of Trump’s inauguration – a good sample of the D base – were populated with people who are now ecstatic about the head grifter of a family of grifters with a creepy personal history ascending to power. Pelosi, Biden, and the rest of the big cheeses are alright with sovietizing healthcare, as if bankrupting the nation will make it all better. The Green New Deal is Soviet central planning no matter how you shake it. The destruction of the livelihoods of millions will come at no change in Climate Change since the two biggest CO2 polluters don’t hone their policies to the wishes of the Sierra Club and are too ecstatic about leaving the stone age. The Dem’s bastardization of the confirmation process is now legendary after they tried to conduct a lynch party on Kavanaugh on the basis of nothing more than the baseless and raw accusation of single person, a person without evidence and littered with contradictions. The Senate hearing room and the mob in the street – the Democrat base in full view – were enflamed with the slander. Speaking of dunces, who else but a dunce could believe this bunk? The rabid D base could.

Women’s March, Washington, DC, Jan. 21, 2017.

And I haven’t mentioned the bilge that came to be known as “collusion” and an impeachment that was solely based on a singular phone call in the president’s exercise of foreign policy. A request for assistance in an American investigation on the grifting habits of the Biden family was turned into coup against the 2016 election. The manner in which the conversation made its way to the wolves in the Dem leadership in Congress speaks volumes. As it turns out, the “whistleblower” was an Obama leftover partisan hack in the bowels of the NSA. From there, the salivating wolves running Congress ran wild with impeachment at a time when a dangerous virus was insinuating itself into the country.

Collusion like impeachment was pure hooey, as Mueller had to reluctantly conclude. The only proven collusion turned out to be an unwitting (or witting) kind between Hillary/DNC and a partisan zealot and a sometime Russian intelligence operative, which ended up in the form of a smear known as the “dossier”, and then to the wolf pack. Who could believe this stuff? Dunces could, especially if clouded by untrammeled hatred and a lust for power. This disreputable cast of characters made up the “loyal opposition” in 2020. Biden was only a surfer riding the wave.

Robert Mueller testifies before the House Intelligence Committee, July 2019. (CSPAN)

Interestingly, Trump’s earlier request to the Ukrainian president unexpectedly gained additional legs in the week before this November election. By then, though, it was too little, too late. The scandal known as “early voting” – a month or earlier – became standard and the Dems exploited it to the hilt. The non-voting tendencies of their demographic base could be corrected by the mailed ballot and ballot harvesting. They already had millions in the bank before the good news about the vaccine, the recovering economy, and Tony Bobulinski’s revelations of Biden and his family’s time-honored tradition of peddling influence to become millionaires and maybe next door neighbors to the Obamas with a Martha’s Vineyard estate of their own. The party of big government is self-interested in it becoming bigger because it will make millionaires of them all. Grifting is a profession for this clan.

Joe Biden (middle), his son Hunter and his sister Valerie Biden Owens in 2016. Recent attacks on the former vice president pivot off the lucrative business activities of his son during the Obama administration. (photo: Visar Kryeziu/AP)

The picture of the 2020 election is more complicated than the elevation of an incontinent grifter to the presidency. The Republican down ballot did slightly better than the top of the ticket. The Republicans are in a stronger position to flood the zone with proposals to restore integrity to our elections. Voter ID, putting an end to early voting, reducing the prevalence of mail-in voting, establishing stronger federal standards in federal elections, and instituting criminal penalties for public officials who violate those official norms are some ideas that should make their way into bills. Let the Democrats play their “suppressing the vote” gambit. These measures poll well. Republicans, get on with it and make some hay.

With Republican successes down ballot, what is the “voice” of the people? Some voters believe this, some believe that, and some are just morons. The last category might be more numerous because it includes the folks who believe in things that aren’t true. Progressivism and socialism are plagued with things that aren’t true. These two related worldviews have a head start in the fantasy department. How many voters are firmly entrenched in them? My guess is that there are many. So, the “voice” of the people is a cacophony with a healthy dollop of the farcical.

So much for elections.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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It’s More Than the Irregularities in Counting

Wayne County (Detroit) poll worker covers the windows after poll watchers were evicted on November 3, 2020.

Justice Alito ordered Pennsylvania election boards to segregate late-arriving ballots. The order is important to be sure, but there are two kinds of possible corruption in this virus paranoia-stoked election: misbehavior in the processing of the ballots and the abuse in the production of them. Alito’s order deals with the former.

Right now, we are in the processing phase and, rightly, much attention is focused on the much rumored, historical, and serious irregularities in Democrat one-party fiefdoms. Yet, let’s not forget the altered system that produced the ballots, delivered them, set the conditions for which they were marked, and played footsie with the deadlines for their arrival for processing. It’s the production side of the equation wherein lies the greatest difficulty to prove widespread criminal abuse, beyond what has been dismissed as just anecdote, but which naturally draws into question the legitimacy of elections. The biggest threat to our democracy (actually, citizen republic) is the Democrats’ long-held desire to conduct monkey business with the franchise.

The setup before the ballots get to the counters makes it possible for all the other suspicious activity in processing them. That setup was due to COVID, which was the expedient to turn our elections into a Third World affair. The virus has been exploited to mutilate our way of life. The COVID panic was used to repeal the First Amendment – unless you’re going to march in the streets for a neo-Marxist revolution, erase our history, loot, pillage, and burn – construct authoritarian regimes in the states, and dismantle livelihoods. The COVID scare was used to destroy the education of our children, social life, and our self-concept as we move about disguised in masks. Children will grow up knowing people only from the cheek bones up. Now the ginned-up madness has tainted the foundational element of a citizen republic, the vote. Among those other things, COVID became the pretext to construct a Rube Goldberg election system; one mostly designed by Democrats to cook up Democrat victories.

Election challengers watch poll workers count absentee ballots for the city of Detroit, Nov. 3, 2020.

Are elections in the COVID and post-COVID era to be limited to rubber stamping Left/Democrat proclivities? The collectivism gang distorted our established ways while Republicans tried to put a break on Democrat designs with ballot integrity measures, to no avail in the era of the COVID panic-as-excuse. The Democrat dream of expanding the franchise to include the living and the dead, the non-citizen and citizen, the uninterested and grossly ill- or non-informed, and the ineligible and eligible was made real.

In many states, particularly blue ones, ballots were sent hither and yon by mail using voter rolls dirtied with many who cannot legally vote and those who would not if left alone. Where did the ballots go? They went to an address to then be marked by God-knows-who. A kind of cattle roundup in the form of ballot harvesting was authorized by the usual suspects to milk every last vote out of the uninterested, ill- or non-informed, living or dead, and ineligible and eligible.

Ballot harvesting.

What was happening behind the closed doors of those addresses? Who and how were the ballots filled out? I don’t know, you don’t know, they don’t know, which now elicits healthy suspicions that the entire process is a sham.

Then deadlines became meaningless, all in order to keep the ballot boxes open so they could be later stuffed to produce the Democrats’ preferred result. Another healthy suspicion. This jerry-rigged system encourages such misgivings. Is this what is meant by the risible chant “count very vote”? Pardon me, after this contrived and mockery of a system, for having my doubts about the results. Reagan said it best, “Trust but verify”. He said it in reference to the Soviet general secretary; many of us are saying it to the people of a party with many similar beliefs.

If Trump loses, nonetheless, Trump will have pulled the makeshift bandage off a fetid wound. He brought out of the interstices all the harmful bacteria that are present in the open wound of our modern politics and system of government. Thanks to a dossier, Mueller, and a coup that was disguised as impeachment, we now know of the existence of the dark influence of a new, pernicious, and burgeoning social class: an American nomenklatura. Sometimes referred to as the deep state, it’s an interweaved and integrated social class of government-associated non-profits and government workers, both appointed from the world of DC and ensconced in the civil service.

The nomenklatura

They have allies in the culture in the Democratic Party, Big Media, corporate boardrooms, the uber-rich, people with haute couture pedigrees and pseudo-prestigious degrees from our campuses-turned-indoctrination centers. It’s a vile socio-political ecosystem that Trump has exposed by his presence and persona.

Out of this milieu came the 2020 election. Biden is the quintessential creature of it. He might ride into office on a river of this socio-political slime. These next four years might be very interesting ones.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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What’s Next?

Supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump bang on the glass and chant slogans outside the room where absentee ballots for the 2020 general election are being counted at TCF Center on November 4, 2020 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)

If Biden wins, he will earn the rap “Your Fraudulency”. The virus has given us more than 200,000 dead. It’s now the go-to excuse for conducting an election that appears to be eerily reminiscent of those in a post-Soviet republic. Massive mail-in voting is, on its face, highly dubious. The blanketing of many urban-dominated states (overwhelmingly blue) with mail-in ballots is an invitation to fraud in states with a history of it. Accounts are trickling in of the dead voting and out-of-staters and non-citizens mysteriously showing up in the vote count. Poll watchers were evicted from the counting (see below), something stipulated in law, ostensibly due to COVID-induced paranoia about “overcrowding”.

And the post-election vote counts in these deep blue, historically corrupt Democrat one-party jurisdictions all blows one way: to the D’s. As they say in politico-speak, the “optics” aren’t good, and neither is the legitimacy. Will Biden be declared the winner by a rankly partisan media, and truly accepted by the public, in an election with as many credibility holes as a block of Swiss cheese?

What’s next for the aggrieved? Frankly, options are few. Potentially illegal votes will disappear like a rain drop in a pool. Segregating them will be impossible once they are counted. The wrangling over the 2000 election brought to light the realization that a do-over isn’t likely because the courts are as reluctant to get involved as a child is in eating his spinach.

Broward County canvassing board member Judge Robert Rosenberg looks over a questionable ballot at the Broward County Courthouse in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, November 24, 2000. (Photo by RHONA WISE / AFP)

The Constitution stipulates the process for choosing the president and leaves management of the election process to the states. If the state turns a blind eye to chicanery, there’s little recourse, especially if the process is as opaque as Trump initially wanted his wall to be.

Court challenges might have legs if the shenanigens clearly violate other Constitutional provisions, as in 2000 when the Gore team violated equal protection in trying to cherry-pick selected Florida counties for recounts. A case could be made here, but it’ll have to overcome extreme judicial hesitancy.

The state legislature could be called into session to block the caper in a legal action, but it will be late to the party and, as of this writing, there seems to be little life at the state capitol. No doubt, the Constitution establishes the state legislature as the election nanny. Still, it would be too little, too late.

Sadly, election fraud has proven to be the the most unenforced crime on the books. There are no finger prints and the smoking gun is so dispersed as to be unrecognizable, and the jury-rigged system of throwing ballots hither and yon in the mail invites suspicions. In response, the public may be limited to the Constitutional right of association. The election lacks legitimacy, so show up at Your Fraudulency’s inaugural in droves and express your disapproval.

Wearing his trademark aviator sunglasses, Vice President Joe Biden visits a mall in Las Vegas with senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto. (AP Photo)

Don’t worry about being accused of mimicking the 2016 vagina-heads. They had no case. They just didn’t like the result. This one has the pungent stink of fraud all over it.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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This Thing is Going to the Court(s) and Worse

USA. Erie. 3th November. Inside the Courthouse opening mailed votes.

“Beyond the margin of fraud” is a cliché but one more true today than ever. Let me be perfectly frank in saying that, in order to limit the “margin”, not every vote should count nor should every potential voter vote. It’s stupendously ridiculous to claim otherwise.

I am one with Andrew C. McCarthy on this in his piece on National Review online. The Supreme Court muddied the waters in a recent 4-4 vote in allowing the Pennsylvania Court to rewrite its election laws but SCOTUS ordered any affected ballots to be held in abeyance till a final determination. This election won’t stop in SCOTUS. Think of the whole range of state and federal courts that’ll have a say on this monstrous flub of an election before we can put “finis” on it. Even then, the final vote will have the lingering smell of a septic tank.

How did we get here? And no, you can’t blame the virus. We can lay fault with the fact that we have forgotten the sole purpose of elections: to register the voice of the people. But how do we know that the tally reflects the “voice”? We don’t, and that’s because of the Democratic Party harangues to “count every vote” while they engage in a full frontal assault on ballot integrity.

The virus has a role . . . as an excuse, a pretext for Castro-style plebiscites. Mail-in voting has always been scandalous since it destroys the secret ballot and no-one knows what happens behind the closed doors of an address. Now we’ve put the gambit on meth. Obstacles in attempts to match signatures, screams of horror against voter ID, and the demand to count everything no matter how mangled underscore the Democrats’ fixation on the need to pile up the pieces of paper as their route to power. At the end of the day, though, did we have an election or merely a greasy slide to power?

Where’s the “voice”? Is it the “voice” of the profoundly uninterested and ignorant? Is it the “voice” of ballot harvesters? Is it the “voice” of the ineligible? No doubt, invalid votes cancel valid ones. So, we have an election that will satisfy few and has a stink rising from it.

Thank you Democrats for ruining a once good thing. In your zeal for power, you’ll only have made your opponents apoplectic. This election will have produced two types of winners: the kind who won in spite of the fraud and those who won with it. For those who rode the current of pungent malfeasance to office, they could be rightly referred to as “your fraudulency”, with no more validity than that.

Will half the country accept a corrupted tally? I kind of doubt it. The Democrats are responsible for this sorry state of affairs. Here’s an interesting question: What happens when elections lose their integrity? Elections have often been referred to as peaceful revolutions. The peaceful part is only possible if they are popularly accepted as credible. If the process lacks credibility, forget about the “peaceful” kind. Opposition will be left with no recourse but the violent other type.

The Democrats are playing with fire and an end to civility.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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Creating a Black Market in Votes

In the wake of the 2016 election, I got into a spat with friends over the issue of voter fraud in our elections. Many dismissed the gravity of the problem in their zeal to hype Hillary’s almost 3 million popular vote margin over Trump. I maintained: Not so fast. The Dems run up the score in the few deep blue states (Actually, the Dems deserve red.). And what about that score? Is the popular vote pristine, meaning one-man-one-vote? Does each ballot represent a vote by an eligible voter? Or, conversely, is the vote total polluted with a lot of noise in the form of ballots emanating from dead people, identity theft, or serial instances of multiple voting. You can’t know the extent the problem till you look.

When we look, we find it. The Heritage Foundation website maintains a log of voter fraud cases. Take a look here.

Last night, Tucker Carlson played a clip of rampant voter fraud in Ilhan Omar’s district (D, Minn. 5th congressional dist.). If the clip wasn’t doctored to tell a lie, then the pictures won’t. If nothing else, they probably pull back the covers on a black market in votes like the one for drugs, sex, porn, or murder-for-hire. See below.

Check fraud is easy if no one checks for ID; likewise in the black market of votes. The fraud is facilitated if voter rolls are infrequently cleaned of the deadwood, as in California in both its forests and voter registration rolls. Add same-day registration and widespread vote-by-mail and the integrity of the popular vote becomes a meaningless talking point.

One antidote is the Electoral College. The Electoral College dilutes the influence of the popular manias in deep blue states as well as malfeasance with the franchise. Like the fact that smartness isn’t evenly distributed in the population, so with corrupted voting in the states. It demands of the winner that he or she have a broader appeal than the corrupted vote totals in a few highly populous states. Now there’s a civics lesson long forgotten.

Check out the website and video.

RogerG

(also on my Facebook page)

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Playing Gotcha While Ignoring the Integrity of the Vote

What conceivable reason could a person give for opposing a requirement for a valid ID before voting?  Could it be that ID’s “suppress” and “disenfranchise” voters?  Surely, some people have good reason for not having a valid ID at the time of voting.  Can the circumstance be handled without obstructing ID laws?  Certainly.  Provisional ballots can be issued till identification is verified.  It’s already being done.

Is getting an ID so onerous that it places an undue burden on the disadvantaged?  Well, if it is, banks and stores are imposing a “disparate impact” on the needy.   Where was Obama’s DOJ in enforcing “equal access” to check-cashing and retail services?

Obama’s DOJ is nowhere to be seen around check-cashing counters and cash registers.  Getting an ID is easy.  It takes some time and a little effort.  Instead, the Obama’s DOJ warriors targeted efforts at purging voter rolls of invalid registrants, while denying access to the fed’s database.  They didn’t hesitate hauling state officials before the federal bar for having the same condition to vote as for boarding a plane, entering a federal courthouse, and to buy booze.

Much of the media is complicit in the charade.  Instead of a balanced treatment of the issue, we get a drawn out game of gotcha.  Trump tweets something and many in the media rush to the “fact-checking” websites to contradict him.

They get hung up on the factoid.  Proving Trump wrong is more important than the core issue.  The real issue isn’t the accurate number of illegal votes, whether its 3 million, 5 million, or 346.  The real contest is between maximizing voter turnout at all costs and ensuring the integrity of the vote.  The two positions are at odds.

The zeal to contradict Trump is an adjunct of the zeal to show vote fraud is rare.  Since it is said to be rare, measures meant to prevent it are assumed to be grounded in racial animus, xenophobia, white privilege, and the rest of the “Occupy” check list.  Thus, full speed ahead to making it easier to vote than to buy toilet paper.

Did it ever occur to anyone that the alleged rarity of a crime is, quite frankly, irrelevant to the need to prevent it?  For example, take murder.  Murder is certainly rare in comparison to all crimes.  It’s statistically infinitesimal.  Following the logic of the no-ID crowd, efforts to define the act and to forestall its occurrence must be a waste of time.

Is it a wild analogy?  Think again.  Infinitesimal percentages are concocted by comparing a small number of occurrences with a much larger pool of instances.  Applying the math to the case of voter fraud, the number of discovered occurrences is infinitesimal to the large pool of 125 million votes.

The reasoning for laws about voter fraud is the same as for laws about murder.  The laws aren’t dependent on the frequency of their occurrence.  The laws exist because the acts occur, unless the no-ID claque is asserting vote fraud is at absolute “0” (absolute zero is 0 Kelvin or -459F).  Now that’s absolutism … and silly.

It’s safe to say that vote fraud is significantly above absolute “0”.  The need to buttress the already shaky proposition of the no-vote-fraud/no-ID-laws clamor leads to the flailing about for other sources of support.  Mentioning Colin Powell or court decisions is a common and worn out tactic.  Neither one has much validity.

Both are examples of the fallacious exercise of argumentum ad verecundiam (argument from authority).  People throw out names or opinions as if these are dispositive.  They aren’t.  Without more substance, their use will fill up space in a column but add nothing to the argument.

The practice of citing court opinions is particularly weak.  Court opinions on issues like voter ID laws range all over the issue landscape.  One reason for the variance is the tactic of court-shopping by activists.  People seek judges and courts with a history of a particular bias.  Yep, bias exists in the judiciary.  Just because a judge has spoken, don’t assume God has.  Search long enough and you’ll find another jurist to contradict somebody.

Facetious arguments such as these only cloud an already hazy situation.  The multiplicity of geographical actors in the  system is astounding.  Voting occurs in millions of homes through mail-in ballots, in over 110,000 polling places (a guesstimate) across the country, all managed by the 50 separate states.  The interactions of this crazy quilt would overwhelm the skills of the X-Men.  It’s a fertile environment for gaffes, waste, and abuse.

Some coordination among some of the states to help clean up their voter lists has occurred with the Electronic Registration Information Center of 21 states and the 30 states belonging to the Interstate Crosscheck Program sponsored by the Kansas Secretary of State.  The country’s most populous state, California, doesn’t appear to belong to either club.

In the headlong rush to rock the vote, California has left a few zombies on the voter rolls.  Dead people vote.  One reporter for the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles found 265 dead voters, with 215 in LA County alone.  146 were Democrats.  On person who went cold in 2003 nonetheless voted in ’04, ’05, ’06, ’08, and ’10.  Another commuter from the grave entered it in 2004 but later roamed out to vote in ’08, ’10, ’12, ’14.  32 of the walking dead voted in 8 elections apiece.

In fact, California was the last state to come into compliance with the Help America Vote Act of 2002.  It took 14 years and the final weeks before the 2016 general election for the state to make itself legal, after it rushed into online registration up to 15 days before the election, and the wave of 600,000 new registrants in the weeks before the June primary.

They don’t even record IP addresses so one enterprising soul with a laptop hanging out at Disneyland’s Star Tour could register the crowd in the waiting line.  Pardon me but I’m skeptical about something called “verification”.

Compounding the difficulties is the campaign to expand the electorate into the margins of the politically casual and ignorant.

It means making voting as easy as turning on the tv set.  It means voting at home and by mail.  Of course, the mail-in vote puts the kibosh to the secret ballot.  Plural ballots sent to the same address presents the delightful opportunity of one person filling out everyone’s ballot.  Who knows what takes place at the kitchen table.

For some states like California, going to the DMV to register your car, or obtain or renew a driver’s license, will nearly lock you into the voter list.  If a person misses the citizen/non-citizen section on the form, the state will seek you out for an answer.  If you refuse one, they’ll register you anyway.

If you explicitly checked “no”, the state will hunt you down with a letter to verify the “no” answer.  Apparently, what part of “no” don’t they understand?

What about that driver’s license, the ticket to all things requiring ID, as in registering to vote?  States like California issue them to illegal non-citizens.  Illegals get one nearly indistinguishable from a 4th generation native.

Except for a notation in the upper right hand corner and on the back, the thing is exactly like my sons.  How this avoids a violation of the Real ID Act, Title II, Section 202 – “uses a unique design or color indicator to alert Federal agency and other law enforcement personnel ” – is beyond my understanding.  I can only hope the small print catches the attention of the eagle eyes of the counter clerk.  Good luck.

But then again, you don’t need it to vote in a state life California.  In that zoo, it’s illegal to even ask for the thing at the polling place.  No better word describes elections in many places in America than “slipshod”.  How did it get this bad?

Well, if your goal is to maximize turnout, you cut corners on vote integrity.  You’re willing to accept some cancellation of legal votes by illegal ones in the rush to get a ballot into everyone’s hands.  Disparagement of the desire to protect legal ones from cancellation is part of the propaganda onslaught that we’re experiencing today.

The absurdity of criminalizing a request for an ID, obstructing access to federal lists that might expose illegals on the voter rolls, pushing for avenues of voting that make a hash out of the secret ballot, and the embrace of the fetish of corralling the inattentive and  uninterested into the electorate makes a mockery of our republic.

It raises an interesting question: Why vote?  Devoting the time and effort to keep up on things will prove to be no asset once your ballot joins those others.

RogerG