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How to Steal 40 Years of Elections
Over at the Federalist, Executive Editor Joy Pullman has a magnificent piece up detailing the things that made her gasp in Mollie Hemingway’s new book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.
The Pullman article is a rip-roaring read, and if you haven’t read Hemingway’s book by now, you will within 15 minutes of reading Pullman’s gazette of the work. I’ll gazette Pullman here in turn, just to whet your appetite. Following is a mighty condensation of what Pullman has said about Hemingway’s new book. Just the first four points — Pullman herself has assembled seven points so far based on her reading to date: “… I’m not even done. I just started the Hunter Biden chapter…”
Heh.
While I work with Mollie and am highly aware of media corruption since it’s our bread and butter here at The Federalist, she still had many surprises for me inside “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Here I’ll share a few things she reports in the book that made me gasp out loud.
1. The DNC Controlled All Poll Watchers for 40 Years
Essentially, after Democrats accused Republicans of cheating in a New Jersey race in 1981, a judge banned the RNC from poll-watching and voting litigation everywhere in the country, then kept re-upping the order until 2018, when it finally expired three years after he died.
2. Lazy Voting Biases Elections Towards Democrats
Also made clear throughout “Rigged” is that lazier and sloppier elections strongly advantage Democrats. This means long election seasons, mail-in balloting, and loose ballot behavior such as mailing millions and opening dropboxes all tilt elections towards Democrats.
3. Facebook Bought Joe Biden the Election
Elsewhere in the book, Hemingway notes that Facebook executives have boasted that they can shut off 80 percent of the traffic to any link they want. Facebook and Google blacklisting of conservative news sites such as The Federalist, The Daily Caller, and Breitbart has been documented since 2017.
4. The United States Has Republican No-Go Zones
Mollie later quotes former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr describing how Antifa — a violent group implicated in actual domestic terrorism — “use[s] legitimate demonstrations as a host body.”
If Republicans genuinely want to win elections — and that is sadly in doubt — they have no choice but to use whatever power they have to make those elections trustworthy again.
Let me (BDB) tell you something. I listened to Mollie’s book, but attentive listening to audiobooks is an on and off kind of thing. Pullman’s article on a book I just listened to still presented me with new information. I had certainly missed the enormous fact of 40 years of the RNC not being allowed to have poll watchers. That was a thing? How can the party not have made this a front-and-center issue every stinking day for 40 years? Mind-blowing malpractice.
That’s a heck of an article over at the Federalist. The book has been reviewed here at Ricochet (glowingly, natch), and I think the usual suspects had her on a podcast to discuss the book. I’m not digging for those links (as much as I appreciate the effort that went into that sort of thing), because I am only presenting a single link in this post — straight to Pullman’s Federalist article. Many times, we are pressed to support a point with no hope of convincing our interlocutor to actually, you know, READ A BOOK. Keep this link to Pullman’s article handy. It’s the right gun for the job.
Finally, this post was inspired by a Cliff Brown post in a group on this site. Good man, Cliff.
Published in General
Yes
Good to have you back BDB
Thank you sir! Good to be back.
I had heard about the 40 year thing before. It’s expiration in 2018 is credited in the clean up of Broward county elections in FL. Most of the dissidents crying foul on the 2020 election are aware of the judge that pushed that 1981 ruling in until his death.
Mollie gave a few interviews to our Rico Podcast group. All were superb. Kudo’s to Mollie. Sad and tragic how the republican party cowed and accepted defeat because of the threat of being falsely accused “a racist”
Stunning. News to me. The fact is bad enough, but the heartbreaking part is that this should have been red meat for everybody further right than Bill Kristol.
It was the Georgia GOP that agreed to a consent decree that flipped the state Blue in 2020. The GOP should never enter into any consent agreement again. That is legal suicide and the Dems are never that dumb.
I was completely shocked by this in Rigged. How could the Republicans not have fought this instead of cowering for 40 years. According to Mollie, the RNC trained Republicans to not run afoul of this consent decree for 40 years, while Democrats received training in how to manipulate elections as poll watchers. It is absolutely insane.
Yet another instance of Failure Theater. How hard would it have been to pass a federal law overturning the 40 year-old court case? If there was some valid reason for the initial order (questionable, but maybe), simply address that issue in the new law. We have three branches of government, and the judicial branch is not superior to the others. There were many years during the Bush and Trump administrations when the GOP had both houses of congress and the Presidency. They could have undone this travesty then. They could have consistently sent bills to Clinton and Obama, making a big stink about how Republicans were being barred from poll watching, implying that shenanigans were likely ongoing since only the Democrats were allowed to watch the process.
But they didn’t. Why not? Is Mollie completely wrong on this? I find it more likely that the GOP power center simply didn’t care. They didn’t want to win and actually accomplish conservative goals, just collect campaign contributions and go through the motions while secretly siding with the Dems.
Change my mind.
Yes, I knew about the restraining order in force for 38 years and the judge who couldn’t renew it because he had passed on. I believe this order was a compromise with then-Republicans, too, but I’m not sure.
It never occurred to me that Democrats would maintain a this-is-the-way-we-do-it attitude or that the Republican poll watchers would not have a historical leg to stand on to assert their rights. It does however explain why the Democrats were so assertive and had deputies and police escorting Republican poll watchers out.
This is why I have, since the 2020 election been very skeptical of those who say we need to organize and talk to people and convince people, and get the vote out. Sure there is certainly an inescapable need for this. but when the entire election system is corrupted, or at least legally one-sided, it makes voting in total an iffy proposition.
Makes me want to go to every GOP convention, sit in the front row and scream “Grow a pair” every five minutes.
There I go; dreaming again.
News to me too. I like Mollie a lot, but is there corroboration on that? What do pretty much every RNC chairman and R president of the last 40 years have to say about that? Have they been asked?
Not that I disbelieve it. Nowadays I simultaneously believe and disbelieve everything. It’s just so outrageous that I’d like to know how people answer it, what has been done to fight it. And everywhere? Including Republican strongholds? It’s hard to wrap my brain around such an idea as 40 years of nationwide lockout of watchers without it being a much bigger deal or constantly challenged.
From Politico 2018:
Judge ends consent decree limiting RNC ‘ballot security’ activities
By JOSH GERSTEIN *** 01/09/2018
After more than three decades, Republicans are free of a federal court consent decree that sharply limited the Republican National Committee’s ability to challenge voters’ qualifications and target the kind of fraud President Donald Trump has alleged affected the 2016 presidential race.
Newark-based U.S. District Court Judge John Michael Vazquez ruled in an order released Tuesday that the longstanding decree ended Dec. 1 and will not be extended.
The decree, which dated to 1982, arose from a Democratic National Committee lawsuit charging the RNC with seeking to discourage African-Americans from voting through targeted mailings warning about penalties for violating election laws and by posting armed, off-duty law enforcement officers at the polls in minority neighborhoods.
To extend the decree, the DNC needed to show that the RNC violated the terms of the pact. Democrats pointed to a series of incidents during the 2016 election in which they alleged people who claimed or appeared to be working for the RNC were engaged in poll watching. A November 2016 POLITICO report describing RNC spokesman Sean Spicer’s Election Day activities led the judge to order Spicer to submit to a deposition.
Vazquez, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, said in his ruling that despite the various claims, the Democrats had not shown any violation “by a preponderance of the evidence.”
It was just the Sec of State, wasn’t it? and maybe the Governor.
Perhaps the people making the decisions for the RNC didn’t want to. The suckers who contributed to the Republican wing of the Uniparty wouldn’t knowingly advance the Democrat agenda, but they’d keep giving to (R) organizations and candidates.
It makes me think of then Speaker of the House Presumptive Eric Cantor’s revealing statement shortly before the 2014 election that cost him his House seat:
You think maybe it was a gaffe, as in accidentally telling the truth? Like Biden announcing the most inclusive voter-fraud organization ever assembled?
I second the recommendation.
Aw shucks, thanks.
Read the book. (Or have it read to you.) You will be simultaneously amazed and outraged. The more light that is shone on this nonsense the better, even if it risks provoking despair. (It might make you wonder what the hundreds – thousands? – of reporters on the ‘political’ beat have been doing lo these many decades.)
Cantor, a top RNC fundraiser,”worked with the Tea Party” in 201o. He got primaried by Dave Brat in 2014, under fire for having “moderated” his views.
A few months later,
What’s the group?
It’s more than 40 years –
you had Chicago in 1960
Also the Tammany hall machine had this down to a science
Because there are ways around it, and I have no doubt the RNC did use those ways to do it. The National comittee was barred. But the way around is to have the State Committees to send in observers and the national campaigns to send in poll watchers.
However having my own experience in such things, the State parties, had lower resources and used them like I would concentrating on areas that we could win and not sending them into districts that were in favor of Democrats.
This does explain a lot of what happened in the hearings after the election as the RNC is better equipped to send people everywhere and was sending observers to places that havent seen a R in 40 years.
Checked with @randyweivoda. It turns out this organizing is done by the county Republican parties. If you have a strong county system plenty of volunteers, but if your the Detroit county board, you probably have no volunteers wanting to go into some of the dangerous neighborhoods. The 2020 election RNC officials didnt know that, so they sent volunteers everywhere, and suddenly a lot of rats were exposed.
HW, didn’t you get the memo?
Statewide elections such as Governor, Senator, and President(ial electors) can be influenced or even determined by a few districts. And if the Dims know which districts you’re NOT watching, that’s where they can dump the illegal votes.
I understand how the game was played. I am just explaining the work arounds the Republicans used to get around the court order.
Unlike the vast majority of people who comment on these things, I have actually run elections.
The Sec State. In GA, the State Constitution limits (severly) the abiltiy of the Govenor to have anything to do with elections…It is the sole responsibility of the Sec of State who is an elected official. At least that is my understanding of the legalities…
But, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln Project, how did you enjoy the
erectionelection?I’m not tracking.
Translation:
The Lincoln Project has some peccadilloes in its past and stages faux racist soy mobs so I was asking those married to the Lincoln Project how they enjoyed the
stealrig while alluding to the fact they may find such things arousing.