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Election Reform Is the Only Issue That Matters
As a followup to more than one of @drbastiat‘s fine posts, and the discussion of the impeachment of the Texas Attorney General, this latest article from Jay Valentine at American Thinker should be read.
He’s got the numbers. His group has documented techniques for controlling elections all over the country. Voter rolls that get thousands of additions, who vote and then are deleted. Printer settings changed so that they print votes that won’t scan. Ballot harvesting is just the tip of the iceberg.
The last presidential election isn’t the one to discuss; last year is the one where they rolled out most of these scams, which is why we got a red trickle instead of a wave. All the polls, all the conventional wisdom said the red wave was coming. Didn’t happen. Elections were blatantly rigged with no consequences. As in Arizona. They have been planning this for years, and most of it is in place and working.
Biden’s unpopularity doesn’t matter. Harris’ poll numbers don’t matter. The Administration’s destruction of the economy won’t make them lose the election. The outrageous overreach of the Executive Branch won’t turn them out of office. Whether Trump or DeSantis gets the nomination doesn’t matter. The way things are now, no Republican can win the Presidency, and Republicans cannot take back the Senate. Now that the Democrat left has seen what we can do with a tiny majority in the House, we’ll lose that too. Unless we can overcome the systematic, well-planned, well-funded conspiracy to control our elections, we’re done as a free country.
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I really, really hope you’re wrong.
But I think you may be right…
If this can happen in Texas, G-d help a state like Pennsylvania.
The Supreme Court upset the balance between rural and urban centers years ago with the one man-one vote decisions. But why can’t the federal government require federal elections be held on one single Election Day with in-person ballots cast at lawfully designated polling places by voters whose eligibility is established at the time of casting their ballot? Why is this so freakin’ hard?
Great Post. Yes it is really the number one issue, but as far as I can see hardly anything has been done to stop the Democrats cheating, except for people like Paxton.
I fear the next election will be an unbelievable fraud. The Dems know this and that is why they don’t even try to hide their criminality anymore – case in point the FBI.
Just as no raindrop is responsible for the flood, our courts have decide that no act of voter fraud is sufficient to change an election result. So the flood will continue.
I like say that corruption in government is our biggest problem. Is corruption in elections a bigger problem than corruption in government? Is it a symptom or the root cause? Dunno, but we have to chip away at both.
Uh oh. You’re going to make Con, Inc. cry.
Yep. This is why they are taking down Ken Paxton.
Exactly. This has been allowed to develop and to build by those who will dismiss it in favor of a status quo. And when combined with a corrupt administration which we have hard evidence of directly interfering with every election at least since 2016, there is no room left for the delusional view of simply wanting “your old GOP back”.
K.T. McFarland has said that the deep state will be even more desperate to alter the election because with all that has been revealed they fear what would not be a reform minded Republican administration attacking the real threat they are to our republic. I believe that to be true but only partly so. They have never had anything to fear from a Romney/McCain/Christie/Graham (there are still plenty of similar names but I will move on) type administration and never would. A determined disruptor has to be next candidate AND that will not matter unless we address our elections seriously.
It’s hard because people thought making it easier to vote was a “good thing” ™, and thus anything that made it easier to vote was to be promoted. In Texas we have had early voting for a long time where youncan vote for the two weeks leading up to the election as well as on election day. But that isn’t enough. I support things like curbside voting for people with mobility/health issues even if it was a pain as an Elwction Judge to actually do it. I’m OK with early voting because it is still in person, but mail in voting is insecure.
Now this idea that voting should be easy has infected the mindset of Americans. Standing in line is hard, so let’s have early voting. Getting time off work is hard, so more early voting. People travel, so mail in voting is needed. Now we have a pandemic, so more mail in voting, and once people see how easy it is…they won’t give it up. After all, why drove to a polling place and stand in line when you can just fill it out at home. So easy.
In 22 I voted for the Republican running for CD-28 because I liked her and donated to her. She was the only person I voted for that election. I doubt I’ll vote for anyone in 24, because the fix is in, even if it isn’t fully developed in Texas. If other States can circumvent the rules it eliminates the validity of our elections here. Texas could elect Senators, Representatives, even send Presidential electors, but if PA, WI, MI, AZ, GA, etc run flawed elections, those elections are overturned by the cheaters.
You should go vote, because it makes your complaints credible.
In person voting on election day is best. Early voting in person (no more that a week before election day) is OK. Absentee or mail-in ballots should only be used in very restricted circumstances. Online voting should never be accepted.
“Republicans just need a better GOTV operation.”
Is Republican GOTV going to work against this:
Oh, I’ll go to the polls and cast a ballot, it just may be blank because I don’t see anybody worth voting for. The GOP is useless and the Dems are just wrong. I don’t want to give even tacit support to either. Voting for the idiotic Libertarians is even worse. But yes, I will go, in-person, and likely cast a blank ballot, or vote in a local or statewide race that I believe in. If Cassie Garcia runs again for US Rep than I’d vote for her. But for President? Why bother, my vote won’t change the outcome in Texas, and the other States are just going to offset Texas anyway.
In a word, no.
I’m confused.
Paxton made a 3 million dollar payout. Only he then had the state of Texas pay the whistleblowers.
Is this the norm?
I could be mistaken but my impression was Paxton had reached a settlement with former staffers who’d brought a complaint, and then he asked the legislature to fund the settlement amount. It appears to me this was just a pretext on which Paxton’s critics could impeach him.
As far as the “norm” goes, it’s not unusual here in WA for us taxpayers routinely to get saddled with large, even multi-million dollar settlements to be paid out to those wrongfully treated by the state bureaucracy, or killed by police in what turns out to have been questionable use of force, or even the result of court-imposed sanctions against the state AG (who’s now running for governor) for having wrongfully and willfully withheld evidence from discovery for many months in litigation, resulting in large financial sanctions against his office, which of course will be paid by public funds.
Here’s what I don’t get. Aren’t there processes for whistleblowing? Aren’t there processes for paying settlements? Aren’t there processes for recusing oneself? It is like Texas is just winging this governing thing. If processes are being following, how can you impeach? If there are no processes, get some! If processes are not being followed, let’s have some consequences.
I have also heard that Paxton helped his friend with an FBI warrant. Again, I do not know what the rules are, but we know the FBI can be unfair with Republicans, so I like to withhold judgement on people being crosswise with the FBI.
One of the things Steve Crowder did before he went a lil bit nuts:
He obtained access to voter rolls, and went and checked the names and addresses against reality.
He found a number of times that a number of voters supposedly lived in massively unlived- in tenement buildings.
He discovered several voters whose “homes” were highway medians.
Apartment and condo affairs that had 60 to 80 units suddenly had over 100 units, containing voters. These units mysteriously disappeared after the election.
But of course, nothing to see here. Please move on.
Or could it be, Don, that you hold some value to one of my father’s favorite principles: “Two wrongs do not make a right.”?
The cited article is a bit breathless. I’m not going to say it is wrong, but it certainly doesn’t convince.
The case against Paxton hasn’t been published very openly. I still have no idea what it’s about, but I’ll admit that my impressio of Paxton is more than mixed. I like some things he’s done, but for others he has been way off. Don’t ask me to say when because I don’t remember. I’m expressing my opinion from living in Texas for not quite three decades.
So, I don’t think Paxton is as popular as the article claims he is.
The Texas legislature has been reliably conservative, and hardly establishmentarian. The state had been dominated completely by democrats since it was founded until George W. Bush was elected as only the second republican governor since reconstruction. I think they’ve come a long way.
I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m not going to conclude anything until I learn more facts and less breathless excited ramblings.
I don’t buy the doom and gloom. The fact is, the present system is the cards we’re dealt with, and we have to play by those rules.
Here’s some things not to do under present conditions. When two Senate seats are up for election, don’t tell your own voters to stay home. Don’t be a sore loser.
If it’s legal in the locality you’re fighting an election in, use those rules to your advantage, even if you disagree with them. Ballot harvesting? If it’s legal, do it. If we’re successful at it, then maybe our opponents will agree that it’s time to end it.
Mail-in ballots? I think it bypasses the secret ballot. But those are the cards we’re dealing with. So we should encourage our voters to use the mail-in if they don’t want to go to the polls.
And with a national campaign, lawyer up before election day. If there’s fraud, have the evidence ready the day after election day.
I suspect that Democrats have a 1%-2% advantage under the present rules, depending on the state. Those can be overcome if there’s a bad economy. In states where Democrats win by 20% margins, it’s not going to matter no matter how much election reform you do.
Giving up because you haven’t had election reform is the wrong approach. And so is running bad candidates.
2024 <-> 1984? We will find out. (Sigh)
WA has had all mail-in voting for quite a few years now, so our system is fairly well worked out, particularly in that ballots are mailed only to registered voters, not en masse to any old address just willy-nilly.
However, as past court battles have shown, once the outside envelope (showing the voter’s signature and date signed under oath) passes muster and the inside envelope with the secret ballot is removed, there is no way to go back to see if any illegally cast ballots swayed an election or not because, once out of the envelope, all ballots look exactly the same.
We had a court fight a few elections back, in a court in central WA so not an overwhelming Democrat area. The judge found a certain number of ballots had in fact been illegally cast, but as they could not be distinguished from valid ones, the election stood. It might seem illogical that illegal votes would benefit the GOP candidate, but that is an inference too attenuated for the court to draw.
And Democrats don’t play by the rules.
Now what do you do?
Well, if you Mitch McConnell, you say you will fight, but then you spend money on keeping your cronies in Washington because…those darn rubes don’t know what’s good for them.
When I evaluate a politician, I have two questions, of equal importance.
Mitch fails #2 and I’m not sure he cares about #1.
I saw a phrase in an article I read with the morning coffee, I think it was in PJ Media, that gave me an answer to the “why bother to vote?” question.
I think we have to vote in North Korea numbers.
You think the left isn’t ready to claim that FJB won re-election by 200 million to 190 million?
If they can claim that Biden got more votes than Obama, they can claim anything. The question is, how long are we going to let them get away with it?
They’ll get away with it until we create a new, real opposition party that threatens the existence of the “controlled opposition.”
The GOP is quite obviously not up to the task.