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It was a primary and now he faces the the Democrat who got the most primary votes (the incumbent is term limited).
Yes, it is just State Controller, an office that most people in this state aren’t aware of.
Granted. But baby steps.
A Republican winning a statewide office here –even State Controller– would be a political earthquake and an enormous accomplishment and set up all sorts of possibilities for the future.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. He’s got a very tough race ahead of him and the odds are absolutely not in his favor.
The link you provide concerns ballot envelope design to make it easier for voters to use — not to improve ballot security. I don’t think it addresses even one of the issues with mail ballots that I raise.
Your reasoning is, just because Democrats think Trump = Hitler doesn’t mean they would (shudder) cheat to make his defeat certain. Democrat election workers are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Even when they are caught cheating in some cases, we are still to assume they are honest in all other cases — rather than cheating successfully. No icebergs here!
I never said anything of the sort. The only reference I made to Democrats was to refute the incredibly silly notion that California is full of Republicans who for some reason can’t or won’t vote.
As for the envelopes, I was specifically responding to Carol who last year went on a bender about how the “Democrats stole the election from Larry Elder,” in part because the envelopes had holes in them. Which is explained in detail in this section of that PDF:
One change I would like to see is that the mail in votes should not be counted until Election Day. Stop counting ballots early — that can only lead to leaks that affect turnout and by extension the results.
Yes, anything can be hacked or rigged, including the things that you think give you accurate information about your ballot.
This is why electing honest people to state legislatures is most important. It’s the only way to secure elections. Which may mean it’s a lost cause.
Sure, but at the moment at least, there is no evidence that is this is occurring in this state. Your “suspicions” are not proof of anything, except maybe deep seeded paranoia.
And how exactly does evidence get found, if nobody looks for it? Or if they’re prevented from looking for it? etc, etc.
The document is a grab bag of suggestions on how mail ballots might be implemented in a particular county. Evidently every county makes its own policy.
“Signature security” refers to covering the signature so that it’s not exposed to potential identity thieves on the outside of the envelope. It’s nothing to do with making sure that the signature is valid.
“Some” counties position the signature block partly on the flap of the envelope and partly on the body of the envelope, to discourage re-opening the envelope after it’s been sealed, to replace or tamper with the ballot inside. This seems like a good idea, but my impression is that only a few counties do it.
“[A]t some point, you have to trust that the people running the elections have some degree of integrity and a conscience.” Indeed, they have integrity as progressives, and a conscience as progressives. To progressives, failing to cheat to make sure Trump loses would figure as unethical behavior.
Their opponents are “fascists”, so whatever they do against them is justified — as John Henry Faulk said to his friend Orson Bean, explaining why he perjured himself in his famous libel suit that ended the blacklisting of Communists.
With in-person voting, a Democratic operative might be able to cast, say, 20 votes. (Because of the risk of being recognized, he would have to cast each vote at a different polling place.) With voting by mail, a single operative could submit thousands of votes.
I can’t begin to tell you how disappointed I am.
First, professional comedy writer Rob Long screws up the Michael Caine quote from Austin Powers.
Then, James Lileks (!) completely messes up the Belgian insult from Monty Python – it’s “Miserable fat Belgian Bastards”. (And also I believe the runner up is “I can’t think of anything more derogatory than ‘Belgian’”)
“Could” and “did” are very standards. Find me a “did” and I’ll be the first one to say vote by mail is a failure and should be ended. Until then, I’ll be voting by mail. Because it’s very convenient and I like it. And it’s not going away.
I’m reminded when banking online first became popular and many, many people said they’d never trust managing their money through a computer over a phone line. Now, it’s of course completely mainstream because it’s actually better than having to go to the bank. There have been problems with it, but those problems get addressed. I think the same thing will happen here.
I’ll leave you all with a little thought exercise: If as predicted, Republicans take back Congress and win 40 seats in the House and a half dozen in the Senate, it will be fascinating to see how many of you will be screaming about this issue then. In fact, there will likely be a ton of Democrats saying the exact same things you are saying now. Will you then take the position that voting by mail is safe and secure? Will you be insisting that there is no need for recounts and audits? Will you be telling everyone you’ve ever met that ballot security is a scam? You all might want to think about how silly all of this may look in 5 months.
I think most will expect that any victory came DESPITE mail-in voting etc, and those victories may easily have been even larger without it. I doubt that the campaign against mail-in voting will fade away on the right. Although I expect the left will cry that they were “cheated” because voting wasn’t loose ENOUGH.
And she’s very close with George Conway so I think her personal alliances cloud her greater judgement.
You should say “the loathsome and grotesque George Conway”, who undermined his marriage and his wife’s career — because it wasn’t enough that Trump was being attacked by 499,999 other people, because his insights were so unique and irreplaceable.
@blueyeti — And this was just the nursing homes …
The report examined 2020 voter participation at 91 nursing homes in Milwaukee, Racine, Dane, Kenosha and Brown counties and found that at least 95% of residents had voted. In Milwaukee, Racine and Dane counties, 100% of nursing home residents cast ballots in the presidential election.
The report did not compare the nursing home voting rate in 2020 with the rate in 2016. The overall voter participation rate in Wisconsin was a record 72% in 2020, compared with 67% in 2016, state election officials said.
Mr. Gableman, citing the staggering figures, said a broader investigation would show similar results in other Wisconsin counties. He called for an audit of all 2020 absentee ballots sent from nursing homes and residential care facilities in the state.
The presidential election in Wisconsin was tight. Joseph R. Biden won the state by fewer than 21,000 votes.
The report detailed instances where nursing home residents deemed incompetent had voted and where signatures appeared forged. In other cases, nursing home residents showed up at their precincts to vote only to be told their ballots had been cast by mail, apparently without their knowledge.
The report suggests that all of the residential care ballots were illegal because the Wisconsin Elections Commission unlawfully loosened the rules governing how ballots were cast in those facilities.
“Given that there are approximately 92,000 residents of [residential care] facilities statewide,” Mr. Gableman wrote, “the fact that tens of thousands of illegal ballots from these facilities were counted casts doubts on the 2020 election result.”
The election commission instead allowed facility staff to help residents vote and mail in their ballots. The commission also permitted ballots to be deposited into drop boxes, all in violation of Wisconsin law.
For what it’s worth, Kellyanne Conway has been giving very good interviews lately. I think the best one is with Newt Gingrich.
And Biden’s margin of “victory” in Wisconsin was less than 21,000 votes.
Voting fraud from nursing homes ALONE can more than account for that.
One item in that story stands out to me:
Didn’t compare the voting rates from the prior Presidential election to the current one? That seems like crucial info to leave out when you are alleging fraud, no? Could it be that the ‘16 numbers nursing home numbers were also very high, which would weaken the fraud case in ‘20?
We’ve been through this before, but clearly a refresher is needed: in 2016 Donald Trump won WI by ~22,000 votes. I do not remember anyone contesting that race or looking into nursing home voting rates then. 🤔
Does it look shady? Yes, it does. But this is hardly new stuff. Every campaign consultant I’ve ever talked to ( and I’ve talked to A LOT) say that nursing and mentally disabled homes have been used to pad votes since the dawn of the republic. Meanwhile, the Crack Trump Campaign Legal Team®️, led by Rudy “Gin & Tonic” Giuliani filed seven cases in WI and lost all of them, including ones that were tried in front of Republican and Trump appointed judges, both in WI and on the Supreme Court. Based on that list, it doesn’t appear that they specifically contested nursing home votes. Why?
I’m sure you guys want to argue that the WI courts, judges, and their support staff were all in on this, but that’s where I get off this crazy train. But hey, if WI Senator Ron Johnson hadn’t been so busy trying to round up alternate (and illegal) electors after the election, maybe he could have looked into this a bit more?
What a 🤡 show.
So we’ve gone from “Find me a ‘did’ [commit fraud] and I’ll be the first one to say vote by mail is a failure and should be ended.”
To (paraphrasing slightly): “Oh, that fraud. Everybody knows about that fraud!”
The crucial fact about 2016 is that the Democrats thought they already had it won, so they engaged in fraud only out of force of habit, and to stay in practice. They learned the hard way that, to defeat Trump, they had to pull out all the stops. And, in 2020, they did.
Why won’t the Wisconsin courts do anything about this obvious fraud? Answer: because the only remedy they have is to rerun the election. (There’s no way to identify which ballots came in the fraudulent envelopes.) In fact, even if all the contested states reran their elections simultaneously and Trump won all of them, there is no Constitutional mechanism to restore him to office.
BTW, nursing home fraud also occurred in Florida in 2000, with senile people casting ballots; but not quite enough to steal the election.
Once again showing how rotten it was for the courts to dismiss pre-election cases for “standing.”
There was an hour wasted.
People have been voting at nursing homes since nursing homes were invented, way before vote by mail was legal. The problem with nursing home voting isn’t the voting mechanism, it’s the overt manipulation of people (and their ballots) who aren’t able to speak up for themselves. Vote by mail is just the latest iteration of it.
This is not to excuse or minimize it: it’s fraud, it’s wrong and it should be stopped. But both parties have been doing crap like this forever.
But nice try.
Well, there is one obvious solution: fix it prior to the election. This isn’t difficult: put election monitors in every nursing home to make sure there is no funny business going on. Which they didn’t do. Not when Scott Walker was Governor, not when Ron Johnson was their Senator, not ever. I presume because they or other Republicans benefited from it. Until they didn’t. And then all of sudden, it’s a major scandal and Trump wuz robbed, boo hoo.
Yeah, that’s not the way politics works. And it never has. Again, that not a reason not to fix it — all for it. But until then, you have to live with with the losses as well as you do with the wins.
The incessant whining about this stuff with little or no actual action on it is so lame.
You’ll notice that all of the law suits brought in Wisconsin by the Crack Trump Campaign Legal Team® were filed and adjudicated after the election.
“It was the rape victim’s fault, Your Honor, because she was wearing a short skirt and walking in the park!”
You’re quite right, though. When Hans von Spakovsky, the Heritage Foundation’s vote fraud guru, tried to warn the Trump campaign about the kind of skulduggery that the Democrats could pull in 2020, they blew him off.
They had swallowed the same kind of pro-Democratic “conventional wisdom” (read: propaganda), that voter fraud is not a significant factor, that you’ve been trying to spread here.
“Fix it prior to the election”, eh? That’s exactly what the Democrats did:
The report blames the irregularities on the Wisconsin Elections Commission. It said the commission unlawfully ended a requirement that “special voting deputies” deliver the ballots and supervise all absentee voting in nursing homes and other residential care facilities.
The election commission instead allowed facility staff to help residents vote and mail in their ballots. The commission also permitted ballots to be deposited into drop boxes, all in violation of Wisconsin law.
“This is not to excuse or minimize it: it’s fraud, it’s wrong and it should be stopped. But both parties have been doing crap like this forever.”
When a liberal (I name no names) is forced to admit wrongdoing on the part of the Democratic Party, his fallback position is, “Well, both sides are equally guilty.” Certainly a preposterous assertion in this case, given that roughly 100% of nursing home worker unions support the Democratic Party.