The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that undated mail-in and absentee ballots cannot be counted — a major win for election integrity just a week before Election Day of the 2022 midterms.
The ruling directs Pennsylvania county boards of elections to “segregate and preserve any ballots contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes” for the Nov. 8 general election but to refrain from counting them. This decision directly contradicts the Keystone State’s Democrat acting secretary of the commonwealth, Leigh Chapman, who told counties to ignore a previous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that effectively said undated mail-in ballots should not be counted. The Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania GOP immediately announced a lawsuit in response.
The RNC and the state GOP argued that Chapman’s directive violated state law, as Pennsylvania requires voters to properly date their ballots. In fact, mail-in ballots for this election cycle even contain wording that reads “today’s date required” and clear instructions for voters to “sign and date” their ballots. Under Chapman’s instructions, some of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties would have followed her lead while others would have followed state law and clear ballot instructions, tainting the election with inconsistencies and chaos. The RNC asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court at least to order counties to segregate undated or incorrectly dated ballots.
“Following an RNC, NRCC, and PAGOP lawsuit, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has made clear that incorrectly dated and undated mail ballots can not be counted,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said. “Republicans went to court, and now Democrats and all counties have to follow the law: this is a milestone in Republicans’ ongoing efforts to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat in Pennsylvania and nationwide.”
This legal victory by the RNC follows two other recent wins: one against Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for restricting the rights of poll challengers and another against the North Carolina State Board of Elections for restricting poll watchers.
“Election integrity begins by following the law, and this decision is a big win for Pennsylvanians,” Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, said in a statement. “Pennsylvania law clearly requires that every mail ballot be dated and signed. That simple, straightforward rule helps to stop late and illegal voting without burdening anyone’s right to vote.”
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
A left-leaning nonprofit instructed public officials how to “control the narrative” about mail-in ballots in the 2020 election. The National Vote at Home Institute (NVAHI) guided officials to sway public opinion in favor of mail-in voting with their “2020 Election Official Communications Toolkit.” The group shared this document with public officials in Wisconsin while working with the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to influence the 2020 election.
CTCL used nearly half a billion dollars from Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg to fund private action within government election offices. They spent most of the money in Democrat-saturated districts, which boosted Joe Biden’s narrow presidential win in 2020. As a partner for the “Zuckbucks” recipient, NVAHI gave public officials advice on how to “control the narrative” about mail-in ballots.
“Do not repeat myths as a way to refute them,” the document says. “Instead, control the narrative by presenting information that affirms the safety, security, and reliability of mail balloting.”
Mail-in voting is not only proven to be more susceptible to voter fraud and errors than in-person voting, it is well known to favor Democrats over Republicans. It essentially functions as a get-out-the-vote operation on behalf of Democrats, whose voters are less motivated to show up at the polls on election day. Republican voters far prefer to vote in person, accurately believing it is more secure.
The group also told election officials to push mail-in voting by placing articles in media outlets: “Reporters will likely already be writing up voter information guides as well as shaping their articles around how well or poorly the election is running. A proactive op-ed strategy is helpful here,” the document says.
NVAHI explained that officials should target free, popular local news publications: “For all these types of outlets, approach them about whether they would run an article on your behalf about the upcoming election,” the document says.
The organization recommended officials use public information strategies such as “playing up the security” of mail-in voting. NVAHI told election officials to dissuade concerns about mail-in ballots by claiming that they contain “over a dozen security features.”
“Voters may be reluctant to fill out a mail ballot because of concerns they’ve heard about stolen or lost ballots. Assuage those concerns without leaning into them,” the document says.
The guide also tells public officials to “instill a sense of urgency” about mail-in voting, recommending an appeal to popularity: “Voters may be unsure whether voting by mail is right for them. Social proof (showing how many people are taking up a behavior) is a powerful way of making mail-in ballots a compelling option.”
The document also recommended that government election offices use particular slogans for public information campaigns, such as “Voting by mail is easy and secure,” and “Let’s all vote safely. Choose to vote by mail.”
NVAHI partnered with the organization Ideas42 to create this toolkit. According to its website, the group is “a non-profit that uses insights from behavioral science to improve lives, build better systems and policies, and drive social change.” Ideas42 works with CTCL partner Center for Civic Design, along with several offices of government secretaries of state.
After CTCL gave a grant of $1.6 million to the Wisconsin city of Green Bay in 2020, NVAHI gained access to absentee ballots and influence over election preparations in the area. NVAHI Wisconsin State Lead Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein emailed the elections guide to former Green Bay City Clerk Kris Teske in August 2020.
When reaching out to Teske, Spitzer-Rubenstein described the toolkit as “a groundbreaking resource that uses behavioral science insights from our partners at Ideas42 to help you connect with communities and get voters the information they need.”
Spitzer-Rubenstein, who worked for Democrat political campaigns in the past, emailed Teske to ask if his group could “cure” absentee ballots. This means altering absentee ballots after they are filed to allegedly fix errors, rather than counting improperly marked ballots as invalid. When Teske turned down the offer, Spitzer-Rubenstein emailed former Green Bay Mayor’s Office Chief of Staff Celestine Jeffreys, who ordered Teske to open the city elections’ ballot-curing process to NVAHI, a private special interest group.
A 2021 audit of Wisconsin elections found the state had counted enough illegal ballots in 2020 to potentially switch its Electoral College votes from Biden to Donald Trump. Vote curing in the election could have contributed to the state counting illegal votes, the audit found.
Also in 2021, a judge ruled that the state’s 2020 use of ballot drop boxes and ballot harvesting, both of which are only possible with mail-in ballots, was illegal. The majority of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin were votes for Biden, who won the state by a margin of 0.63 percent, or approximately 20,600 votes.
Before election day, Green Bay elections officials gave Spitzer-Rubenstein four out of five keys to the room in which the absentee ballots were stored, former Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno told Wisconsin Spotlight.
After the election, Juno expressed concerns that the Central Count location was “tainted by the influence of a person working for an outside organization influencing the election,” according to Wisconsin Spotlight. Teske said she felt that third-party groups such as CTCL and NVAHI excluded the clerk’s office from the election process.
“As you know, I am very frustrated, along with the Clerk’s Office. I don’t know what to do anymore,” she emailed a colleague. “I don’t understand how people who don’t have knowledge of the process can tell us how to manage the election.”
Logan Washburn is studying politics and journalism at Hillsdale College. He is a correspondent for Campus Reform and an outreach assistant for the Freedom Foundation.
Racine County, Wisconsin law enforcement blew the 2020 election integrity question wide open on Thursday after an investigation into one nursing home. It revealed not only that state election officials flagrantly broke the law and ordered health-care employees to help them, but that the problem likely runs much deeper throughout the swing state’s other 71 counties.
An “election statute was in fact not just broken, but shattered by members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said during a Thursday press conference in which he and Sgt. Michael Luell detailed the findings of an investigation into Ridgewood Care Facility. The investigation came about when a woman named Judy signed a sworn affidavit with the Wisconsin Elections Commission after she discovered that her mother, who had died on Oct. 9, 2020 after a period of severe cognitive decline, had voted in the 2020 presidential election. The affidavit was later passed along as a complaint to the county district attorney. Judy alleged that her mother Shirley’s mental state had deteriorated so far that she was having hallucinations and wasn’t able to recall what she had eaten during a day or even what day it was. According to Judy, her mother couldn’t see — her glasses were broken, and she couldn’t even recognize her own daughter — so even if she were of a sound mind, she wouldn’t have known whether someone assisting her with a ballot had voted according to her wishes.
Luell, who led the investigation at the request of the district attorney, found an unusual spike in voting at this care facility: 42 people had voted in the 2020 presidential election. That number is usually 10. Furthermore, in 2020, 38 people had requested absentee ballots, up from the usual 0-3 in normal years.
When Luell attempted to contact the families of these voters to check whether their loved ones had the cognitive capacity to cast a vote, seven replied no, and almost all of them hadn’t voted since 2012. One of the family members said his mother would ask him who he was, meaning she didn’t recognize her own son. She hadn’t voted since 2012 — yet MyVote Wisconsin revealed she voted twice in 2020.
This surge in voting was the result of Wisconsin Elections Commission officials breaking state law. The commission — which is made up of six commissioners, including three Democrats and three Republicans, who are appointed by legislative leaders or the governor and serve as an agency in the executive branch under the governor — authorized nursing home employees to help residents vote, which Luell noted “is a direct violation of law.” According to Luell, employees would ask residents how they voted in the past and then vote according to that party. In other words, if Judy’s mother “could only recall JFK,” staff would vote Democrat for her.
According to state law, however, nursing home staff can’t assist residents with voting. In fact, nobody can help the voter other than a relative or “special voting deputies,” which are people appointed by municipal clerks or elections boards to conduct absentee voting at care facilities. In March, however, the Wisconsin Elections Commission sent out a letter mandating that municipalities should not use the “special voting deputy process.”
“Ladies and gentleman, it’s not a process. It’s the law,” Luell said, citing state Statute 6.875.
The original letter was issued under the guise of COVID guidelines. Nevertheless, in September, after the governors’ lockdown orders had expired and the initial shock of the pandemic had passed, the Wisconsin Elections Commission sent a letter to all residential care facilities telling the workers how to help residents vote, including even marking the ballot for them, in direct violation of state law. Racine law enforcement looked at 2020 visitor logs and found that other visitors were let into the nursing home throughout the pandemic, about 900 times between the decision in March not to use special voting deputies and November 2020. Those visitors included someone to clean the fish tanks and birdcages and even DoorDash delivery people.
“Those people were allowed into the Ridgewood Care Facility, but heaven forbid we make an exception for special voting deputies,” Luell said.
Under Wisconsin state statute 12.13, breaking these laws about special voting deputies constitutes “election fraud,” which is a felony.
“We’re just one of 72 counties, Racine County,” Schmaling noted. “Ridgeland is one of 11 facilities within our county. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of these facilities throughout the entire state of Wisconsin. We would be foolish, we would be foolish to think for a moment that this integrity issue, this violation of the statute, occurred to just this small group of people at one care facility in one county in the entire state. I would submit to you that this needs the attorney general’s investigation,” the sheriff said, calling for the AG to launch an immediate probe into the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
This bombshell investigation is only the latest in the long list of malfeasant actions by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, especially regarding the 2020 election. As Wisconsin radio host and lawyer Dan O’Donnell put it, the commission “was downright derelict in its duty to fairly and impartially oversee an election.”
As O’Donnell documented, the commission unlawfully allowed clerks to “cure” ballots, illegally permitted clerks to go home on election night and return to finish counting in the morning, and illegally told clerks they could relocate polling locations in the weeks before the election.
Furthermore, the commission failed to issue relevant laws and rules for training municipal election workers, special voting deputies, and election inspections. Worse, it failed to investigate voter rolls for the hundreds of thousands there incorrectly, including more than 45,000 first-time voters whose names didn’t match Department of Transportation records, among other issues.
As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway outlines in her new book “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” the Wisconsin Elections Commission also wrongly kept third-party candidates off the ballot, including Kanye West and the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins. Third parties can significantly affect elections in the Dairy State.
“Following the [Legislative Audit Bureau] report, what Sheriff Schmaling has uncovered + disclosed might only be tip of the iceberg of fraud in the 2020 election. The Legislature must be given the time, resources, and cooperation of election officials to conduct a complete investigation of allegations,” tweeted Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin following the Racine press conference. “Using elderly residents with cognitive decline to commit election fraud is reprehensible, and should concern every Wisconsinite and American.”
Johnson continued: “If Democrats will stoop this low to impact elections, one can only imagine what else they’re willing to do.”
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson speaks at a news conference about election security and later-than-typical results being expected in the state’s presidential primary next week on Thursday, March 5, 2020, at the Romney Building in Lansing, Mich. Benson said clerks will face challenges because it is the first major … David Eggert/AP Photo
A Michigan judge ruled last week Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) broke state law when she unilaterally issued rules related to absentee balloting, legitimizing a key claim made by the Trump campaign in its legal challenges to the 2020 election.
Benson issued several unilateral orders during the 2020 election including sending absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. She also issued “guidance” on how to evaluate absentee ballots, a move Michigan Court of Claims Chief Judge Christopher Murray held violated the state’s Administrative Procedures Act.
In the guidance, Benson said “slight similarities” in signatures on absentee ballots should lead a counter to decide “in favor of finding that the voter’s signature was valid.”
Murray ruled Benson violated the law “because the guidance issued by the Secretary of State on October 6, 2020, with respect to signature matching standards was issued in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).”
“I’m glad the court sees Secretary of State Benson’s attempts at lawmaking for what they are — clear violations of her authority,” Michigan state Rep. Matt Hall (R) said in a statement.
“If she wants to make changes like these, she needs to work with the Legislature or properly promulgate them through the laws we have on the books — in this case the Administrative Procedures Act,” he continued.
Murray’s ruling came after Allegan County Clerk Bob Genetski sued Benson and state Director of Elections Jonathan Brater over Benson’s order which Hall described as a “mandatory directive requiring local election officials to apply a presumption of validity to all signatures on absent voter ballots.”
According to the suit, Genetski argued “the presumption contained in the guidance issued by defendant Benson will allow invalid votes to be counted,” but Genetski did not allege “that this guidance caused him to accept a signature that he believed was invalid.”
The court’s opinion concluded:
…nowhere in this state’s election law has the Legislature indicated that signatures are to be presumed valid, nor did the Legislature require that signatures are to be accepted so long as there are any redeeming qualities in the application or return envelope as compared with the signature on file. Policy determinations like the one at issue — which places the thumb on the scale in favor of a signature’s validity — should be made pursuant to properly promulgated rules under the APA or by the Legislature.
Like other progressive secretaries of state, Benson put an aggressive emphasis on voting by absentee ballot in the name of safety amid the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. Over 3.1 million Michigan voters cast an absentee ballot out of a possible 7.7 million voters, WWMT News reported.
In May 2020, Benson used $4.5 million in funds from the CARES Act — the original coronavirus stimulus — to send absentee ballot applications to all voters, according to Breitbart News.
“By mailing applications, we have ensured that no Michigander has to choose between their health and their right to vote,”Benson said according to NBC 25.
“Voting by mail is easy, convenient, safe, and secure, and every voter in Michigan has the right to do it,” she continued.
Hall noted, “The Legislature is an equal branch of government charged with crafting laws. This is not the role of the Secretary of State, and there is a clear process that must be respected.”
Signature validation rules created without the approval of a legislature was one of the issues the Trump campaign and Republicans claimed was done illegally in the 2020 election. Trump’s campaign and Republicans argued in cases nationwide that Article II of the Constitution requires state legislatures to make the rules governing presidential elections, and state election officials and courts lack the authority to change those rules.
Murray’s ruling undercuts the Democrat narrative that Republican legal challenges to 2020 election procedures were without merit and had therefore all been rejected by the courts. The original suit was filed October 6, 2020 — prior to the presidential election — but was not decided until March 9, 2021.
The case is Genetski v. Benson, No. 20-216-MM in the Court of Claims for the State of Michigan.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kyle Olson is a reporter for Breitbart News. He is also host of “The Kyle Olson Show,” syndicated on Michigan radio stations on Saturdays — download full podcast episodes. Follow him on Parler.
To read reports in the mainstream press about the throngs of President Trump’s supporters who rallied in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, you’d think the crowd was made up of a bunch of conspiracy theory-addled rubes and delusional far-right extremists all of them hoodwinked into thinking the election was stolen. To read David Frum’s Twitter take, you’d think they were all Nazis.
The march came on the heels of a poll last week that found a staggering 70 percent of Republicans now say they don’t believe the presidential election was free and fair. That news, like news of the self-described Million MAGA March, was met with a mix of contempt, hysteria, and condescension from Democrats and the media.
Their rough consensus is that GOP voters who still support the president are either treasonous or stupid, reinforced constantly by a brittle insistence that there was “no fraud” in the presidential election. A totemic front-page declaration by the New York Times, “ELECTION OFFICIALS NATIONWIDE FIND NO FRAUD,” has been repeated everywhere, mantra-like. Any claims of voter fraud or ballot-counting irregularities, whether from President Trump or the tens of thousands who marched over the weekend, are “baseless,” “unfounded,” and have “no evidence” behind them.
There’s a palpable nervousness about the media’s insistence that the election was as pure as the driven snow. Maybe they seem so nervous because they know what everyone in America knows: there was nothing pure or secure or even ordinary about the election.
How could there be? Under the pretext of ensuring “voter access” during the pandemic, Democrats, leftist nonprofits, and activist judges across the country unleashed a flood of changes to election rules in the months leading up to the vote, including an unprecedented expansion of mail-in voting, an inherently fraught method of casting ballots that removes almost all oversight from the process.
No matter. States pushed ahead, mailing ballots to outdated voter rolls en masse and recklessly loosening oversight for how those ballots could be collected and counted. Chain-of-custody for absentee ballots went out the window, along with whatever meager safeguards usually apply to absentee voting. Ballot harvesting, long a tradition of corrupt Democratic political machines in places like Detroit and Philadelphia, was introduced in some places for the first time. Taken together, all these pandemic-inspired reforms presented an ideal opportunity for Democrats to flood absentee ballot-counting centers in major cities and run up the vote-count long after the polls closed on Election Day.
Not all the reports of ballot-counting skullduggery amount to old-fashioned voter fraud, but as my colleague Margot Cleveland has noted, they’re just as important because they undermine the integrity of an election just as much as, say, thousands of dead people voting.
Even more egregious than voter fraud (and harder to redress) are cases where election bureaucrats or activist judges simply ignored restrictions that GOP legislatures had passed into law. In Pennsylvania, the state supreme court brushed off rules set by lawmakers and extended a deadline for when absentee ballots could be received. Extending deadlines for absentee ballots is of course an invitation to break election laws—especially in Philadelphia, a city with a long history of ballot-stuffing and bribing election judges.
In other states, the corruption of election integrity was voluntary. In Georgia, the state government settled a lawsuit in March with a cadre of Democratic Party groups that changed the rules for accepting mail-in ballots. Instead of the signature on the ballot having to match the signature on the voter rolls, it only had to match the signature on the mail-in ballot application. You don’t need to be a sophisticated election thief to figure out how to get a fraudulent ballot counted under such rules.
On and on it goes. A dozen states temporarily expanded mail-in voting just for the 2020 election. Others mailed ballots to everyone on the voter rolls. Many others extended the mail-in ballot deadline, set up ballot drop boxes, and allowed mail-in ballot harvesting on a mass scale.
Any reasonable person can look at these changes and conclude they create conditions ripe for fraud and abuse. Only the most naïve, pollyannaish observer would survey all of the above and conclude, as our mainstream media has, that there was “no fraud” in the election. Of course there was, and everyone knows it.
Whether it was enough to change the outcome of the election, we’ll probably never know, partly because the kind of abuses and criminal activity engendered by mass mail-in voting are hard to detect and even harder to prove in court. But pointing all of this out, and having a problem with it, even to the point of saying you don’t have much confidence that the election was free and fair, doesn’t make you a rube or a conspiracy theorist.
By contrast, pretending that none of this had any effect on the election, and demonizing anyone who says it did, as the media is doing now, is a reaction born of self-doubt and desperation—like labeling anyone who disagrees with you a traitor or a Nazi. There’s an exhausted nervousness about it, a contempt rooted in insecurity. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’ve written off your countrymen, and given up on the idea of a republic.
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
Legacy media are lying when they claim that all of President Trump’s allegations of voter fraud are baseless. I know, because I argued a case on the president’s behalf in federal court in Philadelphia.
At issue was President Trump’s request for an order changing the way Pennsylvania absentee and mail-in ballots are being reviewed at the Philadelphia Convention Center. CNN and others claim he “lost.”That’s false: he won. As I made that argument on behalf of the president’s campaign, I can tell you what really happened.
President Trump went to court about two problems: First, only a handful of Republican observers—substantially fewer than the Democrats had there—were being admitted to the room at the Philadelphia Convention Center where inspections were being conducted. Second, the few who could get in weren’t permitted to get close enough to see what was actually happening. The most important questions all have to ask are: Why all the hiding? What’s being hidden?
At the Convention Center counting location, I personally observed dozens of Trump campaign volunteers being barred from the counting room even though they’d been properly registered as observers. That’s why I urged Pam Bondi and Corey Lewandowski, who were on the scene, to authorize the filing of a request that a federal court order the Board of Elections to stop this nonsense.
More hiding: despite a binding order of the state’s Commonwealth Court, the handful of Republican observers who could get into the room weren’t being allowed up to the barrier set at six feet from the closest tables where work was being done. So even though they were in the room where it was happening, they had no way to tell what was happening. If there’s no fraud, why is the Democrat-controlled Board of Elections unwilling to let people get close enough to actually see what its people are doing?
So on a borrowed laptop at around 2 p.m. on election day, I typed up a very short document to start a federal lawsuit and to request that the federal court intervene to prohibit these unfair practices. At about 4:30 p.m., its filing was authorized by the campaign.
The federal judge ordered a hearing that began at 5:30 p.m. and went for two hours. In open court, the judge compelled the Board of Elections to agree that the Republicans could have up to 60 representatives in the room. That was a huge victory, not only for Republicans but for anyone who actually wants to have a vote tabulation worthy of belief.
He also compelled the board to agree that all observers, Democrat or Republican, could get up to the six-foot barrier. While the Democrats claimed that of course, of course, they had always been letting people in and letting them up to the barrier, I had a long list of witnesses who were prepared to testify that this was false. The judge told the defendants pointedly that if they didn’t do what they’d promised in his courtroom they would, he had plenty of authority to make them keep their word.
Having secured this agreement from the Board of Elections, the court dismissed the president’s motion for court-ordered relief as moot. Courts often do that when they secure an agreement between the parties. It means the court doesn’t have to issue an order, which would be appealable, granting or denying the motion, and it means the court doesn’t have to write an opinion. What it doesn’t mean is that the request made on behalf of President Trump to stop the election fraud was moot, despite the false spin CNN and other mainstream media put on it. All of this was a victory for President Trump and anyone else who believes in open government.
I’m no longer surprised by anti-Trump non-news coming from the likes of CNN. But I cannot imagine why Pennsylvania Republican leaders have suggested there’s no reason to think that anything wrong or fraudulent is going on in the counting of Pennsylvania’s votes.
If that were true, why in the world would the Democratic-controlled city government be working so hard to keep Republicans out of the room where those votes are being counted? In a world where every car that drives down the street is on video, why isn’t all of this counting being conducted in broad daylight, under watchful eyes? What do they have to hide?
Other people have gathered substantial evidence that there are indeed things to hide, including this video showing, among other things, footage of government officials wearing Joe Biden facemasks filling in blanks in already-submitted mail-in votes. The hearing I attended wasn’t about that, but it was about the conditions that make that possible.
No one who wants a legitimate vote count should be working to keep observers out of the room where the votes are counted. Yet for some reason the City of Philadelphia sent three lawyers, including the city solicitor himself, to a hearing to try to persuade a federal judge that he shouldn’t even bother addressing President Trump’s request.
Fortunately, the federal judge didn’t take that advice, and he forced the Board of Elections to do the right thing. I call that a solid victory for everyone—except for those with something to hide. For some reason, all of this hiding was being done by Democrats, for Biden.
Jerome M. Marcus is an attorney in private practice in Philadelphia.
It appears that Democrats in Detroit, a city with a long history of election fraud, are tampering with absentee ballots and breaking state law. As absentee ballot counting continues in a handful of key states across the country, reports of voter fraud, ballot tampering, and the illegal removal of Republican election observers are cropping up in Michigan, especially in Detroit, a Democratic stronghold which has a long history of voter fraud.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced it was filing a lawsuit in Michigan over what it claims are systematic efforts to prevent Republican election observers from monitoring the ballot counting process as allowed under state law. The lawsuit comes as video clips continue to surface on social media showing election officials denying access to authorized GOP poll watchers.
Aric Nesbitt, a Michigan state senator, posted a video on Twitter Wednesday afternoon of election workers at the convention center in Detroit, where absentee ballots are being counted. The video shows workers cheering every time an official election observer with the Michigan GOP is ejected from the counting room. Apparently this has been happening frequently, in violation of state law. Democratic observers, says Nesbitt, now outnumber Republicans observers at the convention center 3 to 1.
Here’s why that’s a problem. When an absentee ballot is unreadable for whatever reason, a ballot counter takes out a blank ballot, lays it on the table next to the unreadable ballot, and transposes the vote so it can be filed and tallied. Republican and Democratic “poll challengers,” as they’re called, are supposed to observe this process as it happens and make sure that the vote is transposed accurately. In addition, Michigan state law requires that a Republican and a Democratic official sign off on every voting precinct where absentee ballots are cast in this manner.
Phill Kline is a former Kansas attorney general and now an attorney for the nonprofit Amistad Project, which filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that tens of thousands of ballots in Detroit have been illegally filled out by election officials and Democratic election observers. “We have confirmed evidence that Democratic election officials have violated state law,” he told The Federalist, “and have opened the door for fraud involving tens of thousands of ballots.”
Kline confirmed Republican officials have been barred from observing the counting of absentee ballots, and that transposed absentee ballots are being certified without a GOP official signing off on them.The law, Kline says, states that an official from both parties must sign off “if possible,” and that Democratic election officials are claiming they can’t find a Republican to sign off—even though they are also kicking Republican officials out of the counting rooms.
I also spoke by phone to one GOP poll challenger who asked to remain anonymous and told me the election officials at the convention center are not letting Republican poll challengers remain in the room where absentee ballots are being counted, saying there’s “too many” of them. Asked how many people were in these rooms, the officials in charge could not say, according to this person, who added that the rooms in question are enormous, the size of a football field (remember this is at the convention center, where the Detroit auto show is held).
After kicking out Republican poll challengers, election officials began covering up the windows of the counting rooms with cardboard to block the view of Republican observers. “It was pretty chaotic,” the poll challenger said.
News reports are starting to reflect the chaos at the convention center. The Detroit Free Press reported Thursday morning that a lawyer, Jessica Connarn, who was working as a Republic poll challenger, filed an affidavit saying she was told by someone counting absentee ballots that workers in Detroit were “changing the dates the ballots were received” so they would be considered valid.
“When I approached the poll worker, she stated to me that she was being told to change the date on ballots to reflect that the ballots were received on an earlier date,” Connarn says in the affidavit. The Free Press goes on to report:
Connarn states when she tried to get additional information later from this poll worker, she was “yelled at by the other poll workers working at her table, who told me that I needed to go away and that I was not allowed to talk to the poll worker.”
In that interaction, the poll worker slipped Connarn a note, she states.
The note says “entered received date as 11/2/20 on 11/4/20.”
In Michigan, only ballots received by 8 p.m. on Election Day, this year Nov. 3, are valid.
No One Should Trust The Election Process In Detroit
None of this is new for Detroit, which has been plagued by corrupt election officials for years. In 2005, federal officials launched an investigation after the November election and state officials took over the handling of absentee ballots in Detroit after the Detroit News reported that “legally incapacitated nursing home residents were being coaxed to vote and Detroit’s voting rolls were inflated with more than 300,000 names of people who had died or moved out of the city.” A post-election audit found that nearly 30 percent of precincts showed discrepancies in vote totals.
Despite reform efforts over the years, these problems have persisted. Back in December, a public interest group sued the city in federal court, claiming its voter rolls are “replete with typos, dead people, duplicate registrations and mistakes about gender and birth: One Detroit voter is listed as being born in 1823—14 years before Michigan was annexed into the Union,” according to the Detroit Free Press.
In the 2016 presidential election, voting machines in more than a third of all voting precincts in Detroit registered more votes than the number of voters tallied by poll workers. The irregularities meant that more than half the city would be ineligible for a statewide presidential recount that was eventually called off by the Michigan Supreme Court. Here’s what Detroit News reported at the time:
Overall, state records show 10.6 percent of the precincts in the 22 counties that began the re-tabulation process couldn’t be recounted because of state law that bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals.
The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.
But these problems persisted. In the August primary, ballot counts in 72 percent of Detroit’s absentee voting precincts didn’t match the number of ballots cast, and in 46 percent of the city’s precincts the combined vote counts for Election Day and absentee voting were out of balance. Even Democratic election officials admitted that something had gone wrong in tracking ballots by precinct.
According to Michigan state law, precincts whose poll books don’t match up with the number of ballots cast can’t be recounted. That might present problems for any eventual presidential recount in the state, as it did in 2016.
For now, it seems clear that credible evidence of election fraud has surfaced in Detroit, which is not surprising given Detroit’s troubled history of election fraud. But it’s also deeply disturbing. The Trump campaign’s lawsuit to halt what appears to be a corrupt process is, in this case, entirely appropriate. We need to get to the bottom of what’s going on in Detroit.
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
In the three Midwest battleground states, vote counting irregularities persist in an election that will be decided on razor-thin margins. As of this writing, it appears that Democratic Party machines in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are trying to steal the election.
As reporters and commentators went to bed early Tuesday morning, all three states were too close to call, but President Trump led former Vice President Joe Biden by comfortable margins—far beyond what had been predicted in the polls. None of the networks called these states because enough mail-in ballots remained uncounted that it could swing either way, but Trump’s position looked good.
Then, something strange happened in the dead of the night. In both Michigan and Wisconsin, vote dumps early Wednesday morning showed 100 percent of the votes going for Biden and zero percent—that’s zero, so not even one vote—for Trump.
In Michigan, Biden somehow got 138,339 votes and Trump got none, zero, in an overnight vote-dump.
When my Federalist colleague Sean Davis noted this, Twitter was quick to censor his tweet, even though all he had done was compare two sets of vote totals on the New York Times website. And he wasn’t the only one who noticed—although on Wednesday it appeared that anyone who noted the Biden vote dump in Michigan was getting censored by Twitter.
Buzzfeed later reported that according to a spokesperson at Decision Desk HQ, the votes for Biden were the result of a “data error” from a “file created by the state that we ingested.”When the state noticed the “error” it updated its count, which somehow gave 138,339 votes to Biden and zero to Trump.
It turns out, the vote dump was the result of an alleged typo, an extra zero that had been tacked onto Biden’s vote total in Shiawassee County, Michigan. It seems the error was discovered only because Davis and other Twitter users noted how insane and suspicious the vote totals looked, and demanded an investigation that uncovered what was either a typo or an incredibly clumsy attempt to boost Biden’s vote count.
There was also something suspicious about the vote reporting in Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016. Initial vote totals there showed Biden ahead of Trump by 29 points, a result that can’t possibly be accurate, as plenty of journalists noted.
After the strange results caught national attention, election officials in Antrim County said they were investigating what they called “skewed” results, working with the company that provides their election software to see what went wrong. The county clerk said they plan to have an answer by Wednesday afternoon.
Then another mysterious all-Biden vote dump happened in Wisconsin. Biden miraculously overcame a 4.1-point Trump lead in the middle of the night thanks to vote dumps in which he got—you guessed it—100 percent of the votes and Trump got zero.
Note the vertical lines in both graphs below:
On Wednesday, the Trump campaign demanded a full recount in Wisconsin, citing “reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results.”
In Pennsylvania, the Democratic scheme to steal the election is a bit different. Rather than vote dumps that impossibly go 100 percent to Biden, Pennsylvania is relying on the Democratic Secretary of State’s plan to count indisputably late mail-in ballots as though they were received on Election Day—even if they have no postmark.
This plan was of course rubber-stamped by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which cited the need for “equitable relief” to address mail delays amid the pandemic.
Note that this isn’t just about ballots that come in after Election Day, but about ballots that come in after Election Day that don’t even have a postmark—that is, there is no way to tell when the ballots were mailed, or from where.
Although it’s true that the long delays we’ve seen for absentee ballot counts are due in part to state laws in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that prohibit the counting of absentee ballots before Election Day, which is not the case in most other states. But the cumulative circumstances under which these absentees ballots are now being tallied is highly suspicious.
Unless election officials in Michigan and Wisconsin can explain the overnight vote-dumps and, in Michigan, the “typo” that appeared to benefit Biden, and Pennsylvania officials can explain their rationale for counting ballots with no postmark, the only possible conclusion one can come to right now is that Democrats are trying to steal the election in the Midwest.
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
joe-biden-victory-strategy-collage-mansour-pinkerton-photo / Lawrence Jackson / Biden for President; Various/Getty, AP
Use the pandemic to push for a nation-wide vote-by-mail scheme.
Enlist all the messengers at your disposal (Hollywood, Corporate Media, Big Tech, Pro Sports) to push for vote-by-mail.
Get millions of questionable mail-in ballots into the system.
Send Democratic lawyers into key districts to fight for every challenged ballot. Use the courts and progressive election officials to keep the count going as long as possible with as little verification as possible.
Set expectations that the election will not be decided on November 3. Plan for mass protests in the streets. Scare people into believing that Trump won’t leave office (should he attempt to challenge the results).
Challenge the results in court with the help of election officials and district attorneys that George Soros has spent years getting elected.
Let Chief Justice John Roberts (or the new Justice?) pick the next president. Or let Nancy Pelosi do it.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Democratic political operative Rahm Emanuel famously said. The former Chicago mayor’s point was that a crisis gives political players the opportunity to bend, and maybe even break, the normal rules.
Today, the country is facing a Covid-19 crisis, as well as a crisis of rioting in the streets and a spiking crime rate, and now even a vacancy on the Supreme Court. But as far as Democrats are concerned, the real crisis is Donald Trump, and these other crises provide an opportunity to defeat him.
With less than 40 days until Election Day—and with early voting starting even sooner—Democrats and their media allies (or the “Democrat-Media Complex,” as Andrew Breitbart liked to call them) are not wasting these crises in their quest to win back the White House.
We can see a seven-step Democratic strategy emerge to win the election by unleashing chaos in our voting system, violence in our streets, and a legal fight that could lead all the way to highest court in the land, which is currently missing a member.
1. Never let a Covid crisis go to waste! Use the pandemic to push for a nation-wide vote-by-mail scheme.
By now we’re all familiar with the inequities, even idiocies, of the Covid-19 lockdown rules. In many states and cities, it’s forbidden to have normal assembly for social gatherings, businesses, church services, and even hospital visits.
On the other hand, it’s okay to have massive Black Lives Matter protests, Antifa riots, and anything else the left approves of, at least tacitly. Obviously, such unequal treatment is a formula for societal frustration, rage, and, yes, chaos.
And what a friend the Democrats have in crisis and chaos!
In fact, Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris has said that this sort of chaos is likely to continue—and should continue—through the election. “Everyone beware because they’re not going to stop,” Harris said about the (often violent) protests erupting in American cities. “They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day.”
But according to the Democrats, the only certainty in all of this chaos is that Americans—who are safe to take to the streets in mass protests and riots—are not safe to vote in person on November 3. We must vote by mail, they tell us.
Mail-in voting is “essential from a health reason because we want to keep people at home to vote without having them all collect on Election Day,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last month. “People should not have to choose between their health and their vote.”
If you’re still scratching your head wondering why it’s safe to riot but not to vote, veteran political consultant Dick Morris explained the Democrats’ game plan: “If they feel they’re legitimately losing the election, [they] are going to use the excuse of the Covid virus—nobody can come out and vote in person, they claim … and they’re going to deliberately game the system by sending out millions and millions of mail-in ballots for people that don’t exist or have already voted.”
“And the states will not verify the [mail-in ballot] signatures because they are under the control of Democrats,” Morris added.
2. Enlist all the messengers at your disposal (Hollywood, Corporate Media, Big Tech, Pro Sports) to push for vote-by-mail.
The Democrats are using every tool in their considerable arsenal to push the vote-by-mail messaging, including multi-million-dollar super PAC ad campaigns. Former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar has teamed up with failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to mandate a national vote-by-mail system, and a group called Stop Republicans has launched a digital blitz to push for the idea.
But the Democrats’ favorite tool is, of course, Hollywood and pop culture.
As early as April, about a month into the coronavirus shutdown, the Hollywood wing of the Democrat-Media Complex kicked into high gear to push vote-by-mail.
Actor Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, who were among the first big name figures to contract Covid-19, teamed up with former First Lady Michelle Obama and former Obama White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett in April for an ostensibly non-partisan virtual voter registration drive that encouraged states to loosen vote-by-mail requirements.
Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson joined former First Lady Michelle Obama for a virtual get out the vote event on April 20, 2020, to encourage people to sign up for mail-in voting. (YouTube)
In August, a group of A-list celebrities hosted a virtual “United to Save the Vote” gala—which they claimed was “fiercely nonpartisan”—to raise money to “protect the 2020 election” by, in part, increasing trust in mail-in voting. The virtual roster included Jennifer Lawrence, Jamie Foxx, Dave Matthews, Ed Helms, Jennifer Lopez, Alicia Keys, Sia, Jake Johnson, Sarah Silverman, Kenan Thompson, Chelsea Handler, Gloria Estefan, Randall Park, Erich Bergen, Nick Kroll, Sophia Bush, Jonathan Scott, Kenny G., George Lopez, etc. You get the picture.
According to the event’s website, thesezealouslyanti-Trump “fiercely nonpartisan” celebs gathered virtually to counter the efforts of “politicians who are undermining the security and validity of mail-in voting.”
Meanwhile, the Democrat-Media Complex is engaged in a bit of journalistic jujitsu churning out stories about how the Republicans are the ones who plan to steal the election. Here’s a headline from the Washington Post: “Republicans’ long-term vote heist matters more than Trump’s tantrums.” And here’s one from Rolling Stone: “The Plot Against America: The GOP’s Plan to Suppress the Vote and Sabotage the Election.” But it’s hard to top this headline from the Daily Beast: “This Is How Republicans Steal an Election, and Maybe Kill Some Dems in the Process.”
At the same time, the Democrat-Media Complex is also celebrating the new wokeness of pro sports, which is busy helping Democrats win in November. On September 7, Politico asked, “Could LeBron James Defeat Donald Trump?” As has been widely reported, the National Basketball Association has agreed to set up a “social justice coalition” to help get out the (Democrat) vote.
3. Get millions of questionable mail-in ballots into the system.
Here we might pause to note the distinction between the various kinds of voting by mail.
It is true that absentee voting by mail has been with us for many years. Even President Trump has voted by mail, and our active duty military regularly votes by mail. In fact, Republicans have been quite successful in the past with absentee voting. In Florida in 2016, for example, more Republicans voted by mail than Democrats, and Trump carried the state. There is even legitimate concern that any disparagement of mail-in voting could unintentionally hurt Republicans in November because their voters like voting by absentee ballots. Indeed, there are sincere and legitimate reasons for why absentee voting should be available during the pandemic.
However, there is a big difference between allowing absentee ballots as an option for people who are unable to make it to the polls and mandating that an entire election be done by mail-in voting.
And there is a really big difference between the long-standing practice of sending absentee ballots to voters who take the initiative of requesting them and the new Democratic proposal to mail out unsolicited ballots (or applications for ballots) to every registered voter regardless of whether those voters are still alive or eligible to vote in that jurisdiction. And, as we shall explain, this new effort to mail out ballots to every registered voter is coupled with the left’s years-long fight to prevent these same voter rolls from being updated to remove dead and ineligible people from the lists.
And to make matters extra complicated and chaotic, every state has a different standard for mail-in voting. Some states have more safeguards in place than others. For example, some states require that every mail-in ballot include a verifiable signature, additional witness or notary signatures, and even an enclosed copy of the voter’s photo ID. Some states have few, if any, such safeguards. Some states are loosening or experimenting with the rules for the first time due to the coronavirus pandemic.
And then there is the issue of sending all these ballots through the mail. Can the U.S. Postal Service process them all in a timely manner? Every state has a different deadline for when these ballots need to be postmarked. What happens if they don’t arrive in time? Can election officials process them all in a timely manner? Counting mail-in ballots is much more time-consuming. It can involve matching signatures, checking postmarks, flattening out ballots that were crumpled in the mail, etc. If the recent primaries in Wisconsin and New York are anything to go by, mail-in ballots will take weeks to process and that process will be fraught with problems and potential for fraud.
(To give you a flavor of the postal chaos to come, the chief clerk for Brooklyn’s Kings County Board of Elections testified in federal court last month that in 2018, the USPS delivered “several hundred absentee ballots from the previous November” — which was “five months after Election Day.” And in Wisconsin this week, three trays of mail, which included absentee ballots, were found in a ditch.)
Election officials take receipt of a dolly loaded with mail-in ballots at election offices in downtown Pittsburgh, PA, on May 27, 2020. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
There is also the issue of how voters can apply to vote by mail and who is eligible to do so. According to FiveThirtyEight, nine states and the District of Columbia will simply mail every registered citizen a ballot. In another 14 states, authorities will mail everyone an application to vote by mail. (Although, as we shall see, some states take a generous view of who, or what, might be eligible to receive such applications if outside interest groups decide to mail them out.) In 16 states, nothing is automatically mailed to voters, although voters can apply online to vote by mail. In six states, voting by mail is permissible only with a “valid excuse.” And the remaining states are some hybrid of the preceding categories.
All of these different rules provide plenty of opportunity to game the system on questions ranging from the verification of identity, addresses, and signatures to the timeliness of postmarks and the ability of the postal service to deliver ballots in a timely manner. Because there are so many “moving parts” to the vote-by-mail process, mail-in ballots are fraught with the potential for fraud. Yes, we’ve seen voter fraud before, but we ain’t seen nothing yet. The further we get from requiring that voters go to the polls to vote in person, the more we expand the avenues for fraud.
Consider, for example, the fraud potential that comes with mailing ballots to every registered voter. Back in 2012, a Pew Center study found that 1.8 million dead people were still registered to vote and that 24 million voter registrations were un-confirmable.
Though some states have made progress in updating their voting rolls since the 2012 Pew study, a comprehensive analysis conducted this year by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) found that 349,773 apparently dead people still remain on the voter rolls across 41 states. And apparently the dead still vote! The report also discovered a surprising number of people who apparently voted more than once.
During the 2018 General Election, 37,889 likely duplicate registrants are apparently credited for casting two votes from the same address, and 34,000 registrants appear to have voted from non-residential addresses. Additionally, 6,718 registrants were apparently credited for voting after death.
According to the report, New York, Texas, Michigan, Florida, and California were the top five states with dead voters on the rolls, accounting for 51 percent of all the dead registrants. The crucial swing states of Michigan and Florida had 34,225 and 25,162 dead registrants respectively.
That would seem to be a serious indictment of the system and a warning against mailing unsolicited mail-in ballots or even mail-in ballot applications to everyone on the voter rolls. But Democrats are working hard to bulldoze the path for vote-by mail, or, as Breitbart News often calls it, cheat-by-mail. Democratic governors in New Yorkand Pennsylvania have already moved to ease vote-by-mail, as have local officialsinHarris County, TX, population 4.7 million. Oh, and did we mention that in Nevada’s June primary, more than 223,000 ballots in Clark County (Las Vegas) went to a bum address? That means almost a fifth of all the ballots mailed out in the county went to a bum address.
Election workers process mail-in ballots during a nearly all-mail primary election in Las Vegas, NV, on June 9, 2020. (AP Photo/John Locher)
But, you might ask, why don’t we just make sure the voter rolls are accurate by removing people who have moved or died? Why don’t we have a standardized signature verification protocol and a requirement for an additional witness signature and photo ID for mail-in ballots to ensure they are legit? Good questions. The answer is the left fights these reforms.
Left-wing groups want to expand access to voting by registering as many people as possible, but they also fight to block meaningful efforts to ensure that only eligible American citizens are voting. When Republicans enact legislation to encourage transparency and accuracy in our voting process by removing dead or ineligible voters from the rolls or mandating some form of identity verification, left-wing activists challenge these initiatives in court to stop any reform.
Eric Eggers, the author of Fraud: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election, explained to Breitbart News how left-wing interest groups have fought for years to keep the loopholes that could potentially create a “tsunami of voter fraud” in November.
“Organizations that are funded by George Soros both fight to keep those vulnerabilities in place, as in Ohio, by trying to prevent efforts to pass voter-ID laws or to make the voter rolls more secure,” Eggers said. “But then they also — and this is really the insidious part — they fund organizations that go out and round up voters, regardless of legality of their status, and force them through the vulnerabilities in the system.”
“There are 248 counties in this country that have more registered voters than actual citizens of legal voting age,” Eggers said. “It’s a problem because it creates opportunity for organizations like the formerly known ACORN and La Raza — they’re all funded by [billionaire George] Soros — to go and figure out where the vulnerabilities are and force the voters — whether they’re legal or not — through the gaps.”
But according to the establishment media, the instances of mail-in voter fraud are “infinitesimally small.” And to prove this, the media loves to quote the “non-partisan” Brennan Center for Justice. What the media fails to tell you is that the Soros-funded Brennan Center is leading the charge to expand mail-in voting. They don’t just have a dog in this fight — they have a whole kennel! Quoting the Brennan Center to deny the reality of mail-in voter fraud is like quoting Big Tobacco to deny that smoking causes cancer.
And yet when Donald Trump or any Republican points out the obvious vulnerabilities in our voting system, the Democrat-Media Complex quotes biased sources to vilify Republicans. Nancy Pelosi actually called President Trump and Republicans “enemies of the state” for expressing concerns about vote-by-mail’s fraud potential.
It seems fair to say that Democrats are making sure that the system works for them. Recently, Politico headlined a long piece, “Inside the Democratic Party’s plan to prevent vote-by-mail disaster,” detailing the efforts of the party, and its well-funded allies, to win the November mail war.
A key part of that plan is legal challenges. For instance, in Georgia, the American Civil Liberties Union accused the state government of wrongfully purging nearly 200,000 voters from the rolls. In this legal battle, the ACLU is joined by the Palast Investigative Fund, one of the myriad “non-partisan” foundations that the Democrats always have at their side.
Yet in the meantime, the ACLU has nothing to say when we discover, for example, that during the 2020 Michigan primaries, the number of ballots counted in 72 percent of Detroit’s absentee ballot precincts didn’t match the number of ballots cast. And the votes counted in 46 percent of all of Detroit’s precincts–both absentee and in-person–didn’t match the number of ballots tracked in the precinct poll books. For perspective on what such abnormalities might portend for the next election, we might observe that Detroit has a population of 670,000. In 2016, Donald Trump won Michigan by a mere 10,704 votes.
Oh, and did we mention that a federal lawsuit filed last year alleged that the city of Detroit had over 2,500 dead people still registered on its voter rolls, and about 4,788 registered Detroit voters were flagged as having potentially registered to vote twice or even three times. But I’m sure none of those dead people will vote by mail, right?
Oh, and while we’re on Michigan, we should also mention that Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State who was endorsed by Joe Biden and was a featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention, misprinted the ballots that were created for Michigan voters serving in the military overseas. Guess which candidate was listed incorrectly? You guessed it: Trump! The bad ballots list the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential candidate as President Trump’s running mate instead of Mike Pence. But don’t worry. The spokesperson for Michigan’s Democratic-Biden-endorsed-DNC-speaking Secretary of State has assured us that clerks “will be instructed to duplicate a vote for Trump” for any military voter who mails in one of these misprinted ballots.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) speaking during the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 20, 2020. (DNC via AP)
In the face of all this potentially embarrassing data, the Democrats have decided that the best defense is a good offense. For instance, Joe Biden stays on the offensive, regularly accusing President Trump of seeking to squelch vote-by-mail; but he never allows that vote-by-mail might need to be reformed. Biden charged on September 7 that Trump “wants to make sure those mail-in ballots don’t get where they’re supposed to get.”
We might wonder: If Biden routinely accuses Trump of cheating, should we be surprised if Democratic activists get the hint and decide that they could, and should, cheat on Biden’s behalf? After all, they might rationalize these efforts as fighting fire with fire.
Cheat-inclined Democrats might draw inspiration from an anonymous Democratic consultant in New Jersey who recently confessed to the New York Post that “fraud is more the rule than the exception.” The consultant explained the various ways in which political operatives can harvest mail-in ballots, change them by inserting different ballots into the envelope, use friendly postal workers to disappear ballots in neighborhoods that lean Republican, and so forth. A few hundred bogus ballots here and there can change an election.
“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes — it can make a difference,” the Democratic operative said. “It could be enough to flip states.”
Indeed, even Democratic pets can make a difference—and they don’t even have to be alive! Recently in Atlanta, a family got a voter registration application in the mail for their deceased house cat named Cody.
How did that happen, you ask? Well, outside third-party groups can rent mailing lists and randomly send everyone on the list an absentee-ballot application or voter registration application that they downloaded from the state’s election website. Have you ever used your pet’s name to subscribe to something because you didn’t want junk mail in your own name? If so, don’t be surprised if Fluffy or Spot gets a voter registration or absentee ballot application in the mail.
Georgia’s election officials assure us that Cody the cat would not have been able to vote at the polls in the Peach State because the cat doesn’t have a license or state ID. But one wonders if he would be allowed to vote by mail, assuming his registration application cleared. And, of course, not every state requires a photo ID to vote like Georgia does.
Speaking of Georgia, its Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger, announced on September 8 that his office had identified 150,000 Georgians who had applied for an absentee ballot and then showed up at the polls to vote in person in the June primary; that is, they wished to vote, carelessly or purposefully, for a second time. This in a primary in which a little less than 950,000 people voted; in other words, the attempted (or at least potentially attempted) double voting accounts for around a sixth of total ballots cast. Of these 150,000, Raffensberger added that perhaps 1,000 had actually succeeded in voting twice.
Were these innocent mistakes? Simple confusion? Or guilty action? Whatever the truth about these would-be double voters and actual double voters, we should applaud Georgia authorities for minimizing what could have been a major electoral debacle; thanks to their good work, it was only a minor electoral debacle. In any case, the Georgia ACLU has nothing to say about that.
Voter fraud exists even when you vote in person, but mail-in voting blows the doors wide open in fraud potential. And the Democrats are ready to fight for every ballot—pets and all!
4. Send Democratic lawyers into key districts to fight for every challenged ballot. Use the courts and progressive election officials to keep the count going as long as possible with as little verification as possible.
As we have seen, each mailed-in ballot has the potential to foment a legal fight over its validity. In fact, the Washington Postreported on August 24, that more than 534,000 primary votes in 23 states have been rejected for one reason or another:
Democrats and voting rights groups are now waging court battles to ensure that absentee ballots are not discarded on technicalities, pushing to require that ballots postmarked by Election Day be counted and to make signature-matching laws more voter-friendly.
Meanwhile, in Indiana, a federal judge ruled that Hoosier election officials cannot reject ballots for dissimilar signatures without notifying the voter and giving him or her—aided, of course, by partisan pals—a chance to “cure” the ballot. In fact, 20 states allow a voter to attempt to cure a faulty ballot so that it can be counted. That might be a good idea, but we can see that each “cure” will take a lawyer, not a doctor.
In fact, with such legal fights in mind, the Biden-Harris campaign has already built a SWAT team of 600 lawyers, expecting many more recruits to come.
And just on September 14 came this headline, courtesy of the New York Times: “Biden Creates Legal War Room, Preparing for a Big Fight Over Voting.”
According to the Times, two Democratic legal veterans–Dana Remus, who has served as Biden’s general counsel in the 2020 campaign, and Bob Bauer, a former Obama administration White House counsel–will co-head this legal effort. Others involved include former Obama attorney general Eric Holder and two former solicitors general in Democratic administrations, Donald B. Verrilli and Walter Dellinger. In all, the Times tells us that “hundreds of lawyers will be involved, including a team at the Democratic law firm Perkins Coie, led by Marc Elias.”
The name Marc Elias might ring a bell because, as Breitbart News has reported, he was in the middle of the infamous fake-news Christopher Steele dossier, having retained the firm of Fusion GPS on behalf of the Democratic National Committee. And come to think of it, Bob Bauer, mentioned above, was also a longtime Perkins Coie lawyer, having been there, alongside Elias, during the 2016 presidential campaign and its Steele-y aftermath.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris herself is keeping up the drumbeat, warning Democrats of the many bad things Republicans are thought to be doing.
“There will be many obstacles that people are intentionally placing in front of Americans’ ability to vote,” Harris said. “We have classic voter suppression. We have a president who is trying to convince the American people not to believe in the integrity of our election system and compromise their belief that their vote might actually count.”
By “voter suppression,” she means any effort to make sure that only eligible living non-pet American citizens are voting in November.
But while we’re on this topic, we should note that the Department of Justice announced this week that it’s investigating reports that nine military mail-in ballots were discarded in Pennsylvania. Seven of the ballots were cast for President Trump; the contents of the other two are unknown. Yes, it’s only nine ballots, but the campaign season is young, and there are lots of places where marked ballots can be discarded.
And the crickets you hear is the sound of Democrats, normally so up-in-arms about vote suppression, now being oh-so-quiet about vote destruction.
Democrats are armed and ready for a vote-by-mail total war. We can expect they will have a ground game in every district. Every disputed ballot will get its own Democratic lawyer. Every critical district and state will see litigation over signature-matches, addresses, postmarks, and anything else that might affect Democratic balloting.
In fact, the Democrats’ legal team has already scored potentially game-changing court victories in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina on how long ballots can be counted after Election Day.
In Wisconsin, a federal judge ruled Monday that mail-in ballots can be counted up to six days after Election Day, and a ballot can be counted even if there is no “definitive” sign of a postmark on it.
In Pennsylvania, the state’s Supreme Court ruled last week that mail-in ballots can be received up to three days after Election Day; and, similar to the Wisconsin ruling, these ballots can be counted even if there is no evidence that they were postmarked on time. (The Pennsylvania court handed the Democrats a second victory by keeping the Green Party candidate off the ballot, thereby preventing the Greens from peeling off any progressive voters. We note that the court didn’t grant the GOP a similar favor by kicking the Libertarian Party off the ballot.)
The Pennsylvania Secretary of State also issued an order last week instructing clerks not to conduct signature matches on the mail-in ballots – which means that Pennsylvania essentially nullified signature verification because the state’s election officials won’t be verifying anything.
In Michigan, a judge ruled that postmarked mail-in ballots can be accepted up to 14 days after Election Day, and third parties are allowed to deliver these ballots. This fraud-friendly delivery service is commonly known as “ballot harvest.” It’s all the rage in California and other third world countries.
A ballot drop box in Detroit, MI, on Sept. 24, 2020. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
In North Carolina, a coalition of Democrat-aligned special interest groups got the state to agree to accept mail-in ballots up to nine days after Election Day and to allow voters to “cure” any problems with these ballots. North Carolina election officials also agreed to create vote-by-mail ballot “drop-off” stations, which is essentially an invitation for “ballot harvesting.”
You’ll notice that these are all swing states, and three of them – Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan – were the Rust Belt blue wall states that put Trump over the top in 2016. He won them by 22,748 (WI); 44,292 (PA), and 10,704 (MI) votes. And the Democrats are stopping at nothing to win them back.
Of course, these court victories were concerned with when the mail-in ballot delivery window will close. Let’s not forget the question of when the in-person polls will close. It’s a safe bet that Democratic lawyers will argue—and even sue, as they have in the past—for extra hours in places where their voters might come straggling in late. After all, many protestors and rioters seem to be night people.
5. Set expectations that the election will not be decided on November 3. Plan for mass protests in the streets. Scare people into believing that Trump won’t leave office (should he attempt to challenge the results).
Remember that celebrity “United to Save the Vote” virtual gala? One of the goals of the organizers was to ensure “that everyone knows it will take a week – not a day – to get results.”
One week might be too optimistic. As we noted above, counting mail-in ballots is more time-consuming than regular ballots, and recent court cases have ensured that these ballots will be accepted days and even weeks after Election Day. And, of course, all of these lawyered-up ballot brouhahas will take time.
The American public has become used to getting election results within 24 hours of the polls closing. So now the Democrat-Media Complex is hard at work setting expectations that we won’t know the results for days or weeks or possibly months.
Oh and they want us to know that even if it looks like Trump won on election night, we shouldn’t believe our lying eyes until all of the ballots are found … I mean, counted.
On August 30, Josh Mendelsohn, head of Hawkfish, a Mike Bloomberg-funded Democratic technology company, warned of a “Red Mirage” on Election Day. Mendelsohn argued that Trump might well win the vote on November 3, but that he would not win the overall balloting, including mail-in votes:
We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump. When every legitimate vote is tallied and we get to that final day, which will be some day after Election Day, it will in fact show that what happened on election night was exactly that, a mirage. It looked like Donald Trump was in the lead and he fundamentally was not when every ballot gets counted.
At one level, this is an interesting argument, bespeaking changing trends in voting. And yet at another level, it’s pure Democratic spin, or, should we say, pre-spin.
Indeed, we should bear in mind that Democrats have a history with long counts (and recounts).
For instance, in the 2008 U.S. Senate election in Minnesota, creative counting cost Republican incumbent Norm Coleman his seat; it was awarded instead to Democrat Al Franken. As recalled by Bob Anderson of The Federalist:
On the morning after the election in November 2008, the official tally showed [Coleman] with a 725-vote lead out of 2.9 million total votes cast. Coleman claimed victory. But Democrats flooded the state with lawyers to challenge the outcome. After the first recount, his lead was down to 206 votes, but things were just getting started. Caches of ballots showed up late. Eight months later, the resulting litigation finally ended when Al Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn in July 2009.
Yes, it took the Democrats eight long months, but it was worth it—they had their senatorial victory. Anderson adds that subsequent study found that 1,099 felons had illegally voted–which means that more than three times as many illegal votes were counted than the number Franken won by. But by then, Coleman was out and Franken was in.
Democrat senate candidate Al Franken’s attorney cross-examines a city clerk during the Minnesota Senate recount trial on Feb. 13, 2009, in St. Paul, MN. The Democrat’s lawyers fought for every challenged ballot. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)
This year, the New York Times recalled the 2018 midterm Congressional elections, when Democrats were energetic about “ballot harvesting,” and so, as time went by, their results kept getting better: “As mail ballots were tallied in the days and weeks afterward, Democrats kept winning close races. Their net gains in the House went from an apparent 26 seats on election night to 41.”
(When it comes to recounts, a bag of uncounted ballots usually seems to fortuitously appear to tip the race for Democrats. Alas, Ballot Santa never comes with a sack of gifts for Republicans.)
No doubt with that pleasing prospect in mind—good things come to those who wait—Hillary Clinton has urged Team Biden to carry on the struggle by any means necessary, even if their man seems to have lost on November 3. “Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually, I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch,” she said. “This is a big organizational challenge.”
Hillary is hardly alone in making this charge. Indeed, Democrats and Never Trump Republicans have set up something called the Transition Integrity Project, which has conducted many “war games” in which #Resistance figures role-play various scenarios.
Given the likelihood of difficulties on and around Election Day—who can forget, for example, that back in February, it took the Democrats a full 26 days to decide who had won their Iowa caucus—it might seem reasonable to think that such gaming and planning could be useful civic exercise. Except, of course, we know that the lessons learned will only be applied to the mission of getting rid of Trump. If Trump wins, the Transition Integrity Project will likely have nothing to say about the inevitable Antifa protests, etc.
In fact, now everyone seems to be on message that we should pay no attention to the results on Election Day because the real count will be yet to come. Hence Mark Zuckerberg, whose Facebook empire is in the middle of everything political these days, said recently, “What we and the other media need to start doing is preparing the American people that there is nothing illegitimate about this election taking additional days or weeks to make sure all the votes are counted.”
Facebook also reportedly announced that it may “restrict the circulation of content” following the election in order to curb civil unrest if (when?) things turn violent. And perhaps this is also an example of pre-spin.
Meanwhile, a massive network of well-funded left-wing groups are organizing to take to the streets to make sure the results are in their favor—while claiming that they are simply preparing in anticipation of Trump supporters’ being violent.
On September 8, the increasingly woke Daily Beast bannered: “The Left Secretly Preps for MAGA Violence After Election Day.” As the article detailed, a left-wing group founded after the 2016 election, boasting the militant name of Fight Back Table, has just founded an even newer left-wing group, the Democracy Defense Nerve Center, which is already prepping for Election Day trouble. As one activist told the Beast, the group has been planning out how it can “occupy shit, hold space, and shut things down, not just on Election Day but for weeks.”
Anti-Trump protesters at the Women’s March on Washington, DC, on Jan. 21, 2017. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Anti-Trump protesters hold signs outside the Target Center in Minneapolis, MN, on Oct. 10, 2019. (Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images)
The article identifies the point person of these efforts as one Deirdre Schifeling, described as “a former top official at Planned Parenthood,” and adds:
The coalition includes labor groups, like SEIU and the American Federation of Teachers, social justice entities like Color of Change, and progressive movement outfits like Indivisible and MoveOn. It is also collaborating with mission ally Protect the Results, a group of 80-plus left-of-center and some NeverTrump entities that are also planning mass mobilization in more than 1,000 locations across the country.
Reacting to the article, conservative Michael Brendan Dougherty tweeted mordantly, “If one major party is constantly signaling its commitment to the strategy of precipitating a regime crisis, maybe the regime crisis is already upon us.”
Indeed, as Breitbart News reported, one group tweeted out a call to action to “get in the streets” starting on Election Day:
“On Nov. 3. After you vote, get in the streets! Donald Trump must go and we must make it happen!” reads a post tweeted in August by the far-left ShutDownDC, an “organizing space” partnering with Protect the Results which plans to “rise up to confront the Trump administration’s attacks on democracy” and offers training sessions for coalition members to prepare to take “direct action.”
These mass (and potentially violent) demonstrations will serve as a show of force. They will function as a grand intimidation tactic to make Biden’s victory a fait accompli by using the loudest voices to preemptively drown out any opposition — which is awfully easy to do when your opposition is known as the “silent majority.” When masses of people take to the streets–breathlessly reported on by the media–the message will be that the country is burning in righteous outrage to oust Trump.
And, of course, the message for American voters: If you don’t want your neighborhood burned down, you better vote Trump out.
Demonstrators start a fire and burn the American flag during a protest near the White House on May 31, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
In fact, a recent essay by Shadi Hamid in The Atlanticargues that “Democrats May Not Be Able to Concede.” Hamid candidly tells us that there will be mass rioting if Trump wins; and, therefore, Republicans might want to vote for Biden if they don’t want to see their neighborhoods burn: “For this reason, strictly law-and-order Republicans who have responded in dismay to scenes of rioting and looting have an interest in Biden winning—even if they could never bring themselves to vote for him.” Subtle!
And in case the rioters need a reason to burn things down, these Democrat shock troops have been led to believe that Trump won’t leave office. “Orange Hitler” will simply refuse to concede and cling to power illegitimately—even if he loses. And so, naturally, these left-wing apparatchiks will feel justified in burning down the country and firing on their proverbial Fort Sumter should Trump even contest any ballot fraud.
In fact, one MSNBC pundit actually predicted that Trump-supporting militias would be “showing up at vote counting places threatening people.”
“We have to remember, the fear that I have is not just that he won’t leave, but remember, because so many of these ballots are going to be coming in by mail, we’re not going to have a new president on election night. It’s going to take weeks,” MSNBC political analyst Jason Johnson told host Nicolle Wallace.
“You going to have militia showing up at vote counting places threatening people,” he added. “We are in for a very, very difficult couple of months. We may be comfortable at the polling numbers now, but we have to remember that we have a president that is a proto-dictator and will do anything in his power to stay out, regardless of what the numbers say.”
The message for the Democrat shock-troopers: You are justified in rioting to oust the “proto-dictator” and cheating to disenfranchise his voters.
6. Challenge the results in court with the help of election officials and district attorneys that George Soros has spent years getting elected.
As we noted, the Biden campaign has assembled a Murderers’ Row of Democratic legal talent, which can be expected to have a great effect when vote-counting controversies find their way into the courts.
Democratic lawyers will likely soon be in front of district attorneys and judges, demanding judicial relief for anything they don’t like.
Interestingly, many of those DAs—including in such big cities as Orlando, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, and San Francisco—are of the new breed of George Soros-funded wokesters. In fact, Soros has spent at least $13.4 million, across dozens of states, in pursuit of his vision of Democratic electoral victories.
While these Soros-funded DAs might not be directly involved in any election legal fight, they will likely decline to prosecute any of the Democrats’ shock troops who set fire to our cities (and Democrat donors will happily providethebail for any election rioters.) These DAs could also decline to prosecute anyone engaged in voter fraud or voter intimidation on behalf of Democrats. There are any number of ways a Democrat-friendly local official can assist even indirectly, which is precisely why Democrat donors like George Soros are willing to spend millions on races that are way down-ballot.
A Broward County canvassing board member examines a disputed ballot during the 2000 Florida recount. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)
Consider, for example, the Soros-funded Secretary of State Project (SoSP), which was created to elect secretaries of state in swing states. The Democrats realized that elections can be won or lost depending on who counts the votes and who enforces–or doesn’t enforce—election laws.
Remember the infamous Al Franken race we mentioned earlier? Guess who helped elect the Minnesota Secretary of State who oversaw that fiasco? You guessed it! He was a George Soros-funded SoSP alum.
Oh, and remember Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic-Biden-endorsed-DNC-speaking Secretary of State who had a big oopsy with the military ballots? Yes, she was also endorsed by the George Soros-funded SoSP back in 2010.
As you can see, Democrats play the long-game, leaving nothing to chance. As the Washington Post recently explained—or should we say, anticipated:
Election experts said that the combination of the hotly contested White House race and millions of first-time mail voters could lead to a record number of ballot rejections and trigger a searing legal war over which are valid—and who is the ultimate victor.
“Who is the ultimate victor.” Yes, that is the question. And here should note that the Secretary of State Project was born of the angst Democrats felt after losing the 2000 presidential race.
Even today, the Democrats shudder when they think back to that hotly disputed 2000 election—when it took 36 days to resolve the victor, George W. Bush—and thus they resolve, Never Again.
7. Let Chief Justice John Roberts (or the new Justice?) pick the next president. Or let Nancy Pelosi do it.
As with many fights they have won in the last six or seven decades, Democrats will surely look to the courts. The combination of smart lawyers, friendly DAs, and helpful judges usually get them the victories they want.
Of course, that game plan didn’t work for the Democrats in the 2000 election, when the U.S. Supreme Court, led by an immovable chief justice, William Rehnquist, who took a no-nonsense approach to the Democratic Party’s appeals to keep the Florida re-count chaos going until enough ballots could be “counted” in Al Gore’s favor.
Today, the court is led by a new chief justice, John Roberts, who ostensibly is one of the court’s five conservative justices appointed by presidents Bush 41, Bush 43, and Trump.
However, Roberts doesn’t appear quite so conservative these days. In recent years, he has proven himself to be movable on such issues as DACA, the Second Amendment, and presidential powers, much to the delight of the Democrat-Media Complex. As CNN’s Elie Honig cheered in July, “Roberts defied conventional wisdom and entrenched ideology to join with the court’s traditionally liberal bloc.” By contrast, Vice President Mike Pence has bluntly labeled Roberts “a disappointment to conservatives.”
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts with Associate Justices Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh at the the State of the Union address on Feb. 4, 2020. (Leah Millis-Pool/Getty Images)
So if the 2020 presidential election proves to be anything like 2000 in terms of disputed ballots or other irregularities, it’s entirely possible, even likely, that a case or cases will end up before the Roberts court.
If that happens, you can bet that Roberts will once again be exhorted by the Democrat-Media Complex to “defy conventional wisdom and entrenched ideology” by voting with the liberals on the court. And if Roberts wants to eat lunch at all the cool places in Washington, DC, that’s exactly what he’ll do; by contrast, if he votes with the conservatives and thereby helps elect Trump, his name will be mud inside the Beltway.
Would Roberts stick his neck out for Trump?
Actually, what if he doesn’t have to? What if his swing vote isn’t the deciding factor?
The court is now missing a member with the death of Justice Ginsburg; and if the Republicans are successful in confirming her replacement, this new justice will finally, definitively, tilt the court in favor of conservatives. And this new justice could also cast the deciding vote in a 5-4 decision, if Roberts joins the liberals.
In fact, President Trump has noted the likelihood of the Supreme Court having to decide the election as reason to fill the Ginsburg vacancy before Election Day.
“I think this will end up in the Supreme Court, and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices,” he said, adding that he thinks “having a four-four situation is not a good situation.”
Will the GOP be able to nominate a replacement before the election? What happens if they don’t?
What happens if the currently configured eight-member court splits 4-4 in a decision?
“Any time the justices divide 4-4 in a case, the lower court ruling remains in place. If say, the court were to split that way in a case involving the election, the tie would ratify whatever the lower court decided,” the Associated Press reports.
What’s the likelihood that Roberts would join the conservatives in a 5-3 vote? What’s the likelihood that a new justice will be seated in time to cast the swing vote in a 5-4 decision?
How crazy (or crazier) would the Democrat-Media Complex and their shock troops get if a new Trump-appointed Supreme Court justice–seated days before the election–casts the deciding vote in favor of the man who just gave her her job?
On that last point, James O’Keefe offered a speculative response to one left-winger’s call to “burn the entire fucking thing down” if the GOP tries to replace Ginsburg.
“Just imagine what they’ll do with absentee ballots,” O’Keefe asked.
Yes, indeed.
If the Democrats’ chaos strategy unfolds as we imagined, it’s possible that history will record this as the Trump-Biden-Roberts (Barrett? Lagoa?) election.
But perhaps history will record this as the Trump-Biden-Pelosi election.
The Supreme Court doesn’t have to decide the election. In fact, some believe that the court shouldn’t have intervened in the 2000 election at all because the Constitution and existing federal law already gives Congress the power to settle an electoral dispute.
As Justice Breyer explained in his dissent in Bush v. Gore, the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 give Congress the authority to count electoral votes and “resolve remaining disputes” after the states “have tried to resolve disputes (through ‘judicial’ or other means).” This is as the Founders’ intended, Breyer argued, because Congress “expresses the people’s will far more accurately than does an unelected Court. And the people’s will is what elections are about.”
If the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene (or if the court is split in a four-four decision) and neither Trump or Biden has an Electoral College majority by December 14 (the date Electors must cast their vote), the House of Representatives could decide the election.
The 12th Amendment states that if no candidate has an Electoral College majority, “the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.”
As Breitbart’s Joel Pollak recently noted, the word “immediately” suggests that the current Congress – led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi – could choose the president in this scenario.
But, as Pollak points out, there is a catch: The 12th Amendment makes clear that “in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote.” (emphasis added)
So, even though the House has 435 representatives (the majority of whom are Democrats), there will only be 50 votes cast—one for each state’s delegation.
And here’s the kicker … wait for it…
The Republicans control more state delegations than the Democrats!
Republicans are currently the majority in 26 delegations. Democrats are the majority in 23. Only the Michigan delegation is evenly split 7-7 (but Michigan’s Trump-hating libertarian Rep. Justin Amash will undoubtably throw in with the Dems.)
The Pelosi-led House could, of course, engage in all sorts of gamesmanship to create chaos and delay the inevitable. But even if they try to deny the House a quorum by refusing to show up to vote, the 12th Amendment specifies that a quorum for this purpose can consist of a single member from each state’s delegation. So, if the Democrats decide to skip town, one single Republican congressman from these states could represent the entire state and vote for Trump.
But, of course, with the Democrats controlling the House, they could try to change the House rules to stall for time — all the while whipping up the violence and hysteria of their shock troops in the streets.
As we explained, chaos and crisis are the Democrats’ friends. And we should never underestimate the left’s penchant for chaos, as the violence currently erupting across America’s cities has shown.
In the meantime, we should ask: Are Republicans prepared to deal with the legal chaos vote-by-mail balloting will unleash?
Our advice to the GOP: Lawyer up!
Rebecca Mansour is a Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News. Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.
James P. Pinkerton is a Breitbart News contributor and a veteran of the Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses. Follow him on Twitter at @JamesPPinkerton.
Democrats’ push to promote mail-in voting this fall could be undermined by an important fact: Some of their key constituencies don’t trust it.
Black and Latino voters consistently voice more discomfort and uncertainty about voting by mail, even as a majority of Democrats overall say they plan to cast absentee ballots this fall, according to polling and focus groups. Generating overwhelming margins and turnout among both groups is a key to victory for Joe Biden in November, and Democrats don’t want to lose any votes by suggesting that mail voting is the only proper way to cast a ballot in the general election.
In a series of recent focus groups conducted in Philadelphia and Las Vegas by iVote — a Democratic group focused on voting rights and secretaries of state — and shared with POLITICO, Black and Latino voters said the experience of voting in person “has been ingrained and they feel secure their vote will be counted,”according to the report summary.
The findings are bolstered by a pair of recent polls from the Voter Participation Center, in partnership with Latino Decisions and the African American Research Collaborative, which showed that nearly two-thirds of Latino and Black voters prefer to vote in person because “they believe their vote is more likely to be counted than if they vote by mail.”
A voter cast her mail-in ballot at in a drop box in West Chester, Pa., prior to the primary election, Thursday, May 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Wayne County, Michigan, leaders want the Secretary of State to intervene after there was chaos while counting absentee ballots on primary election night.
Recorded ballot counts in 72% of Detroit’s absentee voting precincts didn’t match the number of ballots cast, spurring officials in Michigan’s largest county to ask the state to investigate ahead of a pivotal presidential election.
Without an explanation from Detroit election workers for the mismatches, the Wayne County Board of Canvassers requested this week for Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office to examine the “training and processes” used in Detroit’s Aug. 4 primary, which one official described as a “perfect storm” of challenges. The board is charged with certifying election results.
Forty-six percent of all precinct numbers were askew, canvassers were told.
According to state law, precincts cannot be counted where poll books — that is, a list of registered voters in that precinct — are not matched with the ballots.
Data presented to the board said 81 precincts, including 73 absentee voter precincts, were +/- 5 votes “without explanation.”
Monica Palmer, one of the Republican members of the four-person Wayne County Board of Canvassers, told the News procedures were not followed.
“It was so inaccurate that we can’t even attempt to make it right,” she said.
Breitbart News obtained an affidavit from Bob Cushman, who was appointed as a “poll challenger” by the Michigan Republican Party and was present as ballots were being counted at the TCF Center, formerly known as the Cobo Center. Cushman said he stayed on site until 5:10 a.m. after Election Day.
Cushman recounted several counting tables “had opened ballots with no poll book” to check whether the individual was authorized to cast that ballot.
In another instance, he “noticed pages being inserted into several poll books.”
According to Cushman, some workers left early as the day dragged into the night.
Polls closed at 8:00 p.m., but Cushman observed at 12:37 a.m., “The threat was made that the $100 bonus that had been promised earlier (over the public address system) would not be paid.”
Cushman said an order was made around 2:00 a.m. to open the remaining ballots “for immediate tabulation without additional processing or notation.”
Cushman will be appearing on The Kyle Olson Show this week and his interview will be released exclusively at Breitbart News.
The Detroit News reported 1.6 million Michiganders cast absentee ballots in August and that number is expected to be higher in November.
Kyle Olson is a reporter for Breitbart News. He is also host of “The Kyle Olson Show,” syndicated on Michigan radio stations on weekends. Listen to segments on YouTube or download full episodes at iHeartRADIO.Follow him on Twitter, like him on Facebook, and follow him on Parler.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
What Did You Say? 
You must be logged in to post a comment.