An Objection to a Recall Effort

There is in progress in Seattle an effort to recall Progressive-Democratic Mayor Jenny “Summer of Love” Durkan. Durkan objects.  A State trial court has said, over Durkan’s objection, that the recall effort can proceed, so Durkan has taken the matter to the State’s Supreme Court.

Remarkably, neither Petitioners nor the trial court identified the particular “policies and safety measures” Mayor Durkan had a duty to implement, but failed to enact.

Here are a couple that were evident to the trial court, are evident to the recall petitioner defendants, and are blindingly obvious to the Seattle residents.

Instead of ordering the city’s police to retreat and abjectly surrender their precinct headquarters and surrounding blocks to a rabble, she could have—should have—reinforced those police with more police, including State police (or at least asked for them; Governor Jay Inslee’s (D) support for police also is an open question) and not surrendered.

When it became obvious that the occupying rabble had no legitimate objective—they engaged in enthusiastic vandalizing, looting, extortion of uninformed visitors, rape, murder—she could have sent in the police to retake the area much sooner instead of wasting weeks, businesses’ lives, people’s lives pleading negotiating with the rabble.

Instead, she declared a Summer of Love while pretending to deal with the…situation.

The residents of Seattle, citizens of Washington and of the United States that they are, deserved, and deserve, better.

Danger from In-Person Voting

It’s quite minimal, regardless of the hysterical panic-mongering of the NLMSM and the Progressive-Democrats. Dr Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator:

“Well, I can tell you it has been safe for me to go to Starbucks and pick up my order,” Dr Deborah Birx told Just The News in an interview when asked about in-person voting.

“If you go into Starbucks in the middle of Texas and Alabama and Mississippi that have very high case rates, then I can’t say that it would be different waiting in line in the polls[.]”

Voters just need to pay attention to what they’re doing.

Voter Fraud

…which the NLMSM and Progressive-Democrats so vociferously deny exists. Here are some data, via The Heritage Foundation and Jim Simpson, Republican candidate for Congress in Maryland’s District 2 (whom I, from my perch in Texas, wholeheartedly endorse). The Heritage‘s full, State by State report can be seen and downloaded from here.

The report covers a long history and a broad range of fraud forms. I’ve picked out three election years—2016, 2018, and 2020. I’ve not bothered to break them out by fraud type, State, or political party; the existence of the fraud is what’s bad.

  • 2020: 9 cases—even though almost no general elections have been held yet—spread across 5 States
  • 2018: 65 cases, spread across 21 States
  • 2016: 62 cases, spread across 21 States

Hmm….

Ranked Voting?

There is a growing push from the Left to move our elections to ranked choice voting. RCV is a technique whereby voters rank all the candidates on a ballot by that voter’s preference, and in the event the first preference candidate doesn’t get a majority, bottom candidates get stricken from the ballot, those votes reallocated in some fashion—or dropped altogether—and the counting redone. The process is repeated until a winner is manufactured out of the æther of preferences.

We already do all the ranked voting we need, and it doesn’t precisely ape the foolishness and unnecessary complexity of RCV. They’re called run-off elections in the primaries. And when there’s no majority in the Electoral College, the House and Senate do ranked voting: more run-offs.

If jurisdictions are dissatisfied with pluralities winning rather than majorities, they can switch to run-offs.