Progressive-Democrat Hypocrisy

Again.

California’s Progressive-Democrats have been busily rewriting election laws to help their party “ballot harvest.”

In 2016 California [Progressive-]Democrats passed a law allowing anybody, including paid campaign operatives and political parties, to collect and return mail-in ballots. Two years later [Progressive-]Democrats prohibited “disqualifying a ballot solely because the person returning it did not provide on the identification envelope his or her name, relationship to the voter, or signature.”

And

[Progressive-]Democrats boasted that they used ballot harvesting to flip seven House seats in California that year including four in Orange County. Before this year’s March primary, hospitality unions threw a “ballot party” for workers outside of Anaheim hotels.

This election season, Republicans have decided to take them at their law. Even worse, according to the Progressive-Democrats,

[Republicans have] also learned to harvest ballots more efficiently by setting up drop boxes at shooting ranges, churches, gun shops, and GOP offices. The boxes, which are locked and supervised, received permission from the site hosts.

Oh, the Progressive-Democrat hue and cry over being challenged in accordance with their own book, Alinsky style. They’re accusing Republicans of voter suppression. And they’re actually serious in their accusation.

As the WSJ put it near the end of its editorial,

When Democrats harvest ballots, they are increasing voter access. When Republicans do it, it’s cheating. Glad we cleared that up.

Election Interference

Here we go.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says expects the social media giant will impose fewer restrictive rules on content following the conclusion of November’s presidential election.

After having used is restrictive rules on content to suppress Conservative speech, posting, and post-sharing. After having explicitly and deliberately “restricted” posts related to the Biden father and son influence peddling in Ukraine and the People’s Republic of China as reported by the New York Post.

“Once we’re past these events, and we’ve resolved them peacefully, I wouldn’t expect that we continue to adopt a lot more policies that are restricting of a lot more content,’ Zuckerberg said, according to BuzzFeed News.

Translation: “Once Biden is elected, I wouldn’t expect that we continue to adopt a lot more policies that are restricting of a lot more content,” because he will have achieved the purpose of his interference.

It’s hard for Zuckerberg’s interference in our election through his Facebook company to get any more blatant than this.

A State Appellate Court

One in Michigan got one right. The Michigan Court of Appeals has reversed a State Court of Claims decision that would have counted ballots postmarked by Election Day but received up to two weeks later.

The appellate court held that

[D]esigning adjustments to our election integrity laws is the responsibility of our elected policy makers, not the judiciary….

The court also held that

the state constitution requires all votes to be turned in by 8 pm of Election Day to be counted, and could not be changed by a judicial order.
“The Constitution is not suspended or transformed even in times of a pandemic, and judges do not somehow become authorized in a pandemic to rewrite statutes or to displace the decisions made by the policymaking branches of government,” Judge Mark Boonstra in one of the opinions.

Political decisions must be made by the political branches of government and not by the judicial branch.

Imagine that.

Here, for good or ill, the political branches have made their decision: only votes received by the end of Election Day—and not by the end of the day itself—can be counted. Full stop.

“Sorting Error”

Fifty thousand Franklin County, OH, voters were mailed the wrong ballots last week. It was a scanner sorting error. That’s what the county’s Board of Elections claimed last Friday.

The affected voters in Franklin County received ballots meant for residents elsewhere in the county and so contained incorrect information for local races[.]

That’s an interesting error. The local post office doing final sorting for the local final delivery routes didn’t notice the misaddressed envelopes? The mailman doing the actual final delivery didn’t notice the misaddressed envelopes as he put them in recipients’ mail boxes?

Franklin County has a population of some 1,300,000. Taking a naïve guesstimate of a typical family having two adults and two underage children, that works out to some 650,000 voters. 50,000 of them works out to a bit over 7.5% of the county’s voters getting the wrong ballots.

Stipulate, arguendo, that the scanner errors were entirely innocent, of the sort that fits in the stuff happens category.

That’s still an enormous error, an unacceptably high error, for mail-in ballots. Absentee ballots—generated one by each on an as-requested basis and on proof that the requester is both who he says he is and eligible to vote—do not have this sort of error, and absentee balloting does not have any error of this magnitude.

Innocent or nefarious, mail-in balloting is just too unreliable.

Update: Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, population 349,000, is a heavily Republican county in the heavily Republican southwestern part of the State. 58,000 mail-in ballots were…misplaced on the way out the door; the intended recipients never got them. That’s roughly a third of the voting population whose ballots were lost.

[T]he Westmoreland County Election Bureau is placing blame on a contractor hired by the county to mail out ballots this election cycle.
“The first batch of processed and approved applications was submitted to the County’s mail house, Mid-West Direct on October 3rd. It has been brought to our attention today that Mid-West did not sent out the ballots on Tuesday as indicated.”

The first batch. The screwup supposedly has been fixed, and new ballots “are in the mail.” “Processed and approved applications?” Whose applications? Absentee ballots don’t get batched up; those ballots get sent to the requestor as each application gets approved. This is the county’s approval for mail-in.

This is yet another demonstration of the unreliability of just willy-nilly mailing out ballots instead of staying with on-demand and -proof absentee ballot voting.

Voting “Anti-fraud Measures”

New Jersey is experiencing more voting…problems…on the heels of Paterson’s voter fraud that led to indictments of four city councilmen. Now, other voters

have received ballots meant for people who have moved out of the state and for deceased voters

Not to worry, though.

some election officials say they’re confident that anti-fraud measures will take care of it, according to local reports.

On the other hand, worry, though. If these election officials’ “anti-fraud measures” are adequate to the task, why didn’t they catch and prevent these ballots from being mailed to the wrong people? Why didn’t they prevent the graveyard ballots?