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.

No Voter Fraud?

Here’s one case—a single incident, but much too large a case to be dismissed for that.

Paterson, NJ, with a population of 145,000, last month held—rather, is holding, since the city isn’t done counting votes—an election for City Council, among other positions. The election was done by mail-in voting since the Powers that Be considered the city’s Wuhan Virus situation that serious.

16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but only 13,557 votes were counted. More than 3,190 votes, 19% of the total ballots cast, were disqualified by the board of elections.

Nineteen per cent of the votes have been tossed.

Why?

Over 800 ballots in Paterson were invalidated for appearing in mailboxes improperly bundled together—including a one mailbox where hundreds of ballots were in a single packet. The bundles were turned over to law enforcement to investigate potential criminal activity related to the collection of the ballots.
The board of elections disqualified another 2,300 ballots after concluding that the signatures on them did not match the signatures on voter records.

There’s more:

Reporting by NBC further uncovered citizens of Paterson who are listed as having voted, but who told the news outlet they never received a ballot and did not vote. One woman, Ramona Javier, after being shown the list of people on her block who allegedly voted, told the outlet she knew of eight family members and neighbors who were wrongly listed. “We did not receive vote-by-mail ballots and thus we did not vote,” she said. “This is corruption. This is fraud.”

And

There were multiple reports that large numbers of mail-in ballots were left on the lobby floors of apartment buildings and not delivered to residents’ individual mailboxes, further casting doubt on the integrity of the election.

But who cares, right? It’s only 3,200 votes that were…wrong.

In a single ward of one council seat race, 24% of the votes cast were tossed by the State’s Board of Elections.

One case? Not so much. Statewide, across all of its 31 elections, the Elections Board had to “disqualify” 9.6% of the mail-in ballots cast. Even with Paterson’s failures discounted, the Statewide failure rate is over 8%.

Mail-in ballots, which have none of the controls of absentee ballots, are a petri dish for the voter fraud that Progressive-Democrats insist is a right-wing conspiracy.