Tag Archives: voting

“We are the source of truth for most questions about the elections we run.”

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Maricopa County election officials and the Arizona Secretary of State are colluding with social media to control what gets said about elections and election procedures in the county. But do not fear, it’s for the voters’ own good.

The offices of both the Maricopa County recorder and the Arizona secretary of state work together with third parties to censor social media content that they believe is mis- and disinformation, including drawing up plans to ban social media users from the county social media accounts and using influencers to spread their message, according to public records obtained from both Maricopa County….

The Gavel Project obtained a number of documents from the county and from the State SecState that make this plain.

Some of those documents amply the breathtaking arrogance of the county and SecState officials and their just as appalling contempt for the average Americans resident in Maricopa County. Here’s Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer:

I posit that the gravest threat to voting rights and our elected form of government is no longer the systematic disenfranchisement of a particular class of people, but instead the undermining of the entire election system through lies and disinformation. And it is in this respect, that the Constitution today is in some ways a thorn in the side of my office. Specifically the First Amendment.

Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates:

We are the source of truth for most questions about the elections we run.

Trust us. We’re from the government.

Presidential Debates

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Former President Donald Trump (R) not only wants Presidential candidate debates, he wants them to occur much earlier than they have in prior campaign seasons.

The Trump campaign has asked the Commission on Presidential Debates to schedule the anticipated matchups between him and President Joe Biden earlier in the election cycle, signaling Trump’s willingness to work the panel on date and venue.

I agree, with a caveat.

Trump shouldn’t give the CPD much time to agree to an accelerated schedule. If they don’t meet an appropriately nearby deadline to get earlier debates scheduled, or if Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden won’t agree to the schedule, or won’t agree to debate at all, then the Trump campaign should schedule the debates, including the venue (my preference here would be town hall style venues, with the majority of questions coming from the audience).

In addition to that, the Trump campaign should invite Robert Kennedy, Jr, Cornell West, Marianne Williamson (who has reactivated her campaign), and Jill Stein to the debates. If any of them decline to participate, then the Trump campaign should place empty barstools (that being the preferred seating arrangement at townhalls) labeled with the names of the candidates who didn’t want to appear.

And then proceed with the debates.

Election Interference

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The No Labels group has folded its tents and quit the political race for this year, for a few reasons I’ve written about before. It appears, though, that there’s more to this fiasco than understood heretofore [ellipses in the original, emphasis added].

Democratic strategist Karen Finney argued No Labels had presented a “dangerous” threat to Biden’s re-election chances that Democrats, including her, actively worked to undermine.
They were very dangerous because they had over $70 million to get on the ballot,” Finney recalled.
“And what they were promising…They were promising that they could win states like Texas. And again, it was totally illogical, but it was a very real threat that myself and others worked very hard to not just undermine, but to make sure that the people they were talking to understood, that their rhetoric just did not work, and their math did not work[.”]

This is a member of the Progressive-Democratic Party openly bragging about having successively interfered with our upcoming election through sabotage of a third party’s effort to field a competing slate of candidates.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party that’s on the ballot in this fall’s national, State, and local elections.

Why Trump Remains on the Ballot

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The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that former President and current Republican Primary Presidential candidate Donald Trump will remain on all of the relevant election ballots, overruling the Colorado State Supreme Court directly and Maine’s Secretary of State by extension. The Court’s reasoning is important. From the ruling’s second paragraph:

Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 [of the 14th Amendment] against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse.

The Court expanded on this, quoting Chief Justice Samuel Chase in his 1869 Griffin’s Case ruling:

[t]o accomplish this ascertainment [of which person[s] are explicitly barred under Section 3] and ensure effective results, proceedings, evidence, decisions, and enforcements of decisions, more or less formal, are indispensable.

The Supreme Court went on:

The Constitution empowers Congress to prescribe how those determinations should be made. The relevant provision is Section 5 [of the 14th Amendment], which enables Congress, subject of course to judicial review, to pass “appropriate legislation” to “enforce” the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Court concluded [emphasis in the original]:

We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.

The three modern-day liberal/activist Justices, Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown

Jackson, while concurring in the overall judgment that Trump stays on the ballot(s), were superficially Roberts-esque in their dissent from the sweeping nature of the Court’s ruling. They began by quoting from Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization:

If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.

But only superficially: they then wrote [citations omitted],

Today, the Court departs from that vital principle, deciding not just this case, but challenges that might arise in the future. … They decide novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner from future controversy. Although only an individual State’s action is at issue here, the majority opines on which federal actors can enforce Section 3, and how they must do so. The majority announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement. We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily, and we therefore concur only in the judgment.

[S]huts the door on other potential means: This is the activist Justices’ desire to keep this controversy alive, to keep a Presidential candidate of whom they have only contempt facing a constant and long-lasting barrage of cases seeking nothing more than to interfere in our 2024 election by interfering with a major and leading (redundancy deliberate) political candidate’s ability to campaign freely. And thereby to deny to us ordinary Americans our ability, our right, to decide for ourselves who we will choose for our President. These Justices do this solely because they personally disapprove of the particular candidate.

 

The Court’s ruling can be read here.

Racism, Arrogance Against Election Integrity

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In the aftermath of the 2020 election confusions in Georgia (both general and runoff), that State passed its Election Integrity Act that, among other things, shortened Georgia’s early voting period from nine weeks to four, reduced the window for mail-in ballots, and moved the deadline for registering to vote to 29 days before an election.

The Sixth Dist. of the Afr. Methodist Episcopal Church, the Ga. State Conf. of the NAACP, and The Concerned Black Clergy of Metro. Atlanta Inc., joined by the Federal government’s DoJ, sued to strike the law as voter suppressing—the stricter voting period unfairly discriminates against Black voters, among other complaints.

This was a nakedly racist suit that used a manufactured racism beef as the core of their argument. Federal District Judge JP Boulee issued a preliminary injunction upholding the law. With particular reference to the Act’s runoff requirements, he wrote,

Plaintiffs presented evidence that Black voters are more likely to vote early. Plaintiffs did not present any evidence, however, which would show why Black voters would disproportionately struggle to vote during the new early voting period

And [emphasis added]

In short…the Court is not persuaded that evidence showing that black voters use early voting more often is sufficient to show that the Runoff Provisions, which shorten the early voting period, will have a disparate impact on black voters. In other words, without more, generalized evidence related to the use of early voting is not sufficient to automatically show that this particular provision, which pertains to one aspect of runoff elections, is discriminatory.

And

Plaintiffs have failed to meet their burden to show that the Runoff Provisions have a disparate impact on black voters. Indeed, Plaintiffs failed to show that eliminating the registration period before a runoff election disproportionately impacts black people. Plaintiffs also failed to show that reducing the early voting period and not mandating weekend voting has a disparate impact. The Court thus weighs this factor in favor of Defendants and against a discriminatory purpose finding.

“Plaintiffs” just expected their unsubstantiated claim to be taken as dispositive fact. Their arrogance runs as deep as their racism.

Regarding the specific question of Plaintiffs not getting their preferred way, Boulee noted the 11th Circuit’s precedent, binding on his court (the 11th Circuit includes Georgia):

The Court acknowledges that the Legislature did not include the alternative option that Plaintiffs would have preferred [a one- or two-week longer voter registration period]. Importantly, the Eleventh Circuit has held that the failure to “‘include the alternative option[s] that Plaintiffs would have preferred’ is not evidence of discriminatory intent.”

That’s the arrogance of Plaintiffs being handled.

The dishonest nature of the plaintiff’s beef is illustrated in Footnote 6 of the Boulee’s ruling [emphasis added, cites omitted]:

6 As to the other named organizations, the Court is not convinced that Plaintiffs established an injury based on a diversion of resources. By way of example, Plaintiffs argued that “[i]t is false that Common Cause ‘says nothing about runoffs,’ . . . Common Cause testified about its voter participation efforts in both the ‘2020 Primary and Runoff election cycles.'” A close look at Plaintiffs’ evidence, however, does not show that Common Cause diverted its resources to counteract the Runoff Provisions. Instead, Common Cause’s representative stated that “[a]s part of the organization’s voter participation efforts, Common Cause GA provided free personal protective equipment (PPE), food, and water to persons, including voters, at or around polling sites, in Fulton County during the 2020 Primary and Runoff election cycles.” Simply put, the fact that Common Cause elected to give out water and other gifts during a runoff election does not show that it diverted resources away from its ordinary activities to counteract the Runoff Provisions.

These plaintiffs, their judgments clouded by their racism and arrogance, are just making things up and claiming them to be true without even a pretense of substantiation.

The judge’s ruling can be read here.