Portland’s rioters were at it again Sunday, this time tearing down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and smashing windows. And this:
One person could be heard saying, “F— all you colonizers. Every one of you that’s against Black Lives Matter can f— the f— off.”
This is the same BLM that Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden refuses to condemn, or even to gently criticize.
Keep it in mind as you vote.
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.
Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden is at it again. Here’s another example of his utter contempt (not hatred, mind you) for blacks.
They’re saying, “Jeeze, the reason I was able to stay sequestered in my home is because some Black woman was able to stack the grocery shelf. Or a young Hispanic is out there, these dreamers are out there, 60,000 of them acting as first responders and nurses and docs.”
Not only are blacks incapable of thinking independently, as Biden said—twice—earlier in comparing them with Hispanics, now he’s saying they’re not even capable of doing anything more complex than shelf-stacking; certainly not capable of being first responders, nurses, doctors.
Party really is disgusting.
Separate from the segregationist identity politics so loudly practiced by the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party is this. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two Arizona voting cases
Arizona Republican Party v Democratic National Committee and Brnovich v Democratic National Committee involving Arizona election laws that ban ballot harvesting and voting in other precincts.
As the Editorial Board puts it [emphasis added],
The Ninth Circuit and some other lower courts have interpreted [the Voting Rights Act] Section 2 broadly to enjoin any law that allegedly has a disparate impact on minorities no matter if the laws have a non-discriminatory intent. The Arizona cases provide the High Court an opportunity to clarify and tighten the standards for Section 2 claims.
Liberals are warning that the Supreme Court in the Arizona cases could “destroy what remains of the Voting Rights Act,” as one headline howled.
And the money quote to end the editorial:
As ever, the left is playing racial politics as the election approaches.
Scott Gottlieb and Yuval Levin had an uproar in their knickers in their Sunday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.
The two center their piece on the failure of President Donald Trump, et al., to take precautions satisfactory to Gottlieb and Levin to minimize their chances of getting the Wuhan Virus. The money quote in their piece, though—from my perspective—is this:
For months, some of them condoned nonchalance about the virus, mocking precautions such as wearing masks as marks of weakness and dismissing public-health concerns as overwrought.
Disregard the distorted characterization of the behavior of “some of them;” what Gottlieb and Levin ignore of those “months” is the empirical demonstration of the low likelihood of getting a Wuhan Virus infection serious enough to be noticed, even in a high-contact, high traffic, high-interaction environment.
On second thought, accept their mischaracterization: that nonchalance emphasizes the low likelihood.