It’s Florida, Jake
I can’t bear to do too much in-depth reporting on what’s been going on with the Florida election. It makes me too angry.
I don’t like losing close elections. Nobody does. But it’s one thing to lose them fair and square. Election fraud is quite another thing. And of course it exists.
Arguments that election fraud doesn’t exist always remind me of those people who swear they can invariably detect when a man is wearing a toupee. The logical flaw is so obvious, and yet they don’t see it (despite their supposedly eagle eye for hairpieces). But here it is: what about hairpieces that are too good to detect?
Well, if election fraud is done well, it’s the same thing. How would you know?
But whatever is going on in Florida right now is not hard to detect. At the very least (and I think what’s really going on is more than the very least), the law that governs the counting and reporting of votes was not followed. As Mollie Hemingway writes:
It is without question that lawful processes were not followed. To say otherwise is scandalous and insulting to the intelligence of most people. Everyone knows what is going on here and to say that there is no evidence, when evidence is obvious to everyone, including those who are pretending it isn’t there, is offensive.
A media that were something other than the communications leaders of the progressive movement would note that Palm Beach County is violating Florida law by refusing to provide required information to the public, and by illegally refusing to allow officials into the ballot counting area to observe what is occurring.
I noted recently that the press plies its trade—which has come to be promoting the fortunes of the left—not just by what it writes but by the stories it emphasizes and those it ignores or minimizes. To report honestly on this story is not in the interests of the left, so they minimize it or mock and try to debunk those who want to spread the word about it. You can be 100% sure that if the parties were reversed, the press would be saying something very different about the actions of the authorities in Florida.
But perhaps the worst aspect of this is that I’m fairly sure that an enormous number of Democrats could hear the entire story rather than the part the MSM is telling them, and would say, “So what?” After all, it benefits their side, and I think increasing numbers do not care about the principle of free and fair elections in which following the rules in a non-partisan way is one of the only guarantees we have of liberty being preserved. But to too many people, it’s become all about winning.
I’m surmising that; I don’t know it for sure. But events in recent years have convinced me of its likelihood.
NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on this:
Whatever is illegal should also render those votes legally unavailable for the certified tally.
As for public reaction, from Democratic Party members — however careless they may be about it, prosecution of those committing illegal acts must occur. From Uranium One, the Clinton servers, and Wasserman-Schultz’s sidekicks to Florida, Arizona and the Kavanaugh kibitzers.
The primary regulatory controls against exactly this sort of after-the-election fraud were deliberately evaded by both counties’ election boards. At this point, no one outside those particular boards (and the information probably even more tightly controlled by an even smaller group of people) knows the following details, details that are supposed be blindingly transparent to prevent fraud:
(1) How many total ballots did Palm Beach and Broward County mail out in the election cycle and how many of those were returned by the appropriate deadline with the correct postmark?
(2) How many provisional ballots were given out on Tuesday, and how many of those were completed and turned in.
(3) How many ballots were issued to voters to vote on Tuesday, and how many of those were actually turned in by the close of polls?
(4) Complete audit records of when un-voted ballots were removed from their containers when shipped by the print company.
Those two counties have provided none of that information, and what they have provided is directely contradicted by the vote totals they claim to have counted.
I noticed this morning that both counties are again dropping votes in overnight- Broward and Palm Beach added 3519 votes for Nelson and 1811 for Scott. The rest of the state combined added 1800 for Nelson and 1050 for Scott. Basically the rest of the state counted 3000 ballots yesterday- Palm Beach and Broward counted 5340. I think it pretty clear that by Tuesday morning, Nelson and Gillum both will be ahead in the count. The officials in the two counties are basically doing what they want and are daring Scott and DeSantis to do anything about it. At this point, unless you get a whistleblower, there will be no way to prove what ballots were added since Tuesday night.
“I noted recently that the press plies its trade—which has come to be promoting the fortunes of the left—not just by what it writes but by the stories it emphasizes and those it ignores or minimizes. ”
This is very important. People tend to judge the importance of a story by the attention is receives. Two great recent examples. Claims of assault against Kavanugh that happened 30 years ago and the press goes bonkers, it’s wall coverage, plus the theme is you have to believe all women. He must be guilty just by virtue of the magnitude of the coverage. Meanwhile, the accusations against Keith Ellison, which are more recent, are substantiated with police reports, are met with a big yawn.
You could pull these comparisons up almost weekly. Happened again this week in who receives all the gushing coverage after the election and who gets ignored.
I’m coming around to the idea that the media is not just biased, but actually somewhat corrupt in what they choose to apply critical analysis to and what they just ignore. They do things in such a way that you can’t quite say they are lying, but they are sure tipping the scales.
So what happens if Nelson and Gillum win in the recount, given the clear legal violations in the vote counting?
This seems to be new territory for nationally prominent elections. I can remember questionable stuff like recounting votes in Minnesota until Norm Coleman lost and Al Franken won. As dubious as that process was, there weren’t blatant violations of state laws.
I guess more lawsuits will be brought, but I’ll be surprised if those suits change anything. It is clear that officials like Brenda Snipes, the Broward County supervisor of elections, need to be fired at least, if not further penalized. However I have little confidence even that will happen.
I can’t think of any American elections overturned afterward.
I don’t know about you, but the sworn affidavit below, in which a temp worker at the Broward County’s Supervisor of Elections main office (SOE) who was working there full time and who, as part of her clerical duties was handling, processing, and delivering absentee ballots around the building (so, she was very familiar with them), says her supervisor told her to deliver a stack of blank absentee ballots to a room she had never been to before, that the room was locked, but that looking through the small window in the door she observed four SOE employees at a desk filling out papers–taking papers from a stack on their right, filling them out, and then putting them on a stack to their left.
On her first delivery she wasn’t allowed into that room, a SOE employee just opened the door and took the stack of absentee ballots then, closed the door. But that on her second delivery of a stack of absentee ballots, she was allowed to enter the room, where she witnessed those four SOE employees–one if whom she was able to identify by name–using the same pens that SOE supplies to voting locations, and systematically filling in stacks of blank absentee ballots in that locked room in the SOE building.
She went home and told her mother what she has seen, but was afraid to report it to SOE management for fear of retaliation (since it was someone in management who had twice that day sent her to deliver a stack of blank absentee ballots to the locked room in the first place).
She reported to work as usual at 9 AM the next morning, went out on a lunch break, and when she returned, a guard barred her from entering the building, told her she was fired (giving no explanation as to why), and told her to “never to come back to that building.”
See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/11/big-update-fl-election-worker-chelsey-smith-signs-sworn-legal-statement-alleging-broward-county-elections-staff-were-filling-in-ballots/
It would seem to me that her sworn testimony would be enough to get a judge to start a hearing about this situation.
The enormous number of democrats whose reaction is “So what?” are clearly not thinking of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
The seeds they are allowing to be sown will in time yield a crop of “wailing and gnashing of teeth”. Abandonment of the rule of law leads to politics by ‘other’ means. Ratchet up the rage high enough and it will find an outlet.
If the citizens cannot vote with ballots, they will vote with guns.
Never mind.
A commenter on the original site where this affidavit was reproduced just pointed out that the date on this affidavit is 3 November 2016, so not referring to this current election.
If the citizens cannot vote with ballots, they will vote with guns.
CapnRusty: Elsewhere I was reading a liberal commenter who considers the Electoral College and the Senate so antidemocratic and biased against Democrats that he claims it will lead to civil war.
neo: Comment re-editing has been working for me lately, but not with the comment above.
Wacky hijinks & election shenanigans in the Sunshine State? Noooooo!
Which is funnier? Clownishly inept vote fraud or goofy media denials of blatantly obvious fraud? I say it’s a toss-up.
Snow on Pine,
Many, many commenters argue that the allegations in the sworn affidavit show the history of voting fraud in Florida, so that the apparent forgeries of votes in the current election simply continue the pattern.
Some also say that the statute of limitations on the 2016 forgeries hasn’t run out yet, so Snipes and others can still be charged.
They also ask, Where were Gov. Scott and Ms. Bondi when this was going on back in 2016?
I wondered when the affidavit was filed. Turns out they were talking about it right after the 2016 election, so yes, filed two years ago.
At
http://sunshinestatenews.com/story/broward-stealing-florida-republican-national-lawyers-association-says
there’s an article from 11/7/16 on the whole Broward County shenanigans.
I for one thank you for the link to the Jim Hoft piece.
(It’s true that Mr. Hoft’s headline is somewhat misleading. I wish people would be more careful — or honest, whichever — when they write their headlines.)
Snow on Pine on November 10, 2018 at 6:52 pm at 6:52 pm said:
Never mind.
A commenter on the original site where this affidavit was reproduced just pointed out that the date on this affidavit is 3 November 2016, so not referring to this current election.
* * *
However, it does go to show prior history of corruption.
Myabe the Dems have learned not to let uninitiated members of the club get involved.
Julie–Even if a court were to accept that the forgery alleged in this 2016 affidavit had taken place, I think that this reported forgery would be viewed by a court today as being an instance of a “prior bad act,” and, as such, wouldn’t likely be admitted as evidence in any case about the current election.
P.S.–I actually think that this idea–that neither the court nor a jury should be informed about/officially cognizant of, or should be able to take into account a person or organization’s “prior bad acts” when coming to a verdict about an alleged current “bad act”–is ridiculous.
What better piece of evidence than that the accused had done something “bad” i.e. illegal, in a prior instance, and I would give such a prior bad act even more weight in my deliberations if the prior bad act was the same kind of bad act as the court/jury was looking at this time.
Such repetitive bad acts demonstrate a “pattern,” and patterns should be recognized as having predictive value i.e. you did it once and your’e therefore likely to do it again.
I think that Broward County election official was shown to be committing fraud but was never punished, as far as I can see.
This was at the time she was caught.
I believe in redemption, but there is such a thing as common sense.
This “prior bad act” thing is infuriating when you see it in action.
When you read in the paper that someone has been acquitted of a crime, by a jury which was deliberately denied the knowledge that, in the past, the accused had committed prior crimes, or even the same crime as he is being accused of committing this time, and perhaps had committed crimes not once, but over and over again, that is truly insane and, in my opinion a miscarriage of justice; counterproductive compassion..
As the Talmud says, (in loose translation) “Those who are kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind.”
How to look on the positive? The score of Chinatown by Jerry Goldsmith is rather unique and lovely. Unless you’ve seen it a bunch of times, you might miss that.
First, it is spare and the film has many scenes with no scored music. Second, almost all of the scored pieces feature a solo trumpet that’s majestic, defiant and sad. It’s almost like the music is hinting throughout the film that in spite of Jake’s go-it-alone toughness, the ending will be very bad.
John Hinderaker of Powerline has some reasonable analysis to the effect now that all the Florida counties have reported, the unofficial tally shows large enough leads for DeSantis and Scott that their wins are safe barring something extraordinary in the recounts and remaining military ballots.
However, in Arizona most of the outstanding votes are from Phoenix and Tucson, cities far more liberal than the rest of Arizona so Sinema likely is the winner.
I still don’t understand why Arizona ends up with so many uncounted votes days after the election but this supposed to be not unusual.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/11/whats-happening-in-florida-and-arizona.php
The Democrats in Georgia have now announced that they have enough “surprise” ballots to force a recount. Surprises are a specialty of Democrats. In Chicago, I was told long ago that The Church did not have to prove the Resurrection was true because the Democrats did it every election.
McSally is finished in this election, though she is likely to be the appointee when Kyl vacates the office at the end of the year- so she will become a sitting Senator.
The affadavit linked above I have seen before- it was filed in 2016. While it is two years old, I imagine that the activities were the same this year. I suspect that Broward officials have been doing this for some time- it is a difficult fraud to stop given the laxity of controls on ballot production and inventorying. They were probably filling out ballots weeks before the election, and continued afterwards when Scott suprised everyone by actually winning. By my counts, Broward and Palm Beach Counties alone have provided Nelson and Gillum with a net plus of 80,000 votes just since Wednesday afternoon. The rest of the state kept moving the target higher just enough to keep Scott in the lead.
Basically, all you need to do is to have a list of registered voters who never vote- there are probably at least 100,000 or more such voters in Broward. You just take that list, fill out request forms for absentee/mail-in ballots, and then fill out the ballots at the same table. Any of those voters show up unexpectedly, you just give them a provisional to pacify them.
That’s pretty much what the dem controlled county voting officials did in Broward, Yancey.
They stuffed the ballot boxes with tens of thousands of ballots listing a full hard left ticket, then “lost” or disqualified the actual ballots turned in by real voters.
And, really, what is the impediment to creating a fake voter?
If anyone in authority really wanted to get to the bottom of this- they could do it, but it would have to be a law enforcement agency with the ability scare the sh*t out of enough of the participants to get them to turn on each other.
The entrenched mafia that is the Democratic Party strikes again.
Suborning the IRA, the DOJ and the FBI isn’t enough, obviously.
Framing an elected president candidate while destroying those close to him in the process also isn’t enough.
Nor is constant, shameless lying about major policy decisions, both domestic and foreign.
Hey, maybe some Dem. Florida politician (Debbie Wasserman Shultz, perhaps) can pull a “Susan Rice” (a “Hail Susan”?) and can send him- or herself—and bosses and colleagues—an email warning against (heaven forfend!) exceeding the bounds of legality; warning against breaking any laws!
Making sure that everything is above-board!
That ought to convince everyone!
Should one worry that the mafia that is the Democratic Party—along with their MSM supporters and enablers—will take voter fraud almost as seriously as they did Hillary’s compromised email server?
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/11/06/the-compromised-comms-of-cia-state-and-hillary-clinton/
Stupid question….
….As Andrew McCarthy describes what the USA is up against:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/obama-appointed-lawyers-thwart-trump-policies-immigration-energy/
The State of Maine has also undergone some progressive “reforms” that may result in the candidate with the most votes in the first count still not winning the election.
Right now, in Maine’s 2nd District, incumbent Republican Bruce Poliquin has 2000 more votes than challenger Democrat Jared Golden. But since Poliquin has less than a 50% majority, then that means that the roughly 16,000 votes that went to the Independent candidate will be recounted, and those who selected Poliquin or Golden as their second choice will have those votes reallocated to those candidates.
This is called “ranked-choice voting”, which was pushed through in a referendum in 2016. The reformers claim that this procedure will lead to the fairest results, since the eventual winner be able to claim majority support. (I don’t think this experiment will end well, as it likely violates the Maine Constitution, and was motivated by animus against Paul LePage, who won the governorship twice in 2010 and 2014, but only with a plurality each time.)
Yankee:
I suppose its constitutionality could be challenged.
It seems to me that one basis for challenge could be it violates “one person, one vote.” The only people who get 2 votes are those who vote for the non-Democratic and non-Republican candidates, and everyone else just gets one vote. Seems inherently unfair.
Yankee:
I just looked it up, and that’s pretty much the situation. Similar arrangements in other states have been ruled okay. although they’re either not used in national elections, or if they are they precipitate a runoff rather than simply using the ranked choices.
The argument that it’s constitutional rests on the idea that everyone has a chance to rank their choices. But that’s an absurdity I think, because in practical terms the only second-rank votes that ever would matter are the ones marked by people who have chosen third- or fourth-party as their first choice. Why should they get 2 chances to vote? If they choose to throw their votes away in order to make a third-party statement, that’s their choice.
I have much less objection to a situation where the rule is that if one person doesn’t get over 50% of the vote there’s a runoff.
I think the theory of the “ranked choices” is that the people who voted Dem or GOP the first time would do the same in the runoff (eg, their “second vote choice” is the same as their “first vote”, and the third/fourth/write-ins would have to vote for one of the top two anyway, so they might as well save time and money and do it all in the same election.
The results would not differ significantly in the two systems, unless some “surprise” happened between the elections.
AesopFan:
No one knows that. If it was close (and it was), a significant number could change their minds in a runoff, or choose not to vote, or some people who didn’t vote could choose to vote.
If it’s one person, one vote, in an election, then no one should get two votes.
This is called “ranked-choice voting”, which was pushed through in a referendum in 2016. The reformers claim that this procedure will lead to the fairest results, since the eventual winner be able to claim majority support. (I don’t think this experiment will end well, as it likely violates the Maine Constitution, and was motivated by animus against Paul LePage, who won the governorship twice in 2010 and 2014, but only with a plurality each time.)
The utility of it is that it avoids perverse results in multi-party contests. It’s less cumbersome and arbitrary than making use of run-off elections. Ordinal balloting is also used in Australia and Ireland with a tabulation method called the ‘Hare system’, which resembles proportional representation.
Seems inherently unfair.
Everyone gets one ballot paper. The effect of your choice is circumstantially contingent. As it is when you have more than two candidates in a contest. (If you have just two candidates, there’s no effective distinction between ranked choice and first-past-the-post).
As for ranked-choice voting, one progressive candidate in Maine made the specific point in his television ads that this new system had the advantage of two votes: he could be ranked first on the ballot, while the more conventional liberal politician could be ranked second. That way he said, you could “vote your dreams” but would still be guaranteed the end result of a liberal or Democrat politician in office.
I am very skeptical of this innovation, and I don’t think it will work out well.
Yankee:
The Maine candidate who said that must have relied on the idea that his supporters don’t get the math, because it only works that way if no single candidate receives 50% of the vote. If anyone receives 50% of the vote, the second-choice votes are ignored.
I have turned off the tv and am only streaming music (Those lush Jackie Gleason pieces from the 60’s, Byzantine chant and rock), and doing a lot of reading. I refuse to live in that state of ‘wound-up’. I have a bad temper for this kind of thing and can hang on to that anger.
neo on November 11, 2018 at 3:24 pm at 3:24 pm said:
AesopFan:
No one knows that.
* * *
Ah, well, that’s true of a lot of political theories.
I don’t know the state of the research on this subject, and, given how biased the academies are, wouldn’t trust a lot of it anyway, but the appeal of the process is captured here.
https://www.fairvote.org/rcv#rcvbenefits
That way he said, you could “vote your dreams” but would still be guaranteed the end result of a liberal or Democrat politician in office.
Your not voting your dreams. Your vote is deployed one way in a given contingency and another way in a different contingency. It’s still only one vote.
I think the utility is better understood in a primary contest, when you may be choosing between programmatic alternatives but are more commonly choosing between personal qualities.
Another way of looking at is to imagine a Canadian-style political convention. You have the first ballot, then the trailing candidate is eliminated and you have the 2d ballot (eliminating the trailing candidate thereafter) and so forth until you have a menu of surviving candidates and one has a majority. Each round of tabulation undertaken in the Condorcet method is like a round of balloting at a convention. The initial supporters of the leading candidates restate their support with each successive tabulation, while supporters of losing candidates transfer their support. It’s just that the decision on the direction of transfer is made ab initio rather than at the time of tabulation. No one gets any more votes than anyone else, it’s just that some support is transferred and some is not. However, each party has the same option and opportunity to transfer, it’s just that the supporters of the leading candidates do not have to avail themselves of the option.
In areas completely dominated by liberals, it allows for the emergence of 3d parties reflecting different shades of liberal opinion. Conservatives in that set up can make their contingent choices to advance the shade of liberal opinion they find less injurious to their interests. An alternative is to have Democratic primaries and then pro-forma general elections, which grants the minority viewpoint no voice at all.
Art Deco:
The supporters of the main parties’ candidates get the option of a second vote, but it’s a fake option, a meaningless option, because they have no one left to vote for. Just the same person they voted for in the first place.
Those who have chosen to vote for the other candidates (third-, fourth-, or fifth-party) don’t merely have a vote that “is deployed one way in a given contingency and another way in a different contingency” but is still only one vote. Instead, by voting for their main candidate (third- or fourth- or fifth-party) they get to deny the majority candidate his or her clean victory, the victory that person would ordinarily get as the person with the plurality of votes. So the third-party people can thwart the will of the majority. Once they do that, the third-party people get to vote again in a meaningful manner, for their second-choice candidate, because (unlike the other voters) they really do have a meaningful second-choice candidate.
I voted third party in the 2000 election. My reaction to Democrat shenanigans in the Florida recount was to subsequently vote straight party Republican whenever possible. Counties that Democrats controlled, and thus counties where Democrats designed the ballots, were counties where Democrats wanted to INTERPRET invalid ballots. Of course the INTERPRETATION would invariably favor Democrat candidates.
The Democrat attempt to interpret invalid ballots struck me as trying to change the rules in the middle of the game. If Democrat voters were confused by the ballots, and did something to render ballots invalid, that is the responsibility of the Democrats who designed the ballots. They should have tried out their ballots on some test group of prospective voters BEFORE the election.
Democrat attempts to invalidate military ballots also influenced my decision.
The supporters of the main parties’ candidates get the option of a second vote, but it’s a fake option, a meaningless option,
Again, it isn’t a second vote. There is only one vote. The vote has a contingent value. Eveyone’s vote has a contingent value. Some contingencies are more likely than others.
they get to deny the majority candidate his or her clean victory,
Your assumption here is that a strictly binary contest is the only fair contest. I don’t know why you’d make that assumption.
In a strictly binary contest, your vote advances one side or another. In a multiparty contest undertaken under first-past-the-post tabulation, the force of your vote is circumstantially contingent and your decision subject to dilemmas. The ranked-choice method resolves that particular dilemma.
Art Deco:
I obviously am well aware that it’s not literally a second vote, as in “vote once one day, vote again another day” or “fill out two ballots.”
But I am speaking in the practical sense. And it is in that sense that I think it is unfair. In the practical sense, votes in the US are binary in terms of parties, except in extremely rare occasions.
And I already explained it this way: “by voting for their main candidate (third- or fourth- or fifth-party) they get to deny the majority candidate his or her clean victory, the victory that person would ordinarily get as the person with the plurality of votes. So the third-party people can thwart the will of the majority. Once they do that, the third-party people get to vote again in a meaningful manner, for their second-choice candidate, because (unlike the other voters) they really do have a meaningful second-choice candidate.
Americans still think elections are won through citizens voting… heh.
They don’t ever pay attention to the long term strategy. Trum winning is enough for the REd team. They don’t get it. THe Blue team doesn’t get it either.