RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/26/u-s-voters-overwhelmingly-want-their-old-election-system-back-ii-tipp-poll/

As 2022 nears an end, another election season has also come to a close. Time for second thoughts, and ideas about what to do to fix an election system that many Americans believe is irretrievably broken. As it turns out, voters have some very strong opinions about that very topic, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

The recent midterm elections were once again marked by claims of voter fraud and possible ballot manipulation behind the scenes by partisan actors, including even election officials. So we asked Americans of all political stripes and demographic backgrounds what rules and practices would they support to make our electoral system more fair?

More specifically, in our online I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from Dec. 7-9, we asked 1,094 registered voters to select among three possible reforms or rule changes: “Requiring voters to show a photo I.D. to vote,” “Stricter mail-in voting,” and “Banning ballot harvesting.”

The answers showed an overwhelming sentiment in favor of change.

But by far the strongest response was for “Requiring voters to show a photo I.D. to vote.” It garnered 83% support from registered voters, with 60% saying they would support it “strongly” and 22% saying they would support it “somewhat.” Just 12% said they would not support a move, with just 6% saying they would oppose it “strongly,” about the same as those who said they would oppose it somewhat (7%).

The numbers may not add to 100% due to rounding. But the point is clear. Americans are hungry to have their elections once again based on solid identification of the voters with official I.D.s.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/dec/26/2022-year-of-victories-for-election-integrity/

The 2022 elections are over, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that they largely followed the rule of law. Compared with the COVID-19-infected 2020 elections, 2022 was a breeze. Americans woke up to the vulnerabilities in election administration and sought improvements.

After 2020, smart states passed reforms to strengthen election security. Court victories also bolstered the rule of law in elections.

A big win for the rule of law occurred in Delaware. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, blocked the Department of Elections from enforcing mail voting and same-day voter registration.

Mail-in voting and same-day registration conflicted with the Delaware Constitution. The state constitution allows absentee voting only in certain enumerated circumstances, such as being ill. The Delaware Constitution also provides reasonable registration procedures, not walk-up no-verification voting on Election Day.

In legislative debate, Delaware Speaker of the House Peter Schwartzkopf quipped, “I don’t know whether [the law’s] constitutional or not constitutional, and neither do you guys or anybody else in here.” No kidding.

He went further: “The best way to get this thing done is to hear this bill, move forward, and let a challenge go to the courts and let them decide it.”

Decide they did.

Days before ballots were mailed, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that both laws were unconstitutional. This ruling effectively stopped a lawless election in Delaware.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/12/17/the-populist-who-gets-things-done/

Ron DeSantis is the man of the moment in American politics. The Republican governor of Florida first gained a national profile in 2020 for defying Covid lockdown orthodoxy and later for his battles against woke. His smashing re-election victory in the Midterms this November – defeating his Democratic opponent by almost 20 percentage points – has propelled DeSantis to new heights. According to a recent poll, Republicans now prefer DeSantis over Trump to be the party’s presidential candidate in 2024 by a huge 23-point margin. The New York Post has declared him ‘DeFuture’. And he already leads Biden in one early election survey.

It is the breadth of DeSantis’s victory in November that has most excited Republicans. He turned a state that was recently considered ‘purple’ – that is, a toss-up between the Democrats and Republicans – into a deeply red state. He ‘rewrote the political map’, as he himself has put it, winning cities and suburbs across Florida, and support from a variety of demographic groups. His pick-ups included the formerly Democratic bastion of Miami-Dade County, which is 70 per cent Hispanic. The voters of Florida had a close-up view of DeSantis for four years and obviously liked what they saw.

In comparison to Trump, DeSantis just looks more dynamic. Virtually every one of Trump’s handpicked candidates was defeated in the Midterms, making Trump a big reason why a much-anticipated ‘red wave’ did not materialise. Trump also faces potential criminal charges for the ‘January 6’ attack on the Capitol and for the retention of confidential documents at his Florida home. The 76-year-old former president announced his candidacy for the 2024 election last month with a snoozer of a speech (some dubbed it ‘low energy’, referencing Trump’s jibe about Jeb Bush in 2016). His first post-announcement meeting was with an anti-Semitic celebrity (Kanye West) and an anti-Semitic nobody (Nick Fuentes).

DeSantis clearly gets under Trump’s skin. Trump’s nickname for him, ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’, is weak, given that he’s not remotely sanctimonious – another sign that Trump has lost his touch. In the past few weeks, Trump has launched unprovoked rants against DeSantis and has sulked about the Florida governor’s supposed disloyalty. In response, DeSantis has kept studiously quiet, which has only driven Trump more nuts.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-rise-of-the-desantis-democrats?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

MIAMI—It’s almost 11 p.m. on a recent Friday night at ONE Gentlemens Club, and it’s dead except for the girls in their thongs, sitting on pleather couches, waiting for someone to give a lap dance to. No one can talk to anyone else. It’s too loud for that, what with the electronic drum, the incessant rapping. The rap is supposed to inspire twerking—and tens. Tonight, no one’s twerking. 

Tory Williams is alone at the bar in fishnets and boots. She should be mixing drinks. 

“Did you vote in the recent election?” I write in my notebook, then pass it to her.

She nods. When I ask who she voted for, a grin appears. “DUH-SAN-TIS,” she mouths. 

“Why DeSantis?” I shout. Williams is a black woman who looks to be pushing forty. She has a fiancé and, after two slow years, a job. It was her brother, she says, who made her rethink her politics. 

Finally, she shouts back, over the bar, through the din: “Money.”

Williams is one of the DeSantis Democrats: Florida voters who, until recently, identified as Democrats but in November opted to reelect Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis—he who resisted the Covid lockdowns, tangled with Disney, and governed with a record budget surplus—in a landslide. 

It’s unclear how many DeSantis Democrats there are: DeSantis’ vote count jumped from roughly 4 million in 2018 to 4.6 million in 2022. Lots of those voters are presumably independents or Republicans who didn’t vote last time. 

But some are disaffected Democrats alienated from the party they once belonged to. That’s evident from the longtime Democratic strongholds that DeSantis flipped, including Hillsborough, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, where DeSantis skyrocketed from a 21-point loss in 2018 to an 11-point win in 2022—a net gain of more than 30 percentage points. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/raphael-warnock-election-denier-georgia-senate-runoff-stolen-free-fair-abrams-integrity-jim-crow-turnout-11671353607?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

I have to spend a lot of time shooting down false claims about our elections in Georgia. Usually they come from losers. But sometimes even victorious candidates make false claims about our elections.

After the 2018 and 2020 elections, Georgia had its fill of false claims from losing candidates that our elections aren’t free and fair. For Donald Trump and his supporters, it was tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots that were supposedly cast but somehow never turned up. For Stacey Abrams and hers, it was tens of thousands of voters who were suppressed, not one of whom came forward during her three-year “landmark” lawsuit.

Georgia’s statewide officials—Gov. Brian Kemp, Attorney General Chris Carr and I—stood by Georgia’s elections in 2018 and 2020, defeating the false claims of failed candidates. Last month Georgia returned us to the Gold Dome with commanding margins, whereas statewide Democratic candidates who endorsed or supported Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” conspiracy theories came up short in dramatic fashion. Sen. Raphael Warnock made it to a runoff, which he won by the smallest margin of any statewide race.

https://thespectator.com/topic/why-don-should-make-way-for-ron-desantis/?utm_source=Morning+Shot&utm_campaign=

When I arrived in Washington, DC in 2006 to learn about US politics, someone told me that in America, there are two main parties: the party of power and the party of stupid. The latter denoted, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Republican Party. And so it continues to prove. The failure of the much-hyped red wave to materialize in the 2022 midterms shows that the GOP has not lost its knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Consider: a day before the election, Biden’s approval rating was 39 percent. This was a reflection of his poor performance (inflation, gas prices and immigration are just a few of the issues on which his administration has shown stunning incompetence). Concerned that the electorate was comparing the moment to the period of prosperity under Donald Trump, Democrats were fearful of what Election Day would bring, while Republicans must have felt giddy in anticipation, like children on Christmas Eve.

Now, the roles are reversed. The Democrats have held the Senate and, while they’ve lost the House, Republican control is by a far narrower margin than they had anticipated. Biden is gloating, and Republicans are in shock.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/electionfraud_corruption_is_deeper_than_anyone_can_imagine.html

Multiple polls conclude that upwards of 70 percent of Americans think our elections are filled with fraud.  But we’re learning it’s deeper and more organized than just a few thousand mules dropping fake ballots into election boxes.

The corruption involves both political parties.  Big Tech manipulates search engine results, and takes down “dangerous” websites.  With Elon Musk’s revelations, we now see that our own FBI is working actively with Twitter to censor conservatives and silence dissenting speech.  It’s next to certain that Twitter wasn’t the only social media giant the FBI was giving orders to.  And the mainstream media are all in on ridiculing, dismissing, or attacking people willing to speak out.

Anyone who floats the idea that the Republican red wave disappeared because of poor GOP tactics, or inadequate candidates, is either stupid or part of this conspiracy.  In fact, it’s an excellent “RINO detector”!

Any “conservative” news organization that is not focusing 100 percent on the corruption that has been unearthed in Maricopa County is complicit.

The left and their RINO allies, along with who-knows-how-many other corporate and foreign actors, have set up the most complicated electoral fraud system in history.  Every step of the voting process — from who is allowed to vote, how they vote, how the votes are tallied, to how the results are reported — is compromised.  They are so far into their corruption that being exposed is not an option.  They will do literally anything to avoid being caught.

A good place to start is with the voter rolls.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/dec/11/jim-crow-20-democrats-redouble-voter-suppression-c/

Georgians broke voter turnout records this year in the primary and general elections, but Democrats have no intention of abandoning the “Jim Crow 2.0” narrative.

The state set records in midterm elections for early voting, absentee voting and total turnout. More Georgia votes were cast in the Senate runoff than in the general election, in the January 2021 Senate runoff or on Election Day 2020.

The state also set three single-day records for early voting.

Even the victory of Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock over Republican Herschel Walker in the runoff did not stop Democratic Party leaders from blasting Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021 as a voter suppression tool.

The narrative prompted eye-rolls from conservatives.

“I take it to mean there is no set of facts that will ever, ever be able to dissuade progressive politicians like President Biden, like Rafael Warnock, like Stacey Abrams from their voter suppression argument,” said Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project. “It’s a narrative that has absolutely no support in the facts.”

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, insisted that Mr. Warnock won in spite of the state’s election law, which tightened pandemic-era voting procedures while expanding early voting.

“What happened in Georgia, despite the efforts of the Republican legislature to make it harder to vote, our people voted. People voted. Georgians voted,” Mr. Schumer said at a post-election press conference. “They said we’re not going to let these barriers stand in our way even if we have to wait in line in the rain.”

Mr. Warnock, who previously called the election law “Jim Crow in new clothes,” warned that some people “would look at the outcome of this race and say that there is no voter suppression in Georgia.”

“Let me be clear: Just because people endured long lines that wrapped around buildings, some blocks long, just because they endured the rain and the cold and all kinds of tricks in order to vote doesn’t mean that voter suppression does not exist,” Mr. Warnock said after his win. “It simply means that you the people have decided that your voices will not be silenced.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/herschel-walker-wrote-donald-trump-political-obituary

Herschel Walker, the Heisman Trophy winner who led the Georgia Bulldogs to a national championship in 1982, just wrote Donald Trump’s political obituary. 

Walker lost his bid to replace Georgia’s incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock, handing Democrats in that chamber a critical majority. A majority which will enable Joe Biden to appoint more judges, enact more legislation and put in place more appointees willing and able to carry out his far-left agenda. Walker was endorsed by former President Trump. 

Having suffered the rare humiliation of failing to win a second term in the Oval Office, and having cost his party a majority in the senate – three times – it is time for Donald Trump to step away from politics. It is the right thing to do for his party, for the country, and for himself. 

Mr. Trump will not win another election. His most glaring political strength today is his ability to energize Democrats, causing not only historic turnout but attracting gushers of campaign cash – for the opposition.

It is notable that Trump-backed candidates all came up short in fund-raising. The Georgia senate race cost more than $400 million. As of mid-November, Democrat Raphael Warnock had outspent Republican Herschel Walker $126 million to $48.5 million.