RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-bipartisan-schedule-for-presidential-primaries-south-carolina-nomination-process-election-race-voters-11670350936?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Democrats have proposed to make the South Carolina primary the first contest in their presidential nomination process, supplanting Iowa and New Hampshire. The problem is that they plan to do so using racial criteria, to “ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process,” as President Biden put it in a letter to the Democratic National Committee last week: “You cannot be the Democratic nominee and win a general election unless you have overwhelming support from voters of color.”

Since that isn’t true of the Republicans, they’re unlikely to use the same criteria or the same schedule. This would be a logistical problem, especially in states that allow independent or crossover voting, where voters can choose on Election Day in which primary to cast a ballot.

Democrats have a point that the process could benefit from some updating, but how about using a rules-based approach? The first primary could go to the state with the closest race in the previous presidential election. In 2024 that would be Georgia, where Mr. Biden won by 0.2% in 2020. Next could be Arizona, where Mr. Biden won by 0.3%, or North Carolina, where Donald Trump won by 1.3%.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/unpopular-biden-desperately-wants-democrats-primary-season-south-carolina

President Joe Biden just pulled a fast one on Pete Buttigieg.

And… on Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Gavin Newsom and other Democrat hopefuls who might (despite vows to the contrary) be planning to challenge Joe Biden in 2024. 

The president’s political gurus are trying to upend the party’s primary schedule – knocking out Iowa and New Hampshire as leaders of the selection process and moving South Carolina, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan earlier in the calendar. Those changes would seriously disadvantage those potential 2024 candidates and several others. 

But, the revised plan would – surprise! — make Joe Biden a shoo-in by prioritizing states with large Black populations. Democrats should beware: the boost to Biden and emphasis on African-American voters could backfire.

Joe Biden has been taking a victory lap recently, taking credit for his party’s unexpectedly strong showing in the midterm elections. But it is notable that the president personally had little involvement in those races; numerous candidates eschewed his participation, concerned that his low approval ratings might prove contagious.

Even now, Biden is a no-show in Georgia, where incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock is battling Republican Hershel Walker to retain his seat. Barack Obama is campaigning in Georgia, but not Biden.

Ignored midst the giddiness over the GOP’s poor showing in the midterms is that Biden remains deeply unpopular. Real Clear Politics puts the president’s average approval rating at 41%; a recent Quinnipiac poll shows his favorability at 36%. 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2022/12/06/georgia-senate-runoff-n2616800

After neither incumbent Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock nor Trump-endorsed GOP challenger Herschel Walker received more than 50 percent of the vote on Election Day in November, the two faced off on Tuesday in a runoff election that saw Sen. Warnock prevail in his reelection bid according in a call that came less than three hours after the polls closed.

Throughout the night as votes were tallied, the lead see-sawed between the two candidates, with Walker leading for a while as day-of votes began to be counted and Warnock taking the lead back as counties around Atlanta reported more votes. 

Despite Walker’s performance among day-of voters, Warnock’s advantage among early and absentee voters kept the incumbent Democrat ahead of his GOP challenger even as turnout in Georgia’s runoff beat records in previous cycles — another repudiation of claims that Georgia’s election integrity law would disenfranchise voters and reduce participation in Peach State elections. 

Still, the outcome looks to be closer than the three percent margin that many analysts and pundits predicted in the Georgia runoff, meaning that Warnock did not run away with his reelection bid and was held closer than expected by Walker’s campaign, due in no small part to runoff campaign assistance from Gov. Brian Kemp following his reelection in November.

At the time Decision Desk HQ called the race, Warnock had 50.46 percent of the votes to Walker’s 49.54 percent with 83 percent of the estimated votes counted. As expected, Warnock led in the early vote by a not-insignificant margin, underscoring calls by some Republicans, contrary to what former President Donald Trump has said, for the GOP to ramp up its early voting efforts to prevent Democrats from running up leads like the one seen in Georgia Tuesday night. 

But for now at least, the 2022 midterm election cycle is finally, officially over — ending again in Georgia with a Senate runoff — the result of which puts the balance of power in the U.S. Senate at 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/12/how-to-win-elections-without-getting-most-votes/

In immigration law tribunals around the Anglosphere, a rule seems to have emerged that simplifies the business of guesstimating how cases involving either the entry or deportation of migrants or refugees will eventually be decided (even after many an appeal has been turned down): It ain’t over till the migrant wins.

Thus terrorists, rapists and career criminals are permitted to stay in once-peaceful countries because their right to a family life will be denied if their families won’t return to their country of origin along with them. (And amazingly enough, they won’t.) Even when governments strain to reject or deport them—and even have planes waiting on the tarmac to whisk them off to Rwanda or Nigeria—the labyrinthine coils of migration and “human rights” law somehow encircle their nervous systems and render them helpless before some hyper-liberal judge or NGO recognised by the United Nations as a key player in “international civil society”.

And then, eventually, the appeals process exhausts the government, and the migrant wins.

Looking at the surprise results in the US mid-term elections, we may be able to discern in their long, winding and uncompleted processes the faint shimmering mirage-like image of a similar rule. Before we get to that image, however, what was the surprise in the results?

As it looks, less than one week since election day, there were two surprises. The first was that despite innumerable advantages in policy and various signs and portents in the opinion polls and the heavens, the expected “red wave” of Republican victories never occurred.

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

This is a “brief history” because the complete history of Democrat electoral malfeasance reaching back to Tammany Hall and Tweed would require four volumes or more. (I’m running into the same problem with a new book I’m outlining analyzing the Democrats as a criminal organization, much like the Mafia or the Camorra.)

So a brief history it is, limited to the past thirty years or so. Believe you me, there’s no lack of cases even in that short span.

The Dinkins Magic Voting Machines

Just days before voting in the 1993 David Dinkins/Rudolf Giuliani election, the New York Times reported that a number of voting machines had been found in a closed Manhattan school. All the machines were loaded with votes for Democrat incumbent David Dinkins.

Voting proceeded without the help of those machines, and of course Rudy was elected. But that was the end of it. As far as I’ve been able to learn, there was no investigation, no inquiries, or, for that matter, any further reportage on it. A Democrat attempt to steal the NYC mayoral election was flushed down the memory hole.

An Inconvenient Decision

We all know the absurdist story of the 2000 presidential election. But it’s often overlooked that Al Gore was attempting an outright steal of a presidential election, a bold move not to be repeated until 2020 – and he attempted it with the open assistance of the judiciary.

The leftist version is well known, since it’s all we ever hear – George W. Bush was only ahead by 900 votes in Florida when Gore, in the pure interests of fairness, requested a simple recount, at which point the right-wing extremist Supreme Court leapt in and handed the victory to Bush by fiat. (This, by the way, has served as an excuse for all electoral cheating since that point – “the GOP started it in 2000… We have to cheat, to protect democracy.” As to what excuses the myriad cases of cheating that occurred beforehand… well, don’t ask me. I dunno.)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19180/election-issues

One of the beautiful things about a democratic republic is you agree on the rules in advance. That way, everybody buys into the outcome. It’s like a football game. If you were to change the rules in the middle of the game, first half Super Bowl for example, the Los Angeles Rams needed 10 yards for a first down, but in the second half, it went up to 15. That’s what happened in the 2020 election, is the rules changed in the middle of the game.

The second thing that happened, and this is the most important. Philanthropy, primarily through the Center for Technology and Civic Life, started pouring money through educational 501(c)3s. The Mark Zuckerberg‑funded C3s poured money into state and local election offices. They would give the state and election office money and say, You now need to enact these policies. In the old days, giving a government official money and telling them what to do with it was called a bribe, right? It was. It was a bribe. If I were to give money to a government official and say, you need to now do this, I would be arrested. But that is what happened all over the country to the tune of almost $600 million, according to 990 filings.

Let me show you Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, the original election budget was $9 million for the city office, according to records from the city council’s budget. Center for Technology and Civic Life gift to Philadelphia totaled $12.3 million, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer article on 8/26/20. They massively increased the Philadelphia budget; what did they do with the money?

These newly hired activists went door‑to‑door handing out ballots. Strangely, the ballots had what is called “undervoting” in it. They would vote for president — and nothing down below. Because after all, there was only one important election to the crowd that was funding all of this. The city employee could not wait around on the front porch to get all those dog catcher and judge races filled in. He would go door to door to door. Also in Philadelphia, they bought radio advertisement. They did a marketing campaign.

[A] county election official… was being told by the government, by the state of Virginia Election Board, “Allow ballots to come in after the election with no postmarks.” Think about that. Allow ballots to come in the mail late with no postmarks.

What happened was a full attack on the rule of law. Philanthropy was funding this just as it had with the “Zuckbucks.” They were rolling over state procedures to allow ballots to be counted that under the law would not be counted.

Think of the consent of the governed. One of the reasons we agree to election rules in advance is so the loser buys into the result, right? That is why you do not change the rules in the middle of the game. That is why you do not have a billion dollars flood the zone with biased spending by election offices.

There’s dark money, and there’s darker dark money. What has been happening is, all of these litigation shops such as the New York University Brennan Center, League of Women Voters — many people are not non‑biased — all of these litigation shops are being fueled by dark money.

We do not know where Marc Elias is getting his donations. He will not say. He does not have to. He has 60 lawyers — 60. Do some payroll calculations here. These are not fee-cases that can fuel this. You can look at the disclosures from the party apparatus to Elias. It does not add up to the accounting. Somewhere, someone is funding this.

What Elias is doing is attacking every state election law that is designed to fix what happened in 2020. Every state is under attack. We just filed to be intervenor‑defendants to help Texas, and Georgia, and wherever he goes, but we have only five lawyers. There aren’t other groups like us. They have a huge, gigantic army.

My concern is in 2024, not only will 2020 be repeated, but it will get even worse.

President Biden recently proposed $10 billion of your tax dollars, federal money, to flood the zone in elections for structural transformation, turning federal agencies, for example, into turn‑out machines, turning the Justice Department into an even more weaponized tool to help one side and not the other.

What I want to leave you with, is that many have developed this massively well‑funded, philanthropic architecture, of much of which we do not know the funding sources. Are they sovereign? Are they Kellogg’s Foundation? Do we even know? Are they Russian? Are they Chinese?

Election operatives have developed this architecture that changes how we run elections. Child voting, foreigners voting, early voting, mail voting.

Mail voting, by the way, is the worst form of voting there is. Let me mention a few mail voting things….We found at the Public Interest Legal Foundation that 158,000 ballots, –158,000 mail ballots in the 2020 election — came in late and were rejected. 158,000 people lost their vote….We also found that 15 million ballots are unaccounted for. What that means is the government election office mailed out a ballot, and it never came back. Mailed it out. We don’t know what happened. 15 million.

Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were where the Zuckbucks money was used most effectively and not been banned, and the governor would veto any legislative change. I’m afraid it’s going to happen again in those states. Those three are the places that worked, where Zuckerberg made the difference in Philadelphia and surrounding suburbs, Detroit, Madison, or Milwaukee. I’m telling you guys the reason Trump lost those states was this private spending in those urban centers through philanthropic money.

There is an effort to disbar all the lawyers. Have you guys seen project 65? Talk about architecture…. Project 65 is another “left‑wing” philanthropic effort. They have no shortage of money. Project 65 was announced a month ago. They’re going to go after the law licenses of any lawyers who do anything after the election, to try to have them disbarred.

Their explicit purpose, they say this, is to shrink the talent pool of election lawyers like me to shrink the talent pool of election lawyers, so the next time we don’t have soldiers who can go to court. That is literally what they say their purpose is.

Some of you may have heard that first New York City and now Washington D.C. passed a law allowing non-citizens to vote in city elections.

When I tell people in the real world about this, they don’t understand what I mean at first because it sounds so outlandish because Americans are supposed to be electing American leaders — not people from the Dominican Republic, or Chinese nationals, and so forth.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/23/maricopa-county-made-arizonas-elections-even-more-of-a-disaster-than-people-realize/

‘This was a horrible thing to experience. Poll workers conveyed a shocking lack of competence — it actually looked like willful incompetence,’ a Maricopa poll observer said.

After it trained upwards of 50,000 poll watchers, poll workers, and other roles for ongoing citizen engagement in the election process over the year leading up to the 2022 midterms, the Election Integrity Network sent out a survey to its on-the-ground volunteers following Election Day to gauge how things went.

The responses from election workers in key battleground districts and states around the country showed a mostly calm election cycle compared to 2020, with one massive and overwhelming exception. In Maricopa County, Arizona, election workers were appalled and aghast at how things had been run there.

“As soon as we sent the survey out, we were flooded with responses showing that they had no confidence in how the election had been run there,” Executive Director of the Election Integrity Network Marshall Yates told The Federalist.

According to Yates, unlike the rest of the country, where survey respondents espoused general confidence in their respective elections, the responses from Arizona were overwhelming, with Maricopa poll watchers and poll workers saying they had “zero” confidence in the election.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/11/20/finally-arizona-attorney-general-launches-inquiry-into-maricopa-county-election-day-fiasco-n1647357

Good news for everyone as apoplectic as I am that no one ever does anything about the third-world-level incompetence (and perhaps worse) plaguing the Maricopa County elections: the Arizona attorney general’s office (AGO) is conducting an inquiry into the disastrous administration of the 2022 midterm election.

On Saturday, Arizona Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright informed Thomas Liddy, the Civil Division Chief at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, that the AGO wanted some answers.

In an email she sent to Liddy regarding “Maricopa County’s Administration of the 2022 General Election,” Wright wrote:

The Elections Integrity Unit (“Unit”) of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office (“AGO”) has received hundreds of complaints since Election Day pertaining to issues related to the administration of the 2022 General Election in Maricopa County. These complaints go beyond pure speculation, but include first-hand witness accounts that raise concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law. Furthermore, statements made by both Chairman Gates and Recorder Richer, along with information Maricopa County released through official modes of communication appear to confirm potential statutory violations of title 16.

Pursuant to the AGO’s authority under A.R.S. § 16-1021, the Unit hereby requests Maricopa formally respond to and address the following concerns that have been raised. …

The letter went on to demand answers about three major issues that compromised the ability of some Arizonans to exercise their right to vote and for their vote to be counted, as well as the county’s responsibility to ensure the integrity of the election:

Election Day Ballot-on-Demand Printer Configuration Settings;
Election Day “Check-out” Procedures; and
Ballots Deposited in Door 3 and Statutorily Required Election Board Close Out Duties.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/house-election-results-new-york-vote-show-ego-prevailed-party-rcna57328

It will go down as one of the bitter ironies of the 2022 midterm campaign: One of the few states that actually faced a “red wave” of Republican victories was deep-blue New York.

Democrats could have prevailed had their state party — which was busy deflecting progressive criticism of their conduct — marshaled better infrastructure and financial support for swing-district candidates.

To sour matters further, Democratic losses in the Empire State appear to be pivotal in the narrow majority in the House of Representatives that Republicans are likely to have starting next year. The icing on this rotten cake is that New York Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.

On a night of many disappointments, the party’s most egregious own goal was the one scored for Republicans by no one less than the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman himself, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney. Maloney, whose DCCC role is to elect as many Democrats to the House as possible, not only presided over the loss of four previously Democratic New York districts, but failed to win his own race after putting his ego above the warnings of party officials and activists.

Maloney isn’t the only one to blame for Democrats’ Big Apple bludgeoning, however. The Democratic legislators who control the statehouse fumbled the ball when they were given the task of drawing up new congressional districts to reflect the results of the 2020 census. Their new congressional maps failed to satisfy the courts that they didn’t violate the state constitution’s bar on partisan gerrymandering, leading to the appointment of a nonpartisan election expert as a special master to draw new maps that cut deeply into Democrats’ previously safe districts. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-could-john-fetterman-have-won/

It’s hardly even believable: the stuttering, sputtering John Fetterman, a stroke victim who only rarely manages to utter a complete sentence, coasted to victory in the Pennsylvania Senate race. Like Joe Biden, Fetterman is so clearly unfit for his new job that no sane person could possibly think otherwise; it boggles the mind to think that any Pennsylvania voter could have seen any of Fetterman’s incoherent ramblings over the last few weeks, both in his debate with Dr. Mehmet Oz and in his campaign rallies, and thought, “That’s the man I want representing Pennsylvania in the Senate.” But Fetterman will show up in the Senate in January — if someone can guide him to where it is — and all the explanations of why this ridiculous charade is set to happen are bad in different ways.

The immediate possibility, of course, is that Fetterman’s victory is due to chicanery at the ballot box. Over at Townhall, Mia Cathell reported Wednesday that “in an undercover video filmed by Project Veritas Action (PVA) journalists at a Philadelphia polling location, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe alleges that the investigative group’s journalists were told whom to vote for mere feet outside of one of the city’s polling places. Two of the interactions were captured on camera.” The person telling voters how to vote was, of course, a Democrat Party operative. O’Keefe explains, “This is referred to as electioneering.” It’s also illegal.

This is striking, but it isn’t evidence of large-scale ballot box tampering. In a clear sign that they suspected they would have to cheat in order to win, the Fetterman camp filed suit the other day to have ballots counted even if they were marked with the wrong date. But as it turns out, they didn’t even need the tainted ballots to put their man over the top. So what does explain the victory of a candidate who is without any doubt the least competent and capable individual ever to stand as a candidate for the United States Senate?