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ELECTIONS

It’s fake news that the Maricopa audit proves Biden won By Andrea Widburg

/www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/its_fake_news_that_the_maricopa_audit_proves_biden_won.html

UPDATE: The Cyber Ninjas document is not final. I’ve clarified this post to reflect that fact.

Democrats are strutting because the final Cyber Ninjas audit in Arizona showed that “[t]he auditor’s final hand count—which quadruple-checked every single one of the 2.1 million ballots—matches Maricopa County’s official machine count.” Big whoop. For those complaining about irregularities in the 2020 election, the question was never about miscounting. Instead, it was about the claim that an inordinate number of the ballots in the Joe Biden pile didn’t come from real people. Instead, they were alleged to have been faked—and the audit confirms almost 60,000 wrongfully counted ballots that could easily switch the Arizona Electoral College vote from Biden to Trump. No wonder Cyber Ninjas says the Arizona result should not have been certified.

There are two documents at issue here, one of which is a purported final draft of the executive summary from Cyber Ninjas, which I’ll get to in a moment, and the other of which is a cover letter that Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate President, sent to Mark Brnovich, the Arizona Attorney General. I quoted above from Fann’s cover letter, which offers the meaningless conclusion that a hand count matched the machine count. That’s what the MSM (including Fox, which you may remember was the first to call Arizona for Biden) is crowing about.

However, the same letter, in a small bow to honesty, also points out systemic problems with election security. The five bullet-points can be summarized this way:

absentee ballots were inadequately verified,
voter rolls do not match the ballots, as well as showing duplicate and dead people,
amateurs oversaw election technology and machinery they didn’t understand and misused,
private companies had the passwords to the vote-counting machines, and
election officials deleted material making it impossible to do a truly accurate audit (or, in legal terms, they deliberately spoliated evidence, which I’m guessing might be illegal under statutory requirements that all voting data must be preserved for 22 months after an election).

What should we make of the 2020 election audit in Arizona? By Bill Weckesser

http://://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/what_should_we_make_of_the_2020_election_audit_in_arizona.html

Of course, President Trump had to lose.  He was an existential threat to the entire liberal project.  In retrospect, Trump’s four years set our betters on their ears.

Trump’s trade and immigration policies didn’t result in a global economic meltdown — as the experts on both sides of the aisle forecast.  Instead, they helped reduce American unemployed, especially among minorities, to record levels.

Trump’s energy policies didn’t usher in an environmental Armageddon.  Instead of the Green New Deal, Trump’s energy deal contributed to lower energy costs and, thus, higher disposable income for our country’s lowest earners, motivating the Saudis to consider selling Saudi Aramco, the key source of the kingdom’s wealth.

Trump’s foreign policy didn’t bring war.  Instead, North Korea realized it had options.  Terrorists were terrified.  And, perhaps most unbelievable, peace broke out in the Middle East.

Our betters, the establishment, the leaders in both parties have told us for decades that none of this was possible.  To even a casual observer, it must have looked as though the wrong folks had been in charge.  So Trump had to be dispatched.

That brings us to the Maricopa County election audit.  Clearly, thousands of illegal votes were counted correctly.  The “leaked” lead story — GOP audit shows Biden wins.  The establishment, or uniparty, looks to have had its hands all over the presentation of the data.  This “leak” on Citizen Free Press shows at least 42,727 votes (categories 1–3) that look traceable to mail-in fraud.

This meshes nicely with Time Magazine’s admission that there had been a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” between business and labor — code for Republicans and Democrats.

Election Officials Don’t Know What Happened to 15 Million Mail Ballots in 2020 Election Real data — from a federal agency. J. Christian Adams

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/election-officials-dont-know-what-happened-15-j-christian-adams/

As any casual observer could tell, the 2020 election was a mess. Now we have real data—from a federal agency, no less—that proves it.

Based on data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an analysis by the Public Interest Legal Foundation shows almost 15 million mail ballots effectively disappeared after election officials gave them to the U.S. Postal Service to deliver to voters.  

Gone, like the Bermuda Triangle of the election.

Some of the mail ballots may have ended up on the floors of apartment complexes. Some were sent to deceased registrants. Some went to addresses where the registrant no longer lives. Some may have gone to vacant lots and businesses. Some, having never been requested by the voter, were never returned.

In 2020, we put the election in the hands of the people who regularly deliver you your neighbor’s mail.

The data also shows that an additional 1.1 million ballots were sent to the wrong addresses in 2020 – the U.S. Postal Service saying they were “undeliverable.” Think on that. One million ballots went to the wrong house or apartment.

This report proves that mass voting by mail leads to chaos, is ripe with opportunities to commit fraud, and disenfranchises voters.

What was the effect on the election outcome?  That depends on other unknowns.  What we do know is that massive numbers of lost ballots present enormous potential for abuse.  The fact of untracked, nearly 15 million ballots triggers an unavoidable cascade of serious, fundamental, deeply troubling questions. 

Such as, how many of those were voted by unintended recipients?  This can’t be known.  Another obvious question is, how many people failed to vote because their ballots went astray?  This too can’t be known.  Another question is why are the voter rolls so inaccurate that wrong addresses are so common? 

Places like Pennsylvania had to be sued to be forced into correcting them.  Another question is why do so many election officials not care?  

To put that 15 million figure in perspective, consider this in Pennsylvania 440,000 mail ballots went missing or were undeliverable in the 2020 election. President Biden won the state by only 81,000 votes.

California Governor Newsom Survives Recall Election By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-governor-newsom-survives-recall-election/

California voters overwhelmingly chose to keep Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom in office in a recall election on Tuesday.

Newsom was spared after a projection by the Associated Press showed that a majority of voters opted against recalling him.

With 61 percent of the estimated vote in, early returns showed that 5.3 million voters supported keeping Newsom in office, while 2.5 million Californians voted in favor of his removal.

In remarks Tuesday evening at the California Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, Newsom said it “appears we are enjoying an overwhelmingly ‘no’ vote here tonight.”

“But no is not the only thing that was expressed tonight,” Newsom said. “I want to focus on what we said yes to as a state. We said yes to science, we said yes to vaccines, we said yes to ending this pandemic, we said yes to people’s right to vote without fear of fake fraud or voter suppression.”

“I am humbled and grateful to the millions, and millions of Californians who exercised their fundamental right to vote, and express themselves so overwhelmingly by rejecting the division,” Newsom went on to add.

Independent Canvassing Effort in Maricopa County, AZ Finds 34 Percent of Votes Missing or Lost By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/08/independent-canvassing-effort-in-maricopa-county-az-finds-34-percent-of-votes-missing-or-lost/

A grassroots canvass of Maricopa County voters in the 2020 election found that over 34 percent of those canvassed said they voted even though the county didn’t have a record of their vote.

Liz Harris, the Arizona resident who organized the independent canvass talked to Steve Bannon about her Voter Integrity Project findings on the Wednesday morning edition of the “War Room.”

Harris told Bannon that although they were run out of one Democrat neighborhood, the reactions to the effort was overwhelmingly positive.

“Nine out of ten people actually thanked us for coming to their door,” she said.

Harris said the canvassers talked to people in over 11,000 homes, and got responses from 4,570.

“We actually went to the homes of the registered voters, and the results are amazing,” said Harris. Based on the results of the canvass, Harris estimated that were up over 173,000 lost votes and 96,000 “ghost votes” in the election in Maricopa County.

“An estimated 173,104 votes are missing or lost, as reported to our volunteers who went door to door verifying registration and voting information for thousands of residents. These are American citizens living in Maricopa County who cast a vote, primarily by mail, in the election and yet there is no record of their vote with the county and it was not counted in the reported vote totals for the election,”  the canvass report states.

“Additionally an estimated 96,389 mail-in votes were cast under the names of registered voters who were either unknown to the residents of the registration address or who were verified as having moved away prior to October 2020”, the report continues.

“The results in the report are from the last two months of canvassing,” Harris told Bannon. “Our questions, they were really simple.  What method did you use to vote. Did you receive extra ballots? What did you do with those extra ballots? How many registered voters are supposed to be here, and how many actually voted? Not once do we ask who the person voted for.”

Recall the California Ideology A careening Golden State is heading for a colossal train wreck. Voters will have to pick between the incompetent engineer or the private passenger rushing into the cab to get the engine back on track. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/08/recall-the-california-ideology/

California once was run by alternating conservatives and mostly centrist Democrats. 

True, paleo-liberal governors like Pat Brown greatly expanded the welfare state. But they also believed in pushing integration, building freeways, dams, aqueducts, and power plants, while preventing forest fires, directing the mentally ill into state hospitals, and ensuring the state enhanced the housing, timber, oil and gas, nuclear, and agricultural industries.  

So why and how would anyone deliberately destroy that heritage? 

Why allow California to have the highest aggregate basket of income, sales, property, and capital gains taxes in the nation, the highest gas and power prices in the continental United States, and nearly the worst schools and infrastructure, the largest populations of homeless, welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and, soon, criminals?

Remember that the left-wing of the Democratic Party became hyper-wealthy through globalization and the tech revolution. Coastal universities like Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley USC, and UCLA became global nexuses of millions who flocked to California to learn business, engineering, science, math, and the professions. 

University endowments were no longer measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars but in the many billions. Hollywood and professional sports now had a lucrative worldwide audience of billions. 

The market capitalization of Silicon Valley was to be measured in the trillions of dollars, as the world bought iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks to Google, tweet, and use Facebook. The result was the greatest concentration of wealth in such a small space in the history of civilization. 

Voter Fraud Is a Supreme Court Problem It is time for states to end this tyranny by reasserting their own rights. By Dan Gelernter

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/07/voter-fraud-is-a-supreme-court-problem/

As a few American Greatness writers, and many of its readers, have pointed out: If our votes don’t count, nothing else matters. Election fraud should be the top subject in our minds every single day.

Last week, a brilliant piece by Ted McCartney suggested we march on Washington, D.C.—peacefully, but in huge numbers—with just a single demand: A constitutional amendment that requires all voting to take place in-person, on Election Day, with voter ID, on paper ballots, and that the ballots be counted that same evening on live-streamed television under the watchful eyes of as many in-person observers as want to be there.

This is an excellent idea. But now we have to think about the other half of this problem: If election laws aren’t enforced, they are essentially nonexistent. 

How many of us remember the way Republicans on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers in Michigan refused to certify the election results because the numbers didn’t add up—but then the cameras turned off for a few minutes, and, when they came back on, the Republicans announced they’d changed their minds and had decided to certify the results anyway? 

In Georgia, drop boxes that had been receiving dozens or a hundred votes a day suddenly, over Columbus Day weekend, received thousands—but there is no camera footage of these particular drop box locations, so we can’t see what happened. Georgia law requires that all drop boxes have cameras. Any location with no camera footage—and there are several—broke the law. But the Georgia pols figured: Who cares? Who’s going to hold us to account? The Supreme Court?

We all remember the Supreme Court’s disgraceful and disgusting behavior following the 2020 elections. Before the election was certified, the justices didn’t want to interfere with an ongoing process. After the election was certified, they refused to hear the election fraud cases because they said it was now a moot point—the election was a fait accompli. This reasoning could have been parodied from the episode of “Yes, Prime Minister,” in which chief government bureaucrats explain the four stages of government intransigence:

1) We say nothing is going to happen

2) We say something might happen, but we should do nothing

3) We say maybe we should do something, but there’s nothing we can do

4) We say maybe we could have done something, but it’s too late now!

We live, or ought to be living, in a democratic republic in which the ultimate authority rests with the people. This should include ultimate authority over interpreting our own Constitution. Who, then, are the geniuses who decided that nine unelected bureaucrats get the ultimate say about whether any law we pass can actually be a law? Or whether any law actually gets enforced? The decision was made by those nine unelected bureaucrats themselves. The Constitution doesn’t grant the Supreme Court the power of judicial review—they just grabbed it. They stole it. And we said, “OK, sure. How much damage could it do?”

Larry Elder Is the School-Choice Champion California Needs, Former Dem Senate Leader Says By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/larry-elder-is-the-school-choice-champion-california-needs-former-dem-senate-leader-says/

Conservative radio host Larry Elder has emerged as the favorite among the Republicans challenging California governor Gavin Newsom in the upcoming recall election. The fire-breathing right-wing radio host is not just appealing to staunch conservatives, however, he’s also earned an unexpected endorsement from California’s former Democratic Senate leader, Gloria Romero.

A champion for school choice, Romero plans to abandon the Democratic ticket on September 14 in favor of a candidate she believes will be a champion for the impoverished black and Hispanic children who have been abandoned by the Newsom administration.

Hailing from South Central Los Angeles, Elder has walked the walk when it comes to advocating for education freedom, Romero said in an interview with National Review. Elder’s father, a janitor who earned a GED as an adult, instilled the wisdom of “hard work wins” in his sons, a credo that the Republican contender believes goes hand in hand with school choice.

“School choice benefits children of parents who preach that education and hard work are key to upward mobility,” he wrote in a July editorial defending the policy.

Sometimes called the “fourth branch of government,” the California teachers’ union has a monopoly on education that is holding students hostage, Romero claims. As to why school choice hasn’t made inroads in California, she blames “the spinelessness, the lack of a backbone, and fear” that Democratic elected officials have had in responding to this “800-pound gorilla in the room.”

Beholden to the massive public education bureaucracy, which accounts for nearly half of the state’s annual budget, Democratic lawmakers have historically squashed any attempts at school reform, preventing lower-income African-Americans and Hispanic children from securing a higher-quality education, Romero, who is Hispanic, asserted.

“You’re looking at a war chest that no other special interest in California can even command. It’s unparalleled. That’s where they get the money to smash down and frighten Democrats to shut up and stand down when it comes to education reform,” she said.

Romero and Elder have pointed to surveys showing tremendous support for school choice among African American and Latino parents. Yet their pleas are ignored by the Democratic Party, which colludes with the teachers’ union to avoid relinquishing their power.

CLINTON’S MIDAS KING-TERRY McAULIFFE- BY MARJORIE WILLIAMS (2000)

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2000/1/clintons-midas-king

You probably know,” says Terry McAuliffe, thumping the arms of his chair at the Oval Room, a restaurant two blocks north of the White House, “I come here a lot. This used to be George’s table.” He’s sitting in the see-and-be-seen chair, the one everyone has to pass on the way into the main dining room. He doesn’t have to spell out that he’s referring to George Stephanopoulos, former media favorite and adviser to President Clinton. “Yeah,” he says, in case you missed the point. “Old George is kind of out of favor now, and I’m in.”

So this is the first clue to how a man becomes what Vice President A1 Gore has called “the greatest fund-raiser in the history of the universe”: it’s not about subtlety. “I’m one of the few fighters in the party,” McAuliffe likes to say. “I think that’s one of the reasons the president loves me. I’m the only one around with any you-know-what.”

Terry McAuliffe can afford to crow. After two decades at the slippery peak of a pursuit most men tire of after two or three election cycles, McAuliffe is the acknowledged master at separating political donors from their money. He is, at 42, a self-made multimillionaire, with a fortune that may reach into nine digits. And, icing on the cake, he has achieved the official role of First Friend to the president, a status sealed during the fall when he posted collateral of $1.35 million in cash to help the Clintons buy their new house in Chappaqua, New York.

The Clintons’ reliance on a private benefactor, especially one as controversial as McAuliffe, raised so many questions that they went on to arrange a different form of financing, without McAuliffe’s help. But the home-financing deal was, in the scheme of things, a drop in the bucket of Bill Clinton’s debt to McAuliffe, the culmination of one of those instructive Washington symbioses: between a man who calls himself “the king of money” and a man whose flirtations with personal and political disaster have made him more financially needy than any other president in memory. “The feeling I had is, the one guy, if he did this, that they couldn’t criticize [by saying] he was going to get something out of it was me,” says McAuliffe. “Because I was so far into everything. I mean, what’s the president going to do, give me another round of golf?”

The “everything” that McAuliffe has been “into” has included: leading the fundraising effort for Clinton’s 1996 campaign, at a time when many other Democrats were writing him off as a one-term president; chairing (and raising money for) his 1997 inaugural; raising nearly $7 million for the president’s legal-defense fund (“I am the fund-raiser for it. I raise all the big checks,” he says); raising money for Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign (“I put her whole money team together…. I made 50 calls for her this weekend…. I love old Hillary!”); raising money for the president’s future library, budgeted to cost more than $125 million; and rounding up corporate sponsors for the administration’s planned millennium celebration on the mall.

Virginia races offer an early preview of Democrats’ midterm challenges By Reid Wilson

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/570932-virginia-races-offer-an-early-preview-of-democrats-midterm-challenges

Voters in Virginia will give Democrats and Republicans the first hints of the political landscape in advance of next year’s midterm elections when they head to the polls in eight weeks.

The marquee match-up is an expensive race for governor between former Carlyle Group chief executive Glenn Youngkin (R) and Terry McAuliffe (D), seeking a return to Richmond after four years out of the governor’s mansion.

But the more revealing test will come in smaller, below-the-radar elections for seats in the House of Delegates. Democrats hold 55 of the 100 seats up for election in November, contests that can approximate what appears to be an uphill battle to maintain control of the House of Representatives in Washington one year from now.

Delegate elections “can certainly, at times, play the role of canary in the coal mine. And I think that’s even more true now given how nationalized our elections at every level have become,” said Tucker Martin, who served as a top aide to former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R). “If there are trends developing you’ll see some of them in the results.”

Democrats lost half a dozen seats in Virginia elections in 1993, a year before control of Congress changed hands in the 1994 Republican revolution. Republicans ended more than a century of Democratic control of the House of Delegates in 1999, a year before George W. Bush became the first Republican president since Eisenhower to take office with control of the House and Senate (though Democrats reclaimed control of the Senate after a party switch).