And on and on and on it goes. First, second, and now third. Need I say more?
One such notable snafu occurred in the state of Arizona, which is embroiled in a lengthy tabulation process that has exasperated voters. A new report from Votebeat has shed a bit of light on the “how” of the voting issues plaguing Arizona. Simply put, the printer settings had been input incorrectly for the voting machines in question.
Election Department representative Megan Gilbertson told Votebeat that the “media weight” for ballots was set to “heavy, as recommended.” That is, apparently, the correct setting. The media weight of the receipts and ballot envelopes was, however, set to a lighter setting. So the printers were not able to heat the ballots enough for the toner to stick, according to reporter Jen Fifield.
These settings didn’t appear to cause any issues, or at least not this widespread, for the primary election or for early voters. Why did this error occur on the literal day of midterm voting? Votebeat reported that printers are tested before voting begins. Why didn’t the alleged testing catch any of these issues? At the end of the day, this falls on the Board of Supervisors and Gates. They will eventually have to answer these questions, and anyone concerned with election integrity will certainly be listening with attentive ears.
For the second congressional election in a row, a journalist has demonstrated that there is a potential hole that could be exploited in the way one Nevada county deals with mail-in ballots.
In 2020, columnist Victor Joecks of the Las Vegas Review-Journal tested Clark County, Nevada’s signature verification process for mail-in ballots, and found that eight ballots were accepted in which the handwriting on the envelope containing the ballot and the ballot itself was different. This year, six ballots made it through, he wrote in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.“I had 11 people send me a picture of their ballot envelope. I then wrote their name in my handwriting. Each voter then copied my version of their signature onto their ballot return envelope. They sent me a picture to ensure it wasn’t their normal handwriting. This simulated signing someone else’s ballot. It’s also legal because each voter signed his or her own ballot.”
In a perfect system, all 11 would have been set aside, he said. Instead, only five failed to make it through.…“What this proves is that Nevada’s mail ballots remain vulnerable to fraud. Even small-scale fraud can shift races,” he wrote…
You’ve Been Gaslighted – Democrats Just Stole Another Election
Think of all the times in just the past few years you’ve been gaslighted. They lied to you about open borders…they lied about Hillary’s 30,000 deleted emails…they lied about spying on Trump…they lied about Russian Collusion…they lied about a perfectly fine Ukrainian phone call…they lied about massive Biden corruption in Ukraine and China… they lied about the Hunter Biden laptop…they lied about the origins of Covid…they lied about the need for lockdowns and masks…they lied about the need for Covid vaccines…they lied about the vaccines being “safe and effective”…they lied and covered up all the deaths and injuries from the vaccine…they lied about the success of miracle drugs Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin…they lied about the stolen 2020 election…
And these are the exact same people now telling you Democrats just over-performed, and stopped a GOP red landslide, against all odds, without cheating and stealing the midterm election. Historically, every president in history facing his first midterm experiences a tough day with automatically 20 to 30 House seats lost…and 4 or more Senate seats lost…but this terribly unpopular President Biden is brain dead with severe dementia, and can’t put 3 coherent sentences together…Yet Biden defied history? While also facing the worst economy in modern history…and the worst inflation in America’s history…and out of control crime…and open borders…and failing schools…and polls showing 75% of Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction…Yet Biden beat all of that?
If you believe Democrats made a miracle happen, without cheating, rigging and stealing…I have a bridge to sell you, over the Atlantic Ocean, in the Vegas desert…
…With the Left’s constant radical messaging of pushing sexualization on kids, driving gas prices up, draining Americans’ wallets, and being soft on crime, it should have been obvious that voters would go another route in this year’s midterm elections. However, it only left Republicans disappointed with the results.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla) believes he knows why the red wave didn’t come as planned.
“I think we’ve got to reflect now. What didn’t happen?” said Scott, adding, “I think we didn’t have enough of a positive message. We said everything about how bad the Biden agenda was. It’s bad, the Democrats are radical, but we have to have a plan of what we stand for.” Despite polls showing Republicans were in the lead ahead of the elections, Scott said that the reason the party fell short was that Republican voters didn’t show up to vote, calling it a “complete disaster.”
Actually, voters did show up – just not where they were needed. That said, I looked at the Republican House messaging as the “new Contract with America”. Frankly, it was hollow, vapid; a wild, wild, West movie town facade with words across a page that said nothing concrete about what Republicans were going to accomplish in detail. There was nothing there of any substance. Heck, even the ordinary blogger could come up with better messaging than these geniuses in DC paying millions of donors’ dollars to high-priced consultants. I certainly didn’t buy it.
Call it “the White Wave.” A flood of white envelopes containing mail-in ballots lofted Democrat candidates to victories in several key Nov. 8 races. Case in point: Democrat John Fetterman will occupy Pennsylvania’s coveted U.S. Senate seat instead of Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz. In that race—and several others—mail-in ballots acted as a breaker against the “Red Wave” of wins that Republican leaders had hoped would wash across the nation at a time when Congress and the White House are both Democrat-controlled.
The lopsided numbers in the Fetterman-Oz race starkly reveal how key the mail-in segment of the electorate has become despite Republicans’ emphasis on in-person voting.
Based on unofficial tallies available as of Nov. 9, Oz drew 500,000 more voters to visit the polls on Election Day than Fetterman did. But that margin wasn’t enough…
Surveying the wreckage of the disappointing Republican midterms, voters were left scratching their heads, trying to figure out what went wrong. With the fundamentals being as bad as they were this year, Republicans underperformed expectations, and it was fairly obvious that they would experience no red wave by early in the evening on Election Night. While I’ve seen plenty of postmortems already, the single biggest issue that wrecked the wave was mail-in voting combined with ballot-harvesting, which all but eliminated Republican hopes in states where Democrats control the voting rules. This is why Senate polls were so wrong in these states.
The two states where the impact was most obvious were Pennsylvania and Michigan, but it snuffed out real Republican chances all over the map in states where the Democrats control voting laws. Pennsylvania literally elected a dead man, and I’m not even talking about the pro-crime radical with such severe brain damage that he can’t form a coherent sentence.
Some day, perhaps even sometime this year if we’re lucky, when election officials in Arizona finally find someone capable of mastering preschool mathematics and they finish counting their ballots, we may know the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections. But that day is not today, my friends. They are somehow still flummoxed by the task of gathering up hundreds of thousands of ballots and feeding them into machines of dubious efficacy. Meanwhile, a different set of election supervisors appears to be ready to move forward with a hand count of nearly all of the ballots. Those officials are facing threats from state Democrats, however. The liberals have gone to court and obtained an order to forbid any such action, though the ruling seems to defy the state’s election laws. But even under the ominous threat of criminal charges, the group of election “radicals” appears to be ready to start the count as early as this weekend. (Associated Press).
…The details of the election law in question make it unclear how this judge’s ruling could withstand a challenge. The normal process typically only involves a handful of precincts undergoing a hand count. But that’s by tradition, not by law. The law only says that the precincts subjected to a hand count must be selected “at random.” The judge’s order even admits that the number could be increased.
There is seemingly more being revealed here than any potential flaws in Arizona’s electoral process or voting machinery. Why would Democrats be so uniformly opposed to a hand count? What is the downside of doing it? When the “official” count as tallied by the machines is finished, they can release those results immediately. But even if it takes weeks to complete the hand count, those numbers could then be matched against the machine tally…
That’s brought us to the point where we have a senile vegetable in the Oval Office who is being handled by a cabal that’s driven by extreme leftist fringe interests. These people wake up every morning bright and early thinking of new ways to get their puppet president to shred the United States Constitution.
In case you missed it, President LOLEightyonemillion is feeling pretty frisky after last Tuesday. Robert wrote on Friday that Ol’ Gropes has vowed to not change a thing now that the red wave didn’t make it to shore.
That means that his handlers have free rein to continue the executive abuses of power we’ve been suffering under since January of last year. In September I wondered how long the country could survive a rogue Justice Department and an attorney general hell-bent on revenge. Well, boys and girls, we’re about to find out.
It’s not just the Biden administration that’s ready to flex. Ryan has a post about Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts threatening Elon Musk with congressional action because Musk mocked him in a tweet.
Nothing unhinged about that at all.
The GOP Consultant Class Has a Choice to Make
As I wrote in my election post-mortem, this entire ordeal has been an unmitigated disaster, and there’s plenty of blame to go around, which I’ll choose not to rehash here.
With that said, there is a looming battle that’s about to take place, and it’s an important one. Namely, who will be in GOP leadership going forward? Is Kevin McCarthy going to be the Speaker of the House? Will Mitch McConnell once again reprise his role as the Senate Minority Leader?
If you ask the GOP consultant class, they will answer in the affirmative to both those questions. Despite the fact that we just had the worst mid-term failure in decades, beltway-dwelling Republicans are just fine with keeping the same failed leadership in positions of power. Why wouldn’t they? After all, Mitch McConnell is supposedly a genius. I mean, it took real skill to pass gun control and to give Joe Biden his infrastructure bill last term.
I’m assured that no one else can possibly do the job. Certainly, it couldn’t be a Republican who might have favorable ratings that aren’t in the low-20s. I mean, who cares if the vast majority of Americans hate the second most powerful Republican in the country, a man who also happens to be 80 years old? Better that we keep him in power as a divisive, controversial figure until he completely ages out. Someone has to keep Lisa Murkowski in line. Of course, getting rid of Murkowski would have been a better solution, but McConnell decided to bankroll her against another Republican instead.
Ever since the professional Republican apparatus decided to target, eliminate and destroy the grassroots movement known as the Tea Party, there was always going to come a time when the battle for the heart and soul of the GOP Club would take place. CTH has been calling this battle ‘The Big Ugly‘ for around a decade.
The Big Ugly battle is essentially the fight between the grassroots working class base of MAGA voters and the professional political snobs in control of the Republican Club boardroom. Some call it the ‘base’ -vs- the ‘establishment’. There are other names and catchphrases, but the essence of the dynamic is the same. A scruffy voting base, who, prior to Donald Trump, had no visible leader to represent their internal interests around the mahogany table.
Ordinary voters were in an abusive relationship with the people around the GOP boardroom. The Club needed our votes, and our money (less so after the Citizens United decision) but had no intention of ever actually delivering on the priorities of the voters. The Republican political establishment played Lucy with the football for years, and We The People always ended up flat on our backs, continually frustrated and feeling used.
…The Corporate Club didn’t and doesn’t care. Instead, while they sold out the working-class to the multinationals (TPA, TPP, Paris Climate, etc) they fought harder, gaslight more, and made even more promises they never intended to keep. Lucy had an unending supply of footballs.
Then in 2015 things changed. The voting base found a weapon for use against the Republican Club, the weapon’s name was Donald Trump. From the very first poll conducted after his 2015 announcement Trump was leading the charge, and that lead steamrolled 16 other Club approved candidates. The Club remained furious and vowed to remove the disrupter we sent into the boardroom…
It suffices to say that Election Day didn’t go as planned for some polling places that experienced and are still experiencing ballot-counting issues. Despite the varying election-related difficulties, multiple jurisdictions share one foreseen commonality. There’s a common thread connecting five counties spread across several states that were in disarray on Election Day: federal “monitors.”
On the eve of the elections, the Biden administration’s Department of Justice announced Monday it would be dispatching such monitors to as many as 64 jurisdictions in almost half of U.S. states on Election Day to oversee federal election law “compliance.”…
‘We have to figure out how to beat them in their own game’
HEGSETH: “what are Republicans to do then? Is this a state-by-state effort? Everything you just said we laid out they will declare you and I and everyone else who thinks this way as election deniers and threats to democacy, we’re spinning conspiracy theories. Let’s just say evereything’s above board in Arizona and ned. Let’s just say you are still delaying it in a way that makes people lose confidence in the process. If you were governor or secretary of state. We laid out some of those things they will have to overcome resistance from people to call them bad names.”
RYUN: “Two-prong approach, Pete. Early voting and mail-in ballots it is rife for corruption and fraud. Where we have the ability to outlaw, we must. Where we can’t and I have to tell you after Tuesday nights elections in Michigan and Pennsylvania and other places we better play by the rules of the game that have been laid out for us. If they want to have early voting, universal mail-in and ballot harvesting in their state we have to figure out how to beat them in their own game. I think that’s the only way you’re going to do it in some of these upper Rust Belt blue states. Beat them at their own game, and where we can, we outlaw that.”
“I’ve never been as wrong as I was this year,” Gingrich, an Epoch Times contributor, said on Nov. 10. “It makes me challenge every model I’m aware of, and realize that I have to really stop and spend a good bit of time thinking and trying to put it all together.”
He pointed to a vote tracking sheet by the Cook Political Report, a bipartisan newsletter that analyzes elections, which shows a roughly 50.7 million Republican turnout for the House—outnumbering Democratic votes by nearly 6 million. Gingrich noted this gap could shrink to 5 million when ballots in deep blue California are fully processed. “But it’s still 5 million more votes,” he said.
“And not gaining very many seats makes you really wonder what’s going on,” he added. “I want to know, where did those votes come from?”
America has become more divided, but Democrats are far more loyal voters
The 2022 midterms are almost in the books. The large red wave did not materialize, although Republicans did pick up some congressional seats and, apparently, the House. There are significant and important reasons why a large red wave didn’t occur and one large warning for Republicans.
First, before anyone says Republicans had bad candidates, keep in mind that the Democrats won the Senate with John Fetterman and Sen. Krysten Sinema, D-AZ, before him. Bad candidates didn’t stop them, and this article addresses why.
6. We are More Divided Than in 2010.
5. The starting point in the House.
4. Republicans had 21 Senate seats to defend.
3. Democrats are far more loyal voters than Republicans.
2. Americans are addicted to government.
1. Republicans failed to convince voters they had a plan.
Somebody better get canned. Someone has to pay. Somebody important. Our culture is a disaster in large part because we have failed to hold leaders accountable when they screw up, because we have given losers a free pass and accepted excuses and therefore, accepted sub-par performance. Look at the wars since 2001 – what generals got relieved for the failure to win them promptly? And look at our military now. It’s a disaster. This goes for the GOP in the wake of last week’s fiasco.
We were supposed to win big on Election Day. The fundamentals were there – history, the bad economy, general malaise. The president is a doddering pervert and at least one of the opposing candidates was a brain-addled ogre. We were told we were going to see a red wave, maybe a red tsunami, and the red we ended up seeing was our blood on the floor. So, who in a very top position of power in the GOP – not some second-tier functionary – is getting fired because of it?
Now, I understand there are a lot of people with a piece of last week’s debacle. But this is a situation that us lawyers call “joint and several liability.” That means a lot of people are to blame and all of them own the results jointly. So when we talk about the GOP leadership, the guys and gals who accepted the job of getting it done, there’s no “What about so-and-so!” There’s no “But I was a victim of circumstances beyond my control!” There’s no excuse…
Go read the rest of the above!