#ballot audit

[stupittmoran]

Top 10 headlines the media didn't tell you this week, Repost & FoIIow for more.

Hunter Biden has been indicted in California on 9 charges.

Federal judge dismisses case to remove Trump from Arizona’s 2024 presidential ballot.

Facebook and Instagram enabled child sexual abuse, trafficking; companies boycotting 𝕏 have ads on both.

Speaker Mike Johnson tells the Biden administration no new funding for Ukraine without an audit.

French farmers sprayed manure on government buildings in protest of taxes and regulations meant to put them out of business.

Senator Rand Paul says he will debate the merit of sending our troops overseas.

University of Pennsylvania President told to resign by the board of Penn for refusing to condemn the genocide of Jews.

According to an Arizona Sheriff, illegal immigrants are being Handed $5,000 Visa gift cards, cell phones, plane tickets.

Elon Musk to bring Alex Jones back to 𝕏 after Tucker Carlson interview exposed what the establishment media, CIA have done to him.

Biden Administration's defense secretary threatens to send US families to fight in Ukraine if we do not send more aid.

Who else thinks it's time to audit the funds being sent overseas? 👀

If you appreciate this Top 10 recap, remember to Repost and FoIIow me for another week in a clown world 🤡🌎

TaraBull @TaraBull808 on Twitter/X

[contemplatingoutlander]

Jack Smith is really, really good at explaining why Trump was indicted. This annotated copy of the indictment from the NY Times is worth reading. Here are a few highlights:

3. The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won. He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures. Indeed, in many cases, the Defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results. His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.

4. Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results. In so doing, the Defendant perpetrated three criminal conspiracies: a. A conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371; b. A conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified (“the certification proceeding”), in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k); and c. A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241. Each of these conspiracies—which built on the widespread mistrust the Defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud—targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election (“the federal government function’).

[1americanconservative]

And here is post Nov 3, 2020 bloodbath,

AZ: deleted the results of the 2020 election before an audit

PA: all forensic evidence, logs, records yellow sheets gone

GA: 74 counties destroyed the original Dominion ballot images

Even Liz Cheney destroyed +1.5 terabyte of EVIDENCE,

https://x.com/Real_RobN/status/1770997825448673543?s=20

[vote-democrat-president-congress]

UPI: "The reason in encouraging the changes to ensure election integrity, the Carter Center siad, is that recent U.S. politics have been "tinged with an aggressive anger and virulent rhetoric that threatens to unravel the fabric of our society."

The guidelines listed are:

Making elections a national priority. The center said the nation's election system is critical to American democracy, so it's critical that "election laws and regulations be guided by principles of fairness that preclude partisanship."

Election laws and should be transparent and simple for the public to understand. One way to ensure the health of the nation's election system, the report's authors say, is to be "fully transparent." Saying that states and localities already have made "great strides" in delivering basic election information to voters, the report's authors say, "this work should continue on all aspects of the process, from registration of voters through certification of election results."

Expand access to voter registration. The center and institute said voter registration rules "should be structured to maximize the likelihood that eligible voters can be added to the rolls without complicated rules or restrictions."

Allow ballot casting to be simple for urban and rural populations. The report's authors said policymakers and election officials "should commit to finding a way to treat voters equitably - eschewing both a 'one size fits all' approach ... in favor of one in which there is "attention to ensuring that voters are not disadvantaged in obtaining or casting a ballot relative to others just because of where they live."

Have technology serve as a boost to voters not an obstacle. Noting that voting machines have become increasingly easier to use, the report's authors urge a design approach that would cover all voting technology, "like electronic poll books and ballot-on-demand printers" so that every step of the election process is accessible and flexible for all voters.

Encourage states and local governments that allow early voting to prioritize counting votes before the election. Saying that offering voting options over several days or weeks makes voting more resilient against potential attacks, the center urged that "communities that allow such ballots should have policies ... that ensure that as many as possible of these ballots (if not all of them) will be returned to election officials in time to be processed and counted as soon as reasonably possible." The center said that, ideally, this should occur before ballots are cast in person.

Make sure oversees voters and military personnel are able to be counted quickly. The center and the institute said states and localities should try to avoid unnecessary restrictions on the use of documents, "like the Federal Postcard Application or the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot."

Keep the process of vote counting transparent and orderly. "Policymakers and election officials must continue to prioritize accuracy even as they strive to complete counts sooner," the report's authors said.

Conduct regular audits of the election process on the municipal level. The center said election officials should use the most up-to-date and available "techniques and best practices" to validate elections' reliability.

Use recognized best practice standards for elections. The report's authors said states and localities also should be open to having "nonpartisan and independent" election observers.

[xox000xox]

And here is,

just few of the Arizona Senate’s official results of the 2020 presidential election audit,

• 74, 243 MAIL IN BALLOTS that are TIED to individuals returned and cast with NO RECORD of ever being SENT OUT.

• 420,987 MAIL IN BALLOTS out of 1.9 million CONFIRMED to have NO signature match. Just in Maricopa County alone.

• deleted the official results of the 2020 election before the very same audit,

And Katie Hobbs and Adrian Fontes belong in prison in 1 cell with 1 bed.

https://twitter.com/Real_RobN/status/1776998766803038636?t=quHFVvWRGvSruQ2iueLk9A&s=19

[darkeagleruins]

We can’t properly monitor and audit COVID numbers.

We can’t properly monitor and audit ballots to make sure they were signed by real people who live at real addresses.

We can’t properly monitor and audit foreign aide to places like Ukraine who are spending it on God knows what.

But don’t worry the government is auditing and monitoring your social media communications and putting you on lists.

Democrat utopia is a police state filed with anarcho-tyranny.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Republican members of the Texas state legislature introduced a slate of bills Thursday designed to subvert election processes and curb voting rights in the state. One of them would even allow the Texas Secretary of State to overturn election results in the state’s largest Democratic-leaning county, with very little rationale for doing so.

On Thursday, Republican state senators introduced Senate Bill 1993, a bill targeting Harris County, a diverse region that includes Houston and is also the most populous county in Texas, to a Senate committee for debate.

SB 1993 would grant Secretary of State Jane Nelson (R) the authority to order a new election in Harris County “if the secretary has good cause to believe that at least 2% of the total number of polling places in the county did not receive supplemental ballots,” according to the bill text. Secretary Nelson would have the same authority granted to a district court.

The bill would “allow really low thresholds” for ordering a new election, Katya Ehresman, the voting rights program manager at Common Cause Texas, told TPM. “Anything from a machine malfunction, which can necessarily be the fault of the county or of an election administrator getting stuck in traffic—which in Houston is incredibly likely—and having a delay in providing election results to the central count station,” she said.

The bill was introduced alongside over a dozen other bills seeking to restrict voter access and overhaul the state’s elections process. Senate Bill 260, for example, would allow the Secretary to suspend election administrators without cause, and Senate Bill 1070 would enable Texas to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a bipartisan program that maintains voter rolls across state lines that has recently been targeted by far-right propaganda.

State Republicans quietly introduced the bills in the State Affairs Committee on Thursday morning—without giving the mandatory 48-hour notice. “Every part of today’s hearing highlights the subversive attacks on elections in Texas,” Ehresman said, “and (SB) 1993 is a part of that.”

With a population of nearly 5 million, Harris County is the most populous county in Texas and the third most populous in the U.S. It became the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories back in 2020, when the county experienced some technical difficulties as election officials tried to change procedures to make voting safer during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Secretary of State’s office conducted an audit of the general election. They found that the county “had very serious issues in the handling of electronic media,” but none of those issues actually amounted to voter fraud.

Harris County saw issues again in 2022, however, as state and local Republicans went after the county’s election administrations by recruiting and deploying poll watchers throughout the county. This prompted local Democrats to request federal observers instead. On Election Day, the county did experience several issues that often take place in more urban counties, like polling sites opening late and some running out of paper ballots, among other things.

The Texas GOP, including Gov. Greg Abbott, seized the opportunity to accuse county officials of “election improprieties,” and 22 right-wing candidates used it as an excuse to challenge their losses. Still, there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

State Democrats argue that the introduction of a flood of anti-voting legislation targeting Harris County has all been a retaliation against the county turning blue back in 2018.

“A lot of what we see is Harris County as an example of a need to invest in election administration and not penalize or detract from it,” Ehresman said.

[simply-ivanka]

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — In the northwest corner of Louisiana, a candidate for parish sheriff demanded a recount Wednesday after losing by a single vote in an election where more than 43,000 people cast ballots.

The tight race shines a spotlight on Louisiana’s recount process and its outdated voting machines, which do not produce an auditable paper trail that experts say is critical to ensuring election results are accurate. States’ recount abilities have proven to be exceedingly important, especially following the 2020 presidential election when multiple battleground states conducted recounts and reviews to confirm President Joe Biden’s victory.

“This extraordinarily narrow margin … absolutely requires a hand recount to protect the integrity of our democratic process, and to ensure we respect the will of the people,” John Nickelson, the Republican candidate who trailed by one vote in last week’s election for Caddo Parish Sheriff, posted on social media Wednesday.

Henry Whitehorn, the Democrat who won the sheriff runoff, did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

Caddo Clerk of Court Mike Spence said he has seen close races during his 46-years of experience, but none with such a sizeable number of voters. Spence said he hopes this will teach residents that every vote matters.

When the recount takes place Monday only absentee ballots will be tallied again and checked for errors. But they only account for about 17% of the total vote in the runoff race. Absentee ballots are mailed in and are the only auditable paper trail under Louisiana’s current voting system.

[homomenhommes]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … December 29

Greek Lovers 

570 B.C. – Polycrates, the Greek tyrant, was born on this date (d.522). By pirate raids and indiscriminate warfare, the tyrant of Samos dominated the East Aegean. He waged various wars and was, until the end of his life, victorious. His ruthlessness drove the philosopher Pythagorus from Samos, where Polycrates was generally despised. Eventually he was lured to Magnesia by one of his enemies, where he was crucified.

But even meanies can lose their hearts to the right guy, and Polycrates, tyrant though he was, was still a normal Greek. His special friend was Bathyllus, so beautiful that Polycrates dared to erect a statue in his honor in the temple of Hera, goddess of women. Polycrates may have thought it appropriate that beautiful Bathyllus have his place among women, but it was considered an act of arrogance nonetheless. Almost immediately thereafter he was crucified.

1879 – Died: Charley Parkhurst, born Charlotte Parkhurst (b.1812), also known as One-Eyed Charley or Six-Horse Charley, who was an American stagecoach driver, farmer and rancher in California. Born and reared as a girl in New England, mostly in an orphanage, Parkhurst ran away as a youth, taking the name Charley and living as a male. He started work as a stable hand and learned to handle horses, including to drive coaches drawn by multiple horses. He worked in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, traveling to Georgia for associated work.

In his late 30s, Parkhurst sailed to California following the Gold Rush in 1849; there he became a noted stagecoach driver. In 1868 he may have been the first female (though passing as a man) to vote in a presidential election in California. At his death, it was discovered that his gender assigned at birth was female.

After Parkhurst died in 1879, neighbors came to the cabin to lay out the body for burial and discovered that his body appeared to be female to them. Rheumatism and cancer of the tongue were listed as causes of death. In addition, the examining doctor established that Parkhurst had given birth at some time. A trunk in the house contained a baby's dress. "The discovery of her true gender became a local sensation." and was soon carried by national newspapers.

The fire station in Soquel, California, has a plaque reading:

"The first ballot by a woman in an American presidential election was cast on this site November 3, 1868, by Charlotte (Charlie) Parkhurst who masqueraded as a man for much of her life. She was a stagecoach driver in the mother lode country during the gold rush days and shot and killed at least one bandit. In her later years she drove a stagecoach in this area. She died in 1879. Not until then was she found to be a woman. She is buried in Watsonville at the pioneer cemetery."

1950 – Jon Polito (d.2016) was an American actor and voice artist. In a film and television career spanning 35 years, he amassed over 220 credits. Notable television roles included Detective Steve Crosetti in the first two seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street and as Phil Bartoli on the first season of Crime Story.

Polito was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is known for working with the Coen Brothers, most notably in the major supporting role of Italian gangster Johnny Caspar in Miller's Crossing. Polito won an OBIE award in 1980 for his theater performances off Broadway and for his lifetime of work in film and television he received the Maverick Spirit Event Award at Cinequest Film Festival in 2005.

When Homicide began pre-production, Polito was asked to audition, and was initially reluctant – he didn't want move to Baltimore for the series, because he had just relocated from New York to Los Angeles. The script he received featured a dialogue scene between two detectives, one Polish American and the other Irish-American. Polito decided that the part he wanted was that of the Irishman, but he was told that he could not read for it. After reading for the part of the Polish-American detective, Polito added a message on his audition tape, saying that if the producers wanted to call him back, he would only be interested if he could take the part of the Irish detective. Series co-creators Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana did call him back, and they rewrote the character as an Italian, and cast him in the role. The other character, the Polish-American detective, was also rewritten, becoming Det. Meldrick Lewis, played by African-American actor Clark Johnson.

Polito was openly gay. He married fellow actor Darryl Armbruster on October 16, 2015, fifteen years after they first met.

He died from multiple myeloma on September 1, 2016, at the City of Hope Hospital, where he was being treated. Polito was 65 years old.

Self-portrait

1960 – Sean Martin, born in Hereford, Texas (d.2020), was a Canadian cartoonist, illustrator, and graphic designer, best known for the Doc and Raider comic strip series which appeared in LGBT publications in the 1980s and 1990s.

Martin lived in New York and San Francisco before moving to Canada in 1986. He took Canadian citizenship in 1989, living in Vancouver, Toronto, and Calgary. He published the first Doc and Raider strips in a Vancouver gay publication in 1987. Although the issue featuring Doc and Raider turned out to be the final issue of the publication, the strip was quickly picked up by other LGBT publications, including the Xtra! newspapers in Canada.

The arrangement was a unique one in that Martin's fee for providing the panel was instead turned over to local charities and organizations, not necessarily LGBT ones; in its time, Doc and Raider underwrote everything from AIDS hospices in New Zealand to an arts festival in Scotland, resulting in total donations of close to a quarter million dollars (US). The characters have also been used to promote safer-sex practices and AIDS education, as well as rodeos, country dance conventions, and film festivals around the world.

Martin published two books of the comic: Doc and Raider: Caught on Tape in 1994 and Doc and Raider: Incredibly Lifelike in 1996. A third, to be presented as an eBook, is currently in the works. He has also written a manual for theatre designers, "Big Show Tiny Budget", based on his years as a scenic and costume designer, and a novella, "Triptych".

Martin retired the regular strip in 1997, although he drew two special five-page stories for the Little Sister's Defence Fund, anthologies What's Right and What's Wrong in 2002. He continued to work as an artist and graphic designer, and prior to his death explored projects to revive Doc and Raider in new formats, particularly with a more political satire slant, as well as short form animations. In addition to the CG reprise of Doc and Raider, which can be viewed at its website, http://docandraider.com, Martin also turned to illustrating such projects as Candide, Gilgamesh, and Aesop's Fables.

During his time in Calgary, Martin worked extensively with the Alberta Rockies Gay Rodeo, providing graphic design for the organization's posters and brochures. His work was honoured in 2001, with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Gay Rodeo Association. Martin's illustration work has also been celebrated: his series of images for Candide are part of the permanent Voltaire collection at the University of Wittenburg.

1966 – Jason Gould is an American actor, writer and director. Gould was born in New York City, the son of singer/actress Barbra Streisand and actor Elliott Gould, who divorced July 9, 1971. He spent his formative years around major Hollywood players in Los Angeles, California.

Gould has appeared in Say Anything... (1989) and the Streisand-directed film The Prince of Tides (1991), but has since rarely appeared in front of the camera. In 1997 he made his West End debut in the play The Twilight of the Golds at the Arts Theatre in which he played the part of David, an opera designer. In 1997 he also wrote, produced and directed the short film Inside Out, playing Aaron in the humorous story of the child of two celebrities who is outed by the tabloids. His real life father, Elliott Gould, also played his father in the short film. His real half-brother Sam Gould played the part of his brother. The short was later combined with other features for Boys Life 3 (2000).

Around 1988, at the age of 21, Gould came out to his parents about being a homosexual. Around 1991, tabloids outed Gould as being gay. In an interview with The Advocate published August 17, 1999, Barbra Streisand said

I would never wish for my son to be anything but what he is. He is bright, kind, sensitive, caring, and a very conscientious and good person. He is a very gifted actor and filmmaker. What more could a parent ask for in their child? I have been truly blessed. Most parents feel that their child is particularly special, and I am no different. I have a wonderful son. My only wish for my son, Jason, is that he continues to experience a rich life of love, happiness, joy, and fulfillment, both creatively and personally.

Nobody on this earth has the right to tell anyone that their love for another human being is morally wrong. I will never forget how it made me shudder to hear Pat Buchanan say that he stood "with George Bush against the immoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women." Who is Pat Buchanan to pronounce anyone's love invalid? How can he deny the profound love felt by one human being for another? ... Unfortunately, however, as long as people like Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan continue in public life, the fight to codify gay marriages will be a tough battle to win.

1971 – Wakefield Poole’s trend-setting Boys in the Sand premieres, prompting Variety to remark, “There are no more closets.” Shot on Fire Island, Poole’s slickly produced film marks a dramatic departure from the low-budget pornography previously available. Boys in the Sand had its theatrical debut on December 29, 1971, at the 55th Street Playhouse in New York City. It was the first gay porn film to include credits, to achieve crossover success, to be reviewed by Variety, and one of the earliest porn films, after 1969’s Blue Movie by Andy Warhol, to gain mainstream credibility, preceding 1972’s Deep Throat by nearly a year. It was promoted with an advertising campaign unprecedented for a pornographic feature, and was an immediate critical and commercial success. The film’s title is a parodic reference to the Mart Crowley play and film The Boys in the Band.

1993 – Dalton Harris is a Jamaican singer. In 2010, he won Digicel Rising Star, and subsequently signed with VP Records. In 2018, he won the fifteenth season of The X Factor in the United Kingdom.

Harris was born in Clarendon, Jamaica, before moving to Kingston to pursue his music career. Harris recalled living a difficult life growing up in Jamaica with a large family with 22 siblings, being poor, and living on his own since the age of 15. He also talked about being physically and mentally abused in his early life. Harris attended Kingston College, where he passed six CSEC subjects. In October 2020, Harris stated that he is pansexual*.

In 2010, Harris became the youngest winner of the Jamaican singing competition Digicel Rising Stars where he won a cash prize of $1.5 million JMD. After his win, he began releasing music in Jamaica. He then traveled across the States for five years to widen his scope. He released many tracks like "I'm Numb", "Watch Over Me" and "That Wonderful Sound" in 2015, "All I Need", "Whisper in the Wind", "Unfaithful Chronicles" and "Dem Kinda Woman" in 2016 and "Perilous Time" in 2017.

In 2018, Harris entered season 15 of The X Factor in the United Kingdom. He auditioned for the series with "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word" by Elton John. He received four yeses from the four judges. Competing in the category of "Boys", he was coached by Louis Tomlinson. Owing the success and increasing popularity of the Jamaican act, the British X Factor was broadcast in Jamaica after the local Television Jamaica (TVJ) bought the rights of broadcasting the programme live in Jamaica.

He reached the final of the contest on 1 December 2018 alongside Anthony Russell and Scarlett Lee. In the final, he sang "A Song for You" from Leon Russell, and dueted "Beneath Your Beautiful" with Emeli Sande. His winner's single was "The Power of Love", performed as a duet with James Arthur, who won the ninth series of The X Factor in 2012.

*Pansexuality is sexual, romantic or emotional attraction towards people regardless of their sex or gender identity. Pansexual people may refer to themselves as gender-blind, asserting that gender and sex are not determining factors in their romantic or sexual attraction to others. Because pansexual people are open to relationships with people who do not identify as strictly men or women, it is often considered a more inclusive term than bisexual.

2012 – Same-sex marriage takes effect in Maine with a voter approval of 53%-47%. Maryland and Washington State are the other states to win marriage equality by popular vote.

[1americanconservative]

They won’t release the J6 tapes

They won’t allow forensic election audits

They won’t allow signature match analysis

They won’t allow Georgia ballots to be examined in court

They deleted footage of dropboxes & ballot data

All for the same reason - it exposes the Marxist coup

[inthefallofasparrow]

... Months earlier, Steinbart had been eating prison food and trying to red-pill other inmates. Now he was hobnobbing at a film premiere backstage with Republican Party officials. And while his speech at the premiere turned out to be unremarkable—he told me later that the event’s organizers told him not to mention QAnon—the fact that he was even able to make it onstage at all was unbelievable.

Steinbart’s compound had failed, but in a way, he had found something even better. Thanks to Republican leaders’ willingness to accommodate QAnon and treat it as a legitimate faction of the party, Steinbart, an obvious grifter and charlatan who specialized in sucking vulnerable people dry to support his own delusions, would be treated like a credible political figure. He had even managed to insinuate himself into the team handling the Arizona ballot recount, becoming one of the audit’s staffers shortly after his release from jail.

[mightyflamethrower]

Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season.

These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.

Indeed, the nation is by now worn out by these serial assaults on constitutional norms: the Hillary-funded Steele dossier subterfuge; the pre-election Russian laptop disinformation campaign; the two impeachments without special counsel reports; the impeachment Senate trial of a private citizen; the effort to remove Trump’s name from state ballots; the ongoing attempt to emasculate the Electoral College; or the radical opportune changes in state election laws to ensure massive mail-in balloting.

Recently, Andrew McCarthy has reviewed in depth this coordination between White House personnel and prosecutors, long known and long denied by the left. Biden, for example, had complained to aides about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tardiness in getting special federal prosecutor Smith appointed—and thus apparently ensuring Trump was convicted before the election.

Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’s now-fired paramour prosecutor, visited and consulted with the White House counsel’s office when he was acting supposedly as a purely local county prosecutor. The January 6th left-wing-dominated congressional committee consulted with the Biden administration in sending forth its criminal referrals about Trump’s purported role in the protests. And to handle his pseudo-indictment against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hired Biden Justice Department official Vincent Colangeio.

Two, the prosecutors’ delayed criminal indictments and E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit were predicated only on Donald Trump running for reelection. After his 2020 defeat, the loss of the two Republican senate seats in Georgia, and the January 6 demonstrations/riot, Trump was written off by pundits as politically toxic.

Then his historic comeback in the subsequent year terrified the left. The reboot prompted the subsequent indictments and suits years after the purported crimes. It was left unsaid that had Trump not been a conservative Republican and leading presidential candidate, he would have never been indicted.

Three, most of the indictments either had no prior precedent in criminal law or will likely never be used again, at least against anyone left-wing. Moreover, many of the writs relied on manipulation of statutes of limitations.

Neither Bragg nor any other local prosecutor had previously transformed a supposedly local affidavit misdemeanor into a supposed federal campaign finance violation, a gambit so preposterous that it had been passed on by federal attorneys.

Letitia James was the first New York Attorney General to indict a state resident for the supposed crime of overvaluing real estate to obtain a loan, which was paid back timely and in full, to the profit of lending institutions. No bank, after auditing Trump’s assets and viability to pay back loans, was unhappy to loan to him. But all were quite happy to profit from the hefty interest—and would likely be happy to loan to him again.

James sought to make Trump a criminal without ever finding a crime, much less a victim. Nor, until the checkered and unethical career of Fani Willis, had any local prosecutor ever indicted an ex-president for a supposedly improper phone call questioning whether all the state’s votes had been fully counted.

Alvin Bragg’s case was nonexistent given the statute of limitations on supposed misdemeanors committed over six years prior—until Bragg transmogrified the accusations of minor crimes into felonies and, with them, extensions granted supposedly due to the COVID lockdowns.

In Carroll’s case, her unsubstantiated accusations of a sexual assault were also well past the statute of limitations until a left-wing New York legislator and unapologetic Trump hater passed a special law—a veritable bill of attainder aimed at Trump—waiving the statute of limitations for a year in cases of accusations of long-past sexual assault in the state of New York.

Four, all the indictments and suits took place in either blue cities, counties, or states. And most of the jury pools in or near New York, Atlanta, or Miami were or will be heavily Democrat. So far, the New York judges who have overseen Trump’s civil and criminal trials—Justices Engoron, Kaplan, and Merchan—were all liberals, appointed by Democrat or liberal politicians, and some have donated to Democrat causes. They were not shy about expressing disdain for defendant Trump. No changes in venues were ever allowed.

Five, all the prosecutors, Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis, are likewise either Democrats or associated with liberal causes. In the case of Bragg, James, and Willis, all three ran for office and raised money on promises and boasts of getting Donald Trump. And all three have now set the precedent that local and state prosecutors can warp the law and use it to go after an ex-president and leading presidential candidate of the opposite party for naked political purposes.

Six, all these cases were equally applicable to high-profile Democrat politicos. E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit was the most laughable of all the court dramas, but its outline and protocols just as easily could have applied to Tara Reade. She came forward to accuse candidate Biden of having sexually assaulted her years earlier—roughly about the same period’s as Carroll’s fluid timelines. Her story is about as believable or unbelievable as Carroll’s. But the difference was that whereas the media canonized the delusional and self-contradictory Carroll as a useful anti-Trump tool, it demonized Reade as a crazy loon and liar—and a potential impediment to Biden’s 2019-20 primary campaign.

Bragg had to torture the law to fabricate a federal campaign finance indictment against Trump. But Hillary Clinton clearly violated federal campaign statutes—and was variously fined—when she tried to hide her “opposition research” payments to Christopher Steele as “legal expenses.” In truth, Steele was hired and paid to concoct a fake anti-Trump dossier and likely should have been barred from working for a presidential campaign given he was not a U.S. citizen.

In the case of Smith, simultaneously with his case against Trump, his twin special prosecutor, Robert Hur, found that Joe Biden had unlawfully removed classified files for much longer than Trump (30 years plus), in a much less secure location (his rickety garage), and without a president’s authority to declassify his documents. Moreover, he had disclosed their contents to his ghostwriter, who destroyed evidence under subpoena by Hur. Yet unlike Trump, Biden was not charged, given that Hur claimed that Biden, in his opinion, was so old and amnesiac that he might win sympathy rather than a conviction from a jury.

Willis indicted Trump for supposedly trying to pressure officials to “find” missing Trump ballots, thus supposedly violating “racketeering” statutes, as he oversaw an attempt to find troves of ballots he thought had been cast for him. Of course, in the same state, Stacy Abrams, after losing the gubernatorial race of 2018, claimed she had actually won, despite losing by over 50,000 votes. She sued to overturn the election and then made a celebrity-political career touring the nation, falsely claiming she was the real governor and her victorious opponent was an illegitimate governor.

For that matter, in 2016, left-wing organizations, celebrities, and thousands of political operatives sought to overturn the Trump victory by appealing to the electors to renounce their states’ popular vote tallies and thus become “faithless electors.” In sum, there was a true conspiracy, or, better, a “racketeering” scheme, to use Willis’s parlance, to coordinate various groups to overturn the constitutional duties of electors to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. Clinton, along with the likes of ex-president Jimmy Carter and soon-to-be House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, would continue to deny that Trump was the legitimately elected president.

In sum, the number of suits against and indictments against Trump grew in correlation to his political fortunes. They were designed in the election year 2024 to do what Democrat voters likely cannot. They are ridiculous and sui generis, and will never be used against anyone other than Trump. They have done more damage to democracy, the rule of law, and equal justice to the law than all of the antics that Trump is accused of.

Moreover, they will set in motion a dangerous tit-for-tat cycle of weaponization that threatens the very constitutional order of the United States.

If Trump is elected to restore the rule of equal justice, will a Republican special counsel revisit Robert Hur’s work and find ex-President Biden quite capable of standing trial for the crimes Hur has already investigated and confirmed?

Will then a new Republican-appointed FBI director order a SWAT-like raid, with Fox News forewarned and Newsmax reporters on the scene, to descend into the Biden beach house?

Will county and state prosecutors in Utah, Montana, and Oklahoma feel that to stop this cycle of illegality, they must charge the Biden family members by bootstrapping local indictments onto federal crimes?

Will conservative women in the future come forward in Arkansas, Idaho, and Alabama to claim that in their past, they now suddenly remember that decades ago a prominent Democrat candidate harassed them? Will their right-wing lawyers cherry-pick the proper red-state judge?

Will conservative district attorneys find ways to indict Joe Biden on the various imaginative bookkeeping and “loan repayments” used to disguise the fact his corrupt family received well over $20 million from illiberal foreign interests, much if not all of it camouflaged to avoid income taxes?

Will some South Carolina legislator get a bill of attainder passed in the legislature, ending the statute of limitations for a year for all those in 2016 who sought to undermine the electors and flip them to Hillary Clinton?

In August or September, will a right-wing state prosecutor and a conservative judge find that Joe Biden’s creative bookkeeping warrants a $450 million fine, payable before appeal?

And will Republican officials and judges in purple states move to get Biden’s name off the ballot?

Such scenarios are endless and, given the current precedents, could all be justified as desperate deterrent measures to shock the left into ceasing their efforts to sabotage our constitutional system and rule of law.

A final note. There is a divine order of balance in the world, one known variously by particular civilizations as kismet, nemesis, karma, or what goes around, comes around payback. We’ve already seen such forces at work: Sen. Schumer at the head of a mob at the doors of the Supreme Court, calling out threats to justices by name, only now finding pro-Hamas thugs circling his own home. Or Democrats during the Trump years straining to find ways to invoke the 25th Amendment, now humiliated into claiming a non-compos-mentis Joe Biden is “sharp as a knife.”

Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared.

[realtalkingpoints]

From the piece:

The study found that there are "hundreds of thousands of illegally generated registrations in the official NYXBOE voter rolls. The exact number is unknown, but it is not less than about 338,000 for registrations active for the 2020 General Election (NYCA [New York Citizens Audit] 2022). If other elections are included, the number of apparently illegal registrations jumps to between 1.2 and 2.4 million."

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Rick McKee, Augusta Chronicle

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 5, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

In yesterday’s election in Wisconsin, the two candidates represented very different futures for the country. One candidate for the state supreme court, Daniel Kelly, had helped politicians to gerrymander the state to give Republicans an iron lock on the state assembly and was backed by antiabortion Republicans. The other, Janet Protasiewicz, promised to stand behind fair voting maps and the protection of reproductive rights. Wisconsin voters elected Protasiewicz by an overwhelming eleven points in a state where elections are usually decided by a point or so. Kelly reacted with an angry, bitter speech. “I wish that in a circumstance like this I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent,” he said. “But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede.” Yesterday’s vote in Wisconsin reinforces the polling numbers that show how overwhelmingly popular abortion rights and fair voting are, and it seems likely to throw the Republican push to suppress voting into hyperdrive before the 2024 election. Since the 1980s, Republicans have pushed the idea of “ballot integrity” or, later, “voter fraud” to justify voter suppression. That cry began in 1986, when Republican operatives, realizing that voters opposed Reagan’s tax cuts, launched a “ballot integrity” initiative that they privately noted “could keep the black vote down considerably.” That effort to restrict the vote is now a central part of Republican policy. Together with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project, The Guardian today published the story of the attempt by three leading right-wing election denial groups to restrict voting rights in Republican-dominated states by continuing the lie that voting fraud is rampant. The Guardian’s story, by Ed Pilkington and Jamie Corey, explores a two-day February meeting in Washington organized by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and attended by officials from 13 states, including the chief election officials of Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. At the meeting, participants learned about auditing election results, litigation, and funding to challenge election results. Many of the attendees and speakers are associated with election denial. Since the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states have passed “election reform” measures that restrict the vote; those efforts are ongoing. On Thursday alone, the Texas Senate advanced a number of new restrictions. In the wake of high turnout among Generation Z Americans, who were born after 1996 and are more racially and ethnically diverse than their elders, care deeply about reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and want the government to do more to address society’s ills, Republican legislatures are singling out the youth vote to hamstring. That determination to silence younger Americans is playing out today in Tennessee, where a school shooting on March 28 in Nashville killed six people, including three 9-year-olds. The shooting has prompted protesters to demand that the legislature honor the will of the people by addressing gun safety, but instead, Republicans in the legislature have moved to expel three Democratic lawmakers who approached the podium without being recognized to speak—a breach of House rules—and led protesters in chants calling for gun reform. As Republicans decried the breach by Representatives Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson, protestors in the galleries called out, “Fascists!” Republican efforts to gain control did not end there. On Twitter today, Johnson noted that she had “just had a visit from the head of HR and the House ethics lawyer,” who told her “that if I am expelled, I will lose my health benefits,” but the ethics lawyer went on to explain “that in one case, a member who was potentially up for expulsion decided to resign because if you resign, you maintain your health benefits.” The echoes of Reconstruction in that conversation are deafening. In that era, when the positions of the parties were reversed, southern Democrats used similar “persuasion” to chase Republican legislators out of office. When that didn’t work, of course, they also threatened the physical safety of those who stood in the way of their absolute control of politics. On Saturday night, someone fired shots into the home of the man who founded and runs the Tennessee Holler, a progressive news site. Justin Kanew was covering the gun safety struggle in Tennessee. He wrote: “This violence has no place in a civilized society and we are thankful no one was physically hurt. The authorities have not completed their investigation and right now we do not know for sure the reason for this attack. We urge the Williamson County Sheriff’s office to continue to investigate this crime and help shed light on Saturday’s unfortunate events and bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice. In the meantime, our family remains focused on keeping our children healthy and safe.” The anger coming from losing candidate Kelly last night, and his warning that “this does not end well….[a]nd I wish Wisconsin the best of luck because I think it's going to need it,” sure sounded like those lawmakers in the Reconstruction years who were convinced that only people like them should govern. The goal of voter suppression, control of statehouses, and violence—then and now—is minority rule. Today’s Republican Party has fallen under the sway of MAGA Republicans who advocate Christian nationalism despite its general unpopularity; on April 3, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, who has destroyed true democracy in favor of “Christian democracy” in his own country, cheered Trump on and told him to “keep on fighting.” Like Orbán, today's Republicans reject the principles that underpin democracy, including the ideas of equality before the law and separation of church and state, and instead want to impose Christian rule on the American majority. Their conviction that American “tradition” focuses on patriarchy rather than equality is a dramatic rewriting of our history, and it has led to recent attacks on LGBTQ Americans. In Kansas today, the legislature overrode Democratic governor Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill banning transgender athletes who were assigned male at birth from participating in women’s sports. Kansas is the twentieth state to enact such a policy, and when it goes into effect, it will affect just one youth in the state. Yesterday, Idaho governor Brad Little signed a law banning gender-affirming care for people under 18, and today Indiana governor Eric Holcomb did the same. Meanwhile, Republican-dominated states are so determined to ignore the majority they are also trying to make it harder for voters to challenge state laws through ballot initiatives. Alice MIranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly of Politico recently wrote about how, after voters in a number of states overrode abortion bans through ballot initiatives, legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma are now debating ways to make it harder for voters to get measures on the ballot, sometimes even specifying that abortion-related measures are not eligible for ballot challenges. And yet, in the face of the open attempt of a minority to seize control, replacing our democracy with Christian nationalism, the majority is reasserting its power. In Michigan, after an independent redistricting commission redrew maps to end the same sort of gerrymandering that is currently in place in Wisconsin and Tennessee, Democrats in 2022 won a slim majority to control the state government. And today, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer signed into law a bill revoking a 1931 law that criminalized abortion without exception for rape or incest.

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[bobapril]

Election Fraud Is Hard

I just got back from being the Democratic observer at a "Risk Limiting Audit."

Here in Georgia, the Dominion scanners read either the mail-in ballot or the machine-printed ballot that is created when you use the machine to select your votes in person. The scanners read a QR-style barcode, but there's also a plain-text summary of the person's vote for every race printed on it.

But how do we know the scanners are reading the mail-in ballots correctly, or that the QR code actually matches the voter's picks? That's what this audit is for. The state generates random numbers that are then used for every county in Georgia to pick a few batches - the in-person votes from a specific precinct, or a specific 100-vote group of the mail-ins, or one of the bundles of early votes. While it doesn't show in the public results, the state keeps a record of the results from EACH batch as it was reported by the machines on or after Election Day.

So on Audit Day, each county pulls out those randomly selected batches, puts each batch on a table with two paid election workers (to double-check each other), and they hand-count them. They use their human eyes to read the printed text, ignoring the barcode, or they visually count the check marks on the mail-in ballots. Those human-generated results are then checked against the machine-generated results, and we see if they match.

So next time you hear someone talking about the machines changing the vote, or wondering about those QR codes, or whatever, let 'em know - there really are humans going back and double-checking this stuff. And not just one human - there's two at each table, and election supervisors organizing it, and partisan observers sitting there keeping an eye on the process. And this is just ONE of the many checks and precautions. Other states have different procedures, but they're all careful and thorough. Election fraud is HARD, y'all - and that's why there's so little of it.

[eaudrey35]

DeSantis suggests Biden could be removed from Florida ballot

First of all asshole Biden is the incumbent President. How do u remember him from the ballot and for what exactly. What crime has he committed. Nothing. Ron DeSantis u r auditioning to hard for the 2nd chair u dumb ass