“What Democrats would like to do nationwide: use every trick in the book to make our elections less secure”.

Alaska’s Special Election Is A Template For How The Left Wants To Rig The Vote

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON at the Federalist

MAY 11, 2022

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Next month, Alaskans will vote in a special primary election for the state’s single congressional seat, left vacant by the death of Republican Rep. Don Young in March. Young, the longest-serving Republican in the history of the U.S. House, was Alaska’s sole congressman for 49 years, so the election to replace him is in some ways an historic event for the state.

But it’s also historic in another way: it will be Alaska’s first ever statewide mail-in primary election. That is, there will be no in-person voting at all. Every single voter on the state’s bloated and error-riddled voter rolls was automatically mailed a blank ballot.

What’s more, there will be no verification requirements for these mail-in ballots. Voters will simply need to fill out their ballot and have a witness observe them sign the envelope. The state’s Division of Election has explicitly said it will not verify the authenticity of the signatures on the ballots.

Normally, to vote by mail in Alaska you have to submit an absentee ballot application ahead of time, which includes a signature that can be used to verify the signature on the completed ballot. But not for this special mail-in election, which is already a chaotic and confusing mess, with 48 names on the primary ballot and a new ranked-choice voting process in place that will send the top four vote-getters from the primary to the in-person general special election in August (which is on the same day as the regular statewide primary election for the November midterms).

By any measure, Alaska’s special election is a mess. But why should the rest of the country care? Because Alaska’s insane statewide mail-in election is a template for how the left wants to run elections nationwide. Democrats and left-wing activists would love nothing more than to hold elections entirely by mail with as few safeguards in place to prevent ballot fraud.

Indeed, Alaska presents a unique and in some ways ideal test case for the left. For one thing, Alaska’s voter rolls are a mess. As of 2020, voter registration was 118 percent of the estimated vote age population, meaning there were more registered voters than actual people who could vote (this problem is getting worse in Alaska; in 2018 it was only 103 percent). Making matters worse is a 2016 Alaska law that automatically registers residents to vote when they submit an application for the state’s permanent fund dividend.

If you want to make an election less secure, you pair bloated voter rolls with mass mail-in voting and then strip all safeguards and verification requirements from the mail-in ballots, which is exactly what Alaska has done.

The state government’s weak excuse for conducting a statewide mail-in election is that, because a special election must be held within 90 days of the vacancy (in this case, Young’s death on March 18) there simply wasn’t time to hire and train the 3,000 poll workers a standard in-person election would require. But even if you buy that, the state has not yet explained why it decided to conduct the mail-in election without any mechanism to verify the authenticity of the signatures on the ballots.

On top of all this, the special primary election next month and the special general election in August will be the first election cycle in Alaska that employs ranked-choice voting, which voters approved in 2020.

It’s hard to imagine an election scenario more ill-suited to such a convoluted and confusing scheme than this special election, partly because voters will be choosing among an unheard of 48 candidates in the special mail-in primary election and partly because the special in-person general election will take place on the same day — and perhaps even on the same ballot — as the regular primary. (The special election is to choose someone to serve out the remaining months of Young’s current term, the regular general election is to choose the state’s next at-large congressman.)

As Sarah Montalbano of the Alaska Policy Forum noted recently in the Alaska Watchman, that means “the bifurcated ballot will have both a special election chosen by [ranked-choice voting] and a general primary election instructing voters to choose only one!”

Montalbano calls Alaska’s special election a “perfect storm,” and for anyone concerned about election integrity and fairness, it certainly is a perfect storm. But for anyone who wants to make elections as unsecure and as open to fraud as possible, what’s about to happen in Alaska is ideal.

It represents the institutionalization of the extraordinary changes to absentee voting in some states during the 2020 presidential election amid fears of in-person voting amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Those changes, which got rid of nearly every safeguard for mail-in voting, were supposed to be temporary, necessitated by the pandemic.

But the left never lets a crisis go to waste, which is why we’re about to see in Alaska’s special election a dry-run for what Democrats would like to do nationwide: use every trick in the book to make our elections less secure.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Why Do Dems Control, HIDE, Election Statistics And GOPers Avoid Trump’s Victory AD2020?

May 11, 2022

Why aren’t we allowed to question the 2020 election?

By D. Parker at American Thinker:

Do you find it strange that we do not dare challenge the prevailing narrative of the ‘democratic’ party of projection and the nation’s socialist media? Especially since questioning electoral integrity is a cottage industry for themselves whenever they lose.

Why does this matter? Consider it from another point of view – why is it so important to the nation’s socialist media and the anti-liberty left? (But, we repeat ourselves.) Why have they obsessed about this for months, viciously attacking anyone who brought up the suspiciously-termed ‘Big Lie’?

Could it be they obsess over this because they are hoping for a repeat performance? In military terms, this is known as ‘preparing the battlefield.’ The Biden Regime already issued a dire warning for the fall, with this key line that shows this is all smoke and mirrors:

In forecasting 100 million potential infections during a cold-weather wave later this year and early next, the official did not present new data or make a formal projection.

They are taking the time to discredit any allegations of their electoral malfeasance in order to issue the same condemnations when they do it again. The new movie, 2000 Mules, from esteemed documentarian Dinesh D’Souza and news anchor Tucker Carlson, are raising these questions, but they are experiencing suppression – why? If you take into consideration all that is being done by the liberticidal left to destroy democracy and this country, this takes on critical importance.

Who can forget how the authoritarian leftists graciously accepted electoral defeat without the merest hint of controversy after losing to Trump in 2016? You can’t? Well, because it never happened! Somehow, we’re supposed to ‘memory hole’ near-constant complaints about ‘Russia collusion’ for four years. So before we go on, let them remind us that only ‘they’ are allowed to question election integrity.

Anti-liberty leftists will always accuse others of what they are doing – they do this for a number of reasons, mainly as a form of disinformation, but you have to consider it must bring a certain amount of perverse pleasure for these hypocrites. They love the Big Lie narrative, because they love to accuse others of being what they are – a socialist workers party, or race-based antagonists dividing people by skin color. Hence, their mantra for the past 18 months is any allusion to the 2020 election being a dumpster fire is of course a ‘Big Lie’, and they repeat it often as admonished by their heroes Hitler and Lenin. (Both are socialists, so they can spare us the fake outrage over the comparison.)

First of all, we’re supposed to forget the Biden laptop scandal that implicated ‘the Big Guy’ – a scandal subsequently suppressed by the biased media. (The same folks that are ever-neutral to a fault except when there’s an election on the line.) Then all bets are off, and that news isn’t fit to print – until 18 months later – when it’s far too late. We are also supposed to forget that news jeopardized an honest election.

Within days of the chaos of mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, and dropbox stuffing, we were told it was in fact the “most secure in history.” One of the ‘debunking’ stories had a great quote that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.’ If the 2020 election was the “most secure in history,” then that extraordinary claim needs some extraordinary proof. That’s correct anti-liberty leftists, if you are going to claim perfection on an historic scale while simultaneously parroting the Big Lie BS (BidenSpeak) however and whenever you possibly can, the burden of proof is on you.  

We are also supposed to forget all the glaring statistical oddities of the 2020 election. That the man who campaigned from his basement, or to tiny crowds in the middle of nowhere, earned 80+ million votes. Even worse, was that his ability to acquire raw vote totals didn’t translate to down-ballot races. Does anyone feel like we’re being set up for the same kind of fairytale story this time around? That those plucky ‘Democrats’ facing long odds in ‘saving the planet’ and initiating change were able to win anyway despite the polling or that their other candidates didn’t get as many votes?

We’re also trying to figure out where the ‘secret history’ of the “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” fits into all of this? Back around the time of the election, it seemed like there was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes between business and labor that cropped up long before the emergence of COVID to ‘protect the election.’

It turns out that’s because there was in fact a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes between business and labor that cropped up long before the emergence of COVID to ‘protect the election.’ But remember, anything about any kind of conspiracy is a Big Lie:

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.

.…

even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream – a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. 

Did you catch that? They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it – George Orwell, call your office. Remember, this was before the COVID pandemic made it necessary to deal with the COVID pandemic:

Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster – and determined to protect it.

Luckily for them, COVID came along, so their conspiracy was justified by a serious crisis instead of only feelings. The other odd thing about all of this is that this article was published back on February 4, 2021; it’s almost as though they wanted to have all of this out in the public record, optimally-timed for it to be seen and then quickly forgotten. Why would they do this? Consider what would happen had they not defensively published this and someone dug it up at some point? With this out there they have all their bases covered. You do have to wonder how this fits into their lie matrix. There wasn’t a conspiracy, but actually there was, or it’s all a big lie, but we keep changing our story anyway. Just remember, we’re not supposed to challenge any of it.

So we go back to the original question: why is all of this important? First, let’s get one thing out of the way, this isn’t about restoring anything. Because we have no doubt this will be the accusation – there aren’t any provisions for this, so that is off the table. But does anyone want to wager that this was part of the plan by the anti-liberty left anyway?

Sure, if Biden and Harris had any honor, they would have resigned by now, but who are we kidding? Anti-liberty leftists lack anything in the way of honor; if they did, they wouldn’t be running around with false monikers like liberal, progressive, or Democrat.

This is important because they are planning on doing it all over again, we realize that’s bloody obvious to anyone on the pro-freedom side, and they’ve already started to telegraph their intentions and meddle in local elections. If it’s supposedly a ‘Big Lie’ then why is there evidence of malfeasance out there – no matter how the anti-liberty left likes to deny it. They have to do it over again because they have nothing else – the people are rejecting the results of their national socialist agenda, so they have no other choice but to cheat and then lie about it.

D Parker is an engineer, inventor, wordsmith, and student of history. The director of communications for a Bill of Rights organization and a long-time contributor to conservative websites.

“Schumer The Dem Ugly” RETREATS!

WaPo: Schumer won’t go for Round Two on filibuster

ED MORRISSEY May 10, 2022

 

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Has Chuck Schumer finally learned math? Or has his Senate Democratic caucus finally learned that Schumer’s terrible at his job? The Washington Post reports that Schumer et al won’t push a vote to change or end the legislative filibuster, even while trying to force a radical abortion bill through the upper chamber.

Apparently Senate Dems have finally reached their limit on stupid and futile gestures:

And that has led to discussions about what Democrats should do next to show their base of voters they will fight to preserve abortion rights. Not on that list? Holding a vote to get rid of the filibuster or to carve out an exception to the rule for abortion legislation.

Relatively few Democratic senators are looking to go down that path again after the party’s attempt to pass a similar carve out for voting rights in January came up short, which highlighted the party’s inability to stay unified and deliver on a major issue for its voters while causing tensions within the conference. …

Democrats’ attempt to get rid of the filibuster to pass voting rights protections in January failed to secure the 50 votes necessary after Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) voted against the measure. Manchin and Sinema have made clear they oppose changing the rules to codify Roe, too.

Not only did the January push fail, it was politically painful for Democrats. The vote drove home Democrats’ limited ability to pass their agenda, pitted Democratic senators against each other and drew attention to the party’s internal divisions rather than Republicans’ opposition to voting rights legislation.

Instead, the Post reports, Democrats will avoid the same outcome and hope to focus voters on Republican “extremism” instead. Joe Biden tried that tack last week when he called MAGA the “most extreme” group in modern American history … and then began to reminisce about the good ol’ days of eating lunch with segregationists in an era where former Klansman Robert Byrd ruled the Senate. For Democrats.

I … don’t think these are the Democrats who can claim to oppose “extremism.” Just sayin’.

One can understand why Senate Democrats don’t want to put on another demonstration of their impotence, though, especially twice in the same election year. But if they want to make an “extremism” argument, pushing the most radical abortion bill possible this close to when vulnerable caucus members have to go before voters in decidedly un-radical states looks almost as stupid and futile as another charge against the filibuster.

NBC News reports that even some Senate Democrats wonder what Schumer’s thinking in pushing this now. The “doomed” abortion bill will “divide the party,” says their First Read column today:

Senate Democrats are once again headed for a show vote — this time on abortion — that risks dividing their party, depressing their base, and looks all but certain to be defeated.

“Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer officially set into motion the procedure [Monday] afternoon to have a key procedural vote on the Democratic bill to provide federal protections for abortion rights on Wednesday. The vote’s timing is still TBD, but is expected in the afternoon on Wednesday, and is still expected to fall short of the 60 votes needed to pass,” NBC’s Frank Thorp and Julie Tsirkin report. …

Of course, Democrats don’t have good options here after the leaked draft opinion raised the likelihood of a decision that axes Roe vs. Wade. And they don’t want to let the decision come this summer without taking some action.

But this comes after other show votes Democrats have taken — on the minimum wage and voting rights — that have divided their party, depressed their base and failed in the 50-50 Senate.

And it looks like history is going to repeat itself.

They actually did have better options. Schumer could have adopted the War Games strategy and realize that the best decision is just not to play, at least not in the moment. Whatever the Supreme Court does, a policy response could have come after the midterms. Alternately, Schumer could have wrapped his arms around the proposal from Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins to codify both Roe and Casey — and their limitations — into statute. Instead, Schumer went almost the full Peter Singer and made Democrats’ abortion push as radical as it could possibly get.

And what will happen? NBC News likely has this right; vulnerable Senate Democrats will be forced to peel off to protect themselves from being painted as radical abortion absolutists in already tough elections. Progressives will then attack them for not being sufficiently radical, not just dividing the party but undermining their GOTV efforts as internecine warfare heats up.

And for what? A performative stunt that Schumer knows has zero chance of passage, and for which Schumer himself won’t go to the mattresses to pass. It’s yet another example of Schumer’s disastrous leadership skills and instincts, which along with Biden’s own incompetencies will doom Democrats this cycle even without this particular fight.

Addendum: Tim Miller is similarly unimpressed with Schumer’s leadership, via our headlines:

What does Chuck Schumer do every day? How is he filling the hours? He has one job, literally! I mean, maybe he’s also trying to engineer a deal on the Electoral Count Act—although there’s scant evidence of movement on that front. And the Senate has various confirmations to push through. But besides that, nothing else matters. Vote counting, reconciliation, and appointments. That’s the to-do list.

Everything that the Senate Democrats are doing that is not on that list is just kayfaybe—which Schumer is also not very good at, by the by. Take the Senate’s plans for tomorrow. To the delight of Republican senators, Schumer plans to make Democratic senators vote on abortion legislation that is both unpopular—it would legalize abortions through all nine months of pregancy, a position most Americans disapprove of—and hopeless, since it does not have the votes to pass.

Here’s a tip: If you are going to force everyone to take a meaningless messaging vote for public-relations purposes, consider choosing a bill that hurts the other party’s popularity, not your own!

Shhhhhhhhhhhh…

“A FETUS HAS NO RIGHTS BECAUSE WHAT……?”

Counterpoint: ‘Product of conception’ rights are human rights

Article sent by Mark Waldeland:

If your argument is that a fetus has no rights because it depends on the care of others, what does that mean for people with disabilities, people who are ill, and refugees? 

By Nathan Johnson

MAY 10, 2022 — StarTribune:

LEIGH VOGEL, NEW YORK TIMESDemonstrators protest outside the Supreme Court after a draft opinion was leaked that overturns Roe v. Wade.

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

The dismaying moral logic Prof. Laura Hermer advances in “Pregnant people have rights. Products of conception don’t” (Opinion Exchange, May 5) would, if applied to other areas of our common life, undercut protection for all vulnerable and voiceless people.

Hermer chides the Supreme Court for assuming in its leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade “that a product of conception, at any stage of development, deserves legal protection against destruction, no matter the wishes of the person gestating it.”

All of us are “products of conception” at one stage of development or another. There is no sound scientific argument for the proposition that products of conception at six months gestation, 2 years of age, or 80 years of age are biologically different enough to merit vastly different levels of legal protection against destruction.

The DNA of each of us products of conception — at all our various stages of development — is the same. Our cellular structure and physical abilities follow a natural course of change from before birth through old age.

Perhaps knowing this, Hermer offers no biological basis for her argument. So how then can she argue that some products of conception deserve no legal protection?

The professor’s answer is that a pre-birth product of conception is dependent on the person caring for it in utero. She states: “Fetuses are not deserving of any independent legal protection, any more than they are able to survive independently. Infants come into the world dependent on the care and love of others, usually the person who gave birth to them. Accordingly, any legal rights they might have should be wholly contingent on each pregnant person’s intentions concerning them.”

Hermer states explicitly that if a product of conception is dependent on the care and love of others, and that care is burdensome, then its legal rights depend on whether the caregiver wants them to exist.

As Hermer notes, infants’ lives depend on the care of others. But so do the lives of people with severe disabilities. So do the lives of ventilated COVID patients. And so do the lives of refugees waiting at the borders of unfamiliar and unwelcoming countries.

Insofar as a woman carrying the fetus was willingly involved in the act leading to conception, the situation differs greatly from that of a person forced to donate body parts to a recipient whose crisis was unrelated to the donor’s actions (a type of case Hermer references). Having ignored this difference, Hermer’s logic seems to apply to any product of conception that depends on others’ care.

Another almost inescapable conclusion of this argument is that “fetuses are not deserving of any independent legal protection” because they are incapable of speaking in their own defense (a part of being dependent). Apparently, being dependent on the care of others and unable to effectively mount a defense of your own life makes one’s legal rights wholly contingent on the burdened caregiver’s intentions. In that case, the severely disabled, the ventilated COVID patient, and the refugee seeking a new home are at risk of their right to live being contingent on the choice of those positioned to care or not care for them.

We must not accept this supremely individualistic, egoistic avoidance of moral responsibility. We all ought to share responsibility for the vulnerable and voiceless in our community. During the pandemic, we have seen shocking displays of egoistic avoidance of moral responsibility for our most vulnerable. The social justice movement of recent years has likewise awakened us to the ways in which we have avoided collective responsibility for our voiceless.

We see how we have provided some “products of conception” with unacceptably low levels of “legal protection against destruction.” We have made their right to live contingent on the intentions of those whose wealth, power and convenience might be burdened by responsibility for them. Hermer’s moral logic further breaks down any sense of communal responsibility for the protection of those whose health, well-being and very existence depend on the rest of us.

We must think differently.

I do credit Prof. Hermer with one accomplishment: Her argument has reignited my commitment (which often cools) to volunteering for, donating to and advocating on behalf of the organizations in our community that protect the poor, the homeless, the refugee and the addicted. Please join me in taking on the burden of responsibility for protecting every life.

Nathan Johnson teaches social studies at Minnehaha Academy. He lives in Minneapolis.

Racist Loony Tune Karine Jean-Pierre Arrives As Joe Biden’s News Press Secretary!

MAY 10, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at PowerLine:

RACE-BAITING AND DISINFORMATION IN THE WHITE HOUSE

We noted here that Joe Biden’s new Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, peddles disinformation in the form of a (false) stolen election conspiracy theory. Is that OK now? It’s all so confusing!

Today we learned that in 2020, Jean-Pierre described the Fox News Channel as racist:

“[Fox News] was racist before coronavirus, they are racist during the coronavirus, Fox News will be racist after the coronavirus,” Jean-Pierre said during a March 15 appearance on MSNBC’s “AM Joy.”

Fox News is the only major White House press organization that can be said to lean to the right. All of the other major organizations that are members of the White House press corps are reliable mouthpieces for the Democratic Party. So Fox speaks for, in effect, around one-half of the American people.

One might think that the job of the White House Press Secretary is to represent the president to all Americans, not just half of them. But Jean-Pierre evidently has no such intention.

Jean-Pierre’s appointment is consistent with the Democrats’ view that politics is not an ongoing debate among fellow-citizens, but rather a war in which one’s domestic adversaries are hated to a far greater degree than any foreign enemy. It is another reminder that liberals are not, for the most part, well-meaning but misguided people.