How to help stop voter fraud

 

Jack Gleason links to the Heritage Foundation’s database documenting proven voter fraud cases at “Electoral Fraud Goes Mainstream" at American Thinker:

. . . The Heritage Foundation has embarked on an extensive investigation of voter fraud -- from both parties, at all levels of government, and in primaries as well as general elections. Katie Samalis-Aldrich and Hans von Spakovsky report “Voter Fraud Cases Continue to Occur, Putting Fair and Free Elections in Jeopardy.“ 

“We recently added nine new cases to the Heritage Election Fraud Database, bringing the total number of entries of proven instances of voter fraud in the database to 1,374. The mounting collection of cases continue to disprove the narrative that voter fraud is not real and that further election integrity measures are not needed.”

These are not “unproven allegations,” but documented court cases where judges and juries have convicted both Democrats and Republicans for not just minor infractions, but significant fraud that has impacted election results. Defendants have pled guilty, paid fines, and spent time in prison. . . .

Further into the article, Mr. Gleason identifies five steps we all can take to improve election integrity:

So what can you do to restore your constitutional right to free and fair elections?

1. Support efforts to clean up voter rolls of people who have died or have moved to another address or out of state. There are databases with this information already, and the only reason not to use them would be to facilitate cheating.

2. Encourage laws to strengthen safeguards for absentee voting and laws that lead to certain prosecution and real penalties for election fraud.

3. Vote in person or submit your absentee ballot as close to election day as possible.

4. Talk to others concerned about election integrity and bring ten of your friends, neighbors, and relatives to the polls with you. Ask if they are happy with the direction of our country and find out if they plan to vote in November. Offer to remind them a day before Election Day and give them a ride.

5. Be alert to the fraud techniques noted in this article and report what you see that’s suspicious to True the Vote, or check this simple list of links for reporting fraud in each state here. You can also submit your information to the FBI tipline. Take photos and videos as evidence.

We are seeing an explosion in crime and violence across the country because of inconsistently applied laws and prosecutors and judges unwilling to convict and punish perpetrators. The same is true with election laws. If individual or organized vote fraudsters see there is little or no consequence to their actions, they will continue to disrupt and alter our elections. . . .

Read the full article here.

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Conservatives: beware of Conservatism, Inc.

 

Ned Ryun at American Greatness cites Michael Anton’s Caveat Emptor for conservatives:

[Michael] Anton says, 

Now I’ll name names. If you’re at National Review, AEI or Heritage Foundation, your job is to pretend to oppose but really support; your whole business model as staff and management collapses if you don’t do that. It’s an open question why the donors donate to these places. I actually believe they’re deceiving their donors for the most part; that is I’d like to believe most donors to Conservatism, Inc. (NRO, AEI, Heritage) are writing checks because they believe these guys are fighting bad leftists, socialists, Communists, America-haters, critical race theory. They’re standing athwart yelling ‘Stop!’ They really think this. They don’t think, ‘I’m writing this check so that Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnoru, Jonah Goldberg and other fat useless grifters can have six-figure jobs to do nothing but sell out my country and pretend that they’re saving it.’ I don’t think they’re doing that, but to be completely clear, that’s what they’re doing.

There’s a lot to unpack just in that one 60-second statement, but Anton is absolutely correct: The overwhelming majority of “conservative” donors, knowingly or unknowingly, are getting played by Conservatism, Inc., which is really about 90 percent of the so-called “conservative” think tanks in D.C. but, quite frankly, it happens even in the smaller ones across the country.

. . .

If, as Anton says, donors think they’re funding these entities to actually fight the leftists, the question should be very simple: proof please of your work. Strongly worded statements and white papers don’t count, for the record. Show us the action items. . . .

If you contribute to conservative organizations or individuals, make sure the recipient(s) really is/are conservative.  Full article is here. 

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Are we asking the right questions?

 

Ned Ryun at American Greatness asks some serious questions. 

You can quibble with me about it all, and no doubt there are some good and well-meaning people mixed up in all of this, but a look at the world around us, from exploding debt to the expansive powers of our massive administrative state to our broken immigration systems to a failed electoral process to Big Tech monopolies crowding out our First Amendment freedoms, should answer all objections. No serious movement would have allowed that to happen or appear to be so full of people who, even now, think all of this is fine. We will just keep pushing on doing the same things that haven’t worked in more than a generation. 

Perhaps if we became more sophisticated in our use of 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 funds, we could address some of our problems in a meaningful way. But instead, we insist on funding retreads like the Heritage Foundation at $80-$100 million a year, AEI at $50-$60 million a year, and the mostly worthless state policy think tanks sucking down hundreds of millions of donor dollars every year. To what end? Serious question. 

None of that money will be or has been used to address the greatest threats to our democracy, from election integrity to Big Tech. Honestly, you could pile 90 percent of that money in the street, light it on fire, and it would be just as effective. 

But instead of thinking about adjusting our priorities, we’re sitting here like programmed robots ready to repeat the same mistakes. Again. And again.

A provocative read;  Mr. Ryun’s full column is here.

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Mail-in ballots and voter fraud

Frank Bullitt’s Editorial today at Issues & Insights makes the case against mail-in ballots:

Democrats and their media scribes have spent more than three years glued to the narrative that President Donald Trump stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton by colluding with Russia to rig the outcome. But they don’t care about the legitimacy of elections. If they did, they wouldn’t be agitating for voting by mail this fall.

“House Democrats have sought to drastically overhaul the American electoral system in light of the pandemic, arguing dramatic change is needed to allow Americans to vote safely,” Politico reported last week.

It seems they have the public on their side. A recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found nearly 60% of voters “either strongly or somewhat support a federal law that would mandate that states ‘provide mail-in ballots to all voters for elections occurring during the coronavirus pandemic.’”

What they don’t have, though, is a good argument to defend their proposal for turning an entire election, or nearly all of one, into a contest of absentee ballots. 

Few elections, even in the U.S., are ever perfectly clean. But the potential for a dirty election sharply increases when ballots are scattered in the wind.

“Absentee ballots are the tools of choice of election fraudsters because they are voted outside the supervision of election officials, making it easier to steal, forge, or alter them, as well as to intimidate voters,” says Hans A. von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation.

The full editorial is here. And the integrity of Ohio’s elections is now at risk. See prior CTP blogs here and here.

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Ned Ryun on “Conservatism Inc.”

Ned Ryun is a columnist and guest on TV news – and I’ve become a fan. I am posting an extract of his recent column at American Greatness, as it’s another skeptical look at “conservative” organizations that probably come looking for contributions from you by mail or email:

It’s about time we had a conversation about the racket in D.C., though it’s probably not the one that springs first to mind. I’m talking about Conservatism Inc.—that ecosystem of mostly worthless and ineffective think tanks and conservative organizations that are part and parcel of the swamp. They came riding into town, some decades ago, all gung-ho about breaking up the administrative state and restoring constitutional government and now, lo and behold, discovered that the swamp could start to feel like a warm, soothing hot tub.

By any metric with which you could measure effectiveness (simply existing doesn’t count) can anyone really tell you why Conservatism, Inc. even exists? A back of the napkin estimate shows that every year, hundreds and hundreds of millions fund these entities, but to what end?

Certainly not to be effective. Over the last 30-40 years, in the supposed heyday of the conservative movement, the size of government has exploded; our national debt has risen from roughly $1 trillion to nearly $23 trillion.

These conservative organizations likewise have grown from relatively grassroots-type groups with budgets of a few million dollars to massive entities, like the Heritage Foundation, with annual budgets approaching $100 million a year. They build swanky office buildings with marble lined bathrooms, employ French chefs, give themselves expense budgets, including even personal drivers, and generally live very comfortable lives, and then sell BS lines to their donors about how they’re changing the world, saving America, and blah blah blah.

. . .

Why do we allow people like the Kochs and the Singers of the world to be identified with conservatism or the GOP? Their bastardized version of capitalism and the free market could very well be the undoing of the party and the movement.

How have we come to this point? Greed is one explanation, with people willing to pimp themselves out and give a veneer of “conservative respectability” to causes and ideas that have almost nothing to do with conservatism.

There are many reasons for how we got here, but the great irony of it all is this: the best hope we’ve had in a generation to give ourselves a chance, Donald J. Trump, didn’t come out of the ecosystem of Conservatism, Inc. So beyond the worthless, corrupt behavior of it, will someone please explain to me why it still exists? Because if it merely exists to pimp out the ideas of Big Tech and pharma and vulture capitalists, the entire thing should be burned to the ground.

The column is here. (Our household contributes to Judicial Watch.)

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How we are losing our Freedom of Speech

Jeffrey Lord has an article titled “Google Bigots and the High-Tech Lynching of Kay James” at The Spectator. The opener:

Kay Cole James, the president of the Heritage Foundation, steps to the podium of the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in suburban Harrisburg and gives the startling update.

Ms. James, at a laughing, self-admitted 70 and famously one of the best known, longtime conservative leaders in the country, announces to the PLC crowd (the PLC is the Pennsylvania version of CPAC and was celebrating its 30th anniversary) that this was her first public comment since she had learned only hours earlier that she had been removed as a recent appointee to Google’s Advanced Technology External Advisory Council. The board, on which she would have served without salary, was designed to review artificial intelligence ethics.

Among other things the outrage mob of over 2000 Google employees accused Kay James of being a “white supremacist.” Kay is an African-American. With a gay son. But Google quickly caved to the mob, dismissing Kay and then dissolving the board entirely.

And Mr. Lord concludes: 

In sum what we are witnessing in Google culture and on too many college campuses is what Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the then-new Soviet Union’s secret police known as the Cheka, described this way: “We represent in ourselves organized terror — this must be said very clearly.” And that “organized terror,” Dzerzhinsky emphasized, involved “the terrorization, arrests, and extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles.” Or, as in the case of Kay James, the mother of an openly gay son [and] her race.

Kay James just had an up-close and personal encounter with this totalitarian mindset — from a major American high-tech company. The organized terror of a Google lynch mob came for her. The quite deliberate message for the rest of America from Google is: Watch out. The next time it could be you.

Full article is here. Alternative search engines to Google include DuckDuckGo and StartPage.

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Tax cuts and Ohio take-home pay

image credit: walorski.house.gov

The Daily Signal website has a report on the real dollars-and-cents impact of the Trump tax cuts. It also has an interactive map, so you can select Ohio and find how much the tax cuts benefit taxpayers in your district.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has been one of the strongest and boldest reforms of President Donald Trump’s first term in office. According to analysis from The Heritage Foundation, the tax law will give hardworking Americans tax breaks in every congressional district and in every state.

Across the nation at large, the average American will take home on average $1,400 more of their paycheck in 2018. For married couples with two children, that figure doubles to just under $3,000.

>>> You can find the average tax cut in your district here [interactive map].

While higher-taxed districts will see more in dollar savings as a result of the tax cuts, they are certainly not the only winners from the Trump tax cuts. In fact, lower-income districts will feel more relief in their tax burden, as they will see a higher percentage of their taxes cut than Americans in higher-income areas.

Taxpayers in the 11^th District (represented by Marcia Fudge) saw approx. $898 more in annual take-home pay.

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Common Core updates: Ohio and Wisconsin

Art credit: www.redstate.com

The Heritage Foundation posted this from The Daily Signal:

On the heels of Republican victories last week, attempts to replace Common Core with homegrown standards are resurfacing in states across the nation.

Most prominently, elected officials in Wisconsin and Ohio are spearheading efforts to reclaim more control of education.

On Nov. 5, the day after the midterm elections, an Ohio House committee passed a bill to repeal the Common Core standards.

Although officials on both sides doubt the bill will garner enough support to pass by the end of the year, they are hopeful the legislature will take up the issue in 2015.

But to be safe, Common Core supporters such as state Rep. Gerry Stebelton, R-Lancaster, say they will double down on efforts to defeat the repeal bill. “It deserved to die,” said Stebelton of the bill. “It has no merit.”

Read the rest here. 

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