Voter fraud update

image credit:thedailysheeple.com

It's better than stuffing the ballot box. Investors Business Daily picked up the report:

Voter Fraud: When President Donald Trump brought up the idea that non-citizens were casting ballots in elections, the reaction was fast and furious. Such a thing, if it exists at all, is exceedingly rare, we were told. But when one state decided to take a close look, it found something quite different.

After a yearlong voter-fraud probe, Texas discovered that, lo and behold, 95,000 people identified as non-citizens had voter registrations. What's more, 58,000 of them voted in one or more Texas elections.

When Attorney General Ken Paxton led the state's investigation, he noted that Texas had already found 165 non-citizens in four counties who had cast 100 illegal votes in two years.

But wait. Isn't all this stuff about non-citizens voting a load of bull? When Trump appointed a voter-fraud commission in 2017, Democrats and the press howled in protest.

Sure, Trump almost certainly exaggerated the number of non-citizen voters. But in response, Time magazine declared that we "know that ineligible non-citizens do not vote in American elections." Vox.com, the "explanatory" news site, derided Trump as "indulging the long-standing myth of the non-citizen voter." Harvard researchers said that there is "no evidence" that non-citizens vote.

Less than a year after he put it together, Trump disbanded his commission, not because it didn't find anything, but because it faced a fusillade of lawsuits and stonewalling from state election officials.

More here. What about Ohio? Eric Eggers at Breitbart reported on the most recent election cycles:

Republican Troy Balderson clings to a narrow margin in last night’s special election for Ohio’s 12th Congressional district, underscoring the impact voter fraud can have in key elections around the country.

The separation of 1700 votes, or less than one percent, highlights the recent attempt by Democratic activists to fight efforts to prevent voter fraud from occurring.

For the past four years, George Soros has spent millions of dollars trying to weaken Ohio’s election security by funding efforts to both block its implementation of Voter ID and prevent the state from removing inaccurate registrations.

Soros pledged $5 million to fund Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias’s efforts to fight voter ID laws in Ohio and two other states ahead of the 2016 election. 

. . .

Consider that 170 registered voters listed as being over 116 years old still existed on the rolls of Ohio’s 12th Congressional when GAI accessed the data last August. That’s 10 percent of Balderson’s current margin of victory, pending provisional ballots. And 72 voters over the age of 116 who “live” in Balderson’s district cast ballots in the 2016 election.

But the Left hasn’t given up trying to create conditions favorable for voter fraud in Ohio. As former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has pointed out, “hyper-partisan liberals…have their eyes on Ohio.” Electing a Democrat as the state’s top elections official would undoubtedly roll back the hard-won safeguards Ohio has implemented. And as Blackwell points out, as goes Ohio, so goes the Presidency.

And it does not look good. Just two days ago, Peter Skurkiss at American Thinker reported:

Ben Stein, a once on-again, off-again conservative, now associates himself with a left-wing advocacy group called Policy Matters Ohio as a "staff associate."  Stein's affiliation with this non-profit came to light when he recently authored an opinion piece in the Akron Beacon Journal titled "Make it automatic for the people." 

Make what automatic?

Why, make voter registration automatic.  As if voting laws and policies haven't been weakened enough, there is now a drive across the country to make voter registration automatic.  It goes under the name Automatic Voter Registration (AVR), and 15 states have already enacted it in one form or another.

AVR works basically like this.  When a person has an interaction with a state government agency (say, Department of Motor Vehicle or a welfare agency), the data he gives will automatically be transferred to the Election Board.  And – presto – that person is registered to vote, unless choosing to opt out.  

Stein is disingenuous when he says AVR would screen out those ineligible to vote, such as non-citizens.  The fact is, there's no reliable way to ensure that all registrants are citizens.  

Read the rest here.

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Voter fraud in the millons

art credit: omnithought.org

At least 3.5 million more people are on U.S. election rolls

 than are eligible to vote. 

Investors Business Daily reports:

Elections: American democracy has a problem — a voting problem. According to a new study of U.S. Census data, America has more registered voters than actual live voters. It's a troubling fact that puts our nation's future in peril.

The data come from Judicial Watch's Election Integrity Project. The group looked at data from 2011 to 2015 produced by the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, along with data from the federal Election Assistance Commission.

As reported by the National Review's Deroy Murdock, who did some numbers-crunching of his own, "some 3.5 million more people are registered to vote in the U.S. than are alive among America's adult citizens. Such staggering inaccuracy is an engraved invitation to voter fraud."

. . .

In his spread sheet, he listed Delaware county as the Ohio county with the largest number of “ghost” voters. Delaware County includes heavily red Columbus. His chart did not list Cuyahoga County, so I did a little search of my own and found the following at a blog called End of The American Dream, by a blogger named Michael Snyder, reporting on the 2012 election:

Barack Obama received more than 99% of the vote in more than 100 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio on election day.  In fact, there were a substantial number of precincts where Mitt Romney got exactly zero votes.  So how in the world did this happen?  Third world dictators don’t even get 99% of the vote.  Overall, Mitt Romney received 30.12% of the vote in Cuyahoga County.  There were even a bunch of precincts in Cuyahoga County that Romney actually won.  But everyone certainly expected that Cuyahoga County would be Obama territory.  And in most of the precincts that is exactly what we saw – large numbers of votes for both candidates but a definite edge for Obama. 

However, there are more than 100 precincts in Cuyahoga County where the voting results can only be described as truly bizarre.  Yes, we always knew that urban areas would lean very heavily toward Obama, but are we actually expected to believe that Obama got over 99% of the votes in those areas?  In more than 50 different precincts, Romney received 2 votes or less.  Considering how important the swing state of Ohio was to the national election, one would think that such improbable results would get the attention of somebody out there.  Could we be looking at evidence of election fraud hidden in plain sight?

Perhaps if there were just one or two precincts where Obama got more than 99% of the vote we could dismiss the results as “statistical anomalies” and ignore them.

But there were more than 100 precincts where this happened in the most important swing state in the nation.

Maybe there is some rational explanation for the numbers that you are about to see.  If there is, I would really love to hear it.

What makes all of this even more alarming is that there were reports of voting machine problems during early voting in Ohio.  It was being reported that some voters were claiming that they tried to vote for Romney but that the voting machines kept recording their votes as votes for Obama…

Lots more here, including specific data on precincts in Cuyahoga County.

Some Cleveland Tea Party readers often volunteer at the polls as observers. Glenn Reynolds has argued for a return to paper ballots. I wish.

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SCOTUS internet sales tax ruling

image credit: usatoday.com

This SCOTUS decision will affect all of us. Sparta Report just announced its decision to close down its little sales center at its blogsite:

effective today, the Sparta Report Shop will no longer be in operation due to the disastrous decision by the Supreme Court’s “republican wing” to allow states to charge out of state businesses with sales tax. We are not interested in complying with 2.5 thousand and more localities and states and keeping track of the various stupidities of the corrupt local political tax wrangling.

Investors Business Daily has more:

Taxes: Whatever you think about the issue of taxing internet sales, the simple fact is that the Supreme Court has just guaranteed that people across the country will now be paying more in state taxes. It's hard for us to see how this is good news.

In its 5-4 decision on South Dakota v. Wayfair, the court overturned two previous rulings that prevented states from taxing sales of out-of-state companies. That meant a catalog company based in Maine didn't have to navigate 45 state sales-tax laws to figure out how much each customer owed, and then remit that money to the right states.

Brick-and-mortar stores have been trying to lift this ban for decades, because, they say, it unfairly tilts the playing field in favor of catalog and online retailers. 

According to the Government Accountability Office, this break cost states up to $13.4 billion in lost revenue last year alone. And, retailers say it cost jobs and hurt local economies.

Not surprisingly, Amazon.com  (AMZN), Shopify (SHOP), Etsy (ETSY), Wayfair (W) and other e-commerce stocks dropped on Thursday.

The Supreme Court ruling was notable not just because it did something it rarely does — namely, overturn previous decisions. (The most recent, Quill v North Dakota, was in 1992.) The court also split in a highly unusual way.

On the majority side were rock-ribbed conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, who sided with Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion. 

But so did stalwart liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Kennedy argued that the explosive growth of online retail rendered the court's previous rulings outdated.

Three of the other liberals on the court, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, sided with Chief Justice Roberts' dissent. Roberts argued that it should be up to Congress to make a change like this.

Whatever the merits of the decision, the Court's ruling means not only higher taxes for consumers, but higher prices.

.  .

More Taxes To Come?

Worse still, the court may have opened the door to letting states impose other taxes on out-of-state firms.

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform argues that states could use this ruling to impose corporate taxes and even income taxes across state lines.

"If physical nexus is no longer required for sales taxes ,then it is no longer required for personal or corporate income taxes," he said. "Now, California (or any state or city that loses population through exit) can tax people and businesses who do their best to avoid that state or city."

If you think that's a fanciful prediction, you haven't been paying attention. State governments will take every opportunity they can to raise taxes — especially if their own residents aren't the ones paying them.

In the end, it makes Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts' dissent look all the wiser.

Read the rest of the IBD report here.

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