Post-election exploding cigars

art credit: The Hockey Writers

Following the Trump win six weeks ago, the Democrat party and its supporters have been apoplectic. And they have been employing all sorts of  tactics to undo the results.

First, the strategy was to claim Hillary won the popular vote, so the electoral vote was not a true measure of the winning campaign. But nobody knows how many illegals voted in California due to Motor Voter laws, and some estimates go as high as 3 million. Without those and other potential illegal votes elsewhere, nobody can say whether Hillary or Trump won the popular vote. (Two short essays on the Electoral College are here and here.)

And when that strategy didn’t get any traction, the Democrats (presumably backed by the Clinton campaign and her financiers) got Green Party candidate Jill Stein to demand recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That blew up in their face, too. Pennsylvania denied Stein legal standing, Wisconsin’s recount yielded an additional 100+ votes for Trump, and the Michigan recount was discredited when something like a third of the tallies in Wayne County (Detroit) showed more votes counted than were actually cast.

So now the Clintons et al are coming out with two more strategies to attempt to either change the results of the election or to de-legitimize to the maximum extent possible, the Trump win. Now, Hillary is blaming Vladimir Putin for hacking the election, even though what is hackable is the emails exchanged within the DNC, not to mention Hillary’s own email server that was notoriously exposed and unprotected. She and Podesta also continue to blame Comey and the FBI. And the lamestream media is repeating this baloney despite the fact that there is NO evidence for these claims. (Anything but the obvious problem of an unlikeable and flawed candidate with a long list of alleged criminal activity who didn’t campaign much in the months leading up to the election…)

DNC supporters are now doing everything they can to intimidate duly chosen electors who will cast their votes in the Electoral College on Monday; many Trump electors are on the receiving end of everything from death threats to mail/telephone/social media pressure to withhold their vote or cast it instead for Hillary, even when many states have laws that require electors to vote for the winning candidate in their respective states.

President Obama piled onto the most recent why-Hillary-lost “narratives” before flouncing off to Hawaii for his final Christmas vacation on the taxpayer’s dime. FLOTUS is already complaining that America now understands what it is like to be “hopeless” – as she joins her family in Hawaii to vacation on the taxpayers’ dime (“Hopeless In Hawaii”).

Despite all the interference in and attempts to undermine the election process, despite all the phony baloney accusations, it is likely that the results of the Electoral College votes on Monday will lead to the Jan. 20 inauguration of Donald J. Trump.

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Track your ballot! Make sure your vote counts.

art credit: NewsNowDC.com

If you have already mailed in your ballot, here’s another precaution you can take. I just found this on Gateway Pundit:

From a Trump supporter:

I am a single, Republican mother of two younger kids in small town Illinois. Within my friends, I keep seeing and hearing of all these examples of voter fraud going on right now with Trump supporters.

Three well-respected people within the same household in my town who mailed in their ballots in favor of Trump went online to make sure their votes were counted – only to find they were not going to be counted because the signatures on the ballot didn’t match those on their letter. They would have never seen this if they hadn’t gone online to verify!

How many others who have no thought to follow up on their vote are having the same thing happen to them?

Track your ballot and verify. Here’s the track-my-ballot link at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

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Voting machine glitches, paper ballots, and early voting

  

art credit: CNN Money

Today, Drudge links to a report at Info Wars about voting machine “glitches” in Texas:

  

Chambers County Clerk Heather Hawthorne issued a press release Tuesday announcing electronic voting would be suspended until the glitches affecting voting machines could be corrected.

. . .

“Moving temporarily to paper ballots in such a situation is standard protocol,” Hawthorne reportedly told 12NewsNow.

On Wednesday, Hawthorne issued another press release claiming the machines had been fixed.

Interesting that this particular Board of Elections could, as a matter of “standard protocol,” switch almost immediately to paper ballots after a “glitch” was discovered. But in the comments below the report were several computer programmer types who said that any student who completed Computer Programming 101 could program a voting machine; my husband is a professional programmer specializing in large databases, and he concurs. It's not difficult. Any “glitch” was unlikely to be a careless programming error. More likely to be deliberate. And since the "glitch" was fixed almost immediately, it would appear to be a pretty simple "correction." 

Voting machine "glitches." Voting without valid i.d. Voting more than once. Early voting ballots counted before Election Day. The list of potential opportunities for voter fraud is a long one. 

What can be done to put a drag chain on potential voter fraud in your precinct? Over at the American Thinker blog, Crystal Hoadley recommends that voters who are planning to pull the lever for Trump vote “as close as possible to Election Day.” Read why here. 

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Project Veritas Video #2: HOW TO commit Voter Fraud

(accessed on YouTube)

Rigging the Election - Video II: Mass Voter Fraud

Stay with it, despite some repetition. (Some of the repetition is probably to cover the base in case the viewer did not already watch Video #1 – or just to drive home a point). You may want to take a shower after you view it. It is sleazy dirty stuff.

And after that, share it on social media, or take up O’Keefe’s request that you forward it (or link) by email or tweet to every “journalist” or “news organization” that you can.

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A Rigged Election: Project Veritas- Clinton, Collusion & Criminality

James O’Keefe released the first of his undercover Project Veritas videos that capture explicit statements from personnel identified with various political organizations working to disrupt Trump and Pence events. These are the people and organizations behind, for example, the cancellation, due to security concerns, of the Trump rally in Chicago. These organizations are not supposed to coordinate with campaigns and the DNC, and you will learn how they position themselves to get around the laws to achieve their goals.

Part 1 of “A Rigged Election,” above, is 16 minutes along. It is very disturbing to watch, and you will need a strong stomach. There is obviously more to come.

Part 1, all by itself, would be a a thorough rejoinder to Greg Gutfeld’s disingenuous statement yesterday on Fox that Trump’s sounding the alarm over a rigged election is premature – sort of like challenging the referee before the game is played. Oh? 

What about the voter registration fraud we are already seeing in Colorado, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere ? What about the actual voter fraud documented from the 2012 election. And now we have Part 1 of “A Rigged Election” that shows the individuals, organizations, and methods underlying all this disruption, fraud, and corruption.

The second video below (h/t Sundance) is James O’Keefe’s short message on what Tea Party people can do to bust through the corporate media black-out on the Part 1 video, per above.

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Voter fraud: minimal or in the millions?

art credit: TheRealSide

 Data suggests millions of voter registrations are fraudulent or invalid. That’s enough to tip an election, easily.

JohnGibb, writing at The Federalist, argues that the potential for voter fraud is real, and actual voter fraud is a bigger problem than we might have thought:

This week, liberals have been repeating their frequent claim that voter fraud doesn’t exist. A recent Salon article argues that “voter fraud just isn’t a problem in Pennsylvania,” despite evidence to the contrary. Another article argues that voter fraud is entirely in the imagination of those who use voter ID laws to deny minorities the right to vote.

Yet as the election approaches, more and more cases of voter fraud are beginning to surface. In Colorado, multiple instances were found of dead people attempting to vote. Stunningly, “a woman named Sara Sosa who died in 2009 cast ballots in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013.” In Virginia, it was found that nearly 20 voter applications were turned in under the names of dead people.

In Texas, authorities are investigatingcriminals who are using the technique of “vote harvesting” to illegally procure votes for their candidates. “Harvesting” is the practice of illegally obtaining the signatures of valid voters in order to vote in their name without their consent for the candidate(s) the criminal supports.

These are just some instances of voter fraud we know about. It would be silly to assume cases that have been discovered are the only cases of fraud. Indeed according to a Pew Research report from February 2012, one in eight voter registrations are “significantly inaccurate or no longer valid.” Since there are 146 million Americans registered to vote, this translates to a stunning 18 million invalid voter registrations on the books. Further, “More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters, and approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.” Numbers of this scale obviously provide ripe opportunity for fraud.

Don’t Let Data Contradict My Narrative

Yet in spite of all this, a report by the Brennan Center at New York Univeristy claims voter fraud is a myth. It argues that North Carolina, which passed comprehensive measures to prevent voter fraud, “failed to identify even a single individual who has ever been charged with committing in-person voter fraud in North Carolina.” However, this faulty reasoning does not point to the lack of in-person voter fraud, but rather to lack of enforcement mechanisms to identify and prosecute in-person voter fraud.

The science of criminal justice tells us that many crimes go unreported, and the more “victimless” the crime, the more this happens. The fact is, a person attempting to commit voter fraud is very unlikely to be caught, which increases the incentive to commit the crime.

. . ..

We have no reason to believe that the low number of prosecutions means only that exact amount of voter fraud is happening. Rather, it could mean a lack of enforcement is failing to reveal the bulk of the violations that are occurring. Thus, as with many types of crimes, especially victimless crimes, the real number of cases is likely significantly higher than the number reported.

. . .

What are some solutions to this problem? States like Michigan have Poll Challenger programs, where observers from both parties may be present at voter check-in tables at precincts. They check each voter’s ID against a database of registered voters for that precinct to ensure the person attempting to vote is actually legally qualified to vote in that precinct. If there’s a discrepancy, the poll challenger may officially challenge the ballot. Other states should implement similar programs.

States should sponsor initiatives to remove dead voters and correct the registrations of people registered in multiple states (make them choose just one state). Since many local jurisdictions are reluctant to clean their voter rolls, federal or state oversight with teeth may be necessary.

. . .

So let us not believe false claims that voter fraud doesn’t exist. It’s real, and we must work to stop it, while making sure those who are eligible to vote but without proper ID are accommodated fairly.

Read the entire article here.

If you are already signed up to work the polls, or act as an observer, etc., you’re doing your bit. What can others do at this late stage of the game? One thing is to spot check voter registrations in your own family. We know a lot of dead people are never purged from the rolls. So it occurs to me that the parent who died within the last several years might still be registered to vote. I can go to the BOE and check out that one in person; it probably helps if you have the photo ID, the death certificate, and (at least in my case) standing (power of attorney or documentation as executor). 

I can also check my own; I’ve been a registered voter my entire life, but for two recent elections, the signature facsimile in the sign-in book was not even close to my own signature. I wonder if that meant my details were also registered in another precinct. So I can check that as well.

Please add your suggestions in the comments.

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No more “Golden Week” early voting in Ohio

art credit: www.americanthinker.com

Good news on Cleveland.com:  

Appeals court says Ohio can scrap 'Golden Week': A federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday that Ohio can shorten its early-voting period, handing a victory to Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted over Ohio Democrats who challenged the change. As cleveland.com's Robert Higgs explains, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel overturned a lower-court ruling that the state could not get rid of its first week of early voting – the so-called "Golden Week," during which Ohioans can register and vote early at the same time. Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper indicated the party may appeal.

Who benefits from “Golden Week” except those looking for opportunities to stuff the ballot box? This ruling is at least a start to restore some integrity to Ohio voting.

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J. Christian Adams on rigged elections

art credit: therealside.com

J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. His New York Times bestselling book is Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery).  His website is www.electionlawcenter.com.

Many readers will recognize Adams as a frequent guest on prime-time TV news programs. He recently weighed in on various aspects of voter fraud, all of which will affect this year’s election. Here’s an extract from his article at PJ Media:

The integrity of our elections [is] suffering from a coordinated, multi-million dollar attack on multiple fronts. It’s far more complicated than one centralized high-powered conspiracy to “rig” the election. A more sophisticated understanding of what is happening is essential to combat the real threat to our elections.

Here are five ways that the integrity of elections are under attack:

5. Big money organizations fight against election integrity

Large brick-and-mortar organizations with multi-million dollar endowments are fighting to undermine the integrity of American elections. These organizations, such as Project Vote, Demos, the ACLU, Advancement Project, and the League of Women Voters have vast financial resources. They have used these resources in key states such as Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and elsewhere to attack election integrity measures. They bring attacks against Voter ID laws, but they also bring more important efforts, such as attacks against citizenship verification.

. . .

I am involved in litigation across the country to help election integrity. In one lawsuit in a swing state, we discovered that non-citizens were voting illegally in Presidential elections. This is both a federal and state felony. When we asked the election supervisor for records showing referral to law enforcement officials, none existed -- because no referral was ever made. Never mind that dozens and dozens of aliens were participating in the election process in just one county. Imagine how many participate statewide. Yet nothing was done to prosecute the illegal voting -- so word spreads through the community that illegal voting is a hobby that goes unpunished.

Rigged?

These same big money organizations send swarms of lawyers to the smallest court hearings, so many that sometimes there isn’t enough room for them in the courtroom.

. . .

Non-citizen voting helps the left win elections. Most of the groups in this traveling roadshow are 501(c)(3) charities.

I doubt very much that Lois Lerner’s Exempt Organizations Unit at the IRS has sent them a letter asking for their social media passwords or the text of prayers recited at meetings.

4. A focus on process brings policy results

Republicans focus on policy. Democrats focus on process. Democrats and the left know if they alter the rules, they can win the elections. Better still, if they alter the rules and brand it a civil rights matter, they disguise their partisan goals with something that sounds better.

What do I mean by process?

Years ago, we all voted on Election Day. That made it harder for the machine to motivate the unmotivated on one single day. Now? The election is spread out over weeks of early voting.

We used to register to vote in advance. Now, instant registration is another process that helps the demographic that has difficulty planning ahead. It means you can register and vote at the same time, making it harder to verify eligibility.

In Ohio, you could register to vote and vote weeks in advance at the same time. When Ohio discovered that California and New York residents such as Amy Little and Yolanda Hippensteele were registering and voting simultaneously for Obama in 2008, Ohio changed the law to eliminate this “Golden Week.”  Naturally, the Big Money Organizations (See #[5], above) sued.

Bush-appointed federal judge Michael Watson ruled that such a change violates the Voting Rights Act and struck down the election integrity measure.

Out-of-precinct voting, mandatory voter registration, felon voting, dirty voter rolls, underage registration, and simple refusal to enforce election integrity laws are process priorities of the left.

You don’t need someone sitting in a smoke-filled command bunker to rig an election. There are more subtle and more effective ways to affect elections.

3. Big Law

The well-funded organizations fighting to block election integrity laws are helped by some of the nation’s largest law firms -- for free!

These law firms use the inflated fees their corporate clients pay to subsidize helping left-wing groups attack election integrity laws.

. . .

The attack on Voter ID isn’t the only instance where large law firms donate their free time to leftist organizations with multi-million dollar endowments. Nearly any time there is an attack on election integrity, Big Law helps.

. . .

2. Failure to maintain rolls

Millions of voter registrations are wrong or out of date. Hundreds of counties, including many in swing states, have more registrants than eligible people alive. That doesn’t mean millions of votes are being cast illegally -- but corrupted rolls provide the perfect environment for election corruption. It’s what allowed Democratic Congressional nominee Wendy Rosen to vote twice for President Obama in both Maryland and Florida.

The guiltiest culprit for corrupted rolls is the Obama Justice Department. It refuses to do anything about the failure to keep rolls clean. Their failure to act is both deliberate and ideologically driven.

. . .

If Trump becomes president, sweeping away the lawlessness inside the Justice Department that turned the federal government into silent partners with election gangsters like Wendy Rosen should be a top priority.  It’s no accident that vote fraudsters across the country, including Melowese Richardson and others, get a free ride from this DOJ and never face criminal prosecution.

1.    Academics and media lying about election integrity

The final way our electoral system is endangered is through the pack of lies pushed by academics and the media. If you pay attention to legacy media, voter fraud doesn’t exist -- only racists want election integrity, and Jim Crow is back.

When it comes to covering election integrity, some of the media are lazy, the rest are activists with by-lines.

. . .

Is the November election rigged? Certainly not in the way you might have thought it was. The election is afflicted with something far more dangerous than a single plot to flip the outcome. The affliction is diffuse, decentralized, and funded by millions of dollars.

Read the rest here (and weep).

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More on voter fraud from The Hill

Ramirez cartoon credit: ldjackson.net

More on the potential for voter fraud this year, this from Ian M. Smith at The Hill a couple of days ago:

Illegal aliens have never had more incentives and ability to vote in our elections as they do this cycle. After being told by the globalist elite [their] illegal entry into the country is without consequence, helps rather than hinders American workers, and unites the national culture, any existing moral qualms of further violating the law, such as by voting, have been thoroughly scrubbed away. Former president Bill Clinton all but ensured this in his speech at the DNC Convention last week.

Speaking directly to illegal aliens, Clinton stated to an applauding audience of delegates that “if you love this country, you’re working hard, you’re paying taxes and you’re obeying the law and you’d like to become a citizen, you should choose immigration reform over somebody that wants to send you back.” Unfortunately for Bill, illegal aliens (and non-citizens in general) aren’t supposed to be ‘choosing’ anyone. Like in every other country in the world, here in America only citizens are supposed to vote.

Despite its unprecedented foreign-born population (currently over 40 million), the US protects against illegal voter-registration by relying on an attestation system. Under federal law, provided one can show a driver’s license or social security number, all a non-citizen need to do if they really want to vote is check a box “confirming” they’re an eligible voter. In other words, it’s an honor system. . . . 

Despite the fact that an illegal vote casted is a citizen-vote cancelled, similar defensive measures are apparently not seen as warranted in the area of voting.

On both the state and federal levels, incentives for illegal alien-voting abound. . . .

. . . Meanwhile, amongst illegal aliens in general, the use of fake or stolen SSNs is commonplace. . . .

The record-close election between Al Gore and George W. Bush led to the formation of a federal commission directed by former president Jimmy Carter to study voter reforms. Notably, its final report stated that better identification requirements were essential because, first, “[i]n close or disputed elections…a small amount of fraud could make the margin of difference… [a]nd second, the perception of possible fraud contributes to low confidence in the system.”

In this current election, where American confidence in general and the integrity of our laws has taken center stage, comments like Bill Clinton’s show exactly why the public’s so angry and frustrated. Whether disdaining democratically-enacted laws, such as our voting or immigration laws, is a shrewd or foolhardy campaign strategy, we shall see.

The rest of the article is here.

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How To Steal Elections: Part 2

art credit: electionfraud2016.wordpress.com

Yesterday, I posted some of Paul Murphy’s July 19 column, “How Democrats Steal Elections” that was published on the American Thinker website. Another column on that website appeared yesterday; it is by Michael N. Mattia, and it is no less disturbing. Some take-aways:

Now that Hillary Rodham Clinton is the Democrats’ candidate for President of the United States, prepare for the most fraudulent, corrupt and dishonest if not outright criminal election process in the history of this country. That has to be the takeaway from all the recent revelations regarding the Clintons and the DNC coronation of Clinton. Significantly aiding this criminality are Obama and the Democratic Party itself.

Obama has co-opted every federal agency tasked with providing honest oversight of the election process.  From the Federal Election Commission to the FBI and ultimately the Justice Department itself, the Clintons and the Democrats  know that there will be no negative consequences to any and all law breaking that they undertake to steal the election.  Voter intimidation by gangs of Clinton thugs will be given the response that the situation will be “investigated.”  In modern day Government usage “investigation” is simply a euphemism for “we intend to do nothing.”   

Release of e-mails proving the corruption and collusion of the Democratic National Committee with the Clinton campaign are simply ignored by the Media and the watch dog agencies of the Government.  No matter how many more e-mails are released from the DNC or how criminally evidentiary they may be, the Clintons know that nothing will dampen the enthusiasm of their lemming like supporters nor in any way endanger their movement to dominance. 

. . .

The only things that drive the Clintons are greed and the lust for power.  There are no religious, ethical or moral constraints on their actions.  If there is enough money dangled in front of her, she will be more than willing to sell out the Country, blackmail be damned.  An elected Democrat, be he Congressman or Senator, would never in a million years vote for impeachment of President Clinton and absent such an action, there is no other way to remove her from office.  She would pack the Supreme Court with ultra-liberal judges acting as a rubber stamp for whatever unlawful or unconstitutional efforts she might embark upon. 

It is now up to the Republican governors, especially, to plan for the onslaught of illegal election activities in their States. [emphasis added]  It is a foregone conclusion that the Democrat governors will turn a blind eye if not wholeheartedly support such activities in order to secure the election of Clinton -- while at the same time giving lip service to the purity of the process.  The tidal wave of Democrat lawyers which will descend on Red States prior to the election in attempts to stymie valid election processes and results will make all previous actions pale in comparison. 

The Republican Party needs to mobilize, now, the assets needed to counteract these people.  State and local law enforcement agents need to be trained in how to specifically deal with the thugs that will be unleashed to effect voter intimidation.   These hooligans will be trained to promote confrontation with Law Enforcement in such a way as to milk the most propaganda from these events.  Be assured that the Mainstream Media will put the most negative spin on efforts to control the intimidation.  Be prepared for an onslaught of charges of voter dis-enfranchisement. Plan, plan, plan, now for the inevitable no holds barred attacks on truth and freedom.

Even if Hillary does not make it to the election (health issues, indictment, whatever), all these tactics will be in play to ensure a win for Fauxcahontas, Biden, Bernie, or fill-in-the-blank. 

This blogger doesn’t hold out much hope that Gov. Kasich will take any meaningful steps to ensure an honest count of the votes in Ohio or to make any efforts to stop intimidation efforts. He couldn’t even see his way clear to show up at the RNC in Cleveland, in his home state. Some voters can do some heavy lifting – by manning the polling stations. At least that might get us past this next election with a modicum of integrity in the vote count in Ohio.

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How To Steal Elections

Photo credit: allenbwest.com

Over the past several weeks, several commentators have been analyzing the prospects for a November election decided by fraud. The potential for fraud and a stolen election this year is yuge, and one of the first articles that caught my eye was at American Thinker. Here’s an excerpt from Paul Murphy’s July 19 column, “How Democrats Steal Elections”:

The reality is that in the 2016 election it now takes more than a majority for a Republican to win. Romney, for example, won about two thirds of all precincts nationwide and probably got in the range of 55% of the verifiable vote, but lost the election to nearly unanimous Obama support from nearly 100% turnout of potentially eligible voters in inner city precincts in key states like Ohio, where the certainty of being accused of racism for even thinking you couldn't get that level of turnout for a week of free pizza and beer prevented any form of verification.

Electoral cheating has probably existed since the second election ever held, but cheating by American Democrats has now reached levels never seen before in a major democracy. Basically what seems to have happened to electoral integrity is akin to the fate of the legendary frog in water slowly brought to a boil with conservatives only marginally aware that a a lot of small battles are being lost and the Democrats relentlessly pursuing four closely linked, long term, and deeply dishonorable, national policies:

Democrats hide the extent of fraud by combining a line of patter denying the existence of voter fraud while accusing Republicans of it with media blitzes publicizing and denigrating isolated, and often not very credible, claims like those that some voting machine somewhere mis-recorded a few conservative votes as liberal.

This is stagecraft 101 for magicians and propagandists alike: focusing audience attention on the insignificance of the occasional process failure in elections where millions of votes are counted while simultaneously raising emotional and credibility barriers against those who might otherwise get people to look a bit more carefully at what other members of the Democrat team are doing.

. . .

The Secretary of State Project, (apparently originally funded by George Soros) which seeks to put Democrats in charge of both the voting, and the vote counting, processes has now succeeded to the point that a majority of American voters are affected.

Key strategies implemented by these apparatchiks include:

Fighting the use of voter id and/or voter list verification though any means possible including slow walking legislated implementations, lawfare, inviting federal intrusion into state matters, and directing state and local authority funds aimed at remediation toward the acquisition and use of dysfunctional technologies with long histories of delay, uncontrolled cost escalation, and eventual failure;

Developing and perpetuating utterly ineffective processes for delivering or counting military ballots (which tend to favor Republicans);

Refusing to reform equally incompetent and ineffective processes for preventing felons, illegals, or the dead (all of whom tend to vote Democrat) from swaying elections; and,

Extending the duration of, while weakening eligibility and verification criteria for, all forms of advance voting.

Using litigation, and the threat of litigation, to sway electoral process decisions in favor of Democrats and against Republicans.

. . .

In particular abuse of the Help America Vote Act (2002) has enabled Democrats to insert significant new opportunities for voting fraud into the system.

. . .

Read the rest of Murphy’s column here. More blogs on this subject coming soon.

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Voter Photo ID Lobby Day

From our friends at the Ohio Christian Alliance: 

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Photo ID law in Wisconsin is upheld

Earlier this week, Cleveland Tea Party Patriots learned about the initiatives to require Photo IDs in order to vote. Chris Long addressed the issue as it concerns voter fraud as opposed to voter integrity. Ohio voters can take a look at a recent development on a voter ID law in Wisconsin, via Hot Air:

Surprise: SCOTUS upholds Wisconsin voter-ID law

POSTED AT 12:01 PM ON MARCH 23, 2015 BY ED MORRISSEY

Or maybe not such a surprise after all. The path to today’s Supreme Court decision to refuse an appeal by the ACLU against Wisconsin’s voter-ID law has been strewn with appellate decisions that supported its implementation, although a last-minute stay by SCOTUS kept it out of play for the midterms. The law will fully take effect for the 2016 election, which may complicate efforts by Democrats to keep the state blue:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left intact a new Republican-backed law in Wisconsin that requires voters to present photo identification when they cast ballots.

The court declined to hear an appeal filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the law. …

A federal judge blocked the state’s voter ID law in March 2012 soon after it took effect and entered a permanent injunction in April, finding the measure would deter or prevent a substantial number of voters who lack photo identification from casting ballots, and place an unnecessary burden on the poor and minorities.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the decision and subsequently ruled in October that the law was constitutional. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court upheld the voter ID law in a separate ruling.

The SCOTUS stay in October had more to do with the timing of the law, thanks to the scheduling of the challenges through the courts. Regardless, the election still went in favor of Scott Walker and the GOP, preventing Democrats from repealing the voter-ID provision before it could come into effect.

This will put a huge dent in the Obama administration’s efforts to squelch voter-ID laws in other states. In order to grant certiorari, the ACLU would have needed four justices to vote to add it to the docket. The fact that they couldn’t even move the liberal wing to unite against a voter-ID law shows that the justices consider the issue settled. Requirements for identification at polling stations are legitimate, in the eyes of the court, as long as enough options for no-cost qualifying ID exist to keep the poor from being disenfranchised.

The dismissal of this challenge to the law will also help boost Walker’s efforts outside of Wisconsin. He’s known for reforming the public-employee unions, balancing the budget, and most recently for signing Right to Work legislation even if he advised the Republican-controlled legislature to move more slowly on the latter. Some forget that Walker backed the voter-ID legislation as part of his reform package that got him elected in 2010, and then reconfirmed in 2012 and re-elected again in 2014. It gives Walker an argument to position himself as the reformer who has a real track record of conservative change in a purple state, change that could turn the state red for good.

However, the Supreme Court decision isn’t keeping the ACLU fromdemanding yet another delay, on the same basis as the last one:

The Wisconsin state elections board says it is awaiting direction from the state Department of Justice about what comes next now that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear a challenge to the state’s voter identification law.

The American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal appeals court to block implementation of the law for the April 7 election.

If the ACLU gets its waiver, it had better enjoy it — because it will be its last.

Update: It’s more accurate to say that the refusal to grant cert in this case upholds the law rather than approves it, although functionally it’s the same thing. I’ve changed the headline from “approves” to “upholds.”

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Five Voter Fraud Myths & Truths

From PJ Media

PJ Media has put together this publication about voter fraud called Crimes Against the Republic. When it comes to voter fraud, there are several myths and several truths of note – enough to leave everyone unhappy.  Here are five:

1. Myth: President Obama won reelection because of voter fraud.  Nonsense.  The margins in key swing states such as Ohio and Virginia were too vast to be driven by voter fraud.  No voter fraud scheme can move tens of thousands of votes.  That’s impossible and would be detected.  The machinery of elections simply doesn’t allow for the possibility of organizing and procuring tens of thousands of votes.  If you are desperate for a singular explanation for Obama’s reelection, you should get to know Catalist.  This massive database and how the modern left uses it to drive turnout among the base is behind Obama’s releection, not voter fraud.  That Republicans and conservatives have absolutely no effective counterpart makes it even more so.

2. Fact: Voter fraud has altered the outcome of elections.  Senator Al Franken (D-Lino Lakes), the Saturday Night Live clown, is in the  United States Senate because of voter fraud.  Franken won his election because Minnesota has same day voter registration, where a person can register to vote and cast a ballot simultaneously.  Felons were ineligible to vote but did so anyhow – by the thousands – 1099 of them to be exact.  This means that Franken owes his Senate seats to graduates of Faribault andLino Lakes.  Remember, Franken won by only 312 votes.  News media in Minnesota contacted many of the felons and they admitted they were proud of their vote for Franken.  Not a one voted for Norm Coleman.  But it’s worse.  Al Franken was the 60th vote to pass Obamacare over a fillibuster.  Because of voter fraud, Obamacare passed.

3. Myth: Paper ballots are the safest.  Paper ballots actually facilitate voter fraud.  Electronic voting machines cannot be hacked from outer space.  The machines are not connected and manipulated by the Illuminati.  The worst form of elections are paper ballots because they are subject to human interpretation.  When paper ballots are counted, partisans on each side get to interpret stray marks the way the want to.  X’s stray from boxes, and magically votes move.  Electronic machine counting is the best way to eliminate voter fraud.  The single best election system is the optical scan ballot where you make selections inside ovals and the paper is fed through an electronic counting scanner.  People who waste time on electronic voting machines are overlooking the many other ways the system is manipulated.

4. Fact: Eric Holder’s Justice Department is Facilitating Voter Fraud.  It isn’t hard to find the ways Eric Holder’s radical version of law enforcement is facilitating voter fraud.  That’s the central story of Crimes Against the Republic.  For starters, multiple individuals have been caught voting more than once in a federal election.  This is a federal felony.  The response from the Justice Department? Crickets.  Take Wendy Rosen.  She was a Democrat running for Congress.  We have reached the Alice in Wonderland moment where a Democrat can pen an editorial admitting she violated federal election law and no federal charges ensue.

 Her excuse for committing a federal felony?  Because election integrity laws make it hard for the poor and blacks to vote.  She  actually says this.  Maybe Eric Holder isn’t prosecuting Wendy Rosen because 1) Rosen is a Democrat and 2) She  is mimicking Holder’s own talking points.   Such are the lawless ways of the Obama age – felons get a pass as long as they are allies of the President, sort of like the New Black Panthers in Philadelphia.  This is the stuff that makes American’s furious, and the Democrats best beware of the whirlwind they may reap.  Many more examples of Holder facilitating voter fraud are in Crimes Against the Republic.

5. Myth: Just Electing Republicans Will End Voter Fraud.  Voter fraud is a non-partisan issue.  Both Republicans and Democrats have been found guilty, though Democrats seem to outnumber Republicans by significant amounts.  Voter fraud is particularly common in Democrat primaries where Democrats use it against other Democrats.  That’s why the Democrat run Rhode Island legislature passed a voter ID law.  Moreover, Republicans sometimes lack a spine to address the institutional and structural issues which open the door to voter fraud.  No excuse absentee voting, one of the most fertile areas of voter fraud, is one example.  In other places, like Colorado, some Republicans are actually collaborators with the beneficiaries of fraud.  Colorado election clerks Pam Anderson and Shelia Reiner were but two.