Daily Broadside | Free and Fair Elections May Be a Thing of the Past

Daily Verse | Hebrews 7:6
This man, however, did not trace his descent from Levi, yet he collected a tenth from Abraham and blessed him who had the promises.

Friday’s Reading: Hebrews 8-10
Saturday’s Reading: Hebrews 11-13

After the mid-term elections in November my suspicions that our elections are no longer trustworthy were further hardened by results in the governor’s race in Arizona, where Kari Lake is challenging the results with what seems like strong evidence of fraud. I would love to believe that she will prove that the election was fraudulent, but I don’t trust the courts anymore, either.

Last night we had some friends over for a small Christmas celebration and I ended up talking with a woman who is involved politically. She told me that she no longer believes that our elections are free or fair and she is also discouraged by Republican leaders who really only seem to be in it for the money.

As I prepared this post, I came across a couple of articles that seem to reinforce our commiseration. Here’s an analysis of RNC spending since 2017—as if we needed more reasons to withhold money from these grifting RINOs.

According to FEC filings, since 2017, the RNC has spent:

  • $3.1 million on private jet services
  • $1.3 million on limousine/chauffeur services
  • $17.1 million on donor mementos
  • $750,000 on floral arrangements
  • $80,000 in alcohol-related expenditures

Nearly $400,000 has been spent on event tickets and other entertainment activities, including $30,000 for a private box at a Las Vegas Raiders game, $13,000 for Broadway shows, $9,400 at Madison Square Garden, and $43,000 at Top Golf locations in Texas, Nevada, Virginia, and Maryland …

… Under the current leadership, the RNC has spent more than $150,000 on what could be considered non-essential office expenses, including $25,000 on Commonwealth Joe coffee, $7,000 on cupcakes, nearly $7,000 on candles and diffusers, and $75,000 total at Pottery Barn, West Elm, Restoration Hardware, and Crate & Barrel. In addition, the committee’s FEC reports show expenditures totaling $381,000 classified as “Furniture Expense” during the same time frame.

More than $100,000 was spent at high-end clothing stores such as Rhoback, REI, Nordstrom, Vineyard VinesFootjoy, Ralph Lauren, Carhartt, and Smathers & Branson. An RNC vendor tells RedState that the Vineyard Vines expense ($12,000) was likely for embroidered jackets RNC staffers recently received.

Yep, middle-American schlubs like you and me fork over hard-earned after-tax money in response to the desperate emails and texts we get from the RNC about how they’re being beaten and we only have until midnight to get a 3x match. Then they blow it on fancy clothing and entertainment and tchotchkes for their friends.

I also came across this from one of the blogs I read regularly, which pretty much sums up where I am.

No, the only thing I care about is that we have free and fair elections in this country, and right now I have no confidence that we do. Do you? That should be #1 for anyone who even pretends be right or right leaning. I specifically excluded the Never Trump crowd earlier because they have no function except to attack Trump. They don’t matter. They’re jesters in America’s political court. But the people I’m talking about should care, and they don’t. If tomorrow Trump climbed aboard his star ship and headed for the skies, we’d still be in deep doo doo, because in their zeal to eliminate Trump from public life because they think it’s important for the future, they’ve ignored the only thing that really matters.

Free and fair elections. The foundation of a representative democracy. Without that, and as I said I have no confidence that we have them anymore, we have nothing. There’s no “Republic” to conserve.

Of course, there are others who don’t think all elections are rigged (and neither do I, but clearly there’s some cheating going on). Stephen Kruiser, who lives in Arizona:

I am not full tinfoil hat about every election in America, but what happened in Maricopa County was not just a weird glitch. It’s the most populous county in the state and contains a game-changing number of Republican votes. The fact that the problems with the tabulation machines all happened there stretches coincidence to the point of breaking.

As I’ve mentioned before, we didn’t have any problems with the machines here in Pima County, which is safely blue. Republicans are known for being Election Day voters and the fact that they were the people most affected by the “anomaly” in Maricopa County is what makes this whole thing more than suspicious.

Kari Lake deserves some answers and it is obvious that she’s not going to stop until she gets some. I don’t know if she can get the election results set aside, but it isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

Even if Lake can’t get this nightmare thrown out, my hope is that Maricopa County officials will be embarrassed enough to change the way they do things. That would require the Arizona GOP to be more functional and vigilant, and I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. Perhaps Kari Lake can goad the party into fighting mode.

I don’t believe our elections are free and fair anymore, not after what I’ve seen in the last two election cycles. I believe that there is some kind of collusion and cheating going on, because what we see on the ground doesn’t match what we see in results—by a long shot.

What’s the answer? A better ground game from the RNC would help. Making I.D. mandatory, along with same day voting with minimal exceptions, like for military personnel posted overseas.

But I don’t know how you keep the Dems from cheating and there’s no way I want the GOP to cheat. We either win clean or we don’t win. But that may be difficult because it appears both parties are involved in the racket.

Multiple polls conclude that upwards of 70 percent of Americans think our elections are filled with fraud.  But we’re learning it’s deeper and more organized than just a few thousand mules dropping fake ballots into election boxes …

The left and their RINO allies, along with who-knows-how-many other corporate and foreign actors, have set up the most complicated electoral fraud system in history.  Every step of the voting process — from who is allowed to vote, how they vote, how the votes are tallied, to how the results are reported — is compromised.  They are so far into their corruption that being exposed is not an option.  They will do literally anything to avoid being caught.

Read the whole thing and have a good weekend.

Daily Broadside | Are Voters Really That Stupid or Are Our Elections That Corrupt?

Daily Verse | Acts 26:28
Then Agrippa said to Paul, “Do you think that in such a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian?”

Wednesday’s Reading: Acts 27-28

Happy Tuesday my friends. I’m back from my travels and eager to write.

I left the day after Election Day and have been watching the returns since.

I’m gobsmacked.

I had predicted “a red wave of tsunami-sized proportions or a trickle of red leaking through an overflowing toilet in Arizona.” At the time I was feeling rather optimistic about the red wave.

But I voted and all I got was this lousy blue-stained t-shirt.

Fetterman. Really?

Are the people of Pennsylvania really that stupid? How married to ideology do you have to be to vote for a 53-year-old hoodie dude who lives with his parents, has never held a real job, and had a stroke six months ago rendering him unable to adequately process normal conversation?

Fetterman beat a politically moderate Muslim, the son of Turkish émigrés, a celebrity doctor and successful television host, by almost four percentage points. Diversity, anyone? 2,710,027 people voted for Fetterman while 2,474,013 voted for Oz, a difference of 236,014 votes.

The vote seems legitimate, but does not seem logical. If legitimate, how do you explain the votes of those supporting Fetterman? It boggles the mind to think that people actually voted for him. Logically, his win makes more sense to me if the vote was fraudulent, yet … was it?

Democrats vent their fury at Trump and his ultra-mega-MAGA supporters, but then elect a screwball like Fetterman (and his weird uncle, Brandon). The contempt for them is richly deserved.

Same in Arizona. As I’m writing this on Monday night, several outlets are announcing that Katie Hobbs has beaten Trump-endorsed Kari Lake in the race for governor. Again, it makes no sense. Hobbs hid herself, refused to debate Kari Lake, and polls showed her trailing Lake (although not by much).

And how conveeenient that Hobbs, as the current Secretary of State of Arizona, oversaw the election that determined whether she became the next governor. And how even more conveeenient that counting the votes took a week!

Our election system is broken. Very broken.

Here’s Emerald Robinson:

Welcome to the Banana Republic of Biden — where the voting machines break down and the tabulators fail and the paper runs out on Election Day!

The rigging was so bad, so obvious, so corrupt that even the corporate media was forced to admit that electronic voting machines didn’t work across America. That was a “conspiracy theory” — you might recall — just the day before.

But — lo and behold ! — the machines were all “down” in Mercer County, New Jersey. They were full of “mishaps” in Harris County, Texas and in Chesterfield County, Virginia and in Bell County, Texas and in Suffolk County, New York. At least 20% of all the machines were “not working” throughout Maricopa County, Arizona. They “ran out of paper” in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. In fact, “officials say that roughly 44 polling locations in Luzerne County ran out of paper to print ballots.”

Of course, it’s completely normal on Election Day for 44 polling places to run out of paper simultaneously. Don’t start fueling conspiracy theories by noticing that such a shortage must be deliberate!

And here she is again:

Countless people have called in the last few days to ask me if Kari Lake or Blake Masters or Adam Laxalt or Lauren Boebert— and all the rest of the midterm candidates in “stalled” races— will ultimately prevail.

My answer is always the same: no. No, I don’t think they’re going to prevail. They’re going to lose. In fact, they’re being cheated out of their victories right now.

My rule of thumb is simple: if you’re a Trump-aligned Republican and your election results were not released within 24 hours of Election Day, then you’re toast.

The entire point of “slow-rolling” vote-counting is that it gives the cheaters the necessary time to count how many ballots they need to beat the Republican candidate and then to manufacture those ballots — or to disappear the necessary number of GOP ballots by “abjudication.”

Didn’t the GOP learn any of these lessons from the 2020 election? Of course not.

I encourage you to read both of her blog posts (and subscribe to her Substack).

Via No Pasaran, Fox News’s Jesse Watters adds:

Elections used to be decided on election night. “American Idol” can handle millions of votes in a commercial break, but it takes Arizona, Nevada a week? None of it makes sense because they don’t want the system to make sense. The longer some of these races drag out for, the better it is for Democrats because they’ve created a system centered around ballots, not votes. It’s not about winning your vote anymore. It’s not about persuading you. It’s about flooding the state with as many ballots as possible and getting them filled out Democrat.

Stalin reportedly said, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.” Right. It’s not the vote that counts; it’s who counts the votes.

We are told that there is no evidence of any fraud whatsoever in 2020 and if we believe there was we’re conspiracy nuts and a dangerous threat to democracy. Yeah, well, I’m convinced more than ever that there is widespread fraud in our elections and if we don’t figure out how to stop it we’re goners.