Without ballot reform, liberty loses

The case for One day, one vote

The Friday Letter / #506 / Aug. 19, 2022
Updated at 8:34 a.m. with corrections and a clarification

If you need something to do, you will find no higher purpose than to lobby your state legislators to shore up your state's voting security. Any conservative who thinks the constitutional wing of the Republican Party is about to walk away with the November election without effort will see a fool looking back from the mirror.

I know people who don't vote because they think their vote doesn't make any difference. Anyone who learns how to make Democrats think that way has a promising career in conservative political consulting.

The opportunities for fraud are vast: 31 states still use internet connections to tally and report their votes. People with adequate cognition know this is the hotbed of fraud – this, drop boxes, and voting by mail.

And lousy voting machines. Texas has a long history of problems with Hart eSlate voting machines. In 2018, voters who tried to vote a straight party ticket saw that some of their votes were switched to the other party. This sounds like fraud, but it was something else that makes simplification even more urgent: antiquated technology. Some voters pushed the submit button before the slow, cumbersome computer had fully loaded their selections. Think of 1980 and Pac-Man.

(The manufacturer's defenders, to no surprise, blame “voter error.”)

As recently as May, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency said that Dominion Voting Systems equipment used in at least 16 states has “software vulnerabilities that leave them susceptible to hacking if unaddressed,” according to an Associated Press story.

The AP tried to play down the significance of the discovered flaws, however, claiming they were unrelated to President Trump's “false allegations” of fraud in the 2020 election.

Just the News reports that Illinois began early mail-in voting on Wednesday. This won't make any difference in corrupt, one-party Chicago either this November or in 2024, but it does compromise voting integrity down state. Worse yet, Illinois voters can now request permanent vote-by-mail status.

We don't need to explain why allowing voters to cast ballots 82 days before an election is bad policy. Aside from them not having enough information – in some cases – to make an informed decision, study after study has shown that mail-in and drop box voting is the breeding ground for fraud. One only need watch videos of Georgia Democrat harvesters stuffing phony ballots into drop boxes to understand that.

Yet this is what the Democrat Party wants, nationalization of all elections in violation of Article 1 Section 4 of the Constitution. It wants universal mail-in balloting with no signature or proof of registration, and unattended drop boxes wherever they feel like putting them. It wants anyone living here, including illegal aliens, felons, the feeble-minded, and dead people, to vote.

Not all old technology is obsolete. Here is an idea: Give voters a pencil and a paper ballot and see if they can figure out what to do with them. (I was in the DMV office the other day and can't guarantee that some of the characters doing business there could navigate such a system.) Romans invented the stylus a very long time ago, and Faber-Castell has been mass producing pencils that actually work since 1761. Paper has been around for 2,000 years since a Chinese dude by the name of Ts' ai Lun came up with a mixture of mulberry bark, hemp, rags, and water for use in his court.

Paper has been much improved since, and so its reliability has been pretty well established. Paper ballots don't get jammed in a machine, and people who would rig our elections can't reprogram them.

Thus, we have the most reliable way to improve vote counting and suppress fraud. At Ballot Access News, editor Richard Winger explains how the system works in France, where elections are held on Sunday, and voters must show a photo ID:

Each polling place has approximately 1,000 registered voters. During the day, poll workers at each polling place take note when 100 ballots have been cast. At that point the ballots are retrieved and sent to the counting station. This is repeated, each time another 100 ballots have been cast. Therefore, because the bulk of the counting is done during the day, the votes will have been counted within an hour and thirty minutes of the closing of the polls.

No complicated, easily-manipulated expensive electronics, no ballot harvesting, strictly limited and controlled proxy voting by people who live in French territories, voting on one day. Results in 90 minutes, rarely the need for recounts.

It's also interesting to note that the vote counters are volunteers, and they work in full public view. Anyone may observe the proceedings. Guess how well that idea would go over in Fulton County, Ga.

Speaking of which, Georgia's highly-touted 2018 election reform legislation was too weak to stop voting fraud in 2020, as is now well established. Georgia and all states should establish one-day voting with strict limits on absentee voting, use paper ballots, and require photo identification with proof of citizenship, registration status, and residence.

If states feel that one or two days of early voting would ease the long waits, that is a reasonable idea.

And if someone can explain how our system is better than France's, please let us know. In the meantime, state legislatures won't reform their voting laws unless pushed – by The People.

Data base

J.F. Murphy did some nosing around and found the answer to a question we should all be asking: How will Biden's expanded army of IRS enforcers compare in size to the institutions we actually need? To wit:

In 1960 there were 3.3 Marines for every IRS agent. Under the new Inflation Explosion Act (euphemistically and ridiculously titled the Inflation Reduction Act), the new ratio will be 1:1.

In 1960, this former Marine officer writes at American Greatness, we had 17 active duty Army troops for every IRS agent. The new ratio will be 3:1.

In 1960, we had 3,539 citizens for every agent. Under the new scheme each agent will have only 2,155 citizens to harass.

“No political leader yet recognizes the quality control issue at hand, of course,” Murphy points out. “Is there a McKinsey study or Harvard business case about a civilian organization that doubled its size while maintaining its culture and capability?”

The answer is likely no for a simple reason: The Permanent State is not about delivering efficient service to its constituents. The Permanent State is about growing and keeping power. That is the root of the Democrat Party.

The U.S. Border Patrol said it had 16,878 agents spread across the nine Southwest Border sectors in FY 2020. Most of them now are occupied with changing diapers, handing out cash and cell phones to illegal immigrants, and placing them comfortably in buses for distribution in the interior.

In summary: 162,000 IRS agents to shake down the middle class, 16,878 overwhelmed, outnumbered Border Patrol agents on the open, come-on-in Southern border.

Short takes on the news

From the Reasons to Take Your Children Out of Government Schools Department: If the Minneapolis Public Schools system needs to lay off or reassign teachers, white teachers will go first under its contract with the teachers union, Alpha News reports. It's part of the “educators of color protections” clause concocted following the 14-day teacher strike last March, and a violation of both the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and the 14th Amendment. . .

Biden's Afghanistan retreat claims another life. Dakota Halverson, the older brother of Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, committed suicide at the memorial for the 13 troops killed during the chaotic evacuation a year ago, their mother reported. After meeting with President Biden last August, Shana Chappell wrote in a Facebook post that “If my President Trump was in his rightful seat then my son and the other (heroes) would still be alive!” – from a story at The Blaze . . .

Those of us on the outside don't usually learn about motivations of those in the elite media. On Lisa Boothe's podcast Monday, Laura Ingraham suggested the country may be suffering from Trump Fatigue. Really, after only six years of sabotage and constant assault by the establishment media and false charges by the ruling class? “The country, I think, is so exhausted,” she said. “They’re exhausted by the battle, the constant battle, that they may believe that, well, maybe it’s time to turn the page if we can get someone who has all Trump’s policies, who’s not Trump.” We wonder if Fox News is turning up the heat on Laura, who may want to consider that abandoning the greatest president of the modern era won't go over well with the re-aligning Republican Party. This is no time for weakness. We'll see. . .

No, Laura, the country is not suffering from Trump fatigue. We are suffering from media fatigue. . .

Crazies on the loose. An MSNBC contributor and the former CIA chief, Michael Hayden, are suggesting that President Trump be executed for improperly holding government documents including the nuclear codes, Just the News reports. Trump was accused of keeping the top secret codes when the FBI leaked the made-up claim to the Washington Post. . .

Recommended reading

“The Clown Prince of Pennsylvania Avenue”
Peter Navarro at American Greatness

Jared Kushner gets wide credit in many circles for engineering the Abraham Accords, a pact designed to bring long-sought peace in the Middle East. Signed by the United States, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, the pact normalized relations between Arab countries and Israel, something no previous U.S. president had been able to accomplish.

Peter Navarro has a different view of the president's son-in-law. Navarro advised Trump on trade and manufacturing policy, but he's even more famous now that the Biden regime has made him a target as a threat to the rulers. Navarro believes Kushner was more damaging to Trump than helpful.

Excerpt:

“Take credit for what worked. Shift the blame for what didn't. Run to Daddy-in-law whenever the big, bad chief of staff got in his way. That was Jared Kushner's modus operandi during the long four years I had to serve alongside the man most responsible for the loss of the Trump White House.

“Kushner came to the D.C. Swamp on the coattails of his wife as nothing more than a young and rich, run-of-the-mill liberal New York Democrat with a worldview totally orthogonal to the president he was supposed to serve. Yet within the West Wing, Kushner considered himself to be the ultimate 'Trump whisperer.'. . .”

Navarro blames Kushner for squandering campaign funds on useless advertising, among other things.

“One of the few staunch supporters of Trump in Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, would write a $250,000 campaign contribution check. Imagine how Thiel felt when he realized his tech bucks were used to pay for less than two seconds of a 60-second, $10 million Super Bowl ad aired some 10 months before election day.”

Also recommended

“Trump's Haters – An accounting of the many and various kinds of Trump hatred and what the president needs to realize about them”
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch at American Greatness

More heartburn from the copy desk

Last week we made reference to Lt. Michael Byrd of the Capitol Police as a rouge cop who murdered unarmed Ashli Babbitt at the Jan. 6 Capitol incident. Actually, Lt. Byrd is not rouge at all, nor any shade of red for that matter. In fact, he's black – and a rogue cop.

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