The Big Truth, Part 2
The Voter Fraud fraud.
About This Series:
I am not a Democrat. Haven’t been since 1980. If I had a political affiliation, it would be Despising the GOP, which has become the American Fascist Party. As such, I have, for practical purposes, come to rely on Democratic victories to save the republic from Nazis, demagogues and the Christian Taliban.
Which is why for years I’ve been utterly infuriated by the Democrats’ inability to communicate the stakes (and the truth), while the opposing Party of Lies endlessly dwells in thirst traps of reactionary unreality.
Why the Dems refuse to message systematically until the cusp of Election Day is an ongoing mystery, though they have often claimed the voters care only about pocketbook issues — and now, finally, abortion rights — versus the jagged noise of the 24-hour campaign. There may be truth in that, but the upshot is ceding the Great Political Message Board to the GOP, which beams a steady flow of disinformation into a near-total vacuum of dis-disinformation.
That’s insane. First of all, policy and legislation do not wait for the three months before the polls open every two years. Secondly, while the Democrats sit on their hands, repugnant lies take hold. As we see in the debt-ceiling clusterfuck, once again the GOP is holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States while blaming the administration for the crisis, when objectively the opposite is true.
And so, for what little it matters, I’m stepping in. This will be the second of eight columns examining crucial issues long since clouded by laughably dishonest Republican propaganda in the service of authoritarianism, racism, toxic antisemitism, anti-secularism, nationalism and pandering-to-the-stupidism. My mission: to distill GOP depravity to its essence, one spurious lie at a time.
“People are watching,” said Kari Lake, noted unemployed Arizonan.
And she is right. So much watching is going on. Because, my God, look what happened to that poor woman. She really, really, really wanted to be Governor of Arizona, but was cruelly denied when — due to the Godless and corrupt forces of socialism, pedophilia, wizards, podiatrists and arithmetic — more “people” using ballots “voted for” her opponent than they did for her.
Or did they?
Lake has forced recounts and subpoenaed forensic evidence and filed about 800,000 lawsuits because, no matter what the actual vote tally was, she is obviously the one and true Governor. And everyone knows it. Especially God (R-Heaven) and Dominion Voting Systems.
“They saw it in broad daylight,” said the little lunatic that couldn’t, “as our elections were stolen right in front of our eyes.”
Though she is clearly batshit nuts, Lake is by no means an outlier on the Island of Misfit Republicans. Such Congressional luminaries as Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) helped the Trump White House hatch its Stop the Steal plot just before January 6. In all, 147 Congressional Republicans voted to overturn the 2020 election outcome, although Trump’s campaign officials acknowledged defeat. Among other observers, including every Republican secretary of state and dozens of state and federal courts dismissing 63 baseless lawsuits. Not only did the US Supreme Court tell him to fuck off twice, I believe even Kid Rock has come around.
But not the majority of Republicans. In a Monmouth University poll late in 2022, 61% of GOP respondents said Trump’s victory was stolen from him by the libtards. That is due to four important factors:
Gullibility
Bigotry
Stupidity
Disinformation
Here’s what not-president Trump said at CNN’s recent blowjob of a Town Hall:
When you look at that result and when you look at what happened during that election — and unless you’re a very stupid person you see what happened. That was a rigged election.
A landmark study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University calculated the historic incidence of voter fraud is between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent of votes cast. In other words, statistically insignificant. In another word: negligible. In another word: irrelevant. This is due to the rigor, across the country, in guaranteeing free and fair elections — and the multiple safeguards built into the system from registration through to the vote counts themselves.
But, but, but, there is some truth about voter fraud in the last two national elections. Back in November 2020, a Republican voter in Nevada named Donald Hartle told a local TV station that someone had stolen the name of his late wife to vote in the midterm election. “That is pretty sickening to me, to be honest with you.”
Well, yeah. Soon his cause was taken up by Fox News, American Conservative Union president Matt Schlapp and lying fuckhead pundit Dinesh D’Souza, who asked, rhetorically, “are you really going to tell me voter fraud doesn't exist?”
It exists. A year later, after an investigation, Hartle finally pleaded guilty to casting his dead wife’s ballot himself. Turns out, that’s part of a trend. In 2020, a Pennsylvania Republican named Bruce Barton helpfully cast a ballot for his mom, who was unable to visit the polls because she herself had to be somewhere else — namely the grave she’d been in for 12 years. Barton pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 5 years probation. Republican Richard Lynn of Wilkes-Barre, Pa, admitted to doing the same thing with his formerly alive father’s identity. As did Porter Township, Ohio, Republican Trustee Edward Snodgrass, whose pop’s corpse was still in the work area of a funeral home when the vote was cast. Snodgrass pleaded guilty.
And there is so much more.
Rensselaer County, NY – Three Republican County officials with ties to the county GOP leadership were indicted on federal charges of ballot fraud. Richard Crist, James Gordon and Leslie Wallace were arrested and charged Thursday with conspiring to violate the rights of county voters during the 2021 election cycle. Separately, in January, a Republican former county election official, Jason Schofield, pleaded guilty in federal court to identity theft for using his access to private voter information to obtain and cast absentee ballots.
Sioux City, IA – Kim Phuong was arrested in a scheme to generate votes for her husband in his unsuccessful primary bid for the 2020 Republican nomination in the Iowa 4th Congressional District, and then again in his successful race for Woodbury County Board of Supervisors. The scheme involved falsely obtaining voter registrations and absentee ballots and casting phony votes for the hubby. She was charged with 46 counts of voting fraud.
Niagara Falls, NY – This about a Republican pol, from March 16, courtesy of the Niagara Gazette:
A Niagara Falls attorney and political operative, already facing rape and related charges, was arraigned Wednesday in City Court on felony and misdemeanor counts in connection with an election fraud investigation that appears to be tied to his sex crimes case. Nicholas D. D’Angelo, 30, pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree attempted tampering with public records, an E Felony, second-degree forgery, a D Felony, first-degree identity theft, a D Felony, and two misdemeanor counts of campaign contribution to be in the true name of contributor.
Meantime, the list of voter-fraud cases against Democrats is near zero. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made a big splash announcing arrests of alleged fraudulent voters, but almost all of the 20 charged are felons or ex-convicts who had been solicited by their counties for voter registration, and who believed their voting rights had been restored with the 2020 passage of Constitutional Amendment 4. Only one of the 20 has, in a plea deal, been found guilty of any crime.
Yes, it’s quite an indictment of the nation’s election infrastructure, and of the Democratic abuse of the system to rig elections and teach history and put litter boxes in high school bathrooms for the woke teens who identify as cats. But the point is not these delicious examples of actual cheating by Republican dickwads. The point is the creation, from whole cloth, of yet another phony grievance to incense the base. Like the Covid vaccine “controversy.” Like climate denial. Like sexually “grooming” children. Like “trickle-down economics.” Like gun violence is a mental health issue, not a gun issue. Like non-existent “partial-birth abortions.” Like “Marxist radicals.” By constantly making claims about rigged elections, they have made their base obsess about “election security.” And under that pretext, they are passing restrictive laws throughout the Red State archipelago whose only effect is to make it harder for minorities and the poor to vote.
Texas Bill Abolishing Harris County Election Position Heads to Governor
RNC Has Filed 73 Lawsuits in the 2022 Election Cycle, With More to Come
Proliferation of new legislation comes in response to false claims about the 2020 election
Voting rights advocates worry new Indiana law will disenfranchise vulnerable voters
All are Republican initiatives. Why? Because they are fascists. (Not saying so in a hyperbolic way. Saying so in a literal way.) See: Ron DeSantis, Gregg Abbott, Paul Gosar and Ted Cruz, who pushed for an electoral commission to review fraud charges in 2020. Because, he said:
I am angry and I think the American people are angry because by throwing the observers out, by clouding the vote-counting in a shroud of darkness, they are setting the stage to potentially steal an election. It is lawless and they need to follow the law.
He was correct. People were angry, because immediately after the 2020 vote (and, in the case of Trump, a month before the vote) he and his fascist fellow travelers never shut up about electoral fraud. It is a bogeyman entirely of their invention, construction and tireless marketing.
In the collegiality of the US Senate, Democrats and Republicans routinely refer to “my friend on the other side of the aisle.” But they are not friends; they are enemies. And day after day, year after year, decade after decade, the Republicans are poisoning wells, scorching the earth and pitilessly despoiling the battlefields of the culture wars.