GOP Cries Against Voter Fraud Go Silent in Face Of GOP Fraud

Mark Harris, the disgraced Republican candidate.

For years now Republicans have whined about almost non-existent "voter fraud" as a justification for voter ID laws and other restrictions on voting that are aimed at disenfranchising voters not-inclined for voting for Republican candidates. Instances of individuals illegally voting are rare, but as North Carolina's 9th congressional distract race has revealed, organized GOP efforts to commit voter fraud is not equally rare.  Indeed, the 2018 election results are being thrown out and a new election has been ordered.   And those GOP shrieks about voter fraud?  They are almost non-existent.  The GOP hypocrisy is stunning and seemingly parallels that of the GOP's evangelical base.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the deafening GOP silence.    Here are highlights:

Republican politicians across the country have for years railed against the threat of voter fraud. Some have made unproven claims about how rampant it has become in order to pass voter ID laws and open sweeping investigations. The sanctity of the vote, they have said, must be protected at all costs.

But when a hard-fought congressional election in North Carolina — in which a Republican candidate appeared to narrowly beat his Democratic opponent — was overturned this week because of election fraud by a Republican political operative, the party was measured, and largely muted, in its response.

The state party chairman, Robin Hayes, issued a statement after officials ordered a new election calling the affair “a tremendously difficult situation for all involved.” National Republicans have been mostly mum.

Mark Harris, the Republican nominee, had eked out a 905-vote lead over Dan McCready. But the North Carolina Board of Elections refused to certify Mr. Harris as the winner and opened an investigation into irregularities. This week, the five-member board, made up of Republicans and Democrats, convened an evidentiary hearing in Raleigh at which witnesses described a voter-turnout effort that relied on the rogue collection of absentee ballots.

Witnesses detailed how people working for a Harris campaign operative, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., had filled out parts of some absentee ballots and improperly collected others. On Friday, Lorrin Freeman, the district attorney in Wake County, said she could seek charges within weeks against Mr. Dowless and some of the people he hired.

State Republicans, who over the past few years have tightened voting laws and had fought to preserve Mr. Harris’s victory, were far less vociferous in denouncing voter fraud than they have been in the past.

That stands in marked contrast to 2016, when the state’s Republicans filed many complaints and claimed for a month that Roy Cooper, the Democrat who was elected governor that year, should not be seated because rampant fraud had enabled his victory. The charge proved baseless.

Among Mr. Harris’s supporters, Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition, a group that works with pastors throughout the state and has close ties to Mr. Harris, would not say whether fraud had taken place in the Ninth District. Instead, she called the board’s unanimous decision a “stolen victory.”
 Prosecutors in the Trump administration have been conducting a high-profile investigation in North Carolina for months to find noncitizens who cast illegal ballots, many of them in apparent ignorance of the law. But although the state elections board sent Justice Department officials evidence of absentee-ballot fraud by Mr. Dowless as early as January 2017, they took no action before last November’s House election, and it is unclear whether they are investigating the matter.
 The party has given scant attention to the more frequent kind of election fraud — the inside-job schemes in which campaigns or election officials manufacture fake votes and destroy their opponents’ real ones — that appears to have taken place in the Ninth District race. Absentee ballots are especially susceptible to manipulation.

On Friday, Mr. Berger, the Republican state senator, resisted suggestions that his party had ignored the fraud potential and noted that state law already banned the misconduct outlined at the hearing this week. But he said, “I think it’s clear that something needs to be done if there’s a reasonable thing that can be done.”

Polls: Rep. Scott Taylor Falling Behind Elaine Luria

Scott Taylor's campaign's sleazy - and illegal - effort to place Shaun Brown on the November ballot as an independent candidate for Virginia's 2nd Congressional District seems to be blowing up in Taylor's face in the wake of media coverage of the forged signatures and irregularities in how signatures were gathered to place Brown on the ballot.  Yes, there are many other reasons to oppose Taylor, not the least being his lock step voting with Donald Trump and the GOP vulture capitalist and tax cuts for the wealthy agenda. But the entire Brown affair reveals just how morally bankrupt - and incredibly arrogant - Taylor is in reality. As for some in the LGBT community who support Taylor for his supposed support for the LGBT community - frankly, I suspect their support is more motivated by political aspirations of their own - the truth is that the pro-LGBT legislation Taylor sponsored in Congress had no chance in Hell of passage (a fact known to Taylor) and, therefore, was little more than a ploy to dupe members of the LGBT community into shortsightedly supporting him.   A piece in Roll Call looks at Taylor's much deserved sinking prospects.  Here are highlights:

Democrat Elaine Luria led Rep. Scott Taylor by 8 points in Virginia’s 2nd District amid lingering questions about the Republican lawmaker’s role in a ballot signature scandal, according to an internal poll released by Luria’s campaign Tuesday.

The survey, conducted by Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, gave the Navy veteran a 51 percent to 43 percent lead over Taylor. A June survey by the same firm showed her trailing by 4 points, the campaign said.

Luria’s campaign credited her lead partly to the alleged scheme to submit fraudulent qualifying petitions to help independent candidate Shaun Brown make the ballot — an apparent attempt to siphon support from Luria.

“While voters in the district have been bombarded by coverage of the election fraud scandal surrounding Congressman Scott Taylor, we have remained focused on sharing Luria’s record of service to her country and community,” Luria campaign manager Kathryn Sorenson said.  “This is a swing district, and we are going to fight for every vote between now and Election Day.”

A special prosecutor is investigating four of Taylor’s campaign staffers for allegedly forging dozens of signatures on Brown’s behalf.

A Richmond, Virginia, circuit court judge ordered Brown’s name removed from the ballot Sept. 5 after finding the petitions she submitted were “rife with errors, inconsistencies, and forgeries.” The Virginia Supreme Court last week dismissed Brown’s appeal.

The Democratic Party of Virginia, which filed the original lawsuit in August to kick Brown off the ballot, has accused Taylor of helping Brown, his 2016 Democratic opponent, in a backdoor maneuver to split the Democratic vote.  Taylor has denied those claims.

Make sure you are registered to vote and, if you live in the 2nd District, get out and vote for Elaine Luria on election day.  If you live outside of the 2nd District, make sure you are registered and vote for every Democrat on the ballot on election day. 

Russia Could Spark a U.S. Electoral Disaster

I suspect that the Founding Fathers - except perhaps Thomas Jefferson - could never have imagined the Internet and cyber warfare.  Or that the presidential candidate of one of the nation's main political parties would be praising a ruthless foreign dictator and inviting attacks on American organizations. Yet, that is where we find ourselves with the 2016 presidential election and Russia's (or more to the point, Putin's) apparent desire to rig an American election in favor of a bombastic narcissist whose level of egomania is only exceeded by his ignorance.  Of course, if America had a responsible media and a better educated populace, there would have been far less fertile ground for the rise on a toxic individual like Donald Trump.  A column in the Washington Post outlines what Putin may try and the negative consequences for America.  Here are highlights:

“U.S. investigates potential covert Russian plan to disrupt November elections.” To those unused to this kind of story, I can imagine that headline, from The Post this week, seemed strange. A secret Russian plot to throw a U.S. election through a massive hack of the electoral system? It sounds like a thriller, or a movie starring Harrison Ford.

In fact, the scenario under investigation has already taken place, in whole or in part, in other countries. Quite a bit of the story is already unfolding in public; strictly speaking, it’s not “secret” or “covert” at all. But because most Americans haven’t seen this kind of game played before (most Americans, quite wisely, don’t follow political news from Central Europe or Ukraine), I think the scenario needs to be fully spelled out. And so, based on Russia’s past tactics in other countries, assuming it acts more or less the same way it acts elsewhere, here’s what could happen over the next two months:

1. Trump, who is advised by several people with Russian links, will repeat and strengthen his “the election is rigged” narrative. The “polls are lying,” the “real” people aren’t being counted, the corrupt elites/Clinton clan/mainstream media are colluding to prevent him from taking office.

2. Russia will continue to distribute and publish the material its hackers have already obtained from attacks on the Democratic National Committee, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, former NATO supreme commander Gen. Philip Breedlove and probably others. The point will be to discredit not just Hillary Clinton but also the U.S. democratic process and, again, the “elite” who supposedly run it. 

3. On or before Election Day, Russian hackers will seek to hack the U.S. voting system. We certainly know that this is possible: Hackers have already targeted voter registration systems in Illinois and Arizona, according to The Post, and the FBI has informed Arizona officials that it suspects Russian hacking teams. Possible breaches are being investigated in several other states, and it’s not hard to imagine that many are vulnerable. The U.S. election system is decentralized and in some places frankly amateurish, as we learned in Florida in 2000.

4. The Russians attempt to throw the election. They might try to get Trump elected. Alternatively — and this would, of course, be even more devastating — they might try to rig the election for Clinton, perhaps leaving a trail of evidence designed to connect the rigging operation to Clinton’s campaign.

5. Once revealed, the result will be media hysteria, hearings, legal challenges, mass rallies, a constitutional crisis — followed by confusion, chaos and an undermining of the office of the presidency. Trump might emerge from the process as president after all. He will then go on, as promised at so many rallies, to “lock her up,” and of course to open a broad relation with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, the only foreign leader he seems to truly admire. Even if Clinton remains as president, she will be tarnished.

6. More likely, the hack will fail, or never even get off the ground. But what’s the downside in trying, or even in letting it be known that it was tried? Rumors of election fraud can create the same hysteria as real election fraud. Already, Russia’s propaganda wire service, sputniknews.com, has speculated that The Post’s article on Russian electoral manipulation is a clever plot to “to hide the actual efforts at electoral manipulation” and a “good cover for vote-rigging.” That thought will be tweeted and posted and shared by a whole ecosystem of professional trolls and computer bots, over and over again until it finally shows up on authentic pro-Trump websites.

7. And what’s the downside for Trump? If he wins, he wins. If he loses — then there are all kinds of ways to make money from the “election was rigged” narrative.

Whatever happens, the political process is undermined, social trust plummets further and the appeal of American democracy, both at home and around the world, diminishes. And that, of course, is the point.

Be very afraid.

Joe Scarborough: Republicans Only Kept House Majority Because Of Gerrymandering

While John Boehner and other House Republicans are disingenuously pretending that they have some type of mandate to derail virtually everything Barack Obama and the Democrats might propose to do, former GOP congressman and television personality Joe Scarborough is admitting the truth:the only reason that the Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives was by scurrilous gerrymandering.  That's today's GOP.  When you can longer win by having programs and policies supported by as majority of voters, you rig the system.  Think Progress looks at Scarborough's admission of the truth.  Here are highlights:

MSNBC host and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough admitted on Sunday that Republicans only kept their majority in the House of Representatives as a result of gerrymandering, noting that the GOP received less votes than Democrats in the 2012 election. Scarborough argued that Republicans must prevent radical ultra-conservative voices from dominating the party’s message and pointed out that the GOP is already losing electoral ground among voters who view it as too extreme and out of touch with middle class Americans:

SCARBOROUGH: William F. Buckley in the 1960s at some point had to start defining the boundaries of conservatism. He went after the John Birch Society, Ayn Rand, George Wallace. That has to happen again with this party because it’s getting smaller and smaller. In this debate, we actually have conservative thinkers, talking about Ronald Reagan being a RINO — a Republican in name only, because he supported an assault weapons ban. They keep pushing themselves closer and closer to the cliff. But I just have to say one other really important point, because I made a mistake over the past month talking about how Republicans have also won a majority in the House. As this article I was referencing mentioned, we actually got a minority of votes nationwide in House races. It was just gerrymandering from 2010 that gave us the majority.

Indeed, a recent Republican State Leadership Committee report boasted that the only reason the GOP controls the House of Representatives is because state legislatures gerrymandered congressional districts in blue states. “Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn,” the report reads. 

Far Right GOP Congressman Resigns Seat After Filing Fraudulent Primary Petitions

One thing that is seemingly the norm with "conservative," "family Values" Republicans: they lie and make a mockery of the Ten Commandments and the Gospel message just like their Christianist supporters.  Yet another case in point is GOP House Representative Thaddeus McCotter (MI) who resigned from Congress yesterday.  It seems his staff had filed primary ballot petitions which contained either fraudulent or duplicate signatures. So much for not lying and being a crook. Meanwhile, he had voted against the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, voted against repealing DADT, and had voted for a federal amendment banning same-sex marriage.  Not surprisingly, he had a 100% rating from the Christian Coalition.  Here are highlights from the Boston Globe:

U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan resigned from Congress on Friday, capping a bizarre political downfall that started after the Republican’s campaign failed to submit enough valid petition signatures to get him on the ballot for re-election.

On Friday, he said the “nightmarish’’ experience, with its “calumnies, indignities and deceits,’’ had made it impossible for him to retain his post and meet his family’s needs.

His staff turned in 2,000 signatures supporting his candidacy, twice as many as needed to be eligible for the Aug. 7 primary ballot. But 80 percent were found to be fake or duplicates.

McCotter initially said he would conduct a write-in campaign but eventually dropped the effort. An attorney, he was first elected to the House in 2003 after serving as a state senator and county commissioner.

One can only wonder if we will next hear that McCotter "has a wide stance" or some  other batshitery.  If you want to really support family values, the GOP ought to be the last place that one looks for candidates who actually care about families.  The same holds true for the "family values" organizations.  Their endorsements ought to be a red flag that hypocrisy and dishonest - not to mention insanity -  are the candidates' real attributes.

Possible Election Fraud In North Carolina on Amendment One

If these reports prove true, I cannot say that I'd be the least bit shocked.  Christianists and far right conservatives seem to believe that they are above the rules and law when it comes to achieving their agenda of inflicting their belief system on all citizens.  Here are highlights of what Joe Jervis just posted:

The polls have only been opened for a few hours and already the Courage Campaign has a report on possible election fraud. Via Adam Bink:

All, we're getting reports here in Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Raleigh (which are base areas for us, e.g. anti-Amendment 1) of precincts handing out INCORRECT ballots. In North Carolina, 17-year-olds can vote in the statewide primary (e.g., for governor, etc.) if they turn 18 by November 6th. However, they CANNOT vote on Amendment 1 in this primary -- they can only vote for candidates -- therefore they are being handed ballots WITHOUT Amendment 1. That is proper election procedure.

The problem is, the reports we are getting are that people OVER 17 are also being handed these ballots WITHOUT Amendment 1 in what would normally be heavily anti-Amendment 1 precincts (Carrboro, Chapel Hill, Raleigh). We are working on testimonials from voters who have experienced this -- in the meantime, if you report on Amendment 1, PLEASE ask readers to call 1-866-OUR-VOTE if they experience this in NC, or know someone who did. That will enable the campaign's field team to investigate and correct this as soon as possible.

Call the above number if you get the wrong ballot.

Message to Obama: We Supported You. Time to Live up to Your Promises

John Aravosis of America Blog has a column over at Salon that looks at the issue addressed in my last post. I haven't minced my words on my frustration with Obama - neither has John. Here are some highlights:

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Team Obama keeps telling lesbian and gay Americans like me to be patient. If we just wait a little longer, administration officials whisper to us lovingly (and out of earshot of the media), after the White House finishes with healthcare reform and getting the troops out of Iraq, your time will come. In the meantime, cheer up -- we put a gay band in the inaugural parade!

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Everyone loves a parade, but we don't like being betrayed. And while gay and lesbian Americans were initially willing to cut our new president some slack, the president's now-clear reticence to follow through on even one of his many campaign promises to the gay community has put the Democratic Party on the precipice of an ugly and very public divorce with this once-solid constituency.

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But a funny thing happened on the way to equality. Rather than clouds opening up and angels descending from on high, Barack Obama became president and things never got better for the gays. In fact, they got decidedly worse.

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The president would like us to believe that he's awfully busy being president, and if we only wait a little while longer, we'll get our rights. Of course, the president isn't too busy to stab the community in the back by continuing the military discharges, defending DOMA, and comparing us to pedophiles. (On Wednesday, White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs was given a chance to repudiate the DOMA brief's language about incest and pedophilia and would not.)

Mormons and Proposition 8: PR Disaster and Election Fraud?

I must say that I am somewhat enjoying seeing the Mormon Church and its sheep like followers reeling from the backlash from the Mormon role in passage of Propostion 8. On the legal front, both the Salt Lke Tribune and 365gay.com are reporting that the State of California is going to move forward with an investigation of possible election fraud by the Mormon Church. Not only would a finding of fraud cost the Mormon Church money in terms of fines, but it would lay a great groundwork for further backlash against Mormons in general. I cannot think of a more deserving bunch to suffer the consequences of their hate based actions. Didn't the Church leadership ever stop to think that actions have consequences and not always the ones expected? Here are some highlights from the Salt Lake Tribune:

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(San Francisco, California) California officials have begun an investigation into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to see if it broke the law during the campaign for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. The California Fair Political Practices Commission said it wants to determine if the Church accurately described its role in the battle over Proposition 8.

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The Church put an estimated $25 million into the battle to end gay marriage in California. If the Commission finds the Church broke state election laws, it could be fined up to $5,000 per violation. The Commission also could file an additional civil lawsuit. Porter said, seeking remedies up to three times the amount that was misrepresented or misreported.

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In terms of other bad PR being reaped by Mormons, the Salt Lake Tribune also has a story that looks at the negative experience that Mormons across the country are enduring. One would think that the allegedly infallible Church leaders might have foreseen some of this. Personally, I hope that backlash only gets worse. Here are some highlights.

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Although they live a continent away from California, LDS Church members Gregory and JaLynn Prince, of Washington, D.C., still have felt the backlash from their church's involvement in the traditional marriage initiative known as Proposition 8. Their daughter, Lauren, a Boston University student, has lost friends over the issue, while their son, an LDS missionary in San Bernardino, Calif., has had a disproportionate number of potential converts cancel appointments.
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About two weeks ago, during a first-ever class on Mormonism at Wesley Theological Seminary, where the Princes have built bridges for years, students pointedly asked them: "What was your church thinking?" "We are not taking sides on the issue, but the way this was done has hurt our people and the church's image," JaLynn Prince said. "It reminds me of the naive public relations strategy we had regarding the Equal Rights Amendment." In some minds, the so-called "Mormon moment" heralded at the start of 2008 has stopped short. Now, angry opponents of Proposition 8 are demonstrating at Mormon temples, accusing the church of being anti-gay.

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The Mormon push for Proposition 8 reinforces what people already think of Mormons, he [Mark Silk, professor of religion in public life at Trinity College] said, "that they have a lot of money and are willing to work for a socially conservative cause." That image may hurt the LDS Church with a wide swath of the American public. Mark Silk, professor of religion in public life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., thinks the visceral opposition to Proposition 8 is much more consequential for the LDS Church than either the Romney campaign or the perceived association with polygamy.

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It is not clear, however, whether the LDS Church will soon jump into another political fray. "Politics is a tough game, especially at this visceral level where one side is talking about religion and the other about rights, " said Gordon, the Penn scholar. "I would be surprised to see them do this again. They really need to heal some wounds."

Judge Blasts GOP Lawmaker In Anti-Gay Petition Fraud Case

Isn't it refreshing to know that election fraud is a "family value" to members of the GOP. These people are unbelievable:

(Cincinnati, Ohio) A Republican lawmaker behind an unsuccessful bid to repeal Cincinnati's ordinance protecting gays from discrimination has been accused of knowing names to get the issue onto the ballot in 2006 were fraudulent. Two women working on behalf of Equal Rights Not Special Rights have pleaded guilty to election falsification.

State Rep. Tom Brinkman, who was the head of the organization was never charged, but at a hearing the judge in the case suggested he was involved and knew that Lois Mingo, 48, and Precilla Ward, 32, had falsified the petitions by crossing out names and addresses of signers and replacing them with addresses of registered voters in order to make them appear valid.

"It's terrible," said Judge Robert Ruehlman from the bench. "It takes away the right to democracy. It takes away the right for people to decide issues when you cheat like that."
Like Brinkman, Judge Ruehlman is a Republican.