Election 2018: vote early, vote often

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s going on with vote-counting in Arizona and Florida—and especially Florida—is profoundly disturbing. It’s one thing to lose a close race. It’s another to have votes dribble out in a slow bleed, always seeming to favor Democrats (and with Democrats being in charge of vote-counting in the districts in question), and in some cases in violation of the regulations for reporting votes.

The Democrats have made it clear, also, that they are not interested in rules. They are interested in winning above all else even if they have to break the rules. If they define themselves as the Good and Republicans as the Evil, whatever they do is justified in their own minds. They proved that indisputably with the Kavanaugh hearings. No one who observed that outrageous travesty can doubt that.

So I would not be at all surprised, not for a moment, if the Democrats in one or several states are committing election fraud. In previous years I was far more reluctant to say that. Now it just seems to be the most likely explanation.

Some commenters from Australia have described how voting is handled in their country (see this and this). They profess to be puzzled by the mess here. But the United States has a history of state-by-state control of voting, and people are loathe to give that up. One reason is that instituting new systems will cost money. Another is that it could make it harder to commit election fraud, and many people in charge want to preserve that ability. A third is just plain inertia.

I remember back in 2000 being shocked by the way voting is handled—or mis-handled—in Florida. I’m sure there have been changes in the nearly-20 years since then, but I don’t know that most of them are for the better. We seem to have done away with “hanging chads” and the “butterfly ballot” (I think we have, anyway), but very serious problems remain. Of course, the powers that be in say, Broward County, no doubt think these things are a feature rather than a bug.

In general, I am against early voting and mail-in voting. I think the old system, which some states still preserve, of going to a polling place and voting all on one day (with a small number of exceptions for absentee ballots obtained by people who cannot attend because they will be out of town or are ill), is the way to go. But that system is more and more being phased out, in the name of convenience and encouraging more and more people to vote. It also encourages more and more abuse of the system.

I have to say I am depressed about what’s happening now. I can’t really look on the bright side at the moment or offer a pep talk. Sorry, but that’s the way it is. If you want to offer something of that sort in the comments, be my guest. I think we all could use some cheering up.

Problem with comment editing?

The New Neo Posted on by

At the moment, some readers are reporting a problem with comment editing. They can comment, but can’t edit afterwards.

I don’t know if it’s the case for everyone, or just a few. I tried reinstalling and reactivating the edit plug-in, and there’s still something wrong. Please bear with this; I hope to get it fixed soon. It has been a bit glitchy lately, so it may just heal itself.

Please let me know whether or not the edit function is working for you.

UPDATE 2:00 PM November 9: It seems to be working now. Let me know if it goes out again.

Thousand Oaks shooting

The New Neo Posted on by

Until now I haven’t written about last night’s shooting in Thousand Oaks, California that has left 12 dead.

I may have told myself I’d wait because we didn’t know all that much about it yet. But I think my reluctance was really because I feel such a sense of sorrow and weariness about events like this, which seem more frequent and deadly than ever, even though I’m not at all sure that’s statistically true.

Young people are enjoying themselves in a bar, and a guy walks in and blasts many of them away, including a security guard (or guards) and Ventura County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ron Helus, who was called to the scene.

The shooter was an ex-Marine who is reported to have had PTSD. Or maybe he was just a garden-variety disturbed person who turned violent. He lived with his mother, and police were well aware that he was troublesome and had been called to the house about some sort of disturbance a while back:

Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean said that deputies were called to Ian Long’s house in April. “He was somewhat irate, acting a little irrationally,” Dean said.

The deputies requested the help of mental-health specialists, who met with Long. Ultimately it was decided to not detain Long for evaluation or treatment, Dean said.

I’m not going to criticize whoever made that decision. These things are notoriously difficult to predict, and there are a lot of disturbed people who’ve had the police called on them, and we can’t lock them all up nor will they be locked up for long in any event. And I don’t think this particular perp had any serious crimes in his past, so it may be that he was able to get a gun legally.

And if he couldn’t get one legally, I have no doubt he could get one (or many) illegally.

In the next few days you will be reading terribly sad stories of young lives cut short, and you will read stories of courage as well. You will read speculation on the gunman’s motives, and you will read statements about how we should ban more guns.

All I will say right now is that my heart goes out to the victims of this sickening crime and their families. RIP.

Leftist mobs/thugs threaten Tucker Carlson’s home and family

The New Neo Posted on by

This happened last night:

A group of angry Antifa protestors gathered outside of Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson’s home on Wednesday evening.

The anti-fascists group, possibly associated with Smash Racism D.C., chanted “Tucker Carlson, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night” outside of Carlson’s Washington home, according to Fox News. In a video posted online, the group can also be heard saying, “Racist scumbag, leave town!”

Carlson’s wife, Susie, was home alone at the time. He told Fox she locked herself into a pantry and called police.

The host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” said the group broke his oak door and one person mentioned a pipe bomb, as heard on a security video.

“Here’s the problem, I have four children,” he told Fox. “I never thought twice about leaving them home alone, but this is the reaction because this group doesn’t like my TV show.”…

Smash Racism D.C., posted Carlson’s family address on Twitter in a now-deleted post, The Daily Caller reports. Carlson told Fox the home addresses of his brother and his former college roommate, Neil Patel, who co-founded “The Daily Caller” with him, were also made public.

The group’s Twitter account was suspended as of Thursday morning.

This does not surprise me in the least. It’s a logical extension of what’s been happening on the left, and it will not stop because people ask them to.

When I read that article, I noticed two things. The first is that it took this long for Twitter to suspend the account. I happen to think that using Twitter to post addresses of public figures, when done by any group with the obvious intent of helping people go to these people’s homes to invade their privacy and cause trouble, should be cause for suspending an account even before something else happens. After all, Twitter use is a privilege, not a right, and Twitter has made it very clear that it will police its users’ tweets for dangerous hate speech. So Twitter certainly should include the banning of obvious incitement to riot at someone’s house because of political disagreements.

The other thing I noticed is more subtle, but still quite noticeable. In fact, it leapt out at me when I read the article. It was the use in the second paragraph of the phrase “anti-fascists group” to describe the demonstrators.

That is how they describe themselves. But it is an Orwellian description. These people are using the techniques of the actual fascists of the 30s. The idea is to stifle freedom of expression, punish those who disagree, and frighten the rest of us who might also disagree into silence.

And yet USA Today uncritically uses these groups’ own Orwellian nomenclature to describe them, unchallenged.

I think perhaps Sinema was right: Arizona just might be “the meth lab of democracy”

The New Neo Posted on by

What else can explain the state’s extraordinarily cockamamie voting system?

Other, much bigger states somehow manage to do it in a night, and maybe an extra day to finish up. That’s true even if they have a lot of mail-in ballots. Then of course later there might be recounts, if necessary, and that can take a long time.

However, although on Election Night all the online reports were that 99% of Arizona’s votes had been counted, we now discover that about 26% remain uncounted. So the outcome of the Senate election in Arizona is completely in doubt because only about 16,000 votes separate the two candidates (the Republican McSally is currently leading Sinema, but that could change).

What’s more, it will take many more days to count the 600,000 as-yet-uncounted votes. One wonders what on earth is going on there. The website I just linked is devoid of any explanation, although it does say which counties have what number of votes still outstanding, and how the already-counted vote percentages went in those places. I did some math, and by my calculations McSally might just barely pull it out in the end, although that depends on the uncounted ballots in each county having the same proportions of votes for each of the candidates as the already-counted ballots do. Do early voters and/or mail-in voters vote the same as people who come to vote in person on Election Day? Dunno.

I found a reasonable explanation in the comments of this thread at Instapunidt:

80% of Arizona voters get their ballots by mail. You can either vote at your kitchen table and drop it off in the mailbox…or vote and drop it off at a polling place on election day (bypassing whatever lines, I think). Those mail ballots are inside an envelope which is signed by the voter. The delay here is that the signatures on those 600,000 envelopes have to be verified (as you have to show ID at the polling station), and then the envelopes opened and the ballots run through the machines….

The signatures aren’t verified at the polling station, but back where they’re counted. Other than some common sense regarding whether the signature on the ballot matches the signature on the registration, I can’t tell you what standards they use, but I’ll guess that there is some method to contest a signature…

…the ID isn’t required to drop the ballot. That is why the signatures are verified.

That is a really lousy system.

Of course, one wonders whether there will be some shenanigans and ballots for Shimena will suddenly be found, just enough to put her over the top. This idea is tempered somewhat by the fact that the Secretary of State of Arizona (“chief election officer”) is a Republican.

These days, is there any other state that is unable to count a full quarter of its ballots until many days after the election is over? I don’t think so. And remember, we’re not talking about a recount here; we’re talking about the initial count.

Although it’s highly possible there will be a recount in this race, as well.

Apparently the Arizona Republican Party has been critical of the situation for quite some time, even before this year’s election, and has filed suit:

Republicans filed a lawsuit Wednesday night to challenge the way some Arizona counties count mail-in ballots as election officials began to slowly tally more than 600,000 outstanding votes in the narrow U.S. Senate race — a task that could take days…

About 75 percent of Arizona voters cast ballots by mail, but those ballots have to go through the laborious signature confirmation process, and only then can be opened and tabulated. If county recorders have issues verifying signatures they are allowed to ask voters to verify their identity.

The suit filed by four county Republican parties — Maricopa, Apache, Navajo and Yuma counties — alleges that the state’s 15 county recorders don’t follow a uniform standard for allowing voters to adjust problems with their mail-in ballots, and that two counties improperly allow those fixes after Election Day.

A judge set a hearing for late Thursday morning.

Maricopa County Republican Party Chairman Chris Herring told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Bruce St. James and Pamela Hughes on Thursday that the county is not suing to stop the counting of ballots, but is suing for equal protection for all voters under the 14th Amendment.

“You can’t give one American one set of rules for voting and another person another set of rules in the same jurisdiction,” he said.

“That’s what is happening in Arizona.”

The article notes that the Republicans had complained before the election as well, and had already threatened to sue. The Democrats of course have countered that this is some sort of voter suppression, although it’s hard to see how because all the Republicans seem to be saying is that a uniform standard is necessary. And it’s not a new problem, although it’s really been highlighted this year:

The sluggish count is a perennial issue for Arizona, but has rarely received such a high level of attention because the GOP-leaning state generally has had few nationally-watched nail-biting contests.

Well, they’ve certainly got one now.

In other undecided Senate races, although Scott is ahead in Florida, Nelson has asked for a recount. And although the Republican in the Mississippi race for senator is favored to win, because it was a 4-way race and no one received over 50% of the vote a runoff is required.

I guess this is what’s meant by “spare ribs”

The New Neo Posted on by

Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a spill:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 85, fractured three ribs in a fall in her office Wednesday night, according to a statement from the Supreme Court’s public information office.

“Tests showed that she fractured three ribs on the left side,” the statement said. She was taken to George Washington University Hospital…

People, especially younger people, were offering the octogenarian affectionately known as RBG their own ribs on social media Thursday morning. They even started the hashtag #RibsForRuth on Twitter.

The #RibsForRuth campaign is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But it highlights the left’s desperation to keep her alive and functioning as a SCOTUS justice until a Democrat is elected president or until Democrats take over the Senate. I would guess that Ginsburg herself must feel the same way.

Falls in the elderly and fragile bones are not unusual, particularly in very petite women such as Ginsburg.

Jeff Sessions resigns: so long, it’s been not all that good to know you

The New Neo Posted on by

Jeff Sessions has tendered his (forced) resignation.

But wasn’t this something that we knew would happen after the election? I don’t have time to look for a link right now, but that’s my recollection. If that’s correct, I don’t know why people would be treating this as some sort of big amazing news.

I was puzzled as to why it didn’t happen sooner. Sessions’ recusal made him essentially ineffective for some of the biggest tasks of his office.

Here’s what I wrote about him this past August.

And of course the Democrats are trying to pull their usual tricks to stymie the approval and/or effectiveness of his successor (and the person named so far—Matthew Whitaker—may not even be the permanent appointee).

Just imagine what would be transpiring if the GOP had lost the Senate.

Bye bye old investigations; hello new investigations

The New Neo Posted on by

As far as the halting of the ongoing House investigations, goes, they can still continue till the end of the term. My sense of it is that a great deal has been uncovered so far—at least, enough to convince those who are paying attention that the rot goes deep. But the trouble is that so many aren’t paying attention, and/or so many are simply reading what the MSM has to say about it all. So those investigations could have gone on for many more years and much of America would have ignored their findings.

That’s how cynical I’ve become.

For the right to win any sort of meaningful and lasting victories, more has to change with our educational system and various other non-political institutions, because until that happens, everything is filtered through the lens of the left. Oops, I guess I’m repeating myself.

And of course, two can play at this game. The Senate, for example:

Florida goes red and votes to turn itself blue

The New Neo Posted on by

In close races, the Republican candidates for governor and senator in Florida were victorious.

At the same time the voters of Florida gave them their wins, about a million and a half felons in the state were automatically given the vote next time (with the exception of felony sexual offenders and murderers). There were about 8 million total voters in the election in that state this year, so you do the math—another one and a half million voters stands to change the voting tendencies of the state to blue, blue, blue.

And the vote to restore these rights was not even remotely close: about 64% pro and 36% con. The measure needed at least 60% to pass, and it got it.

So, why did the voters of Florida do this? To begin with, Florida was an outlier in terms of votes and felons: it was one of only four states that doesn’t automatically restore voting rights on the completion of a sentence, although felons who’d served their time could apply for clemency to the governor and a Clemency Board. To the voters of Florida, automatically restoring their rights instead must have seemed only fair, and a way to bring the state in line with most other states (see this for a map that will tell you the policies in all the states).

However, the political reality is that this change in Florida is likely to make the state reliably Democratic, and those voters who don’t like that fact will have voted for it.

Or is that the case? No one knows for sure how these people will vote or how many of them will actually vote. But I do think it’s much more likely than not that the vast majority of those who do end up voting will vote the Democratic ticket.

Florida is one of the most important states in the US during presidential elections. Anyone who’s been around for the last two decades or so is highly aware of that. So this has potentially enormous national repercussions.

[ADDENDUM: I want to add that noting in this post means that I think that ex-felons shouldn’t be allowed to vote in Florida. I think that’s up to Floridians. In most states, they can vote, and my basic position is that they should be allowed to vote after serving time and parole.

However, I continue to think—depending, of course, on how many choose to vote, and what party they tend to vote for—that because Florida appears to be balanced on a knife-edge in regard to the two main political parties, this change in law is more likely than not to lead to more voters for the Democrats, and therefore has a very real potential of turning the state reliably blue. If that turns out to be incorrect, I will be happy to have been wrong.]

More post-election thoughts: the battle and the war

The New Neo Posted on by

I think of yesterday’s election as a small skirmish, a battle in a long long war.

And yes, that’s a metaphor. But I think it’s an apt one.

During the Obama years the right was worried about a lot of trends that seemed to be pushing the country to the left. Among them were not just demographics, although there was definitely that, but (and I count these as even more important) what’s known as the Gramscian march through the institutions. The particular institutions I’m thinking about have been first and foremost our educational system, which is now so strongly and predominantly on the left that it acts as their basic indoctrination arm. There’s also the media, the entertainment business, and to a growing extent the churches.

These trends did not throw themselves into reverse in 2016 with Trump’s election. In fact, I believe they’ve mostly gotten stronger during the last two years, fueled by the propaganda of extreme Trump-hatred to which so many people have fallen prey.

Trump is a very unique guy. We can argue about how much of his uniqueness is good and how much bad (and we have, we have) but whatever his good traits are (and I believe there are many), they will not and cannot be transferred to the party as a whole or to politics as a whole.

We have term limits for the presidency in this country (fortunately, or I think we’d currently be seeing the third term of President Obama), and Trump will not be president forever, even if he manages to win a second term. We need to find a way to counter the enormous influence of the leftward tilt of the educational system and the press, the combination of which I believe is the reason so many leftists either won their elections or came very close to winning in states that until quite recently would not have considered them for even a moment. As commenter Richard Saunders pointed out:

I am at a loss to figure out how people like Sinema and O’Rourke get to within striking distance in states like Arizona and Texas? They make George McGovern look like a conservative. How does Hirona win handily when she showed herself on national television to be a complete fool?

The source must be attributed to control of the education system by the left, and that terrifies me.

And of course it’s not just the educational system, although that’s a big big part of it. Even though the MSM keeps losing more and more of the public’s trust, people are still very influenced by it. One of those influences is what the MSM chooses not to cover. Whether or not people trust the media, I believe that the vast majority of voters are nevertheless shaped by the MSM whether they are aware of that fact or not.

The solution is not just for Republican office-holders to be successful in what they do, although that helps somewhat. I have come to believe that most people do not vote by taking a good hard calculating look at the facts. Most people vote with their hearts and their guts, and their hearts and guts have a tendency to push them in a leftist direction.

A few more thoughts on the election

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not the least bit surprised by the Menendez win in New Jersey. It’s a very blue state, and although Menendez is a pretty bad candidate he’s still a Democrat, and that counts for a lot.

And of course, although I think Elizabeth Warren has covered herself with shame recently, there was no way that Massachusetts was going to reject her. It was never even going to be close.

Right now I’m watching Arizona with interest. It’s still unclear who will win, although it amazes me that anyone would vote for Sinema. But many things amaze me that are facts.

Scott Walker is hanging on in Wisconsin by a thread. He’s behind (NOTE: and just like that, I checked a few minutes later and he’s ahead), but only by a couple hundred votes. My guess is that there will be a recount. You know what usually happens with recounts.

It’s been a funny night. Although some polls weren’t correct, the general thrust of the polls was. The originally predicted blue tsunami had slowed to a blue wavelet, but (as predicted) it will be enough to take the majority in the House. With the Democrats’ usual devotion to solidarity, they will probably stick together and act as a majority, but I’m not sure what it will get them except the opportunity to impeach anyone they want without a chance of convicting and removing them, and the ability to stop all the House investigations cold and start their own investigations of the opposition. The Senate, on the other hand, will continue on its merry way, confirming Trump’s judges and continuing its own investigations.

I think that tonight the Democrats are happy but not all that happy. And the Republicans are sad but not all that sad. The next two years will tell quite a tale.

ADDENDUM: I just noticed that Rick Scott beat Nelson in the Florida Senate race. Again, a rather narrow victory, but I’ll take it. On the other hand, felons will be able to vote in Florida next time, so there’s that.

And all of a sudden I see that almost all the Wisconsin votes for governor are in, and Walker is still about a thousand votes ahead. That will almost certainly trigger the dread recount.

And Marsha Blackburn beats Bredesen in Tenessee for the Senate. And she did it handily, besting him by about 10 points.