No thanks… the US Postal Service was a big part of the problem in the last election – they used their “election mail strike teams” to move ballots all over the place!
AJ — re your comment yesterday; that was my part of my point, neither the democrats nor republicans have done anything to prevent the migration of wealth from the people to the few. Hence, my comment this is proof socialism is non-existent in the democratic party (or at least its leadership) Reagain started this and Bush Sr/Jr, Clinton, Obama, and Trump did nothing to change it. When it comes to the economic policies that have ruined the working and middle classes but allowed the rich to increase their wealth, the two parties are the same.
Tychicus – mail in voting has existed in many states for decades with no problems. However, making voting easy increases the number of voters which benefits the Democrats thus the Republicans wish to discredit the idea.
hwesseli: There have always been problems with mail-in voting, and such problems were exponentially multiplied due to all the nefarious shenanigans going on during the 2020 US elections.
From the time of the Founding Fathers, voting in the USA was never meant to be “easy.” All voting should be done IN PERSON (unless it is a properly-arranged absentee ballot), ON ELECTION NIGHT and WITH PAPER BALLOTS. We absolutely must return INTEGRITY to our elections, or the Republic is finished.
We should just call him Scuba Diver Joe, because he’s underwater in everything.
CNN’s John King: Biden is “underwater on the economy—significantly so—underwater on gas prices, underwater on inflation, underwater on abortion, underwater on crime.” pic.twitter.com/2PixZlZs2r
“If elections are conducted outside of the law, the people have not conferred their consent on the government. Such elections are unlawful, and their results are illegitimate.” — Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley, writing for the Wisconsin Supreme Court majority in Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission”
“A court of law has finally confirmed it: The 2020 election was “illegitimate.” And all the demands for sufficient evidence of voter fraud to reverse the outcome were a red herring.
The truly dispositive factor, as stated by a Republican Wisconsin state legislator in a March hearing and affirmed in the opinion: “If a vote is cast in an illegal process, it’s an illegal vote!”
The reasons for legislatively enacted absentee ballot protections are clear. Justice Bradley quotes the Wisconsin Legislature’s rationale: “(P)revent the potential for fraud or abuse … overzealous solicitation of absent electors who may prefer not to participate in an election … undue influence on an absent elector … or other similar abuses.”
And that’s exactly what unlawfully relaxed provisions occasioned in Wisconsin:
Nearly 3,600 trips by 138 “mules” to drop boxes to traffic 137,551 votes. (Trump lost the state by about 20,000.)
Illegal assistance with absentee ballots by nursing home staff to residents, some with dementia.
“Zuckerbucks” exploiting these changes to “purchase Joe Biden an additional 65,222 votes, without which Donald Trump would have won the state by 44,540 votes.”
But again, per Wisconsin’s Supremes, Donald Trump didn’t have to prove the existence or extent of fraud, only deviation from legislative schemes. Because – nota bene! – the votes’ unlawful nature is the proof.
The same “pollution” of the “integrity of the results,” as the Court expressed it, occurred in:
Michigan: Unlawfully imposed rules for validating absentee signatures and a refusal to comply with an enactment allowing access to drop-box video surveillance.
Georgia: The Stacey Abrams settlement that, as a U.S. Supreme Court amicus curiae brief demonstrated, ran afoul of schemes regulating – what else? – drop boxes and signature identification.
Pennsylvania: A state Supreme Court decree involving absentee deadlines that, per U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, “squarely alter(ed) an important statutory provision enacted by the Pennsylvania Legislature.”
As Texas and 17 other states argued in a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, these jurisdictions’ “significant and unconstitutional irregularities … cumulatively preclude(d) knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election.””
“With so much recent finger-pointing in Washington over foreign influence in U.S. elections, it seems as if lawmakers would be doing everything they could to try to close loopholes that allow illegal political donations from China, Russia, and other overseas interests into U.S. campaigns without detection.
A group of GOP House members introduced legislation to do just that as far back as 2015. Their bill attracted significant bipartisan support, but stalled amid partisan sniping over Democrats’ pursuit of the now-discredited Trump-Russia collusion allegations.
The effort picked up some steam in recent weeks when two vulnerable House Democrats folded those provisions into a broader bill aimed at combatting foreign influence in U.S. politics.
Although reformers are hopeful it will pass later this year, powerful forces oppose cleaning up the system.
Most individual campaigns and political action committees have taken a basic step to prevent secret foreign donations: requiring the three- to four-digit customer verification value or CVV on the back of the credit card during donor transactions. Doing so helps verify that the donor is the individual they purport to be, and that the address attached to the account is within the U.S. and its territories. It’s also considered the industry standard that the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council recommends for all e-commerce.
But there’s at least one big hold-out: ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising behemoth that raised $3.8 billion for more than 21,000 Democratic candidates, committees, and organizations in the 2020 cycle.
Historically, trying to prevent foreign money from flowing to U.S. elections wasn’t considered partisan. After all, such donations are illegal. ActBlue has changed that calculation. Several years ago, most big fundraising entities, including the vast majority of individual Democratic presidential, House, and Senate campaigns, along with WinRed, a GOP fundraising juggernaut used by numerous conservative campaigns and causes including the Republican National Committee, started using the CVV. ActBlue, however, remains a hold-out.
“We just want to make sure that ActBlue and anyone else requires the same thing that every vendor does when you buy a TV set online or anything else – that it’s not a fraudulent donation or coming from an illegal source like the Chinese,” John Pudner of Take Back Action Fund, a conservative election reform advocacy group, told RealClearPolitics.
ActBlue did not respond to questions about whether it continues to accept donations without verifying their legitimacy. On the ActBlue website donation page, however, there’s no field asking donors for their CVV along with a credit card number and expiration date.
With the onset of the digital fundraising age, soliciting and making political donations online is just a click away, and millions of campaign contributions are racing through international cyberspace on any given week. That’s good news for political fundraisers with the task of raising funds to underwrite campaigns, but bad news for the integrity of the U.S. election system, especially because federal election law hasn’t kept up with this brave new world of online donations.
The Federal Election Commission largely expects campaigns to police themselves for foreign donations, which can be difficult to detect if donors use fake names without any address or any verification process of gift credit cards, which also lack personal information. It’s easy for illegal contributors to fall under the radar if they make small donations because the FEC doesn’t require campaigns to publicly report cash contributions under $200. For donations between $50 and $200, candidates are required to make an effort to obtain accurate identifying information – though they aren’t required to report it. For donations less than $50, campaigns aren’t even required to keep records of identifying information.
That feature of campaign finance law, Pudner and other critics say, opens up an unrestrained spigot for illegal donations. Foreign donors or fraudsters easily can deploy so-called robo-donations, computer programs that use false names to make hundreds of donations a day in small increments to evade reporting requirements. A Missouri woman named Mary Biskup appeared to give more than $170,000 in small credit card donations to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, but when asked, she said she never donated a dime. Another contributor had given donations using her name without her knowledge.
There’s plenty of evidence that foreign actors are trying to infiltrate the U.S. political fundraising system. In the 1990s, the Senate led a high-profile investigation into allegations that Chinese officials had funneled money into the Democratic National Committee and President Clinton’s 1996 reelection effort.
In 2008 and 2012, Republicans accused Obama’s campaigns of accepting foreign donations through credit card contributions, but the FEC dismissed the complaints. Still, the Obama presidential campaigns, along with ActBlue, never required donors to verify their credit cards using the CVV system.
Earlier this month, two New York state residents were charged with illegally using funds from Chinese and Singaporean investors to donate $600,000 to then-President Trump’s reelection campaign in 2017. The scheme was part of an effort to demonstrate political connections as they sought funds to build a China-themed amusement park in upstate New York, prosecutors said. The Trump campaign was not accused of wrongdoing.
Congress has known about the risk since at least 2012 when the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative nonprofit run by investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, issued a report deeming online donation systems extremely vulnerable to foreigners attempting to violate federal contribution laws and limits.”
Further proof your assertions about abortion benefitting Dems at election time is misguided.
Americans who look favorably on the decision overturning Roe are 18 percentage points more likely to vote in the midterms — 70% compared with 52% of those who see the decision as a loss for women. @KnowlesHannah @EmGusk @sfcpoll https://t.co/gEY0IdGOoy
A lot of us were predicting this months ago but got pushback because the left was so vocal .. on Twitter.
But this follows the same dynamic as VAGOV – those who considered abortion a top priority voted 60/40 for Youngkin, even after McAuliffe dedicated millions to the issue. https://t.co/O8qyIs3uxd
And if you want to return voting to the standards of the Founding Fathers — forget paper and secrecy, just get all the white property owning men to gather at the town square and tell them to divide into groups according to who they support. Be prepared to see a few baseball clubs to keep supporters in line and some whiskey barrels and cash to entice a change of mind.
Florida education law is confusing (read the article) – and it was deliberately worded vaguely to create both confusion and caution. More than one school board has flipped flopped more than once over textbooks, another board has advised teachers to clear the classroom of novels until they know which ones are acceptable, and another board told people with same sex relationships not to mention it. Sure a high school chemistry teacher can say stick to the subject material but he doesn’ teach health, history, English, etc ie subjects that may offend people. For elementary teachers this will be a confusing new school year. Elementary teachers like rules and routines and they want clear instructions. When Ontario changed its health curriculum 3 times in 5 years to satisfy special interest groups, teachers got whiplash. I can only imagine the angst in Florida since political rhetoric often doesn’t match reality.
And given these conditions, Florida has a teacher shortage — one they want to fill with unqualified veterans and even veteran spouses. As I said before, this suits corporate elites perfectly – create an undereducated working class conditioned to structure and routine who won’t think for themselves – ie stay subservient.
True those who approve of overturnig Roe vs Wade are committed voters but they are a smaller group. According to polls, 37% approve of the decision, this means about 28% will vote. Meanwhile, 63% disapprove, this means about 33% will vote. Thus, a continual emphasis on the Roe vs Wade decision makes sense for the Democrats. And they have more voters to motivate than the Republicans so it makes even more sense to keep abortion rights in the news. Hence we have a 10 year old rape victim and just recently a Texas woman who suffered a miscarriage was initially refused a D&C. These stories will motivate the other 30% to the voters booth. And you will see Republicans politicians trying to avoid a discussion after all they can only collect an additional 9% by keeping abortion in the news.
hwesseli- the large medical group which I work for does not do abortions. At all. However, we do D&Cs regularly. We had to call in the OR crew this morning for a woman who was hemorrhaging. I would think that the provider who is refusing a D&C would be facing malpractice. However, not every miscarriage needs a D&C. Only those with excessive bleeding or retained tissue.
Wandering Views 
No thanks… the US Postal Service was a big part of the problem in the last election – they used their “election mail strike teams” to move ballots all over the place!
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-postal-service-makes-announcement-on-mail-in-ballots-ahead-of-midterm-elections_4633936.html
LikeLike
AJ — re your comment yesterday; that was my part of my point, neither the democrats nor republicans have done anything to prevent the migration of wealth from the people to the few. Hence, my comment this is proof socialism is non-existent in the democratic party (or at least its leadership) Reagain started this and Bush Sr/Jr, Clinton, Obama, and Trump did nothing to change it. When it comes to the economic policies that have ruined the working and middle classes but allowed the rich to increase their wealth, the two parties are the same.
Tychicus – mail in voting has existed in many states for decades with no problems. However, making voting easy increases the number of voters which benefits the Democrats thus the Republicans wish to discredit the idea.
LikeLike
hwesseli: There have always been problems with mail-in voting, and such problems were exponentially multiplied due to all the nefarious shenanigans going on during the 2020 US elections.
From the time of the Founding Fathers, voting in the USA was never meant to be “easy.” All voting should be done IN PERSON (unless it is a properly-arranged absentee ballot), ON ELECTION NIGHT and WITH PAPER BALLOTS. We absolutely must return INTEGRITY to our elections, or the Republic is finished.
LikeLike
They know that too Tychicus, hence their daily efforts to run the Republic into the ground by making fraud easier to pull off.
LikeLiked by 1 person
We should just call him Scuba Diver Joe, because he’s underwater in everything.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Orwell had them pegged.
“Facebook Censors Top Economist For Defining A Recession…”
LikeLiked by 2 people
It’s simple, don’t groom children for later exploitation, and stop sharing anything sex or gender related in classes other than health class.
What part aren’t you geniuses getting?
——–
LikeLiked by 1 person
——–
LikeLiked by 1 person
The gaslighting never stops.
———
LikeLiked by 1 person
🙂
———-
Sorry, but that’s not going to save you. Buh-bye Liz. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
As always, remember, vote fraud is a myth…..
“If elections are conducted outside of the law, the people have not conferred their consent on the government. Such elections are unlawful, and their results are illegitimate.” — Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley, writing for the Wisconsin Supreme Court majority in Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission”
“A court of law has finally confirmed it: The 2020 election was “illegitimate.” And all the demands for sufficient evidence of voter fraud to reverse the outcome were a red herring.
The truly dispositive factor, as stated by a Republican Wisconsin state legislator in a March hearing and affirmed in the opinion: “If a vote is cast in an illegal process, it’s an illegal vote!”
The reasons for legislatively enacted absentee ballot protections are clear. Justice Bradley quotes the Wisconsin Legislature’s rationale: “(P)revent the potential for fraud or abuse … overzealous solicitation of absent electors who may prefer not to participate in an election … undue influence on an absent elector … or other similar abuses.”
And that’s exactly what unlawfully relaxed provisions occasioned in Wisconsin:
Nearly 3,600 trips by 138 “mules” to drop boxes to traffic 137,551 votes. (Trump lost the state by about 20,000.)
Illegal assistance with absentee ballots by nursing home staff to residents, some with dementia.
“Zuckerbucks” exploiting these changes to “purchase Joe Biden an additional 65,222 votes, without which Donald Trump would have won the state by 44,540 votes.”
But again, per Wisconsin’s Supremes, Donald Trump didn’t have to prove the existence or extent of fraud, only deviation from legislative schemes. Because – nota bene! – the votes’ unlawful nature is the proof.
The same “pollution” of the “integrity of the results,” as the Court expressed it, occurred in:
Michigan: Unlawfully imposed rules for validating absentee signatures and a refusal to comply with an enactment allowing access to drop-box video surveillance.
Georgia: The Stacey Abrams settlement that, as a U.S. Supreme Court amicus curiae brief demonstrated, ran afoul of schemes regulating – what else? – drop boxes and signature identification.
Pennsylvania: A state Supreme Court decree involving absentee deadlines that, per U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, “squarely alter(ed) an important statutory provision enacted by the Pennsylvania Legislature.”
As Texas and 17 other states argued in a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, these jurisdictions’ “significant and unconstitutional irregularities … cumulatively preclude(d) knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election.””
LikeLiked by 2 people
Of course not, because that would be the right thing to do.
“Will Congress Close the Foreign-Donor Loophole?”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/08/01/will_congress_close_the_foreign-donor_loophole__147975.html
“With so much recent finger-pointing in Washington over foreign influence in U.S. elections, it seems as if lawmakers would be doing everything they could to try to close loopholes that allow illegal political donations from China, Russia, and other overseas interests into U.S. campaigns without detection.
A group of GOP House members introduced legislation to do just that as far back as 2015. Their bill attracted significant bipartisan support, but stalled amid partisan sniping over Democrats’ pursuit of the now-discredited Trump-Russia collusion allegations.
The effort picked up some steam in recent weeks when two vulnerable House Democrats folded those provisions into a broader bill aimed at combatting foreign influence in U.S. politics.
Although reformers are hopeful it will pass later this year, powerful forces oppose cleaning up the system.
Most individual campaigns and political action committees have taken a basic step to prevent secret foreign donations: requiring the three- to four-digit customer verification value or CVV on the back of the credit card during donor transactions. Doing so helps verify that the donor is the individual they purport to be, and that the address attached to the account is within the U.S. and its territories. It’s also considered the industry standard that the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council recommends for all e-commerce.
But there’s at least one big hold-out: ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising behemoth that raised $3.8 billion for more than 21,000 Democratic candidates, committees, and organizations in the 2020 cycle.
Historically, trying to prevent foreign money from flowing to U.S. elections wasn’t considered partisan. After all, such donations are illegal. ActBlue has changed that calculation. Several years ago, most big fundraising entities, including the vast majority of individual Democratic presidential, House, and Senate campaigns, along with WinRed, a GOP fundraising juggernaut used by numerous conservative campaigns and causes including the Republican National Committee, started using the CVV. ActBlue, however, remains a hold-out.
“We just want to make sure that ActBlue and anyone else requires the same thing that every vendor does when you buy a TV set online or anything else – that it’s not a fraudulent donation or coming from an illegal source like the Chinese,” John Pudner of Take Back Action Fund, a conservative election reform advocacy group, told RealClearPolitics.
ActBlue did not respond to questions about whether it continues to accept donations without verifying their legitimacy. On the ActBlue website donation page, however, there’s no field asking donors for their CVV along with a credit card number and expiration date.
With the onset of the digital fundraising age, soliciting and making political donations online is just a click away, and millions of campaign contributions are racing through international cyberspace on any given week. That’s good news for political fundraisers with the task of raising funds to underwrite campaigns, but bad news for the integrity of the U.S. election system, especially because federal election law hasn’t kept up with this brave new world of online donations.
The Federal Election Commission largely expects campaigns to police themselves for foreign donations, which can be difficult to detect if donors use fake names without any address or any verification process of gift credit cards, which also lack personal information. It’s easy for illegal contributors to fall under the radar if they make small donations because the FEC doesn’t require campaigns to publicly report cash contributions under $200. For donations between $50 and $200, candidates are required to make an effort to obtain accurate identifying information – though they aren’t required to report it. For donations less than $50, campaigns aren’t even required to keep records of identifying information.
That feature of campaign finance law, Pudner and other critics say, opens up an unrestrained spigot for illegal donations. Foreign donors or fraudsters easily can deploy so-called robo-donations, computer programs that use false names to make hundreds of donations a day in small increments to evade reporting requirements. A Missouri woman named Mary Biskup appeared to give more than $170,000 in small credit card donations to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, but when asked, she said she never donated a dime. Another contributor had given donations using her name without her knowledge.
There’s plenty of evidence that foreign actors are trying to infiltrate the U.S. political fundraising system. In the 1990s, the Senate led a high-profile investigation into allegations that Chinese officials had funneled money into the Democratic National Committee and President Clinton’s 1996 reelection effort.
In 2008 and 2012, Republicans accused Obama’s campaigns of accepting foreign donations through credit card contributions, but the FEC dismissed the complaints. Still, the Obama presidential campaigns, along with ActBlue, never required donors to verify their credit cards using the CVV system.
Earlier this month, two New York state residents were charged with illegally using funds from Chinese and Singaporean investors to donate $600,000 to then-President Trump’s reelection campaign in 2017. The scheme was part of an effort to demonstrate political connections as they sought funds to build a China-themed amusement park in upstate New York, prosecutors said. The Trump campaign was not accused of wrongdoing.
Congress has known about the risk since at least 2012 when the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative nonprofit run by investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, issued a report deeming online donation systems extremely vulnerable to foreigners attempting to violate federal contribution laws and limits.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
HRW,
Further proof your assertions about abortion benefitting Dems at election time is misguided.
———
LikeLiked by 1 person
tychicus,
Vote by mail works. Oregon has been doing it for decades .
https://www.vox.com/21401321/oregon-vote-by-mail-2020-presidential-election
And if you want to return voting to the standards of the Founding Fathers — forget paper and secrecy, just get all the white property owning men to gather at the town square and tell them to divide into groups according to who they support. Be prepared to see a few baseball clubs to keep supporters in line and some whiskey barrels and cash to entice a change of mind.
LikeLike
Florida education law is confusing (read the article) – and it was deliberately worded vaguely to create both confusion and caution. More than one school board has flipped flopped more than once over textbooks, another board has advised teachers to clear the classroom of novels until they know which ones are acceptable, and another board told people with same sex relationships not to mention it. Sure a high school chemistry teacher can say stick to the subject material but he doesn’ teach health, history, English, etc ie subjects that may offend people. For elementary teachers this will be a confusing new school year. Elementary teachers like rules and routines and they want clear instructions. When Ontario changed its health curriculum 3 times in 5 years to satisfy special interest groups, teachers got whiplash. I can only imagine the angst in Florida since political rhetoric often doesn’t match reality.
And given these conditions, Florida has a teacher shortage — one they want to fill with unqualified veterans and even veteran spouses. As I said before, this suits corporate elites perfectly – create an undereducated working class conditioned to structure and routine who won’t think for themselves – ie stay subservient.
LikeLike
True those who approve of overturnig Roe vs Wade are committed voters but they are a smaller group. According to polls, 37% approve of the decision, this means about 28% will vote. Meanwhile, 63% disapprove, this means about 33% will vote. Thus, a continual emphasis on the Roe vs Wade decision makes sense for the Democrats. And they have more voters to motivate than the Republicans so it makes even more sense to keep abortion rights in the news. Hence we have a 10 year old rape victim and just recently a Texas woman who suffered a miscarriage was initially refused a D&C. These stories will motivate the other 30% to the voters booth. And you will see Republicans politicians trying to avoid a discussion after all they can only collect an additional 9% by keeping abortion in the news.
LikeLike
A high school classmate now a professor of Covenant College in Georgia just published a new book
Given his religious outlook and the increased role strangers and scapegoats play in modern politics I think it might be worth a read.
LikeLike
Well that was weird, that should have been an Amazon link — well, you get the idea
LikeLike
hwesseli- the large medical group which I work for does not do abortions. At all. However, we do D&Cs regularly. We had to call in the OR crew this morning for a woman who was hemorrhaging. I would think that the provider who is refusing a D&C would be facing malpractice. However, not every miscarriage needs a D&C. Only those with excessive bleeding or retained tissue.
LikeLiked by 1 person