The New York Times Shows Its Agenda on Vote Fraud

After years of ignoring vote fraud within New York City and state, The New York Times finally wrote a story on it, in Texas.  Of course, the story was incredibly biased and instead was, again, only written to make it harder for vote fraud to be prosecuted.

From a journalistic standpoint, the story is flawed.  Keep in mind a jury, who, unlike The New York Times, was there for the entire trial, convicted Rosa Ortega.  Yet the Times story features a picture of her family and lawyer and focuses on her side of the case: "She said in court that she had not known she was ineligible to vote and was confused by registration forms and explanations by election officials."

A side the jury did not find persuasive.  As was reported elsewhere: “The jury took a few hours to find her guilty on both counts.”

While the Times focuses on Oretega's alleged confusion, the jury clearly put more weight on other matters.  For example (emphasis ours):

The Tarrant County indictment stated that she voted in the November 2012 General Election and the May 2014 Primary Run-off, knowing she was not eligible to vote because she is not a U.S. citizen. Ortega had previously applied to vote, but Tarrant County officials rejected her application because she admitted on the form to non-citizen status when asked. She filled out an application five months later and alleged she was a citizen.

Obviously the jury did not feel this was a confused person but rather a person who knew what she was doing and was trying to get around the law.  She was a person who changed her citizenship answer after she was rejected and told she was ineligible. 

The Times briefly quotes the Assistant AG in the case:

Jonathan White, an assistant attorney general who helped prosecute the Ortega case with Tarrant County officials, said the evidence of fraud was unambiguous. “She told the elections office she was a citizen,” he said. “She told everyone else she wasn’t,” including a recorded statement to prosecutors in which she said she was a citizen of Mexico.

The jury obviously believed the prosecutors. 

Regardless, the national focus the Times gives this story is in stark contrast to its stance on vote fraud locally.  The New York Times has ignored vote fraud in its own neighborhood for years.  It has become comical how it ignores vote fraud.  Here are just a few examples:

ICMYI: NY Ballot Box Stuff Scheme Now Importing People from Israel
More on NY Vote Fraud Scandal, Apartment Manager Vote Fraud?
Hard to Tell Where the Incompetence Ends and the Fraud Begins
Police Prove How Easy it is to Impersonate Voters in Hometown of Vote Fraud Deniers
Brazen Voting Fraud Alleged Among Ultra-Orthodox In Williamsburg

We could even list the vote fraud in New York by famous New Yorkers such as Al Sharpton and Geraldine Ferraro if we went back further.  Vote fraud is rampant in New York and instead of covering it, they present a biased view of one case in Texas. 

Fake News?  

The Far Left Is Running, and Ruining, the Democrat Party

For years, newspapers have written about the “Tea Party” running and ruining the Republican Party.  While those stories were completely overblown, there seems to be some truth to the far left ruining the Democrat Party by demanding nonsensical things against the wishes of the majority of Democrats.

Let’s take as one example: potential obstruction of President Trump’s qualified and popular Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch.  On the far left there are people like Al Sharpton demanding obstruction indefinitely.

 “They can stall as long as they want till their man gets in the White House,” Sharpton continued.

On the other side, you have the number two Democrat in the Senate Dick Durbin stating:

 “The base wants me to reject him out of hand,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the body’s No. 2 Democrat, who will meet with Judge Gorsuch on Tuesday. “I don’t think that serves the country well.”

So individual senators are stuck between doing what is right for their country and their constituents versus appeasing their far-left base.  A great example is Senator Sheehan of New Hampshire. 

Last week, Shaheen said, "Everybody I've talked to agrees he should get a hearing and an up-or-down vote."

As the ninth Democrat committed to bringing Gorsuch's nomination to a vote, Shaheen would have guaranteed that Democrats would not be able to sustain a filibuster. White House press secretary Sean Spicer welcomed her decision and hopes more Democrats would join her.

So Shaheen flip-flopped. She tweeted to Spicer that she only meant a cloture vote.

. . .

That's just not true. An "up-or-down vote" in the Senate means a vote to confirm the nominee, not a procedural vote to close debate. Shaheen knows better. She just hopes the rest of us don't.

Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri did a similar tweet and now she is using a more extreme tactic in an effort to get the base off her back. 

“I’m not talking about the Supreme Court nominee at all, in any way,” Ms. McCaskill said. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

If the Senators ignore their constituencies and cave to the extremists in their party, Republicans have a strong case to end the 60-vote filibuster.  As the Fix’s Aaron Blake writes in the Washington Post:

And as I've written, an unprecedented Supreme Court filibuster against a clearly 
qualified and likable nominee would just give Republicans a good excuse to do away more of the filibuster. 

Whether the Democrats have given into liberal extremists or will they listen to their constituents is up in the air but, as Roll Call writes, one thing is for sure:

If Democrats have a cohesive strategy, they’re hiding it.

How Democrats Try to Win a Republican Primary: Crying Wolf on Intimidation

Today, the small election law community is going crazy over the Republican Senate runoff in Mississippi.  Unlike the rest of the political world that is concerned with the result, the liberal election law community is concerned with intimidation in the Republican primary.

 

Don’t get me wrong, Republicans are very concerned with intimidation.  That is why Republicans and conservatives highlight it when it happens, such as when pair of New Black Panther Party members in para military uniforms wave a Billy Club in front of a polling place.  The Democrat position on the surface is the same, but in reality is hypocritical in the extreme.  While even at least one career Democrat prosecutor at the Department of Justice agreed that the New Black Panther Party members’ actions were an open and shut case of intimidation worthy of prosecution, Democrat party officials in Pennsylvania felt the opposite.  They rewarded one of the pair with a Democrat party position. 

This is relevant for Mississippi because of the differing views on intimidation.  All the conservative and Republican poll watcher/challenger training that I have attended has conveyed the same message:  You are either there just to observe, OR you bring your concerns to the election officials. There is NEVER a circumstance where you confront a voter in the polling place. 

This is not to say that I don’t understand what the left is thinking when they worry about intimidation of voters, it is what they attempt to do.  If the situation where reversed, at least some Democrat Party officials would be there intimidating Republicans if history is any guide.  Just this week it came out that a Democrat in Washington State was trying to intimidate Republican voters in Florida in 2012 with official sounding letters. 

To be clear, I am not talking about isolated examples such as the New Black Panthers or a single person in Washington but the efforts of the Democrat party in places like Virginia, arguably the most political and the second most targeted state in the 2012 election.  While all the Republicans\Conservatives I know emphasize in their training that you do not speak directly with a voter, the Democrats in Virginia in 2012 where suing for the right to confront voters inside the polling place!

Of course Democrats don’t call their actions confronting or intimidating voters but rather “assisting” voters in polling places.  However, the court in Virginia in 2012 rejected the Democrats’ request because it felt, correctly, that inside a polling place is no place for partisan activists to be confronting voters. 

So today, MSNBC will likely trot out someone who committed vote fraud himself, Al Sharpton, to discuss how Republicans/conservatives are allegedly intimidating voters in a Republican Primary.  Hey, it is a good thing to do if you're a liberal activist.  Not only has Sharpton been rewarded with a primetime TV slot for his pro-intimidation/fraud efforts, but so are liberal activists.  For example, the Brennan Center’s Myrna Perez was rewarded for her career of crying wolf and wildly exaggerating on non-existent  intimidation and list purging claims with a nomination to be one of two Democrat Commissioners on the Federal commission overseeing aspects of voting, the Election Assistance Commission. 

While Democrats interested in election law outside of Mississippi are going to focus on ginning up non-existent stories of intimidation by poll watchers who are in reality observing the elections, Republicans interested in election law are going to be hoping for an honest election.   

Police Powerless to Stop Vote Fraud as Liberals Would Rather Prosecute Police For Trying

Many Democrats and their liberal supporters love to make unsubstantiated and wild claims of disenfranchisement and restricting access to voting.  These same folks have no interest in actually fixing elections.  Ironically the state that may prove this best, New York, is the home of the leading vote fraud deniers, MSNBC’s Al Sharpton and the Brennan Center.  And this is not a matter of a Republican group calling out Democrats. 

Recently Democrat New York City Councilman Ben Kallos went off

City Councilman Ben Kallos slammed the [New York City] Board of Elections on Wednesday for its blame-dodging response to a scathing Department of Investigation probe.

Kallos had told the board to hand in a plan on how it would fix problems identified by the Department of Investigation. Instead, officials sent in a response that dismissed most of department’s recommendations as outdated.

That scathing report, among other problems, showed how easy it was to impersonate a voter when the police did so with shocking ease. 

This is not an abstract problem as police just weeks before  witnessed an organized scheme to impersonate voters when they saw young kids actually impersonating voters. 

But here is the problem. 

The police can’t do anything about it.  The police who witnessed the voter impersonation could not act because it was not in their “purview.” 

The police who investigated the problems and reported on it, had their report turned over to the DA requesting the police be prosecuted.  As Councilman Kallos points out the City Board of Elections officials are literally doing nothing on the substance of the report. 

We give a lot of credit to Councilman Kallos for calling for action on the probe.  But the fact remains that because of the efforts of people like the Brennan Center and Al Sharpton, in New York the police are more likely to get into trouble for trying to stop vote fraud than the criminals are likely to be prosecuted for committing it. 

President Obama and Democrats Do Not Want to Protect Minorities’ Voting Rights

When a President appoints a commission to fix a problem you would think a President would at least mention the commission or its findings when he discussing the subject.  Yet, in the last two weeks President Obama has given a number of speeches on voting, but has failed to mention his own Presidential Commission on Election Administration headed by his former White House Counsel and Campaign lawyer, Bob Bauer.

Why?

Simple, Democrats led by the President have no interest in fixing elections but rather only have an interest in elections as a political issue. 

Heritage Scholar Hans Von Spakovsky and Peter McGinley point out something interesting:

Last Friday, in a speech at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference, President Obama proudly announced that the Justice Department had taken on more than 100 voting rights cases since 2009. The problem with that claim is that, since 2009, the Justice Department has taken on only 39 voting rights cases ^[2]—and as former Voting Section lawyer Christian Adams points out, only 13 were relate ^[3]d to protecting minority voting rights. And, with respect to some of the cases in which the department has been involved, it lost spectacularly—such as its false claim that South Carolina’s voter ID law was discriminatory.

Perhaps President Obama misspoke when he overstated the number of voting rights cases by more than 60—or perhaps he was misinformed by his Attorney General, Eric Holder. In fact, the ever-criticized Bush administration had a much better enforcement record with much higher case numbers than the Obama administration, as was outlined in a report ^[3] released by the Justice Department’s Inspector General in March 2013.

That’s right even on minority rights President Obama’s Department of Justice has done less than the Justice Department he loved to attack that of his predecessor President George W. Bush.  President Obama and many Democrat have no desire to fix elections; rather they only want to talk, mostly untruthfully, about elections for political gains.  This is why President Obama won’t discuss his own commission on fixing elections or work with Republicans on issues such as list maintenance that have bipartisan support.  This is why President Obama speech on elections was in front of Al Sharpton, a well-known perpetrator of vote fraud, and not to organizations such as those of Secretaries of States that actually work on elections. 

FYI, the RNLA has released a detailed analysis of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration’s report that is available here.