The Dems should put forward a candidate named Gerry Mander, and the Repubs would all vote for him. If the Repubs can't win legitimately, they lie, cheat and steal. That's why no one in my family will EVER vote for ANY Reublican EVER again.
13
Not funny. Great title.
1
Socrates gets it consistently right.Why doesn't the NYT recognize this in it's" picks"???
8
Looking forward to watching It's a Wonderful Life this year. Henry F Potter seems like such a decent guy these days.
My question is do trump fans not watch this classic Christmas movie or do they watch it and completely fail to see the relevance to trump? My guess is they steer clear.
3
The real question my dear Gail is how come a country such as U.S. can get elected a man like Donald Trump. There's no easy explanation. Trump showed himself as a buffoon since the time of his TV shows. His stories with women remind those 'Bunga bunga' by Berlusconi. We can also ask: —What kind of country the U.S. is—.
2
Lest we forget: Trump hired his lapdog Kris Kobach to head the Voter Fraud commission he set up to look into the 3-5 Million illegal votes cast in the prez election 2016. The commission closed for lack of a case. Kobach went back to KS, where he became the ACLU's favorite target, and was sanctioned by the courts to roll back illegal and racist profiling of voter registration. Then he was found by the court to have ignored those orders, found in contempt by the court, and finally lost his bid to be KS governor. Truth is that voter fraud cases are mostly grandma or grandpa forgetting whether they voted, and turning around to vote again (like forgetting to take their medicine). Even then there have been TENS of voter fraud cases prosecuted over more than a billion votes. But then....North Carolina. President Trump--you forgot to look in your own party. Wait, call Kris Kobach
2
It's lovely . . . when a republican tells you something is happening, listen up. They KNOW it's happening! How do they know, you ask? Why, because they're DOING it, silly . . .
10
In North Carolina we now have witnesses coming out to confirm they took absentee ballots from voters on behalf of a convicted GOP GOTV gun-for-hire and still not a peep from Kris Kobach. Probably still crying in his beer after losing the Governor race to Laura Kelly.
3
No one beats the grifter Trumpers in election fraud.
The GOP is rife with every kind of corrupt politics.
Witness Wisconsin...
What a disgusting display of power madness.
3
It is unfortunate but there are very few honest Republicans now in office. They will do whatever they can get away with to stay in power. In addition, they do not care about future generations. Consider their stance on environmental issues such as climate change. Still the American voters and non-voters are to blame. We keep electing those politicians who lie to us the most.
4
Reading about what is going on with election fraud by a Republican operative in North Carolina, the targeted disenfranchisement schemes employed by the newly elected governor of Georgia while he was secretary of state (a direct conflict of interest), and now the usurping of power by the Republican-led state congress in Wisconsin, I am really worried for our democracy. We are seeing a wholesale power grab, and what is being done to stop it?
6
Ms. Collins is incorrect when she says Democrats aren't involved in voter suppression.
Although he was then technically an independent (after being a Democrat and then a Republican), Michael Bloomberg, who is considering seeking the Dem. presidential nomination, actively participated in such a scheme during his last re-election campaign for mayor of NYC.
He gave several million dollars to the housekeeping fund of the Independence Party, that didn't have to be reported, for the expressed purpose of challenging voters in black and Latino districts (his opponent was black). This only came out during the trial of an Independence Party official who stole much of the money.
If anyone is considering supporting Bloomberg, I hope you will keep this in mind plus his hypocrisy in seeking gun control legislation while making large contributions to Republican candidates who opposed such legislation in order for him to get the Republican nomination for mayor in the first place.
2
Don't forget the gubernatorial election in Georgia where the Republican candidate refused to relinquish his Sec of State position throughout the race, putting him in a perfect position to suppress Democratic votes by:
- Not delivering sufficient voting machines to Democratic-intensive areas, leading to 3-4 hour lines to vote precisely in the places where he didn't want people voting at all;
-Closing polling places in Democratic-intensive, African American areas for such reasons as 'not having sufficient ramps', thus requiring voters to go 20 miles away to vote in an area with no public transit;
-Purging the voter rolls of hundreds of thousands of voters, 70% of whom were African American;
-Disqualifying voters on Election Day, including a black friend of mine who has consistently voted in Georgia for 25 years but who was told that her voter registration had expired for lack of voting history;
-Refusing to count absentee ballots;
-Linking his fundraising site to the official Sec of State site.
Voter suppression? Electoral fraud? Oh YES. Republican? Oh YEAH.
13
Projection. That's the name for it.
If you hear Trump accusing a political opponent of a crime or bad behavior, you can be sure that he's guilty of that offense. It's invariably the genesis of the accusation for Trump, probably because he has no imagination.
If authorities were serious about determining the truth about Trump, they'd start an investigation into every personal attack he's made during a rally or in a tweet. Whatever he accuses others of, he's done it.
9
Exactly - his own perfidy is the narrative he knows best, and that's important to a third-rate reality tv "star"...
2
Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republicans are taking a page from the other NC Republican playbook, the one in which they pass unconstitutional laws grabbing power from Democrats who won the governorship and the office of the attorney general.
Talk about poor losers. They had already gerrymandered districts and otherwise cheated so they could win and they still lost. Imagine that.
3
The wrong spouse wore the "I really don't care, do u?" jacket. Spanky has TOLD US that because HE will not be here.to see.the consequences of his actions-- taxes, deficits, environmental--- he does NOT CARE. Not one iota. And if Democrats go along we are just as complicit.
4
Phony voters? Small potatoes. Rumor has it, there's a phony president, who got less votes than his opponent. He dons fake hair, a spray-on tan and a tie that often covers his crotch, to look like he leads the formerly free world.
How to detect him? Watch for third grade levels of vocabulary and spelling, temper tantrums, rattling bone spurs, and a tendency to grab women below their equators without so much as a "How d'ya do".
If you spot him, do not approach him, but call Animal Control, as he is prone to unprovoked attacks and may be rabid.
6
"Trump Gets It All Wrong"
Uh, Gail, ya think?
1
This all reminds me of what happened in Maine shortly after Paul LePage (Trump: The Prequel) took office. Although it does have significant communities of refugees from Africa, Maine is still lily-white. But it seemed that every two years, a black person (probably a native Mainer) is spotted driving from New Hampshire into Maine, immediately fueling claims that hordes of black people are being "bussed in" to vote for Democrats.
36
@Boo Radley
I live part of the year on the border between NH and ME. Maine and NH both do have immigrant "drops" imposed by the feds. It's not enough of a volume to make a difference in voting (though both states are really quite purple), but it's not insignificant in terms of state funding outlays for welfare, schools, healthcare, and the like.
1
You can also: guffaw, snicker, giggle and tee-hee
2
Caption over General Dunford: "I can't believe this guy ranks me."
3
Thanks, Gail.
1
...hats and mustaches?
I wondered WHERE all those MAGA caps went!
we have met the enemy and....woops... they are us!
3
Hmmm...the look on Dunford's face. Penny for your thoughts, sir?
1
Ballot harvesting is what won the Democrats all the congressional seats in Orange County, California.
Which makes me overjoyed, but, just saying...
Regarding fraud, being two-faced and 'making his bed to LIE in'
'At the president’s New Jersey golf course, an undocumented immigrant has worked as a maid since 2013 and makes his bed'
1
Looks like Republicans went out and proved their contention that voter fraud is real.
"Donald Trump is wrong about everything. "
Whatcha gonna tell me, water is wet? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dok7x-mUcvM
2
so THAT'S what those MAGA caps are used for! I've been wondering......
1
I vote once, then come back dressed as a pirate and vote again. Fools 'em every time.
6
General Dunford's look in photo is priceless. Thought bubble: "What the heck are you talking about?"
23
@treabeton I was thinking it looked like: "What the heck am I doing here?"
1
Because he IS all wrong
ALL the time
1
When Oregon adopted vote by mail early voting for all elections, federal and state, it strengthened democracy, and surprise, surprise, it ended with a lot more Democrats.
The system is cheaper, leaves a paper trail, and makes rigging an election pretty damn hard.
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
6
"Trump Gets it All Wrong" should read "Trump Doesn't Get It...Any of it". That would be more accurate. Trump hasn't a clue about anything that a President of the United States should know and care about.
Trump is the transactional president. He is not the president of all the people. He is there for the rich, the mega corps, the bullies, tyrants as well as the bigots, racists and fear-mongers among us. He is there for Donald Trump, Trump Inc. and Trump family members and loyalists. For all of those, Trump gets it right. For everyone one else Trump doesn't care a whit. He doesn't get it.
Mental illness is treatable. But when there are such terrible genetic defects as persist within the body Trump there is no cure. Trump IS all wrong. Let's keep this disease from spreading. Let's get it right.
3
Outrageous how the republicans message their own misbehavior on others. Hypocrisy and evil.
4
LIke everything trump, his motto, "I have met the enemy and he is me."
1
Anyone who has moved states (any paying attention) has noticed how easy it would be to vote twice (new state, old state) soon after the move, when mail is still getting forwarded. State voter rolls aren't shared and should be. My ex-Florida family members could have easily added four votes to the tight statewide races in Florida. But we think felonies are a bad example. Yet here we are in North Carolina!
4
@EricW,
Presumably there are new people at the old address, who have registered to vote there. It would probably be easily detectable if someone did try to vote at an old address, and we would hear about it more.
4
@EricW - Some states do manage to uncover double voting when someone votes in two states. I don't know the mechanism for determining that, but my state found nine cases of people who'd voted in two states - and all of them were Republicans. Some said they'd heard and believed that lots of people were committing voter fraud and never getting caught, and others said the fact that they owned a house in two states entitled them to vote in both states.
2
"Meanwhile in North Carolina, the Republican State Legislature is hard at work on a constitutional amendment to require voter IDs."
To buy groceries, I suppose?
7
In Maricopa County we are not allowed to even touch a voters ballot. When I was phone banking and called a woman who was ill and couldn’t get to a mailbox to mail in her ballot, I was willing to go pick it up for her but was told that it was actually illegal!
Here's the way Canada votes: http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&document=index&lang=e. It's all pretty simple, and we still use paper and pencil. No dysfunctional machines, no hanging chads. Just show your i.d. (see link), mark an X on your bit of paper, fold it over, take it to the nice election person who removes the counterfoil, and pop it in the box. Ballots are manually counted and results are tabulated. Works for us.
As for gerrymandering, according to Wikipedia, "Some countries, such as Australia, Canada, and the UK, authorize non-partisan organizations to set constituency boundaries in an attempt to prevent gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is most common in countries where elected politicians are responsible for defining constituency boundaries." There you go.
10
For a party that doesn't believe in evolution, the Rs have forced an evolutionary transmogrification of our election processes. I remember when it used to be "elections have consequences". Now, it appears that the situation has changed to "elections have no consequences".
1
A better headline is Trump Gets it All Wrong. On a day when the stock market lost the entire years' gain and he attended a funeral of a predecessor that pretty much pointed the finger at his behavior, it's getting hard to find the good news.
I did have a laugh, as much as one can these days, when a headline on another site said Trump Blames Mueller for his low approval ratings. Duh, ya think? The man who is about to line item identify his crimes for all to see, yeah, I'd say one could blame him for pointing out, you know, the truth, something of which Mr. Trump has no relationship.
Then I read in NYT about lessening environmental protections for drilling and realize he can destroy our environment so that even Al Gore as president can't fix. He is an angry spiteful person and he will no doubt do all he can to prove just how angry and spiteful he can be.
It will take a heroic effort from all of us to untangle the web of greed and racism, his two support groups. Ironically, his trade tariffs might just irk enough of his base that his only true love will be his mirror.
6
Trump doesn't "get" anything. He just lies and lies and lies. Avoidance of facts is his modus operandi - as a salesman, the facts are his enemy, an inconvenience best to be avoided. No point in trying to correct him, or his Republican enablers. They know exactly what they are doing. Creating their own realities to justify disenfranchisement.
Perhaps we need laws demanding that absentee ballots should be processed before the elections, and if any are rejected, the senders must be notified. Precincts should be required to publish the names and addresses of people who they refuse to let vote, and the reasons for doing so, so it can be subject to review. There should be a law that in the even of a close election, no result can be confirmed until contested votes are analyzed. There needs to be some oversight on how votes/voters are rejected/discounted, and at the very least fining of counties with excessive numbers of rejected voters/ballots for not doing a better job.
Where are the lawsuits? Where is the outcry? Where is the Democratic leadership in highlighting this hypocrisy and battling back against it? There is none and the United States will become an authoritarian dictatorship before any of you realize it. The GOP are the villains and the Dems are the dupes here. You absolutley deserve what you are getting.
47
@Andrew
Thank you for your post Andrew, seriously. We American citizens might need a little motivation as we seem rather passive about all this. I for one do not think we have to show our disgust with the current administration by the destruction of public property, but I hope that we are like a giant beast slowly rising from a collective slumber and will raise the volume of our unhappiness with the White House and its illegality and undemocratic direction.
8
There have been law suits. For instance, there was a recent one in North Dakota regarding that state's requirement for a numbered street address. The challenge to the law was denied.
7
@Andrew North Carolina is currently reviewing to hold a new election or do something else. Nancy Pelosi announced today that the House may choose not to seat Harris. Dems are not silent on this issue.
11
Undocumented people are not going to try to register to vote or vote, for that matter - why provide the authorities with a written document showing where you live, etc. ?
4
In Houston, democrats sent out hundreds of pre-marked voter registration cards to non-citizens telling them this registration was part of their citizenship process. Ms. Collins is clueless and trying to disguise the fraud with humor. Well, nobody is laughing!!!
1
@James
Data please...
4
@James
And you can show us definite proof of this?
3
I do not believe you. Citation?
You say Trump believes the "only reason he has ever lost an election was phony voters." Problem with that statement is he's never lost an election. He's 1 for 1 there or "batting a thousand" as they say.
His party may have had the recent split decision, but ultimately that was a huge win for the party. Given all the uproar over the surprise win by the underdog in 2016, the expectation should have been that democrats were going to seize control of both chambers of congress as occurred during the first Obama midterm. That was not to occur this time.
More to the point, it's really interesting that when liberals thought Trump would clearly lose the election the story was that voter fraud never happens. Now liberals admit it happens but only the other side cheats. Obviously this is a ridiculous position. Cheating is a big part of the human condition and both liberals and conservatives are equally or nearly equally predisposed towards it.
1
@Bill
For crying out loud, Trump has said outright that he believes the only reason he lost the POPULAR VOTE is because of "millions" of illegal votes being cast against him. He states outright that he "really" won the popular vote.
It is true that Trump won the electoral college and thus the election. In fact, if Trump had NOT won the electoral college, the "impeachment" talk would become instantly irrelevant since he could simply be dragged kicking and screaming out of the WH. The reason he bothers to lie about the popular vote is because while the electoral college can give him power, the popular vote is the most direct measure of what voters actually wanted. The country WANTED Obama. The country WANTED Clinton. Heck, at least once, the country WANTED G.W. Bush.
The country as a whole did not WANT Trump, which is why the majority of the country did not vote for him.
3
Except on the N.C. case the other side really did cheat.
2
@Bill - What happened in NC wasn't voter fraud, it was election fraud. They're two totally different things. There were no individual voters breaking the rules in order to vote more than once or vote when they shouldn't, there were ONLY Republican partisan officials defrauding the voters by illegal means.
3
It was entirely possible that buses hired to bring NH voters to the polls (college students, perhaps) were buses of transport firms in Massachusetts, with Mass license plates.
1
@Nick Schleppend - It would have taken about 500 buses to bring in the number of "illegals" Trump claimed voted in that election. Think no one would have noticed an extra 500 buses?
2
@Nick Schleppend. No busses were actually observed, and NH/Mass has high speed (65mph) EZPass at the border North of Boston. This is just ANOTHER trope to fool his rubes.
1
The Republicans have been making this claim for over 30 years, making it more forcefully for 20, without any meaningful proof. In the meantime the gerrymandering going on grows worse and worse, better than 50% of the cases brought to State Supreme Courts have declared district maps to be illegal and several times unconstitutional. And the constant attempts and voter suppression, don't get me started!! Who is really guilty of illegality regarding election tampering? I vote AGAINST the Republicans.
8
NC just approved after years of Republicans effort a ballot measure to require voter ID but this wasn't voter fraud it was Republican candidate fraud. So the silliness of an expensive system for voter ID to protect the Republicans even though NC has a rate of .000032% of voter fraud in NC.Where as we seem to have a NC candidate fraud issue that extends back to the Republican primaries of 2016. What we need is a system of Republican candidate ID. Candidate's mug shots, finger prints so when the Republicans do this again we can just march the candidate off to prison.
5
I love the lead photograph, with Trump and Gen Dunford. It says a lot.
1
And ... wait for it ... next the President Tariff Man is going to explain the 3 day, 6% plunge in the markets as being because he lost the House, thus we are losing billions and it's the voters' fault. Which Hunt, Tariff Man??
8
Let me see. Trump continues to lie about voter fraud (just like every other subject) which is the fault of the Democrats, starts a phony commission led by the loathsome conspiracy theorist Chris Kobach (who thankfully lost the Governor's election in Kansas) then has to disband it because as someone once said, "there ain't no there, there." Now as it happens we find out that yes, drumroll please, the Republicans engaged in voter fraud via using a known vote swindler to rack up those "absentee ballots" for Harris. Of course, Harris would have us beleive that he knew nothing about any of this which is the same as standing over a dead body, pistol in hand with smoke coming out of it while exclaming "I did not do this?" Once again it is the GOP who are wearing the black hats but what do you want from "Trump's band of Scurvymen" who passed a phony tax cut bill and tried on numerous occassions to take away healthcare from the most vulernable Americans.
9
Voter harvesting problems, not withstanding, one great answer to many of the election woes (long lines, closed polling places, bad machines, voter I.D.) is to move to 100% mail-in ballots as we have in Washington state (as well as Oregon & Colorado.) Our ballots can be mailed in, or placed in secure ballot boxes around the state (often at the local library.) If this were the case, voters could be educated that it is illegal to ask a stranger to mail in your ballot for you. Do it yourself.
There's even a paper trail...Another great benefit is voting at home where you can do research on measures and down-ballot races you don't know much about. My family does it together. We discuss. It's great participatory democracy. And did I mention no lines?
Let's do it, people.
7
Is anyone the least bit surprised at Republicans behaving badly.
This is the same party that voted over 50 separate times in congress to deny people Obamacare. This is the same party that just gave one and a half trillion tax dollars to the wealthy and want to reduce Medicare and Social Security to pay for it. This is the same party that rolled back financial protections designed to help prevent another 2007 near depression. This is the party that has ignored our badly needed infrastructure rebuilding. This is the party that not only tolerates but defends all of trumps shenanigans. This is a party that needs to be sent into the twilight zone.
17
Similar to the period after FDR, when the XXII amendment was passed, there will be some introspection on the part of Congress once this administration is over. The weaknesses in our republic are now apparent: when a single party is in charge of all three branches of government and both houses of congress (you read that right), the president is untouchable, both for reasons of malfeasance and incompetence.
This is reminiscent also of Britain's limiting of royal powers in the 19th century. It will be the job of congress to figure out how to protect the republic from the excesses of a single person. This likely means constitutional protection of the independent counsel, and stronger institutional checks on the whims of the president.
4
Gerrymandering;
many forms of voter suppression;
professional tampering with absentee ballots;
lame-duck GOP legislators suddenly deciding that governors and attorneys-general have too much power when the newly-elected ones are Democrats.
Just possibly, I think there may be a pattern emerging here.
And we probably don't even know the half of it.
If you know you can't win by fair means, win by foul.
336
@mancuroc
By foul or fowl? Easily both. They play the game by controlling the referees because they are chicken to play fair.
16
@mancuroc
Donkeys entire.
1
Now we see that voter fraud is not needed if you lose the election. You only have to see the shenanigans taking place in Wisconsin and Michigan where the lame duck Republican legislature is rushing to defang the governors office and pass other legislation that would negate the will of the people. In the past this took place under cover of darkness. Now, its simply out in the open with the republicans saying if you don't like it do something about it! The arrogance, and lack of respect for the democratic process is appalling and concerning. Its at times like this that an independent court would step in to protect the people. Oh wait the republicans have corrupted the courts as well. The state legislatures learned quickly from the actions of Mitch McConnell.
8
Which party wants fewer, rather than more American citizens to participate in elections?
The answer should tell anyone with a even modicum of intelligence which party can't win truly fair and democratic elections and make it easy to understand why there’s so much furor on the right over the alleged but actually almost nonexistent problem of voter fraud, and so much support for voter ID laws that make it hard for the poor and even the working class to cast ballots, and for gerrymandering that assures minority rule.
GOP politicians don’t dare say outright that only Republicans should have political rights, (as Donald Trump already has), at least not yet. But if you follow the current actions prevalent on the political right to their logical conclusion, that’s where you end up. The truth is that what’s going on in American politics is, at root, a fight between democracy and autocratic plutocracy. And the plutocrats know exactly how to use hate and tea party run state legislatures to accomplish their goal
13
@rich The poor and working class will have their ID simply because they need it more then rich/entitled individuals who have others doing their bidding the majority of the time. As a poor person, you don't have that luxury. You do your shopping, driving, and run your own errands.
@Roland
The income break point at which people need ID to do common chores is high. How many people do you know who have butlers and maids?
The number of people who cannot afford the money or time to travel long distances or pay large fees to obtain birth certificates needed to get voter IDs is remarkably high.
2
@Roland - Those hindered by the lack of a driver's license, which is the form of voter ID required most often, are the 11% who don't drive. That includes the very elderly, the disabled, some of the poor and some students.
I'd like to clear something up about Trump's assertion that you need ID to buy groceries. Remember he was born in Queens and has lived in NYC all his life. People in that town know him well. That's why a bodega owner or anyone else would demand an ID from him. They know just how sleazy he is. Also the reason none of his neighbors voted for him in Manhattan.
12
@Shack Yeah we always knew he was a fraudster and operator. Always has been and will remain so.
3
We can now add voter fraud to Trump's list of things he accuses Democrats of engaging in which are in fact done by Republicans.
Nothing new really, it is typical of Trump to project his dirty deeds onto any opposition.
254
@serban Indeed, Trump has accused so many people of things he's done or is doing himself that I'm expecting someone to find his Kenyan birth certificate any time now.
227
@serban
Um seven races in California were reversed as a direct result of Ballot Harvesting. Its open and legal there because the Dems control the State. But its ok when Dems do it, right?
3
@GregP, I think it was illegal to harvest votes in North Carolina when Democrats were in charge too. And no, it isn't okay when either party does it.
27
It would be a hoot if it didn't hurt so much.
Which is worst: winning through this (illegal inmost places) do-it- yourself absentee voting; n or have a ( Republican) legislature strip the positions they hold now of significant powers, in time to obstruct the newly and duly elected officials in the new year.
It's the equivalent of: If I can't have it my way, I'll just take the government - and the election -away.
3
Voter fraud: when someone pays a specific person to vote for a certain candidate.
Hmmm... could that include paying members of the Electoral College to vote for a certain candidate?
3
The electoral fraud in North Carolina is nothing short of the hijacking of democracy, and the practice is hardly limited to that State.
Never let it be said or understood that today's Republican Party, anywhere, has the slightest respect or commitment to the core principles of democratic rule. The GOP is simply not interested in it, rigging the system to gain or retain partisan power even when preventing citizen voting or when voted out of power by the electorate.
If the NC example fails to persuade, look no further than the efforts to short-circuit electoral politics in Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia, to mention but a few GOP jurisdictions where votes are suppressed or election results annulled for the illegitimate sustenance of power.
The Republican Party has become an institutional traitor to the foundations of the American nation.
11
242 years of blatant voter suppression in America and the Republicans think our greatest problem is people changing clothes in the parking lot and voting twice?
America should have 100% voter turnout on every election. And, we need to keep changing the rules to make it easier for everyone to vote until we get there.
6
The fascination with Trump and his misdeeds is GREAT. I keep learning more and more about how things really work. Absentee ballot fraud easy -- not reported by NPR who commented that this will be on the agenda of the new Democratic Assembly in Albany . Time to vote NO, Dems.
In his own way Trump has been a great president because so much is being revealed.. LOVE IT.
1
Voter fraud exists, everyone posting here already knows that.. to what degree? That is the debatable part. However, presenting id when you vote should not be a issue.
2
@Roland. It's NOT "voter fraud" that is the problem, per se, it is ELECTION FRAUD that is.the problem.
Make the day we vote in national elections a holiday. Can You imagine the marketing opportunities? Hallmark could get all in on those voting day cards, tailgate parties in the parking lot adjacent to voting places and lots and lots of dip. Super Sunday move over.
But seriously, can you think of a better way that would make it easier for people for vote. A day off to exercise you right to vote that makes money for retailers. That sounds pretty American to me.
Then all we have to do is go after all the constrictions legislatures are putting into place on a basic right to favor one part of the electorate. Then off to gerrymandering, tally-ho.
2
"And now it does appear that a major congressional race was impacted by that very type of evil-doing."
This is inaccurate. Although there is more than a little irony here for sure, the fraud here is actually different from the "fraud" Republicans ostensibly seek to prevent with ID laws. In addition to related voting suppression tactics such as closing polling places in Democratic areas, making registration more difficult, and purging of registration rolls, Republicans have pushed ID laws to make in person voting, where fraud is vanishingly rare outside of evidence free Republican anecdotes, more difficult. What happened in NC was not in person voting fraud, but absentee ballot fraud. Absentee ballots have always been far more prone to fraud than in person voting and Democratic attempts to make absentee voting more secure have generally been opposed by Republicans, in contrast to their moves to hinder in person voting. (Traditionally, absentee ballots have favored Republicans, though that may no longer be as true today when such ballots are more widely used.)
1
Failed 45 made no mistake.
Roy Cohn Rule #1: Always accuse the other guy of what you are doing. When you are lying, cheating and stealing, loudly accuse the other guy of doing the same.
7
At this point in Trump's disastrous Reign of Presidential Terror, "Breaking News" will be if and when Trump ever does anything right. So far he has been in office 685 days, and I really cannot think of a thing in those 685 days that Trump did that was positive or constructive for our country, its people, the world, and the planet. Quite the reverse, unfortunately.
Only 775 days, 9 hours, 0 minutes, and 02 seconds until he is out of office. Of course, the GOP could change that number to be much shorter.
There is a website that keeps track of this.
https://howlonguntiltrumpleaves.com
3
I don't have to turn on Faux News to know the way they are reporting this is as an attempt for Democrats to steal an election.
Truly a sad state of affairs.
Only in trump's America could a Funeral be the high point and feel good moment of the year.
4
Well Gail, apparently you are unaware (AS USUAL) of the un-disputed fact(ette) that 6,423 Democratic absentee ballots in N. Carolina were signed by Pancho Villa. So there!
Since voter fraud has now been proven, liberals should have no objections to strict controls and voter ID laws.
Right?
1
Funny. How would a photo ID have prevented the problem that Gail is discussing? Hint: It WOULDN'T!
3
@George Orwell - This isn't voter fraud. Not one of those voters wanted their absentee ballots collected so they could be changed or discarded. This is election fraud perpetrated by officials of one party, the Republicans.
Jeong, is that you? It's ok, i'm a liberal, it's safe. I may be white, but I love you anyhow. If your fly was down, wouldn't you want someone to tell you?
Bottom Line for All of This - Our president lost the popular vote and his insecurities and narcissism cannot deal with it. Combine these with limited intelligence and you get Donald Trump.
3
Voting is compulsory for Australian citizens. America should pass a similar law.
3
I like Gail’s mention of putting polling places in fifth floor walk ups, maybe also mandate that private vehicles cannot be used to get oneself to a polling place, think of all the deplorable who would suddenly loose interest.
3
As an "elderly (65) white man" who is a lifelong Democrat and who volunteered to help Abigail Spanberger get elected in VA-7, I'm having trouble figuring out why Gail would lament that there is "no easy way" to keep me from voting.
2
Republican mantra; cheat, lie, steal, whatever it takes to stay in power so we can cheat,lie and steal some more.
5
This is election fraud, not voter fraud!
3
Perhaps we should consider that the real voter fraud may, indeed, be widely promulgated by an emotionally erratic guy disguised with a bad comb-over hiding his partial baldness, orange hair hiding his age-appropriate grey, a bottled tan hiding his palor, his jingoistic militarism hiding his shifty avoidance of military service, all the while dog-whistling Dixie to fool just enough voters to support him.
3
The most obvious fraud I see is the one in the White House pretending to be presidential and doing a poor job of it.
5
One of the main reasons why we are having all of these discussions about voter ''fraud'' or ''harvesting'' or whatever is that republicans are on the cusp of being voted completely out of existence.
They won by the slimmest of margins in so many districts, states, and even for the Presidency (77,000 in 3 states out of over 120,000,000).
This is of course, with gerrymandering, voter suppression (changing of voter ID requirements, poll taxes, and restricting access overall by minimizing actual voting times and where people could vote) and general overall fear mongering.
The voter dam is about to burst through general demographics, Progressive policies/candidates taking flight and white privilege coming to an end. It is only a matter of time, and will really come about in the next election cycle or the one after that.
We just have to keep pushing from now until then...
5
These GOP people all seem to make good examples of why we should all study Abnormal Psychology. They're all such outliers of behavior that I can't laugh about anymore (though I do still try). Sadly, for them, such behavior has become mainstream.
1
Gail, you are like balm for the soul. However, as an older white man, I am a total liberal. You want guys like me to vote!
2
One of the main reasons why we are having all of these discussions about voter ''fraud'' or ''harvesting'' or whatever is that republicans are on the cusp of being voted completely out of existence.
They won by the slimmest of margins in so many districts, states, and even for the Presidency (77,000 in 3 states out of over 120,000,000).
This is of course, with gerrymandering, voter suppression (changing of voter ID requirements, poll taxes, and restricting access overall by minimizing actual voting times and where people could vote) and general overall fear mongering.
The voter dam is about to burst through general demographics, Progressive policies/candidates taking flight and white privilege coming to an end. It is only a matter of time, and will really come about in the next election cycle or the one after that.
We just have to keep pushing from now until then <<<
2
Too bad Solzhenitsyn is dead. He'd have loved seeing the Republicans borrowing so heavily from Stalin's playbook. The part where they cheat, gerrymander and use coup-d'etat tactics while sullying their opponents with lies is just the kind of fun-house tactic that totalitarians excelled at.
2
“We don’t see voter impersonation fraud anywhere in the country because it would be such a dumb way to steal an election,” said Richard Hasen, the author of “The Voting Wars.” Doubt that. Most journalists use facts to support an argument. Gail Collins uses guesswork.
1
This story gives a whole new twist to the "dog ate my ballot" excuse.
1
One of the main reasons why we are having all of these discussions about voter ''fraud'' or ''harvesting'' or whatever is that republicans are on the cusp of being voted completely out of existence.
They won by the slimmest of margins in so many districts, states, and even for the Presidency (77,000 in 3 states out of over 120,000,000).
This is of course, with gerrymandering, voter suppression (changing of voter ID requirements, poll taxes, and restricting access overall by minimizing actual voting times and where people could vote) and general overall fear mongering.
The voter dam is about to burst through general demographics, Progressive policies/candidates taking flight and white privilege coming to an end. It is only a matter of time, and will really come about in the next election cycle or the one after that.
We just have to keep pushing from now until then ...
1
One of the main reasons why we are having all of these discussions about voter ''fraud'' or ''harvesting'' or whatever is that republicans are on the cusp of being voted completely out of existence.
They won by the slimmest of margins in so many districts, states, and even for the Presidency (77,000 in 3 states out of over 120,000,000).
This is of course, with gerrymandering, voter suppression (changing of voter ID requirements, poll taxes, and restricting access overall by minimizing actual voting times and where people could vote) and general overall fear mongering.
The voter dam is about to burst through general demographics, Progressive policies/candidates taking flight and white privilege coming to an end. It is only a matter of time, and will really come about in the next election cycle or the one after that.
We just have to keep pushing from now until then. <
1
All the Republicans have now is dirty tricks. See the demographics changing, suppress the vote. Lose an election? Change the laws to neuter the incoming office holder. Your President a glaring crook. Just tell the country that it's the party out of party that should be impeached. Some day in the near future, the tide will turn and the African-Americans, the Hispanics, Millenials and Women will swing the vote irrevocably towards the Democrats, then the Republicans will have to face the truth that W's immigration stance was correct.
2
This is not a surprise. It was obvious that Republicans were committing voter fraud when they accused their opponents of doing it. That's the GOP M.O.: Accuse others of doing EXACTLY what you're doing or planning to do. The Driver's License laws are a voter fraud, a poll tax and a terror tactic designed to deprive the poor, the minorities, the elderly and the disabled of their basic rite of citizenship. Scream about patriotism as you betray your country for money. Shriek "fake news" at real news as your side produces and distributes false stories with Russian help. Call your honorable predecessor Putin's Patsy when you're the patsy. Act outraged that immigrants are breaking the law when you're breaking every law on the books. Republicans are a national fraud. They should be prosecuted under the RICO Act. They are a Clear and Present Danger to the United States.
2
One of the main reasons why we are having all of these discussions about voter ''fraud'' or ''harvesting'' or whatever is that republicans are on the cusp of being voted completely out of existence.
They won by the slimmest of margins in so many districts, states, and even for the Presidency (77,000 in 3 states out of over 120,000,000).
This is of course, with gerrymandering, voter suppression (changing of voter ID requirements, poll taxes, and restricting access overall by minimizing actual voting times and where people could vote) and general overall fear mongering.
The voter dam is about to burst through general demographics, Progressive policies/candidates taking flight and white privilege coming to an end. It is only a matter of time, and will really come about in the next election cycle or the one after that.
> We just have to keep pushing from now until then
1
It is time to declare war on the Republican Party.
Jim Crow has not left the building. At least not in north Florida (a.k.a. southern Georgia). The small town near which I lived was plainly divided between the White section and the... other.
Being white, I naturally voted at the "white precinct", but after voting (after dark) I obeyed a whim and drove by the two "other" precincts. Both had multiple Sheriff's deputy squad cars parked at strategic point just outside the precinct line, lights flashing.
I didn't bother to stop and ask a Depitty Dawg what he and his uniformed friends were doing there, because I knew the answer.
Intimidation.
I'll leave it to you to figure out how such intimidation works.
2
The old retort "it takes one to know one" comes to mind every time the Fraud in Chief claims fraud, or misuse of private emails and phones or charitable contributions, or selling your soul to Russians, etc. Yet Republican voters support his claims and those of their party, making a mockery of democracy and starting new initiatives like that in Wisconsin to end the democratic tradition of accepting election results. The party as a whole is a fraud and its voters are individually guilty of treason to the America way.
In some areas, the repubs harass minority voters by demanding they prove they can read English to prove they are US citizens even when they show appropriate ID. Perhaps they should have demanded the same of trump, who seems unable to speak English without mangling it bigly.
He is a big joke, but no one is laughing.
2
Ballot-Harvesting: Look at California
The picture emerging from California's election is grotesque. How again did Democrats engineer their strange midterm victory in Orange County and in other traditionally Republican areas? In that election, apparently-winning Republican candidates were all unseated as the ballots just kept arriving, and arriving, and arriving, until the results flipped. Each and every time.
Welcome to ballot-harvesting. Anyone in California can turn in ballots now, no questions asked, no chain of custody required. Which is why it's illegal almost everywhere in the world. California, on the other hand, back in 2016, passed AB1921, a law that actually permits it.
Ballot harvesting undermines the 2,500 years quest of law makers, judges, political thinkers and even mathematicians to assure the legitimacy of the votes through guaranteed proof of custody from the point vote is cast to the point it added to the toll.
Even Ancient Greeks demanded that multiple people of the opposing political camps watched that only one black or white pebble is dropped into a tally basket by any voter.
Who is watching those harvesters?
That is another military official with Trump, not Jim Mattis.
Great story, MG.
Could you please explain why the southern Florida counties have so much trouble every election.
Gail, you've hit the nail square and deep. Donald Trump is wrong about e everything.
"Ballot harvesting" is alive and well in California also. Different party benefits. Just Google® it.
@fFinbar
so not true!
To mmwhite,
One more thing he's never done like reading a reasonable book.
People, where do you think this came from?
d) it came from the day in 1962 that peter brant introduced his kew forest school pal, 16 year old donald trump, to the cool kids at cameo bowling alleys on austin street in forest hills. we met trump, and all agreed he was a snotty arrogant, rich kid and told him to get lost and stay in jamaica estates.
The Republicans do not do anything as obvious as “busing in Voters from Massachusetts” or even gathering up illegal aliens to vote! This is gross misdirection by the Republicans who quietly go around collecting unsigned absentee ballots or move the one voting location to a space miles from town or pass onerous laws requiring identification of many forms or cut back on early voting days.The Republicans are masters of voter suppression -if you are not voting for them, Beware! Obstacles Ahead!
2
I love Gail because she can brighten my mornings a bit. Where I live, among low income senior seniors, Trump and FOX TV seem to rule more often than not. What is frightening about the “other” is the way they say LIBERALS. How did a little old lady, who votes her conscience become the creature from the black lagoon?
1
@Carole
It's hilarious--so many Americans consider "liberal" a dirty word. The more civilised countries regard liberalism as basic social decency, and political positions many (most?) Americans regard as socialist are in other countries considered centrist or slightly right of centre. The world looks on in amazement as Trump's dupes continue to support grifters who keep them poor, ignorant, abused, and ill. Seriously weird.
1
Now the weird stuff is not just from Trump, but, all the Republicans too! The loser Republicans are messing around with democratic ways in Michigan & Wisconsin. They have lost all moral compasses following their leader!
"Putting the polls on fifth floor walkups". Hmmm, I wonder if...
Gail,
You haven't been correct about a single thing regarding President Trump yet.
According to you, he should have been out of office before Dec. 2017.
#smh
There should be a huge outcry in the media as well as by the public about this event in North Carolina, but instead the only article about it is Gail Collin's humorous column. Same with the chaotic snafu in Broward County, Florida. It's as if the American public has such low expectations about the quality and validity of the voting process that most just sigh and shrug their collections shoulders as if, oh well, so what. I've seen more seriousness about the voting process in third world countries in Africa or newly Democratic, ex-Communist countries. The USA ranks According to a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center only 55.7% of the voting-age population cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election. That ranks 28th out of 35 highly developed countries in terms of voter turnout. If all of the money could magically be removed from the political process and advertising wasn't allowed to broadcast lies and smear the other candidate with negative advertising then more people would get excited about voting. Also, blockchain technology company Voatz, is developing mobile, phone in voting which identifies the caller's individual voice as a security step. The blockchain ledger keeps an accounting for every single vote, which proves that each person only votes once. The ledger is kept in multiple locations throughout the computer network, safeguarding against hackers or any security breach. Estonia is already incorporating blockchain for their national elections.
1
And it goes without saying that the silence is thundering when the election fraud is republican.
Kris Kobach, where are you?
3
Funny how this seems to work -- for decades we have been hearing the claims of voter fraud and the need for every more rigorous identification and other restrictions. And yet when push comes to shove the real incidents of voter fraud are poll closings, misleading instructions and outright manipulation of the votes by election officials. Does remind one of advice once attributed to one of Hitlers ministers -- 'best way to cover up what you are doing is to loudly and frequently accuse your opponents of doing precisely what you are doing'. Seems we have been given a master class in election manipulation this time. And no, stricter voter identification is precisely what the GOP want -- and there is no evidence that this will do anything but make it harder for some groups to vote. If anything, we should IMHO make voting mandatory and bring civics back into the school curriculum -- unless the real objective is to do away with democracy. And bring back a hereditary ruling class -- the nobless without the oblige...
1
That Constitutional Amendment requiring voter IDs on North Carolina actually passed in last month’s dubious election. What the legislature is working on is the implementation of the new constitutionally mandated requirement. This in a state where people waited in line for hours to apply for the new “Real ID” well before the election at state drivers license offices that were unable to process those applications in a timely manner. The experience suggests another effective voter suppression tactic: be so slow to create the new IDs that people die or give up. Sigh.
1
Thinking about voting on mail in ballots I think it would be great for all states to use this.
It seems that some states are trying to invalidate ballots on the basis that a signature that doesn't match or that some piece of data on a registration doesn't match another data base in state records.
I propose a simple system. Every registered voter gets two pieces of mail from their state. One is a ballot they can fill in. The other is a sticky attached to a piece of slick paper that can be peeled off and attached to the ballot that will have a bar code to verify the ballot.. If a voter prefers to vote in person, then he or she takes that sticky with him to the polling place and attaches it to the paper ballot he fills out. The only other thing he does is fill in his mailing address. That will be compared with the record on the bar code on the sticky
1
This is so hilariously tragic I don't know if I should laugh(cynically) or cry. The Trump Party folk should really hire Indian politicians and their staff as consultants instead of these dumb amateurs, I am talking real Indians not the Native Americans.
Indians have perfected the art of "booth capture," voter intimidation, ballot box stuffing and when none of that works plain bribery. Or hacking the voting machines in an industrial scale (rumored.)
During election time, election workers, really underpaid but committed workers and cops have stopped suspicious "lorries," (trucks) filled with cash on highways. It was headed to districts to be been handed out to voters. This is "normal." Election officials work hard to keep it fair but stuff happens.
The worst case scenario is electronic voting without paper backup. The political party with the "best" hackers can re-shape any election. Allegedly.
Do we want that here? Its coming, unless we as a responsible Democratic country stop it at its tracks. There are not too many of us left, most don't care or vote. They are the proverbial lobsters who don't know they are being cooked until it gets personal. By then, its too late.
Why, it's almost like the Republicans aren't sincere in their desire to combat electoral fraud--almost as if it's actually a pretense, and their real goal is to disenfranchise people! But that's just silly, Republicans believe too much in democracy to do something sinister and cynical like that.
2
Why are voting records not available online? Why can't we develop automated systems, that can be trusted?
Is it because the people in charge of creating these systems are liars and cheaters?
1
Watching Trump and the ugliest of his Republican toadies and lackeys getting their comeuppance is starting to be fun.
Trump babbles increasingly absurd things -- he's become his own Comical Ali because ... why? Has he exhausted the supply of people willing to be humiliated on his behalf? His administration is collapsing because everyone can see it's not only a lost cause, but one that will take a lot of people down with it. Sarah ... you should have taken the hint from watching Sean.
With the Democrats in control of the house Trump will start to take real incoming fire. Trump has so many vulnerabilities, so many skeletons just waiting to pop out of closets, that the odds of him dodging all of the bullets look miniscule.
Trump has actually become the best thing to happen to the Democratic party in a long time. Trump has peeled off all the educated suburban "soccer moms" and handed them to the Democrats. He's made it next to impossible for a woman to run for office as a Republican anywhere other than the hardest-red districts. He's completed the Republican alienation of young people. He's alienated just about everybody except downwardly-mobile whites. He's forced out moderate conservatives and turned elections into referendums on him.
The interesting question is when do Republicans bail on Trump, how do they do it, and what do they have left when they do?
Everyone keeps saying Trump will head the ticket in 2020 ... don't bet on it.
2
Americans know that the Republics cannot win elections unless the supress and/or disenfranchise poor and Minority Americans.
They’ve been doing it for half a century and they will continue for another half a century or until America stops allowing them to steal our electoral process.
1
This absentee ballot scam is probably more widespread than we know. Republicans seem to alight on a way to fix elections and then try them out in a southern state where no one's paying much attention since it's "deep red." A few points in a deep red state won't rattle any cages.
If the scam works, then it's tried out in competitive races...like the North Carolina race.
This may seem like conspiracy theorizing, but, doggone it, the scam in NC is looking increasingly like it was well planned and executed.
1
Thank you for early morning chuckles served up a la Trump. What a buffoon albeit a dangerous one. No, he has not been right about one single thing and he is unhinged as far as reasonableness and rationality. He can't go there as his mind won't allow it. Again, he is either a)unhinged, b)demented, c)both. I go with c and the proofs are in the tweets.
Trump, despite hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from the IRS and creditors, still follows filthy rich people rule #1, NEVER spend your own money. Fred taught him that and evidently convinced Trump that the IRS is just another federal government institution that can be ignored or destroyed by decimating its staffing budget.
Trump probably asked for a double scoop ice cream cone, and expected the vendor to give it to him free because he is so wonderful. Narcissism starts probably at birth but definitely within childhood.
1
Literature is replete with stories of con men, flim flam artists, grifters, and snake oil and love potion salesmen. Some of the stories are tragedies; others are comedies. The universal theme is that innocent, naive, average people are bilked while smarter, wealthier folks just ignore the whole thing.
Trump has been accused of being ignorant, stupid, and mentally disturbed, all of which may be true. But that he is a con man or grifter etc. is beyond dispute. All he is selling is “you’re not happy and I alone can fix it.” Those who buy it are the same who buy snake oil. His claims of voter fraud are just part of the con, along with criminals flooding the border, climate change being a Chinese hoax, tariffs being good for consumers, etc, etc., etc.
Mueller’s investigation together with recent news reports indicate that Trump may be selling the US to the highest bidder who pays him or the Trump Organization the most to receive the most favored treatment from him. Russia and Saudi Arabia are presently in the cross hairs; it is probable there are others.
The final act of this play has not been written. Will it be a tragedy for Trump or a tragedy for the US? It’s definitely not going to be a comedy.
1
Gail, I love you, but as "an elderly white male" myself, I am getting a bit weary of being associated with voting for Trump merely as a result of age, race and gender. Please stop?
1
If I didn’t know better, cuz it’s low probability he has voted consistently, I’d bet Donald votes in either NY or FL by absentee, from which his suspicions come from...
Well, this is how I like my irony served up! Apparently, this isn't the first election fraud perpetrated by the vote harvester guy in NC. Oh no, he's been at it for a while and the current "winner" lost in 2016 due to vote harvesting by another republican last time around. He figured it out and used the same guy to vote harvest him to victory in 2018. You gotta love that. We should get Kris Kobach on this right away! In understand he's got some free time on his hands.
There's no reason for Gail to pooh-pooh the president when he talks about fraud. If there's one thing Donald Trump IS an expert on it's fraud. He practically invented it.
1
I am grateful for this endless chatter of eulogy for President Bush 41 , we get a break from watching Donald J. trumps face in every single 24/7 news stations !
1
"Trump Gets It All Wrong"?
Shouldn't the story really be "Trump Never Got It Right"?
That's the story of this presidency!
1
Methinks the GOP doth protest too much. Dr Freud called it projection. They are guilty of everything they accuse others of doing. All totalitarians and crypto-totalitarians act this way.
3
Trump knows there were no busloads of Democratic fraud voters brought in from Massachusetts, he knows he lost the popular vote, and he knows that voter fraud had nothing to do with it. He tells people anything they are willing to believe, as long as it benefits him. He is morally bankrupt, clever, and successful, not stupid. The only people getting it wrong are the people who fall for it, and the result has been increased Democratic voter suppression - exactly what he has been trying to accomplish.
2
Does Trump REALLY think that all someone needs to do to cast multiple ballots is to go to their car and keep returning to the polls wearing different hats, fake mustaches, or false noses with glasses? Let me guess, Shrink Face and Mr. Thumb tried that in a comic book that Trump remembers the maid once read to him.
2
From: "Speak softly and carry a big stick" to “I loved my previous life. I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.” to "[John McCain is]... not a war hero. He's a war hero - he's a war hero 'cause he was captured. I Like people that weren't captured, OK, I hate to tell you."
And my former rightist acquaintances wonder why I no longer associate with them.
2
In Trumpworld, winning is the only thing. In his way of viewing the world, voter fraud would be a perfectly acceptable way to win an election, if it weren't so impractical to orchestrate. He has to settle for promoting the lie that fraud is running rampant.
Lance Armstrong was recently interviewed about his post-scandal life. In it, Armstrong said that Trump criticized him for his 2013 acknowledgment that he used PADs. Trump wasn't criticizing his drug use, but rather his admission. According to Trump, "failure and lawsuits" would follow. Doing the right thing was Armstrong's mistake.
No wonder Trump looked so uncomfortable at the Bush funeral.
2
What do you mean by "every time he lost an election"? He's only run for one in his life, and he actually lost that one because almost 3 million people that we know of, actually voted for the other candidate than for him.
3
Thank you for stating the obvious. It seems that cheaters, liars, and corrupt people always project onto others. The book DARK MONEY nicely covers conservative billion and millionaires funneling vast amounts of money into American politics through unregulated PACs - but George Soros is the GOP & FAUX News boogeyman. You hear of crisis actors and paid protesters for Democrats but I am only aware of documentation showing the Koch brothers using this tactic - I believe in Kentucky. You hear right wing accusations of voter fraud but you can only find evidence of right wing voter suppression, gerrymandering, questionable state voter purges, and now possible Republican voter fraud. As a former Republican, and now Independent, i find the current GOP revolting and scary.
1
Democrats cheat too. There doesn’t seem to be any high moral ground on either side. Seems more like well, they are doing it so we should too. Still a corruption of our system, folks.
I personally want Voter ID so we can fix this.
Trump probably doesn't know about absentee ballots any more than he knows about grocery shopping. His whole world is limited to no more than 100 yards from a luxury jet or a golf cart. He only imagines what lies beyond those boundaries.
1
I live in Fannin County Georgia and voter fraud is just a way of life. The Republicans are in control and I was Democratic Chairman for several terms. One of the favorite tricks of the election board was to hold the absentee ballots in the office and the day before the election, they would then drop most of the Democrat ballots in the federal mail box which would then be transported to Gainesville, Georgia to be post marked and then mailed to Atlanta before returning to Fannin, County. This resulted in the ballots being returned seven to ten days after the election was over. I filed a charge with the Secertary of State in which Karen Handel was in charge. The charge resulted in the Democratic Party being the only group invested in Fannin, County. My Brother was involved in this fraud and in 1984 in the Sheriffs election, the Democrat won the election twice but never served as the results were changed every time by the Republicans to reflect a tie vote. On the third election the Democrats gave up. The FBI did conduct an election and my brother, James Brown (half-brother) did serve six years in Federal Prison as he would not turn states evidence against the other people in the court house as just about everyone working in the courthouse was involved in the fraud. Here in Georgia voter fraud is still practiced by every means possible. My brothers finger prints were found on over 400 absentee ballots.
2
..now it there is no reasonable prospect that anything Mueller does or says could result in Trump's removal.
Trump famously said "I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes" . That has now been replaced by "Trump could be caught handing American military secrets to Russia and still not have any Republican votes for impeachment".
Whatever evidence and proof of criminal acts that Mueller could come up with, it is certain that such evidence and proof could not be as powerful an indication of wrongdoing as the evidence in the public record that Bret Kavanaugh was lying in the senate hearings relating to his confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice.
Once Ford’s account included three people she said were there AND his calendar had them all at Tim Gaudette’s house on July 1, 1982, AND Ford’s description of the interior of Gaudette’s house in Rockville, MD exactly matches that of the actual house, which still exists: the only way that Kavanaugh was not lying is either: Ford somehow obtained access to his 1982 diary/calendar, or Ford has a time machine or Ford stalked Kavanaugh in 1982 and planned for this if he was nominated to the Supreme Court..."
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4216597|
1
trump was right all along. There was massive voter fraud -- it now appears likely that absentee ballots were stolen and/or filled out by others. Strangely (not really) trump's lackeys who were investigating the voter fraud that trump claimed took place "missed" the real fraud and was quickly and quietly disbanded.
North Carolina, Florida, Georgia! We know what you did! It's time to really investigate these frauds, declare the elections so affected a nullity and lock up those responsible.
1
Trump verified two of his many major flaws during yesterday's memorial service for GHW Bush; he doesn't pray and he can't read. Otherwise the words to the Apostles Creed and the hymns would have been recited.
Instead of leaving this as a he said/she said argument about illegal voting, how about we demand greater transparency? If absentee ballots are going to be disqualified, it should be done before the actual election takes place, and states/precincts should be required to process these ballots and notify those addressees about the problems within days of receiving them.
If people are denied the right to vote on election day, the precincts should be required to publish the names of those denied and why. If someone's name appears in multiple precincts (because they moved perhaps), there should be some notification as well.
We need mandatory, mail-in paper ballot only voting during a 6-week period. No machines, no lines, no barriers. Add automatic voter registration and rank-choice voting. Outlaw partisan gerrymandering and remove the electoral college. Allow a five-party platform for debates And watch how quickly you see more choices (and voices) created. Do all this and you’d actually have accurate representation.
2
Long ago I backpacked around the world with my ex-wife a sweet, but confused woman who particularly distinguished herself by having absolutely no sense of direction. Mine is quite good, but in her company I developed a foolproof method. Whenever we exited a fleabag hotel or cheap local restaurant, I watched her impulse about which way to turn, then chose the opposite direction. As far as I know this is the only resemblance between her and Donald Trump.
7
Sounds like my ex-husband (minus the “sweet” part.
I hope that every citizen exercises their right, privilege, and responsibility to vote. However, I have to say that many articles I read give me doubts. I understand that California does not require citizenship to vote. I hope that is inaccurate.
I applaud legal immigration. Our nation is made up of immigrants who came here (on a one-way ticket) to build a better life or escape persecution in some far off land. I am against illegal immigration by those merely seeking a handout from the government.
I do not understand why we cannot reform our broken immigration system and enforce our sovereignty. The immigration proposal made last year does that.
One side of the aisle wants 'open' borders - assuming that every new immigrant will vote for more entitlements. The other side wants a 'closed' border, fearing that new immigrants will not adopt American culture and values. Of course, neither are correct, but our current system breeds doubt and suspicion on both sides.
You have it completely wrong about one side of the aisle. The Democratic Party does NOT call for open borders, nor does it support immigrants and their rights because it is seeking votes for entitlement programs. You cannot find a single major Democrat who argues that. They want common sense, comprehensive immigration reform, treating people with respect, not separating children and their families, and giving Dreamers the rights they so deserve.
OTOH, the Republicans do, just as you say, fear immigrants and want to curb immigration because, incorrectly and without evidence, they believe immigrants do not assimilate, come here for handouts, and commit crimes. Of course, as you know, none of their fears are borne out by the facts.
4
@jrgfla - Rest easy. In California, non-citizens can't vote in elections for state and federal offices.
And you're mistaken when you claim “one side” wants open borders. There is not a single Demoocrat in office or who ran for office in the recent election calling for open borders.
Where have your misconceptions come from?
3
@Marsha Pembroke Marsha, separating children and their families is something that has gone on long before Trump took office. I don't believe Republicans fear immigration at all.. but something has to be done about illegals in America. I live in Canada, a far more Liberal nation (and less democratic I think..) and our nation has some pretty strict rules on such things.. in rare instances you could spend up to 2 years in jail for it..
At the end of the day there is a big difference between Immigrants, refugees, and those who enter a nation illegally (for whatever reason..) and if America has as many illegals as people believe than.. that's huge problem.
Proves what I've always maintained: Vote fraud occurs at the wholesale level, not the retail level that the R's obsess over.
6
Going door to door to steal absentee ballots seems like a really inefficient way to commit voter fraud... unless you already know where the absentee voters live. You would need to at least know party affiliations and voting records to stand any chance of influencing an election.
I'm wondering who supplied to voter data to Dowless. Detailed information like that isn't free. You're not getting ballot identification data for a few thousand dollars either. Even friendly partners will generally charge somewhere around $100 thousand for the data and mobile app. There has to be a silent donor somewhere.
1
It is alleged that they DID know these things. The idea was to HELP infrequent minority voters to request absentee ballots and then COLLECT them. It isn't known whether they also helped fill out the ballots and whether all of the ballots were turned in.
2
Information is readily available and is used for phone banking in almost any race. It is not secret nor illegal to get it.
Several years ago the Republicans made a lot of noise in Michigan about having "poll watchers" present at polls to look at every person's ID and form that you fill out to get a ballot. I am a lawyer and knew I would have no difficulty voting, but it intimidated even me to think some Republican shill would be looking me over to try to challenge my vote since I live in a pretty liberal area.
I called our local newspaper and left a message that it would be helpful if they would explain to voters just what these "poll watchers" could do with respect to them. I told them that as a lawyer, I was intimidated and that the non-lawyer population might well decide to give voting a pass if it involved being challenged by some evangelical on a mission to give the Republicans the win.
To my immense relief (and even surprise), the paper ran small stories on the front page three separate days telling voters that the watchers could not speak to them, could not challenge their ballots, and had to sit in the back and be quiet. I have no idea if anyone else was relieved the way I was to know that the "watchers" would leave me alone, but I'm forever grateful to our local paper for tracking down the answer and publishing it for us.
16
Voting problems of all sorts exist. This is a non-partisan problem. Voter harvesting was done extensively by Democrats in Orange County. Retirees from NY regularly vote both there and in Florida. And who an forget the intimidation caused by the Black Panthers showing up with rifles at some Philadelphia polling places.
Thanks, Gail, for acknowledging what most Dems have ever so strenuously denied: that voting fraud is a real problem.
Now let's hear your ideas for dealing with the problem (other than telling us for the thousandth time that Trump gets it all wrong). What precisely would Kalama Harris, Eliabeth Warren or Michele Obama propose to do to improve the situation (particularly people casting multiple ballots, which dilutes each of our proper votes)?
Regarding California, it wasn’t exactly “voter harvesting.” Picking up absentee ballots is legal in California.
The response from the California GOP was this: “... [the representative of the GOP] blamed the GOP’s losses in California on changing demographics in the state, a large cash infusion for Democratic candidates and a heightened enthusiasm among the Democratic base in the run-up to the election.”
1
Voter fraud is not a problem. On the other hand it appears that (GOP) election fraud is.
1
Ulysses, turn off Fox Fake News!
It's polluting your brain with untruths. Contrary to Trump and the Republicans, there are very, very few cases of outright voter fraud. But they use that charge as a pretense to curb voting rights of the poor, minorities, and students — and, thereby, undermine Democratic voting.
By the way, the Democrats did not commit fraud in Orange County; they won there because suburban and conservative Republicans are tired of Trump, his racism, and his misbegotten policies.
OTOH as Ms, Collins points out, the Republicans in North Carolina did engage in election fraud. Yet, Trump and the Republicans are tellingly silent about it, or hurling baseless charges. The Republicans also gerrymandered voting all through the nation so much so that the Democrats keep getting shortchanged in representation in state legislatures and congressional delegations.
Do some wider reading, especially by nonpartisan political scientists and you may open up your eyes to what is really going on!
Let's combine two seemingly unrelated things: George H. W. Bush's passing and Donald Trump's comment on voter fraud. Bush was repeatedly taken to task, perhaps wrongly, but the jury is still out, for not knowing about grocery store scanner technology. Donald Trump gets a free pass, as always, for wrongly thinking you need to show a picture ID to buy groceries.
10
@White Buffalo
How does Trump get a free pass on that remark? He was widely ridiculed for it.
“In most states if this was going on you wouldn’t be able to see it,”
This is scary. Hopefully Democrats will do something to close loopholes, especially with so many "solid" Republican area races being so close these days. Republicans will do anything to get and keep power. Changing laws for incoming Democrats in Wisconsin is another tactic.. they tweek the system to help Republicans when they win, then take it away when they leave.
The ONLY solution to stop manipulation is to vote ALL Republicans OUT at all levels of government.
10
You forgot to mention the voters' fraud going on in Wisconsin, where the legislature is defying the voters and is changing the rules of Governing.
17
This behavior gives more credence to voting by mail and making sure people know that no ballots will be accepted unless they come through the US Mail. Yet another item for canvassers to address when talking with people.
I hope the penalties for ballot stealing are severe, including pictures of the villains on the front page of every paper and maybe even milk cartons!
3
Republicans gerrymander, supress the vote, and take power away from elected officials that aren't in their party. So, this should surprise no one.
14
The Republican mindset:
1) Something bad might possibly happen somewhere.
2) Therefore, something bad has happened somewhere.
3) Therefore, something bad is happening everywhere.
4) People need to know about this bad thing.
5) People need to be angry and frightened about this bad thing.
6) This bad thing must be prevented from every happening again.
7) The Democrats did it.
19
8. Buy gold. Or testosterone supplements. Maybe both.
Actually, Trump is right about voter fraud happening. He knows because it's his supporters doing it.
17
And, because that's how he got elected in the first place!
1
Let’s consider the term “absentee” in Absentee Ballot:
An “absentee” is someone (or something) that doesn’t show up. Like a student skipping school. Or a soldier going AWOL. Possibly a chief executive refusing to visit war dead on a day honoring them.
Absentee has bad connotations. It’s like dereliction of duty. And the GOP now seems fascinated by “absentee ballots.” So fascinated they go out to collect them, possibly after requesting them to mailed to a voter, even offering to fill them out for the voter, or deliver them on behalf of the voter.
What do we do when students play hooky? Or soldiers go AWOL? WE DO NOT REWARD THEM!
When Absentee Ballots become Tainted Ballots or Missing Ballots, we need a new term. And we need to send out Law Enforcement.
Tampering with voting, no matter how it occurs, is a pernicious, unacceptable, unlawful, undermining of our democratic Republic. It is reprehensible. Shameful. A embarrassment to our nation. A Black Eye on the GOP - which seems bent on finding any method to wrest political control for itself, while denying the WILL of the voters.
6
A few bogus votes would have no appreciable effect on an overall vote and wouldn't be worth the effort. It would probably take thousands of bogus votes to have any effect on the average election and that is not likely to happen. The Republican hue and cry about the non-issue of voter fraud is just a means of suppressing the potential Democratic vote. Let's get real.
4
It matters enormously when the count is a difference of only 900 votes!
1
Democracy is not in the voting, it's in the counting.
7
It’s in both.
While I don't believe in mass voter fraud in the USA, I know there is massive fraud in many other ways. It would be interesting to compare voting addresses with state and federal income tax addresses and driver's license addresses and children's school addresses, and car registration addresses, and benefits addresses. Generally, all of these addresses should be identical except registration of cars at second homes. Everyone, including Florida and other non state income tax residents are required to file federal tax returns. It is illegal to have driver's licenses from more than one state. Also, the Social Security Administration has no face to face meeting with Social Security recipients. If you die in a foreign country and your family does not notify the US government, your checks keep being deposited into bank accounts your relatives can access through ATM's. No one knows if billions of dollars are being defrauded from Social Security this way. Fraud is a cancer on Social Welfare programs. People stop supporting these programs when they feel their money is being stolen. Supporters of social programs should be the hardest on people who commit fraud.
1
There is, in fact, little fraud by individuals in our welfare programs, especially in the food stamp program. Fraud in government programs is usually larger-scale, by providers, such as dishonest doctors and medical facilities.
The biggest fraud is in defense industries, with massive cost overruns and trillions unaccounted for,
There is also legalized chicanery such as in massive oil and gas company subsidies, big farm and big Pharm subsidies, and major tax loopholes favoring investment bankers and real estate moguls.
Worry about the organized, big hucksters and rip-off artists, not the little guy!
1
"There’s also Trump’s more recent argument that voters should have to have special IDs because “if you go out and you want to buy groceries you need a picture on a card. You need an ID.”
"People, where do you think this came from?"
As bizarre as this statement is, IMO Trump is referencing a time 30-40 years ago when people often bought groceries with checks and had to show ID. Either that, or he is referencing when he or his military-school friends had to show ID when buying beer. Either way, it shows he has few shared commonalities with the average adult American.
7
@Dan88 It's pretty clear from this statement that he has never actually purchased groceries.
6
Actually in some NYC supermarkets you must show ID to use a credit card for payment. I have asked for ID in Harlem and Bronx markets.
@NYCSandi I'm guessing that Trump has never been to any markets in Harlem and the Bronx, grocery or otherwise.
@C I couldn't say if he did or didn't himself buy groceries in his life, but I'm guessing at some point he may have found himself in a grocery store when he was younger and witnessed this kind of transaction.
1
Pretty soon the Republicans won't have to do any voter suppression or fraud to retain or expand power. In Wisconsin Walker has shown them what to do: if Democrats win, simply change the rules or before you leave office, simply vote to take all power away from any incoming Democrat. Seems to work. This is the same guy who knocked off unions and the base, which apparently now includes blue-collar workers who really believe Republicans are on their side, and that a crooked billionaire is their savior. Up is down and down is up--that seems to be the new thinking. A word of caution: imagine if Democrats now turn around and use Walker's strategy to take away the of incoming Republicans? Oh, that's right, no issue there: they will be called communist and dictators, and will be quickly jailed.
Wake up people. We are turning into a banana republic. We have met the enemy and he is us---those who fail to understand that in a democracy those who govern get authority from the people, and not the other way around. We are the people. The french people this week showed politicians what would happen if you push people too far. Let's not have to go there. Pay attention to what is happening to the right to vote in this country: it has become a weapon for those who want power at any cost.
5
Since St Reagan’s time the republicans have been busy running elections any way they want to get the results they want, so the president may be correct in his assertions of voter fraud; except that it’s his party doing the cheating.
5
Look to ALEC. My guess is this type of voter suppression, the stealing of absentee ballots and worse, has been going on by Republicans for awhile in many red states, all concocted by the skullduggery convention called ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council - first developed the idea of claiming voter fraud as an excuse for voter suppression - Trump signed on to the idea to sooth his ego because most Americans did not want him anywhere near the White House). Look to 2010.
3
So what is this Trump bluster about fraudulent elections all about?
What Trump is doing is very dangerous for this country by continually lying, then lying about his lies, and frequently reversing himself several times in what he says.
Trump, ever the con artist, is doing 3 things:
1 Paving the way to discredit and de-legitimize government and the law--giving the Kochs, Mercers, and other billionaire business people and big GOP libertarian donors their money's worth. Weaken the government, then wahoo: utopian free market capitalism--profits, not taxes; lie, pollute, and scam without regulations or accountability; desperate middle class willing work for a pittance...
2 By keeping the citizenry confused & having little idea what to believe, Trump escalates doubt in everyone's mind.
To his base, they feel they can't trust the government--a lengthy GOP campaign since St Ronnie, who also lied and repeated lies sufficiently (but amiably) so Americans came to believe them, such as de-regulation is good, trickle-down economics helps the middle class (still waiting), and government is the problem not the solution.
To Dems and liberals, we can no longer rely on or trust Trump & his government to help anyone, be fair, do what is best for all. Welcome to authoritarianism and King Trump. Tough luck.
3 And when Trump is not elected in 2020, he will claim the elections were fraudulent, and he refuses to leave.
There is always a method to King Trump's madness.
Where is the crown?
1
All this time when Trump and his disciples have parroted stories of buses full of illegal voters there has been true illegalities perpetrated by absentee vote 'services' to actually steal votes.
Yes, Mr. President there was collusion, and the voter frauds are in your political party.
2
Of course tRump has it all wrong. On everything. HIs bad economic policies are beginning to unravel, his handling of the immigration issue has, in true dictatorial fashion, turned into a humanitarian crisis, foreign policy a muddy morass of deceit and dis-respect. This list goes on and gets worse by the day. And yet there is still a chorus that says he is doing a great job!
It boggles the mind that this lack of leadership is tolerated in the country. We should all be ashamed of what we've become.
4
I have to admit, on this one I was not surprised at the irony. We all grew up learning that the people who complained most about teacher's pets, were teachers pets themselves. Any party so preoccupied with election fraud must have it in their blood since that (and avoiding five-story walk-ups voting stations) is the only way they can win. Al Gores "count every vote" left the Bush army howling with laughter, and we know how that one turned out. Question to President little-hands Trump--what exactly is it you are saying?
1
Remember when Trump used to call in phony stories about "how great Donald Trump was" to reporters in NYC as fake tipster "John Barron"?
The guy has made a career of lying and projecting.
And getting away with it.
The GOP voter fraud thing should always be examined at the source- for obvious reasons.
4
I worked for a firm that was hired by the DNC to do an election audit during the Gore v. Bush recount. The job was to take the actual day voting records of those people casting votes in the 4 counties and compare them to our Deceased File, which was compiled from over a dozen sources (including the SSA). We found over 3500 dead people voted for Al Gore in those 4 counties and fewer than 500 dead people voted for Bush in the same counties. These were people who cast those votes on the day they were already officially known as being dead.
Needless to say, this analysis was quickly buried and forgotten about, but it's a good reminder that Zombie Voting is the easiest crime in the world to commit because the person whose vote was stolen isn't around to complain, and as long as nobody is asking for photo ID..it's easy for someone to ask for Elmer or Esther Anderson's ballot as long as they know the address...and read obituaries and funeral home notices.
We do need a national standard for VoterID, even if it means digitally photographing someone who can't produce an ID. That JPG file can be attached to a voter roll database very easily. The mere thought of someone getting caught serves as a deterrent.
In addition, the audit found a significant (more than 750) college students and (more than 1500) snowbirds..were suspected of voting both back home as well as in FL.
VoterID is now on the radar now that Republicans have caught on and are using the same tricks.
1
The GOP’s stranglehold on elections is the central issue facing America today.
Even with the Democratic capture of more governorships in the midterms, the GOP still holds the overwhelming majority and, largely through gerrymandering, the GOP still holds even more of the state legislatures. And with that power they are maintaining and defending insecure and easily manipulable election systems like those in North Carolina and Georgia, instituting policies that undercount likely Democratic votes, passing laws that suppress likely Democratic votes and laws that purport to wrest power from Democratic executives. And for years they have been packing the courts with judges who will rubber stamp it all.
Our only hope is capturing not only the White House but the Senate in 2020. And even if we can manage to pass laws outlawing gerrymandering and ensuring election system security, we still face a GOP-packed Supreme Court that could well rule that such issues are the “states’ rights” province of the very states that instituted them in the first place.
The media needs to blow this issue up in neon and keep it before the voters every single day until November 3, 2020. Our mandate must be so clear, so overwhelming that John Roberts cannot escape the truth: his legacy—not to mention our democracy—depends on the Court’s upholding of fair elections, open to every citizen, free of tampering, where every last vote actually counts.
1
Great comment. Now replace every "GOP" with "Grand Old Party" and see if you still hold by it.
I will wait right here.
Round of applause for the County Clerk's office who refused to certify the election. Good job.
The irony is stunning. I wonder about the voters though. Who turns over their ballot to anyone other than the mailman? The truly paranoid would drop off their ballot in person.
We happen to live in a mail-in/drop-off county. In effect, all ballots are absentee ballots. They have a few in-person polling stations but generally speaking your ballot is home delivered.
I would never, ever, ever, let some random stranger touch my ballot. What kind of system allows that behavior? Who thinks that behavior is normal?
The worst part though is Mark Harris and Leslie McCrae Dowless are giving honest canvassers a bad name. An honest canvasser knows writing anything on behalf of a signatory is against the law. You just don't do that. Fraud is extremely counter productive. Work on your verbal persuasion skills instead.
The next time a legitimate canvasser knocks on the door now, the entire nation is going to immediately assume they are scamming them somehow. As if political canvassing wasn't a tough enough job already! Thanks Harris...
1
Over the years I've guilty-watched enough episodes of Maury, Steve Wilkos, et al. to know that 90%+ of the time when someone is accusing others of wrongdoing, the accuser is guilty of the transgression.
Maybe Republicans are just throwing out red meat to their base with the accusations, especially now that the party has been Trumpified. Or maybe they are so sure Democrats must be doing these things because they themselves are doing it, and "everybody is corrupt, right?"
So we see with voter fraud. There are isolated one-offs totaling a relative handful of incidents over decades, or a couple districts with incompetent voting processes fumbling the ball. So far the only organized, large scale instances of voter fraud we're seeing that might actually have tipped races have benefited Republican candidates. And we're not even talking all the credible instances of voter suppression by Republicans, with no such efforts attributed to Democrats that I have seen.
"Isn't that special?" says the Church Lady.
One interesting fact about Robeson County -- it is about one-third African-American, one-third Native American, and one-third White, and Democrats outnumber Republicans 48,783-9,732. Bladen County has 57% Democrat registration to 15% Republican. Strange that Harris managed to carry both of these counties by a large margin.
5
This is why Gail Collins is where she is! After all the yelling about illegal immigrants and the fate of our country due to countless examples of voter fraud, the GOP parties in North Carolina are now proving our fearless leader correct! Departmetn of Irony has issued the edict that an enterprising fellow in North Carolina took it upon himself to pick up absentee ballots and the "election" of Mark Harris appears to have had, uh, several/more than several/hundreds of fraudulent votes. Not the millions and millions of people in CA where the same person votes many times, as Trump claimed, but more than say a handful.
1
@Katalina
"Our fearless leader"... Really?
No offense, but most people listening to Donald Trump know better than to believe anything he says.
@N. Smith Uh, pretty sure "fearless leader" refers to a classic sketch on Rock & Bullwinkle.
It is sad that we must now integrate a very sordid and basic fact into every high school government class across America: Republicans cheat.
2
Getting it wrong implies he does not know
He is lying. Republicans are lying. Republicans are cheating on an industrial scale.
Now that they got shellacked in mid terms they continue to try to cheat and lock their hatred of Democracy into laws that will have to be undone by courts over the next six months because they are so blatantly illegal abuses of power - all to thwart the will of We the People as expressed at the ballot box
Republicans hate democracy almost as much as they hate reality
1
Does Trump get it all wrong ?
Of course he has no idea of what the actual responsibilities are for the office which he holds.
Of course he has no idea of what a Patriot is.
The stark contrast at the GHW Bush funeral was amazing !
Of course he has no need for facts as they simply get in his way.
For a man who ranks "loyalty to him" from others in the absolute highest regard, he apparently has NONE for our country.
Long before Trump was in office;
The GOP operatives in North Carolina were stealing and "manipulating" absentee votes - on top of their perpetual Gerrymandering.
The GOP Congress in Wisconsin were bitter sore-losers - "emphasis on losers" - long before they voted away rights of the incoming Democratic governor.
The sickness in the Republican Party runs long and runs deep !
How sad this is as having a true two party system - where the parties work to come to reasonable compromises of opinion for the sole purpose of serving their constituents with the end gave of a better America.
2
Gail, it's about time that Trump's election should be declared null and void only because of thousands non-eligible voters who voted for Trump through 'Absentee Ballots' in 2016.
Trump, who promoted the idea of voter fraud after he lost the popular votes to Hillary by more than 3 million votes, didn't mention about rigging of his election by White uneducated voters who voted by mail even after they knew that they were not eligible to vote because of their past felony records.
The same culprit called Richard Dowless, in the latest North Carolina elections who doomed the chances of Democrat Dan McCready through "extensive ballot harvesting" as you've reported, to make Republican pastor Mark Harris win the House race by 905 votes, must've also made Trump win by thousands of votes in NC in 2016.
That is the reason why the Trump and the Republicans should start looking at their own Devils like Dowless who're collecting 'absentee ballots' forms from Black and minority residents without their signatures to make their candidates in the Republican party win the elections.
There are every possibilities that many of the White Republicans with recent felony records have sent 'absentee ballots' on their own to their local election offices to make Mark Harris win in North Carolina.
Although the election office in NC has not certified Mark Harris's win yet but they did make Trump win the state in 2016 with the same type of 'absentee ballots' that we're talking about.
Go figure !
1
No sense beating around the bush. Fact is that Trump fails miserably at introspection. It's the narcissism in him, it doesn't allow him to view himself as anything other than the center of the universe. Gods gift to humanity and the cosmos.
Truth is he is a human wrecking ball that spoils everything he touches or comes into contact with. All he has is the grift and that will be coming too an end soon.
Imo he craves respect, honor, recognition and adoration. Unfortunately for him he has not even the slightest clue how to go about earning any of it. He always seems to be in the way of himself.
Reality is that he was a fool for entering politics where there is nowhere to hide ones weaknesses. He will fade from the picture an angry and much despised narcissist fully deserving of whatever ills await him. Good riddance I say.
1
I'm a Massachusetts mole voter in New Hampshire.
My chameleon voting is so well disguised that anyone investigating fraudulent voter registration will be fooled.
How did I do this? Simple. I was bused into NH in 1953, established a school record, a Social Security number, employment, and property ownership. Voila! No one can tell I'm a phony voter! (There are thousands of us, maybe millions! But you will never know...)
2
One thing you can absolutely, unequivocally depend on about Donald Trump is that you won't hear the truth come out of his mouth. He even lies about the lies he tells. You don't even have to wonder if you are being lied to with him, you know you are. In an oxymoronic kind of way, there is an honesty about his dishonesty. I just disregard what he says anymore. I don't even have to "factcheck" what he says. I know I can depend on him to lie.
As for his statement about having to show picture ID for buying groceries, that was just plain ignorance. He has probably never even been in a grocery store. He has people for that. His statements about voter fraud in California were just him being his dependable lying self.
I was shocked I tell you shocked, that the Republicans in North Carolina were trying to steal the election, just as they stole it in Georgia and Florida. I really was shocked that the election officials in North Carolina actually will not certify the election until it can be determined if there were fraudulent activity. Maybe there is hope for our struggling democracy?
Now if only something can be done about the Republican legislatures in North Carolin and Wisconsin stripping Democratic governors of power....
Two things Republicans seem to be good at, are lying and stealing power. Just an observation.
Another trick! My wife was once told not to bother voting, because there were so many Republicans in our district, her Democratic vote would not count.
As for Trump, there is an old saying, "He who smelt it dealt it."
4
That's not Mattis...
The elderly white male comment was beneath you. In my neck of the woods you would be wrong as well in assuming that it would reduce the republican vote.
Kindest regards
@Ben, oh come on. Lighten up. Who makes up trump's base? Mostly older white men.
As the wife of a Parkinson's afflicted Vietnam veteran, who watched him suffer in line for two hours to vote, yeah. The idea of grumpy trump voters having to climb stairs, maybe at a polling place 28 miles away cuz the Democrats closed the one nearby? That's funny. The weird thing is, Democrats will never do that. Democratic voters would not allow it. Republicans? They seem to just love it if other Americans can't vote.
2
The deaths of President Trump and Senator McCain, and the sight of Senator Dole willing to expend the last bit of strength in his fragile body to salute the casket of his adversary and his friend reinforces that President Trump is and always will be a syphilitic chancre on the face of the American presidency.
2
@Didier
I wasn't aware that Trump had died. Did I miss something?
1
The North Carolina problem with absentee ballots of minorities being harvested by private contractors sounds like just the case to call in the actor posing as our Acting Attorney General, Matthew G. Whitaker.
Someone should flash the image of a Jacuzzi into the sky, and Whitaker will show up wearing a white hood.
We’ve been worried about MBS in Saudi Arabia, but we should be worried about MGW in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
If Republicans only worked harder learning how to govern, instead of working so hard to steal votes from African-Americans and Mexican-Americans, this would be a much better nation.
If state election officials in the red states did their jobs more honestly, the white majority would start to shrink.
Hmm . . . maybe these Republicans are not as stupid as they act and look.
That’s General Dunford in photo.
It's really quite simple: Republicans are entitled cheaters with a goal of power.
2
The smartest, easiest way to Make America Great Again is to never, ever, ever vote for a Republican.
6
Trump as the leader of the odious Republican party's Southern strategy, make people of color the scapegoats while at the same time conning those same people of color out of the one power they have: the right to vote. How corrupt can a party be to carry out a methodical process of going door to door collecting black vote-in ballots and either destroying them or changing/writing in the GOP candidate. Then unlike during the Presidential election with Trump crowing about how illegals and blacks are illegal voting for Democrats, now there isn't even a peep by the same GOP President nor one single member of this odious political party. What a shame!
When you convince yourself that the opposition is corrupt, even without evidence, it is easier to justify being corrupt yourself. This rule seems to apply when you hear about voter fraud (there was a GOPer, or two, who were busted in 2016 for voting twice and they claimed that Democrats do it too) or when listening to Trump rant about “Crooked Hillary” or “Lyin’ Ted”. Corrupt people think everyone is corrupt.
"Trump Gets It All Wrong" is the weekly summary of this dumpster fire of an administration.
Republicans cheat in elections all over the country. They are evil from Trump at the bottom to the ordinary Republican at the top.
I struggled to find thoughts to write, a cloud of questions. Are the Republicans so corrupt and delusional when it comes to voter fraud because they actually believe the nonsense they spout? Are the lies about fraud consciously false, simply used to publicly justify their unethical squashing of voter rights? Are they looking to win at all costs, and how long have they been so criminal? It's hard to say, but it seems like the answer is yes, they have become a party that is willfully ignorant, unethical, and vicious.
3
If you're a cheater you accuse others of cheating. After all they must be doing it too.
4
Read their lips: they're liars!
Trump is so delusional that he probably believes whatever he says.
If Republicans can't steal an election, then they break the rules and go home, just like they're doing in Wisconsin after losing big time. Trump wouldn't have tried that since it requires thinking ahead... he fans the flames instead.
I'll say one thing for them, when they go down in flames they try to take the rest of us with them. They don't fiddle around while the world burns, they call it their plan.
I hope the door slams in their faces when their own clothes start burning! Don't call the fire dept!
One of the main reasons why we are having all of these discussions about voter ''fraud'' or ''harvesting'' or whatever is that republicans are on the cusp of being voted completely out of existence.
They won by the slimmest of margins in so many districts, states, and even for the Presidency (77,000 in 3 states out of over 120,000,000).
This is of course, with gerrymandering, voter suppression (changing of voter ID requirements, poll taxes, and restricting access overall by minimizing actual voting times and where people could vote) and general overall fear mongering.
The voter dam is about to burst through general demographics, Progressive policies/candidates taking flight and white privilege coming to an end. It is only a matter of time, and will really come about in the next election cycle or the one after that.
> > > We just have to keep pushing from now until then
2
um, that 4-star general to Trump's left is not DefSec Mattis.
It’s called projection. Accuse the other side of doing what your side does or wants to do. And it’s in the R playbook.
1
It's clear that Individual One's method is to accuse the other folks of doing what he and his ilk are actually committing, er, doing. With that in mind, has anyone seen his birth certificate?
Classic Gail column, after reading it you shrug and think Trump is a buffoon, and go about your business. Problem with this picture is that it is exactly what the Trumpovs want. Their plan is to play dumb and accept the inconsequential criticism for their apparent buffoonery while perpetrating their treason in conspiracy with Russia to undermine the West. In the criminal justice system this is the common " I'm too dumb to be a criminal" defense. Its used in most every "white-collar" crime case. Gail should not aid and abet the Trumpovs with her columns. Lets get serious and get the Trumpovs!
PROSECUTE RUSSIAGATE!
The one thing that we can count on is that if The Donald says it - it is wrong.
This man is not only dishonest, he is willfully ignorant of all matters that matter.
1
Yes, massive fraud is a fact. The fraud is the buffoon in the WH pretending to be qualified to hold the office. Mr. Tariff Man is a disaster.
3
One of the main reasons why we are having all of these discussions about voter ''fraud'' or ''harvesting'' or whatever is that republicans are on the cusp of being voted completely out of existence.
They won by the slimmest of margins in so many districts, states, and even for the Presidency (77,000 in 3 states out of over 120,000,000).
This is of course, with gerrymandering, voter suppression (changing of voter ID requirements, poll taxes, and restricting access overall by minimizing actual voting times and where people could vote) and general overall fear mongering.
The voter dam is about to burst through general demographics, Progressive policies/candidates taking flight and white privilege coming to an end. It is only a matter of time, and will really come about in the next election cycle or the one after that.
We just have to keep pushing from now until then !
1
Speaking of getting it all wrong, your lead-in pic looks a lot more like Joe Dunford than Jim Mattis...
Though Trump does look a lot more like Alec Baldwin, with this lighting...
Or was this a test for a job at Palantir...
Trumps lies are his conman's fraudsters way of telling us how he is planning on cheating apparently. Fraudster in Chief he is!
Yes he has been lying his whole life, been a fraudster and conman his whole life, ripping people off, taking money and filing bankruptcies by his art of the game style. He is worse than scrooge or the Grinch because he is ripping off the majority of the voters who did not elect him (Madam President got the most person votes) because he managed by hook or crook to get the electoral college from red states to put him in the White House. God help us all. What I see in the red writing on the wall (see Malania's trees) is he plans on joining forces with the Russians and other dictators and making himself just like them a dictator. Please people two men and a truck, move him out before 2019.
Another day, another example of how Trump is a liar and a borderline incoherent one at that. Really, what else is there to say at this point. (Actually, there were several examples of Trump being a liar today, but who's counting.)
1
In 1992 Bill Clinton won the popular vote in a plurality, thanks to Ross Perot's campaign stealing votes from Bush I. The republican party immediately went into overdrive to ignore the will of the people. They did the same thing in 1996, 2008, and 2012; ignored the will of the people to somehow make illegitimate the elections of Clinton and Barack Obama.
In 2016 they were helped along by the Russian/Assange hackers and a very compliant press.
Republicans have given up on democracy and are now trying fascism. Or nazism.
The current so called republican president looks as if he committed treason while the republicans in 2009 did commit sedition while they plotted to deny any wins to the newly elected Democratic President from that basement room at the D.C. steak house. Remember folks, in denying Obama any wins they were also plotting against you and me.
We the People must stop voting for republicans. They are bad for US.
Lock em away!
ELECTION FRAUD not voter fraud
3
In my home county, there have been only two voter fraud trials in the last 25 years -- one in federal court and one in state court. Both concerned absentee ballot fraud akin to what is now under investigation in North Carolina. The federal case involved political operatives manipulating absentee ballots for residents of a nursing home. The state case involved operatives in a minor-party primary going to various homes with absentee ballot applications, bringing the signed applications to the board of elections and collecting the absentee ballots, going back to the homes to get the blanks ballots signed, and filling in the votes themselves.
Neither of these voter frauds would have been prevented by the Republican rush to pass voter ID laws, because voter ID restrictions affect in-person voting only, not absentee ballots. Why? Because Republicans view absentee voters as Republican voters: military voters, wealthy families who can afford to travel in the fall, corporate executives who are constantly away on business. Republicans want to make it difficult for Democrats to vote, not Republicans -- so absentee voters are not covered.
A voter ID law that targets in-person voting only, and ignores voting by absentee ballot, would be like a law that prohibits a student from bringing an iPhone to school but not an AR-15.
2
I've voted by absentee in the last few elections. Knowing what I know now, I'll give up my absentee status and vote in person from now on. Although I am disabled, I will bring a chair so I don't have to stand in line. I want my vote to count.
1
People don't understand probability very well. It is much more effective for someone with power to have a 0.1% chance of changing 10,000 or 1mn ballots that to have 1 person with certainty fake one ballot or even 10 or 100. The punishment for vote fraud is so severe, no one would be incentivized to fake a vote in the way Trump is describing. However if a person in power can change policy to make 1 in 1000 voters from the other side not vote, that could be enough to tip a statewide election. The Republicans have openly admitted to doing this (Hyde-Smith followed Trumpism too closely in saying the quiet part out loud.) Voting needs to be easy, and voter-security measures must be evaluated and required to affect all parties and cultural groups equally.
Deep in the reading of Caro's LBJ epic, this episode is so strongly reminiscent of ballot box 13. Everything, from the unsavory county-level actors to the absurdly lopsided distributions of late-tallied "missing" ballots, matches, frame for frame, LBJ's stealing of his senate seat in '48.
I have this theory that Republicans/right wingers do a lot of projecting and do "protest far too much". They accuse their "enemies" of the very things they do or at least think of doing. One of their admitted strategies is to turn their opponents strengths into weaknesses. We see it all the time in action. It allowed Trump to mock a war hero and a family who had lost a son in war. Unfortunately, they now resort to blatant lying, and they play the victim card extremely well. It's all so tiresome. Will people in this country every catch on?
6
Why would/should we expect anything more from such a lying narcissistic sociopath?
Trump’s addled, hair-ball of a mind lives in its own reality where he is king of the “Make America Great” game show - what is now a laughing stock of a destructive fake reality show. The same people who think “Real Housewives of ....” is real are the ones that have put this grifter in a position to destroy our country. His cult is fading (as it should), our Markets are crashing, our allies are bailing, his minions are getting richer by the second and our enemies are growing stronger every day, having dangled shiny but fake objects in the face of the king of shiny objects.
We must get rid of Trump (and his minions) as soon as possible - before we fall off the cliff and must learn to speak both Russian and Chinese. We CAN live peacefully with the rest of the world, but it would take an actual human leader, someone with character, gravitas, integrity, honesty, a gasp of reality and experience to do so.
Trump is no match for Putin, Xi, Kim, MBS or even Dutherte. He is ignorant, gullible, dishonest and incapable of truth and devoid of morals. WE NEED A REAL LEADER - someone like Joe Biden, John McCain, Barack Obama or George H.W. Bush - and we need him/her NOW.
10
@RealTRUTH - I agree wholeheartedly. In addition to your suggestions of real leaders, how about a man born of the same courageous, valiant, noble and selfless character as George H. W. Bush, notably Robert Mueller. A known Vietnam veteran with a Purple Heart, Bronze Star with Combat V, Gold Star, etc. he exemplifies the finest character traits that America can produce. He is tireless doing his civic and patriotic duties by investigating the greedy Criminal in Chief without producing one leak out of his exemplary staff. Yet, all the while, Trump ridicules him and places his honor into question daily using a cheap tool like Twitter without one day ever serving in the military or one minute not thinking about how the highest office in the land will serve to further enrich himself and his children. Such a pox on the character of our entire nation.
3
You need identification if buying e-cigarettes with your groceries, suggesting Donald Trump is a “vape I.D.” President.
4
@Keven Very clever!
Actually, down heah if you wanted to suppress the elderly white male vote, you'd put up "unisex" signs on the polling place bathrooms. :)
8
I can understand why Trump thinks there are fake voters.
After all, this is a guy who has lived his entire life with nothing but fake friends. His own life story is fake. His hair, skin color, teeth, golf scores, TV shows, crowd size, net worth ….. all fake. Fake bone spurs. Fake writings. Fake publicity agents who turned out to be his own fake self. The list could go on forever.
How could a fake like him possibly believe in reality?
20
@KJ Very true - when you lead a life of dishonesty, you assume that all are playing the same game.
3
"Short of putting all the polls in fifth-floor walk-ups, there’s no easy way to keep elderly white men from voting."
Sounds like a good way to cull them.
4
Suggestion (not theat the world isn't already full of a lot of good ideas) ---
SS# assigned automatically at birth.
SS Administration automatically registers when child reaches 18
All DMVs to issue FREE photo ID to people carrying a SS card who are non-drivers. Cost covered by a fractionally increase to prices for drivers' licenses.
This photo ID is valid at polling places (a concession to the GOP).
This would cover the bulk of the population from here on out. Then we just need to deal with special situations.
One last thing - all voting by mail in ballot, like we do here in Oregon. No polling stations. No lines. And of course that obviates the need for ID if the registration happens automatically by the SS Administration upon the 18th birthday.
I know it's never quite as simple as that but it's a lot less complicated than some people make it.
1
That's not Jim Mattis in the photo at the top of this column. Oh no, it's the invasion of the pod people! Why did we always think they'd come in metal ships?
The grifter's dog whistling, race baiting and gas lighting is working among his band of red hats who have been parroting the Trump line-those bad hombre immigrants (those brown people from south of the border that he despises) are 1: Signing up in droves for public assistance the minute they climb of the yuuuuge wall (oops, wall does not exist), 2: Voting early and often to help democrats (oops, what do you mean they aren't registered and can't vote) 3: Have calves the size of cantaloupes after carrying tear-gas contaminated drugs from Tijuana (I made that up but if Trump sees it then it will be an official tweet).
In all seriousness, the gaslighting, the voter suppression and efforts of the Republicans to stifle the voice of the people is disturbing and if many believe this to be acceptable is as mentally disturbed as the grifter from Queens.
1
If only Donald Trump had driven to Canada with a dog on his car roof, we would have President Hillary Clinton instead!
3
The Oaf of Office is horrible, we can agree. But the Republicans were really bad long before he slithered into the picture and they sure don't need his help in the crooked department.
2
Trump is a sore loser and a big liar. The fact that Hillary won the popular elections for the presidency made him declare, with no proof whatsoever (as usual), that people that were illegal voted over and over again. Too bad he stole the presidency via a deeply anti-democratic Electoral College...given his constant abuse of power in destroying this republic. As you said, Trump gets everything wrong, in a malicious way, so to benefit personally...at our expense. The only guy that is illegal here, given the strong support from a foreign government he has dealings with, is Trump himself. He must be ousted!
2
It might also be option
D) 1980s porn stars as they embody everything Trumps fears :-)
1
The real irony is that Democrats have been insisting there is no voter fraud as a defense for accusations against them (us). We end up protecting corrupt Republicans. What suckers we can be!
1
I read elsewhere that Republican leader Mr. Paul is staying silent about these shenanigans.
Imagine if it was a Clinton or Obama if the shoe was on the other foot...
Well, to borrow from the deplorables...
LOCK THEM UP!
Ignoring the clear wishes and legislating against the electorate is ipso facto treason.
4
Where is Kris Kobach to explain to us the difference between voter fraud – committed by Democrats – and election fraud – committed by Republicans?
3
The awful truth about all of Donald Trump's rantings about illegal voters is that it doesn't even have to apply to illegal aliens springing over the border, when African-Americans and Democrats fit the bill quite nicely.
1
As I read this column, I am listening to NPR and the subject is exactly the same.
Definitely the right time to examine voting procedures and clean up the system.
2
Among the most despicable acts of this, or any, election. They will stop at nothing. Look at Wisconsin!!! The Grand Old Party has become the WAAC party. Win at any cost.
Disgusting.
6
Coming from Georgia, land of the new governor who made his non-recusal as secretary of state a national news item, I am not entitled to a lot of deference on voter fraud. So bear with me when I suggest that there is some cross-talk going on here, and the complaints about "fraud" are not a joke. The question is what qualifies as "fraud." What a lot of people are doing is walking into polling places with their drivers licences and voting. Is that fraud or not? Technically, fraud requires intent to defraud, and it's hard to say that you are being intentionally deceitful if the election people hand you a ballot. On the other hand, it is not legally appropriate for non-citizen aliens to be voting, even if one is "documented" with a driver's license. In that looser sense, voting is meaningfully skewed in states like California by our dysfunctional immigration system.
19
Dave Oedel,
voting fraud attempts have been investigated thoroughly over the years, there very few attempts. The vote is important and your state executes approaches that dis enfranchise many of your fellow citizens. Closing of polling places being one of the most effective, it is a lot harder to vote if your new polling place is a long bus ride away. I say bus ride because the poor use mass transit a lot more than more affluent people. I would be ashamed if my county or state was engaing in this type of voter sppression, because it is un democratic, un patriotic and yes shameful.
100
@Dave -- I think you must spell out what you mean by "...voting is meaningfully skewed in states like California by our dysfunctional immigration system. "
I suspect you were taken in by the claims that "California is registering non-citizens to vote, here's the fact-check on that:
https://www.factcheck.org/2018/09/false-claim-of-california-registering-noncitizens-to-vote/
There is no evidence that illegal votes by non-citizens has affected the outcome of any election in California. (illegal citizens who are parents of school children are allowed to vote in school board elections in San Francisco -- that's all.)
So I read your complaint here as some sort of complaint that legal immigrants who have attained citizenship should not be permitted to vote. I think you had better study the constitution again, and think about what citizenship means.
79
@Dave Oedel Evidence of a skewed vote? No one has come up with any.
42
Voting by mail and absentee voting are extremely vulnerable to fraud. For example, a person with a spouse temporarily disabled and unable to vote, casts her ballot by mail...feeling justified in doing so because "I know how she would have voted." Clear fraud, and done by a friend of mine (who cast the ballot for Trump, by the way). There has to be a way to increase the voting percentage without continuing to push methods which are so vulnerable to fraud. Pay people to vote in person? Why not give every voter a $50 gift card for standing in line in presidential, senate or house elections? We pay people (not enough, but we do pay) for jury duty.
57
@JPE .
Geesch, We have the technology to land a rover on Mars in the exact spot we intended.
This is not rocket science, folks.
Put 5 PTA presidents in a room for a day and they'll have a solution with a budget and comprehensive plan of action completed by the time they have to pick their kids up from school at 3pm.
Crowd Source this problem.
Offer $5 million dollars to anyone in this country for an idea that works.
23
@JPE, Or fine them for not voting like they do in Australia. Of course if we did that, we'd have make election day a holiday or require two weeks early voting.
18
@JPE
We start paying voters and our democracy is over. What about people with disabilities?
My wife is blind and requires assistance to vote. Absentee ballots are easy for people with infirmities. Any effort to diminish the ability to vote should be met with skepticism.
20
I worked as a state-wide trainer for one state's Board of Elections in 2016. Absentee ballots are verified more closely than any other method of voting. Once an absentee ballot is mailed the voter that requested it can only cast a Provisional ballot if they later decide to show up at the polls. When and how an absentee ballot is returned to the BOE is also carefully checked. Could someone, maybe a BOE insider, collect, alter and submit absentee ballots for other people? Of course, every system that involves human interaction can be rigged. The penalties and chance of getting caught are so likely, few try this or any other election-day fraud. Gerrymandering, voter roll purging and making voting more expensive are the preferred methods to discourage citizens from casting a ballot.
The greater threat is the chance that enough people are convinced a misogynist charlatan, a failed TV show host, is qualified to lead a nation anywhere except to ruin. Look at the art of my ancestor, George Caleb Bingham, a Missouri leader and artist, to visually understand the history of US balloting.
2
Here in Florida (in a very close election) thousands of absentee ballots were disallowed because of discrepancies in signatures. Thousands. No one was contacted to see if their signatures might have been forged. No one was alerted to the fact that their votes were disqualified. No one was accused of voting twice (by mail and then again in person). No one knows who was in charge of making these determinations. Not enough time was given to election supervisors to recheck with the actual voters and no one was charged with voter fraud. It just went unremarked upon that thousands of people were disenfranchised from their most sacred right as American citizens. I myself did not submit an absentee ballot because my signature and handwriting cannot be replicated due to carpel tunnel syndrome. When I went to vote there was an electronic signature device like the one at a supermarket and it worked about the same, missing every other letter written. Fraud is hard to prove but incompetence remains a constant here in the Sunshine State and our Republican legislators wouldn't have it any other way.
1183
@Rick Gage
Georgia had a similar situation with 53,000 absentee ballots set to be discarded for exact match law until a federal judge intervened. They were only then given the chance to vote provisionally but there were not enough provisional ballots at the polls. Provisional voters have to return within three days with documentation. 1.5 million voters were purged. Massive voter suppression takes many forms. The Peach State is right there with the Sunshine State in denying voters their basic rights.
(And comparing an electronic signature and an actual one is absurd.)
452
@smb-Voters have no guarantee and no means to validate that their provisional ballots will get counted. Sadly, Georgia's Republican legislators have a long and successful history of disenfranchising voters.
139
@Rick Gage. I don’t understand why the Democratic Party just rolls on this bizarre “signature match “ issue. This is so clearly a way to manipulate an election! Why no legal challenge???
78
I'm not at all surprised that Trump could be so clueless about buying groceries; clearly he has never in his life even run to the corner store to buy gum. But has he never actually voted? Surely if he had ever once been inside a poll, he would know that things don't work at all the way he seems to think they do. I have been a poll worker in California for over 10 years; we recognize people we last saw when they voted 2 or 4 years ago - something as simple as putting on a hat and coming right back in is not going to fool us. Plus, there is the whole bit where you have to sign in - does he think people can just randomly pick a name, and instantly know the address that goes with it? (you have to give both).
But I really think this is something that should be investigated - has Trump ever voted, and if he has, how often? He doesn't seem to have much commitment to the ideals of American democracy - what do you want to be he's never participated in it before?
805
@mmwhite
And does he vote in New York, or is his legal residence actually in Florida, where he can claim great tax advantages? If he's registered to vote in either state, his name should appear on the voter rolls. His one little vote doesn't matter when he can make millions by claiming that he lives at Mar-a-Lago six months and one day out of the year.
157
Thanks for making this point...I was thinking about it too.
71
@mmwhite The same doubts occurred to me. Lack of voting fits with the fact that he's never expressed a desire to be mayor or governor or senator--just President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world. Everyone else is a loser.
114
Third party workers/volunteers should not be able to collect ballots period, anywhere.
Though legal in states like CA how it likely plays out in the future is that GOP states will match the policy and abuse it. Up until the midterms, GOP was always able to buy elections. This ballot harvesting will become their new gerrymandering.
88
Why don’t the corrupt Republican legislative leaders in North Carolina do it the easy way, like my state of Wisconsin: set restrictive voter ID rules and, when the Democrat wins anyway, pass laws to lessen his powers. Democrats took the governor and attorney general races in Wisconsin, but the lame duck, gerrymandered legislature is Republican. Before the governor took office, they took away powers his Republican predecessor had. Isn’t that a fine example of democracy at work?
252
@Frank Yes, this is the American version of democracy.
10
@Frank, I don't know how to break it to you, but the North Carolina Legislature did that two years ago, when Governor Cooper was elected.
The Governor and Legislature are still embroiled in lawsuits based on those legislative actions.
43
@Frank It is the republican example of how they view democracy at work. Their motto seems to be they have the right to win even if it includes cheating.
26
Worse than the dirty bit of cheating in NC, is the Republicans' never-ending efforts to suppress votes and usurp power.
One of the worst cases was in North Dakota, where, after Native Americans helped elect Heidi Heitkamp Senator, Republicans, tried suppressing Native American votes by instituting a law that required a voter IDs to have a street address. A district court granted an injunction by stating this:
“The state has acknowledged that Native American communities often lack residential street addresses. Nevertheless, under current state law an individual who does not have a ‘current residential street address’ will never be qualified to vote.”
But the injunction was lifted by US court of appeals and the Supreme Court (surprise, surprise!) refused to reinstate the injunction.
In Wisconsin, gerrymandering helped the Republicans win more seats (63 or 99) though Democrats got 190,000 more votes. Republicans also passed legislation there to curtail the power of incoming Governor and Lt. Governor, both Democrats. The law is expected to signed by the Gov. Walker, a Republican, who was kicked out by the voters.
Talk about sore losers.
147
Expect this kind of voter suppression and ballot fraud to grow exponently over the next few election cycles, as younger and more diverse voters begin to realize their power at the polls.
If all of the generations voted in equal proportion, we would quickly see the demise of gerrymandering and far right Tea Party type candidates and representatives.
In 2014, the 65+ age group outvoted the Millennials by 4 or 5 to 1. That all changed in 2018, thanks to #metoo, Trump and candidates that looked more like America today. I don't see that changing. But I also don't see white nationalists surrendering without a "no rules" street fight, as we have seen recently, from Wisconsin's disgraceful GOP power grab to McConnell's breach of every Senate norm.
The world is changing fast and we need leaders who can understand what it means for the average citizen, pretty much the opposite of Trump and McConnell.
365
@Look Ahead
...and exponentially!
25
@Look Ahead-It's true. Technically the Republican base is shrinking and there aren't enough registered Republicans to put Republicans in office. This is why the Republicans have expanded their over-reach to thwart the will of the majority of votes and to keep power contained in their own hands.
73
@Look Ahead, most people have no idea what "exponentially" means and never use it correctly. You did. Thanks!
2
There is so much wrong with our elections.
John Kerry should have won in 2004!
This isn't talked about enough.
Between swift boating and the Ohio Secretary of State who manipulated conditions, much like GOP partisans were able to do this year in Georgia and Florida, Kerry voters were swindled.
This is when the polls started to be especially unreliable. That obviously happens when there is nefarious activity, (or, lately, in the case of some Trump voters not wanting to admit they are voting that way, it seems.)
Several books and reports were written about Ohio 2004 and yet it has been ignored and overlooked by the media and legislators.
This probably gave comfort to all those who continued to find ways to disenfranchise voters, mostly Democratic leaning ones.
1
Voter fraud was a big Republican concern long before Trump complained, with many red states enacting voter ID laws. Because the penalties for voting illegally are VERY strong, big fines and years in jail, the risk/reward ratio is way too high (for even one vote) for this to ever make sense. Ever so often, somebody lets the cat out of the bag about the real purpose being to stop voters who are less likely to vote for the right candidate (Pennsylvania, 2013).
Looking at the rows of mailboxes when visiting my mom in her nursing home years ago it seemed clear that there could be a much more effective option... The only real option for voter fraud is to figure out ways to find people to ask for absentee ballots, intercept them along the way, and either "help" the recipients vote, or lose returned ballots before they get back to the polls.
It's a brilliant plan. Kudos to North Carolina which seems to have discovered it through analysis of the historic and current voter patterns. Now, if their commission can only stay in business. Apparently, they need an extension to pursue the case, and given the state is very RED, I wonder if they will get it.
7
Trump has it all wrong, except he, so far, has been doing things
his own way. He is still there and still doing it. We all know he has it all wrong, but he must be doing something right or he would have been shown the door (you would think).
@Robert McKee He delivered the tax cut and the beer addicted Supreme, so he's just ducky to the super rich who pull the strings of the Greed Over People party.
1
Long before the Orange Menace, Charlie Webster, former state GOP chairman in Maine, "claim[ed] that 'dozens of black people' who were unfamiliar to municipal officials voted Nov. 6 in rural Maine towns." (Bangor Daily News, 12 Nov. 2012)
Many of Maine's towns are so small that "municipal officials" either know or are related to most of their town's voters so this seems unlikely at best.
In terms of ethic diversity Maine is one of the "whitest" states in the nation so "dozens of black people" would have stood out like --- well, a lot of black folk against a very white background.
Mr. Webster also had a bizarre theory about how college students "from away" voted multiple times and another about busing Democrats into the state to sway elections.
"Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid..."
16
"Trump Gets It All Wrong"
When has he ever gotten it right?
18
In Texas, a woman who was on probation voted, not knowing that she had no right to vote. She was sentenced to five years in prison for this accidental action. She is serving time.
When Republicans steal elections, what is their sentence? Whether it is by voter suppression, harvesting absentee ballots, or some other way of the many they have devised, where is justice? Voters are deprived of their sacred right to vote.
That woman in Texas was obviously unfairly sentenced. Epstein who ran a child sex ring with hundreds of young victims had a lighter sentence, thanks to Acosta and thanks to his own money. Trump certainly never served time for his Trump U fraud although he paid a settlement.
Elections keep being stolen by Republicans and hacked by Russians. The GOP Congress ducks and covers. As usual.
40
@smb That's horrifying! Why didn't they just delete her vote and tell her not to vote again until she was off probation or whatever? So now Texas is paying to incarcerate this woman for 5 years? And she has a prison record so forget about getting a job. I am so never going to set foot in Texas, not that I ever wanted to. Shudder.
1
Stalin said, "The people who vote are not the important ones--it's the people who count the votes that are."
24
Worse than getting it all wrong, he doesn’t get it at all.
14
"Trump Gets It All Wrong"? Is that title some kind of meta joke or non sequitur? I surely could be seeing it again, like say, tomorrow.
2
People of color are discouraged from voting through various tricks of the trade, the GOP trade that is.
One obvious one not mentioned here is the fact that Mexicans have to avoid polls because ICE may harass or even arrest them. This is Trump's favorite I believe.
If Mexican's vote they tend to vote Democratic.
6
it seems that the Republican primary where Mark Harris supposedly defeated Robert Pittenger should also be looked at.
After the Republican primary, the Charlotte Observer's link to their story said "Mark Harris' stunning NC upset sets stage for fall matchup." The story contained this line: "Despite two polls that showed Pittenger ahead by 30 points, [Harris strategist Andy] Yates said the race closed in the final weeks."
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/election/article210774979.html
12
Gail, your humor is so welcomed. Here in Chicago back in 1960, where garbage was picked up and streets were snow plowed if the right ward bosses were kept happy and our mayor’s “ troops” knew how to dispense patronage and jobs, the motto was “ vote early and often.” Now that Trump wants our vote and emulates being a ward boss, perhaps he also aspires to that same “early and often” voting approach for his GOP brethren.
9
“Harvesting” by Democrats was also prevelent in California. I still say, a thorough investigation of voter fraud should begin in CA, the most liberal and crooked state, where anything goes.
1
@Pvbeachbum -- got any sort of evidence to back up your claims?
2
@Pvbeachbum, citations please!
2
@Pvbeachbum
Thank you. This type of vague, insinuating 'whataboutism,' will prove useful if Democrats indeed start playing political hardball.
2
Voter IDs are not a bad idea. What's bad is that there are so few places to get them. Like in PA where you need to go to one of a handful of driver license bureaus -- but only those that do photos. You can get a photo for your license at any AAA location, but not for voting. Well, the federal courts here ruled the photo requirement unlawful because of the burden it placed on the old, disabled and poor. But for how long until the Supreme Court decides?
9
@Richard - Having a valid photo ID is one of the basic necessities of functioning in an effective capacity in our society. I would like to see Democrats advocating for policies and actions that make it easier for people to get such IDs. This would benefit in 2 ways. The disenfranchised would be a step closer to making their way in society and it would disarm the GOP of one of its favorite vote suppression strategies.
The truly effective way to fight the GOP's attempt at voter suppression by requiring IDs is to help people get IDs, get registered and vote.
1
@Richard,
No matter how you spin it, voter ID requirements are a poll tax.
Plain and simple.
3
Gail you forgot to mention the most superior method of voter fraud - lame duck legislation that guts the winning Democrats power and grass roots driven ballot measures. The best thing is, you plan it well in advance and use the state legislature to claw back a Dem's vote and hand it to a rich GOP donor. Absentee ballot stuffing is so five minutes ago in my state.
18
Did Kasich know about this? If not, why not? If so, why didn't he say so? All cons all the time.
6
Here in Massachusetts, we were very amused by the claim that "busloads of voters from MA" were going to NH to vote illegally. Nine out of ten people have cameras on their phones, yet nobody ever got a picture of these buses or MA license plates at polling places in NH. Also, not many people here are not very interested in voting for dog catcher in Moo Hampshire.
20
@Maureen -- New Hamster is such a funny state ... the first thing you see at the border is the pretentious "Live Free or Die" sign ... followed in about 100 yards by the turnpike tollbooths.
2
The gop strategy is simple - projection. Blame the other side in advance for committing crimes and misdeeds you plan to commit.
20
Gail, it is very good that you raise two vital issues: fake mustaches and Doritos. Trump may have a point. The last time I voted, I noticed a man who suspiciously resembled the Frito Bandito. He voted, went out to his car, used his electric razor to shave, then returned to vote again.
What to do, what to do , what to do?
8
"... there’s no easy way to keep elderly white men from voting."
Not to diminish any other group ... you don't have to belittle one group to recognize another, but in this case particularly it's because they remember the price they paid in Normandy and Okinawa and the Pusan Perimeter and Khe Sahn so that they and others could have that right. In their day, it was largely they who were called and who answered. Of course, they also buried their comrades who defended the right of thoughtless journalists to ridicule them.
5
@Charles Becker
Yes, they showed bravery when their nation called on them.
It would be nice if they also could summon the resolve to show sagacity when confronted with strong indications that their current president (aided by his party, which is in up to its elbows) betrayed their country to a hostile foreign power and is even now under the influence of that enemy. Otherwise, what does their sacrifice mean?
2
Trump’s “big brain” continues to transmit incorrect information. People who are here illegally are terrified of being around any government officials so they do not vote. Someone told me about hiring two people without papers to do some outside work. As they were working, the gas man, who was wearing a uniform, arrived to read the gas meter. The two workers immediately dropped their shovels and ran. The person who hired them ran after them and explained the uniformed gas man was not a government official. Voting locations have many government officials. Frightened immigrants do not go anywhere near voting booths.
9
COn artists like Trump always accuse their enemies of doing exactly what they are doing.
14
If you want to steal an election, just buy the patent for "voting machines" from China like Ivanka Trump just did.
8
Between this and the shenanigans going on currently in Wisconsin and Michigan, not to mention all of the nonsense regarding the governors race in Georgia, isn't it time to admit to the obvious? Republicans hate democracy.
10
I am an elderly white man who has been voting Democratic for almost 60 years. Thanks for helping me understand what it feels like to be unfairly lumped in someone else's opinion of what constitutes "deplorables."
7
@Brad Denny, some people are just too ready to classify other people. I am a Democrat also but am white woman living in a Southern State. I get a bit tired of the bashing of residents of Southern states. I am also tired of extreme partisans in both parties trying to tell me what I should and should not say. I did not vote for George H.W. Bush, but I mourn his loss. Those extreme partisans in my own party would castigate me for such a statement. Bush was an imperfect man and an imperfect president but he did much good for our country and other countries. I am appalled by the people who feel it is their duty to point out only his failings.
2
@Brad Denny
Us old white guys should probably take a few more lumps before we complain about how we are treated. I mean, when it comes to other groups we are talking a history of mass murder and torture.
1
I guess if you think the purpose of journalism is to find an "us vs them" theme on a daily basis in a way that you can turn it into an aggressive attack - Gail's on top of things. However this kind of common enemy personality is simply an example of the "call out culture" where journalist gain stature by coming up with yet another way to identify an act to disagree with. The NYTs is an easy way for Gail to reach her audience- the audience who can award status or agree with shame or punishment of the alleged offender. As we say good by to one of our great presidents Gail wants us to remember to hat e the current one.
@Dixon Duval frankly I don't really need Gail to be reminded to hate the current occupant of the White House. He does that himself quite well, multiple times a day.
As for her dig at "elderly white men", I agree that was a little below the belt. But there is so much else she is spot on with that I can forgive this slip. After all, a number of those "elderly white men" she's talking about are willing to forgive (and have forgiven) so much more and much worse from the occupant in the WH.
2
@Dixon Duval Gail's column is an OPINION column, which means that it is Gail's opinion not that of the NYT. Whether or not you agree with her is irrelevant. ...And, yes. The majority of Americans hate the electoral college president. He has damaged our country beyond anyone's expectation...except Putin's.
2
@Dixon Duval, so reporting the news or having an opinion on the news is divisive?
2
So, what is so terribly wrong with voter IDs?
You cannot survive in the US without an ID.
Try to get on a plane.
Try to get into many buildings, including g Federal buildings.
Just silly to be against voter ID.
1
The point is most of theses people do not get on a plane, they can’t afford it.
Many people don’t frequent government buildings either.
I don’t have a problem with getting an ID to vote, just don’t make it difficult to get an ID, and have enough properly trained poll workers to check IDs.
4
dick west: Getting onto a plane is not a right of citizenship. Anyway, the problem is not really IDs; it's that it can be difficult, and sometimes costly for poor people to get them. A few dollars can be a lot to someone who has a hard time putting food on the table, and a trip to an office that issues IDs can mean missing a day of work. Remember poll taxes?
2
@dick west, I don't think most people are against voter ID but want fairness in what IDs are accepted. My mother had an expired driver's license and we didn't know where her naturalization papers were. Her birth certificate was in Danish from a church in Denmark. She had voted for many years and even worked in political campaigns. Luckily she was able to vote because the voter ID law hadn't passed yet. After her death we found her naturalization papers and her Danish birth certificate. She was more patriotic than most Americans I know.
3
Apparently Mr. Harris, the conservative former pastor, does not recall the seventh commandment about stealing.
5
Republicans cannot win on their policy ideas.
Republicans cannot win on their tax reforms.
Republicans cannot win on their religious tolerance.
Republicans cannot win on their economic plans.
Republicans cannot win on their honesty and integrity.
Republicans cannot win on their 'scandal-free' administrations.
When you cannot win a 'free and fair' election on your merits, there is only one thing left to do: cheat.
Gerrymander. Voter disenfranchisement. Voter roll purges. Voter registration cancellations. Ballot diversions. Ballot destruction. When all else is hopeless - cheat! And then, when you lose anyway, pass lame-duck laws to take away future power from those who defeated you despite your cheating. We see it all with today's Republican party. Sad. And un-Constitutional.
15
We living citizens gave Trump a splash of cold water, one ballot at a time, last month when we took back the House. Let's gear up for such a strong Democratic showing in 2020 even he won't be able to attribute his loss to illegal aliens and deceased voters.
7
Can we all agree Ballot Harvesting opens the door for fraud and should be illegal in every place? Won't see this comment, just like m other one about California doing the same thing never made it through the censor. Nothing uncivil in the post, just truth and it never appeared.
1
Gail just made a pretty good case why this race in North Carolina should be given a new Election. Now, can we get a do-over in all the races in California too? Not a problem when it happens in California out in the open for all to see but one instance in North Carolina is an issue? Good thing the hayseeds here in North Carolina care about democracy. Too bad those progressive liberals in California just care about winning.
1
@GregP, so North Carolinians are hayseeds? And where is your proof of vote harvesting in California?
2
If they claim it's not happening, it probably is. If they claim it's happening it probably isn't. If they claim the other side is doing something bad it's more likely than not that they are actually the ones doing it. Welcome to today's G.O.P.
Ain't it grand?
17
Re: Republican efforts to deprive voters of their right to the ballot box, denying same, and then being caught out in the act.
There's an old saying that applies here, regarding sudden aromatic changes in crowded, close quarters: The smeller's the feller.
6
Trump’s motto is: “Lie often and with a loud voice”. His motto is fast becoming the NEW GOP motto. Along with: “Votes don’t elect elected officials, dirty tricks, vote theft, and voter suppression do.”.
If Young Mr. Trump paid for a bag of Doritos with a promissory note, when the note was due, Trump would have filed for bankruptcy, screamed that the shop owner defrauded Trump and that he should be jailed, and claimed a tax deduction for depreciation for the bag of Doritos.
21
Republicans have been using projection since Roger Ailes. They simply accuse their opposition of doing the very thing they are doing and it works like a charm on many Americans whose inclination is to dislike or distrust Democrats for no reason at all already. Yesterdaythe Party of Lincoln showed in Wisconsin their absolute disdain for democracy and their love and adoration of authoritarian power — for themselves. As a parting gesture, because they lost the election, they passed a package of laws to disembowel the normal workings of Wisconsin state government. Only a thorough going Capitalist and Authoritarian could stomach the workings of the Republican Party at this point in history. If you have any care for yourself and your family you avoid these people like the plague.
34
Does it occur to center left pundits that calling out republican crimes and misdemeanors produces the effects opposite to the ones they intend. There is really no legitimate basis for a republican to win anything, ever. Not with their support for all welfare junkies who are already rich, total support for all robber barons and scofflaws, an unyielding desire to produce Sowetos where "others" live behind barbed wire, and dedication to destroying everything necessary to produce a functioning democracy.
What, other than illegitimate tactics and strategies, hogwash and humbug, could they possibly use? Republican crimes and misdemeanors produce republican victories, not losses. See Georgia and Texas.
If Gail is intending to trigger gratuitous eye rolling from the center left, and voter apathy - she is succeeding.
2
I guess the answer is to outlaw absentee voting. That means nobody can vote absentee: disabled, the busy out of town types and of course the military. I mean seriously, if you aren't willing to go AWOL, get on a plane and fly to the nearest airport close to your out of the way rural town, catch a bus and then stand in line on the first Tuesday of November (never mind the primaries) then you don't deserve to vote. And make sure you bring 3 forms of ID.
4
I always try to remember that when Trump uses the word "phony" it isn't based on objective and verifiable fact. It comes from having one of the most "brilliant guts in the world." Therefore, challenging his declarations is an exercise in futility. So, Gail, next time you hear him speak or read his tweets, just say to yourself and others "You can't argue with a gut like that."
I know it sounds really weird at first but eventually you'll get used to it. Believe me.
4
I wonder when was the last time that President Trump got out and walked around -- anywhere -- let alone a polling site.
12
@Norm Olsen. I heard this morning on NPR that the funeral guests of former present GHWB were invited to Blair House after the ceremony. Blair House is 250 yards from the National Cathedral. trump's motorcade was 50 yards long. A stretch limo and several security vehicles. By the time the first car arrived at Blair House, the last car was mostly likely still idling at the cathedral. That this man who claims to be in excellent health, plays golf every weekend (in a golf cart), couldn't walk a couple of football fields is ridiculous. I don't know what the cost of all those vehicles was, but I'm sure it isn't cheap. I'm so sick of trumps antics including the enormous amounts of taxpayer money being spent every time he decides to leave the white house. Every weekend jaunts to Mar a Lago. trump's famous for his bankruptcies. I think he's doing a great job bankrupting our democracy!
1
@Norm Olsen When a polling site is on a golf course.
Here in NC, we HAVE a constitutional amendment now, as a result of the mid-term elections. The GOP legislators, in a lame duck session in which they still have a veto-proof majority (they lose that in January), are working to come up with a bill that will pass judicial muster.
They failed miserably in their last attempt to do that. An appeals court overturned the law because it "target(ed) African-Americans with almost surgical precision." The US Supreme Court refused to hear the legislature's appeal of the ruling.
To be fair, the GOP seems to be trying harder to be reasonable in this version of the voter id bill but still, these lame-duck shenanigans are very much of a piece with what's going on in the sore-loser GOP legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan.
10
I'm surprised that Republicans aren't stealing mailboxes. If the Republicans had any good ideas and cared about the country they wouldn't have to cheat to win elections.
15
The point is when is lying trump right ?
We just had the funeral of George h. W. Bush our 41st President. The last President, a War Hero, a deeply flawed man during his time but also a kind heart-ed gentleman.
Now we understand from ex Canadian Prime Minister a friend of him, that it was his request trump was invited.
Wise decision, because it was a pleasure to see Donald J trump suffer the whole time sitting next to President Obama and Michelle and Hillary Clinton whom he wanted to lock up.
9
Well, only six more years of Trump as president. Thank, Donald for bringing America back to Americans.
1
@David Yes Mr. Trump is by far the best President ever past present and future. I think the fake news and manipulated info like the New York time do is a crime .
I hope 6 more years of Mr. Trump and after that make him King because he is the only one good option the rest is all fraud or non sense.
Mr. Trump doesn't even take salary. while Clinton was and still is doing fraud with the Clinton fondation.
Obama and Clinton lies. they get to be rich while working at a salary.
And Trump loose millions and don't even take salary ...and he works long hours like no other President ever did , and he is 70+ years old .
no one compare to him to me he is a hero. Thanks Mr. Trump the President .
@David well said, Americans deserve the Donald.
An intergalactic biologist/political scientist/systems analyst looking down and judging things on different Worlds across time might well put this entry in the journal for the Earth:
There was a brief moment in time a Nation called the USA could have really and substantially lead Earth onward and upward socially, morally, and materially.
Imperfect as less advanced civilizations always are it was on tract to do just that. They had their ups and downs and their fights but mostly as a Nation they were pulling the oars in the same direction and making broad social and egalitarian material progress.
They had a vital 2 Party system that give their processes necessary healthy diverse opinions, critique, and checks and balances. All under some significant faithfulness to common goals. principles, truth, fairness, reason, and genuine civility.
But one of the Parties, the GOP, mutated and destroyed this leading Nation's political gene pool. Winning became its goal and to win it artificially bred candidates, voters, information on traits that simply favored worst instincts/traits.
It violated all the rules of healthy species social evolution to capture a moment in time and their very narrow selfish objectives.
Thus the USA lost its ability to be the beacon of fairness, justice, reason, modernity, egalitarian equality; lost its ability to lead regarding issues that face all humankind.
The mutated cancerous GOP should have been removed but wasn't in time.
Sad to report that.
5
In this one thing Trump was right: the elections were rigged by GOP extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression campaigns, and actual ballot tampering. If that is not enough, these really sore losers are officially restricting the powers of positions which will be filled by Democrats voted for by the people of the state.
I hope the very next time a member of the GOP talks about a rigged election, we all just laugh in their faces and hold up mirrors.
6
To Trump and all his Republican toadies screaming about voter fraud, I offer this line: "We have seen the fraudsters and it is us." Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan are perfect examples of vote rigging before, during and after the midterms." The only question that remains is why we, the American majority, allow ourselves to be ruled by a minority party that cannot win the popular vote without cheating?
15
Although it made me laugh, I have to object when Gail suggests that the origins of Trump’s assertion that you need an ID to buy groceries was -
A) A traumatic childhood experience in which he treated his class to ice cream at the ballpark and told the vendor “ just send the bill to my Dad.”
Firstly, it’s much more likely that he (or his Dad) would have billed each of his classmates for triple the price of the ice cream after the game, to turn a tidy profit, secondly, he would offered the vendor only 50% of the total cost, once the ice cream was distributed, and if the vendor had refused would have stiffed him and told him to sue, and thirdly, the idea that Donald or Fred Trump would have treated anyone to anything at any age, is too weird even for a Gail Collins column.
13
@Susan -- I think you are missing the jest. There isn't a vendor in any ballpark that would send a bill to anybody.
@Susan - so true! We're still trying to apply "normal" motivations and actions to everything the tRumps do. It just doesn't work. They are crooks and grifters, every last one.
As a lifelong Democrat and an elderly white man I can do without Ms.Collins’ smart aleck remarks about my demographic. The failed Clinton campaign ignored addressing anything regarding Senior Citizens,especially the cost of our life-extending drugs.
I am perfectly capable of climbing five flights of stairs,and will do so if necessary to vote for the best candidate in 2020
Really, is there anything Trump gets right?
Yesterday was the prime example of Donald Trump’s idea acting as President of the United States. It was difficult to even watch Donald Trump sitting on the outer pew at President George H.W. Bush’s last day in Washington DC - the funeral service.
First Donald walks in and hands his overcoat to a “servant” to carry away. He shakes hands with President Obama and Michelle, who obviously, out of respect, extend their hands. Michelle even shows us how to smile when it’s the last thing you want to do, out of respect. The Clintons totally ignore the Trumps, good for them, and look straight ahead, whileTrump gives a look like, “I don’t think they like me.” Melania is just there, period. Nothing more, nothing less. Luckily the Carters are down the aisle and do not need to interact.
When Donald figures out this couple hours is not going to be about him - at all - he looked sullen, removed, flat. During the service he looked straight ahead, that way not having to deal with the fact that no one around him likes him. At times he crossed his arms, even on his chest - psychology 101 - sign of defense.
He didn’t sing or recite the Apostle’s Creed - even though he portrays himself as some sort of Born Again. Just sat there.Still realizing Bush was loved, revered with intense respect.
But even in the midst, #43 walked over and shook his hand. He touched the man who made fun of the “lights” legacy of his dad.
Now that takes strength!
7
Voter fraud, as encouraged by...republicans. This would be the first time that Trump could be right, except he would never denounce cheating efforts when on his behalf. Trump's ego is so 'monumental' that he'll never admit he lost the popular vote, and that he is sitting now on a stolen White House...if it weren't for the anti-democratic Electoral College (an antiquated remnant of white male supremacy to assure self preservation in power). But I digress. Republicans have been caught , red-handed, trying to steal an election in North Carolina...different from their usual gerrimandering, and establishing barriers and hindering the voting of democratic- leaning folks. Having grown up in Bolivia, voting fraud maneuvers are well known, as they are in Russia, witness lasr re-election of Putin by widespread stuffing of ballots (and denounced by rhen secretary of state Clinton, hence, Putin's distinct support, and collusion, of Trump...to deny Hillary's win). But voter fraud in a country that prides itself for being such a pure and graceful democracy? It stinks. No humility, no repentance, or promise to do better next time?
5
Finally something decent going on in NC. Unbelievable. What's gong on in Wisconsin with the Republicans taking rights away from the incoming governor and attorney general who are democrats. Same thing happened in NC when Governor Cooper, a Democrat, beat the incumbent Republican gov. Oh those crafty, play by the rules Republicans. NC loves constitutional amendments. The first year I moved here a constitutional amendment was passed banning gay marriage. Well thankfully the courts nullified that. We won't get into the bathroom nonsense that harmed our state. Personally I'd like to steal every absentee ballot in my district if it would keep my representative, the wretched Mark Meadows, from ever setting foot in the Capital again.
3
@amp Mark Meadows? My sympathies. I've had to put up with Trey Gowdy.
Republicans don't like voters voting the way they want. So (if you're Republican) you have to stop it any way you can.
3 states, now, are trying every which way to invalidate the people's clear choices a month ago. Republican lame-ducks in Wisconsin and Michigan, who have been CLEARLY rejected by the voters, are, instead stripping the newly elected governors and other state-wide officers of their powers. North Carolina's Art Pope-owned lege has come up with a truly crack-pot scheme that puts the LOSING party in control of voting in even-numbered (election) years and the WINNING party in control in odd-numbered years! How this can be Constitutional under these states' constitutions or under the 14th & 15th Amendment is a fantasy.
And this is on top of the most blatant voter fraud ever discovered in the last half-century, in the NC 9th. And, lo and behold, who is the obvious perpetrator and beneficiary? Why, it's the REPUBLICANS!
It's time for the Federal Courts to step in and stop Republicans from INvalidating elections and force them to be valid. We cannot count on Congress when Mitch McConnell is Senate Majority Leader--he will NEVER bring up legislation he doesn't like, will hurt his donors, or might lose his party seats, legal or not.
Our Democratic Republic and Constitution is under attack on myriad fronts, and the attackers, not just Donald Trump, all have (R) after their names. If they win, we become a failed democracy and a corrupt dictatorship, like Russia.
3
After seeing Grumpy at the Bush service yesterday when he sat quietly with his mouth shut, a joy in itself, Republican things are getting back to normal as in Wisconsin, the Republicans are shutting down the powers of the newly elected Democratic governor.
Trump was hammered in the speeches given at the service. Praising a good man in front of a really rotten one leaves no room.
The Democrats new to the House have their work cut out. Restoring voters' rights would be an excellent place to start.
5
Ms Collins, it's still rough going but I would like to thank you. I couldn't have gotten through the year without you.
4
If you took all of the people that Trump claims to have committed voter fraud and assembled them on the National Mall, you’d still have considerably less people than actually attended Obama’s inauguration, yet still considerably more than actually attended Trump’s. Don’t bother doing the math, just take his (and the GOP's) word for it.
As always, Gail, thanks for sharing your wittiness in portraying the ironies of this corrupt farce.
2
The only cheating I heard about was by Republican operatives in North Carolina. I'm surprised Trump failed to mention that. It must have been an oversight (written with a smirk).
5
Once the Mueller report is released we won't have to worry about voter manipulations or Russian influences helping Trump in 2020. He won't be the Republican candidate.
3
Republicans know that America is turning its back on them. That's why they have to steal and cheat. That's why Republicans commit election fraud in North Carolina and support voter suppression in too many states to count. To put it more bluntly, the Republican Party has become anti-democracy and un-American.
3
Republicans have warned us about voter fraud, and it’s now true. Of course they do it.
6
It really is simple, Democrats want YOU to vote, and Republicans don't unless you are white, male, and have an accountant on your staff. And they will use every method they can to suppress your vote - gerrymandering, ridiculous ID requirements, limiting hours and numbers of polling places, and ballot "harvesting." And then, if Republicans fail to get the desired outcome, Republicans will ignore the will of the people and try to hogtie state government as we see in WI and MI.
7
Trump is like a recurring nightmare. But when I awaken, I'm confronted with the terrifying reality that he continues to have enough support in Congress and the public for him to hold the most powerful office in the land. He is corrupt to the core and he has succeeded in bringing out the worst instincts in others.
5
Harris may have used the same tactic to oust the incumbent Republican in the primary, but still Republicans don't care. Their allegations of "voter fraud" are clearly not intended to promote integrity in elections, but rather to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. Now they are ranting that vote counting should immediately be halted as soon as the Republican candidate is ahead.
With liberal groups' longtime advocacy of increasing voting by mail, I have often thought that the potential for election fraud and voter intimidation is high. Even without an organized effort as alleged for the North Carolina congressional district, intimidation by family members is possible, especially of the elderly, who may be more likely to vote absentee, and more vulnerable. When I worked the polls in the early 2000's, before electronic voting machines, we had to count absentee ballots by hand. They were always more heavily Republican than the in-person votes. The clerk at the time was a Republican. I wondered whether a higher proportion of absentee voters really did favor Republicans, or whether there was ballot tampering.
We Americans are quite capable of committing election fraud without any help from Russians.
2
Voter registration drives are equally vulnerable to manipulation as are the subsequent elections. In 2012, when our daughter worked for the Obama campaign in Colorado, they were taught to be scrupulously impartial when registering voters. Their GOP counterparts apparently were not and were caught going through the registration forms and dumpstering those who declared Democrat. They were legally prohibited from registering voters in Colorado that year as was the GOP in Florida.
That kind of distinction - be totally impartial until registration closes and thereafter push as hard as you can to get your side out to vote - must be very difficult to enforce when voter registration overlaps with early voting.
8
How on earth can we possibly break the governance-by-the-minority lock the GOP has methodically built into the American system?
North Carolina likely had absentee ballot “harvesting” that resulted in a GOP victory in a Democratic district, and there are similar concerns across the country—where GOP candidates keep being magically elected by narrow margins. Here in Georgia our secretary of state presided over his own election, turned down federal election security assistance in the wake of the Russian hacking, instituted rules to ensure undercounting of likely Democratic votes, and defends electronic machines with no paper back-up. And given the wide disparities between exit polling and actual vote count in some of the states that mattered most, we have every reason to believe some kind of election system monkey business occurred in November 2016.
But look beyond our election system issues. GOP court packing has resulted in judges who somehow manage to find easily manipulable systems just ducky, and we now have a Supreme Court that will likely hold election system security a matter of “states’ rights”—rather than the cornerstone of our democracy—and return the cases to the GOP foxes to cut more holes in the henhouse. And we have gerrymandered GOP state legislatures that pass laws allowing them to pursue litigation at 180-degree odds with their duly elected Democratic attorney generals.
If there is a way out of this box, I sure wish somebody would tell us.
17
Voter ID laws with picture requirements seem like common sense to the common white baby boomer who has no knowledge of poverty. To many of us who have moved around and have no idea where our birth certificates are, which is necessary to get a photo ID, they are disenfranchising. Yes, Trump is almost always wrong.
9
@Anthony
It is not that hard to get a replacement birth certificate as I had to do at one point. You just have to know what city you were born in. You write or email to the local records office, give them your date of birth, pay a smallish fee and they will send it to you. In my case I had been adopted by my step father and had a name change at thirteen so I had to give them my birth name as well as my current name and my birth parents' names. Then make several copies and keep in safe places!
1
@Julie -- you're right, but this presumes you have the income, time and stability to do all of that.
In effect this amounts to a subtle poll tax; it's a barrier the poor may not get past.
Beyond that, many jurisdictions require that you be able to prove residence in some way: rental or ownership papers, utility bills etc. Many of the poor and even not-so-desperately poor cannot manage that. You find lots of people, particularly students, renting without having their name on a lease or the utility bill.
1
@Lee Harrison I was able to get mine; but it wasn't easy. A copy of your birth certificate wasn't good enough; they wanted the original. (Luckily, I had it, and didn't have to write off to Iowa; but how many don't have it anymore and have to write out of state for one - possibly with fees -, or never had one in the first place, as with some elderly rural voters?)
A neighbor had shown me a fundraising letter they got from the NRCC.
It included a letter from Trump warning about evil Democrats cheating.
It also said a $210 donation would buy 120 absentee ballots.
Buy absentee ballots?
My husband and I wondered what that could possibly mean = ballots are free.
N. Carolina seems to explain what they meant.
16
San Mateo County, in California, is doing county-wide all-mailed ballot elections. Besides opening itself up to the kind of fraud described here, imagine all the smaller frauds and intimidations which will never be caught.
A dominating spouse demands to "do it for you." Your church, or your union, or your boss, strongly suggests that everyone get together to fill out their ballots.
There's a reason that we have secret ballots in this country. There should be no all-mail elections, and absentee ballots should only be granted when the voter will be physically out of the area or otherwise unable to come to a polling place.
4
@PaulSFO
As an obvious Republican it seems to have escaped your notice that all reported serious voter fraud in this recent election has been conducted by Republican candidates and some of the most blatant gerrymandering in the country exists in Republican controlled states.
7
@John.
I'm not a Republican and, if you were able to read and comprehend my comment, you'd notice that it is not related to either party.
Alas, I thought our days of mockery were over after the bathroom nonsense got squashed.
Ms. Collins, we had more than ten days of early voting which is very convenient. Some years ago when I needed an absentee ballot I got it at election headquarters, filled it out then and there and that was that.
True, the GOP is doing everything it can to make sure certain people do not vote, but some gerrymandering was thrown out by the court and other districts are in question.
North Carolina is embarrassing, but not nearly as bad as Wisconsin ----yet.
7
I moved to North Carolina from California a year ago, wow - what a difference. And I always had an absentee ballot in CA, but in NC you need TWO people to sign your ballot here. So ripe for fraud - bet they’ll find many ballots that were signed by the same two or three people. And now there’s the Constitutional Amendment requiring an ID to vote. A judge has already ruled that gerrymandering is illegal here and the districts have to be redrawn before the next election, so of course the ID thing was quickly put in to make it difficult to vote.
15
@Delcie They already have found a suspiciously high number of ballots witnessed by the same people.
What we are seeing here is an infallible principle in politics. If you want to know which politician is totally guilty of something just look for one who is loudly using accusations of that thing for political advantage. Recall that Newt Gingrich went after President Clinton when he was stepping out on his first wife who had cancer yet. Examples of those who are screaming away about corruption while they are socking it away themselves abound. I have always interpreted it that way. When Republicans make these accusations of voter fraud you have to take it to mean "If I were in your position I would be doing it so I can't believe you are not doing it." That's just the nature of the beast.
20
@Bill H
I agree. I believe that people extend their own personality onto others. Thus, a person who says "everyone cheats on their tax returns" is probably cheating on his tax return.
13
@Jeffrey C
It's called projection. People used to say the fault you find most in others is the one you possess.
It's rampant in the GOP.
5
@Bill H
So true.
There's an old country saying: make sure your barn door is locked when the man who sings the loudest in the church choir comes to visit.
4
Voter fraud is bad, whether it is committed by Republicans or Democrats. Everyone agrees that voter fraud is rampant in mail-in ballots and vote counting, but this doesn't mean voter impersonation fraud should be ignored. The free state-issued photo voter IDs are much easier to get than other types of IDs previously accept at polling places.
@William Case
No, not everyone agrees that voter fraud is rampant in mail-in ballots and vote counting.
And getting free state-issued photo voter ids may not be so easy if you don’t have transportation to the issuing authorities, if the office hours are inconvenient or limited, if the documentation required is excessive.
5
@William Case "Everyone agrees that voter fraud is rampant in mail-in ballots and vote counting...."
The only people who agree on that are Trump's base. Take a trip to reality=PLEASE!
6
@William Case
No one is agreeing that " voter fraud is rampant in mail-in ballots and vote counting".
And the existing laws have caught the Republican fraudsters red handed. Voter ID's would have done absolutely nothing in the NC case.
5
Trump might be wrong about everything, but when you consider he is just a cartoon character that embodies what the American spirit has become, it begins to take on a different look.
Just as there were many who believed Obama was born in Kenya, there are a lot of Americans who believe voter fraud, of the far fetched kind, happens on a regular basis. These are the people who whole heartedly support making it difficult for the poor, the brown, the black, the native Indian, the minorities to vote. If it comes to closing down their voting precinct all together, then do that.
When you look at what the Republican Party elected officials are doing in Wisconsin and Michigan, you have to wonder what is the exception and what is the rule. The way McConnell changed the rules in the Senate to accomplish his own aim speaks volumes.
Trump may epitomize the corruption and decadence of what has become the American Way, only because he is President, not because he is worse or better. We need to take a look at ourselves and realize that many of us condone this behavior because we ourselves are engage in it every day, lying, stealing and trying to get ahead, make a buck, anyway we can. It is true in almost every industry. Why should the industry of politics be any different? I do not believe, though, that many of these people can be better than this. After all, this is the way our country has been for eons, but it was not always the case that they have had both reins of the buggy.
9
And then there is the other thing. The voters vote one way and that party wins, and the losing party seeks to remove all hint of power from the incoming party.
18
Rather than signatures, why don't we use fingerprints? One digit, from hand or foot, that shouldn't change all that much over the years.
Carry a gizmo that reads the prints for those who can't make it to the voting booths. At the same time, said gizmo automatically records the voter's preferences.
Details and quibbles can be worked out without all that much fuss, I'm sure.
1
So we have accusations of fraud from both sides: one side alleging massive in-person fraud and the other claiming ballot and result mis-handling.
Part of the problem is that machine results can be tampered with and ballots can be burned. The solution: certificate voting. Whenever someone votes, they would be given a digitally signed string of numbers that clearly identifies the precinct, hour of voting, and the votes cast. A complete list of all certificates would then be made publicly available so that any citizen could count them, validate them, check for presence of their own vote,and compare the hourly totals with independent observations of traffic at each precinct.
7
@Debbie The difference is that one side is making it up and has absolutely no proof or indication of any fraud. It appears that the republicans have indeed cheated in NC. That is the difference.
5
The GOP had two years-2 years!- to pass meaningful legislation while controlling the WH, Congress and most of the state houses.
In November the US electorate graded their performance and gave them a resounding failure for their work.
Now WI, NC and MI are throwing a collective, political temper tantrum based more on their failure to lead and govern.
This is less about voter fraud and more about the republicans realization that they have lost the ability to govern for the foreseeable future in these states- maybe even for most of a generation.
It should be remembered that paul ryan and scott walker are more alike then they are different!
Good riddance to both!
28
I stopped reading when I got to the card reference. I spend a good deal of time trying to unravel Mr. Trump's twisted thinking, beginning with his Kefavee reference during the campaign. That one seemed to me to be a conflation of "Kerfuffle" and bad hearing.
The ID card, thought I, seemed to me to combine some idea of the role of food stamps and the requisite ID requirements of the welfare system to go along with the claim that welfare recipients use those benefits to buy liquor and cigarettes.
It's only by trying to untangle what's going on in that large, empty head that we can even attempt to deal with the misconceptions and pure fiction coming from his mouth. Maybe it's not even worth the effort.
5
@Ted Lehmann Trump could no more give a definition of Kerfuffle (horrible word IMHO) than the rest of the universe could define Kefavee.
Allegation after allegation from North Carolina. People directly involved have come forward and talked about their complicity and who paid them. So... where is the investigation? Where are the arrests? There have to be multiple felonies lurking in there; it's about time someone was held accountable.
26
@Paul H The NCBOE (NC Board of Elections) is investigating, after having refused to certify. This is a non-partisan group. Trial has to come after investigation.
Let me get this straight: Democrats win half a dozen elections in California by harvesting ballots. And when on election has a tiny number of such ballots in NC, that's a problem? Very witty, but not very persuasive.
@Mike Livingston I havent seen any allegations that the elections in CA involved fraud, while there are multiple, credible and backed-by-evidence allegations of fraud in NC. And they are not tiny -- enough ballots are in play to swing the election.
18
@Mike Livingston you've made an interesting assertion about ballot harvesting in California. Care to share a single iota of evidence from a reliable source? (read: hyperlinks)
5
It’s legal there, and there’s no proof of shenanigans in California. Fox News forgot to say that part. In NC, only a relative or guardian is permitted to take an absentee ballot to the polls in lieu of the voter. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/the-conversation/sd-what-is-ballot-harvesting-in-california-election-code-20181204-htmlstory.html
2
As a university student in the (original) Richard Daley’s Chicago of the early 1970’s, I must disagree with Ms. Collins on one point.
As sure as the wind would whip off Lake Michigan in February, many dead people would vote in Chicago on Election Day. It was well known back then that the Boss’ machine would procure lists of recently deceased Chicagoan, and pay people a sum of money (I understand that $50 was the going rate) to vote in the name of the deceased.
Although I’m not sure if it’s still accepted as fact, it was long believed that John Kennedy won the 1960 election for president in no small part due to this technique for getting otherwise “incapacitated” voters to the polls.
2
@ScottC, check the inflation numbers to calculate the value in today's dollars, then multiply by the number of votes you think reasonably necessary to ensure an election is "swung".
Does the result seem like a gamble somebody might take to you?
4
I would say to that:
1) if you mean “gamble” as in getting caught, that was not much of a gamble at all in those days; and,
2) if you mean “gamble” as in amount risked vs potential rewards, you must understand the potential money to be made from graft was enormous. During the time I was in college, newspapers reported that a check of the home of one recently deceased politician revealed about $1mil in cash, stuffed mostly in shoe boxes.
1
"Traumatic childhood experience in which he treated his class to ice cream at the ballpark and told the vendor to “just send the bill to my Dad."
Trump treating people to something? A more likely scenario: he bought himself an ice cream and told the vendor that one of this classmates would pay for it.
81
@Scott
Good one.
Even more unlikely is any classmate going anywhere with him willingly
He sounds like he was a horrid youngster too.
1
@Scott -- everybody seems to misunderstand the humor/sarcasm of Gail's joke here.
There isn't a ballpark vendor anywhere in America who sells you anything without cash in the hand. The "trauma" to poor little Donnie would be having the vendor and all the fans in the stand start laughing at him for being the little grifter/cheater/liar that he is now.
Here's an idea for matching signatures on the mail-in ballots to the original registration forms:
Use the computer to make sure that things are fair! Election workers aren't handwriting experts, after all, and human signature matching could be misused as an excuse to toss ballots.
Okay. Here's how it would work. The two signatures must use the same ink color, be the same height and length within 0.05 millimeters, and the signatures lines on the ballot and the registration form must match at every point within an entirely reasonable margin of error -- say 0.01 millimeters. So far, so good. But if the voter doesn't press as firmly and evenly on the ballot as on the registration form, credit them with only half a vote, and at the end, round any leftover half votes down to zero. Finally, shred all rejected mail-in ballots and tell no one.. Wait! No! Shred all the ballots since it would be unfair to discriminate.
3
@ACounter
How about thumprints on registration forms and a scanner to match the thumbprint at the voting booth for all this fictictious voter fraud.
Since Gingrich, the Republicans have gradually abandoned every principle except the notion of winning at all costs. They have devolved into an organization willing to do or say anything to win. Anything. Trump’s presidency is the inevitable result. What is amazing is how anything Republicans or Trump says or does is treated seriously. At least the phrase, “without any evidence” does go before almost every statement Trump makes. Some of us hope this state of affairs is a cautionary tale, not a new standard of behavior for a president or political party.
92
I have no problem with requiring an ID to vote, as long as it provides for issuing a picture ID when you register. (Our local pool was able to afford a picture ID system, so I expect it is within the wherewithal of the voter registration system.) Also it should be phased in, over, say, 10 years. Individuals who have been voting for years in the same place should be given a lot of notice that they will need to do this. A 10 year expiration of your registration would do this, with appropriate accommodation for the elderly and disabled.
23
@RDJ In spite of the overwhelming evidence that voter impersonation is essentially non-existent, you still want voter ID cards. Why?
1
I’m so non-evil I couldn’t come up with putting the polls on the fifth floor. But now that you’ve pointed me in the right direction, let’s do it. Oh and the elevator to make it ADA compliant just happened to break too.
11
We vote with computers controlled by a secret windows operating system known only to Microsoft.
Our votes are turned over to a programmer who does with them whatever he/she wants.
What else is there to say.
27
Everything in this post is wrong. There is no secret version of Microsoft Windows, and it is not used to rig the elections. Programmers do not operate voting systems, period.
Convicted felons working for republicans use good old old-fashioned leather and elbow grease to commit their election fraud, as in this case in North Carolina where they simply take the ballots from voters and either lose or modify them. Let's stay grounded in reality, shall we?
16
@Allan
Uhm, no. We have paper ballots where I live. Even if you elect to use the computerized voting machine, it generates a paper ballot that you can read before you place it in the secured receptacle.
That’s what else there is to say.
4
@Clearheaded -- in the early days of electronic voting machines there were some Diebold voting machines that did approximately justify Allan's characterization. You can read the ugly history of these grossly-defective systems here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions
I don't believe any state uses them anymore, and their defects, and the defects of several other voting system led to the paper-ballot + optical scanner systems common today.
Trump's idiotic sayings exhaust me. I'm sure I'm not the only one tired out by his bizarre thoughts.
219
@Linda I don't listen to him and avoid reading about his outbursts. I am not happy about this gentleman's behavior, but life is challenging enough without adding Mr. Trump's and his supporter's insults. And yes, I was also exhausted, but that is exactly what he wants. Don't follow the Pied Piper and as this story goes, the city of Hamelin paid a high price for it and so will America.
12
@Linda That's the point. When people get too tired to fight, they win.
15
@Linda I agree, except he hasn't had a "thought" in years, if ever, only delusions. Thoughts require the ability to think and recognize reality, both of which are beyond the capacity of the brain of this Very Stable Genius who has no understanding of how to shop for groceries, much less vote or behave appropriately.
12
Both Democrats and Republicans claim voter fraud or suppression when it suits them. Both then deny it.. when it suits them.
7
@HLB Engineering
There is a slight difference. There is no substantial evidence for the Republican claims while Republican objectives are clearly to discourage voters who would vote the wrong way from voting. Their rationale of serious voter fraud has yet to be substantiated. In which case, what are the Republicans trying to accomplish?
206
Perhaps both parties ( or candidates if in the primaries) use it as an excuse for losing, but one party is actively using unproven voter fraud as a way to suppress votes while the other party is trying to make it easier to vote.
34
@HLB Engineering
the only known case of Democrat voter fraud happened in PA in the 80's. There was also a case in 2004 of giving poor people gifts if they voted (but to be fair, it wasn't to support a candidate, but to vote). On the other hand, we have a lot of examples of Republicans doing it. Like the one in this article.
10
The GOP has laid the ground work for Trump to become president and they got judges and deregulation and Trump got access to foreign funds for his families biz.
44
I love articles that quote Trump as if he has legitimate comments as a legitimate actor as legitimate president. Trump failed to win a majority of votes but was adjudged to have prevailed in an election that many dispute. Trump is suspected of criminal behavior. Many of his cronies have been indicted and convicted of criminal behavior. Trump's family members are suspected of criminal behavior. I'm eager for the truth to come out. I'm eager to here the results of Democratic investigations when the new Congress steps in.
137
Let us not forget Jared Kushner's sister started selling 'visas" to rich foreigners as soon as Trump was elected?
1
Ah, remember the good ole days, when elections were cheated away honestly through the massive amounts of dark money used to finance untruthful negative ad campaigns? That’s so 2016...
50
@Kris K
What's insane is the very notion that a handful of illegal immigrants, who spend their whole lives hiding in the shadows, are going to risk jail and deportation to submit their one measly vote, which they know doesn't make any difference in the grand total.
1
Did Republicans ever believe in democracy? Now it seems there isn’t even a pretense with gerrymandering, blatant voter suppression, false claims of voter fraud, and now actually stealing votes. And if all those fail to bring them a win, they resort to stripping the office of its powers as in WI, NC, and MI.
We are becoming a majority ruled by a minority that is seriously out of step with those they are ruling. As the impact of their policies become more apparent - dirtier water and air, loss of health care, corporate power over individual rights, etc, tensions will grow.
We must restore integrity to our voting system to save our democracy and future.
306
Trump just wants Money. Nothing else. He’s particularly interested in keeping interest rates low because he has debt. I’m not sure what the tariff thing is about. He can’t have any wants fulfilled if he looses votes. I’m sure anyone that cheats for him will be rewarded.
31
@Barbara Snider
Also not so good for the real estate market- he doesn't like that either.
6
the Republicans seem to always be the ones screaming about cheating, yet they are the ones most often cheating.
politics should have a system like sports where the first violation is a small penalty and then it increases dramatically with each successive one. R's might already be disqualified by now.
60
Here is the real irony … in Arizona the GOP successfully defended a law that prohibited anyone except family members or caregivers to collect absentee ballots … presumably because those who would do so would be Democrats!
Short answer: It's OK if you are a Republican.
41
@John Graubard
A better law would allow a team of one Republican and one Democrat to pick up completed ballots and deliver them to the election office. That way, we wouldn't have Florida elections decided without votes held up in postal facilities because of Trump's crazy pipe bomb supporter. The postal facilities served Democrat counties.
5
@John Graubard
Never expect consistency, logic, or morality from the GOP. You'll just be wasting your time.
If Republicans were actually worried about fraud instead of trying to repress voting, then a simple solution could be used. Have a photo booth set up at the polls, take a photo, make an ID for anyone who was lacking and immediately enter the person's name and address in a data base. Problem, if there were one, would be solved. That's not the point, is it?
In a democracy, any effort to defeat voting is an effort to kill democracy. Everyone should be encouraged to vote and it should be as easy as possible. If, and only if, specific problems are known to exist and are investigated carefully, then changes can be made, integrity assured. This hasn't slowed mean spirited Republicans from making up problems so they can pretend to solve them.
Some Republican state legislators (this means you, Wisconsin) appear to have gone nuts. The legislature in Wisconsin, imitating earlier actions in North Carolina, just voted to strip the incoming Democratic governor of much of the powers of his office. This is a dead enders game, one in which both parties will eventually be forced to participate.
At the end of this ugly process, democracy collapses of its own weight because people will lose faith that voting means anything and conclude they can't live in a deliberately unjust society where they have no voice. Fed on a steady diet of extreme talk radio and Fox Noise, we have politicians and political party that wants to win at the risk of destroying the nation.
108
@Doug Terry - in the so-called Third World there is an even simpler solution: when the person votes an indelible stamp is placed on his or her hand.
10
I find it extremely ironic that the pious mr harris finds himself deeply involved in voter fraud. No doubt in my mind that he didn’t know what was being done in his behalf as he introduced the man behind the organized scheme to harvest absentee ballots to a candidate for Charlotte City Council.
If NC does not require a new election for the house representative of the 9th district of NC this will be an stolen election.
67
Maybe the point is that though voter fraud is a rare occurrence and lives mostly in the chaotic and disturbed mind of Donald Trump, election fraud is something the Republicans have been intimately familiar with for quite some time. Misleading the public about candidates, lying about political intent, accepting all manor of bribe and then boldly making bribery legal, voter ID, voter intimidation, and on and on it goes. Every one of these GOP led attempts to manipulate the election could be characterized as election fraud in a country that has held itself out as a democracy. And, not just any democracy but the keepers of the flame of democracy the world over. That much we now know is bunk but so is the voter fraud claim which is being used only to advance the election fraud that continues to roll on from county to county and state to state with the GOP happily driving the bus.
42
Only Republicans are deeply concerned with voter fraud. Fear of an inevitable demographic change, perhaps? And, yet, their party members might be most likely to carry out voter fraud. Actually, based on motive, it makes perfect sense.
25
Thank you, Gail. Please do write a column or two about the GOP attempts to legally remove power from the incoming Democratic administrations of Michigan and Wisconsin.
Btw, this is just what McConnell and his GOP cheat team did when Obama was elected president, and kept it up for two terms.
Republicans deserve no quarter. Once they're out, we need a firewall to keep them out, for generations--or until they express some serious regret for cheating, lying, and defrauding voters who voted Dems in and Pubs out.
76
@Eric Yep, they're just using the NC playbook up in Michigan and Wisconsin. Shameful!
As that old Seinfeld episode emphasized, there is indeed a Bizarroworld where everything is the opposite of what it appears to be or actually is. And if we were to define Trump in one word - yes, admittedly that is close to impossible - the word Bizarroworld would come to mind. As far I can count, and I am full up to page 50 on both sides with "/'s", every utterance from Trump's pursed lips and fowl mouth is a lie or exaggeration or inane and senseless.
To Gail's correct assessment of North Carolina, let us add to the mix Florida and Georgia. There are frauds and "illegals" in these three southern states, but they are home-grown white boys (and probably gals, too). Or how about what is happening in Michigan and Wisconsin as we speak? The people voted for Democrats to be governors, an attorney-general, and a Secretary of State between these two states. Yet each Republican legislative body will probably successfully vote to diminish the powers of the above...against the will of those who voted for them!
Let's face the facts. Voter fraud is alive and well by the Grand Old Party. And it ain't here in California. And by the way, Mr. Trump, tread softly when you impugn the fifth largest economy of the world....
50
@Kathy Lollock
Bizarro world was actually a concept of DC Comics in the 60s. Bizarro was the opposite of Superman in every way. Could it be that Trump is Bizarro Obama?
1
Good one, Gail. Ta very much. Today's events at the National Cathedral (where is the National Synagogue or the National Mosque?) were uplifting even for this curmudgeon. They were doubly welcome for the contrast they drew between 41 and 45. And that was in spite of the fact the 41 was an enabler of Reagan and all his wickedness. But then thoughts expand, and I see that from Nixon to Trump, every GOP POTUS has detracted from the presidency in his own way. Clinton was no saint, but his sins were as grains of sand to the boulders of either Bush, or of Nixon, or Reagan. As for Trump, I hope the Republic will survive him and his gang of cutthroats. Meanwhile, let us now praise famous men, and let the others notice.
32
@Des Johnson
You ask rhetorically, “where is the National Synagogue or the National Mosque?” There is none.
As any non-Christian in the US will tell you, the United States is, despite the establishment clause in the Contitution, a Christian country. Christmas, not Eid, is an official holiday. Public schools frequently plan spring break around Good Friday and Easter, not Passover. Even the founding documents reflect the Christian values of the founders.
Is this bad? I would argue - Not necessarily. As long as the spirit of the establishment clause is maintained, this lends a moral underpinning to American values. However, we need to be careful that we don’t mistake teachings of particular religious groups for those values.
1
@Perverse: Unfortunately, the current SCOTUS refers to the spirit of clauses of the constitution only when it suits their ideological bent. And we can be very clear that some who voted for Trump did so on the understanding that he would advance their particular religious beliefs. A serious deficit in American society now is imposed by this retrigrade attitude to religion. That deficit is in discussions on an alernative set of ideals that would unite us--alternative to Neolithic thinking.
1
The story I read in the Washington Post had better than culling and trashing absentee ballots - the voter wapo interviewed said the collector told her not to be concerned about not knowing who to vote for, the collector would fill in the ballot.
29
To this distant and naive observer, it remains unclear why a technically advanced and wealthy country like the USA cannot establish country-wide automatic voter registration and give every registered voter an appropriate ID. Please explain, anyone ?
33
@sissifus Because one of our two major political parties is fundamentally opposed to everyone being able to vote. We COULD do what you describe, but Republicans don't actually believe that everyone should be able to vote. Voter ID isn't about preventing fraud, it's about preventing likely democratic voters from being able to cast a vote in the first place.
Republicans know that they are incapable of winning elections, if all things were fair, so they have to rig the game in their favor before it even begins, just to be competitive.
14
@sissifus
It is because the constitution gives the right to vote to the individual states. The federal election is not run by the federal government!
5
@sissifus
Maybe this will help...............
"To this distant and naive observer, it remains unclear why a technically advanced and wealthy country like the USA cannot establish.............."
Fair voter registration,
Healthcare for all citizens,
Quality public education,
Affordable higher education,
Racial equality,
Elections without corruption
Economic opportunity and equality for all,
Reasonbale standards of social protection.........
Hopefully that makes it a little clearer.
6
Gail Collins once again puts her finger in several wounds, but somehow the general anaesthetic which Mr T has been taking since the house elections has affected the brains of others in the Republican Party (insofar as the said organ is present)...
Were the President actually the king of all he surveys, he would create new aristocrats from failed members of the Republican Party and install them in a new, shiny House of Trump, which would have a power of veto over all decisions taken by the House of Representatives.
Failing such powers, he is forced to continue with the program of deception and manipulation which his "friend" Vladimir so willingly supports, as it is in the latter's interests to have one of his two biggest rivals on the world stage waste his time and energy on such pointless pursuits (when will Mr T actually begin to govern and stop trying to manipulate?)
In the words of the late Phil Ochs, "we thought that Nixon was the Devil..." but boy, were we wrong!
19
It appears that the Republican primary may also have been subjected to manipulation of absentee votes, making Mr. Harris' whole candidacy possibly fraudulent. How ironic that the evangelical candidate and supporter of Mr. Trump may be the poster child for election fraud.
45
@Brokensq --absentee ballot fraud is far more effective in primaries because there are far fewer voters, and the circumstantial evidence that his primary was rigged this way is very strong.
7
@Brokensq
But certainly not surprising.
4
@Brokensq Yeah, it's looking very much like Harris stole the primary, as well. Pittinger should sue him.
Do you think any elected official has shopped for groceries? Hit a pothole while rushing to work? Waited at Penn Station for a train home that may never come? How is it that the "out of touch with the common person" offense bears no condemnation from Mr and Mrs. J Q Citizen in Texas, North Carolina or Florida? For any of these GOPers to claim voter fraud misreads the biggest threat to democracy - that 30% of our people are too busy managing a frenetic life to wait in line to vote on a Tuesday in November. Smoke, mirrors, snake oil- a winning formula where the loser is all of us.
16
@John Quixote Groceries: I remember when GW Bush was running for re-election against Clinton, his handlers took him to a grocery store and he stood there apparently gob smacked at the idea that a machine could scan a bar code and come up with the price of a can of peas. Obviously he had no idea how regular people dealt with the world or what the real world was like. He probably never went to a grocery store. The servants handled all that.
4
For some odd reason, Republicans have decided to leave their scruples beside the side of the road beginning sometime in the last 4 or 5 decades. It didn't happen all at once, but now we have a political party that thinks it's perfectly okay to cheat the American people in order to get elected. They actually feel entitled to the votes they steal. It's a zero sum game with these folks. Even many Christians have gotten caught up in this "the end justifies the means" way of doing things because it will get them the prize of getting Roe v Wade overturned. It's pure hypocrisy. And now we have characters like Trump and McConnell who do not mean our country well. We have to keep voting, no matter the obstacles.
36
@MKathryn
Someone needs to get the message to all the Republican voters who only care about abortion when they vote that the Republicans will NEVER repeal Roe vs. Wade!
They would lose a huge percentage of their voting base if they no longer had abortion as a campaign issue. They would never again win an honest election, although that is probably true today.
Democrats in Congress should allow the Republicans to defeat Roe vs. Wade temporarily, then when the Republican party has turned to dust, relitigate R vs. W with little opposition.
Thanks, Gail for focusing in on this North Carolina voting situation in Bladen County. Even living in this state the situation is as clear as mud and asking questions or cruising the internet does not get you very far. So your brief description is as clear as any I have found.
My limited time and experience here tells me we live in an interesting period. In some places and situations openness is the rule and southern charm seems genuine, but politically especially with the state Congress in GOP hands it is truly a swamp. and GOP cheating perhaps as common as a rooster crowing while blaming it on democrats equally so.
Interesting times is the Chinese curse for troubles and hardships. Perhaps North Carolina will outgrow its schizophrenic behavior, but first we must find an honest GOP which sees beyond its own selfish interests to the needs of its people. Possible? Perhaps but I am not holding my breath.
13
@just Robert
“...an honest GOP...”
Looking at the current crop? I’d say, nope, it just isn’t feasible.
4
Thank you for this column, Gail! Our NC Republican legislators have been working hard to solve an in person voter fraud problem that doesn’t exist, while ignoring the easiest way to do it: absentee ballots.
Why do our Repubs ignore them? Because in NC white people use them more than black people. NC black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic.
In this case, it appears Repubs collected absentee ballots (illegal) in selected neighborhoods, and surprise, a record number weren’t turned in.
But voter fraud in person? No. I live & vote in NC. Even without photo ID, for someone to imitate me or any other voter on the rolls would require knowing my full name, where I live, my precinct, driving there, standing in line, reeling off my address info & forging my signature to get a ballot. Then doing it all over again to vote as someone else.
It just doesn’t happen. A full 2016 recount in NC proved it. Out of 4.5 million ballots, 400 had problems & only a few were in person attempts - two by Trump voters.
These Repub efforts are voter suppression, period. The photo ID law in NC (ruled unconstitutional) accepted driver’s licenses, but not official state issued NC Public Assistance photo ID. Guess who has those?
But the Repubs are persistent. A month ago NC voters passed a vaguely worded photo ID constitutional amendment that gives our Legislature wide latitude implementing it.
My guess: Same stuff, different day.
19
Ballot Harvesting. A cross between organ stealing and sleazy political “ operators “, invariably of the GOP persuasion.
“ If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy “ - David Frum.
Truer words have NEVER been spoken.
Seriously.
24
"People, where do you think this came from?"
Fine, Gail, I'll bite and play armchair psychologist on this one.
It all stems from the fact that 45's oldest sibling, Maryanne, was the high achiever and favored sibling in the family. And her accomplishments have been seemingly authentic---she came of age at a time when women didn't exactly have a lot of female role models in the high courts---and independent of latching on to the family business and family name. (The possible exception of course being financial, where her hands might also be in the fraudulent tax scheme cookie jar with the rest of the Trumps. But hey, let's look beyond that for a moment.)
My guess is that 45 couldn't stand trying to live up to Maryanne. My guess is that 45 was always compared to Maryanne. My guess is that 45 couldn't stand any of it. My guess is that it all comes from there.
The outsized ego, unchecked narcissism, and unmatched insecurity all come from growing up in the shadow of his sister and having a terrible relationship with his father. Imagine the shame of 45 growing up and not even being able to compete with his sister! It all makes sense now. (Well, except for the part where millions of people think that he is a decent man and a truth teller. But hey, at least we know the source of it all now.)
18
You wonder why they go to all this trouble. The voter fraud hoaxes, the gerrymandering, the stolen court seats, rewriting the rules to disempower the Democrats who manage to win an election . . . Why don't they just cancel elections, fire the judges they don't like? Does anyone imagine that their supporters would object? Or that the Democrats would take up arms?
10
Lately, Gail, it’s hard to tell the difference between the GOP and the mafia, as corrupt operations bent on maintaining power to benefit themselves and their patrons, to the detriment of the majority of people in this country.
14
"Feel free to chortle/snort/howl at the moon when I tell you the accused fraudsters are Republicans."
What a huge surprise.
As a party, the GOP has made it amply clear that they have abandoned even the pretense of democracy. (See Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Michigan for some of the latest evidence.)
One wonders if Republican voters share their elected officials' disdain for democracy, whether they simply don't care (as long as they win), or if someday they might sicken at what they've helped create and stop voting for authoritarian thugs. I am not optimistic.
14
Will the republican controlled North Carolina legislature now use their Ninth District's "vote harvesting" as evidence of the need for picture ID's? Will they try to suppress voting by Democratic constituencies on the evidence of their own fraudulent activities? This would just seem the natural progression from where we are right now. The next goose-step forward in the march of the fascists, nationalists, and kleptocrats that are willing to destroy anything to maintain control.
5
Liberals need to stop harping on the "you need an ID to buy groceries" thing. To a Trump voter, buying groceries means buying beer. You don't go out to buy groceries without bringing home beer. And you need an ID to buy beer. Trump is very well in touch with working-class America in this regard. When you make fun of him for saying it, you're playing into his hands. After all, only a snooty coastal elitist would interpret the word "groceries" in a manner that doesn't include alcohol by default. Sure, you liberals don't need an ID to buy your avocados and hummus and kale and fair trade organic espresso grind, but us REAL Americans need an ID to buy our real American groceries. Yet despite Trump's ability to resonate with the reckless, unhealthy, self-destructive nature of the American psyche, he is now facing the prospect of becoming a one-term (or less than one-term) president. If the economy starts sinking, if Kasich mounts a strong primary challenge (winning at least a handful of states) and an incredibly successful third-party candidate shows up out of nowhere to siphon off Republican voters who are tired of Trump's endless broken-record repetition, it'll be 1992 all over again. We all have to pray that this doesn't happen. Democrats won't have the senate, so a Democrat president would be useless. Trump needs to stick around after the economy collapses, so he and the Republican Party can be held accountable for the economic devastation they've caused.
7
@Randy Thompson It's not a Democrat president. It's a Democratic president. When you say Democrat in that context, you are signaling to other republicans who you are. Giving yourself away.
2
That’s not Secretary Mattis with Trump. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs possibly?
1
President Trump and the malevolent, metastasized version of what was once the G.O.P. have a very simple rule: accuse Democrats (and any other perceived enemies) of corrupt behavior, but do that same behavior yourselves. It's a grown-up version of the schoolyard taunt, "I know you are but what am I."
For years, Republicans have used "voter fraud" as a completely transparent excuse to disenfranchise potential Democratic voters. And now Republicans engage in voter fraud themselves in North Carolina.
During the Obama presidency, Republicans howled about presidential executive orders, even as they tried to block Obama from doing anything at all. Then, President Trump comes to power, and his first order of business is a slew of executive orders.
Again, during the Obama years, Republicans tried to block as many judicial appointments as they could. This lead Senator Reid to invoke the "nuclear option" on lower court appointments. So what did the Republicans do? Block a Supreme Court appointment for an entire year, and then invoke the "nuclear option" on Supreme Court appointments as soon as Trump was elected.
Republicans aren't engaging in hardball politics. They're perverting democratic norms and twisting facts and truth to confuse people and sow fear. Well, someday, they shall indeed reap what they sow.
23
To simplify: America will never be a democracy while it still tolerates the Republican Party.
23
I like the Swiss system. Every eliglble voter receives his/her ballot by mail about three weeks before an election or plebiscite. You have a prepaid envelope to return your ballot, or you may place it into the ballot box by hand if you prefer.
17
It's so hard to determine what I dislike most about President Trump.
But it's this. He CONSTANTLY says, and tweets, words that are completely divorced from facts or the truth.
Call it "fake spews."
14
That pesky nineteenth amendment is not doing Republican politicians much good either.
Thankfully the brilliant minds in the GOP have not figured out how to suppress votes of women who persist in voting the wrong way.
Oh wait. Exact Match Laws. Never mind, the GOP is on top of it:
"According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage."
Fake hats. False mustaches. Real women. So much fraud to worry about. So little time left to keep their majorities.
10
The Democratic candidate wasn't the only victim: Harris didn't just steal the general election, he also stole the primary from the Republican incumbent.
Yes, Republicans, you too can be the victims of election fraud. Perpetrated by members of your own party.
Is there no honor among thieves?
13
The only thing Trump does not get wrong is how easy it is to appeal to ignorance and basa impulses in order to get ahead. And whose fault is that? Thete are a lot of people out thete filled with hatred and just asking to be conned.
5
Dear Gail,
With apologies to Frank Baum, “don’t look behind the curtain”, the Donald knows everything!
Our wizard President has no brains, no heart and definitely no courage. He makes it up as he goes along because his base doesn’t really care. What’s going on in my great state and in Wisconsin and North Carolina is beyond belief. The Republicans will stop at nothing to retain power.
My hopes and prayers are with Bob Mueller.
16
It's no accident that Trump is wrong about everything, Gail. Ever since he came up with the brilliant idea of making himself a spokesperson for birtherism, at least so far as his public positions (official and those he deems tweet worthy) are concerned he's been channeling right wing whack jobs like some evil spirited ventriloquist's dummy. Department of Irony suggestion: While somehow elected to highest office without holding a single serious conviction, it now very much looks like Trump will leave highest office holding plenty.
10
Don't forget the woman in Texas who didn't realize she couldn't vote because she had been in jail. Her vote was provisional and thus was never counted but she is going to jail for 5 years. This is why some people don't think there is the same justice for everyone.
7
It is proverbial that in Chicago the motto is "Vote early and often" and that the cemeteries vote. I don't know if that is true, but the story goes back long before Trump. You can even find it in Henry Adams's "Democracy", written about 1879.
Voter fraud is a potential threat, even if in the past it has not occurred on a significant scale. Preventing it is like airport security even though we haven't had a hijacking since 2001.
2
Almost every adult has a driver's license for I.D. But the driver's license makes no claims about citizenship. Having an ID for voting is not a bad idea but the ID should be provided free of charge to every citizen. The cost would be, say, $10 per person.That would come to a maximum of $3.3 billions. This is not too large a sum for the U.S. exchequer. My be our super rich citizens can donate some for this money. India, not a particularly rich country, provides an Aadhaar ID card to every Indian citizen free of charge.
8
@ALM
Why should there be any charge? They should be free and the states should be required to be very aggressive in making sure every eligible voter has one.
Voting is a right -- we, the people, own the state government, we shouldn't have to pay to take part in it. Also, a fee to vote is a poll tax, and poll taxes have long been ruled unconstitutional.
19
@ALM Charging even 1 cent for an ID that is required to vote constitutes a poll tax, which is a violation of the Constitution. If you want institute Voter ID constitutionally, the ID has to be provided free of charge, to every citizen in the country. However that would defeat the purpose, because Voter ID is not designed to prevent fraud, it's designed to prevent Democrats from voting.
4
@Charles trentelman
There should be no charge. That is what I said aove.
2
We could laugh at, make fun of, and deride Trump's explanations of hacking (a 400 lb. man in New Jersey) our elections (and the DNC) and people putting on another hat or mustache and voting again and again if it wasn't so frightening to find that Russia was involved in our elections and if it wasn't even more frightening to find that one of our political - our American - parties was involved with voter fraud. As the GOP base continues to shrink they do have a problem with maintaining control and influence. Their answer rather than attempting to become a more inclusive Party is to cheat. Whether through voter intimidation, identification cards, or "harvesting" absentee ballots the GOP's answer is voter suppression rather than the genuine work of actually representing the needs and desires of the nation.
33
@Rev Wayne
Gail Collins tells it like it is. I am glad the Election Officials are doing the right thing in this matter.
1
The title of this piece - "Trump Gets It All Wrong" - is all wrong. Trump doesn't try to get anything so can't be said to have gotten it wrong - or right. He simply creates whatever "facts" he needs to support whatever argument he is trying to sell. That is his genius. He is a salesman, and doesn't let the facts bog him down.
17
Cause for dread: would be harder to spot in most states, so is likely happening.
Cause for hope: the Republicans on the Board of Elections acted with integrity.
Cause for amazement: see "Cause for hope" above.
22
I think MSNBC reported that the bipartisan NC Board of Elections is refusing to certify the state's 9th district election.
It should be unthinkable, but nothing is these days: had the Board of Elections not been bipartisan, would Mark Harris now be preparing to be sworn in as the duly elected Representative?
17
I have worked in Elections for 15 years and NEVER seen attempted or completed fraud.
Our County is excellent, but it would be very hard to pull off, and engage enough people, to make a difference.
Perhaps stealing absentee (Vote By Mail) ballots, but our system would catch that.
No end to way he undermines democracy and its processes.
34
While clever writing, and I love you Gail Collins, this subject doesn't really lend itself to humor.
Right now, we're dealing with suspected (subpoenas already flying) absentee ballot harvesting, and a "deprive the voters" legislation designed to remove all powers from newly elected Democratic governors (as well as in some cases, the secretary of state and attorney general) by the lame-duck Republican controlled legislatures in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Republican brazenness has reached new heights when it's not enough to suppress the vote on Election Day--they need the days after too, when they turn to overturning the vote for anyone who wins who isn't THEM.
At this rate, the Governors of Wisconsin and Michigan will be allowed to say, maybe sign bills passed by Republicans, or order coffee, or run contests for new state slogans.
How about one that would be great for license plates: Wisconsin [Michigan--red states now and forever.
57
@ChristineMcM
Don't forget Utah. Our legislature is hastily passing legislation to 'fix' a medical marijuana ballot measure because Mormon church officials didn't like it the way the voters intended. This isn't one or two red states. This is a nationwide coordinated response from the Republican party signifying that the will of the people... the electorate... is an annoying encumbrance to them. I think the RNC will be toast in 2020 if they keep on with this. People really don't like their vote being ignored.
11
@ChristineMcM And here in Georgia--well, you know the sordid story.
6
@ChristineMcM
Wisconsin, Red by hook or crook!
4
Yes Don the Dishonest has it all wrong, Rep Steve King of Iowa will set him straight. It was three million Mexicans changing sombreros to fool the election volunteers, along with each carrying 100 pounds of marijuana to bribe the inspectors, and of course those handlebar mustaches were fake also.
He even thinks those guitars of the Mariachi bands are filled with cocaine right from Quintana Roo. What can be better for a good honest Kansan conservative, than a well paid investigation into something that exists in the imagination of a sociopath. Just a good way to bilk the public with the consent of the Gran Old Plunderers of the treasury.
So as the tale goes it had to be all those Mariachi bands in East Los Angeles that gave HRC those 3 million extra votes, they all own several sombreros, except the ones from Texas that wear Stetsons. Oh maybe it was all the Chinese in Los Angeles and San Francisco, you know, you can't tell them apart so we have been told, but they are not like those Caucasians from the upper Midwest, so who to believe?
Well any one that voted against the self made racketeer had to be an illegal, who else would be so disrespectful of the great man that he knows he is?
58
Quote from the Gusadian's report on the Bush funeral, describing the moments after trump took his place alongside the former Presidents and First Ladies:
"Trump had deadened the atmosphere like a standing chill."
This perfectly describes his effect on the nation.
268
Kennedy's victory in 1960 was the result of a stolen election. Theodore White in The Making of the President 1960 reported that 93% of the voters in Cook County (meaning Chicago) voted. Really? Kennedy carried Texas by 25,000 votes and LBJ must have had something to do with that result. To his credit Nixon did not contest the result because he felt the presidency should not be under a cloud of suspicion.
8
@Stephen Kurtz
And the reason you're mentioning ancient history now is....
4
@Stephen Kurtz - and we all know what an upright, honest guy Nixon was . . .
1
Gail, You are truly a treasure. My 17yo son and I eagerly await your every column. Thank you!
19
I'm out of chortles, which are a friendly noise, when it comes to the lying cheating greedy Republicans and their looting exploiting ways. Nor is there any room for surprise at the ways they are willing to serve their masters in order to keep power and roll back the 20th century. Hypocrisy justified by religion based on the voices in their heads: that's expected too.
That Ibis is a thing! Good on you, Gail Collins. Wish this comment section allowed pictures: they're beautiful, but you'll have to go to a link because they only exist in a Chinese nature preserve (perhaps we could send the Trump family there, to collect on their nepotism?):
"This species is at the brink of extinction, with only 10 birds found in the wild in the 1980s."
http://www.edgeofexistence.org/species/asian-crested-ibis/
One can hope that at some point before the sixth extinction begins paring down humans as well as all other species to a point that people have to stop lying about it, there will be enough fed up people who want our country back to stop treating pure evil and the seven deadly sins as MAGA.
Here's hoping. I'm not giving up just yet, but I want my country back. Enough with the cowardly bully and the pretense that white nationalism is patriotic
There more. Sacramento police arrested protesters at a Nazi rally who had been stabbed, and charged the victims. The Nazis? Check it out: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/05/antifa-charges-california-activists-stabbing
47
Addendum: Carl Sandburg quoted by chess master and resistance formulator Garry Kasparov in a Masha Gessen New Yorker article:
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/garry-kasparov-says-we-are-living-in-chaos-but-remains-an-incorrigible-optimist
50
@Susan Anderson - thanks so much, Susan, for that wonderful link to the Ibis. Gorgeous!!
7
@Susan Anderson
An inelegant version of the quotation, which is anyhow not Carl Sandburg's, and isn't in the New Yorker article you link to. It's a fake attribution on some websites. The adage itself goes back in one way or another to 1911, and in more or less the modern way ("pound the facts, or the law, or the table") to 1934. Pat Buchanan, of all people, has the best version: "“When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on you side, pound the table.”
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/07/04/legal-adage/
5
Technology is not the answer, humanity is. We need paper ballots with nonpartisan human beings counting and auditing them. Or we can have our usual fast election returns with hacked electronic votes. How’s that been working for us? We know what we need to do so American voters get what they want, if we have the will and patience to actually do it.
Here in Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, was elected to the U.S. Senate in a vote so close that it took a week to count the remaining ballots. We all waited, while Trump absurdly spewed that elections should be conclusively determined by the end of election night.
Arizona largely uses mail-in ballots. I wonder what the Senate result would have been if the election had been completely determined electronically? Well, it still was mostly, as the ballots were fed through machines, but at least there’s a paper trail. And mail-in ballots are convenient, so they get more people voting.
How can we avoid the disenfranchisement of requiring voter IDs, fraud with absentee ballots, and hacking of electronic votes? We could require a voter to physically show up at the polling place, provide their name, address, and signature, and fill out a paper ballot on their own. They would have to remember how to vote, but maybe that’s a good thing? Everything old is new again, in the interests of fairness?
It’s been said before: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
29
@Blue Moon
About a dozen years ago, I took photos of a security expert for a high tech trade publication. He’d been testing commonly used electronic voting machines (Diebold, I think), and was less than sanguine about what he’d found.
“I can tell you exactly how many keystrokes it takes to hack into a machine,” he said. “How many keystrokes to change the vote. And how many keystrokes to exit without leaving a trace.”
12
@Railbird
How did JFK squeak by in 1960? In part because Chicago was hacked (and with all paper ballots back then). Humans will always seek competitive advantages over other humans. The GOP is ahead in the voting game right now. Democrats need to get on the ball. And then we need laws to level and regulate the playing field. Voting is a human endeavor, so it will always be flawed. Democrats are the best option for progress on this front; they make a genuine effort to be fair. Somehow, they need to figure out how to win by wide margins if they are to overcome the hurdles that have been set in place to defeat them.
3
A hundred years ago Emma Goldman said that if voting changed anything they'd make it illegal.
Well, it did change things, once upon a time, and the second half is right on schedule.
98
Yes. He is very good at being consistently wrong. And every day more evidence comes forth that Trump and the GOP willingly sold democracy and purchased strongman autocracy...follow the money.
60
Dishonest Donald the Narcissistic is unable to accept the fact that he actually lost the public vote, his opinion of himself will not allow that. With help from Kris Kabach of Kansas he has the foundations of a conspiracy theory.
All he had to do was make up a story about those he has been telling his supporters are the cause of their problems. Illegal immigrants are his and their major target. It is not too hard to get those bigots and others like them to believe these tales despite any evidence of any sort. Those who believe these kinds of prevarications and other such fables do not need proof, they just convince themselves these are true.
Don the Dishonest has a long history of getting people to believe his scams and frauds. Several thousand contractors believed he would make good on contracts, a few thousand fell for his education scam, investors fell for his Casino financing, and a bank or two fell for his taking out a mortgage on a hotel or two, a loan on a plane and a yacht.
Almost all his business dealings for the past 15-20 years have been some sort of swindle. That is the business plan of the Trump organization, make a deal, refuse to pay, force a lawsuit that the other party can not wait to be settled, settle for as low as 1/3 the agreed upon price.
It is Racketeering as defined under RICO. Of several RICO suits pending none is by the FBI or Justice Departments. The new congress has the duty to open hearings on him and his business practices.
124
The GOP's philosophy: If you can't win when you play by the rules, change the rules.
606
@KenF: Also: If you can't win when you play by the rules, cheat. It helps to have a hostile foreign power interfere to get you elected.
33
@KenF -- And, if you lose anyway, change the rules while you're a lame duck, just to spite your opposition. See North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan for examples. Republican sore losers, hard at work subverting democracy.
17
@KenF No the GOP philosophy is: If you can't win playing by the rules, CHEAT!
3
The beauty of Trump is that he tells the world his method. He tells the world that he makes up stuff and then makes up stuff and the Trumpsters vote him in.
The GOP in North Carolina followed this model and did a little bit of “ballot harvesting" even as the party and Trump were pointing fingers at the myriad ways the Democrats were stealing the election.
Do you think that this will make Trump or the GOP introspect about their false charges or illegal actions? Absolutely not. In true Trump fashion they'll double down and begin spinning the story of how they were actually trying to help people vote. What they won't tell you is that their ballot would be counted ONLY if the vote went their way, or else the ballot would be "lost."
257
@chickenlover Unfortunately, it's been happening way to often, way before Trump seriously entered the political scene. At some point, the GOP decided that they had to fix things so that they had the highest possible chances of winning elections, always. This has always been done by random candidates and local politicians, but the GOP seems to have institutionalized it.
Despite that, Democrats have still won too often for their tastes. So, they set out to keep control of power by trying to stack the courts with conservatives (and outright Republican partisans, if they could). Then they can stymie legislation, as they did for six years with Obama, so that legal challenges where the law is unclear will go their way.
Trump dropped himself into that knowing about it all. He assumes making the accusation is profitable, because he knows it's actually happening, and like most criminally inclined people he assumes everyone is doing it if they can get away with it.
But, mostly, Trump doesn't care if it's true or not. Throwing the claim out there means he can claim victory even in the jaws of defeat. And, as with the best conspiracy theories, there is no way to prove the claims false. If there is no evidence, it's merely because the conspirators are very good. Which, of course, generates even more outrage from those inclined to believe.
Trump is a con man. I think he learned it from his father, and the family wealth allowed him to get away with it since childhood.
9
@chickenlover. Amazing, isn’t it? Trump “tells the world he makes stuff up and then makes stuff up and the trmpsters vote him in”—because, they say (if my relatives are any measure), he is “authentic.”
An “authentic” liar. World class, at that.
7
@chickenlover
"Introspect" is not a transitive verb.
One can "be introspective" or to correct the above misuse,
"Do you think this will make Trump or the GOP become introspective about their false charges.."
Lack of precision in grammar and word usage (sadly prevalent) reflects lack of education and lazy thinking. Both of which have contributed to our current president's election and continuing support.
1
We wouldn’t need absentee ballots if states all had mail-in ballots and month-long voting. But of course, you’d need both parties to support such a reform, which isn’t likely in any of our lifetimes.
40
@PaulB67
And what do you think the mail in ballots are? Some people are away from their registered voting address for longer than a month, say for a tour of duty at the border. There will always be a need for absentee ballots.
54
@PaulB67
In CA, all are designed "Vote By Mail" and can be done in person, a month in advance, dropped off, or mailed.
It is not a difficult concept.
All people are allowed to vote.
14
@Ivy: The problem with letting everybody vote, and counting them all, is that the Democrats win. Republicans are terrified that California's bad habits will catch on.
35
When considering Donald Trump, it's important to remember that he's a psychological black hole.
Donald is a body of intense malignant narcissistic stupidity from which no truth, decency, honor or humility can ever escape.
If the truth were staring at Donald from Stormy Daniels' cleavage, Donald wouldn't see it.
Somehow, a critically ill portion of American voters thought this black hole would make a fine public servant in spite of his spectacular lifelong record of giving his country and nearly everyone he's known the shaft.
Of course, you can't entirely blame the 63 million American voters for helping Trump University's Electoral College anoint this grifting scofflaw and pathological liar to the nation's throne....many of them were hypnotized and duped to Hate Hillary and resent Democrats for doing bad things like adopting universal healthcare, making the rich pay taxes, regulating Wall St. thieves, preserving the environment, letting women control their own bodies and caring just a little too much about non-white people.
That radical leftist agenda had to be stopped - and who better than a Birther Liar who's not afraid to tell it like it is - or isn't - to Make Lying From Morning Til Night Great Again.
There's a lot to celebrate this year.
Everyone's getting a beautiful lump of filthy, polluting coal, a giant loaf of White Wonder Bread and refillable bottles of delicious, nutritious Snake Oil in their Christmas stockings.
Merry Filthy Lying Christmas, Trumpistan !
1100
@Socrates
I hate to admit it, but I do love to see you wholly riled! All the best ...
224
@Socrates
One of your best comments. You hit all the most obvious points without going too far with your critic. Since adolescence I have never understood what exactly we American citizens had to be so proud of. All of the people I knew were flawed, like everyone else as history has shown us, yet they took great pride in the wealth this country provided as if they were individually responsible for it. It's as if they planted all the trees, dug the rivers, buried all the minerals, and created all the abundant natural resources. It wasn't just luck, it was American exceptionalism. Enter the new Republican Party and DJT. Look at what we have done with our good fortune to be in such a wonderful place.
174
@Susan Anderson
Yes, Socrates´way with words is truly poetic.
42
I'm still waiting for an explanation of why there are so many close elections nowadays. Most everywhere, the parties differ in representation; it's never 50/50. The electorate in each region certainly has its idiosyncratic preferences as to issues and personalities, and turnout, by party, is usually uneven, yet the final results hardly differ from tossing a coin a multitude of times. The Law of Averages in mathematics says that this will happen with a coin, but it seems completely contrary to expectation when it occurs with fired-up, opinionated humans. If all these competing factors conspire to have every vote cancelled by an equal and opposite vote, then it hardly seems worth the effort, fraud or no fraud, because what remains is just noise, bearing no information at all as to the general feeling .
8
@stan : The answer is gerrymandering.
15
@stan continople
Gerrymandering of course.
2
I don’t understand how a state can demand an ID to vote and yet allow absentee ballots. Of course the republicans have been committing every type of voter fraud imaginable. We need to seriously get real about voting. Make it mandatory, make sure each vote is registered so that people can verify if, when and who they voted for. Is this so complicated?
104
@BillBo
In CA we have scanned paper ballots in addition to the electronic count.
Signatures in voter log in person and on Vote By Mail (absentee) ballots are electronically compared to registration signature.
Also addresses are confirmed.
We do not require ID nor we should.
My most Rep county in CA.
15
@BillBo - nope (of course not) - the other option that would prove helpful is if voting weren't limited to one day - or happened at the weekend. Anything to make it easier (not harder) for voters. We voted absentee this last time because we were going to be in England during the election - but hey, it's Massachusetts and I'm willing to bet our votes got counted.
12
@Marcia Thompson, I prefer early voting in person. That way anyone who truly wants to vote can. I have voted that way for several years.
2
The same logic applies to the voting machines that lacked paper trails are were easily hacked. Suddenly, exit polling was inaccurate in such precincts- and the Republican Secretary of State always announced that the Republican candidates won fair and square.
It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court doesn’t want to rule on these matters. I guess it’ll have to wait until the Democrats win elections despite all the dirty tricks used to prevent this.
159
Gail, you gave us options A, B, and C, but left out our favorite catch-all option explaining Mayhem 45*:
D) the Don had an $18.5 million$ interest payment due on his casino which he couldn't meet, so his dad sent his lawyer to said casino to purchase $3.5 million$ in chips which were never redeemed - and the only penalty was assessment of a $30,000 fine:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html
It's the perfect encapsulation of "rules/laws don't apply to the Don", and "paying fines is just another business cost".
299
@R. Law
Answer:
E) all of the above
4
@R. Law
"It's the perfect encapsulation of "rules/laws don't apply to the Don","
Nor do they apply to the princess-aka my lovely daughter Ivanka. When it was revealed she was using a private e-mail system for her "work" @ WH, her apologists @ FIX News informed their Deplorable Followers to reset assured the princess was "unaware of the rules".
8
@MorGan - isn't it interesting how actual laws (Pres. Records Act) passed by Congress get relegated to "rules" status ?
A law passed 40+ years ago, no less ? Indeed, a law in effect during the entire existence of Advisor to the President, Ivanka.
3
The simplest path to understanding what is factual and true about any contentious situation is to read what Trump says about it and assume the opposite to be the truth. This is about 90% successful in predicting the truth as finally revealed, and that's a higher percentage than almost any political pundit could ever claim.
446
@Larry Bennett - Larry you're off by a few percent.. I think 90% counter-Trump truth is low. Probably about 98% wrong for Trump, about 98% untrue is in the right ballpark. Trump accidentally entered the same room as the truth once, and jumped out the window to get away before he was tainted. Too bad this was on the ground floor.
54
@Larry Bennett
Not only that but as soon as Trump accuses someone of some wrongdoing, you can bet he is guilty of the act himself. That should always be the first indicator of Trump wrongdoing and I wouldn't be surprised if Mueller and his team use this rule to open new inquiries into Trumps multitude of misdeeds and illegal activities.
7
@Larry Bennett, here is the truth, nothing but the truth, so help me God:
Trumppy lies all of the time, he has no reason to tell the truth.
But wait, wait - we will have the truth by reading the court filings this month.
What a Christmas gift!
3
Apologies to G &S’s Major General
I’m Donald Trump and at the stump I always reek of victory,
I never lose and then abuse the ones who disagree with me,
I never read, go by my gut, and make decisions instantly,
The Media and the fake Press go after me so constantly,
The Midterms were a huge success, they took the House by voter fraud,
By weird hairdos, mustachios they pulled it off and I am awed,
In Twenty I am set to run, there’s no one who will dare oppose
And on the side I plan to produce TV Reality Shows,
I’m very popular with clods, more so with little schooling Whites,
From Immigrants I’ve got a plan to take away their Voting rights,
My reign has been so awesome, it’s the greatest one in History,
They'll write books 'bout no other, all the authors will be praising me.
379
Larry, you are a national treasure. And so is Gail Collins. You help to lighten the burden, at least for the moment, of dealing with today's grim reality. On bad days, you at least let me smile. Long may you both live and prosper, and continue to entertain us.
111
@Larry Eisenberg Love your writing style and ideas. How do you do it sir!
I am in awe and envious. God bless - happy holidays and keep writing Larry.
18
@Larry Eisenberg
Possibly your best work ever. Certainly one of the Greatest Hits.
7