George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 13 March 2019.]
We have a special election coming up to fill the state’s Senate seat for District #1. Nevada County is in District #1 and election day is Tuesday March 26th. This special election has again raised concerns about who may and how should people be able to vote. Mr Greg Diaz, Nevada County’ s Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters has stepped into the dialogue in a highly partisan manner for someone holding a non-partisan office.
He gave an unfortunate interview in the 12mar19 Union (here) in which he falsely characterized Nevada County Tea Party’s position on voting, claiming “I can't have it when someone's telling people not to vote, or not to vote their vote-by-mail ballot”, and stating that “Their true intent: is to make it more difficult for folks to vote.” These highly political charges are wrong on all counts, since the Tea Party actually supports the advice and counsel of California’s Election Integrity Project, and clearly says that on its website (here).
The EIP states it “is a nonpartisan group of U.S. citizen volunteers seeking to fulfill our duty to actively participate in the governing of our state/country by helping to ensure the integrity of the voting process that protects our freedoms and way of life. EIP volunteers seek to protect our Republic, a government of, by, and for the people by maintaining an active role in that part of government which empowers citizens with our most fundamental right ~ the right to choose our representatives by vote.” The EIP’s stated goal is “to enable citizens to become active participants in the entire election process, from overseeing the integrity of the voter rolls, to ensuring that each lawfully cast vote is counted and counted fairly, and that all processes are in compliance with federal, state and local laws, statutes and regulations.” (more here and here)
Greg Diaz went partisan with his statement that the NCTP wants to make voting hard for people by telling them to take their mail-in ballots to their polling place, exchange it for a paper ballot, vote, and turn it in right there. First, the NCTP has always promoted every franchised US citizen to vote in every election for which they qualify. Second, the NCTP only cites the state’s non-partisan EIP recommendation to guarantee that a vote’s chain of custody is not compromised by practices like ballot harvesting, and that the vote gets counted in a timely manner. Today, we need to be reminded of this again given the massive irregularities that came to light after last November’s election.
Ballot harvesting is a practice of implementing absentee voting by partisan harvesters showing up at your door and offering to take your ballot to the polling place, and even help you vote. This obviously breaks your ballot’s ‘chain of custody’, and opens up the process to all kinds of fraud, including not delivering the ballots as promised if the voter belongs to the wrong party. North Carolina Democrats were able to stop this practice in last fall’s election. Now Republicans in California are also voicing concern since several of their congressional district victories were overturned by the arrival of thousands of harvested Democrat ballots days after the election.
As reported in the California Political Review, “Two years ago, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law AB 1921, which legalized the practice known as ballot harvesting. Specifically, the law (now) allows any person to collect a vote-by-mail ballot from an eligible voter and turn in the ballot to a polling place or a registrar of voter’s office.” (here) Today Congressman Ken Calvert (R-CA) has started pursuing the legalities of ballot harvesting in preparation for new legislation. The presumed purpose of this is to counter HR-1 ‘For the People Act’, the bill that just passed the House on a party line vote. HR-1 intends to federalize voting laws and weaken safeguards to prevent voter fraud under the guise of making it easier to vote. (more here and here)
However, there is an inconsistency in how the progressives characterize ease of voting on a partisan basis. The Left has long maintained that the Right is home to the nation’s preponderance of deplorably ignorant voters, and that the Left attracts the educated Americans who primarily make up the Democrat Party. Then one cannot help but ask why it is the Left that constantly wants to weaken or eliminate processes designed to check voter fraud, while claiming Republicans want to complexify voting in order to confuse Democrat voters, and reduce their vote count. And conversely, it is the Republicans who always promote voter vetting and voting procedures to prevent voter fraud so that only franchised US citizens are encouraged and able to cast ballots. Anybody ever wonder about that?
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] The Left’s position for years has been that there is no or negligible voter fraud in US elections. Why? Their position is that if there was no prosecution of a voting complaint or irregularity, then it does not count as voter fraud. This no matter if hundreds of dead or otherwise unqualified people were shown to have voted, or more people voted than were registered to vote, or any one of a number of other kinds of evidence that fraud did indeed occur. (This kind of assessment let the Obama’s AG Lynch give Hillary a pass after FBI’s Comey, who outlined a litany of her violations, recommended no prosecution for breaking national security laws and Dep State regulations in her safekeeping of confidential information and destruction of subpoenaed emails.) The proof of election fraud is complex to establish and expensive to pursue in the courts, especially by under-funded election oversight groups consisting of citizen volunteers who detect and report the frauds.
The alt-Left (now sanctified as merely ‘socialists’) today is also on record for promoting the biggest constitutional election fraud of all in their expressed desire to let everyone – citizens or not, and no matter how they got here – within our borders vote. Most certainly all resident illegals should be counted so as to up the Left’s share of House members, and therefore leverage the Democrat’s legitimate vote count.
But what I find more important in how elections are conducted and who should vote is the haphazard way we franchise US citizens to vote. It is established and clear that not all US citizens qualify to vote. Young people, felons, and the mentally incapacitated are denied the vote (and other prerogatives – purchase of guns, consumption of alcohol, driving vehicles, entering into contracts, curfew violations, … – granted to adult citizens) because of their ignorance of needed knowledge and/or their propensity to make bad decisions.
So the obvious question keeps coming up, should there be some minimum requirements a voter should satisfy in order to retain his voting franchise. The most important of these is some minimum knowledge of our country’s governance and the issues/candidates on the ballot. The prime reason we deny children the vote is their presumed lack of such knowledge and malleability. But once an individual passes a certain age (an age which the Left has been aggressively attempting to lower), then all such prudent considerations are abandoned, and every demonstrable doubly dummy is welcomed into the voting booths. Everyone knows that children aren’t the only ones who lack critical thinking skills, sufficient knowledge to vote, and can be easily influenced by others. Why then are they singled out for these deficiencies when adults are not? Because of their age, don’t they have at least as much ‘skin in the game’ as the older voters who will depart sooner? My own sentiments on voting are a matter of record here and here.
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