Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment
by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw
My, my, my, what a conundrum we are in. Jill Stein, the Green Candidate for
President, requested a recount of the votes cast in the State of Wisconsin in
the November 8th election. Wisconsin’s
GOP thought they were immune to any scrutiny over their fraudulent elections
and now they are panicking. In June of
2016, Republican Governor Scott Walker replaced the non-partisan Government
Accountability Board who oversaw elections in the state, with a partisan
Election Board. From Journal Sentinel:
Excerpt:
Wisconsin GAB in final days as
state's elections authority
Whether Wisconsin's unique nonpartisan elections board was a failed
experiment or was so successful that it became a political target, this much is
true: It goes away this week.
Targeted for elimination by Gov. Scott Walker and fellow Republicans
who control the Legislature, the Government Accountability Board officially
disbands as of Thursday. It was the only
nonpartisan elections and oversight board in the country.
In its place are two new commissions made up of partisan appointees that will regulate Wisconsin's
elections, ethics, campaign finance and lobbying laws.
The Election Board is overseeing the recount in Wisconsin
that is currently taking place. Jill
Stein had unsuccessfully sued the Board’s decision to allow machine recounts in
Wisconsin’s 72 counties, pursuing “hand counts” of the ballots. Hand counts are considered the most accurate
and uniform method of counting the votes.
From Milwaukee Patch:
Excerpt:
Campaign urges counties to follow
recommendation of the judge and "conduct a hand recount, which she called
the ‘gold standard.’”
Jill Stein, the Green Party
presidential candidate who requested a recount of Wisconsin’s nearly 3 million
presidential ballots to quell hacking fears, doesn’t plan to appeal after a judge rejected her lawsuit requesting a
hand-count, the campaign said Wednesday…
Dane County Circuit Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn said in her ruling
that the Stein campaign hadn’t met
Wisconsin’s high threshold for a hand-count of the ballots, the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported…
Bailey-Rihn said there were good reasons for a hand-recount,
but neither the Stein nor Clinton campaigns showed a legal basis — such as
fraud — for her to mandate it. “I follow
the law. That’s who I am despite my personal opinions," Bailey-Rihn said. “It’s (the counties’) decision. It’s
their discretion. I may disagree with it…but
I must follow the law.”
Under Wisconsin law, county
election officials may decide whether to recount the ballots by machine or
order a hand-recount. At least 56 of
Wisconsin’s 72 counties, including Dane, plan a hand-count.
Donald Trump didn’t help the GOP’s cause on Sunday morning
when he assured the nation a recount of the 2016 election wouldn't change the
outcome and was a waste of resources. In
a tweetstorm, he quoted Hillary Clinton’s concession speech and made his own
claims of election fraud. From The
Washington Post:
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump:
·
Trump is going to be our President. We owe him
an open mind and the chance to lead." So much time and money will be spent
- same result! Sad
·
In addition to winning the Electoral College in
a landslide, I won the popular vote if
you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
·
Serious
voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - so why isn't
the media reporting on this? Serious bias - big problem!
·
On Sunday morning, President-elect Donald Trump
assured us all that a recount of the 2016 election wouldn't change the outcome
and was a waste of resources.
Given the acknowledgement by Donald Trump that there was
massive fraud in the 2016 election, I would think that the Republicans as well
as the Democrats would insist on a nationwide recount to assure Americans as
well as the world that American elections are legitimate. But, alas I would be wrong as a matter of
fact, the GOP has now filed a lawsuit requesting a judge stop the Wisconsin recount. From the Journal Sentinel:
Excerpt:
Trump supporters file suit to stop
recount
Madison — Using a famous legal precedent, supporters of Republican Donald
Trump filed a federal lawsuit Friday to
stop a recount of the presidential vote in Wisconsin and safeguard the
president elect's Nov. 8 victory here.
The lawsuit contends, in part, that
the state's recount process is unconstitutional because ballots aren't treated
equally in all cases — a standard
established in the 2000 U.S. Supreme Court case that halted a recount in
Florida and left Republican George W. Bush as the winner of that year's
presidential race with Democrat Al Gore.
Say what?? The GOP
demands that the uniform, accurate “hand count” be denied and then claims the
recount unconstitutional because the counts aren’t conducted “accurately and uniformly.” What a load.
And not only that, they are claiming a violation of Trump’s rights under
the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, using the Supreme
Court’s 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore as precedent. From Wikipedia:
Excerpt:
Equal Protection Clause
Bush argued that recounts in Florida violated the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because Florida did not have a statewide vote recount
standard. Each county was on its own to determine whether a given ballot
was an acceptable one. Two voters could have marked their ballots in an
identical manner, but the ballot in one county would be counted while the
ballot in a different county would be rejected, due to the conflicting manual
recount standards. [24]
Gore argued that there was indeed a
statewide standard, the "intent of the voter" standard, and that this
standard was sufficient under the Equal Protection Clause.[25] Furthermore, Gore argued that the consequence of ruling
the Florida recount unconstitutional simply because it treated different voters
differently would effectively render every state election unconstitutional [26]
and that each method has a different rate of error in counting votes… If Bush wins, Gore argued, every state
would have to have one statewide method of recording votes to be
constitutional.
It was a bulls*&t argument in 2000 and is now. The partisan Supreme Court could have ordered
a uniform method of recount such as a “hand count” like the Florida Supreme
Court ordered but was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision was not based on the
constitution and was bogus. So much so
that the Supreme Court ordered that their decision “COULD NOT BE USED AS
PRECEDENT IN ANY OTHER ELECTION CASE.”
Some critics of the decision argue
that the majority seemed to seek refuge from their own logic [46] [47] in the
following sentence in the majority opinion [48] "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for
the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many
complexities…"
Critics, however, interpreted the
sentence as stating that the case did
not set precedent in any way and could not be used to justify any future court
decision, and some suggested that this was evidence the majority realized
its holding was untenable.
So what is going on here?
What is the GOP trying to hide in Wisconsin? Maybe the answer can be found in Alternet:
Excerpt:
Pressure Builds for Presidential
Recounts in a Key 2016 Swing State
Pressure is mounting to re-examine
the presidential vote in Wisconsin, where a series of screenshots posted
Tuesday showed electronically tallied
countywide counts erroneously added in thousands more votes to the totals than
the ballots cast.
“It doesn't garner public confidence to see errors like this in
election results, especially in a close battleground state,” wrote
Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor and voter turnout expert,
who on Tuesday posted an image of the electronically calculated count in Sauk County, Wisconsin, showing 2,700 more votes
tallied than ballots cast…
McDonald’s tweet was not the only
one surfacing Tuesday showing this over-counting anomaly. As Susan Eraslan
wrote after posting similar screenshots, “The
numbers display that in 3 precincts in Outagamie County, all won by DT, more
votes were counted for president than cast. Follow-up tweets found 1,500
more votes tallied than ballots cast, but soon after those screen shots were
posted they were said to be corrected—or deleted.”
“To be clear: Certified results in just one Wisconsin county bring Trump’s margin of
victory down almost 7 percent. We don’t know about others,” tweeted
Dan Solomon, who followed up with more vote-count tabulation screenshots. “Okay, this is very significant…
The vote count snafus in these two counties are among a dozen counties
identified by election integrity activists as reporting improbably high turnout
levels—above 85 percent—in the presidential election. “Either these voter
turnout percentages are an historic achievement, unparalleled in my experience,
or the unofficial results are not true
and correct,” wrote Richard Hayes Phillips, a PhD statistician, in an early
analysis of 12 Wisconsin counties, including Sauk and Outagamie counties.
Later Tuesday, McDonald tweeted
that 10,000 votes were added to Trump's
totals in Pennsylvania, increasing his lead from 58,000 to 68,000 votes.
Here, too, it's not clear if that was a tabulation error or would be corrected,
he said. "Most likely this was a bonafide error corrected in a county
canvass. But if one is of this magnitude, who is to say there aren't
others?"
This recount isn’t about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton,
this is about America’s elections. This
recount is about a corrupt two party system that is out of control. This recount is about Republican control of
the Senate and House as well as the Supreme Court. If the American people cannot hold their “elected”
officials accountable through an honest election system, then America doesn’t
exist. Our American soldiers are dying
in foreign lands for nothing if we have lost the ability to determine our own
destiny.
The GOP is claiming they have a mandate from the American
people to slash Social Security, Medicare, Veterans’ benefits, infrastructure spending
and gift the savings to their banking benefactors and the Democrats are letting
them. The GOP claims this mandate was
given to them during the 2016 election when we “voted them into office.”
We must have the truth or else everything we believed in was
a lie. That is why the GOP is panicked
about the Wisconsin recount as well as the recounts in Michigan and
Pennsylvania. We must know the truth
about our elections and the millionaires who determine our destiny.
By Patricia Baeten
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