Category: voter id

Fraud unmasked

By Steve Woodward

Stay at home in your senior care facility this fall. And vote. Someone you’ve never seen before will show up and collect your absentee ballot, removing the danger of licking a stamp or walking to the mailbox. If you do not know for whom to vote, we can help with that, too. Just leave it to us.

Oh, and do not worry about finding your state issued ID. The collector will not ask for it. He will not even ask for your name. It will be added to the ballot in advance.

Although this proposed scenario reads like something out of a Soviet-era proclamation, it seems perfectly logical to the director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections. Director Brisson Bell outlined a lengthy wish list of statutory changes as to how we vote in a memo to Governor Roy Cooper and the General Assembly to “address the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on our elections.”

The memo — perhaps we should call it the Bell Dossier — was dated March 26, authored only nine days after Cooper’s St. Patrick’s Day Massacre that shut down restaurants at 5 p.m., thus it was released at the initial onset of corona-steria. The timing strongly suggests Bell and her “voter reform” gang had this list ready to roll out long before a few bad servings of bat tartar rocked Wuhan, China.

The eternal struggle to rig our elections to give the left permanent power is not unique to North Carolina. In fact, erstwhile presidential pretender Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) this week submitted a bill, the VoteSafe Act of 2020, that proposes to spend $5 billion of taxpayers’ dollars “to ensure that voting is safe and accessible.” And easily compromised by teams of fraudsters long after the masks and gloves come off.

The Harris plan is dead on arrival. In hindsight we should be thankful it was not quietly inserted in the $2.2 trillion CARES Act. Closer to home, it will surprise no Republican that Gov. Cooper will do everything in his power to enable Bell and the state BOE to drag her reforms across the finish line.

Bell’s memo runs five single-spaced pages, laying out 14 specific recommendations that she insists are vital because election season is close at hand. Voting as we have known it could kill us all if we do not act. In reality, early voting will not begin until October, half a year from now. Cooper might have opened and closed the state two or three times by then but the threat of the Wuhan Virus carrying over into the fall is unlikely, even if that is the dream of the Left and their media soldiers. Don’t forget, the New York Times early on called it the Trump Virus. They’s rather see Trump go away and the virus stick around for as long as it’s useful. Unfortunately, a few “experts” have suggested a second outbreak later in the year, but these were the same people urging us to fill movie theaters in February.

Some minor aspects of how we live might permanently change when this horror is behind us. Bell’s memo addresses permanency, too. A majority of the changes she proposes would be permanent with a few exceptions. In the same breath, Bell says she is merely reacting to the virus, for the greater good don’t you know, in the short term even as she schemes rigging elections into perpetuity. Her lack of sincerity is almost amusing.

Voter Integrity Project / North Carolina (VIP/NC) provided the public service of reviewing the Bell memo, point by point, and providing analysis of where the red flags are lurking. There are nearly as many as in a Chinese military parade. Here are some of the more reviling elements:

Expand options for absentee ballot requests. Allow fax and email absentee ballot requests. Allow county boards of elections to pre-fill a voter’s information on an absentee request form (and usher in future ballot harvesting).

Reduce or eliminate the witness requirement. Bell uses terms like “social distancing” and again, “COVID-19”, in (explaining) her dream to reduce the ballot witness requirement to one or even none. Let’s see how long this full-blown panic keeps everybody homebound before you allow something this stupid.

“Temporarily” modify restrictions on (ballot) assistance in care facilities. 

In the name of COVID-19, Bell wants county BOEs to be allowed to rig (early voting) operating hours as they did in 2012. We cannot speak for all counties, but the abuses in Wake County were extremely heavy-handed. The Wake BOE also only allowed certain Republican-leaning sites to be open for 10 days while the Democrat sites were open all 17 days.

The bottom line, concludes VIP/NC, is that this is not a response to a rampant virus. This is a page out of a yellowed, dog-eared playbook: Overwhelm the system and then exploit the chaos.

Virus, bad. Remedies, worse.

 

 

 

Voter ID hangs on

By Steve Woodward

North Carolinians voted last fall to amend our state constitution to require every registered voter to present valid identification at polling places. Viewed by intelligent human beings in and beyond our state as a no-brainer, the amendment’s passage instead caused Democrat activist craniums to all but explode.

This despite the fact that, at the end of 2018, 35 states required or requested “some form of identification at the polls,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.  Yet there was North Carolina on a list of states holding the dubious distinction of requiring zero voter ID, including known Democrat-controlled sanctuaries for illegal immigrants such as California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Quite an exclusive club.

Opponents of voter ID view the privilege of voting through the same lens as everything else in their world — race. They believe it is inherently racist to require minorities, people of color (insert your go-to oppressed category here) and those who live in poverty to possess a form of ID. Never mind that this presumption on the left that poor minorities can’t access or don’t need an ID only magnifies their strategic scheme of imposed economic soft tyranny. This keeps certain classes of citizens reliably dependent on government entitlements and, thus, reliably dependable Democrat voters. Or so goes the theory of the past century or more.

Governor Roy Cooper pounced after the amendment won voter approval, attempting to veto what he condemned as a “sinister and cynical” effort to disenfranchise North Carolina voters. His veto was overridden. That merely set off legal challenges to the amendment. This is how the left responds to the “will of the voter” in the 21st century. If they disagree with the outcome — Donald Trump being duly elected President is their highest profile source of outrage — they wait for courts to overturn or stonewall with prolonged appeals.

The state NAACP used the same anti-Trump claim of Presidential “illegitimacy” to launch its request for judicial review of the amendment’s passage. Racist Republicans, argued the NAACP, gerrymandered their way to power and, therefore, represent an “illegal supermajority”. By extension, the votes of those who supported the voter ID amendment don’t count. Let that third-world logic sink in.

But a Wake County Superior Court judge could not see the flawed logic — the prism of racism appearing once again — and agreed with the NAACP’s outrage in a ruling last February. While he was at it Judge Bryan Collins also voided an amendment to cap the state income tax. What if entitlements for those reliable voters run short of cash? We can’t cap the income tax and protect the “rich”, aka, people who carry IDs!

Despite more than 55% voter approval of an ID amendment last November the left and their compliant activist courts were having none of it. They’ve been seething since 2010 when Republicans gained control of the General Assembly for the first time in 140 years. Hell bent on revenge, Democrats appeared to score a major victory when the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 upheld a lower court ruling that erased 28 state house and senate districts that existed only for one reason — so-called “racial gerrymandering.”

That potential mess was remedied by a team led by a Stanford University academic brought in to “fix” NC’s districting lines for 2018. Meanwhile, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice filed a lawsuit in a Wake County court to keep the hope of overturning voter ID alive.

More than eight months later, a three-judge panel ruled July 19 that voter ID will be required, per the amendment, in 2019 elections. The panel dismissed five of the six claims in the suit. However, by keeping one claim on the table and deciding not to dismiss the case entirely, the panel did not enshrine voter ID and continues to ignore the will of the voters.

Democrats charge North Carolina ceased to be a functioning democracy when Republicans surged to power in 2010. But if there is a case to made for deteriorating government accountability to our citizens, it’s clear the finger points at a hijacking of democracy by activist judges and their Democrat allies.