Sept. 28, 2020

 

 I am really getting fed up with the lies and deliberate attempts by Trump to sway the election in his favor by deliberate lies, misquotes, taking things out of context, and bullying citizens by saying that he will refuse to accept the outcome of the election if it goes against him. What the hell kind of president is that. It will be the first in the history of our country that a president has ever not accepted a peaceful and smooth move  transition to the next presidency. If you read his niece’s book, Too Much and Not Enough, you will understand, after seeing how he was raised and supported by his father, that he simply cannot stand to lose anything. He always has to win and be right. He was formed and shaped that way by his father and the rest of the family just kept quiet because they didn’t want to anger the father. Anything goes to win. It is the first time in the history of our country that we have ever had someone like that as president, and we have had some very colorful characters.I am really fed up with my fellow Republican citizens who fail to challenge their leader on these matters. They have lost their integrity in my estimation. If you think that I am biased you are right, I am biased in favor of the truth. I have fought my battles both in the States (Civil Rights Movement) and here in South Africa for the last 50 yrs. against the lie and deep injustice of apartheid and I am not about to stick my head in the sand now as regards the country of my birth that has shaped and formed me to believe in the truth and justice that has been, personally, very costly in my own life, as most of you know.

 

NY Times report: Trump paid $750 in U.S. income taxes in 2016, 2017

Fact-Checking Falsehoods on Mail-In Voting

Linda Qiu

Sun, September 27, 2020, 5:24 PM GMT+2·7 mins read

If you are among the tens of millions of Americans who intend to vote by mail this year, you’re facing a deluge of misinformation about the integrity of that voting method.

Much of it is coming from President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly attacked state efforts to expand voting by mail. He uses language meant to discourage it, mischaracterizing mail-in ballots as “dangerous,” “unconstitutional,” “a scam” or rife with “fraud.”

His comments are not true. There have been numerous independent studies and government reviews finding voter fraud extremely rare in all forms, including mail-in voting. The president is making these claims to lay the groundwork for possibly not accepting the voting results, going so far as refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.

Here’s a fact check to help debunk some of the common misperceptions and falsehoods.

 

Voters are facing a deluge of misinformation about voting by mail, some prompted by the president. Here's a guide to those false claims. (Lennard Kok/The New York Times)

Absentee ballots are more secure than mail-in ballots. False.

Trump, in explaining why he favored mail ballots in one state and not in another, has claimed that states like Florida — where he has voted by mail — are more secure because they use “absentee ballots” rather than mail-in ballots. (The state itself refers to them as “vote-by-mail ballots.”)

There have also been viral Twitter posts claiming that mail-in ballots cannot be “verified,” pose a greater threat to election integrity than “absentee ballots” or are not handled through a “chain of custody,” meaning they are not properly tracked.

Despite these claims, which sound consequential, there is no meaningful difference between “absentee ballots” and “vote-by-mail ballots.” The terms are often used interchangeably. Moreover, they are both secure forms of voting.

In terms of security, both mail-in and absentee ballots are paper ballots hand-marked by the voter, which the National Conference of State Legislatures considers the “gold standard of election security.” Forty-four states have signature verification protocols for mail ballots.

Because some states will automatically send mail-in ballots to registered voters, Trump sought to draw another misleading distinction. He claimed Democrats were “cheating” by mailing what he called “unsolicited ballots,” tweeting: “Sending out 80 MILLION BALLOTS to people who aren’t even asking for a ballot is unfair and a total fraud in the making.”

Before the election, nine states and Washington, D.C., will indeed automatically mail ballots to voters — but only to those who are registered and not, as Trump has said, to “anybody in California that’s breathing,” “people that aren’t citizens” or “people that don’t even know what a ballot is.” Those automatic ballots will reach 44 million voters — not 80 million — including in the heavily Republican state of Utah, as well as Washington, which has a Republican secretary of state overseeing the election.

Votes are being cast on behalf of dead people and pets. False.

In August, some of Trump’s supporters and family members began circulating misleading claims that “846 dead people tried to vote in Michigan’s primary,” pointing to a news release by Michigan’s secretary of state to suggest that there had been a scheme by voters to cast ballots on behalf of the deceased. But the release itself did not say this, and had only pointed out that there were 846 “voters who died after casting their absentee ballot but before Election Day.”

Similarly, a Facebook post that has since amassed over 100,000 shares, likes and comments — and has been repeated by the president — falsely claimed “500,000 mail in ballots found in Virginia and 200,000 in Nevada with dead peoples names and pets.”

What had occurred was that a nonprofit in Virginia sent out 500,000 ballot applications with a wrong address on the return envelopes. In a story about the mistake, a local radio station quoted the leader of another civic organization as saying “one person stated that a dead person received one and a pet received one.” Similarly, a conservative legal group found that during primary elections in June, two counties in Nevada sent out more than 250,000 ballots that were undeliverable because of outdated or wrong addresses.

In buttressing his claim that mail ballots are not secure, Trump has repeatedly said that a friend in Westchester County, New York, received a ballot for his deceased son. This is improbable as New York is one of seven states that require voters to have a reason to request and vote by an absentee ballot; it is not mailing out ballots to voters unprompted.

As for pets voting? A database of proven election fraud cases maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, includes just one example of a woman requesting and then casting an absentee ballot for her dog. That database also notes that since 1991, there have been only 11 cases where someone filled out an absentee ballot on behalf of a dead person.

Mail-in ballots will lead to a ‘rigged’ election. False.

Numerous studies have found little evidence that mail-in ballots help one party over another. Of the 16 states where more than half of voters voted by mail in the last presidential election, Trump won nine. Several Republican states like Iowa, Missouri and Alabama have expanded mail-in ballots this year.

And yet, Trump continues to claim, without evidence, that “Democrats are also trying to rig the election by sending out tens of millions of mail-in ballots” or that “they’re not sending them to Republican neighborhoods.”

Nevada and its election system, in particular, has become a target, particularly after Gov. Steve Sisolak blocked plans for the Trump campaign to hold an outdoor rally in the state. Trump has falsely claimed 14 times that Nevada officials “don’t even want verification of the signature” (they do) and seven times that Sisolak was “in charge of ballots” and therefore “can rig the election” (the Republican secretary of state supervises elections, and local officials handle the ballots).

The president’s unfounded suspicions that mail-in voting harms Republicans have been further amplified online with viral posts claiming that a “Trump Landslide Will Be Flipped By Mail-In Votes Emerging A Week After Election Day.” These claims were based on misconstruing the findings of a Democratic data and analytics firm. The firm’s chief executive had simply warned that in-person voting by Republicans would create a “mirage” of Trump leading on election night, but that results could change once “every legitimate vote is tallied.”

But there was this one time ...

With election officials running thousands of local, state and national elections, mistakes are bound to happen. These isolated incidents, however, are not evidence of widespread wrongdoing. But they can be taken out of context.

Last week, for example, Trump and others highlighted ballot printing and mailing errors that affected fewer than 1,000 ballots.

In Michigan, more than 400 ballots listed the wrong person as Trump’s running mate. The issue was fixed and alerted within two hours, and officials said the state would still accept any affected ballots that were returned. There is no evidence that the misprint was widespread or that the Democratic secretary of state had “purposely” printed the wrong name, as Trump claimed.

In another instance of error, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, accidentally sent roughly 500 voters two ballots. Election officials said the mistake was unlikely to lead to double voting, as the ballots contained specific codes for each individual voter.

Even in the rare example where there was malfeasance, as there was during a May special election for seats on the City Council in Paterson, New Jersey, where four men were charged with fraud, Trump has exaggerated the situation nonetheless.

“In New Jersey, 20% of the ballots were defective, fraudulent, 20%,” he said at a rally in Pennsylvania in August. “And that’s because they did a good job. OK? So this is just a way they’re trying to steal the election and everybody knows that.”

The local board of elections in fact rejected 3,200 ballots or 19% — but not 23%, 30% or 40%, as Trump has gone on to claim. And those in both parties told The Washington Post that not all were fraudulent. Ballots can be disqualified for mismatched signatures or for other user errors.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

 

 

Sept.24, 2020

(CNN)President Donald Trump's refusal on Wednesday to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power if he loses to Joe Biden in November is leading America towards a dark place during a year of incendiary political tensions.

Trump's intransigence, included in his latest assault on perfectly legitimate mail-in ballots on Wednesday, posed a grave threat to the democratic continuum that has underpinned nearly 250 years of republican government.

"Well, we're going to have to see what happens. You know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster," Trump said, when asked if he could commit to the peaceful transition.

"(G)et rid of the ballots and you'll have a very ... there won't be a transfer, frankly. There'll be a continuation."

This sounds like psychological blackmail.

Sept. 25, 2020

 

The FBI director just totally shut down Donald Trump's vote-fraud conspiracy

 

Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large

Updated 1442 GMT (2242 HKT) September 25, 2020

(CNN)In the space of a single sentence uttered Thursday, FBI Director Christopher Wray unwound months of wild conspiracy theories pushed by President Donald Trump and his allies about mail-in ballots in the 2020 election.

"Now, we have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it's by mail or otherwise," Wray said in response to a question about the safety of voting by mail, which millions of Americans are expected to do amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Wray was testifying in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Under oath. Meaning that if he didn't tell the truth about his knowledge in regard to what he knew about the record of fraudulent voting by mail, he would be committing a crime.

None of that stopped the White House from attacking Wray for his assertion.

 

Election 101

"With all due respect to Director Wray, he has a hard time finding emails in his own FBI, let alone figuring out whether there's any kind of voter fraud," White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Friday morning on CBS. That echoed attacks Trump himself has made against Wray for the way in which the FBI has responded to a probe into the origins of the counterintelligence investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

"So Christopher Wray was put there," Trump said last month in an interview with Fox Business Network. "We have an election coming up. I wish he was more forthcoming, he certainly hasn't been. There are documents that they want to get, and we have said we want to get. We're going to find out if he's going to give those documents. But certainly he's been very, very protective."

Wray was not just "put there," of course. He was appointed to his current job by -- wait for it -- Trump. In announcing his nomination of Wray to replace fired FBI Director James Comey, Trump called him a "man of impeccable credentials."

 

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Consider, for a minute, what you have to believe in order to side with Trump and Meadows in this back-and-forth:

close dialog

 

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1) That the FBI director lied, under oath, about voter fraud because, uh, well, I don't know.

2) That all of the data on past voting, which time after time after time has shown there to be no measurable amount of widespread voter fraud in mail-in or in-person voting, is simply wrong.

3) That longtime Republicans -- including former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge and longtime GOP election lawyer Ben Ginsberg -- are somehow also in on this conspiracy to cover up past fraud via mail-in ballots.

Conspiracy theorists are able to incorporate contradictory facts into their schemata under the aegis of "Well, everyone is in on it!" -- and if that's where you want to stake your claim, well, I can't stop you. I give you Trump's own response to questions about voter fraud on Thursday:

"So we have to be very careful with the ballots. The ballots -- that's a whole big scam. You know, they found, I understand, eight ballots in a waste paper basket in some location. And they found -- it was reported in one of the newspapers that they found a lot of ballots in a river. They throw them out if they have the name 'Trump' on it, I guess. But they had ballots."

What Trump is referring to are nine -- yes, nine -- military ballots that, according to the Justice Department, were found "discarded" in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. US Attorney David Freed said seven of the nine ballots were marked for Trump, which raises all sorts of questions -- mainly how he knew that. Freed said the DOJ was beginning an investigation into the ballots although there appears to be no evidence that the ballots were purposely thrown out. Also worth noting: More than 6 million people cast votes for president in Pennsylvania in 2016. Nine votes of 6 million is a miniscule portion of the overall vote.

It's important to note here the difference between occasional mistakes made with a handful (or even more) ballots and the sort of widespread voter fraud that Trump is alleging. The discarding of nine ballots is NOT evidence of much of anything other than that nine ballots somehow got either misplaced or thrown out. It's certainly not proof of a broad-scale mail-in voting conspiracy aimed to eliminate Trump votes. Anecdotes may be alluring, but they aren't statistically significant.

That won't stop Trump. Every incident of a ballot not making it where it should go will be seized on as evidence that he's right about Democrats trying to steal the election from him.

But the thing I just keep coming back to is this: Why, exactly, would Wray take that risk? Because he hates Trump that much? But if that was true, how did he win Trump's trust to be appointed to the job in the first place? He's just that cunning?

There's no good answer. Wray is a lifetime law enforcement professional who has never shown the least bit of ill will (or any will) toward Trump. He said he had never seen "any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election" because there has never been "any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election."