Look out California, the wingnuts are coming for our elections! Again! A bunch of people I thought we were totally done with for all time have returned, painfully, like malaria, or a nasty infection!
A national election-denier group with a history of funneling large sums of its donors’ money into its leaders’ pockets.
A law firm that once admitted to falsely accusing thousands of voters of being non-citizens.
A self-proclaimed election integrity advocate fundraising off disproven claims that spread across conservative media.
These groups and others have been making dozens of requests for public records from California election officials in the lead up to the November election.
All these racist nutbags, who I am sick to the absolute teeth of, are clamoring for President Brainworms’ ear, because they know that he is old, and has very limited intellectual capacity, and that he demonstrably believes whatever racisms he hears. So naturally all the worst creeps in the country are having a field day.
Just look at these assholes!
[Some of the] conservative activists pushing for changes to election administration include:
Cleta Mitchell, head of the Election Integrity Network and a Trump ally, who is pushing the Commerce Department to require a partial hand count of the election results because of potential national security risks with voting machines.
Mike Lindell, a longtime Trump ally who has spent years promoting claims that voting machines were used to manipulate U.S. elections, who wants Trump to declare a national emergency and prevent the use of electronic voting machines in November.
Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally and former White House chief strategist who hosts the influential right-wing podcast War Room, who has repeatedly urged Trump to use emergency powers to require voter identification at the polls and send ICE agents to polling places.
Just the worst, most nightmare blunt rotation ever, but why would you be putting your lips on something any of these people touched? We know where they’ve been!
And now they have set their sights on California, of course. Apparently our Secretary of State, San Diego’s own great Dr. Shirley Weber, has received a nastygram from the Trump administration. Reuters says the letter was sent to Secretary Weber and also Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan this week.
Wonder why they’re zeroing in on California! Just kidding, I know why — we’re their white whale, but they’re no fucking Queequeg.
California could prove pivotal in deciding control of the U.S. House of Representatives, especially after the state’s voters approved a new congressional map that heavily favors Democrats as part of a nationwide redistricting sprint that began in Republican-led states.
Voters in Los Angeles will also weigh in on a ballot measure that would allow certain noncitizen legal residents to cast ballots in municipal elections.
Apparently the Justice Department sent out a “password-protected thumb drive” to LA County with the names of people the federal government “believes are likely noncitizens” and were sent mail-in ballots from California, along with a list of demands.
Here’s the demands, per Talking Points Memo:
refuse to send ballots to people who appear on the DOJ list until their citizenship status has been confirmed;
segregate the mail-in ballots already returned by people who appear on the DOJ list;
don’t count the mail-in ballots of those on the DOJ list until their citizenship status has been confirmed.
And they were given 48 hours to comply or face some sort of action!
Comply how, with what, you ask? Well, it’s uhhh, hmmm, well, what they need to do is, hmmm, uhhh, but they only have 48 hours to do it!
What bullshit. Clearly, this is an impossible task and so vague as to be laughable, but what it signifies is much worse. The far Right and other MAGA lickspittles are going to try to harass people of color and other vulnerable types — trans people, immigrants, women, the same people they have been going after this whole time — in order to try to fuck our elections here, because that’s what they do. One might say that’s all they do!
Right-wingers have been braying about imaginary noncitizen voters and making shit up in their little pea brains about it for years, because they despise democracy.
For example, here’s a total dumbshit getting nailed for believing his own nonsense, but in 2012.
More than a year ago, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler said there could be in excess of 11,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Colorado and more than 4,000 of those who had cast ballots, and he has called noncitizen voter registration a “gaping hole” in the system.
But earlier this month, Gessler, a Republican, announced that his office had found only 141 people who were noncitizens registered to vote out of 1,416 names run through a federal database, and of those 141, only 35 who had cast ballots. That number represents 0.001 percent of Colorado’s 3.5 million registered voters.
Yeah, that “gaping hole” is in your brain, Scott.
Then, in 2016, the same lie was dragged into the national spotlight instead of the usual small-timer assholes claiming their neighbors aren’t “real” Americans. Guess who did it?
In 2016, for the first time, presidential politics was roiled by claims of widespread illegal voting. In the weeks after the election, the claims continued. President-elect Trump insisted, “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.” On that same day, four hours later, he added, “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California — so why isn’t the media reporting on this? Serious bias — big problem!” After his inauguration, the claims escalated. “I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD,” he declared.
Can you guess what the outcome was there? Ding ding ding!
The absence of fraud reinforces a wide consensus among scholars, journalists and election administrators: voter fraud of any kind, including noncitizen voting, is rare.
Lest MAGA leave any election un-interfered with, here’s one of the Trump failsons making the exact same claim in 2018, which was immediately debunked, on account of him using links to stories out of Florida from 2012 as “proof,” which had been debunked six years earlier.
And don’t forget 2020. The far Right even had a big, fat, violent, deadly shit fit about election results back on January 6, 2021, remember that? When a bunch of trash showed up at the Capitol in order to — what were they trying to do, anybody remember? HMMMMMM. Golly and gosh, it looks like a bunch of unhygienic right-wingers were trying to fuck our elections back then, too!
This despite the fact that anybody with any ability to think at all can point to study after study after study — from domestic, international, academic, political, and nongovernmental institutions — along with observing the obvious, showing that our voting system is, in fact, state-of-the-art, and secure, and that hordes of people from other countries are not getting bused in, to clandestinely vote.
But we have all seen how hysterical and emotional racists are. They will do anything to cling to their outdated, outmoded bullshit, other than actually working toward being a better person, because if there is anything that characterizes racists it is how lazy they are.
Which brings me to Donald Trump and his crowd of subliterates, who have no business running a corner store, much less this country, but they lied and stole and cheated their way into power so now we have to deal with these worthless fucks yet again.
I wish I had a better option for you — for all of us — for the midterm elections, but what people have to do, if we want to keep our country, is turn out in enormous droves, and vote yourself silly.
A lot of people outside California (and a shameful number of Californians themselves) don’t understand that this is a massive and populous state, and so as such, we probably have more wingnuts than the rest of the country combined. You guys think we’re a bunch of messy liberals, but nope!
California does have its share of do-gooder progressives and militant lefties and everything in between, but it also has its far-right freaky-deekies, and those people are much more numerous than I would like. California literally contains multitudes, and it’s a constant struggle between “hey man, let’s all live in peace and prosperity and enjoy this absolutely stunningly beautiful state we are all lucky enough to live in, have some homegrown weed” and “why not just sterilize all the minorities?” And somehow, propositions to that latter effect are always defeated by some god-awful hair-raising margin, like 50.8-49.2, and then you get to wander around in liberal California wondering which out of your neighbors are the worst pieces of shit.
The only way we can win out over fascism is if we work together, and one way to do that is to get out there and vote in such enormous numbers that they know we will all come for them if they try to lie about the results.
Your vote is your voice, and what we need this November is a collective, deafening shriek. If it wasn’t so important, these creepy cocksuckers wouldn’t be trying so hard to take it away from us all. It won’t be the end of our problems with authoritarian grifters, but it might be the beginning of the end of them!
So, Californians and everyone else, vote, if you can. Vote to frighten fascists. Vote to fuck over racists. Vote to cancel out a shitlord authoritarian grifter’s vote. Vote to spite your worst ex.
Just vote.
You left out the response when Officials were asked about the thumb drive.
They said words to the effect of: "we dont plug random unsolicited usb drives into our system. Thats a basic data security rule for us. We haven't looked at the contents of that drive and we have no intention of doing so."
I remember when it was unseemly for Al Gore to keep counting those ballots in that FL election he won.