Our right-leaning counterparts have invested decades into promoting the idea that if they win, it’s because they have the mandate of the people in what truly must be a right-leaning country. And if they lose, well, it’s because those dastardly Others cheated. Massively.
Massive, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. The Heritage Foundation sees fit to reach back to 1948 to pad out the numbers in its “1,088 proven instances of voter fraud” among hundreds of millions of votes cast since then. A plurality involve false registrations and fraudulent use of absentee ballots. Among 13 cases of “Impersonation Fraud at the Polls” are cases of election workers running the poll and one by a man wanting to demonstrate how easy it is to impersonate someone at the polls.
“All levels of government and Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD, including during EARLY VOTING,” Trump tweeted shortly before the 2018 mid-term elections. “Cheat at your own peril. Violators will be subject to maximum penalties, both civil and criminal!”
Naturally, those threats about cheating are meant for Democrats. IOKIYAR.
Take Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer recently charged with murder in the death of George Floyd. (You may have heard of it.) It seems Chauvin may have voted improperly in Florida in both 2016 and 2018:
Derek Michael Chauvin, 44, is listed as having property in both Oakdale, Minn., and Windermere, Fla. On Friday, Dan Helm, a Florida attorney and candidate for Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections, asked Orange County State Attorney Aramis Ayala to prosecute Chauvin for violating the state’s election laws when he voted in Florida elections. Helm said the violation is a third-degree felony.
Orange County, Fla., voting records list Chauvin as an active voter and affiliated with the Republican Party of Florida.
In an e-mail Friday, Helm told the Star Tribune that he checked the county’s voter file after learning Chauvin had property there. “When I learned he voted here to influence our elections, while living in Minnesota, I was outraged,” said Helm, who described himself as active in voter protection efforts in Florida.
Working and (presumably) paying taxes in Minnesota over his 19 years with the Minneapolis Police Department would make Chauvin ineligible to claim Florida residency. Heaven forfend Chauvin also voted in Minnesota in those same elections!
Maybe it’s a Florida thing. Huffington Post reports on the voting habits of the White House’s new secretary of press disinformation and her boss, Donald J. Trump:
Kayleigh McEnany cast Florida ballots in 2018 using her parents’ address in Tampa, even though she lived in Washington, D.C., and held a New Jersey driver’s license. Trump cast a Florida ballot this year using a business address in Palm Beach, where he had promised the town government he would not live.
Trump signed an agreement nearly three decades ago that his Mar-a-Lago social club would not be used as a private residence. Florida law, HuffPost adds, does not permit a business address (including a social club) to be used as a residential address for voter registration.
McEnany voted in both the 2018 primary and general elections in Florida using her parents’ waterfront address in Tampa as her legal residence rather than the house she and her husband bought in 2017, located a mile and half away ― all while living and working in Washington as a full-time employee of the Republican National Committee.
At the time, McEnany’s driver’s license and car registration showed an address in Edgewater, New Jersey. Those documents can only be obtained by proving residency in that state, according to the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission website.
McEnany has since changed her legal residence to her own house in Hillsborough County. Voting by mail 11 times in 10 years has not dissuaded her from condemning the practice as her boss does.
Maybe it’s a Florida thing.
Conservative bomb-thrower Ann Coulter faced a couple of dust-ups over her voter absentee voting. Connecticut dismissed a complaint alleging she fraudulently used her parents’ New Canaan address to cast absentee ballots in 2002 and 2004.
Then in 2006, she moved to Florida where Coulter allegedly falsified her registration address and voted there. Coulter listed “999 Indian Rd” in Palm Beach as her residence, having never lived there. “The Indian Road address is that of Coulter’s Real Estate agent and her husband David,” the Brad Blog reported.
“She never lived here,” Suzanne Frisbie, owner of the Indian Road home, told the Palm Beach Post. “I’m Ann’s Realtor, and she used this address to forward mail when she moved from New York.”
And what happened with that? This was, after all, a period when the Bush administration was firing U.S. attorneys for not pursuing voter fraud with sufficient vigor.
Coulter was cleared of wrongdoing after intervention by the FBI with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. And not just any FBI agent, reported the Palm Beach Post, but “Supervisory Special Agent Jim Fitzgerald, of the FBI Academy’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Va. — the closest reality gets to the serial-killer catchers on CBS’ Criminal Minds.”
The Palm Beach Post links are now dead, but Harpers extracts this:
County Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson, meanwhile, decried what he called “FBI intrusion.” He referred the Coulter case to PBSO after poll worker Jim Whited originally reported the incident. “This doesn’t bode well in terms of the public’s impression that celebrities receive preferential treatment,” Anderson said. “I’m curious about how anyone can justify the FBI’s intrusion.”
First-year Detective Kristine Villa in December was assigned the job of investigating whether Coulter committed a felony in February 2006, when she cast her ballot in the wrong precinct in a Palm Beach election after registering to an address that wasn’t hers.Villa’s report leaves the clear impression that Coulter’s attorney, Miami’s Marcos Jimenez, stonewalled Villa for five months—at times agreeing to make Coulter available, at others reneging, often not returning calls promptly or claiming not to be able to reach his client.
But hey, if you’re white and blonde (blonde-ish in Trump’s case), it’s all good, as your intentions are assumed to be. Not so for the Others. You know, THEM. As I’ve written before:
Nice, decent white people wake up on Election Day, shower, dress, eat breakfast, then go the polls to do their patriotic duty by casting their votes. OTHERS — Poors numbering in the invisible millions — are not like US. They go instead to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense just to add a single extra vote to their team’s total.
And those hordes of invisible malefactors must be stopped before they cheat (and Republicans lose) again.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.