Essential Politics: The recall isn’t just about California. It’s a preview of where 2022 might be heading

I'm sure that along with the vast majority of you, I'm so glad and relieved about the failure of Gov. Gavin Newsom's recall election that took place yesterday. Many of us feared low turnout, but the voters showed up and a Latino and multiracial electorate propelled the successful result. Of continuing concern with respect to the polarization in our society is the Republican Party's extremist stance and tactics. According to this piece:

"In January, a Times investigation by Anita Chabria and Paige St. John found that recall campaign leaders sought to capitalize on Republican disappointment and allied with radical and extreme elements to help collect signatures. Some early recall backers were linked to QAnon, the Proud Boys, far-right militias and other extremist groups that share support for Trump, online organizing tactics and distrust of elections."

Our democracy is much too precious to leave in the hands of those who would destroy it simply because they do not like the outcomes of elections. They want a gerrymandered system where politicians pick their voters instead of the other way around with voters deciding who will represent them. At least for now, I think we can all take a breather that democracy won last night.

-Angela Valenzuela

Essential Politics: The recall isn’t just about California. It’s a preview of where 2022 might be heading

The shadow of former President Trump and far-right groups hangs over California’s recall election. Above, challenger Larry Elder, left, and Gov. Gavin Newsom. (Irfan Khan; Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) BY LAURA BLASEY  MULTIPLATFORM EDITOR, NEWSLETTERS  SEP. 8, 2021 6:30 AM PT

In less than a week, the final ballots will be cast in the recall election to unseat California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The results of the Republican-led effort — which culminates on Tuesday — has implications that reach across the country and into the 2022 midterm election. For months, Times staffers have closely covered the recall election, and their reporting reveals four themes that explain how we got here and what might be coming next year. The leading GOP candidate seems familiar The recall’s leading Republican candidate is popular in conservative media and hosts his own radio show. He has eschewed the establishment and is relying on a grass-roots support system. He’s made dismissive comments about women, may not have properly disclosed his finances and fueled skepticism about climate change and vaccines. Larry Elder certainly seems to be utilizing the Donald Trump playbook. The result is a broad coalition of support that includes new converts, evangelicals and former Trump supporters, Marisa Gerber writes. He’s not the only candidate doing so: California has a slew of pro-Trump recall candidates, Julia Wick reports. Across the country, Republican hopefuls are angling for Trump’s support base and seeking endorsements from Trump himself. As for how Elder feels about Trump? In 2019, he called Trump’s election “divine intervention,” but has since scaled back his praise, trying to appeal to both Trump supporters and more moderate Republicans, James Rainey writes. There could be danger in being seen as too moderate. Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, the most experienced Republican heading into the election, has an establishment past and what he admits are “vanilla” views, and he is struggling to break out of the pack, writes Laura J. Nelson. The recall is being fueled, in part, by Trump’s lies The epicenter of recall mania is Amador County in the Sierra foothills. About 1 in 5 registered voters signed recall petitions — the highest concentration in California. The Times’ Hailey Branson-Potts spoke to voters there, reporting that conservatives deeply believe Trump’s falsehood-filled campaign that he won the 2020 election. By and large, she writes, these voters refuse to cast their ballots by mail, believing Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations that mail-in voting leads to rampant voter fraud. If Newsom prevails, many said they won’t believe the results. Far-right groups and internet rhetoric played a role In January, a Times investigation by Anita Chabria and Paige St. John found that recall campaign leaders sought to capitalize on Republican disappointment and allied with radical and extreme elements to help collect signatures. Some early recall backers were linked to QAnon, the Proud Boys, far-right militias and other extremist groups that share support for Trump, online organizing tactics and distrust of elections. The recall effort soon picked up support from dissatisfied Republicans unaware that it was being driven by extremists, with organizers insisting the far-right groups don’t represent the values of the recall movement. But inflammatory rhetoric has continued to show up, especially in social media campaign ads. As Maura Dolan wrote last week, internet advertising has pushed falsehoods and capitalized on emotions in less extreme ways, heightening recall tensions. The recall has national implications As my colleague Evan Halper writes, California has served for decades as an incubator for ideas that go on to influence the rest of the country, from climate change to housing. Experience in California politics can also propel elected leaders onto the national stage — think Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Reagan. As Melanie Mason wrote last week, surviving a recall could offer Newsom a spotlight, as it did former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — who parlayed his survival into a presidential run. And, if you’ve been closely following our coverage, you know that many of the issues and talking points that colored 2020 have crept into the recall race — and they may very well shape the midterm elections next year. It’s no wonder then that national Democratic figures are voicing support for Newsom ahead of next week’s election day. As Noah Bierman wrote in this newsletter last week, Democrats are desperately working to maintain their slim leads in the House and Senate through the midterms. Maintaining the California governor’s seat is part of that strategy: the governor will have the power to fill the seat of Sen. Dianne Feinstein if she retires or falls ill. So far, polls show a growing majority of Californians oppose recalling Newsom, and the state is heavily Democratic, giving the governor an edge. Early returns on mail ballots show more than twice as many Democrats have voted than Republicans and that liberal areas have the highest rates of return, Mason and Seema Mehta report. But Democrats fear a low-turnout election could bolster Republican chances of taking control of the state. They are so nervous that Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning with Newsom in the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday. Next week, President Biden is expected travel to California to stump for Newsom. More on the recall election — On Google and YouTube, Newsom and Elder are aiming for two different Californias, write Rahul Mukherjee and Vanessa Martínez. — Vaccines, unemployment, housing, drought: Here’s where the top recall candidates stand on the issues. —From Mehta and Mason: As the recall charges into its final days, Democrats’ midsummer panic has given way to cautious confidence that Newsom’s outlook has brightened, aided by healthy turnout so far, a towering advantage in money and the emergence of an ideal foil: Elder. — The national cavalry has come to help Newsom. But the anti-recall effort is mostly a California fight, writes columnist Mark Z. Barabak. — As candidates crisscross California, faith communities have become a central place for proselytizing to potential voters, Faith E. Pinho writes. The role of religion on the campaign trail has been amplified in recent weeks by lingering anger over California’s COVID-19 restrictions. — A shaman, a rapper and a surgeon: Julia Wick has a rundown of the lesser-known names on your recall ballot. The view from Washington — When Joe Biden was running for president, he promised to close a squalid border camp in Mexico where thousands of migrants had been left to await the outcome of their immigration cases by the Trump administration. He followed through — and a worse one emerged under his watch, reports Molly Hennessy-Fiske. — From Tracy Wilkinson: As the Taliban prepares to announce a government in Afghanistan, the Biden administration is being forced to abruptly recalibrate its approach to a group long viewed in the U.S. as terrorists. — Also from Wilkinson: Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Tuesday that charter flights carrying U.S. citizens and Afghans to safety from northern Afghanistan were being held up by concerns over security and knowing who’s on board, not because of Taliban extortion. — The board of directors of Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ rights organization, has fired its president, saying he assisted former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration in responding to sexual harassment allegations that led to the governor’s resignation. The view from California — From Evan Halper: California is leading the world in confronting climate change. Yet the opaque carbon trading scheme that is a linchpin of the state’s climate efforts — California is leaning on it to meet as much as half of its greenhouse gas reductions — is under serious strain at home even as it is getting copied far beyond California. — California is preparing for a first-in-the-nation experiment to move California’s health insurance program for low-income and disabled people beyond traditional doctor visits and hospital stays into the realm of social services. Over the next five years, the state will plow nearly $6 billion in state and federal money into the plan. — Ten months after California voters rejected a state law eliminating cash bail for many offenses, Patrick McGreevy reports on a new fight brewing in the Legislature over an alternative plan that would slash the amount arrestees must pay to get out of jail. — Also from McGreevy: California law enforcement officers could be stripped of their license to carry a badge if they engage in serious misconduct, including excessive force, racial bias and dishonesty, under legislation approved Friday by the state Assembly. Sign up early for our California Politics newsletter, coming in August, to get the best of The Times’ state politics reporting, including full coverage of the recall election and the latest action in Sacramento. https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2021-09-08/essential-politics-recall-california-preview-where-elections-are-going-essential-politics

The Election was Stolen – Here’s How… by Greg Palast

My sources are telling me that the election was indeed stolen, but not by the Russians and that that's a distraction and that you can read for yourselves about it here in this piece by investigative reporter, Greg Palast.

Good enough.  It speaks to what he not only found, but had said months earlier was happening even before the election occurred.  Essentially, it involved voter suppression through what came to be called the “Crosscheck" that purged minority voters with similar names from the polls, regardless of middle names, addresses, and social security numbers and shunting them to provisional ballots that didn't get counted.  Quote from within:

This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate.  The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students—the list goes on.  It’s a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck.

Glad to see that Palast's investigative reporting has brought this to light.  Here is a link to his movie titled, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD.

This is a sad day for our fragile democracy.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

 
The Election was Stolen – Here’s How…

by Greg Palast,  author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits,

 

Friday, November 11, 2016 

 

Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives.
Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.
The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report,
“The GOP’s Stealth War on Voters,” 8/24/2016.

Crosscheck in action:  
Trump victory margin in Michigan:                    13,107
Michigan Crosscheck purge list:                       449,922
Trump victory margin in Arizona:                       85,257
Arizona Crosscheck purge list:                           270,824
Trump victory margin in North Carolina:        177,008
North Carolina Crosscheck purge list:              589,393

On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump.  The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.
Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.”  His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor. Here's a sample of the list

Those accused of criminal double voting include, for example, Donald Alexander Webster Jr. of Ohio who is accused of voting a second time in Virginia as Donald EUGENE Webster SR.

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Note: Watch the four-minute video summary of Crosscheck. The investigation and explanation of these methods of fixing the vote can be found in my book and film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits (2016).

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No, not everyone on the list loses their vote.  But this was not the only racially poisonous tactic that accounted for this purloined victory by Trump and GOP candidates.
For example, in the swing state of North Carolina, it was reported that 6,700 Black folk lost their registrations because their registrations had been challenged by a group called Voter Integrity Project (VIP). VIP sent letters to households in Black communities “do not forward.”  If the voter had moved within the same building, or somehow did not get their mail (e.g. if their name was not on a mail box), they were challenged as “ghost” voters.  GOP voting officials happily complied with VIP with instant cancellation of registrations.
The 6,700 identified in two counties were returned to the rolls through a lawsuit.  However, there was not one mention in the press that VIP was also behind Crosscheck in North Carolina; nor that its leader, Col. Jay Delancy, whom I’ve tracked for years has previously used this vote thievery, known as “caging,” for years.  Doubtless the caging game was wider and deeper than reported.  And by the way, caging, as my Rolling Stone co-author, attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tells me, is “a felony, it’s illegal, and punishable by high fines and even jail time.”
There is still much investigation to do.  For example, there are millions of “provisional” ballots, “spoiled” (invalidated) ballots and ballots rejected from the approximately 30 million mailed in.  Unlike reporting in Britain, US media does not report the ballots that are rejected and tossed out—because, after all, as Joe Biden says, “Our elections are the envy of the world.”  Only in Kazakhstan, Joe.
While there is a great deal of work to do, much documentation still to analyze, we’ll have to pry it from partisan voting chiefs who stamp the scrub lists, Crosscheck lists and ballot records, “confidential.”
But, the evidence already in our hands makes me sadly confident in saying, Jim Crow, not the voters, elected Mr. Trump.
What about those exit polls?
Exit polls are the standard by which the US State Department measures the honesty of foreign elections.  Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting.  Exit polls solve the problem.
But three times in US history, pollsters have had to publicly flagellate themselves for their “errors.”  In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton.
So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong?
Answer:  they didn’t.  The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate.  That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?”  What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted.”
In 2000, in Florida, GOP Secretary of State Katherine Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as “spoiled” because their chads were hung and other nonsense excuses.  Those ballots overwhelmingly were marked for Al Gore.  The exit polls included those 181,173 people who thought they had voted – but their vote didn’t count.  In other words, the exit polls accurately reflected whom the voters chose, not what Katherine Harris chose.
In 2004, a similar number of votes were invalidated (including an enormous pile of “provisional” ballots) by Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.  Again, the polls reflected that Kerry was the choice of 51% of the voters.  But the exit polls were “wrong” because they didn’t reflect the ballots invalidated by Blackwell.
Notably, two weeks after the 2004 US election, the US State Department refused the recognize the Ukraine election results because the official polls contradicted the exit polls.
And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those queried as they exit the polling station—yet Trump is declared winner in GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are forced to apologize—when they should be screaming, “Fraud!  Here’s the evidence the vote was fixed!”
Now there’s a new trope to explain away the exit polls that gave Clinton the win.  Supposedly, Trump voters were ashamed to say they voted for Trump.  Really?  ON WHAT PLANET?  For Democracy Now! and Rolling Stone I was out in several swing states.  In Ohio, yes, a Black voter may have been reluctant to state support for Trump. But a white voter in the exurbs of Dayton, where the Trump signs grew on lawns like weeds, and the pews of the evangelical mega churches were slathered with Trump and GOP brochures, risked getting spat on if they even whispered, “Hillary.”
This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate.  The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students—the list goes on.  It’s a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck.

*****

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