.#NCSBOE Director Kim Strach: investigation found a "coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot operation.' #ncpol #nc09
— Jim Morrill (@jimmorrill) February 18, 2019
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Geoboy
How about we have the entire Republican Party charged under RICO as performing acts in the furtherance of an ongoing criminal conspiracy.
rikyrah
No!!
You don’t say!!
The GOP is a thief????
jonas
So while the GOP has been running around pretending to care about “rampant voter fraud,” it was basically a scheme to spray bullshit around so that we wouldn’t notice their RAMPANT ELECTION FRAUD — up to, and including, helping Russia steal the general election for Trump.
SFAW
The tweet doesn’t say which party did that. (Not that I have much doubt.) It also doesn’t say whether the NC Board of Elections is going to require a new election.
Outside of that, interesting tweet.
Betty Cracker
I haven’t followed this story closely. Last I heard, the NC rep who was “elected” via cheating hasn’t been seated and they were considering a do-over. Is that still the case?
SFAW
@jonas:
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
David Anderson
@Betty Cracker: The seat is being held open at this time. The state board has not decided what to do yet (or at least not announced a decision)
MattF
I suggest we protest to the UN and request that they send a team of observers to monitor elections in North Carolina.
Mike in NC
Talking heads on MSNBC wringing their hands over so many vacancies in the hapless Trump administration. Why? Ivanka is a multitasker.
Frankensteinbeck
@jonas:
No. The two aspects are connected by a different angle. To racists, narcissists, abusers, and assholes (the GOP big tent), their enemies cannot legitimately win. If their enemies do win, it is proof that those enemies cheated. To a lesser extent, anything they themselves do to win is morally justified and the more corrupt, the more it’s proof that they are (clever, innovative, brave, etc.) heroes.
dmsilev
@Mike in NC: Can’t Mick Mulvaney take on another dozen or so “acting” positions?
cleek
@SFAW: “The tweet doesn’t say which party did that.”
it doesn’t have to.
the guy at the heart of this GOP-benefitting absentee ballot scam was literally employed by the GOP candidate, and nobody has accused the Dem of anything.
billcinsd
@jonas: every accusation is a confession for the GOP
Kent
From what I heard on NPR this a.m. the NC Elections Board is in a pickle. They have a 3-2 Dem majority and if they don’t come up with a bipartisan decision (Don’t know what that means….4-1 vote?) then it kicks to the US House of Representatives. So either they fix the problem or Pelosi wil fix it for them. Heh.
I would not be half surprised if they fight this out long enough so that no one ever gets seated in that district until the 2020 elections. If they decide to do a do-over they have the problem of the primaries which were also tainted.
cmorenc
@SFAW:
The only instance of absentee ballot shenanigans being alleged or investigated in the NC-9 congressional race was against an operative (Leslie McCrae Dowless) for the Republican candidate Mark Harris.
debbie
The graphic couldn’t be more appropriate, considering Trump is Eric Cartman reborn.
debbie
@David Anderson:
Do you think they would go back to “redo” the primary (where that guy also screwed around with ballots) or just the November election?
Leto
Norman Rockwell in the age of the Civil Rights Movement
debbie
@Mike in NC:
Yep, and Jared wears his ninety million hats very well, thank you.
Frankensteinbeck
@debbie:
If he finds five dollars in each of them, he can pay off his debts!
debbie
@Leto:
Thank you for this. Rockwell used his medium as a platform to right wrongs. Thomas Nast would be proud.
Betty Cracker
@debbie: Don’t think it’ll happen, but I’d love to see their portfolios shrunk down to “prison reform” — from the inside.
kindness
You know the local Republican committees/peoples are going to go out and claim victimhood on this abomination to voting, right? Of course they will.
Leto
@debbie: That article has some of his charcoal sketches and early paintings that show the evolution of the paintings, as well as the models he used. Even when he was suffering from cataracts, his paintings were very powerful. Maybe Tom Levenson can do a post about artists during the Civil Rights era.
joel hanes
We’ve known that they’ll steal elections if they can since 2000 in Florida.
Kent
@debbie: Dems would probably benefit if they didn’t redo the primary as the GOP would be left with the tainted candidate.
I have no idea what the law requires though. And the Dems hold a majority on the board of elections.
debbie
@Leto:
Yes, I went through the slideshow. Funny, but I never noticed the tomatoes until today — there was so much focus on the large human hands surrounding her.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
I’d like to see them share a cell next to Madoff.
mad citizen
@Leto: Of course the Saturday Evening Post was/is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Yet another proud achievement. Who knew it was still being published? I live in the Indy metro area and have not seen current issues anywhere, or at least not noticed them at Barnes & Noble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saturday_Evening_Post
ThresherK
@Leto: “Saturday Evening Post” policy at that time allowed showing black people only in service industry jobs
I’m a Yankee and have been to the N.R. museum several times. I’ve also been to the one in Rutland, VT. I had no idea this was a (written or unwritten) rule for the Post. Aaaand now I’m wondering how common this was for all the magazines.
Brendan in NC
@MattF: I’d also preemptively request that for the next several national elections in the entire US.
randy khan
@Kent:
Not seating anyone is an okay result from my perspective, although it would be better to rerun the election (the general, not the primary).
V
I know that I am asking for a really big favor, but could some journalist start asking prominent Republicans to comment on NC-9? I really would like to know Kobach’s thoughts on it, for example.
SFAW
@cleek:
@cmorenc:
Yeah, I know all that. I guess I was foolishly hoping for something other than Al Capone’s safe, so to speak.
“The NCBOE may have declared someone a winner!!!” Yes, and …?
Leto
@ThresherK: Good question. I’m reading “The Warmth of Other Suns” and continuing to learn that I still have so much to learn. Racism//white supremacy/dominance is so thoroughly baked into all parts of our institutions that just seeing them brought to light at times can be jarring. But once sunlight hits it, we can’t allow darkness to come back.
Matt McIrvin
@Mike in NC: Trump thinks the situation is great! If the positions just stay vacant, the acting officials don’t have to go through Senate approval, and if he doesn’t have to worry about that they’re all more beholden to Trump.
KSinMA
@ThresherK: My guess is that the policy had something to do with selling magazines/subscriptions in the South.
PaulWartenberg
@Geoboy:
when you consider how the GOP is routinely suppressing vote counts and sabotaging of absentee ballots, they deserve getting hit with conspiracy charges and violations of election laws up and down the code books. I dunno if RICO is applicable, the prosecutors can only break that hammer out for very specific crimes.
Chet
Why is it reasonable for the penalty for cheating in an election to be a do-over? They should be disqualified and the second place (first non-cheater) finisher certified the winner.
The Midnight Lurker
I’ve been a ratfucker’s ratfucker for almost forty years now, and I keep telling you people…
They can not create wealth, so they steal it.
They can not win free and fair elections, so they steal them.
They steal.
Any questions?
joel hanes
Lifted and lightly edited from Juanita Jean’s :
File under You Can’t Make This Shit Up:
The almost-new- Attorney-General, Bill Barr, has a son in law named Tyler McGauhey.
McGuahey is leaving the Justice Department to avoid conflicts of interest with Barr when he’s confirmed.
Where’s he going, you ask?
To the White House, of course, to work for White House counsel … to fight off the Russia investigation. That’s right, folks, the new Attorney General’s son-in-law will be helping Trump … against the Justice Department.
http://juanitajean.com/you-just-cant-make-this-up-2/
cleek
@Chet:
i don’t think there’s enough evidence to conclusively say that the GOP candidate knew his guy was going to cheat. plausible deniability is doing a lot of work.
John 2.0
I want to take a moment to highlight how crazy this is. Kim Strach, the director of the NCBOE started as the chief investigator with the NCBOE back in the early 2000’s. Her husband Phil is a high powered and well connected Republican lawyer. The NCBOE basically had political version of regulatory capture where in the first decade of this century ONLY Democratic members of the NCGA were targeted by the NCBOE for campaign finance and/or corruption cases. To be sure, many of them earned it, but at the time I was working in the NCGA, so I knew of several instances where the Board ignored R’s in favor of going after D’s.
Anyway, Kim’s now the head of the Board. So this must mean that the evidence is SO overwhelming they can’t sweep it under the rug. The public evidence looks very bad, but I would guess that the Board stops well short of implicating Harris in any wrongdoing. Harris knew he was hiring a felon, and I don’t think could reasonably ignore the fact that he was hiring him to commit fraud on his behalf.
moonbat
@KSinMA: It might also have to do with the high number of KKK members in Indiana in the 1920s and beyond.
Joe Falco
@Chet:
Unless you can prove the candidate and their campaign coordinated the cheating, a do-over is a better outcome. Otherwise, you incentivize more ratfuckers to taint elections for their chosen candidate. And if you got a person in power who has no qualms about using their pardon to cover up their crimes, well then, nation of men instead of laws and so forth.
socraticsilence
In this case a primary do-over might actually be fair– even if it benefits the GOP– the GOPper who lost the primary (the Congressman at the time) also alleged fraud at the time but it fell on deaf ears (probably because giving it credence would have killed the primary winners chances in November).
John 2.0
@socraticsilence: Pittenger already announced he has no interest in running if there’s a new primary. There’s a live legal question in NC if the Constitution allows for a ‘do-over’ of an election when the result has been certified, which it was in the primary.
Lots of moving parts, but I think the GOP is stuck with Harris.
Shana
@ThresherK: On the plus side, the SEP published a lot of PG Wodehouse, both short stories and novels in pieces, and paid extremely well.
But yeah, probably more than a little racist, although I’m not sure if they were more or less so than most publications of the time.