By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — In the days after the November 6 midterm elections, accounts of serious voting irregularities around the nation usually showed Democrats benefiting from some sort of sleight of hand.
Their cry was “Count every vote,” but that meant hordes of fraudulent and illegal votes would dilute the choices of law-abiding citizens. It’s as if a counterfeiter demanded that he be allowed to make his purchases with fistfuls of phony money.
Some major races including Florida’s, Georgia’s, and Arizona’s attracted attention over what seemed to be unnecessarily prolonged vote-counting and suspicious circumstances, although dominant media generally tried to laugh these off.
Conservative national radio host Laura Ingraham said on November 14, “The media and the Democrats are perfectly aligned in their narrative, always now,” as she discussed contested Florida results.
A few days earlier, a caller to Ingraham’s program observed that if a state like Florida, run by Republicans including Gov. Rick Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Sen. Marco Rubio, can’t prevent Democratic fraud, what of a state run by Democrats?
Phoenix radio talk host James T. Harris (KFYI, 550 AM) made a point on November 9 probably echoed by many others, asking why only Democratic candidates benefit by all sorts of votes turning up after Election Day.
Irregularities were cited on conservative outlets that dominant media preferred not to hear.
The Glenn Beck national radio program mentioned a U.S. citizen in Iowa, who originally was from Argentina, being handed a ballot pre-marked for Democratic candidates — with the inferred motivation that being Latino meant an illegal alien who would cast a fraudulent vote.
Conservative columnist Wayne Allyn Root posted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on November 10 that he had “mass texts” sent out by the Nevada Democratic Party and other liberal organizations urging illegal aliens to vote.
“The texts said to either vote Democrat or ‘you’ll be detained, jailed and deported.’ Who do you think that applies to? Not me,” Root said. “I’m not in any danger of being deported. Are you?”
Writing of magical boxes of votes appearing from nowhere, Root said, “Democrats think they can change election results days later — with boxes of votes that appear out of thin air.”
As vote tabulation continued in a number of races well past Election Day, the results didn’t appear as encouraging as first thought for Republicans nationally, but the GOP hadn’t been routed. And Democrats were living down to their reputation of trying to steal as much as they could.
An official Republican Party poll observer spoke at the Arizona Project Tea Party weekly meeting in north Phoenix on November 12 about what he saw while serving at a polling station in suburban Scottsdale, just east of Phoenix, on general-election day.
In an interview before he addressed the audience, the man, who asked to be identified as “Mr. Cooper,” told The Wanderer: “I just figure I’m one polling place. If it was happening at one polling place, it’s happening at 250 polling places.”
Voters who had their ID information all ready to show at the polling station were Republicans, Cooper said, while voters who had to fumble for it, or didn’t have it, or had to go back to the car to get it, were all Democrats.
“It’s a cultural issue, it really is.”
Also, he said, 35 of the ballots, all from Democrats, were marked for too many candidates.
A 19-year-old woman wasn’t registered to vote, and her ID card showed a Wisconsin address, but Cooper said he was instructed to let her vote.
Cooper said that when he called the office of Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, for guidance about questionable ballots, he was told to accept every one.
Even if people had chosen to receive early ballots in the mail, they still could bring them in to polling stations as late as Election Day. The return envelope containing the ballot that they marked had a box for their signature and the date they filled it out.
In five instances, Cooper said, the signed names were different than the names printed on the ballot envelopes.
In addition, he said, five individuals brought in multiple ballots to drop off, which constituted illegal “ballot harvesting.”
Arizona law allows a person to bring in an early ballot for a different individual in limited circumstances, such as delivering an ill family member’s vote. However, the person can’t bring in multiple ballots from unrelated individuals or households.
This is to prevent such abuses as stolen ballots, unauthorized marking of ballots, and breaking the chain of possession from the time the voter surrenders his ballot until a possible stranger hands it in at the polls.
The restrictive law was passed after a surveillance video showed a man wearing a liberal activist group’s T-shirt during Arizona’s 2014 primary election bring a large box full of marked ballots to the recorder’s office and stuff hundreds of them into a receptacle to be tallied.
The Wanderer included this incident in its lead story in the November 6, 2014, hardcopy edition, “2014 Election Result — Was It Close? How Much Did Obama’s Guys Cheat?”
At that time, longtime liberal Arizona Democrat Terry Goddard, running for Arizona secretary of state, tried to dismiss the possibility of vote fraud, but the video disproved him. Goddard lost his race.
The recent victory of far-left Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema over Republican Martha McSally for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Never-Trumper Jeff Flake attracted some surprised attention across the nation, but there were explanations in addition to vote fraud — although the Phoenix area’s relatively new Democrat Recorder Fontes was gaining a reputation for partisanship.
The Washington Free Beacon conservative national website called some attention to Fontes’ opening of five “emergency voting centers” just preceding the November 6 election, with two of them close by in one Democratic area, but large portions of GOP territory lacking such a center.
Quizzed about whether voters’ alleged emergencies were valid, Fontes said he was prevented by law from asking about that.
Television interviewer Brahm Resnik told Fontes that Democratic candidates were leaving door hangers at people’s residences saying, “Just show up” at the center.
Fontes arrogantly replied, “You’ve got your privacy that I have to respect, and by the way, what, pray tell, is the problem with giving voters access to the ballot box?”
The problem wasn’t, of course, about providing ballot access, but about fishing for more votes after the official early voting period ended but before November 6 Election Day.
Phoenix radio host James T. Harris suggested on November 12 that the emergency voting locations were used for illegal ballot harvesting.
As of late afternoon on November 14, the Arizona Secretary of State’s office said Sinema led McSally, who had conceded, by nearly 40,000 votes, out of nearly 2,204,000 total votes cast for both of them, plus nearly 54,000 votes for a Green Party candidate who had thrown her support to Sinema.
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on November 13 that he didn’t reject the idea of vote fraud, but tens of thousands of votes separating candidates is too wide a spread.
“Voter fraud is real, but it’s not 40,000 votes real. . . . That said, the Democrats are always going to try to harvest ballots and they don’t care what the law says,” Querard said. “So everyone should still pay attention and call out when they see laws being ignored or games being played.”
As for Fontes’ ethics, Querard said, “There doesn’t seem to be any question that Adrian Fontes is incompetent at the minimum. From a distance, and depending on the bias of the observer, incompetence can look an awful lot like corruption, but they are two different things, and we’re going to need the benefit of time and data before we can figure out, with a strong degree of certainty, which of those labels belongs to Fontes.
“Lastly, crying wolf is a terrible idea, because voter fraud is real, but the public will become numb to the topic if you keep shouting ‘voter fraud!’ and there is no concrete proof of real voter fraud,” Querard continued, adding that witnesses and prosecutions are needed so people will see it’s not just a case of losers saying sour grapes.
D.C. Wizards
McSally jumped into the Senate race last January after being pushed to do so by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and his establishment D.C. wizards, even though an energetic former Arizona Republican state senator, Kelli Ward, already had forced Sen. Jeff Flake into early retirement from the 2018 campaign.
Ward lost the GOP primary to McSally in August after a barrage of advertising attacks and a vote-splitting strategy using former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio as a third GOP candidate.
Querard commented: “After rough primaries in either party, there will always be a certain percentage of voters who will not vote for the nominee because they still feel the wounds of the primary too strongly. It is why you have to be careful to win the primary without doing damage whenever possible.
“Yes, McConnell and his friends spent a ton of money to defeat Ward and install McSally as the nominee and, yes, they did so by claiming that Ward opposed Trump and the border wall, which is complete garbage,” he said.
“If McSally had lost (to Sinema) by 5,000 or 10,000 votes, it would be highly probable that lingering resentment played a critical role in the defeat. In this case, the margin will be five or 10 times those amounts, so it is going to be a collection of factors,” Querard said.
Various complaints lodged against McSally included that she ducked debates, and wasn’t prepared for one debate she had.
National radio talker Ingraham expressed dislike of McSally’s brief video concession announcement, where the candidate relaxed on her couch with her dog. McSally’s not concerned, Ingraham said, because she thinks Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey will appoint her to Arizona’s other U.S. Senate seat.
After Sen. John McCain died in August, Ducey named Jon Kyl, himself a former GOP senator who had served with McCain, to fill the vacancy until the seat goes before the voters in 2020. However, Kyl stipulated that he was prepared to serve only a few months. This left Arizonans wondering what kind of placeholder Ducey had appointed, and who might be his next choice.
As to factors that counted against McSally with voters, Querard told The Wanderer this was an election with high turnout for Democrats, as both they and independents voted “to send a message to the president.”
In addition, Querard said, “Sinema had no primary, so she got to occupy the moderate middle the entire campaign, without being pushed right or left.” Also, “The media helped cover for her to minimize the damage from her public comments repeatedly trashing Arizona.
“McSally’s real voting record, which was to the left of John McCain, was a turnoff to conservatives in spite of her election-year pivot towards President Trump,” Querard said. “And her election-year pivot . . . actually cost McSally the moderate image she might have been able to win with, by driving away independent women voters especially.”
When The Wicked Prevail
A retired chairman of the Phoenix-based Maricopa County Republican Party, conservative Rob Haney, told The Wanderer that Democrats have fraud as their solution if they don’t win on Election Day.
“Midterm election-vote tabulation fiascoes bring to mind Prov. 29:2: ‘When the just prevail, the people rejoice; but when the wicked rule, the people groan’,” Haney said on November 14. “The righteous citizens of America will be groaning for the foreseeable future because the corrupt Democrat Party now controls the legislative and enforcement bodies of elections in critical electoral-college states.
“From allowing unionization of government employees to motor-voter registration, to mail-in ballots, to no voter picture ID required, to ballot harvesting, to illegal-alien voting, to innumerable voter-law abuses throughout the country, the Democrat Party has achieved their goals. If they don’t win outright, they have fraud as a recourse,” Haney said.
“They could not have accomplished this without the aid of the McCain RINO (Republican in Name Only) wing of the Republican Party,” he added.
“Long before they were called Trump-haters, they were called McCain RINOs. They opposed the Republican Party platform planks of immigration-law enforcement, pro-life, pro-traditional family, small government, and lower taxes. I witnessed McCain repeatedly side with the Democrats for continued illegal immigration,” Haney said.
“I saw Republican big-business owners side with Catholic Church lobbyists to oppose any effort to enforce or pass stronger anti-illegal immigration laws. I saw McCain’s efforts to remove the pro-life planks from the Republican platform and attack pro-life organizations,” Haney said.
“The RINOs kept defending and electing McCain even though he voted against lower taxes and against defunding Obamacare. I saw McCain destroy the Republican Party.”
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