State of elections since 2020

Bentleyspop

josevolution said:

Well we can at least say we voted in the last democratic held elections! 

You, me, and billions of 👽 

Tim Simmons

shecky said:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pro-mamdani-super-pac-takes-hefty-check-ultra-wealthy-donor-despite-billionaires-shouldnt-exist

Surprised? No.

IDK. Seems like the joke is on the Billionaire. Giving money to a guy who says he shouldn't exist? Weird. 

mickeyrat

A Tarrant County, TX resident who has worked as an election judge criticized the county’s move to cut more than 100 polling sites.

“You’re not saving money,” she said. “You’re sacrificing democracy to save a buck.”

Read the full story (with Fort Worth Report and Texas Tribune): https://propub.li/3UEtHZd

Tim Simmons

Now this is how you steal elections. 

mickeyrat

Pennsylvania must count undated mail-in ballots, US appeals court rules - https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/pennsylvania-must-count-undated-mail-in-ballots-us-appeals-court-rules-2025-08-26/

mickeyrat

excellent interview/talk. 

Marc Maron on Brainf*cked Trolls and Liberal Scolds
Pod Save America
Duration: 1:23:29
Published: Sun, 24 Aug 2025 07:05:00 +0000
Episode: https://crooked.com

Media: https://pdst.fm/e/arttrk.com/p/CRMDA/claritaspod.com/measure/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/284/pdrl.fm/b85a46/stitcher.simplecastaudio.com/9aa1e238-cbed-4305-9808-c9228fc6dd4f/episodes/ed41914e-b846-4a99-8221-8b3bd5446afd/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=9aa1e238-cbed-4305-9808-c9228fc6dd4f&awEpisodeId=ed41914e-b846-4a99-8221-8b3bd5446afd&feed=dxZsm5kX

Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/1192761536

<p>Marc Maron, comedian and podcast trailblazer, sits down with Lovett to discuss why the left always has to be such a buzzkill, whether Americans voted for Trump purely out of annoyance, and why the ...

Subscribe to this podcast: https://feeds.simplecast.com/dxZsm5kX

----
Sent from Podcast Republic 25.8.20R
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.itunestoppodcastplayer.app

mickeyrat

mickeyrat

a little nerdy and dry but......

https://youtu.be/1nus5JA3Vh4?si=fBDrA9WSCqEx7Dlq

mickeyrat

Authoritarians rarely try to build lasting states. They build smash-and-grab machines, designed for immediate extraction, not long-term stewardship. And we can watch it play out in real time.

Just this week, the Trump administration pledged a $20 billion bailout to Argentina’s Javier Milei, a man Trump calls a “fantastic and powerful leader.” Milei has gutted social programs, fueled inflation with whiplash austerity, and then leaned on his friends abroad to keep the lights on. The result? Washington is preparing to buy Argentine bonds and shovel U.S. taxpayer money into Milei’s re-election campaign disguised as economic “stability.” Even Steve Bannon squawked a one-word review on Gettr: “Wat.”

Meanwhile, American farmers are furious that the bailout comes as Argentina cuts export taxes on soybeans to flood the Chinese market, undercutting U.S. growers already clobbered by Trump’s own tariffs. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it: “Donald Trump wants to lend $20 billion of our money to bail out a political ally and his global investors before an election.” Neera Tanden added the kicker: “Someone needs to explain the rationale for cutting USAID but bailing out Argentina from their own whack policies.”

Argentina today joins a long list of short-lived authoritarian experiments that end with foreign bailouts, currency collapses, and broken promises. Think Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet’s Chile, or the Argentine junta of the 1980s, regimes that looked “strong” until the debt came due. These weren’t durable governments; they were short, ugly, profitable looting runs that enriched elites while leaving ordinary people to sift through the rubble.

And that’s exactly what Donald Trump and his coterie of planners, financiers, and enablers are engineering here at home. The pardon economy, Project 2025, deliberate financial sabotage, and even the rhetoric spilling out in county board meetings are all pieces of the same puzzle: hollow the system, cash out quickly, and leave someone else holding the bag.

Let’s start with the most obvious racket: pardons. In Trump’s hands, clemency isn’t a mechanism of mercy; it’s a market. Immunity becomes the coin of the realm. Allies who keep quiet, cronies who remain loyal, or donors who stay generous all get their receipts stamped “forgiven.” This is governance as patronage: not blind justice, but targeted immunity. Think of it as a loyalty rewards program, “PardonPoints”, where miles never expire and the only qualification is fealty.

And the cost isn’t abstract. As Liz Oyer, the U.S. Pardon Attorney, told Congress, Trump’s clemency spree has already drained taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars. Victims of financial crimes saw more than $330 million in restitution wiped away, with the public forced to pick up the tab. Add in lost fines, unpaid penalties, and investigative resources, and the overall hit to victims and taxpayers tops half a billion dollars.

Oyer didn’t just crunch numbers; she pulled back the curtain on how clemency became a pay-to-play racket. She testified about a Ponzi-scheme operator whose restitution vanished after relatives hosted a six-figure fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, and a telecom executive who saw tens of millions erased after his company’s PAC maxed out donations. Each case looked less like justice served than like invoices stamped “Paid in Full” by Trump’s political machine.

For her trouble, Oyer was fired, not for botching the math, but for refusing to rubber-stamp the restoration of gun rights to Mel Gibson, Trump’s Hollywood pal. She lost her job because she wouldn’t hand a lethal weapon back to an actor with a history of racist rants and domestic abuse allegations. That’s how the pardon economy works: reward loyalty, punish dissent, and send the bill to the public.

Then there are the individual transactions. Oyer testified about white-collar felons whose restitution vanished after family members cut fat checks to Trump’s political committees. A Ponzi-scheme operator convicted of bilking retirees got his debts erased after his brother hosted a six-figure fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. A telecom executive facing tens of millions in restitution had his slate wiped clean shortly after his company’s PAC maxed out donations. Another fraudster’s family poured money into a Trump-aligned super PAC in the weeks before his pardon papers were signed. Each story reads less like justice served than like an itemized invoice for presidential access.

That’s what a “pardon economy” looks like: a pipeline transferring wealth upward by erasing the obligations of the well-connected. It does two things at once: it locks down loyalty, and it teaches everyone else that corruption is a survivable offense, so long as you pick the right team. The rule of law becomes the rule of leverage.

But why stop at individual favors when you can rewrite the entire playbook? Enter Project 2025. The glossy, 922-page policy document was bad enough, but the undercover reporting from Democracy Now! revealed something even darker: a second, hidden phase.

Russell Vought, Trump’s former OMB director, boasted over coffee in a DC hotel suite that “80% of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies.” He bragged about drafting memos justifying the president’s power to deploy the military against protesters. He talked about firing civil servants, ending agency independence, and using executive choke points to gut abortion rights.

Trump may publicly shrug, “I don’t know what the hell Project 25 is,” but Vought made the truth plain: “He’s been at our organization. He’s raised money for our organization. He’s very supportive of what we do.”

They are writing the blueprints for a rapid, short-lived consolidation of power. They’re not planning governance; they’re planning seizure.

Max over at UNFTR laid it out in brutal detail: the economic policies of this administration are designed to implode. Tariffs that hit consumers, rate cuts to juice short-term corporate gains, deregulation to let monopolies and polluters run wild, all of it is sabotage in plain sight.

But it’s sabotage with a purpose. Max again: “They want to drastically cut rates to stimulate the top end of the corporate economy to cover for the other areas of the administration’s agenda that are going to tank it for the vast majority of us.”

Call it short-term authoritarianism. A bloodless coup meant to plunder the treasury. Create the crash, funnel the benefits upward, and prepare the memos to call in the military when the public notices. Historically, authoritarian regimes that follow this pattern burn bright and collapse quickly. The only question is how much damage they inflict before they fall.

Trickling Down to Coos County

And if you think this is only about Washington, think again. Authoritarian rhetoric doesn’t stay bottled up in think tanks and White House memos; it filters down to your county board.

At a recent Coos County meeting here in Oregon, Commissioner Rod Taylor, a January 6 insurrectionist or “J6er” as he proudly calls himself, parroted the talking points almost word for word. He claimed George Floyd “died of a drug overdose,” dismissing the jury’s verdict of murder as “gaslighting.” He painted right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk as a martyr, declaring, “Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. His children do not deserve to grow up without a father.” And he wrapped it all in a civics-class bow: “We need to learn to disagree better.”

The rhetorical moves were textbook: factual inversion, martyr-making, bothsides-ism, and finally the soft-sounding bromide of “civility” to paper over the authoritarian core. Cast the right as perpetual victims, dismiss systemic injustice, and reframe accountability as persecution, that’s the playbook.

What’s most striking is how seamlessly Taylor slid from these national talking points into county housekeeping, affordable housing projects, foundation grants, zoning minutiae. That juxtaposition is the tell. Authoritarian rhetoric is normalized as just another item of county business, smuggled in between sewer lines and timber grants. Big lies become background noise.

This is why the fight isn’t just national. Project 2025 needs county commissioners willing to repeat its talking points, school boards willing to enact its culture wars, and local institutions too timid to resist. If we don’t snuff out these narratives at the local level, we’re handing the playbook live actors.

Mock the theater, yes, ridicule the idea that George Floyd “just overdosed” or that loyalty deserves a lifetime supply of pardons, but also act. Demand transparency. Protect civil servants from political purges. Force public records disclosures. Build strike funds and mutual aid networks to withstand economic sabotage.

Because here’s the truth: they aren’t building for sustainability. They’re building for speed, for seizure, for extraction. “I want to be the person who crushes the deep state,” Vought declared. And in the pardon economy, in the Project 2025 blueprints, in Rod Taylor’s remarks, we can see exactly what that means.

The only way to stop it is to stop it everywhere, yes, in DC courtrooms, but also in your county board meetings. The Death Star is only as dangerous as the local officials who flip the switch.

Elections matter. So does the plumbing. Voting is the pressure valve; nonviolent disruption is the emergency brake. If we only show up every two years, the machinery Trump and his allies are building will still be in place, ready to cash out the gains no matter who sits in the Oval Office. We have to do both: elect, and disable.

Disruption doesn’t have to mean chaos, and it certainly doesn’t have to mean violence. It can start small. Imagine a rolling, one-day-a-week work stoppage where teachers, small retailers, or service workers simply don’t show up. Visible, coordinated, and impossible to ignore. Or a month-long consumer boycott of billionaire-owned companies, paired with buy-local vouchers and mutual aid so that the burden falls on corporations, not communities.

Other tactics scale in the same spirit. Sector-wide sympathy stoppages, even four hours during rush hour by transit workers or port crews, can ripple through the economy. Coordinated mass cancellations of auto-renew subscriptions or memberships show up instantly on corporate balance sheets. Local small businesses can join in by closing for a day in solidarity and turning storefronts into mutual-aid hubs, flipping the story from “hurting locals” to “protecting community.”

The disruption doesn’t have to come only from the streets. Municipal governments can pass ordinances to shield civil servants from political purges, force hearings on privatizations, or refuse to honor dubious federal directives without judicial review. Professionals, doctors, teachers, librarians, clerks, can pledge to uphold ethical standards even against unlawful political orders, denying authoritarians the cooperation they depend on. And when visibility matters, citizens can flood county offices with phone calls, plaster public spaces with art, or stage sit-ins at symbolic storefronts.

None of this is fanciful. It is lawful, nonviolent, and effective when coordinated. The point is to make extraction costly and repression visible, to prove that authoritarianism cannot run on autopilot. Voting may change who is in the chair, but disruption changes what the chair can do.

follow me on Substack at marygeddry.com and @magixarc.bsky.social

#USPolitics #PayToPlay #Authoritarianism

Halifax2TheMax

mickeyrat said:

Authoritarians rarely try to build lasting states. They build smash-and-grab machines, designed for immediate extraction, not long-term stewardship. And we can watch it play out in real time.

Just this week, the Trump administration pledged a $20 billion bailout to Argentina’s Javier Milei, a man Trump calls a “fantastic and powerful leader.” Milei has gutted social programs, fueled inflation with whiplash austerity, and then leaned on his friends abroad to keep the lights on. The result? Washington is preparing to buy Argentine bonds and shovel U.S. taxpayer money into Milei’s re-election campaign disguised as economic “stability.” Even Steve Bannon squawked a one-word review on Gettr: “Wat.”

Meanwhile, American farmers are furious that the bailout comes as Argentina cuts export taxes on soybeans to flood the Chinese market, undercutting U.S. growers already clobbered by Trump’s own tariffs. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it: “Donald Trump wants to lend $20 billion of our money to bail out a political ally and his global investors before an election.” Neera Tanden added the kicker: “Someone needs to explain the rationale for cutting USAID but bailing out Argentina from their own whack policies.”

Argentina today joins a long list of short-lived authoritarian experiments that end with foreign bailouts, currency collapses, and broken promises. Think Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet’s Chile, or the Argentine junta of the 1980s, regimes that looked “strong” until the debt came due. These weren’t durable governments; they were short, ugly, profitable looting runs that enriched elites while leaving ordinary people to sift through the rubble.

And that’s exactly what Donald Trump and his coterie of planners, financiers, and enablers are engineering here at home. The pardon economy, Project 2025, deliberate financial sabotage, and even the rhetoric spilling out in county board meetings are all pieces of the same puzzle: hollow the system, cash out quickly, and leave someone else holding the bag.

Let’s start with the most obvious racket: pardons. In Trump’s hands, clemency isn’t a mechanism of mercy; it’s a market. Immunity becomes the coin of the realm. Allies who keep quiet, cronies who remain loyal, or donors who stay generous all get their receipts stamped “forgiven.” This is governance as patronage: not blind justice, but targeted immunity. Think of it as a loyalty rewards program, “PardonPoints”, where miles never expire and the only qualification is fealty.

And the cost isn’t abstract. As Liz Oyer, the U.S. Pardon Attorney, told Congress, Trump’s clemency spree has already drained taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars. Victims of financial crimes saw more than $330 million in restitution wiped away, with the public forced to pick up the tab. Add in lost fines, unpaid penalties, and investigative resources, and the overall hit to victims and taxpayers tops half a billion dollars.

Oyer didn’t just crunch numbers; she pulled back the curtain on how clemency became a pay-to-play racket. She testified about a Ponzi-scheme operator whose restitution vanished after relatives hosted a six-figure fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, and a telecom executive who saw tens of millions erased after his company’s PAC maxed out donations. Each case looked less like justice served than like invoices stamped “Paid in Full” by Trump’s political machine.

For her trouble, Oyer was fired, not for botching the math, but for refusing to rubber-stamp the restoration of gun rights to Mel Gibson, Trump’s Hollywood pal. She lost her job because she wouldn’t hand a lethal weapon back to an actor with a history of racist rants and domestic abuse allegations. That’s how the pardon economy works: reward loyalty, punish dissent, and send the bill to the public.

Then there are the individual transactions. Oyer testified about white-collar felons whose restitution vanished after family members cut fat checks to Trump’s political committees. A Ponzi-scheme operator convicted of bilking retirees got his debts erased after his brother hosted a six-figure fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. A telecom executive facing tens of millions in restitution had his slate wiped clean shortly after his company’s PAC maxed out donations. Another fraudster’s family poured money into a Trump-aligned super PAC in the weeks before his pardon papers were signed. Each story reads less like justice served than like an itemized invoice for presidential access.

That’s what a “pardon economy” looks like: a pipeline transferring wealth upward by erasing the obligations of the well-connected. It does two things at once: it locks down loyalty, and it teaches everyone else that corruption is a survivable offense, so long as you pick the right team. The rule of law becomes the rule of leverage.

But why stop at individual favors when you can rewrite the entire playbook? Enter Project 2025. The glossy, 922-page policy document was bad enough, but the undercover reporting from Democracy Now! revealed something even darker: a second, hidden phase.

Russell Vought, Trump’s former OMB director, boasted over coffee in a DC hotel suite that “80% of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies.” He bragged about drafting memos justifying the president’s power to deploy the military against protesters. He talked about firing civil servants, ending agency independence, and using executive choke points to gut abortion rights.

Trump may publicly shrug, “I don’t know what the hell Project 25 is,” but Vought made the truth plain: “He’s been at our organization. He’s raised money for our organization. He’s very supportive of what we do.”

They are writing the blueprints for a rapid, short-lived consolidation of power. They’re not planning governance; they’re planning seizure.

Max over at UNFTR laid it out in brutal detail: the economic policies of this administration are designed to implode. Tariffs that hit consumers, rate cuts to juice short-term corporate gains, deregulation to let monopolies and polluters run wild, all of it is sabotage in plain sight.

But it’s sabotage with a purpose. Max again: “They want to drastically cut rates to stimulate the top end of the corporate economy to cover for the other areas of the administration’s agenda that are going to tank it for the vast majority of us.”

Call it short-term authoritarianism. A bloodless coup meant to plunder the treasury. Create the crash, funnel the benefits upward, and prepare the memos to call in the military when the public notices. Historically, authoritarian regimes that follow this pattern burn bright and collapse quickly. The only question is how much damage they inflict before they fall.

Trickling Down to Coos County

And if you think this is only about Washington, think again. Authoritarian rhetoric doesn’t stay bottled up in think tanks and White House memos; it filters down to your county board.

At a recent Coos County meeting here in Oregon, Commissioner Rod Taylor, a January 6 insurrectionist or “J6er” as he proudly calls himself, parroted the talking points almost word for word. He claimed George Floyd “died of a drug overdose,” dismissing the jury’s verdict of murder as “gaslighting.” He painted right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk as a martyr, declaring, “Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. His children do not deserve to grow up without a father.” And he wrapped it all in a civics-class bow: “We need to learn to disagree better.”

The rhetorical moves were textbook: factual inversion, martyr-making, bothsides-ism, and finally the soft-sounding bromide of “civility” to paper over the authoritarian core. Cast the right as perpetual victims, dismiss systemic injustice, and reframe accountability as persecution, that’s the playbook.

What’s most striking is how seamlessly Taylor slid from these national talking points into county housekeeping, affordable housing projects, foundation grants, zoning minutiae. That juxtaposition is the tell. Authoritarian rhetoric is normalized as just another item of county business, smuggled in between sewer lines and timber grants. Big lies become background noise.

This is why the fight isn’t just national. Project 2025 needs county commissioners willing to repeat its talking points, school boards willing to enact its culture wars, and local institutions too timid to resist. If we don’t snuff out these narratives at the local level, we’re handing the playbook live actors.

Mock the theater, yes, ridicule the idea that George Floyd “just overdosed” or that loyalty deserves a lifetime supply of pardons, but also act. Demand transparency. Protect civil servants from political purges. Force public records disclosures. Build strike funds and mutual aid networks to withstand economic sabotage.

Because here’s the truth: they aren’t building for sustainability. They’re building for speed, for seizure, for extraction. “I want to be the person who crushes the deep state,” Vought declared. And in the pardon economy, in the Project 2025 blueprints, in Rod Taylor’s remarks, we can see exactly what that means.

The only way to stop it is to stop it everywhere, yes, in DC courtrooms, but also in your county board meetings. The Death Star is only as dangerous as the local officials who flip the switch.

Elections matter. So does the plumbing. Voting is the pressure valve; nonviolent disruption is the emergency brake. If we only show up every two years, the machinery Trump and his allies are building will still be in place, ready to cash out the gains no matter who sits in the Oval Office. We have to do both: elect, and disable.

Disruption doesn’t have to mean chaos, and it certainly doesn’t have to mean violence. It can start small. Imagine a rolling, one-day-a-week work stoppage where teachers, small retailers, or service workers simply don’t show up. Visible, coordinated, and impossible to ignore. Or a month-long consumer boycott of billionaire-owned companies, paired with buy-local vouchers and mutual aid so that the burden falls on corporations, not communities.

Other tactics scale in the same spirit. Sector-wide sympathy stoppages, even four hours during rush hour by transit workers or port crews, can ripple through the economy. Coordinated mass cancellations of auto-renew subscriptions or memberships show up instantly on corporate balance sheets. Local small businesses can join in by closing for a day in solidarity and turning storefronts into mutual-aid hubs, flipping the story from “hurting locals” to “protecting community.”

The disruption doesn’t have to come only from the streets. Municipal governments can pass ordinances to shield civil servants from political purges, force hearings on privatizations, or refuse to honor dubious federal directives without judicial review. Professionals, doctors, teachers, librarians, clerks, can pledge to uphold ethical standards even against unlawful political orders, denying authoritarians the cooperation they depend on. And when visibility matters, citizens can flood county offices with phone calls, plaster public spaces with art, or stage sit-ins at symbolic storefronts.

None of this is fanciful. It is lawful, nonviolent, and effective when coordinated. The point is to make extraction costly and repression visible, to prove that authoritarianism cannot run on autopilot. Voting may change who is in the chair, but disruption changes what the chair can do.

follow me on Substack at marygeddry.com and @magixarc.bsky.social

#USPolitics #PayToPlay #Authoritarianism

  * The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

And we’re supposed to be worried about whether AOC is single or married, Ilhan Omar’s company increased in net worth and a six year old laptop story non-story.

Good fucking luck. Way too late.

shadowcast

mickeyrat said:

here we go...... this is just a primary

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-new-mexico-voting-machines-7b91e326d2f378898046ec7df779ba20.

 

2022 Midterm elections Joe Biden New Mexico Voting machines Voting Elections Government and politics Biden cabinet Presidential elections Donald Trump Conspiracy theories

County's refusal to certify the vote hints at election chaos

By CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY

2 hours ago

ATLANTA (AP) — The conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines that erupted during the 2020 presidential contest flared this week in a remote New Mexico county in what could be just a preview of the kind of chaos election experts fear is coming in the fall midterms and in 2024.

The governing commission in Otero County refused to certify the local results of the state’s June 7 primary because of the equipment, in what was seen as another instance of how the falsehoods spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies have infected elections and threaten the democratic process.

“We are in scary territory,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former election official in Colorado and Utah who now advises federal, state and local officials. “If this can happen here, where next? It’s like a cancer, a virus. It’s metastasizing and growing.”

There is no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of voting equipment in the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden. But that hasn’t stopped the false claims, particularly those about Dominion machines.

“I have huge concerns with these voting machines,” Otero County Commissioner Vickie Marquardt said Monday as she and her two fellow commissioners — all Republicans — voted unanimously. “When I certify stuff that I don’t know is right, I feel like I’m being dishonest because in my heart I don’t know if it is right.”

---

2022 MIDTERM ELECTIONS

ND governor targets fellow Republicans to mixed results

Wisconsin election investigator fined $2K daily for contempt

Police, civil rights group in $336K accord over 2020 protest

Moore holds funding edge in Maryland gubernatorial primary

The commissioners in the conservative, pro-Trump county could point to no actual problems with the Dominion equipment.

New Mexico's secretary of state asked the state Supreme Court to step in and order the county to certify the votes, and the high court did so on Wednesday. That would ensure that the nearly 7,400 ballots that were cast in Otero County are recorded as legal votes. The deadline for county certification is Friday.

In the weeks and months following the election, various Trump allies claimed that Dominion voting systems had somehow been manipulated as part of an elaborate scheme to steal the election.

On Monday, the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol presented testimony that Trump was told repeatedly that his claims of a stolen election and rigged voting systems were false and dangerous. That included pushback from his inner circle to the claims about Dominion voting systems, which are used by jurisdictions in 27 states.

Former Attorney General William Barr, in a videotaped interview with House investigators, said he spoke with Trump about the “idiotic claims” surrounding Dominion.

Barr said he found them to be “among the most disturbing allegations” because they were “made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people." He added that the claims were doing a “grave disservice to the country.”

Trump ignored that, and his allies persisted in attacking Dominion. According to the House panel, the day after Barr spoke with Trump, the president released a video in which he claimed without proof that “with the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you can press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden.”

Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against various Trump associates and conservative media organizations, including Fox News.

The company said in a statement Wednesday that the action by the Otero County commissioners was “yet another example of how lies about Dominion have damaged our company and diminished the public’s faith in elections.”

Otero County, with a population of about 67,000, went for Trump by nearly 62% in 2020. One of the commissioners is Cowboys for Trump co-founder Couy Griffin, who was convicted of entering restricted U.S. Capitol grounds — though not the building — during the Jan. 6 uprising.

New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said the commissioners were violating the law and their oaths of office in refusing to certify the vote. She said that there is a process to deal with any problems that arise with an election but that the commissioners did not specify any.

“Unfortunately, when one county decides to act completely outside the law, it gives credence to others who may want to do the same thing," she said. "We have the potential to see this spread and have a domino effect.”

Numerous procedures are in place, including pre- and post-testing of voting equipment and post-election audits that ensure machines are working properly. In New Mexico, voters mark their paper ballots by hand. The ballots are then fed into a scanner to tally the results.

Vulnerabilities do exist, as with any technology, but election officials work to identify and fix them. A recent advisory issued by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency highlighted certain vulnerabilities discovered in Dominion voting systems and provided recommendations to election officials.

But those pushing false claims about voting systems want more than just paper ballots cast by hand -- they also want ballots to be counted entirely by hand. Experts say this is unreliable, time-consuming, labor-intensive and entirely unnecessary given the various safeguards.

Among the most prominent advocates for this is Jim Marchant, a former state lawmaker who on Tuesday was selected as the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Nevada. Marchant is among a group of “America First” candidates seeking to oversee elections while denying the outcome of the last one.

continues.....

Common sense is back!!! 

mickeyrat

Recent history shows that Democrats preside over much better economies, yet voters continue to trust the GOP more on the issue. Why? https://trib.al/M52q9wx

The answer may lie in voters seeing Dems as focusing on the poor, when those who work one, two, or even three jobs don’t think of themselves that way.

“I always use the example of the Child Tax credit, which was game-changing for families,” Melissa Morales, the founder of an independent Latino voter outreach group, said. “The Child Tax Credit did an incredible amount to uplift working-class people in this country. But the way that Democrats talked about it was that [it] was going to lift 40 percent of children out of poverty.… So when people hear that frame, they hear, ‘This is a program for poor people.’”

At this moment, with voters increasingly dissatisfied with Trump’s governance—including the first government shutdown since he was last in office—Democrats need to think about how to reframe their economic policies so they resonate more with those voters. 

Because while it’s true that Democrats support programs that help low-income families, and their base supports those policies, the truth is that many working-class voters don’t see themselves represented in Democratic rhetoric even when it applies to them.

mickeyrat

Lerxst1992

We may need to figure out how to reach the voters that currently exist to bring those words to life.

Go Beavers

mickeyrat said:

Recent history shows that Democrats preside over much better economies, yet voters continue to trust the GOP more on the issue. Why? https://trib.al/M52q9wx

The answer may lie in voters seeing Dems as focusing on the poor, when those who work one, two, or even three jobs don’t think of themselves that way.

“I always use the example of the Child Tax credit, which was game-changing for families,” Melissa Morales, the founder of an independent Latino voter outreach group, said. “The Child Tax Credit did an incredible amount to uplift working-class people in this country. But the way that Democrats talked about it was that [it] was going to lift 40 percent of children out of poverty.… So when people hear that frame, they hear, ‘This is a program for poor people.’”

At this moment, with voters increasingly dissatisfied with Trump’s governance—including the first government shutdown since he was last in office—Democrats need to think about how to reframe their economic policies so they resonate more with those voters. 

Because while it’s true that Democrats support programs that help low-income families, and their base supports those policies, the truth is that many working-class voters don’t see themselves represented in Democratic rhetoric even when it applies to them.

Good point, and it also made me think of anecdotal stories of adults who grew up in poverty, and a lot of them reflect on it saying they didn’t know they were poor at the time. This most likely came from parents themselves not self-identifying as poor, or at least not talking as if they are. 

mickeyrat

https://www.wosu.org/npr-news/2025-10-09/dominion-the-voting-tech-company-at-the-center-of-false-2020-claims-is-sold?fbclid=Iwb21leANWp_9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHl9EjfBpgiuedof75cbuSJPSfNGU7GYg-gB34MPAi75AiXcg5loW9QIbwKkB_aem_GpdU8wUpTjABq8v4IphCAA

Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of false fraud claims about the 2020 election, has been acquired by an entity called Liberty Vote.

"As of today, Dominion is gone," the company said in a press release Thursday. "Liberty Vote assumes full ownership and operational control." Dominion's website now redirects to libertyvote.com.

President Trump and his allies, including Rudy Giuliani, have falsely blamed Dominion and its machines for rigging the 2020 election, taking votes from Trump. The baseless claims against Dominion caused one of its executives to go into hiding in 2020, and led to numerous defamation lawsuits.

Giuliani recently reached a confidential settlement with Dominion. Most notably, Dominion won a nearly $800 million defamation case against Fox News.

Earlier this year, an official with Trump's Justice Department reached out to county clerks in Missouri and asked to inspect Dominion voting equipment they used in 2020.

The Liberty Vote release makes a couple of nods to conservative election priorities, including calling the acquisition "a bold and historic move to transform and improve election integrity in America." Conservatives in recent years have used the phrase "election integrity" and talked about increasing faith in the nation's voting systems.

The release also notes that one of Liberty Vote's priorities is "[l]everaging hand-marked paper ballots enabling compliance with President Trump's executive order, and ensuring election security and compliance with federal standards."

continues.....

josevolution

mickeyrat said:

https://www.wosu.org/npr-news/2025-10-09/dominion-the-voting-tech-company-at-the-center-of-false-2020-claims-is-sold?fbclid=Iwb21leANWp_9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHl9EjfBpgiuedof75cbuSJPSfNGU7GYg-gB34MPAi75AiXcg5loW9QIbwKkB_aem_GpdU8wUpTjABq8v4IphCAA

Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of false fraud claims about the 2020 election, has been acquired by an entity called Liberty Vote.

"As of today, Dominion is gone," the company said in a press release Thursday. "Liberty Vote assumes full ownership and operational control." Dominion's website now redirects to libertyvote.com.

President Trump and his allies, including Rudy Giuliani, have falsely blamed Dominion and its machines for rigging the 2020 election, taking votes from Trump. The baseless claims against Dominion caused one of its executives to go into hiding in 2020, and led to numerous defamation lawsuits.

Giuliani recently reached a confidential settlement with Dominion. Most notably, Dominion won a nearly $800 million defamation case against Fox News.

Earlier this year, an official with Trump's Justice Department reached out to county clerks in Missouri and asked to inspect Dominion voting equipment they used in 2020.

The Liberty Vote release makes a couple of nods to conservative election priorities, including calling the acquisition "a bold and historic move to transform and improve election integrity in America." Conservatives in recent years have used the phrase "election integrity" and talked about increasing faith in the nation's voting systems.

The release also notes that one of Liberty Vote's priorities is "[l]everaging hand-marked paper ballots enabling compliance with President Trump's executive order, and ensuring election security and compliance with federal standards."

continues.....

That’s another nail in the coffin of Democracy they now will have control of the voting system and the nation just sits and watches