The Big Lie, Con't

Once again, the actual voter fraud in 2020 and 2022 favored Trump and the GOP, not Democrats.

James Saunders, the 56-year-old Shaker Heights tax attorney convicted last week of voting multiple times in the last two general elections, was sentenced to three years in prison, a judge decided Monday morning.

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Andrew Santoli coupled Saunders' sentence with a $10,000 fine, a punishment, as Santoli detailed in last week's hearing, to match the severe violation against the nation's voting laws.

"You violated the premise that every citizen, regardless of race, creed or religion, speaks in one voice," Santoli told Saunders from the bench last Monday. "Your opinion does not outweigh other citizens."

Throughout the case, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office presented evidence that Saunders, who traveled regularly to a second home in Pompano Beach, Florida, attempted to cross states lines to vote multiple times, by mail and in person in Broward and Cuyahoga counties.

The case of election fraud was the first of its kind in 2023, county prosecutors present at trial told Scene. Because Saunders' duplicitous votes infringed on federal law, his actions in Florida were under Santoli's, and the court's, jurisdiction.

For both prosecutors present at trial and for Chief Prosecutor Michael O'Malley, the Saunders trial—and its steep sentencing—was a clear deterrent to future violators.

"One person one vote is the foundation of our democracy," O'Malley wrote in a statement. "I think the message is clear: do no commit election fraud in Cuyahoga County."

 

The system works, and it catches the actual vote cheaters.

 

And you know what?

 

It caught Trump and his merry band of clowns too.

Last Call For Lake Of Fire, Con't

With her state "election fraud" case dismissed by Arizona's supreme court, perennial loser Kari Lake is now trying to manufacture new "evidence" that the governor's race was "stolen" from her with a wholesale lie for a new round of legal appeals.

 

A May 28 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows a screenshot of a Truth Social post from former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. The post includes a clip of people touching and moving voting machines.

"WE CAUGHT THEM," reads Lake's post. "This is VIDEO EVIDENCE from Maricopa County’s own live stream – they didn’t know we were recording – that shows officials breaking into machines AFTER they were tested & sealed. They re-programmed the memory cards right before Election Day, causing 60% of polling locations in GOP areas to stop working. This is SABOTAGE!"

The Instagram post generated over 700 likes in less than a week, and the Truth Social post received over 12,000 likes. Similar posts have garnered hundreds of interactions on Instagram. A Gateway pundit article with a similar claim received over 2,000 shares on Facebook, according to social media insights tool CrowdTangle. 

 

It is of course a massive lie.

 

The video shows election workers inserting new memory cards into tabulation machines as part of standard procedures, according to a Maricopa County election spokesperson. The workers reset the machines to ensure that the memory cards have no votes stored in them. The process is not evidence of sabotage. While printers at some polling places were affected by a glitch on Election Day, the glitches were not related to this process.

Lake, a Republican, ran for governor of Arizona in 2022 and was defeated by Democrat Katie Hobbs by about 17,000 votes. She has since made numerous baseless allegations of election fraud.

Lake’s claim about sabotage is “demonstrably false,” according to Matthew Roberts, the communications manager for the Maricopa County Elections Department. The county also debunked the claim on Twitter.

 

She's lying because she needs to continue to do so in order to fleece her followers for fundraising purposes. She doesn't actually think she's won, she can't actually prove it, and everyone knows it, but the gullible fools are going to give her money anyway.

 

The grift is the only thing that matters.

BREAKING: "George Santos" Arrested On Federal Charges

New York Republican Congressman "George Santos" turned himself into custody this morning, facing 13 counts of federal charges stemming from his fraudulent 2022 campaign.

 

Embattled Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., turned himself in to federal authorities Wednesday morning as it was revealed he faces 13 criminal charges including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and false statements, officials said.

Santos was charged with:

• Seven counts of wire fraud
• Three counts of money laundering
• One count of theft of public funds
• Two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York confirmed Santos was in custody at the federal courthouse. The 20-page, 13-count indictment against Santos was unsealed shortly after he surrendered.

The indictment alleges that while Santos was paid an annual salary of $120,000 at a Florida-based investment firm in 2020, he applied for unemployment benefits in New York, receiving more that $24,000.

It also accuses Santos of soliciting donations to a company that he said would help his election to Congress, before using that money on personal purchases, including designer clothing.

And he's charged with making false statements on his Financial Disclosure Statement that he filed with the House of Representatives before his election.

Santos has faced bipartisan calls to resign after it was revealed that he lied about parts of his resume while running for Congress last year. Santos fabricated details about his education, career, ancestry, and charity work during his campaign.

Last month, he announced that he's running for reelection in 2024.

 

This should be the immediate end of his career and expulsion from the House, but Clown Master Ringmaster Kevin McCarthy is already saying "Santos" should be considered innocent until proven guilty and that McCarthy would not call for his resignation until then.

So no, nothing's going to happen to "Santos" anytime soon, and while he'll probably face a trial before facing voters again in November 2024, I can't imaging New York Republicans aren't already looking for another crook they can run.

Last Call For Lake Of Fire, Con't

The "election fraud" fraud is coming apart in Arizona, and Kari Lake's legal team is now facing the first of many sanctions and punishments in the months ahead as the hammers drop.

 

Republican Kari Lake’s lawyers were sanctioned $2,000 Thursday by the Arizona Supreme Court in their unsuccessful challenge of her defeat in the governor’s race last year to Democrat Katie Hobbs.

In an order, the state’s highest court said Lake’s attorney made “false factual statements” that more than 35,000 ballots had been improperly added to the total ballot count. The court, however, refused to order Lake to pay attorney fees to cover the costs of defending Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes in Lake’s appeal.

Chief Justice Robert Brutinel cited Lake’s challenge over signature verification remains unresolved.

Hobbs and Fontes said Lake and her attorneys should face sanctions for baselessly claiming that over 35,000 ballots were inserted into the race at a facility where a contractor scanned mail-in ballots to prepare them for county election workers to process and count.

When the high court first confronted Lake’s challenge in late March, justices said the evidence doesn’t show that over 35,000 ballots were added to the vote count in Maricopa County, home to more than 60% of the state’s voters.

Lawyers for Hobbs and Fontes told the court that Lake and her lawyers misrepresented evidence and are hurting the elections process by continuing to push baseless claims of election fraud. Attorneys for Fontes asked for the court to order Lake’s lawyers to forfeit any money they might have earned in making the appeal, arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to benefit from their own misconduct.

Lake’s lawyers said sanctions weren’t appropriate because no one can doubt that Lake honestly believes her race was determined by electoral misconduct.

Lake, who lost to Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes, was among the most vocal 2022 Republican candidates promoting former President Donald Trump’s election lies, which she made the centerpiece of her campaign. While most other election deniers around the country conceded after losing their races in November, Lake did not.

 

The good news for Kari Lake is that her claim of voter signature discrepancies is being sent back to a lower state court for review. 

The bad news for Kari Lake is also that her claim of voter signature discrepancies is being sent back to a lower state court for review.

 

When that ruling goes against her, that's going to open her up to yet more sanctions and worse.

 

Stay tuned as this Lake of Fire is going to get torched.

Walker, Georgia Arranger

Former Georgia GOP Senate loser Herschel Walker is in real trouble this week as the Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberger has broken what looks like a huge campaign finance fraud scandal, if not outright embezzlement.

 

When Herschel Walker emailed a representative for billionaire industrialist and longtime family friend Dennis Washington in March 2022, he seemed to be engaging in normal behavior for a political candidate: He was asking for money.

But unbeknownst to Washington and the billionaire’s staff, Walker’s request was far more out of the ordinary. It was something campaign finance experts are calling “unprecedented,” “stunning,” and “jaw-dropping.” Walker wasn’t just asking for donations to his campaign; he was soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal company—a company that he never disclosed on his financial statements.

Emails obtained by The Daily Beast—and verified as authentic by a person with knowledge of the exchanges—show that Walker asked Washington to wire $535,200 directly to that undisclosed company, HR Talent, LLC.

And the emails reveal that not only did Washington complete Walker’s wire requests, he was under the impression that these were, in fact, political contributions.

In the best possible circumstances, legal experts told The Daily Beast, the emails suggest violations of federal fundraising rules; in the worst case, they could be an indication of more serious crimes, such as wire fraud.

But Walker—who had been schooled on campaign finance rules since his campaign launched in August 2021, according to a person involved in those conversations—appears to have dismissed the Washington team’s concerns that the money may have gone to the wrong place. When a third party informed a Washington Companies executive that the money couldn’t be used for political purposes, they raised the issue with Walker, asking at one point whether the funds should be redirected to a super PAC supporting his candidacy.

Walker never contributed any of his own money to his campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and it’s unclear what happened to these particular funds. Walker may have ultimately returned the money to Washington, but he did not reroute the money to the super PAC, according to FEC filings and a person with direct knowledge of the events.

“It was good talking with you today,” Tim McHugh, executive vice president for the Washington Corporations, wrote to Walker last November. “After our call, [redacted] reached out to me and said [a person] clarified with you that any funds sent to the HR Talent account cannot legally be used for political purposes. Political contributions must go to either the Team Herschel or 34N22 accounts.”

34N22 was a super PAC supporting Walker. Walker was not allowed to solicit donations for the super PAC in excess of federal limits, which this amount of money explicitly was. But that was not McHugh’s concern; he was worried about the hundreds of thousands of dollars his boss had wired to HR Talent in March.

“We will need your assistance to get the prior contributions made to the HR Talent account in March corrected,” McHugh concluded in the email.

While Walker’s campaign was battered from the jump by a hurricane of controversies, this situation stands out.

According to the legal experts who spoke to The Daily Beast for this article, this scheme appears to not just be illegal—it appears to be unparalleled in its audacity and scope. The transactions raise questions about a slew of possible violations. In fact, these experts all said, the scheme was so brazen that it appears to defy explanation, ranking it among the most egregious campaign finance violations in modern history.

Saurav Ghosh, director of federal reform at Campaign Legal Center, called the arrangement “jaw-dropping.” Jordan Libowitz, communications director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said if Walker “used the campaign to funnel money into his own business, that’s one of the biggest campaign finance crimes I’ve ever heard of.” Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer and deputy executive director of Documented, remarked that the exchanges were “stunning and, to my knowledge, without parallel in recent history.”

“Campaign finance laws are designed to prevent massive under-the-table payments like those described here,” Fischer said. “While we don’t have all the facts, these emails point to highly illegal, potentially even criminal activity.”

 

I'm hoping this means the feds come knocking and Merrick Garland has a few surprises for him, as this looks like the most slam dunk campaign fraud scam in recent history.

We'll see how this going, but my question is would we ever have known about this if Walker had won five months ago?

Burning Lake Of Fire, Con't

Professional election loser Kari Lake had nearly all of her "election fraud" case tossed by the Arizona Supreme Court this week. 

 

Arizona's top court has declined to hear Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake's challenge to her election loss, but kept the case alive by sending one of Lake's claims back to a county judge to review.

Lake asked the Arizona Supreme Court to consider her case after a Maricopa County judge and state appeals court rejected her claims that she was the rightful governor, or that a new election should take place.

The former television news anchor made seven legal claims in her case, six of which the state's top court said were properly dismissed by lower courts, according to an opinion released Wednesday written by Chief Justice Robert Brutinel.

Those included claims that tens of thousands of ballots were "injected" into the election, which Lake called an "undisputed fact" in her lawsuit, as well as alleging that problems with tabulation machines disenfranchised "thousands" of voters.

The opinion said Lake's challenges were "insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law."

But the sixth legal claim, which has to do with Lake's allegation that Maricopa County did not follow signature verification procedures, must receive a second look by a county judge, the court ordered. The county and appeals courts interpreted Lake’s signature-related challenge as applying to the policies themselves, not how the policies were applied in 2022, and dismissed her claim based on grounds that she filed her legal challenge too late.

But that was an error, the Supreme Court said, noting, "Lake could not have brought this challenge before the election."

Lake's claim invokes a section of Arizona law that requires signatures on early ballot envelopes be checked against the signature already in a voter's file, and sets the process and timeline for verifying, or "curing," a ballot if the signature doesn't appear to match. She claimed Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer's office accepted "a material number" of ballots with unmatched signatures last year.

The Supreme Court did not evaluate Lake's signature claim on its merit, only on the legal justifications offered by prior courts. The court's order requires Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson to evaluate that single element of Lake's case again to determine if the claim was properly dismissed previously, or if Lake can prove “votes (were) affected ‘in sufficient numbers to alter the outcome of the election.’”

The Supreme Court quoted the appeals court ruling, saying that to prove her claim, Lake must provide a “competent mathematical basis to conclude that the outcome would plausibly have been different, not simply an untethered assertion of uncertainty.”

In response to the ruling, Richer, who also is a Republican, said, “I of course have the utmost respect for both the people sitting on the court and the court as an institution, and we’ll now proceed and win, again, for about the 30th time."

His office, as well as the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, have defended their work in numerous lawsuits stemming from the November election, and became targets for attack among losing Republican candidates and their allies.

Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, a defendant in the lawsuit, did not comment Wednesday evening on the court's ruling.

Alex Nicoll, a spokesperson for Lake, declined comment, noting Lake’s longstanding refusal to speak to The Arizona Republic. In a separate statement sent to The Republic and other media outlets, Lake made various claims that cannot be verified and overstated the court’s ruling. She said she was "thrilled" by the court's decision and that the signature issue “alone casts the veracity of Katie Hobb’s victory in serious doubt.”

In addition to further review of the signature verification piece, there is another unresolved issue in the case: whether Lake should face sanctions for filing what Hobbs’ attorneys have dubbed a frivolous and bad-faith lawsuit. Lawyers for Hobbs asked the court to order Lake to cover their costs and attorneys' fees, and Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ lawyers sought unspecified sanctions as well.

The Supreme Court said Lake, Hobbs and Fontes could file court arguments on the issue, but restricted those arguments only to Lake’s factual claims, such as that over 35,000 ballots were “added” to affect the outcome of the election.

Brutinel succinctly shot down that claim.

“The record does not reflect that 35,563 unaccounted ballots were added to the total count,” he wrote in the court’s opinion. “The motions for sanctions will be considered in due course.”

 

So Lake may have a legal claim to a small part of her case, which isn't actually something that would have affected the outcome of the election at all. Meanwhile, legal sanctions against her for wasting the state's time are being considered.

 

The bigger picture here is that Lake's claims that the election was stolen from her were laughed out of court completely.  It's ball game, and the only questions left are how badly Lake is going to be made to pay for her farce.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Nobody on earth should be surprised that Albuquerque police have arrested a loser Republican for the shootings over the last month at New Mexico Democrats' homes and offices. 

 

Police in Albuquerque on Monday announced the arrest of a failed candidate for state Legislature in a string of shootings at locations associated with high-profile Democratic leaders.

Republican Solomon Peña is accused of conspiring with and paying four men to carry out four shootings at the homes of two Bernalillo County commissioners and two state legislators.

Two other shootings previously believed to be linked to the case so far have not been connected to the suspect, police said at a news conference early Monday evening.

On Jan. 9 police announced the arrest of another suspect in the case and said they took possession of a firearm possibly used in one of the shootings.

But on Monday, Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina described Peña as the initiator of the shootings.

"It is believed that he is the mastermind behind this," he said at Monday's news conference.

Peña was arrested by a SWAT team in the Albuquerque area Monday, the chief said. Ballistics evidence from one of the shootings connected the case to the suspect, Medina said.

 

So yeah, a Republican who lost paid people to terrorize the Democrats who won.

Sounds like a terrorist conspiracy to me, which should land Mr. Peña in prison for several decades. Let's see what Merrick Garland and the DoJ decide to do here. He made dozens of Twitter references that his election loss was "fraud" and "stolen."

Then he paid people to shoot up the homes and offices of the Democrats who beat him.

Remember, the Republican response to a Democratic win is to attack it legally...and illegally.

Fantasma Santos, Prizrak Edition

That George Santos was somehow going to be involved with Russian oligarch money may actually be the least shocking thing about the whole pack of lies he's told to get elected.

 

George Santos, the freshman Republican congressman from New York who lied about his biography, has deeper ties than previously known to a businessman who cultivated close links with a onetime Trump confidant and who is the cousin of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, according to video footage and court documents.

Andrew Intrater and his wife each gave the maximum $5,800 to Santos’ main campaign committee and tens of thousands more since 2020 to committees linked to him, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Intrater’s cousin is Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role in the Russian energy industry.

The relationship between Santos and Intrater goes beyond campaign contributions, according to a statement made privately by Santos in 2020 and a court filing the following year in a lawsuit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against a Florida-based investment firm, Harbor City Capital, where Santos worked for more than a year.

Taken together, the evidence suggests Santos may have had a business relationship with Intrater as Santos was first entering politics in 2020. It also shows, according to the SEC filing, that Intrater put hundreds of thousands of dollars into Santos’ onetime employer, Harbor City, which was accused by regulators of running a Ponzi scheme. Neither Santos nor Intrater responded to requests for comment. Attorneys who have represented Intrater also did not respond.

The congressman, whose election from Long Island last year helped the GOP secure its narrow House majority, has apologized for what he called “résumé embellishment” while rebuffing calls for his resignation. He is under scrutiny by prosecutors in New York and Rio de Janeiro.

Ties between Santos, 34, and Intrater, 60, reflect the ways Santos found personal and political support on his path to public office.

While Intrater is a U.S. citizen, his company, the investment firm Columbus Nova, has historically had extensive ties to the business interests of his Russian cousin. As recently as 2018, when Vekselberg was sanctioned by the Treasury Department, his conglomerate was Columbus Nova’s largest client, the company confirmed to The Post that year.

Intrater’s interactions in 2016 and 2017 with Michael Cohen, who at the time was working as a lawyer for Donald Trump, were probed during special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible links between Trump and the Kremlin.

Intrater’s company paid the lawyer and self-described Trump fixer to identify deals for his business, and court records show they exchanged hundreds of texts and phone calls. Neither Intrater nor Vekselberg was accused of wrongdoing in Mueller’s investigation.

 

Sure, but Michael Cohen was.

 

Look how much stuff that has been uncovered since people began digging into Santos, and look how much the GOP leadership knew and ignored in order to get him into office.

 

None of it is a coincidence, I assure you.

Phantasma Santos, Con't

Professional con man and Republican Congressman (but I repeat myself) George Santos is discovering the hard way that when your entire life is a juicy lie and that the GOP crime family had dirt on you, there's no longer a reason for the press to stop digging.

 

In late 2021, as he prepared to make a second run for a suburban New York City House seat, George Santos gave permission for his campaign to commission a routine background study on him.

Campaigns frequently rely on this kind of research, known as vulnerability studies, to identify anything problematic that an opponent might seize on. But when the report came back on Mr. Santos, the findings by a Washington research firm were far more startling, suggesting a pattern of deception that cut to the heart of the image he had cultivated as a wealthy financier.

Some of Mr. Santos’s own vendors were so alarmed after seeing the study in late November 2021 that they urged him to drop out of the race, and warned that he could risk public humiliation by continuing. When Mr. Santos disputed key findings and vowed to continue running, members of the campaign team quit, according to three of the four people The New York Times spoke to with knowledge of the study.

The episode, which has not been previously reported, is the most explicit evidence to date that a small circle of well-connected Republican campaign professionals had indications far earlier than the public that Mr. Santos was spinning an elaborate web of deceits, and that the candidate himself had been warned about just how vulnerable those lies were to unraveling.

Fraudulent academic degrees. Involvement in a firm accused of a Ponzi scheme. Multiple evictions and a suspended driver’s license. All of it was in the report, which also said that Mr. Santos, who is openly gay, had been married to a woman. The report did not offer conclusive details, but some people briefed on the findings wondered whether the marriage was done for immigration purposes.

It remains unclear who else, if anyone, learned about the background study’s contents at the time, or if the information made its way to party leaders in New York or Washington. Mr. Santos, 34, managed to keep almost all of it from the public until after he was elected, when an investigation by The Times independently unearthed the problematic claims documented by researchers and others that they missed.

After The Times sent a detailed list of questions for this story, a lawyer for Mr. Santos, Joe Murray, said “it would be inappropriate to respond due to ongoing investigations.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Santos’s congressional office did not respond to a similar request for comment.

Mr. Santos himself has admitted to some fabrications, but insists he was merely embellishing his qualifications. He has vowed to serve out a two-year term in Congress. State, local and federal prosecutors are now investigating his activity.

So it's no longer an issue of whether or not Kevin McCarthy and the crooks, thieves, and grifters will protect their fellow criminal George Santos, it's all about why they have to do so in order to save their own hides.

They knew.

The existence of the vulnerability study underscores one of the most vexing questions still surrounding the strange saga of George Santos: How did the gate-keeping system of American politics — Republican leaders, adversarial Democrats and the prying media — allow a fabulist who boasted about phantom mansions and a fake résumé get away with his con for so long?

Interviews with more than two dozen associates, adversaries and donors, as well as contemporaneous communications and other documents reviewed by The Times, show that Mr. Santos inspired no shortage of suspicion during his 2022 campaign, including in the upper echelons of his own party.

Well-connected supporters suspected him of lying and demanded to see his résumé. Another former campaign vendor warned a state party official about what he believed were questionable business practices. And the head of the main House Republican super PAC told some lawmakers and donors that he believed Mr. Santos’s story did not add up.

But in each case, rather than denounce Mr. Santos publicly, the Republicans looked the other way. They neglected to get the attention of more powerful leaders or to piece together shards of doubt about him, and allowed him to run unopposed in the 2022 primary. Some assumed that Mr. Santos’s falsehoods were garden variety political embellishments; others thought Democrats would do their dirty work for them and Mr. Santos would be exposed in the heat of a general election campaign.

 

"We ran a crook, but it's the Dems' fault they didn't find out!"

 

Sure, Jan.

Last Call For It's All About Suppression, Con't

A Trump "alternate" elector for Wisconsin is of course on the Wisconsin Election Commission, and he's more than happy to reveal the goals of the Republican controlled panel to keep Black people from voting however they can.

 

Republican Robert Spindell, a member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, is proud as a peacock of the work Republicans did to suppress the vote in Milwaukee in the November 2022 election. Spindell, who also serves as chairperson of the party’s Fourth Congressional District, which includes much of Milwaukee County and almost all of the city of Milwaukee, sent an email to Republicans in the district hailing the party’s success at undermining the democratic process:

“In the City of Milwaukee, with the 4th Congressional District Republican Party working very closely with the RPW, RNC, Republican Assembly & Senate Campaign Committees, Statewide Campaigns and RPMC in the Black and Hispanic areas, we can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”

“…this great and important decrease in Democrat votes in the City” was due to a “well thought out multi-faceted plan,” Spindell bragged, that included:

• “Biting Black Radio Negative Commercials run last few weeks of the election cycle straight at Dem Candidates…

• A substantial & very effective Republican Coordinated Election Integrity program resulting with lots of Republican paid Election Judges & trained Observers & extremely significant continued Court Litigation.”

Urban Milwaukee shared these comments with Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, who was momentarily stunned.

“Wow,” Wikler said. “That’s as ugly as it gets. I have never seen someone take credit so blatantly for suppressing the vote. We saw the same techniques with the Russian effort to suppress the vote in 2016.”

In the 2016 presidential election, Russian trolls targeted Black people with social media messages attacking Democrat Hillary Clinton to “confuse, distract, and ultimately discourage” Black citizens and other pro-Clinton blocs from voting.

Spindell’s message also pointed to Republican efforts to sell GOP candidates to Black and Hispanic voters, including opening party offices in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and holding Black & Hispanic Republican oriented events, but the net efffect, he noted, was to convince them not to vote. “Promoting the Republican “Cares” Message; pointing out the many flaws of the Democrat Candidates; coupled with a Lack of Interest, persuaded many voters not to vote,” his message bragged.

 

The goal is to rob Black voters of their vote, period. This is what I mean by systemic racism, plain and simple.

 

Never forget that they see us as subhumans who deserve to be controlled like pets or destroyed like vermin.  They hate us that much, and are willing to spend tens of millions to make billions in hurting us.

I'm tired of it.

Holidaze Week: New Year, Same Old NY Times

The New York Times is very eager to tell you how the New York Times wasn't responsible for the terrible poling that vastly overestimated the "Red Wave" in 2022 even though the New York Times had terrible polling that vastly overestimated the "Red Wave" in 2022.

It's a real mystery, New York Times!

 

Not for the first time, a warped understanding of the contours of a national election had come to dominate the views of political operatives, donors, journalists and, in some cases, the candidates themselves.

The misleading polls of 2022 did not just needlessly spook some worried candidates into spending more money than they may have needed to on their own races. They also led some candidates — in both parties — who had a fighting chance of winning to lose out on money that could have made it possible for them to do so, as those controlling the purse strings believed polls that inaccurately indicated they had no chance at all.

In the election’s immediate aftermath, the polling failures appeared to be in keeping with misfires in 2016 and 2020, when the strength of Donald J. Trump’s support was widely underestimated, and with the continuing struggles of an industry that arose with the corded home telephone to adapt to the mass migration to cellphones and text messaging. Indeed, some of the same Republican-leaning pollsters who erred in 2022 had built credibility with their contrarian, but accurate, polling triumphs in recent elections.

But a New York Times review of the forces driving the narrative of a coming red wave, and of that narrative’s impact, found new factors at play.

Traditional nonpartisan pollsters, after years of trial and error and tweaking of their methodologies, produced polls that largely reflected reality. But they also conducted fewer polls than in the past.

That paucity allowed their accurate findings to be overwhelmed by an onrush of partisan polls in key states that more readily suited the needs of the sprawling and voracious political content machine — one sustained by ratings and clicks, and famished for fresh data and compelling narratives.

The skewed red-wave surveys polluted polling averages, which are relied upon by campaigns, donors, voters and the news media. It fed the home-team boosterism of an expanding array of right-wing media outlets — from Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast and “The Charlie Kirk Show” to Fox News and its top-rated prime-time lineup. And it spilled over into coverage by mainstream news organizations, including The Times, that amplified the alarms being sounded about potential Democratic doom.

 

A three-word mea culpa down in paragraph ten. Efficient!

 

Look, the Times is right about Real Clear Politics being absolute shitbags, but the Times should have known better, especially with its own polling shop.

It did not know better.  Luckily, voters did.

Holidaze Week: Fantasma Santos, Con't

Constantly consistently, and pathologically lying about his resume and his background, GOP Rep-elect George Santos is in increasing amounts of trouble. He refuses to resign, and his MAGA troll defenders are screeching that the only reason Santos's lies are being pursued is because he's an openly-gay Republican, whom Democrats are targeting for extermination (you know, instead of Republicans targeting LGBTQ+ folks as usual!)

Santos's larger, more immediate problem is that while lying about his college curriculum vitae or his place of employment aren't strictly illegal but is highly unethical, lying about how he got all his considerable millions to loan to his campaign actually is against the law, as Semafor's Kadia Goba explains.

When he first ran for Congress in 2020, Santos, who appears to have suffered from financial trouble for much of his adult life, filed disclosures listing no assets and a salary of $55,000, which he earned as a vice president at LinkBridge Investors, a business development firm. But the filings from his most recent run suggest he came into sudden riches, making between $3.5 million and $11.5 million from a company he founded called the Devolder Organization in 2021. He loaned his campaign more than $700,000.

In a phone conversation with Semafor, Santos offered a short tick-tock of how he made his money that left certain key details unanswered.

At LinkBridge, he said, he worked in the so-called “capital introduction” industry, which typically brings together investors and hedge funds. He eventually left that job for Harbor City Capital, a Florida firm the Securities and Exchange Commission accused in April 2021 of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Santos was not charged in the fraud, and he says he departed in March, shortly before the company ran into legal trouble, in order to strike out on his own. He incorporated Devolder in May, a few weeks after the S.E.C. filed suit against Harbor City.

Santos said that Devolder was also in the capital introduction business, including “deal building” and “specialty consulting” for “high net worth individuals.”

As an example of his work, he said a client might want to sell a plane or a boat. “I'm not going to go list it and broker it,” he said. “What I will do is I will go look out there within my Rolodex and be like: ‘Hey, are you looking for a plane?’ ‘Are you looking for a boat?’ I just put that feeler out there.” He said he had a network of wealthy investors, family offices, “institutions” and endowments that included about 15,000 people. Within the first six months of starting Devolder, he said he “landed a couple of million-dollar contracts.”

“If you’re looking at a $20 million yacht, my referral fee there can be anywhere between $200,000 and $400,000,” he said.

Santos did not respond to follow-up questions asking what the million-dollar contracts entailed, or if he could share the names of previous clients from his business.

Devolder was dissolved in September 2022 after failing to file an annual report. Given that timing, Rep.-elect Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., has raised the question of whether it was created merely to funnel illegal campaign donations. Santos added further to the mystery by reviving Devolder in Florida last week after the New York Times ran its initial bombshell story about fabrications in his resume, at an address reportedly owned by a former Harbor City executive.

Santos told Semafor that Devolder only shut down because his accountant accidentally submitted its yearly paperwork late.

Republicans have been reluctant to weigh in on Santos’s controversy. But on Tuesday, Rep.-elect Nick LaLota, R-N.Y. followed Democrats in calling for an ethics investigation and law-enforcement involvement “if necessary.” Rep.-elect Anthony D’Esposito, R-N.Y. from the neighboring district urged Santos to “pursue a path of honesty.”

Goldman, a former prosecutor, told Semafor he thought a formal inquiry might not be necessary if Santos simply volunteered documents about his business dealings and finances.

“If he wants to avoid an investigation and he wants to truly come clean, as he claimed he was trying to do yesterday and that other Republican members elected called for him to do, then he should be an open book and reveal all of this related to the Devolder Organization,” Goldman said.

That, however, seems unlikely to happen soon.

“I don’t dance to the tune of Congressman-elect Dan Goldman,” Santos told Semafor. “I don’t dance to the tune of these guys. If it was requested of me to produce any documentation from this organization, I have no problem doing so to people with the proper authority, not to authoritarian members of congress that think they have authority over their peers.”

 

He's certainly suggesting that the he won't be cooperating with any House Ethics Committee investigation, not that it will produce anything under a GOP-controlled House. But he also seems to be suggesting that maybe the SEC or Justice Department should have a look, and frankly I think they should. 

 

But it turns out that local Nassau County Republican DA Anne Donnelly is taking the lead. 

Anne Donnelly, the Republican district attorney for Nassau County, has opened an investigation into GOP Rep.-elect George Santos after he admitted lying about his work experience and educational background.

Santos, 34, admitted Monday to fabricating key parts of his resume that he had announced on the campaign trail, including that he did not graduate from Baruch College, work for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs, or own any properties.

Santos' admission came one week after a New York Times report found holes in the record he touted during his campaign for New York's 3rd Congressional District.

Donnelly, a longtime Nassau prosecutor who took office at the beginning of the year, told Newsday in a statement:

“The numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-Elect Santos are nothing short of stunning. The residents of Nassau County and other parts of the third district must have an honest and accountable representative in Congress. No one is above the law and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it."

Pretty sure Santos is in real trouble here.

 

Having said that, NY Dems and the local media can't be spared from the criticism either, because the even larger issue is exactly how this con man won a House seat in the first place as former Dem Rep. Steve Israel explains.

Voter disconnection must be part of the explanation for why Santos won. Voters in NY-3 say they value integrity and honesty, and I believe they do. But they weren’t on the lookout for a huckster politician; they didn’t think that could happen here, because it hadn’t before.

Moderate Democratic candidates have fared well in the region since 2000. Had Joe Biden run in the redrawn NY-3 map in 2020, he would have won by 8.5 points instead of 10.5, according to Politico. This year, most political observers viewed the district as naturally Democratic, especially against a Republican who’d lost his last election. That’s what I mean by Democratic complacency: the complacency of the establishment.

When he ran against Tom Suozzi, my successor, in 2020, Santos was a complete unknown. I asked Suozzi if he’d found anything of note in his opposition research, but Suozzi said he hadn’t bothered to do much. “It was the middle of COVID,” he said. Santos “had only $40,000 in his campaign account, and he was a nut. We ignored him and won by 12 points.”

Santos ran again in 2022, maybe because he understood that being ignored was a strategic advantage. This time around, the DCCC prepared an initial research document that raised plenty of red flags. The committee turned that document over to the Democratic candidate, Robert Zimmerman, who says his campaign “was unrelenting in getting people’s attention.” But, according to Zimmerman, the prevailing response was along the lines of This guy isn’t going to win, so he’s not a story.

Only after Santos defied expectations did that dynamic change. And by that time, it was too late for voters to react to Santos’s long con. Here’s where media decline enters the story.

The media’s failure to dig into Santos shows the predicament that local newsrooms face in 2022. Newsday dominates the media landscape on Long Island. And its reporters do quality work—they turned out an important investigation just a few years ago that exposed racism in the local real-estate industry. But they don’t have the resources to cover everything—not even everything in their political backyard—and they appear to have written off NY-3 as low priority given the district’s Democratic tilt. So did all the other once-mighty New York–area media operations.

Some observers have also criticized Zimmerman’s campaign for not fully investing in opposition research based on the initial DCCC project. Perhaps that criticism is justified, but we shouldn’t let the Republican Party off the hook. Republicans accepted Santos’s narrative without due diligence because they prioritized extreme ideology over actual qualifications. Santos was at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, and has even claimed that he helped arrested insurrectionists with their legal fees.

NY-3 voters should have had an honest choice between two candidates—not a choice between Zimmerman and Santos’s fan-fiction version of himself. Politicians embellish résumés; if that were a crime, every candidate in America would be in prison. But Santos’s lies are an assault on democratic norms. The Republicans should have vetted Santos. The Democrats should have checked him out more thoroughly. The media should have as well.

But now, barring a surprise Santos resignation or action following investigations by the House Ethics Committee and the Department of Justice, Long Islanders—and the nation—are stuck with a congressman who is a figment of his own imagination. The caucus of unhinged representatives—the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, the Lauren Boeberts, the Matt Gaetzes—has just increased by one.

 

Trump lied about everything, and lied his way into the WHite House as Democrats in 2016 got complacent, lazy, and apathetic. The same thing happened on a smaller scale in 2022, and the issues of apathy, complacency, and outright laziness in the Democratic establishment continues.

Santos is what happens when you don't fight like hell for every seat.

Remember that going forward.

Holidaze Week: Lake Woe? Be Gone! Con't

We've now reached the "and find out" phase of Kari Lake's "election fraud" crash and burn nonsense, as confirmed Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs is seeking $500,000 in sanctions and other punishment for Lake's colossal time waste of a lawsuit.

Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs and Maricopa County filed for sanctions Monday against Republican Kari Lake, less than 48 hours after a judge ruled against Lake's efforts to have herself declared the winner of Arizona's governor race.

Hobbs and the county asked for sanctions against Lake and her legal team after an Arizona judge denied Lake's bid to reverse the results of the November election in a two-day trial. Lake, a prominent election denier and Trump ally, was allowed to go to trial last week with two of her 10 claims, which alleged misconduct with ballot printers and problems with ballot chain of custody.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson denied Lake’s challenge after the trial in a 10-page ruling Saturday. He said the court did not find clear and convincing evidence of misconduct that would have changed the election results. Thompson also noted that the defendants had stated their intention to seek sanctions against Lake and ordered them to file a motion for sanctions by Monday morning.

Attorneys for Hobbs, who has been Arizona's secretary of state for four years, joined the county in its filing Monday seeking $25,050 from Lake, which includes attorney fees for Hobbs and the state’s most populous county. The county took aim at Lake’s remarks before the election indicating she would not accept the results unless she won, as well as her “groundless” and “frivolous” lawsuit after the election was certified.

“Before a single vote was counted in the 2022 general election, Kari Lake publicly stated that she would accept the results of the gubernatorial election only if she were the winning candidate,” the county said in the filing.

“But she has not simply failed to publicly acknowledge the election results. Instead, she filed a groundless, seventy-page election contest lawsuit against the Governor-Elect, the Secretary of State, and Maricopa County and several of its elected officials and employees (but no other county or its employees), thereby dragging them and this Court into this frivolous pursuit.”

Lake plans to appeal but it's a moot point as the election was duly certified and Hobbs will be sworn in on Monday as Governor. There's nothing Lake can do to prevent it, and if Lake decides she's going to do something extremely stupid and/or extralegal, I hope Hobbs doesn't hesitate to press charges.

We'll see. This should be over, but it's not going to be anytime soon, I suspect.

Holidaze Week: Lake Woe? Be Gone!

Kari Lake just lost her ridiculous "voting fraud" case in Arizona, and she gets nothing but coal (and hopefully crushing legal and financial sanctions) for Christmas.

An Arizona judge on Saturday rebuffed an effort by Kari Lake, the defeated GOP candidate for governor in Arizona, to reverse the outcome of her November election, ruling against her after a two-day trial that showcased speculation about systematic malfeasance at the polls but failed to prove it.

The finding was in line with recent judgments against Abe Hamadeh and Mark Finchem, the unsuccessful candidates for attorney general and secretary of state, respectively, who also sought to challenge their losses. Taken together, the rulings show how the judiciary in Arizona, a state rife with distrust in the democratic process, rejected challenges to election results and affirmed the will of voters.

Lake, a former television news anchor and acolyte of former president Donald Trump, lost the Nov. 8 election by more than 17,000 votes. After making election denialism a centerpiece of her campaign, she refused to concede, even after the result was certified on Dec. 5. Days later, she sued her opponent, Democrat Katie Hobbs, as well as officials in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and more than half the state’s voters.

Lake’s complaint, which asked that she be declared the winner, centered on problems with printers in Maricopa County. Those problems required some voters to wait in line, travel to another polling place or deposit their ballots in secure drawers for tabulation at a central location. County officials have said the problems resulted from insufficient printer heat settings. They also acknowledged at trial that “shrink-to-fit” settings at several voting locations caused ballots to be rejected, though they were all duplicated and ultimately counted. A deeper analysis is still underway, they testified.

A judge found on Election Day that the mechanical issues did not prevent anyone from voting. But in a 69-page filing, attorneys for Lake used a grab bag of unproven assertions and anecdotal accounts to argue that “hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots infected the election in Maricopa County.”

The claims reached far beyond the administration of voting to include conspiratorial allegations about efforts to combat election misinformation, which the filing deemed an “unconstitutional government censorship operation,” as well as evidence from the 2020 election.

The judge hearing Lake’s case, Peter A. Thompson of Maricopa County Superior Court, earlier tossed most of her assertions but allowed arguments to proceed on two claims — that employees at Maricopa County’s ballot contractor stuffed extra ballots into the system and that the printer problems on Election Day were intentional.

In Saturday’s 10-page ruling, Thompson said the court “acknowledges the anger and frustration of voters who were subjected to inconvenience and confusion at voter centers as technical problems arose during the 2022 general election.”

“But this Court’s duty is not solely to incline an ear to public outcry,” he wrote. “It is to subject plaintiff’s claims and defendants’ actions to the light of the courtroom and scrutiny of the law.”

 

Katie Hobbs' defense team was not nearly as sanguine.

A lawyer for Hobbs told the court that Lake’s lawsuit represents what is “rotten in Arizona.”

“For the past several years, our democracy and its basic guiding principles have been under sustained assault from candidates who just cannot or will not accept the fact that they lost,” said the lawyer, Abha Khanna. “The judiciary has served as a bulwark against these efforts to undo our democratic system from within, and we ask this court to assume that role once again.”

In a closing statement, Khanna said, “Kari Lake lost this election and must lose this election contest. The reason she lost is not because of a printer error, not because of missing paperwork, not because the election was rigged against her, and certainly not for a lack of a full opportunity to prove her claims in a court of law.”

“Kari Lake lost the election because, at the end of the day, she received fewer votes than Katie Hobbs,” Khanna added.

 

Sadly, I don't think we've seen the last of Kari Lake. I think she's going to lose her bolts and come apart, right up until the Arizona State Capitol Police decide to detain her for threats made on the life of Hobbs. 

On the other hand, Arizona Republicans, narrowly controlling the state legislature, can certainly try to make Hobbs' life miserable. We'll see if this Lake drowns in her own misery.

 

 

 

Last Call For Lake Woe? Be Gone!

Professional Arizona Republican Election Loser Kari Lake will actually get a chance to prove her claims in court, as a judge tossed most of her election fraud case...but not all of it.

 

A Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled Monday that Arizona Republican Kari Lake, who lost last month’s gubernatorial race, will be allowed to head to trial on two narrow claims in an election lawsuit.

Judge Peter Thompson ruled that the majority of the claims Lake made in her initial complaint – 8 out of 10 – would be immediately dismissed. The motion to dismiss hearing in Maricopa County did not present evidence or witness testimony. But on two of the counts, the judge found Lake should be allowed to proceed to a trial to attempt to prove intentional misconduct that resulted in her loss.

Lake lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state, by about 17,000 votes.

The judge narrowed one allegation involving the printers on Election Day, allowing the Lake campaign to present evidence to back her claim that a Maricopa County employee had interfered with Election Day printers resulting in her losing votes.

The judge will also allow the Lake team to present evidence that Maricopa County violated its election manual regarding ballot chain of custody. The Lake campaign claims an unknown number of ballots were added, resulting in her loss. The judge called this claim a dispute of fact, rather than law, so Lake should be allowed to present her evidence in court.

Despite most of her lawsuit being dismissed, Lake tweeted, “Our Election Case is going to trial. Katie Hobbs attempt to have our case thrown out FAILED. She will have to take the stand & testify.”

She added: “Arizona, We will have our day in court!”

Lake has been tweeting out links to a fundraising site, urging followers to send money to support her legal effort.

The judge also ruled that Hobbs could be called to testify in her capacity as secretary of state, an office she’ll hold until she is sworn in as governor.

Democratic attorney Marc Elias, whose legal team is representing Hobbs, framed the court decision as a victory, pointing out that most of the claims were dismissed and that a higher hurdle lies ahead in the trial. “Proving intentional wrongdoing and that it affected the outcome of the election will be impossible for Lake,” Elias tweeted.

 

Again, Lake is alleging deliberate election fraud, specifically through the fabrication of ballots by Katie Hobbs. She will have to prove that to a judge.

It will not end well for her, and that's a good thing. Heavy sanctions should be applied to Lake and her legal team when this suit fails.

Last Call For Fantasma Santos

New York Republican George Santos, who won NY-3's House seat on Long Island in November, seems like on the surface the kind of Republican who could have a long career as the "reasonable" Red State warrior in Blue New York, young, openly gay, and charismatic, the well-educated scion of a Long Island real estate empire and the son of Brazilian immigrants.  

The problem is of course that like many Republicans, he's an inveterate liar.

 

George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.

His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.

But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.

Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.

There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.

His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.

Yet the firm, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is something of a mystery. On a campaign website, Mr. Santos once described Devolder as his “family’s firm” that managed $80 million in assets. On his congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors. But Mr. Santos’s disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three election law experts said could be problematic if such clients exist.

And while Mr. Santos has described a family fortune in real estate, he has not disclosed, nor could The Times find, records of his properties.

Mr. Santos’s eight-point victory, in a district in northern Long Island and northeast Queens that previously favored Democrats, was considered a mild upset. He had lost decisively in the same district in 2020 to Tom Suozzi, then the Democratic incumbent, and had seemed to be too wedded to former President Donald J. Trump and his stances to flip his fortunes.

His appearance earlier this month at a gala in Manhattan attended by white nationalists and right-wing conspiracy theorists underscored his ties to Mr. Trump’s right-wing base.

At the same time, new revelations uncovered by The Times — including the omission of key information on Mr. Santos’s personal financial disclosures, and criminal charges for check fraud in Brazil — have the potential to create ethical and possibly legal challenges once he takes office.

Mr. Santos did not respond to repeated requests from The Times that he furnish either documents or a résumé with dates that would help to substantiate the claims he made on the campaign trail. He also declined to be interviewed, and neither his lawyer nor Big Dog Strategies, a Republican-oriented political consulting group that handles crisis management, responded to a detailed list of questions.

The lawyer, Joe Murray, said in a short statement that it was “no surprise that Congressman-elect Santos has enemies at The New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations.”

 

So he lied about his work at Goldman Sachs, he lied about his Baruch College degree, he lied about his family business, and oh yeah he's wanted for bad checks back in Brazil.

 

That Democrats in the state left Tom Suozzi's seat open for this clown to win it over Robert Zimmerman, figuring Zimmerman would win by osmosis or something, should serve as a critical lesson to the state's cancerous Democratic state party.

The fact that this level of scrutiny was not given to Santos until after her won with the rank lies and fabrications is a failure of the NY Times itself. This white supremacist clown should have been exposed months ago.

But the NY Democratic Party should have had this oppo research ready to go. Even an afternoon of work would have cost Santos the race, and they just didn't care to do basic due diligence.

 

Better late than never, and hopefully he faces crushing ethics and campaign finance investigations that drive him out of politics for good. But he never should have been allowed to run in the first damn place, let alone win.

 

And in the end? This is all the fault of the GOP, with another material fraudster in office.

Do better, Entire State of New Fucking York.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

As I've been telling you for years now, Republicans consider any election they lose to be "fraud", and Arizona GOP loser Kari Lake is no different.

 

Kari Lake, the losing Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, filed a lawsuit Friday contesting the results of an election that was certified by the state this week.

Ms. Lake’s lawsuit came after she had spent weeks making a series of public statements and social media posts aimed at sowing doubt in the outcome of a contest she lost by more than 17,000 votes to her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs. That loss was certified in documents signed on Monday by Ms. Hobbs, who currently serves as secretary of state.

A former news anchor, Ms. Lake centered her candidacy on false conspiratorial claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald J. Trump, who had endorsed her. For the past month, Ms. Lake, her campaign and other allies have been soliciting Election Day accounts from voters on social media and at rallies.

“If the process was illegitimate, then so are the results,” Ms. Lake said on Twitter on Friday evening after announcing her lawsuit. “Stay tuned, folks.”

Ms. Hobbs called Ms. Lake’s suit “baseless” in a post of her own on Twitter, describing it as the “latest desperate attempt to undermine our democracy and throw out the will of the voters.”

Ms. Lake sued Ms. Hobbs as well as officials in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is Arizona’s largest county.

The suit claims that the election was corrupted in Maricopa County and that she should be declared the winner. The 70-page filing relies on a hodgepodge of allegations, ranging from voter and poll worker accounts to poll numbers claiming that voters agreed with Ms. Lake on the election’s mismanagement. Some of what is cited comes not from last month’s election but from the 2020 contest. Other allegations accuse officials of wrongdoing for taking part in efforts to try to tamp down election misinformation.

Fields Moseley, a spokesman for Maricopa County, said the court system was the proper place for campaigns to make their case to challenge results.

“Maricopa County respects the election contest process and looks forward to sharing facts about the administration of the 2022 general election and our work to ensure every legal voter had an opportunity to cast their ballot,” Mr. Moseley said.

A number of those cited as experts in the lawsuit and one of the lawyers who filed the case — Kurt Olsen — are part of a loose election-denial network led by Mike Lindell, the pillow company entrepreneur who has been pushing conspiracy theories about election machines since early 2021. Another Lake lawyer, Bryan Blehm, represented the contractor Cyber Ninjas during the partisan audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results last year and also represented supervisors in Cochise County this year in a lawsuit over an attempt to carry out a hand-counted audit plan.

Ms. Lake’s legal action came as lawsuits were also filed Friday by two other Arizona Republicans who lost their midterm elections: Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, and Abe Hamadeh, the attorney general candidate. Mr. Hamadeh, who is trailing his opponent by 511 votes in a race that is undergoing a recount, was joined in his lawsuit by the Republican National Committee.

Mr. Hamadeh previously filed suit late last month seeking to overturn the election, but the suit was dismissed by a Maricopa County judge for being filed prematurely. His new suit — filed in Mohave County, a Republican stronghold where he won 75 percent of the vote — is more narrow than Ms. Lake’s, claiming that it is not questioning the election’s validity. But, as with Ms. Lake, Mr. Hamadeh is seeking an order overturning the election results and declaring him the winner, claiming he is not alleging widespread fraud but rather “certain errors and inaccuracies.” On Twitter late Friday, Mr. Hamadeh wrote that “Maricopa County faced unprecedented and unacceptable issues on Election Day.”

Dan Barr, a lawyer for Mr. Hamadeh’s opponent, Kris Mayes, said the lawsuit was “based on speculation” and contained “no real facts.” He said he planned to file motions to dismiss it and move it to Maricopa County early next week.

Mr. Finchem, one of several secretary of state candidates around the country who denied the results of the 2020 presidential race, lost by more than 120,000 votes. In his suit, filed in Maricopa County, Mr. Finchem alleged that Arizona had “failed miserably” to administer a “full, fair, and secure election” and asked that the court declare the election “annulled” and name him the winner.

That suit was filed by Daniel McCauley, who also represented Cochise County in its recent failed attempt to deny certification of the election results.

 

You can't have a circus without clowns, and there are plenty involved in this "legal" process. The whole point of course is to justify the violence coming against Arizona Democrats who won. If you somehow still thought that Mike Lindell and his army of election liars were just going to go away, well, you have your answers.

Only crushing sanctions, disbarment, and punitive contempt charges are going to begin to slow these guys down.

We'll see.

Warnock, Win Notched

Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock has faced voters five times in the last two years and change, a Democratic primary in 2020, two general elections, and two runoff wins with last night's victory over Republican Herschel Walker, and being the 51st Democrat in the US Senate means the current power-sharing agreement with Mitch McConnell goes into the trash.

 

Democrats had already clinched control of the Senate, with 50 seats secured last month, which would allow Vice President Kamala Harris to cast the tie-breaking vote as she does now. But winning a 51st seat, thanks to Warnock’s victory Tuesday, comes with important benefits for the Democrats running the Senate and for President Joe Biden’s administration.

The party will now enter 2023 with a true Senate majority – one that won’t require the power-sharing agreement that has been in place over the last two years in an evenly divided chamber. That outright majority means that Democrats will have the majority on committees, allowing them to advance Biden’s nominees more easily.

For example: The Senate Judiciary Committee, with its 22 members, will shift from a split of 11 Democrats and 11 Republicans to 12 Democrats and 10 Republicans. That removes a GOP procedural mechanism to slow down the confirmation of Biden’s judicial nominees.

Democratic leaders, meanwhile, face a reduced risk that a single senator can hold its priorities hostage, since the party can now afford to lose a vote. Harris, who has already cast the third-most tie-breaking votes of any vice president, and the most since John Calhoun nearly 200 years ago, would be less tied to Capitol Hill.

It’s also an early boost to Democrats ahead of a 2024 election in which the party will have to defend several seats in deep-red states, including West Virginia and Montana, to maintain its majority. 

 

The good news is that the Dems did astonishing well for 2022. The bad news is 2024 is going to be a far tougher road, and whether you like them or not, both Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin will be up for re-election, along with Jon Tester, Jacky Rosen, Sherrod Brown, Bob Casey, Tim Kaine and Tammy Baldwin. Dems will have to defend all these seats and depending on the presidential outcome, we might have to defend all eight seats and run the table to keep the Senate.

Now, we did that this year and even gained a seat with John Fetterman. But Florida (Rick Scott) and Indiana (Mike Braun, leaving the seat for a Governor's run in Indiana) are going to be tough to pick up. let alone beating Ted Cruz in Texas or Josh Hawley in Missouri.

We'll see how all this turns out.

How The Republicans Blew The "Red Wave"

Despite a three-point national vote lead in the 2022 Midterms, Republicans only gained around 8-10 seats in the House. Granted, that's enough to give them the majority next year, but that number should have been 28-30 or even 48-50 House seats. The difference? Democrats finally got as good as the GOP when it came to gerrymandering and defending their turf in a structural change from ten years ago, as Decision Desk's Zach Donnini analyzes.

The US House structural bias was more favorable to Democrats than expected for three reasons. First, as a byproduct of their previous house majority, Democrats held an incumbency advantage in most competitive districts. Republicans had to bear the burden of flipping Democratic seats to win the chamber. This challenge certainly cost Republicans several seats, where strong Democratic incumbents resisted national trends and held their Trump-won districts even as the nation shifted six points to the right. To compound the issue, Republicans did not even take advantage of the incumbents they could have had. Supported by Donald Trump, loyalist Republicans Joe Kent and John Gibbs led ousters of popular and electorally successful incumbents Jamie Herrera-Beutler and Peter Meijer, handing two districts to Democrats. Second, Democratic gerrymanders were highly effective. While Democrats could only pass optimal partisan gerrymanders in four states (Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, and Illinois), they took advantage of the opportunity with clinical efficiency. Democrats won 24 of 30 (80%) of seats in these four states, despite only winning 54% of the combined house popular vote (controlling for uncontested districts). The third and final reason is the most worrisome for Republicans: the new Republican coalition—built by Donald Trump—is not remotely designed for success in the US House.

Fast Fact: Although recent political realignment has allowed Republicans to acquire a massive structural advantage in the US Senate, it is helping Democrats counteract gerrymandering and gain a structural advantage in the US House.

Why are Republicans Developing A Geographic Disadvantage in the House?

While Republicans were successful in rural America well before Donald Trump arrived on the political scene, it was not until the 2016 Presidential Election that the party began to dominate the regions. In 2012, Democrats wasted far more votes than Republicans in blowout House races. While 30 Democrats won their race by 60 points or more, only 7 Republicans won by the same wide margin. The 2016 election was an election of regional polarization: very blue areas (generally cities) became bluer, and very red areas (generally more rural areas) become redder. In the 2012 presidential election, only ~33% of Americans lived in a “non-competitive” area, a county where either Democrats or Republicans won >65% of the vote. But in 2016, this number increased to 43%. Democrats did boost their numbers in heavy blue areas, but it was Republican success in rural areas that primarily drove this increase, closing the gap between the two parties in wasted votes.



Ancestral rural Democrats across the country, particularly in the Midwest, left their party in droves for Trump and the GOP. For the most part, Republican House candidates did not need this marked improvement in the reddest areas, these were the districts Republicans were already holding easily. Of course, some of these rural voters were districted with blue areas and did contribute to battleground seats, but most of these rural improvements were turning 50-point wins into 60-point wins for the GOP.

Although Republicans disproportionately improved in very red areas in 2016, serious problems did not start to develop until 2020. Partisan realignment since 2016 (educational polarization and racial depolarization) has proven to be disastrous for the GOP in the House. To oversimplify American politics, the safest blue districts tend to be in cities, and the safest red districts tend to encompass rural areas and small towns. The battleground districts are disproportionately located in high-education suburban areas, where Republicans are slipping. Conversely, Republicans enjoy higher and higher levels of minority support as Black and Hispanic voters trend toward the party. Dividing all counties into five categories, ordered by the highest to the lowest proportion of the vote won by Biden, Trump only gained between 2016 and 2020 in the bluest counties. To make matters worse, Democrats gained the most in the most competitive counties.



Republicans will have to grapple with the uncomfortable reality that trading a suburban vote (in a competitive House district) for an urban vote (in a deep blue House district) deeply harms their ability to hold a geographic advantage. If educational polarization continues at this rate, it could be Democrats that hold a significant advantage in the US House by the end of the decade—but not because of gerrymandering.

 

Republicans did better in states like New York, Florida and California. But Democrats did better in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, the big five battleground states. Dems won competitive districts that needed fewer increases in votes to win, while Republicans did things like turning 30 point losses into 20 point losses in deep blue House races. Dems also picked up House seats that they shouldn't have in GOP states like Ohio, and Republicans handed them wins by purging their party of "moderate" seats in states like Oregon and NC.

If Democrats had fixed New York's gerrymander, we would have kept the House, because going forward the competitive suburban House districts are where Democratic vote growth is the best.

Last Call For Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Arizona Republicans are doing their dead-level best to destroy voting in the state, vowing that if they can't win, then nobody will.

 

Officials in a rural, Republican-controlled county in Arizona have voted to delay certifying the results of this month's midterm elections and miss the state's legal deadline of Monday, despite finding no legitimate problems with the local counts.

The move by the board of supervisors for Cochise County in southeastern Arizona, near Tucson, puts more than 47,000 Arizonans' votes at risk and is expected to set off court action. The state's secretary of state's office plans to file a lawsuit on Monday, spokesperson Sophia Solis said by email.

"There is no reason for us to delay," said the board's chair, Ann English, a Democrat, whose vote was outnumbered by the county's two Republican supervisors, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd.

Before Monday's vote, Arizona's state election director, Kori Lorick, said in a statement that the state's secretary of state "will use all available legal remedies to compel compliance with Arizona law and protect Cochise County voters' right to have their votes counted" if the board failed to complete its "non-discretionary duty."

 

The problem with that of course is that the Arizona GOP may actually end up losing more races as a result of Cochise County's Republicans disenfranchising themselves like the childish idiots they are.

Board members who voted against certification would face the very real prospect of civil and criminal penalties. And in all likelihood, they would achieve nothing, as Arizona courts would almost certainly step in and order the board to abide by its legal obligations and certify the results.

But in the unlikely event that the courts didn’t intervene, the board’s gambit would only hurt the voters of Cochise County and the candidates that they support.

If the board has still refused to certify by the Dec. 5 deadline for state certification (which can be extended to Dec. 8, but no later), the law requires that the secretary of state still move ahead with the statewide canvass of results. In that case, the statewide canvass would not include the results from Cochise County, which is heavily Republican.

This mass disenfranchisement of Cochise County voters − at the hands of their own board of supervisors − could result in flipping the final results in a number of tight races, with Republican candidates and voters paying the price. For example, Republican Juan Ciscomani would likely lose his congressional race to Democrat Kirsten Engel.

That decision could prove decisive in the race for state superintendent, handing Democrats a win over their Republican opponents. This outcome would be even more likely if another heavily Republican county, such as Mohave County, followed the lead of Cochise County and likewise refused to certify. 

 

Again, the law makes it clear that these Republican scoundrels don't have any recourse. The courts will almost certainly rule against the county and possibly they could end up in jail. 

But if they are willing to disenfranchise their own voters, let the Democratic candidates take the wins.

And if you don't think 10 or 20 thousand votes matter in the grand scheme of things...

 

A swing of 3,340 votes from GOP to Dem in the 5 closest House races would have allowed Dems to hold the House.

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) November 27, 2022

 

We lost the House by less than 4k.

 

Always remember that.