It’s Not Quite Kristallnacht, but It’s Not The Fourth of July Either

It’s Not Quite Kristallnacht, but It’s Not The Fourth of July Either

By Clarice Feldman

 

Just days before the eightieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, when Nazis burned synagogues, looted Jewish homes and shops, and rounded up Jewish families for concentration camps, Tucker Carlson’s home was surrounded by Antifa thugs who pounded on his door (cracking it), terrifying his wife, uttered threats against him and his family and painted an anarchist symbol on his driveway while the DC police did nothing to these modern-day brownshirts. This is not the first time they have engaged in violence and threats in my city, and not the first time there have been no legal consequences for their lawless, threatening behavior. Administration officials have now been so often harassed in restaurants by this gang that one of the finest establishments has now hired private security officers to keep them at bay. If this keeps up, we may resort to the oldest tradition in DC now largely abandoned as we have upped the commercial culinary establishments here many notches: dining privately with friends in their homes. We won’t have to, of course, if DC police finally act against these threats and vandalism by arresting these thugs.
In several places in Arizona, Georgia, and Florida -- most obviously in Broward and Palm Beach -- Florida, election workers are racing to undo the results of a free election, undermining the very basis of our political system.  And they are thumbing their noses at judicial efforts to halt the theft.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for Senate who currently leads Democratic opponent Sen. Bill Nelson by 15,000 votes, has won his first lawsuit against Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher. As ballots in the gubernatorial and Senate races head to a recount, Scott sued Bucher Thursday night for refusing to allow official party and campaign representatives into the ballot counting area, and having staff members determine a voter's intent without review by the county canvassing board.
On Friday, West Palm Beach Circuit Court Judge Krista Marx granted an injunction ordering Bucher to submit "over-voted" and "under-voted" absentee ballots to the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board for public review of each vote before they are counted.
In a machine recount, all completed ballots are re-fed through ballot-counting machines to try to confirm the original, unofficial counts.[snip]
Scott also filed a lawsuit against Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes on Thursday evening, alleging that her office is hiding information about the number of ballots left to be counted. Broward County Circuit Judge Carol-Lisa Phillips ordered the immediate release of voter information from Snipes, ruling in Scott's favor.

Both Snipes  and Bucher seem to have defied these court orders.
Snipes’s operation has so often violated Florida election laws, including destroying the ballots in the 2016 Debbie Wasserman Schultz congressional election, that the governor sent election experts there to monitor it. To no end, it seems.

In August, a judge sided with the Florida GOP in its challenge of how the county handled absentee ballots. Republicans claimed Snipes' office was opening ballots in private, preventing people from challenging if they were properly cast, according to Politico.
And then in 2016, Broward County violated the law when it posted early voting results online before polls even closed, the Miami Herald reported.
The error was made by a young employee of an outside company hired by the county to tally the election results and a lawsuit against Snipes' office over the incident was "unsuccessful," according to the Miami Herald. Snipes also won a lawsuit that same year after being challenged for leaving off an amendment regarding medical marijuana on some mail-in ballots.
In 2004, her office had to scramble to send out new absentee ballots after it said some 58,000 voters did not receive them despite requesting them, the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time. There were problems with absentee ballots this year, too. Multiple people said they did not receive absentee ballots or got them too late to submit them, according to the Miami Herald. Some ballots also had duplicate pages, voters said.
"This is consistent. It happens every election. Every election there is a snafu of some type every time," Benjamin Bennett, a former Broward elections inspector, alleged.
Snipes is also the subject of a lawsuit, filed in August by the American Civil Rights Union before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which questions Snipes' handling of potentially ineligible voters.
Broward was also criticized this year for the design of the ballot. The Senate race was displayed on the bottom left corner, below the instructions. Some 24,000 cast a vote for governor, displayed at the top of the ballot, but not Senate, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Bucher’s conduct in banning the media from reporting her operation in Palm Beach seems to have escaped media attention,, but not Marco Rubio’s:

Marco Rubio 
✔
@marcorubio
‪#PalmBeachCounty‪ elections supervisor bans media cameras from public ballot counting & threatens them with arrest. 
‪How much more will it take to convince skeptics that what is happening in Palm Beach & #BrowardCounty is not a normal elections process?  

Yesterday afternoon, Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner ordered a recount in both the Senate and gubernatorial races, a first for the state of Florida. 
In Arizona, the parties entered into a consent agreement:

The settlement comes after Republicans filed a lawsuit Wednesday in a bid to prevent Maricopa and Pima counties -- the two biggest counties in the state -- from using procedures that permit mail-in ballot fixes to occur beyond Election Day, arguing that the practice was improper.
Four local Republican parties filed the lawsuit.
If the signature on the voter registration doesn't match that on the sealed envelope, both Maricopa and Pima County allow voters to help them fix, or "cure" it, up to five days after Election Day.
Many other counties allow voters to cure only until polls close on Election Day.
However, now all counties may cure ballots until Wednesday.
Roughly 272,000 votes remained uncounted, the Arizona Secretary of State's Office reported Friday. 

The vote tally irregularities seem insufficient to undo the election results (except perhaps in Arizona) despite the best effort of the election-supervising hacks, the aim seems to be to force a redo of the elections and to delay the seating of the elected Republicans.
This vote theft is a long-established Democratic trick. 

According to FairVote there have been 27 contested state elections (recounts) since 2000 and regardless of who had the lead going in Democrats have won… all 27. C’est un miracle! [snip] So if you’re worried about the Democrats stealing elections in Florida and Arizona you have good reason. We’re certainly not dealing with amateurs here. And they will continue counting all the Democratic votes “not yet counted” and all the provisional votes fit to count in every Democrat leaning stronghold until they get the right answer. Or until they’re thrown out of the casino for cheating.

The election chief of Broward county is not the only familiar figure. The legal teams supporting Snipes are as well. Defending Snipes’s conduct, Governor Senator Nelson, who without the work of Snipes seems to have lost the election, is Marc Elias, Seattle-based lawyer with Perkins Coie. 

The Clinton campaign's top lawyer who was behind the controversial anti-Trump dossier is spearheading the recount effort to keep Floridian Bill Nelson in the U.S. Senate, and is already facing accusations he is trying to "steal" the seat from under the noses of the Republicans.
Marc Elias, of Seattle-based law firm Perkins Coie, retained opposition research firm Fusion GPS which hired former British spy Christopher Steele to compile the dossier which included salacious and unverified allegations about President Trump's visit to Russia before he was elected to the White House.
Now Nelson, the Democrat incumbent since 2001, has turned to Elias with the hotly contested Florida Senate race looking more likely to be decided after a recount.[snip]"Let's be clear: When Elias says 'win,' he means 'steal'," Scott's campaign said, according to NPR.
Scott pointed to several examples in the past when Elias's Democratic clients led elections by razor-thin margins, claiming there was no precedent for successful recounts. These included Al Franken's Senate victory in Minnesota in 2008, where he won by 225 votes, one of the closest races in history.

Franken’s victory was the result of mysterious ballots found long after election day and the likelihood that many persons not entitled to vote legally were allowed to do so. 

Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
As soon as Democrats sent their best Election stealing lawyer, Marc Elias, to Broward County they miraculously started finding Democrat votes. Don’t worry, Florida -- I am sending much better lawyers to expose the FRAUD!

In Georgia’s gubernatorial election, Stacey Abrams is intent on keeping hope alive by refusing to concede, claiming continued counting may force a runoff election:

The standoff leaves open the possibility of litigation as Abrams' campaign has pushed for the continued counting of absentee, mail-in and provisional ballots and renewed its concerns that Kemp remains the chief elections officer supervising his own election, a race already marked by disputes over the voting process.
If a runoff is necessary, the second round would take place Dec. 4, extending Abrams' bid to become the first black woman elected governor in American history while Kemp looks to maintain the GOP's domination in a state where Democrats haven't won a governor's race since 1998.
Partisan observers nationally have watched intently for clues about just how much of a battleground Georgia can be in the 2020 presidential campaign.
With reported votes exceeding 3.9 million -- almost 95 percent of Georgia's 2016 presidential turnout -- Kemp has just more than 50 percent.
Before the Kemp campaign declared victory Wednesday, Groh-Wargo estimated that about 15,000 votes separate Kemp from a runoff. She says at least that many outstanding absentee and mail-in ballots remained to be counted.
Kemp's spokeswoman in the secretary of state's office, Candice Broce, said that by Wednesday afternoon the number of uncounted absentee and mail-in ballots was less than 2,000 -- with her boss still above the 50 percent threshold.
Broce said about 22,000 provisional ballots have yet to be processed, according to a canvass of county officials across the state. Mahoney asserted that those numbers make it impossible for Abrams to pick up enough votes to deny Kemp an outright victory.

Ironically, almost to the day of Kristallnacht (On November 9, 1989), the Berlin wall which had kept imprisoned behind it -- those Germans trapped in the Eastern portion of Germany -- came down, ushering in a new era of freedom for those who had been there and ultimately ending the Soviet empire’s grip on Eastern Europe.  Maybe someday soon crooked and incompetent election overseers and sloppy election laws which give them a free hand to monkey with the expressed will of the legal voters will stop these outrageous practices and liberate us from the corrupt barriers to free elections.