The SDGOP spin blog finds itself in an awkward position this morning. Week before last, the right-wing Freedom Caucus hawked its Trumpist election denial in a press release. The SDGOP spin blog dismissed this sally as a “wacky crusade” by 23 Republican legislators to relitigate the 2020 election, despite the complete lack of evidence of any alleged fraud.
But yesterday, the SDGOP spin blog’s prime sponsor, Governor Kristi Noem, endorsed the Freedom Caucus’s wacky crusade, or at least attempted to co-opt it and stay on the good side of the democracy-hating election deniers, by issuing her own press release saying she agrees with the wingnuts that “South Dakota would do well to conduct our elections in a transparent fashion. That includes ensuring that the right to vote is not tainted by illegal ballot harvesting or improperly ‘stuffed’ ballot boxes.”
Unlike the SDGOP spin blog, which must publish all of Kristi Noem’s pablum without any critical analysis, I am free to say, Bad parenting, Kristi. When the kids throw a tantrum over perceived but non-existent wrongs, you don’t say, “Hey, good tantrum, kids! I agree with your grievances. I’ll go get you some candy.” You say, “Knock it off. There’s nothing to fuss about. You’re making a scene that will only upset others. Behave or you’re grounded.”
Stop patting liars on the head, Governor Noem. We need elected leaders to speak the truth: there is no rampant election fraud (what rare instances we have found often come from the screamers). We need elected leaders to defend our election officials from baseless attacks. We need our election officials to defend our election processes by pointing out that our election processes are already secure, that the 2020 election was the most securely conducted American election ever.
Noem has to be asked, “Do you believe Biden won the 2020 election?”
Mr. Powers finds himself in an awkward position every time he looks for the zipper on his trousers.
Solution in search of a problem!
Of course, it all depends upon what you mean by “ballot harvesting,” something that these wingnut Republicans don’t want to talk about. What do they mean? Well, let’s delve into that. Many people with disabilities or who are temporarily incapacitated by illness vote absentee. They depend on a family member or trusted care giver to deliver the ballot to a drop box or a mail box. Republicans in Wisconsin want to define that as “ballot harvesting.” Doing so is a simple way to disenfranchise people with disabilities or who are sick, which seems to be the ultimate goal of Republicans. Why they have it out for the infirm is anyone’s guess, but apparently they do.
Also, let’s say you work two jobs, one after the other. You don’t have time to go to the polls, but you vote absentee, and your wife mails your ballot for you. Republicans in Wisconsin want you to think the wife is harvesting your ballot. They want each person to put that ballot in the mail individually. Liz and I vote absentee and we drop our ballots off at our nearby post office. If I run them in and drop them in the mail, I would be considered a ballot harvester. There is no common sense to what the Republicans define as ballot harvesting,
They wanted to define our “Democracy in the Park” event, where you could drop off your absentee ballot with sworn election official at any number of local city parks, as an example of ballot harvesting. They think that drop boxes are ballot harvesting. Sorry, these efforts are not ballot harvesting. They are making voting more convenient for people. No fraud occurred as a result of these efforts in any election in which they occurred. So, they need to get real about what is ballot harvesting and what is simply making voting more convenient.
She’s switching her focus now from non-existent CRT to non-existent Ballot Harvesting. Like tRump, find a new scape-goat, re herring, or fear every week or so, just to keep the base riled up. SD Repubs don’t need much ‘fearful
riling’ as they pretty much stay fearful anyway.
Nazis euthanized the infirm. GOP-brains are NAZI. All-day, every-day. They are just paving the way to when it is necessary for them to cheat. And disenfranchise voters who tend to never vote for the Nazi party.
I wonder if the “Improperly “stuffed” ballot boxes” leaves the door open for “properly” stuffed ballot boxes. Votes for the right candidate are proper but votes for the wrong candidate are suspect.
So many imaginary threats, no action on real threats: climate change, coronavirus, chronic economic underperformance, threats of violence and insurrection from Trumpists…
Sharp eye, WROG. By the way, maybe Noem herself is acknowledging the fakery of the furor by putting “stuffed” in mock quotes.
who wrote this frame-able piece of drivel? Is it on a sheep skin? And who are all these representatives and merely two senators? Were they the ones who wrote the Governor? What did they write? Did they forget to include “illegal or improper” votes? This sheep skin smells remarkably like Trump’s fake elector certifications from six renegade Republican swing states.
Kristi’s practiced signature begs handwriting analysis. How likely is it everyone mentioned on this faux sheepskin could also benefit from therapy? I only know Phil Jensen but it is pretty clear he would. And “Freedom” Caucus? Who and why did they choose that misleading moniker? Like all things Trumpist and Republican, it is a con, a shell game, designed to usurp political power. Likely for greed.
Russia has created a violent world security crisis in Ukraine. For several years now. Trump is apparently a co-opted American who has enabled Putin to do so, eventually at a very high level. Then he was stopped. Impeached. Finally the “people spoke” and voted Trump out of office.
Are Kristi and these legislators Custer and his troops’ Last Stand?
The danger of the democratic vote is that a reckless soulless Republican Party nominates such incompetent conspiratorial officials. Kristi is just a fly in the ointment, along with 20 or so other governors in the country. But boy does she ever make the mix ugly!
See https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/26/politics/trump-putin-ukraine/index.html
Loren, worse yet, it is a solution that ignores the real problem of voter disenfranchisement. There are voters who are not welcomed into the voter roles, voters who are not made to feel welcome voting, even voters whose votes are made more difficult to cast. That is the election integrity that we ought to be addressing. SD (as should every state) should be seeking out ways to ensure EVERY person should be made to feel welcome and enabled to cast a vote in every election with no hinderance. Then talk to me about election integrity.
Ballot box tilling, suffocation and strangulation has to be as large of a concern as “harvesting” and “stuffing.”
It is useless to analyze this missive from our Governor. It is nuts, just bonkers.
O is correct. Early in his adult life Liz’s father went to register to vote, but he was told that Indians couldn’t register. He was a proud man, and he took that rejection very hard. It was humiliating for him. It wasn’t the first time he’d been discriminated against, but it was the last time he tried to register. He was always interested in local politics, and would meet with Art LaCroix when he was Rapid City’s Mayor, but he refused to register to vote. He was a very strong Republican, too.
Registering to vote should be welcomed and voting in every election should be encouraged. Making it easy for people to register and to vote ought to be the first requirement of every public official.
Hey, Kristi, you vile piece of work and nasty, thieving, ignorant baggage. In this glorious country and states of MAGATs, you’ve never once addressed voter intimidation, because you’re too stupid to know it exists.
Once AGAIN this afternoon I was accosted in a local parking lot, this time by a large a–hole that’s a Sam Elliot wannabe (the actor whose eyebrows join his nose hairs that creates his moustache? And always wears a preposterous cowboy hat?) and demanded I pay for his gasoline. I wasn’t smart enough to yell for police and just said “huh?”
He noticed I had Biden/Harris 2020 bumper stickers on my truck and he said “Damn Biden–lookit gas prices.” Took me a few seconds, but I taunted him about being a sore loser that voted for a stupid loser. He was enraged and started at me with clenched fists, but got a grip and returned to his truck and tailgated and honked at me all the way to the Hot Springs Public Library.
I grabbed my bag of return books and my ever-present crowbar and ran (OK, limped) to his huge Dodge Ram; he peeled rubber out of the parking lot at 2005 Library Drive.
jfc, it’s well past time for this sh*t to end; Trump and his acolytes need to die in the worst way. I am so tired of this it’s no longer amusing.
For starters on “voting integrity” one should read Stacey Abrams “Our Time Is Now” book! Just currently into it and what a story on her battles in Georgia over the past decade or so with voting “laws”! Current Governor Kemp (whom she’s running for gov against) when he was Sec. of Georgia State, conned the Republican legislature into several laws after the 2010 Supreme Court decision on “Heller” (which stopped much federal supervision of elections) that has kept hundreds of thousand of Georgians from voting.!! One would never think such laws could exist in America, but they sure do and are bring copied in red state after red state.
Voting, according to red state GOP logic, is a privilege granted by the state to its citizens. But, a privilege granted BY the state can be revoked by the state in red states lingo and mind-set.
But, I will maintain that voting is still a RIGHT granted by at least 3 articles of our US Constitution and cannot or should not be nullified by states on a whim. Vermont and Maine still allow prisoners to vote. Red states put in place
dozens of laws restricting anyone who gets crosswise with states laws from voting. Then even purge names off voter rolls if you miss a couple elections.
It seems so true, the GOP wants to ‘choose’ its voters, not take chances on whether the voters choose them or not.
I saw “2000 MULES”. Black, brown, and cautious voters sending their ballot with another, trusted person to be dropped into a sanctioned drop box during a global pandemic is cause for a movie about voter fraud? Dinesh D’Souza is making bank again on fantastic fears generated upon the semi-educated MAGA nation.
Oh, correction for both of us, Jake! In her new ad, Kristi is going after Jamie Smith for voting to bring in CRT. I’ll have analysis of that in the morning.
How many Republicans were elected in the stolen election of 2020? How many? I am still waiting for the Lt. Governor of Texas to pay his voter fraud bet to Senate candidate John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. Another blowhard republican, Dan Patrick of Texas, all talk no thought or follow-through.
Analysis: Mr. Smith voted for CRT.
Also a fact on the teevee: Mr. President (somebody’s Uncle) Joe said “C’mon, man!”
Please enlighten us grudznick, how exactly did Mr. Smith do that? What did the legislation say? I only ask because you have SO often claimed not to know what CRT is, yet now you seem quite clearly able to identify it in legislative application . . . unless you are unquestioningly just repeating the tag line of a tribal paid infomercial currently running on the tee-vee.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfwmaKIph8
grudz, don’t make things up, you’re better than that.
Pony Girl must already be expecting to lose the election in November, so she is setting up a situation where she can cry “foul” when Jamie Smith cleans her clock.
Hey, lets do it the OG American way when we are taxed without representation. I have been telling all my convict family and friends, as well as underage kids working after school and summer jobs, “Either they hand you your ballot or you hand ol tax collector a fistful of sweaty pocket lint”.
If all the disenfranchised taxpayers refused to be taxed like our wig wearing Declaration of Independence drafters once did, the unAmerican extorters will turn blue in no time. Of course the reply I get is always, “They’ll just lock me up”.
“Not if they’re choked out”. The key is to synchronize the tax boycott.
Without the vote of such a great number of working citizens, we really aren’t the ones making any decisions. And that is why the schools suck, the water sucks, the laws suck, the government sucks, etc.
The greatest threat to our country is from within. They call themselves ‘patriots’ or GOP. They’re the fancy red lobsters we need to ship off to their King George. So cliche.
This just turned up yesterday from an informed California resident proving, once again, massive vote fraud is done by magats. This time in my district in iowa.
https://www.rawstory.com/republican-voter-fraud-2659208499/ magat running against super freaky Steve King,in 2020. His wife took 23 absentee ballkots from friends homes when they were away and filled them out herself.