On today’s BradCast: Yes, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, committed voter fraud while serving as President of the United States. And, speaking of elections, we had a few on Tuesday in California, Wisconsin and Nebraska. [Audio link to full show is conveniently posted below.]
But first up today, if Trump is accusing someone else of doing something, it’s a near certainty it’s because he’s doing it himself. While he’s been busy pretending in recent weeks that Democrats steal elections by absentee voting, it turns out it was Trump himself who actually committed voter fraud in the state of Florida this year when he voted in the Sunshine State’s primary election in March by absentee ballot. No, voting by absentee is not a crime or fraud in and of itself (as he continues to claim). But voting in the state of Florida — in-person or via absentee — without having a lawful permanent domicile there is, in fact, a felony.
As Washington Post recently documented, thanks to some digging by attorneys, historians and neighbors of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, Trump signed an agreement in 1993 that turned Mar-a-Lago from a single family residence into a commercial club. It cannot be both at the same time under state law, despite Trump’s recent assertion on a Palm Beach application for approval of a boat dock at his seaside club that the club was his “personal residence”.
As the facts started coming out that Trump’s claim to have moved his residence from New York to Florida last year was, in fact, unlawful, he quietly rescinded the application for a new dock this week. But he can’t rescind the fact that he committed voter fraud in the state of Florida by falsely claiming residency there and then voting unlawfully in their March primary elections. If it was anyone else (any Democrat, anyway), charges would be brought. But, like former GOP superstar Ann Coulter, who also blatantly and knowingly committed voter fraud in Palm Beach, Florida (as The BRAD BLOG meticulously and indisputably documented years ago), Trump will probably find a way to eventually get off the hook for his voter fraud crimes as well. He shouldn’t. Even if that means waiting until he’s out of office to bring criminal charges against him. Republicans have jailed, fined, deported and otherwise thrown the book at others for far lesser election-related crimes in recent years.
That, as Trump is claiming a bogus (if unspecified) crime by former President Obama that he and Fox “News” have now dubbed “OBAMAGATE” in apparent hopes of tarring Trump’s presumptive Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, somehow. The pretend scandal seemly has something to do with Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty in federal court to lying to federal officials about his contact with Russian agents prior to Trump’s inauguration and about being an undeclared agent of Turkey even while serving as National Security Advisor. But, despite Trump describing “OBAMAGATE” as the “biggest political crime in American history, by far!,” so big, in fact, that it “makes Watergate look small time”, neither the President nor Fox “News” seem to be able to explain either what the crime is, or why Trump says that his own Constitutional powers as President allow him to commit any crime he wants, while that same Constitution didn’t apply to President Obama apparently (even as there is no evidence to demonstrate that Obama committed any such crime.) It was, however, quite amusing when a guest on Fox “News” recently pointed out that little problem with Trump’s otherwise ingenious plan.
Then, we’re joined by longtime, champion progressive blogger HOWIE KLEIN of Down With Tyranny to discuss Tuesday’s Special Elections for the U.S. House in California and Wisconsin and a big win for progressives in Omaha during yesterday’s primary elections in Nebraska. Progressive Democrat Kara Eastman trounced former Republican Ann Ashford, wife of former conservative Democratic Rep. Brad Ashford, to win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House in Nebraska‘s 2nd Congressional District. Eastman will run against hard right Republican Trump loyalist Donald Bacon in November, after the incumbent Congressman defeated her by about 2 points in 2018. Klein argues that it sometimes takes a couple runs at it before progressive candidates are able to unseat incumbents. He believes Eastman, a strong supporter of a Medicare for All single-payer universal health care system, has a very good shot at flipping the seat from red to blue this year, fueled by the populist progressive grassroots support that lead to her landslide win on Tuesday
Meanwhile, the news was not as good for Democrats in the two U.S. House Special Elections yesterday. In Wisconsin‘s 7th Congressional District (so gerrymandered by Republicans that it stretches across 26 different rural counties!), Republican Tom Tiffany easily defeated Democrat Tricia Zunker by about 15 points. As Klein tells me, however, she did better than Clinton in that district, which went for Obama in 2008, Romney in 2012 and to Trump by about 20 points in 2016.
The most stinging loss of the night for Dems had to be in California‘s 25th Congressional District, where establishment-backed Democratic candidate Christy Smith appears to have lost to Republican Mike Garcia by about 12 points (at least with 82% of ballots now tabulated). This is the seat vacated late last year by freshman Democratic Rep. Katie Hill, who resigned amid a revenge porn and ethics scandal. Klein explains how and why the Democrats lost on Tuesday, and blames much of it on a lack of support — and, at times, opposition — from the conservative Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). That election, by the way, is the one that Trump and Republicans were pretending over the weekend was being “stolen by Democrats!”
As co-founder of the BlueAmericaPAC with Heather Digby Parton of Hullabaloo and John Amato of Crooks and Liars, Klein also details several progressive U.S. House candidates today who could use your support in upcoming primaries around the country. Several of them are facing contests with incumbent establishment Democrats over the next two months as nearly 20 different states have yet to hold their primary elections this year…
Not particularly on topic, except that it deals with voting, but watch Ben Adida of VotingWorks squirm when confronted with a challenge to his ballot-marking device when he spoke at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University last week.
CK –
My brain will not allow a full hour of Adida. Got a specific time-stamp I should look at in the file?
Unfair! I already sat through the whole thing live. But for you, I’ll see if I can find it.
47:27. I thought I asked a pretty good question, especially given that the Q&A on Zoom kept glitching and erasing my question before I could post it. By the way, you can avoid watching him squirm by reading the transcript, but I will admit to enjoying the visual. He is pretty snotty.
CK – Thank you! You asked an excellent question, and it’s only shocking that it took until 47:27 for anybody to ask it! Thank god you did!
And, yes, Ben Adida did have to do some squirming there. He mostly spoke to the issue honestly by admitting that a) people don’t verify their ballots, b) even when they do, they don’t always verify them correctly (though he was a bit less clear on that point) and then he completely avoided c) How can ANY voter know if ANYbody verified ANY ballot, correctly or otherwise after an election!
I don’t blame him for not even addressing that point, because I’m quite certain he knows very well that there is no way for any voter to be able to know. So, with BMD systems like his, we are back to 100% unverifiable election results.
It was also disturbing that it took so long for the next question that came up (the last one of the session) regarding EAC certification, and the fact that he admits (without using this language) that he is using real election with real voters as guinea pigs to test his system before seeking federal certification for the devices.
While that is a joke and an insult to American democracy, he is correct in that that is probably the best way to do it under our current system IF you insist that computers must be used in elections. Of course, that means that some elections will use software that has no third-party testing before its used in an actual election. That’s outrageous, but if you think some elections are more important than others, I guess it doesn’t matter.
Of course, I think ALL elections are equally important, and using some of them to test a product made by a third party is obnoxiously ugly and cavalier and just one of the reasons that confidence in American democracy has fallen so quickly down the toilet.
Guys like Ben ain’t helping. Folks like YOU, however, who sit through his nonsense to ask questions that should have been addressed BEFORE the stupid Zoom session even began, are the only thing that is going to save this mess….if it is to be saved at all….
So, thank you, CK!
Aw, shucks. I did my best to channel your criticisms of BMDs. What you can’t see in the video is the chat, where there was a fair amount of discussion. One of the people who was buying his stuff hook, line and sinker wrote that QR codes rule.
I wish I’d been able to challenge what strikes me as his completely unsupported claim that QR codes just make it easier for the computer doing the counting. Why? Why is it not just as easy for the computer to count the votes that humans can read? What does the QR code add other than obfuscation? I was probably one of the few non-coders in attendance, assuming the audience was similar to the ones who used to go to the free lunch in a crowded room sessions pre-quarantine, so I could be missing the technical reasons underlying his claim, but he acted as though it was incontrovertible common knowledge. Perhaps someone here can enlighten me or confirm that he’s full of it.
I’m no QR Code expert, but I might guess the argument is that filled-in ovals are harder to line up and track, versus a compact QR Code which is easily read by a scanner. If the paper is damaged or printing on it is misaligned it could be more difficult to read than a QR Code. But that’s just a guess.
Beyond that, I invited Ben to respond to the critique here. It didn’t go well. You can read the Twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/TheBradBlog...37647841357824
He has at least one obvious factual inaccuracy in there: his claim that you didn’t watch the video. You obviously watched the part in question and continued to the end. He’s tetchy.
I’m still unclear on what actual problem he’s trying to solve. A shortage of expensive, whiz-bang tech in an essential governmental function isn’t such a problem. He also needs to address the shortcomings with his proposed solution to whatever problem it is, because even he has to admit that the shortcomings exist, even if he’s unwilling to acknowledge that they’re pretty fundamental ones.
Piled Higher and Deeper indeed.