Counting The Votes In Michigan

It is somewhat odd that an election candidate that received approximately 1 percent of the vote can demand a recount, but that is exactly what Green Party candidate Jill Stein did.  It’s not likely that the recount will change her status. In Michigan that request was denied, but when the votes were counted, the numbers were interesting.

Breitbart.com posted an article today the vote totals in Detroit.

The article reports:

Voting machines in 37 per cent of Detroit precincts recorded more votes than mathematically possible during November’s presidential election, according to records obtained by The Detroit News.

Reports obtained by the newspaper from Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett found that in 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, more votes had been counted than the number of people who had been marked as having voted, which might serve as evidence of voter fraud across the city.

Following the report, Michigan’s Secretary of State Ruth Johnson announced plans to conduct a full investigation into the irregularities. Detroit was one of the areas in which Hillary Clinton’s support was particularly strong.

The article further reports:

“We’re assuming there were (human) errors, and we will have discussions with Detroit election officials and staff in addition to reviewing the ballots,” said Michigan’s Elections Director Chris Thomas on Monday.

However, Krista Haroutunian, the chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, said that although “there’s always going to be small problems to some degree, we didn’t expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit.”

“This isn’t normal,” she added.

Michigan was one of the last states to be counted, with Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton by 10,704 votes, taking him to his landslide electoral college victory of 306 votes compared to Clinton’s 232. He also became the first Republican to win the state since George W.H Bush in 1998.

There is a real need for a voter ID requirement in American elections, particularly in our large cities. Detroit was not the only city where more people voted than were eligible to vote. In one North Carolina city, it was discovered that 240 people listed a gravel parking lot with a shed as their address. Voter ID would have solved that problem. If Congress is really  concerned about the integrity of elections, they would support stronger voter ID laws in federal elections instead of chasing straw men about leaks that probably came from inside the DNC.

 

Stacking The Deck In The Presidential Debates

Yesterday Lifezette posted a story about the bipartisan commission that is in charge of planning the debates of the presidential candidates.

The story reports:

The men and women who run the supposedly “nonpartisan” Commission on Presidential Debates have put their money where their mouths are — and it all has gone to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The amount of money is small by the standards of a modern presidential campaign, but it is one-sided. A pair of Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University examined campaign finance reports and found that all of the $5,650 in contributions that commission members have made to presidential candidates during this election season have gone to Clinton.

Republican Donald Trump, who will meet Clinton in the first debate a week from Monday, received no donations from debate commission members. Green Party nominee Jill Stein and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who both learned Friday that they will be shut out of the first debate, also received nothing.

It gets even better. The article quotes one of the commission members:

Kevin Zeese, an adviser to the Stein campaign, told LifeZette the contributions are further evidence of a bipartisan conspiracy to rig the electoral system against third-party alternatives. And the fact that Clinton scooped up all of the contributions made by commission members this year fits with the fact that she has won support not only from her own party but many Establishment figures in the Republican Party, as well.

“Hillary Clinton has done a really good job of uniting the two parties,” he said. “It’s almost like one party.”

Has it occurred to the commission that the fact that ‘it’s almost like one party’ might be the problem? That is exactly the reason Donald Trump is doing so well–the establishment Republican party is indistinguishable from the Democrat party. The establishment Republican party is no longer the party of smaller government and lower spending–they are now the party of ‘we want to do the spending.’ Donald Trump is not a conservative, but at least he has some sort of business sense.

There is a book called Tragedy and Hope 101: The Illusion of Justice, Freedom, and Democracy that discusses the move to morph the two-party system in America into a system that appears to be a two-party system, but in reality is a one-party system. In this scenario, elections happen, but the same people are always in control. We are dangerously close to that place, and I believe that the election of Donald Trump might be a way to avoid going there. It is going to be a very interesting election–there are a lot of people who are very fond of the system the way it is and will fight with everything they have to make sure it does not change.

At any rate, are you willing to believe that the debates will be fair and unbiased?