Only 29 Percent Think 2020 Elections Will Be Fair

By John Semmens — Semi-News — A Satirical Look at Recent NewsAccording to a poll conducted by the Public Affairs Council, only 29 percent of voters think the November elections will be conducted fairly. Public Affairs Council President Doug Pinkham said “we’ve never seen an American election with so much doubt about whether the results will reflect the will of the voters.” Oddly, similar doubts expressed by President Trump spurred Democrat and media outrage. They contend that Trump's doubts are evidence of his opposition to democracy.It's not as if there isn't any evidence supporting concerns about the integrity of the upcoming elections. While FBI Director Christopher Wray may be unable to see any worrying indications that this year's elections might not be as honest as they should be, disturbing reports abound. A few of those recently reported are shown below.In Texas, a vote-harvesting scheme during the state’s 2018 primary election found corrupt Democratic Party officials arrange to have ineligible people mailed absentee ballots. A grand jury indicted County Commissioner Shannon Brown Marlena Jackson, Charlie Burns and DeWayne Ward on 134-counts of fraud.In Virginia, 1,400 voters received more than one vote-by-mail ballot. Fairfax County Registrar Gary Scott blamed a printing malfunction: “instead of just reprinting the mailing labels mangled by the machinery, election workers inadvertently used the salvageable ones from the mangled sheet plus a total reprint of the whole sheet.” While he called the mishap “an honest mistake,” he admitted that “the duplicates could be used by an unscrupulous person to cast additional ballots.”In California, thousands of vote-by-mail ballots were found in a garbage dumpster in Petaluma. In Pennsylvania, nine mail-in ballots for Trump were found in the trash. In Wisconsin, trays of mail including absentee ballots were found in a ditch. A Public Interest Legal Foundation voter roll study found 350,000 deceased voters still registered as eligible to vote, 38,000 duplicate registrations, and 34,000 votes cast from addresses different from those on their voter registrations.Despite this evidence, MSNBC's Chuck Todd alleges that “vote by mail fraud is a made up story.” CNN's Alisyn Camerota called the evidence “mere hiccups in a democracy as large as ours is. The fact of the matter is that the country is pretty evenly split between the major Parties. The actual margin of victory is likely to be very thin. Making a big deal over who comes out on top and whether duplicate or ineligible votes were cast seems overblown. Either way, the country is going to get a president that roughly half the voters voted against.”Schiff Advises Republicans to Ditch TrumpHouse Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif) advised Republicans “to disassociate themselves from the Trump Administration lest they go down with the ship. The whole world is against Trump. He can't survive the November elections. Members of his Party who resign now may be spared the wrath that awaits Trump bitter-enders next January. As I see it, their basic choice is resignation now or incarceration later.”Schiff dismissed Trump's concerns about vote irregularities, saying that “irregularities have been part of the process since the beginning of elections in this country. If Trump had been in politics as long as the rest of us have he would have a better understanding about how things have worked over the decades and centuries. Other, more experienced Republicans are hip to how elections work. I suggest these elder statesmen reassert control over their Party. Since the days of FDR Republicans have done very well as the minority Party. Salvaging that long-term role would be better than being annihilated, which is where they're headed by staying loyal to Trump.”Dems Warns Against Filling Court VacancyHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) warned Trump to not fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of long-serving Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She went on to ironically claim that “the appointment of a successor who does not share the same perspective on abortion rights will signal that the Republicans are coming after our children.”The reality is that during her time on the Court Ginsburg was a staunch opponent of any limitations on abortion. She helped steer the Court to strike down many state statutes that sought to limit the carnage wrought against the tiniest humans. Her replacement by almost anyone else would seem to make the womb a much less dangerous place. Making the womb a less dangerous place was the motivation for President Trump to sign an executive order banning the murder of babies who survive an attempted abortion.Pelosi questioned Trump's sincerity, asserting that “the only reason he wants to save these unwanted lives is to win votes. Remember, before he ran for president he, like most New Yorkers, was pro-choice. We already have the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act that was enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Bush in 2002. Why do we now need an Executive Order?”Perhaps we need the Executive Order because the 2002 law is widely ignored. Last year, Gov. Ralph Northam (D-Va) admitted that the law is not enforced in his state. “The normal practice is for the aborting doctors to simply allow babies to die if they were erroneously born in an attempted abortion,” he said. “The key words that allow us to ignore the law are 'born alive.' The survivor of an abortion is, in our view, not properly 'born.' It is merely a result of a botched medical procedure. Trump's Executive Order has the same defect. Consequently, we hold that neither the 2002 Law nor the recent Executive Order can be used to compel life-saving interventions to be performed. For the feds to try to enforce either would be the most blatant trampling of Virginia's state's rights since Lincoln was president.”Biden Boasts: “I Beat the Socialist”Democratic presidential nominee former Vice-President Joe Biden rebuffed charges that his proposed policies are “socialist” by pointing out that “I beat the socialist in the primary. After my South Carolina primary win drove all the other candidates from the race it was one-on-one between me and Bernie. I whipped him good.”“You know, never once have I read the term socialist or socialism off the teleprompter I use to make my campaign speeches and answer interview questions,” the Candidate recalled. “I think the absence of those words pretty definitively proves I'm not a socialist. As for the allegation that I am stealing Bernie's ideas that's malarkey. When you win you are entitled to the spoils of war. Cadging his ideas and forcing him to be my campaign adviser shows the American voters who is the boss. It's my greatest coup since I stole Neil Kinnock's life story for my 1988 presidential campaign.”In related news, Biden unveiled what he called “a simpler and more hip Pledge of Allegiance. It goes 'I pledge allegiance to the United States of America, one nation, indivisible, under God, for real.' It's shorter and cuts out that conditional stuff committing the nation to liberty and justice for all. A democracy shouldn't have permanent values. Each generation of voters has the right to define the purposes of their government. Liberty may be of little worth to someone still harboring grievances for what happened to his ancestors and justice is in the eye of the beholder.”Whether there will be any Americans alive to recite his new Pledge has the Candidate very worried. “This year alone over 150 million Americans have been shot to death,” Biden said. “And another 200 million could be dead of the COVID virus before the end of the year. The only upside to these tragedies is that social distancing will be optimally attained.”Harris Re-Imagines Public SafetyDemocratic Vice Presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif) contends that “the idea that calling on police to keep our communities safe is necessary or proper is out-dated. It is founded on the idea that force must be met by counter-force to keep criminals from victimizing the innocent. If we use a more progressive way of thinking the first thing we realize is that no one is innocent. A person who appears to be the victim of a criminal may have had ancestors who committed crimes against the ancestors of today's apparent criminal. What Republicans call a crime may be just retribution for the earlier transgression.”“I my mind, the majority of the violence in encounters with so-called criminals arises when the so-called victim resists just retribution,” Harris said. “Who's to say that the money demanded isn't more rightfully the property of the person making the request? Who's to say that the sex sought by the so-called rapist isn't fully deserved? Once we open our minds to these and similar possibilities we can understand that there may be better ways to achieve public safety than having police intervene.”“In a Harris-Biden Administration our focus will be directed toward mediation of disagreements that are currently categorized as 'crimes,'” the Candidate promised. “Persons currently stigmatized as 'criminals' for demanding something that the so-called victim would rather not provide will be rescued and uplifted by our Administration in much the same way that persons who disdained to be self-supporting were succored by President Johnson's Great Society program that provided government housing, food stamps, and cash income. Once the segment of society that now has to take independent action to get what they want knows that the government is on their side their need to prey directly on others will subside.”A possible preview of a re-imagined public safety paradigm is being tried out in Seattle where the City is paying former pimp Andrè Taylor $150,000 a year to work as a “street czar” and come up with alternatives to relying on police to keep order. Taylor says his “past experiences dealing with lawbreakers make me the perfect guy to negotiate a truce among the gangs. I figure if we give each gang a fair share of the action most of the bloodshed can be eliminated. The cops could never accomplish this.”Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) has a plan for reducing the violent confrontations between cops and criminals that often leads to someone getting killed. “It seems to me that if we eliminate traffic stops the killings will also stop,” James observed. “Basically, once a suspect is in his car, the cops should let him get away. This would end deadly car chases and avoid the shootouts that often occur once the suspect's car is caught or disabled.” James says that “we should rely more on social pressure and guilty consciences to persuade suspects to give themselves up in a peaceable manner.”Bloomberg Launches Vote-Buying SchemeDesperate to block President Trump's reelection, former Democratic presidential candidate and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decided to pay the monetary penalties of Florida's convicted felons so they can vote for Joe Biden. “When the Florida Court ruled that sentence completion included paying monetary restitution to the victims of their crimes I knew I had to step in if the Democratic Party hoped to turn these potential voters into actual voters,” Bloomberg said. “I have billions to spare for a good cause and this is as good a cause as I can think of.”Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody contends that “Bloomberg's plan violates Florida's statute against paying for votes” and has asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the FBI to initiate a criminal investigation of the scheme. House Judiciary Committee member Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) characterized Bloomberg's ploy as “bribing people to vote a certain way.”Bloomberg denied that he “is buying votes or bribing felons to vote a certain way. I have no means of compelling the recipients of my generosity to even cast a vote. My money merely wipes out their legal obligations under the state's laws. In many cases this relieves them of tens of thousands of dollars in debt. They can then return the favor by voting Democrat and swing Florida's electoral votes to the Biden-Harris ticket, but there is no enforceable quid-pro-quo, so there is no crime on my part.”Bloomberg further insisted that his action “is a necessary counter to Trump's efforts to steal black votes from Democrats. Every other Republican has had the decency to respect the Democratic Party's ownership of the black vote. But Trump has stepped over the line with his opportunity zone districts, support of historically black colleges, and prison reform. His economic policies drove black unemployment rates to historic lows. These actions on his part have caused many blacks to rethink their loyalty to the Democratic Party. My bid to shore up the black felon vote for Democrats is payback for Trump's invasion of our territory.”Dem Pushes Anti-Ballot-Harvesting LawConcerned that ballot-harvesting poses a real threat to the integrity of elections, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is cosponsoring HR8285, the Election Fraud Prevention Act. This legislation calls for withholding federal funds from states that refuse to ban ballot-harvesting.“Look, ballot-harvesting breaks the chain of custody of ballots,” Gabbard pointed out. “When voters cast their ballots at the polls they show an ID and sign a registry. When voters send their ballots through the mail, no one touches them except postal workers. But where ballot-harvesting is allowed sleazy political operatives target vulnerable voters in their homes and collect their ballots. Once a ballot is in their hands it can be manipulated however they like. Just as the chain of custody for evidence of a crime must be secure to ensure that the evidence is not tampered with, so too must the chain of custody for ballots be secure.”House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) vowed to prevent Gabbard's bill “from ever getting to the floor of the House. If you actually read her bill you will see that it is cosponsored by Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill). As far as I'm concerned, Tulsi's collaborating with the enemy renders this proposal unacceptable. If she hopes to get along with me she must go along with me and vote the way we want her to vote rather than conspiring to undermine our Party's quest for power.”Satirical Look at Recent NewsJohn Semmens is a retired economist who has written a weekly political satire for The Arizona Conservative since 2005. He says working on his satires is one of the ways he tries to honor the liberties our Founding Fathers tried to protect.” His work has been cited on the Rush Limbaugh program. Please do us a favor. If you use material created by The Arizona Conservative, give us credit and DO NOT change the context. Thank you.