patrick.net

We should never use any voting machines.

All votes should be black pen on paper only, counted by hand by all parties, and in public view.

It was a world wide caper, not just USA. In total, 73 countries have been having their elections stolen.

Patrick says

We should never use any voting machines.

All votes should be black pen on paper only, counted by hand by all parties, and in public view.

I'm not sure if paper ballets are part of the SAVE act but I saw Mayra Flores today claim she has enough votes to shut down the house if the Senate won't vote on it. I wish she said, kill the filibuster and then vote.

It's probably the single issue I think is worth removing the filibuster for. They can put it back after we get voting straightened out.

Small tendrils of hopium still cling to the election frauds.

https://slaynews.com/news/activist-federal-judge-blocks-doj-accessing-oregons-voter-rolls/

A Democrat-aligned federal judge in Oregon moved Monday to block the Trump administration from accessing the state’s unredacted voter rolls.

The ruling dealt another setback to the Justice Department’s effort to obtain detailed voter registration data from Democrat-run states.

U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai, a Joe Biden appointee, said he intends to dismiss the Justice Department’s lawsuit and will issue a written opinion in the coming days.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/just-ribbing-wednesday-january-28

Yesterday, Politico ran a terrific elections story headlined, “Virginia state court blocks Democrats’ redistricting push.” The subheadline said it all: “The ruling is a major setback for Democrats’ efforts to redraw the lines in the state.”

If you’ve been following the great redistricting arms race, you know the playbook: one side redraws maps in their favor outside the normal census cycle, the other side screams unfair! and then rushes to do the exact same thing in their own states. It’s mutually assured gerrymandering.

Yesterday, circuit court judge Jack Hurley, Jr., in rural Tazewell County, Virginia, just dropped a reality check on the Democrats’ play in the Commonwealth. He blocked their entire push to ram through a constitutional amendment that would have let them redraw congressional districts mid-decade, potentially flipping the current purplish 6D-5R split into something dark blue – maybe even 10D-1R in their most hopeful schemes.

In other words, Democrats basically tried to turn Virginia all-blue, even though at least 40% of its residents vote red, with a rushed, last-minute constitutional referendum jammed onto ballots without proper notice and without even kissing voters first.

Judge Hurley didn’t decide whether the gerrymander itself was fair— he didn’t need to. He ruled that the whole process was procedurally invalid: Democrats rushed through it and skipped steps. Judge Hurley drily observed, “Certainly, both houses of the Commonwealth’s legislature are required to follow their own rules and resolutions.”

That’s probably all she wrote. The state constitutional amendment enabling the mid-census redistricting is now blocked. Kaput. There will be no voter referendum this spring. So there will be no new maps in time for 2026 midterms. The current court-drawn maps with their 6D-5R split remain in place, unless a state supreme court appeal succeeds. Most commenters think the state’s top judges lean conservative, so a reversal seems unlikely, given all the problems Judge Hurley pointed out.

Virginia Republicans called it “a decisive victory for the rule of law.” Democrats complained that “Republicans who can’t win at the ballot box are abusing the legal process... This was court-shopping, plain and simple!” Court-shopping. That’s rich.

The mid-decade redistricting wars rage on. California and Utah already delivered Democrat gains —lawsuits in progress— while Texas and other red states added more seats. Texas recently beat the Democrats’ challenge at SCOTUS, so its new +5-GOP map sticks. The gerrymander-go-round keeps on spinning, and where it stops, nobody knows.

Speaking of the Supreme Court, yesterday the Hill ran an unintentionally encouraging op-ed headlined, “The Supreme Court could bring Texas-style gerrymandering to your state.” Several outlets, including WaPo, ran the exact same op-ed yesterday, which seems to defy normal journalistic inclinations toward exclusivity, but who cares, especially when a narrative needs a push? The op-ed anguished over the most anticipated decision of the entire court term, maybe of the whole Trump 2.0 era.

One of the most influential decisions this Supreme Court term is over Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which regulates states into ensuring that minority districts exist. The rationale is not that electoral districts should reflect the state’s political makeup, giving Democrats and Republicans proportional representation. Haha! That would be silly. The Act is all about skin color, arrogantly presuming that people with similar melanin levels vote the same.

Courtwatchers forecast that SCOTUS is preparing to knock down one of the Act’s final pillars, causing the entire rotten racial edifice to topple over into the dustbin of history. If that does happen, then a whole bunch of states —particularly but not only Southern states— are salivating at the chance to redraw racially-reserved districts for political advantage— a goal SCOTUS has already explicitly approved.

“If this case is decided unfavorably,” the op-ed warned darkly, “all levels of government will rush to redraw their maps in discriminatory ways, disrupting the 2026 primary elections.” Or improving the 2026 primaries, depending on how you look at it.

It’s a nail-biter. The decision is expected this term. It could happen any day now —which would leave time for adjustments prior to the midterms— or it could come at the end of the term in July, possibly too late to make any difference this time around. You can bet the planning is well underway.

Either way, this promises to be a blockbuster Supreme Court term, including this VRA case and other monumental decisions, such as whether Trump can keep running his tariff dashboard the same way, whether men can play in women’s sports, and whether presidents have authority to remove Fed governors like mortgage fraudster Lisa Cook. It’s going to get spicy.