Denver mayor travels for Thanksgiving after urging people to stay home
Mayor Michael Hancock said his wife and daughter are in Mississippi and he decided it was safer to travel to them rather than them to travel to Denver.
By Phil Helsel
November 25, 2020
Denver’s mayor is explaining himself and offering an apology after he traveled to Mississippi for Thanksgiving, though he had urged others to stay home if possible because of the coronavirus pandemic. Mayor Michael Hancock said he made the decision to head out of town because his wife and daughter are in Mississippi, where his daughter recently took a job.
“As the holiday approached, I decided it would be safer for me to travel to see them than to have two family members travel back to Denver,” he said Wednesday.
Earlier in the day, the mayor tweeted public health guidance surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday that urged people to avoid travel if possible — a request the Democratic mayor acknowledged when explaining his own travel.
Hancock’s travel was reported earlier Wednesday by NBC affiliate KUSA of Denver.
The mayor’s trip comes as officials in Colorado have warned about a steep increase in Covid-19 cases that threatens to stress the hospital system, and after warnings from the governor and others to keep Thanksgiving gatherings small and safe.
Hancock said in the statement that his family canceled their traditional multi-household Thanksgiving celebration.
The station reported he traveled to Houston for the Mississippi trip, and that his account tweeted the guidance to stay home about 30 minutes before his flight.
“I recognize that my decision has disappointed many who believe it would have been better to spend Thanksgiving alone,” Hancock said. “As a public official, whose conduct is rightly scrutinized for the message it sends to others, I apologize to the residents of Denver who see my decision as conflicting with the guidance to stay at home for all but essential travel.”
It’s not the first time recently that a government official has apologized or had to explain themselves for actions taken as infections rise across the United States and increased restrictions have been implemented.
Earlier this month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom apologized for attending a dinner at the French Laundry restaurant in wine country with people not in his household.
Newsom said he and his wife had been invited to a friend’s 50th birthday party, it was larger than he’d anticipated and that “I made a bad mistake” and that he should have left.
“The spirit of what I’m preaching all the time was contradicted,” Newsom said. He said he and his wife had only been out two other times since February and they were alone, and that “this has not been a practice I’ve indulged in in the past.”
Also Wednesday, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced he will quarantine and be closely monitored after he learned he’d been exposed to someone who has tested positive for Covid-19.
Polis said that he had tested negative, but that he would be re-tested in the coming days.
New data from Sweden show it’s safe to keep schools open, but Joe Biden’s Covid-19 advisors seem more interested in shutting down.
By John Tierney
November 20, 2020
For the lockdown-weary, a brief window of hope opened after the presidential election. With Joe Biden victorious, Democratic politicians and their media allies lost their incentive to weaken Donald Trump’s economy and stoke Covid-19 panic among voters. And with Republicans well-positioned to retain the Senate, governors and mayors in blue states could no longer count on a windfall from a Democratic Congress to rescue them from the consequences of their lockdowns. Finally, cooler heads could prevail—right?
So much for that fantasy. Instead of reconsidering their policies, local officials are restricting more businesses and closing more schools, as New York City has just done. Journalists continue treating Covid deaths as the only ones that matter, while ignoring the mounting medical and social toll from lockdowns. Promising more restrictions, Biden has created an advisory board comprised of individuals who favor stricter lockdowns and foresee restrictions continuing until late next year, even if a Covid vaccine is quickly approved.
Biden and other leaders claim to be following “the science,” but that obviously doesn’t include the research showing the high costs and low benefits of lockdowns and school closures. Closing schools was a dubious move in the spring, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that it would likely do little to stem the pandemic (and noted that school closings in other countries had failed to make a discernible impact). Today it makes even less sense in light of the accumulated evidence.
For young students, the risk of dying from Covid is lower than the risk of dying from the flu, and researchers have repeatedly found that children do not easily transmit the virus to adults. The clearest evidence comes from Sweden, which did not close elementary schools or junior high schools during the spring Covid wave, and which did not reduce class sizes or encourage students and teachers to wear face masks.
Not a single child died, and there was little effect beyond the schools, as a team of Swedish economists reports after analyzing records of Covid infections and medical treatment for the entire Swedish population. The researchers, from the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala, took advantage of a natural experiment in Sweden by comparing hundreds of thousands of parents at the junior high schools (for students aged 14 to 16), which remained open, against those at the senior high schools, which switched to online instruction for two months in the spring.
There was scant danger from the schools that remained open. The parents at those schools were 15 percent more likely to test positive for the virus than the parents whose children stayed home, but they were no more likely to be treated or hospitalized for Covid. The classroom teachers were twice as likely as the online teachers to test positive, but their infection rate was nonetheless lower than the rate among parents at either type of school. Just 0.2 percent of the classroom teachers were hospitalized for Covid, lower than the rate among parents. The Swedish researchers suggest additional protections for classroom teachers, like encouraging them to start wearing masks or allowing the older, more vulnerable ones to teach online. But after calculating that a closure of all the junior high schools would have reduced the Swedish national rate of Covid infection by a mere 1 percent, the economists conclude that closing schools is “not a particularly effective way” to stop the spread of the virus.
The chief effect of school closures is to hurt students. In St. Paul, Minnesota, where schools have been mostly closed since March, 40 percent of the students are failing this quarter—double the normal rate. In the Dallas public schools, which closed in March and reopened late this fall, recent tests revealed that half of the students have regressed in mathematics since last year, and that’s probably typical of the “learning loss” that will have long-lasting effects on students around the world. Economists at the World Bank estimate that the spring closures will ultimately reduce the affected students’ lifetime earnings by 5 percent—a loss totaling $10 trillion worldwide. Extrapolating from the well-established effects of education and income on life expectancy, another team of researchers calculates that the springtime school closures in the United States will shorten students’ lives by a cumulative total of more than five million years—more years of life than were lost to the pandemic in the spring.
But those considerations don’t carry much weight with teachers’ unions—and the politicians who depend on them for reelection. Governors and mayors kept many schools closed or only partially open at the start of the fall, and this month they’ve been ordering further shutdowns. Since New York City reopened its schools in September, there has been a minuscule rate of infection among students and staff members—just two cases per thousand. But Mayor Bill de Blasio is so in thrall to the teachers’ union that he closed schools this week even though the city’s positivity test rate is well below the threshold used for closing schools in the rest of the state.
The school closures are disproportionately harming African-American and Hispanic students, and other lockdown measures fall hardest on low-income workers who can’t do their jobs from home, as was repeatedly pointed out by Trump and the researchers he consulted, like Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution. Atlas, whose calculations show that the social costs of lockdowns exceed the benefits, calls them “a luxury of the rich.” But despite Biden’s professed concern for reducing inequality, he has not urged schools and businesses to remain open. While he says that he will not impose a national lockdown, his advisory board is dominated by public-health professionals eager to impose still more costly restrictions.
One board member, Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania, used to be renowned for his devotion to cost-benefit analysis. He was an architect of Obamacare, including its controversial board (denounced by critics as a “death panel”) empowered to contain medical costs by limiting expensive treatments. He has advocated allocating medical resources according to a “complete lives system” that “prioritizes younger people who have not yet lived a complete life.” In a 2014 essay, written when he was 57, Emanuel said that once he reached 75 he would refuse most medical treatments, even simple ones like antibiotics, because he did not want to endure the diminished quality of life that comes with old age.
But once Covid became a campaign issue this year, he quickly recalibrated. The median age of Americans dying of Covid is close to 80, but Ezekiel wants to protect them with what is surely the most expensive (and least proven) medical intervention in history. The lockdowns so far have cost trillions of dollars, but Ezekiel dismisses them as inadequate because they have lacked “staying power.” He has advocated an eight-week national lockdown and a national mandate to wear masks, and he doesn’t expect vaccines to make a difference anytime soon. If all goes well, he says, schools might reopen next fall.
Another member of the board, Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, warned in March that lockdowns and school closures could do more harm than good, but he soon joined the chorus of Democrats criticizing Trump for wanting to keep schools and businesses open. In July, he warned against reopening schools too hastily, and by August he was calling for a national lockdown “as comprehensive and strict as possible,” so that people would be allowed to leave home only for food shopping and visits to doctors and pharmacies.
Osterholm also singled out New York governor Andrew Cuomo for praise, calling the state “a model for the rest of the United States.” This seemed rather bizarre, given that the Covid mortality rate in New York is the nation’s second-highest (exceeded only by New Jersey’s), and that infections peaked before Cuomo ordered a lockdown in March. Cuomo also famously justified the lockdown by declaring, “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” This just-one-life rationale has traditionally been considered a prime fallacy in making public policy, which is supposed to be based on rational consideration of the common good. Now it apparently constitutes “the science” guiding the next president.
De Jesus Lopez-Garcia has a criminal history spanning back nearly 15 years that includes convictions for battery of a spouse, assault with a deadly weapon, inflicting corporal injury on a spouse, battery of an officer, and vandalism.
San Jose, California police arrested Garcia on November 22nd for two counts of murder, battery on a spouse or cohabitant and violation of a protective order.
ICE points to three instances within the past two years in which the repeat felon was released into the community following jail stints in California, even as the immigration enforcement agency lodged detainer requests seeking to have De Jesus Lopez-Garcia transferred into their custody for deportation proceedings.
In the states where no cheating is suspected, Biden’s percentage of the mail in vote remains consistent among different batches within the same state. If one batch of mail in votes in one state went 70% for Biden, then all the other batches of mail in votes in that same state also went 70% for Biden.
But not in the critical swing states.
In the critical swing states, after they stopped counting votes in the middle of the night, and then resumed counting later on, the percentage of mail in votes for Biden was way, way higher than it was in earlier batches within that same state.
You can read a detailed article about this at this link:
This report studies 8,954 individual updates to the vote totals in all 50 states and finds that four individual updates — two of which were widely noticed on the internet, including by the President — are profoundly anomalous; they deviate from a pattern which is otherwise found in the vast majority of the remaining 8,950 vote updates. The findings presented by this report suggest that four vote count updates — which collectively were decisive in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, and thus decisive of a critical forty-two electoral votes — are especially anomalous and merit further investigation.
In particular, the finding that the broader data follows general patterns and our ability to measure just how much any individual vote update does — or doesn’t — follow this pattern allows us to make concrete claims about both how extreme any given vote update is and about what any particular vote update might have looked like, had it been less extreme one one axis or another.
We further find that if these updates were only more extreme than 99% of all updates nationally in terms of their deviation from this generally-observed pattern, that, holding all else equal, Joe Biden may very well have lost the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, and that he would have 42 fewer Electoral votes — putting Biden below the number required to win the Presidency. Either way, it is indisputable that his margin of victory in these three states relies on four most anomalous vote updates identified by the metric developed in this report.
We once again note that this analysis is largely restricted to four individual vote updates out of a sample of nearly 9,000. This report by no means suggests stopping investigations in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, or elsewhere; it is merely that these four key ballot updates are both profoundly anomalous with respect to a metric which removes any component of different states having different partisan leanings or a different number of voters. Furthermore, this analysis does not require that we regard the final vote totals in any of these states (or counties thereof) as suspicious, nor, critically, does it require that we accept that the observed data should follow any particular distribution a priori. We merely show that the data, adjusted appropriately to remove differences in size and political leaning between states, does follow a certain pattern, and that four key vote updates deviate profoundly from that pattern.
It is our belief that the extraordinarily anomalous nature of the studied vote updates here, combined with the staggering political implications, demands immediate and thorough investigation.
Johns Hopkins University has just reported the following:
“Surprisingly, the deaths of older people stayed the same before and after COVID-19. Since COVID-19 mainly affects the elderly, experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data. In fact, the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same.”
Although the people who conducted this study find the results “surprising,” I myself do not.
Anyway, this is proof that the panic and hysteria over COVID-19, as well as the lockdowns, closures, cancellations, restrictions, and other authoritarian actions on the part of political leaders, were all completely unjustified.
Which is exactly what I have been saying all along.
“Specifically, video from the State Farm Arena in Fulton County shows that on November 3rd after the polls closed, election workers falsely claimed a water leak required the facility to close. All poll workers and challengers were evacuated for several hours at about 10:00 PM. However, several election workers remained unsupervised and unchallenged working at the computers for the voting tabulation machines until after 1:00 AM.”
In Pennsylvania, in the middle of the night, after they stopped counting votes and sent everyone home, they found a batch of 600,000 votes, and 99.5% of them were for Biden.
WATCH: Crowd gasps after finding out that a mysterious spike of votes in Pennsylvania had 600,000 votes for Biden and only 3,200 for @realDonaldTrumppic.twitter.com/Sa1n3jpyhf
#PA#PALegislature#ChainofCustody "What I saw there was a chain of custody, that in all cases, that was broken." Mail-ins, drop box, the election day USB card flashdrives: no chain of custody. They have photos of a guy walking in w baggies of USBs. pic.twitter.com/zbCpexLYp1
Splitting 5 to 4, Supreme Court Backs Religious Challenge to Cuomo’s Virus Shutdown Order
In earlier rulings related to coronavirus restrictions in California and Nevada, the court had taken the opposite approach. But its membership has changed since then.
By Adam Liptak
November 26, 2020
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court late Wednesday night barred restrictions on religious services in New York that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had imposed to combat the coronavirus.
The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The order was the first in which the court’s newest member, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, played a decisive role.
The court’s ruling was at odds with earlier ones concerning churches in California and Nevada. In those cases, decided in May and July, the court allowed the states’ governors to restrict attendance at religious services.
The Supreme Court’s membership has changed since then, with Justice Barrett succeeding Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September. The vote in the earlier cases was also 5 to 4, but in the opposite direction, with Chief Justice Roberts joining Justice Ginsburg and the other three members of what was then the court’s four-member liberal wing.
In an unsigned opinion, the majority said Mr. Cuomo’s restrictions violated the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said Mr. Cuomo had treated secular activities more favorably than religious ones.
“It is time — past time — to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.
The court’s order addressed two applications: one filed by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, the other by two synagogues, an Orthodox Jewish organization and two individuals. The applications both said Mr. Cuomo’s restrictions violated constitutional protections for the free exercise of religion, and the one from the synagogues added that Mr. Cuomo had “singled out a particular religion for blame and retribution for an uptick in a societywide pandemic.”
The restrictions are strict. In shifting “red zones,” where the coronavirus risk is highest, no more than 10 people may attend religious services. In slightly less dangerous “orange zones,” which are also fluid, attendance is capped at 25. This applies even to churches that can seat more than 1,000 people.
The measures were prompted in large part by rising coronavirus cases in Orthodox Jewish areas but covered all “houses of worship.”
In a letter to the court last Thursday, Barbara D. Underwood, New York’s solicitor general, said that revisions to the color-coded zones effective Friday meant that “none of the diocese’s churches will be affected by the gathering-size limits it seeks to enjoin.” The next day, she told the court that the two synagogues were also no longer subject to the challenged restrictions.
Lawyers for the diocese questioned “the fluid nature of these modifications and the curious timing of the governor’s latest modification,” and they urged the court to decide the case notwithstanding the revisions.
Lawyers for the synagogues said Mr. Cuomo should not be allowed to “feign retreat” when “he retains the unfettered discretion to reimpose those restrictions on them at a moment’s notice.”
In a dissenting opinion on Wednesday, Chief Justice Roberts said the court had acted rashly.
“Numerical capacity limits of 10 and 25 people, depending on the applicable zone, do seem unduly restrictive,” he wrote. “It is not necessary, however, for us to rule on that serious and difficult question at this time.”
“The governor might reinstate the restrictions,” he wrote. “But he also might not. And it is a significant matter to override determinations made by public health officials concerning what is necessary for public safety in the midst of a deadly pandemic. If the governor does reinstate the numerical restrictions the applicants can return to this court, and we could act quickly on their renewed applications.”
In a second dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, said Mr. Cuomo’s restrictions were sensible.
“Free religious exercise is one of our most treasured and jealously guarded constitutional rights,” she wrote. “States may not discriminate against religious institutions, even when faced with a crisis as deadly as this one. But those principles are not at stake today.”
“The Constitution does not forbid states from responding to public health crises through regulations that treat religious institutions equally or more favorably than comparable secular institutions, particularly when those regulations save lives,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Because New York’s Covid-19 restrictions do just that, I respectfully dissent.”
The larger question in the two cases was whether government officials or judges should strike the balance between public health and religious exercise.
In a concurring opinion in the case from California in May, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that government officials should not “be subject to second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary, which lacks the background, competence and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”
But in a recent speech to a conservative legal group, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who had dissented in the earlier cases, said courts had an important role to play in protecting religious freedom, pandemic or no.
“Whenever fundamental rights are restricted, the Supreme Court and other courts cannot close their eyes,” Justice Alito said this month, rejecting the view that “whenever there is an emergency, executive officials have unlimited, unreviewable discretion.”
In ruling against the diocese, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn said the case was difficult. But he concluded that he would defer to the governor.
“If the court issues an injunction and the state is correct about the acuteness of the threat currently posed by hot-spot neighborhoods,” the judge wrote, “the result could be avoidable death on a massive scale like New Yorkers experienced in the spring.”
In refusing to block the governor’s order while the two appeals went forward, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit drew on Chief Justice Roberts’s concurring opinion in the California case. Since the restrictions on churches were less severe than those on comparable secular gatherings, the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion, they did not run afoul of constitutional protections for religious freedom.
In dissent, Judge Michael H. Park said Mr. Cuomo’s order discriminated against houses of worship because it allowed businesses like liquor stores and pet shops to remain open without capacity restrictions.
Chief Justice Roberts rejected a similar argument in the California case. The order there, he wrote, “exempts or treats more leniently only dissimilar activities, such as operating grocery stores, banks and laundromats, in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods.”
Judge Park responded that the order in the California case, coming as it did in the context of an emergency application that was decided in summary fashion, had limited force as a precedent. Moreover, he wrote, it had been “decided during the early stages of the pandemic, when local governments were struggling to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed.”
In asking the Supreme Court to step in, lawyers for the diocese argued that its “spacious churches” were safer than many “secular businesses that can open without restrictions, such as pet stores and broker’s offices and banks and bodegas.” An hourlong Mass, the diocese’s brief said, is “shorter than many trips to a supermarket or big-box store, not to mention a 9-to-5 job.”
Ms. Underwood responded that religious services pose special risks. “There is a documented history of religious gatherings serving as Covid-19 superspreader events,” she wrote.
Indoor religious services, Ms. Underwood wrote, “tend to involve large numbers of people from different households arriving simultaneously; congregating as an audience for an extended period of time to talk, sing or chant; and then leaving simultaneously — as well as the possibility that participants will mingle in close proximity throughout.”
Still, she wrote, religious services are subject to fewer restrictions than comparable secular ones. “Among other things, in both red and orange zones, casinos, bowling alleys, arcades, movie theaters and fitness centers are closed completely,” she wrote.
Huge court win lets Trump present ballot evidence, could overturn Nevada result
By Paul Bedard
November 25, 2020
In its first court victory, a Nevada judge has agreed to let the Trump campaign present its evidence that fraud and illegalities plagued the state’s election, enough to reverse Joe Biden’s win and set an example for other state challenges.
According to Trump officials, the judge set a Dec. 3 hearing date and is allowing 15 depositions. What’s more, the campaign plans to present its evidence that could result in the rejection of tens of thousands of mail-in ballots in Democratic Clark County where Biden ballots outnumbered Trump ballots by 91,000 in unofficial results.
“BIG news in Nevada: a Judge has allowed NV Republicans to present findings of widespread voter fraud in a Dec. 3rd hearing. Americans will now hear evidence from those who saw firsthand what happened—a critical step for transparency and remedying illegal ballots. Stay tuned,” White House chief of staff Mark Meadows tweeted.
American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp, one of those heading the Nevada case, told Secrets, “It gives us a real chance, if to do nothing else, to begin to show this historic level of fraud.”
BIG news in Nevada: a Judge has allowed NV Republicans to present findings of widespread voter fraud in a Dec. 3rd hearing. Americans will now hear evidence from those who saw firsthand what happened—a critical step for transparency and remedying illegal ballots. Stay tuned.
But its biggest claim was that the signatures on hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were not verified by human officials, as required by law.
What’s more, they found that officials used a machine to verify signatures, apparently against the rules, and even those machines were plagued with problems.
Schlapp said he is eager to get a chance to finally show its evidence of fraud and for the campaign to present the thousands of examples of signature machine errors. Since many states require signature verification, that is where the campaign’s fraud investigation is focused.
“The biggest thing which is true in all of these states we’re talking about including in Georgia where a third of the ballots were cast in the mail Nevada half the ballots were cast in the mail, with no legal signature verification, certainly not in Clark County, that is the big treasure trove of illegal balloting in all of these states,” he said on Fox late Tuesday.
Breaking News: NV judge agrees to hear evidence of illegal voting and allow Republicans/Trump campaign to depose those who know about the dirty deeds of campaign 2020. Big News! 🚨🚨 pic.twitter.com/53bbWGD5gY
The campaign also has testimony from a blind person who claims somebody else voted for her and that she was barred from voting as a result. And they plan to present evidence that Native Americans were offered bribes of TVs and gas cards for their vote.
“Our filing said we have over 15 individual and tenss of thousands more from mail-in fraud. We have enough to switch the outcome,” Schlapp told us.
Late last night, he revealed the judge’s decision on Sean Hannity’s Fox show. Schlapp said, “For the first time in this whole tragic story of the 2020 presidential election, a state court has granted republicans in Nevada and the Trump campaign, the ability to present their case of widespread illegal balloting, and to just depose up to 15 people who know what went down in Clark County in the state of Nevada, so this is big news you know a lot of people in the national media have said, you know, if you have evidence of voter fraud, show it. Well, we have thousands and thousands of examples of real people in real-life instances of voter illegality. And I just think it’s a great step that we’re going to have a chance to present it. A court if we get a fair hearing. I believe the results in Nevada should be switched.”
Group Files Emergency Petition in Wisconsin After Identifying 144,000 Potentially Fraudulent Ballots
By Zachary Stieber
November 24, 2020
A group on Tuesday filed an emergency petition with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, challenging the state’s unofficial election results.
The Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project said it found tens of thousands of ballots that may be fraudulent.
“We have identified over 150,000 potentially fraudulent ballots in Wisconsin, more than enough to call into question the validity of the state’s reported election results,” said Phill Kline, director of the project, in a statement. The count includes 144,000 fraudulent votes and over 12,000 legal votes not counted.
“Moreover, these discrepancies were a direct result of Wisconsin election officials’ willful violation of state law,” he added.
According to unofficial results in the state, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump by about 20,000 votes.
The group said it found that more than 10,000 Republican ballots weren’t counted; more than 10,000 GOP voters who had their ballots requested and filled in by another person; and around 100,000 illegal ballots that were counted anyway.
The 45-page filing asks the Wisconsin Supreme Court to block the certification of election results because of the alleged irregularities.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission told The Epoch Times via email that the commission didn’t have any comment on the matter.
The lawsuit details a series of alleged illegal actions taken by Wisconsin officials that led to significant numbers of improper votes being counted. One example is not enforcing state laws that require voters to present photo identification when requesting an absentee, or mail-in, ballot. The only exceptions are for voters who are hospitalized or “indefinitely confined because of age, physical illness, or infirmity.”
The indefinite confinement exception was interpreted to apply to people with COVID-19. Statistical analysis shows nearly 100,000 exploited the exception, the project said.
The possibly fraudulent ballots were identified in a data analysis performed by statistician Matthew Braynard and mathematician Steven Miller.
The project announced last week it would be filing federal and state lawsuits challenging the presidential election results in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona.
Two Wisconsin counties are currently engaged in a recount initiated at the request of the Trump campaign.
The deadline for the partial recount is Dec. 1.
The Thomas More Society, based in Chicago, describes itself as a national public interest law firm dedicated to providing free legal services for clients all over the United States in defense of life, family, and religious liberty.
“NO ABSENTEE BALLOT UNDER THIS SUBSECTION SHALL BE COUNTED WHICH IS RECEIVED IN THE OFFICE OF THE COUNTY BOARD OF ELECTIONS LATER THAN [EIGHT O’CLOCK P.M. ON THE DAY OF THE PRIMARY OR ELECTION]”
“Pennsylvania Supreme Court Extends Vote By Mail Deadline” “Mail ballots will now be accepted if they are received by 5 p.m. on the Friday after the election and were either postmarked by Nov. 3 or there is no evidence to suggest they were sent after Election Day. Previously, mail ballots had to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day.”
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — On the morning of the primary here in August, the local elections board met to decide which absentee ballots to count. It was not an easy job.
The board tossed out some ballots because they arrived without the signature required on the outside of the return envelope. It rejected one that said “see inside” where the signature should have been. And it debated what to do with ballots in which the signature on the envelope did not quite match the one in the county’s files.
“This ‘r’ is not like that ‘r,’ ” Judge Augustus D. Aikens Jr. said, suggesting that a ballot should be rejected.
Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor here, disagreed. “This ‘k’ is like that ‘k,’ ” he replied, and he persuaded his colleagues to count the vote.
Scenes like this will play out in many elections next month, because Florida and other states are swiftly moving from voting at a polling place toward voting by mail. In the last general election in Florida, in 2010, 23 percent of voters cast absentee ballots, up from 15 percent in the midterm election four years before. Nationwide, the use of absentee ballots and other forms of voting by mail has more than tripled since 1980 and now accounts for almost 20 percent of all votes.
Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.
“The more people you force to vote by mail,” Mr. Sancho said, “the more invalid ballots you will generate.”
Election experts say the challenges created by mailed ballots could well affect outcomes this fall and beyond. If the contests next month are close enough to be within what election lawyers call the margin of litigation, the grounds on which they will be fought will not be hanging chads but ballots cast away from the voting booth.
In 2008, 18 percent of the votes in the nine states likely to decide this year’s presidential election were cast by mail. That number will almost certainly rise this year, and voters in two-thirds of the states have already begun casting absentee ballots. In four Western states, voting by mail is the exclusive or dominant way to cast a ballot.
The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say.
In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time. Before this year’s primary, for example, a woman in Hialeah was charged with forging an elderly voter’s signature, a felony, and possessing 31 completed absentee ballots, 29 more than allowed under a local law.
The flaws of absentee voting raise questions about the most elementary promises of democracy. “The right to have one’s vote counted is as important as the act of voting itself,” Justice Paul H. Anderson of the Minnesota Supreme Court wrote while considering disputed absentee ballots in the close 2008 Senate election between Al Franken and Norm Coleman.
Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner. The list includes the 2000 presidential election, in which problems with absentee ballots in Florida were a little-noticed footnote to other issues.
In the last presidential election, 35.5 million voters requested absentee ballots, but only 27.9 million absentee votes were counted, according to a study by Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He calculated that 3.9 million ballots requested by voters never reached them; that another 2.9 million ballots received by voters did not make it back to election officials; and that election officials rejected 800,000 ballots. That suggests an overall failure rate of as much as 21 percent.
Some voters presumably decided not to vote after receiving ballots, but Mr. Stewart said many others most likely tried to vote and were thwarted. “If 20 percent, or even 10 percent, of voters who stood in line on Election Day were turned away,” he wrote in the study, published in The Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, “there would be national outrage.”
The list of very close elections includes the 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, in which Mr. Franken’s victory over Mr. Coleman, the Republican incumbent, helped give Democrats the 60 votes in the Senate needed to pass President Obama’s health care bill. Mr. Franken won by 312 votes, while state officials rejected 12,000 absentee ballots. Recent primary elections in New York involving Republican state senators who had voted to allow same-sex marriage also hinged on absentee ballots.
There are, of course, significant advantages to voting by mail. It makes life easier for the harried, the disabled and the elderly. It is cheaper to administer, makes for shorter lines on election days and allows voters more time to think about ballots that list many races. By mailing ballots, those away from home can vote. Its availability may also increase turnout in local elections, though it does not seem to have had much impact on turnout in federal ones.
Still, voting in person is more reliable, particularly since election administrators made improvements to voting equipment after the 2000 presidential election.
There have been other and more controversial changes since then, also in the name of reliability and efficiency. Lawmakers have cut back on early voting in person, cracked down on voter registration drives, imposed identification requirements, made it harder for students to cast ballots and proposed purging voter rolls in a way that critics have said would eliminate people who are eligible to vote.
But almost nothing has been done about the distinctive challenges posed by absentee ballots. To the contrary, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state recently sent absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in the state. And Republican lawmakers in Florida recently revised state law to allow ballots to be mailed wherever voters want, rather than typically to only their registered addresses.
“This is the only area in Florida where we’ve made it easier to cast a ballot,” Daniel A. Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida, said of absentee voting.
He posited a reason that Republican officials in particular have pushed to expand absentee voting. “The conventional wisdom is that Republicans use absentee ballots and Democrats vote early,” he said.
Republicans are in fact more likely than Democrats to vote absentee. In the 2008 general election in Florida, 47 percent of absentee voters were Republicans and 36 percent were Democrats.
There is a bipartisan consensus that voting by mail, whatever its impact, is more easily abused than other forms. In a 2005 report signed by President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III, who served as secretary of state under the first President George Bush, the Commission on Federal Election Reform concluded, “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
On the most basic level, absentee voting replaces the oversight that exists at polling places with something akin to an honor system.
“Absentee voting is to voting in person,” Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has written, “as a take-home exam is to a proctored one.”
Fraud Easier Via Mail
Election administrators have a shorthand name for a central weakness of voting by mail. They call it granny farming.
“The problem,” said Murray A. Greenberg, a former county attorney in Miami, “is really with the collection of absentee ballots at the senior citizen centers.” In Florida, people affiliated with political campaigns “help people vote absentee,” he said. “And help is in quotation marks.”
Voters in nursing homes can be subjected to subtle pressure, outright intimidation or fraud. The secrecy of their voting is easily compromised. And their ballots can be intercepted both coming and going.
The problem is not limited to the elderly, of course. Absentee ballots also make it much easier to buy and sell votes. In recent years, courts have invalidated mayoral elections in Illinois and Indiana because of fraudulent absentee ballots.
Voting by mail also played a crucial role in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, when the margin between George W. Bush and Al Gore was razor thin and hundreds of absentee ballots were counted in apparent violation of state law. The flawed ballots, from Americans living abroad, included some without postmarks, some postmarked after the election, some without witness signatures, some mailed from within the United States and some sent by people who voted twice. All would have been disqualified had the state’s election laws been strictly enforced.
In the recent primary here, almost 40 percent of ballots were not cast in the voting booth on the day of the election. They were split between early votes cast at polling places, which Mr. Sancho, the Leon County elections supervisor, favors, and absentee ballots, which make him nervous.
“There has been not one case of fraud in early voting,” Mr. Sancho said. “The only cases of election fraud have been in absentee ballots.”
Efforts to prevent fraud at polling places have an ironic consequence, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, told the Senate Judiciary Committee September last year. They will, he said, “drive more voters into the absentee system, where fraud and coercion have been documented to be real and legitimate concerns.”
“That is,” he said, “a law ostensibly designed to reduce the incidence of fraud is likely to increase the rate at which voters utilize a system known to succumb to fraud more frequently.”
Clarity Brings Better Results
In 2008, Minnesota officials rejected 12,000 absentee ballots, about 4 percent of all such votes, for the myriad reasons that make voting by mail far less reliable than voting in person.
The absentee ballot itself could be blamed for some of the problems. It had to be enclosed in envelopes containing various information and signatures, including one from a witness who had to attest to handling the logistics of seeing that “the voter marked the ballots in that individual’s presence without showing how they were marked.” Such witnesses must themselves be registered voters, with a few exceptions.
Absentee ballots have been rejected in Minnesota and elsewhere for countless reasons. Signatures from older people, sloppy writers or stroke victims may not match those on file. The envelopes and forms may not have been configured in the right sequence. People may have moved, and addresses may not match. Witnesses may not be registered to vote. The mail may be late.
But it is certainly possible to improve the process and reduce the error rate.
Here in Leon County, the rejection rate for absentee ballots is less than 1 percent. The instructions it provides to voters are clear, and the outer envelope is a model of graphic design, with a large signature box at its center.
The envelope requires only standard postage, and Mr. Sancho has made arrangements with the post office to pay for ballots that arrive without stamps.
Still, he would prefer that voters visit a polling place on Election Day or beforehand so that errors and misunderstandings can be corrected and the potential for fraud minimized.
“If you vote by mail, where is that coming from?” he asked. “Is there intimidation going on?”
Last November, Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, suspended a school board member in Madison County, not far from here, after she was arrested on charges including absentee ballot fraud.
The board member, Abra Hill Johnson, won the school board race “by what appeared to be a disproportionate amount of absentee votes,” the arrest affidavit said. The vote was 675 to 647, but Ms. Johnson had 217 absentee votes to her opponent’s 86. Officials said that 80 absentee ballots had been requested at just nine addresses. Law enforcement agents interviewed 64 of the voters whose ballots were sent; only two recognized the address.
Ms. Johnson has pleaded not guilty.
Election law experts say that pulling off in-person voter fraud on a scale large enough to swing an election, with scores if not hundreds of people committing a felony in public by pretending to be someone else, is hard to imagine, to say nothing of exceptionally risky.
There are much simpler and more effective alternatives to commit fraud on such a scale, said Heather Gerken, a law professor at Yale.
“You could steal some absentee ballots or stuff a ballot box or bribe an election administrator or fiddle with an electronic voting machine,” she said. That explains, she said, “why all the evidence of stolen elections involves absentee ballots and the like.”
Laziness leads to sloppiness, and sloppiness is how the most brazen heist in American history is being exposed.
Stealing the 2020 election was a mammoth undertaking, involving widespread lawlessness and illicit partnerships between private actors and public officials. They’ve been working to cover their tracks since Election Day, but they didn’t work fast enough. Now, the courts need to stop them from destroying any more evidence so that the people of Pennsylvania—and the rest of the country—can accurately assess the ramifications of their wrongdoing.
Explosive new litigation filed in federal district court on Nov. 21 details and documents a wide variety of illegal practices that were used to inflate the number of votes received by Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, including disparate treatment of voters based on where they live and outright manipulation of Pennsylvania’s voter registration system by partisan activists.
An unprecedented number of mail-in and absentee ballots were cast this year, and practically everyone expected that this would result in a higher-than-usual rate of ballots being rejected for various flaws, such as lacking a secrecy envelope or missing information. In Pennsylvania, tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots were likely to be rejected, based on historical patterns. Instead, a mere 0.03 percent of mail-in ballots were ultimately rejected—somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1,000 votes.
Considering that a significant majority of mail-in votes were cast for Biden, the Democrat candidate benefited handsomely from this discrepancy. But how did this anomaly happen?
It turns out that election officials in Democrat strongholds such as Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), Philadelphia County, and Philadelphia’s collar counties—particularly Delaware County—exceeded their authority in order to give voters preferential treatment that wasn’t afforded to voters in Republican-leaning areas of the state.
Specifically, election workers illegally “pre-canvassed” mail-in ballots to determine whether they were missing a secrecy envelope or failed to include necessary information. When ballots were found to be flawed, voters were given an opportunity to correct, or “cure,” their ballots to make sure they counted. In at least some cases, Democrat Party officials were even given lists of voters to contact about curing their ballots.
Election officials in Republican-leaning counties rightly interpreted this as a violation of Pennsylvania’s election code, but Democrat Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar issued guidance authorizing the illegal practices despite lacking the statutory authority to do so.
That’s not the only way Democrats broke the law to give their candidate an unfair advantage, though. Extensive on-the-ground investigations conducted over the past year and a half by attorneys and investigators with the Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas More Society have uncovered another element of the plot that involved even more egregious behavior.
Boockvar also exceeded her authority by granting private, partisan organizations—including the notoriously pro-Democrat group “Rock the Vote”—access to the Commonwealth’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE).
“Rock the Vote’s web tool was connected to our system, making the process of registering voters through their online programs, and those of their partners, seamless for voters across Pennsylvania,” the lawsuit quotes Boockvar as saying.
That’s not supposed to happen. It’s one thing for outside groups to submit registration applications to the state on behalf of would-be voters, but election clerks are the only ones who are supposed to enter this sort of information directly into the records.
It’s easy to see why by inspecting post-election voter lists, which contain names such as “Mary April Smith,” followed by “Mary May Smith,” “Mary June Smith,” “Mary July Smith,” and so forth through the rest of the calendar. When the same voter lists were purchased just a week later, however, those suspicious names had mysteriously disappeared from the rolls.
Under the circumstances, that’s direct evidence of a systematic effort to conceal wrongdoing. All further alterations to the SURE system should be immediately halted to allow a thorough investigation of the records before any more evidence can be destroyed.
The thieves who attempted to hijack the 2020 presidential election were bound to slip up somewhere, and now they’re trying to clean up the glaring evidence of their wrongdoing before the full extent of their crimes can be exposed to the American public. We can’t allow that to happen, or we may never be able to trust the integrity of our elections again.
NYC sheriffs broke up a sex party with 80 people, a room full of mattresses, and boxes of condoms
November 23, 2020
The New York City Sheriff’s Department broke up a sex party in Astoria, Queens on Sunday at 2 AM.
There were over 80 mask-less attendees at Caligula, a self-described swingers club, violating New York state COVID-19-regulations.
Two party organizers and an attendee were charged with multiple misdemeanors for breaking COVID-19 regulations and selling alcohol without a liquor license.
The party comes days after New York City Schools closed indefinitely due to rising COVID-19 rates.
New York Democratic Leaders Caught Maskless At Private Party Despite COVID Restrictions
By Mary Margaret Olohan Social Issues Reporter
November 21, 2020
Elite New York Democrats attending a Brooklyn private party did not adhere to the state’s coronavirus restrictions, photographs show.
The event was a private birthday party for Carl Scissura, who is the head of the New York Building Congress, a trade organization, the New York Daily News reported Thursday. Other attendees included former Brooklyn Democratic Party Chairman Frank Seddio and Deputy Brooklyn Borough President Ingrid Lewis-Martin, the publication reported.
Photographs of the event showed that very few people wore masks, though the party attendees stood in close proximity to one another as they chatted. One photograph showed both Seddio and Lewis-Martin chatting maskless.
“This is a particularly trying time and there were shortcomings that I regret,” Scissura said in a statement, according to the New York Daily News, emphasizing that the party was not his idea. “I greatly appreciate the gesture of my friends to throw me a surprise party, but we all must follow strict protocols so we can get past this pandemic.”
Scissura also said that guests had their temperatures taken before they entered the party and that everyone was given a mask, the Daily News reported. (RELATED: Feinstein, Who Pushed For Nationwide Mask Mandate, Seen Maskless In Public)
Lewis-Martin said the party took place last Saturday — only a few days after Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued coronavirus restrictions mandating that private groups be no larger than 10 people.
“The limit will be implemented due to the recent prevalence of COVID spread resulting from small indoor gatherings,” the governor’s office said Nov. 11. “These gatherings have become a major cause of cluster activity across the state.”
Additional Democratic leaders have also recently violated their own COVID restrictions. Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom was photographed dining maskless indoors at one of the world’s highest rated restaurants, despite his restrictive coronavirus guidelines for Californians.
Newsom has urged California residents to wear face masks “in between bites” at restaurants. He announced Monday that California is “pulling an emergency brake” and mandating the most restrictive tier of coronavirus restrictions for more than two dozen California counties. Seddio told the Daily News: “I farted about four times, but fortunately it didn’t smell. That was a good thing that happened. My wife punched me twice ‘cause she heard me do it. That was the most exciting part of the night.”
He also said that only about 10 people attended the party, but after being told pictures showed over a dozen attendees, he sarcastically told the Daily News: “That’s a great angle … I can’t even imagine that.”
Lewis-Martin told the publication that she has “antibodies” since she “was already sick,” so she had “no concern about spreading or anything.” She also said that groups of people came and went in “shifts” and that the photographs may have been taken during a time when these shifts overlapped.
Cuomo’s office, Seddio, Lewis-Martin and Scissura did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Your Political Leaders Hate You And Think You’re Stupid
Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.
By John Daniel Davidson
November 20, 2020
One thing should be abundantly clear by now, after ten months of this pandemic: our political leaders hate us and they think we’re stupid. Nothing else can explain the blatant hypocrisy we’ve seen, mostly from Democrat governors and mayors who are eager to impose harsh lockdowns and strict rules for the public at large but then turn around and do whatever they please with their own families, friends, and cronies.
Examples abound, but this week brought a fresh spectacle of hypocrisy in the form of a nervous, patently disingenuous apology from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was caught dining at an opulent birthday dinner for a top California political operative at a fancy French restaurant in Napa earlier this month, in apparent violation of his own COVID-19 protocols.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. On Monday Newsom announced he was “pulling the emergency brake” on reopening his state amid a spike in COVID cases, dealing a crippling blow to shuttered businesses and out-of-work Californians who have been struggling for months under rolling lockdown orders.
Only after Newsom was widely criticized for his rank hypocrisy did he offer an attenuated mea culpa, explaining that upon his arrival he was surprised to find there were “just a few extra people” at the party, but quickly added it was an “outdoor restaurant” in Napa County, which has looser restrictions compared to other areas of the state. Blinking incessantly and smiling tightly, Newsom finally got around to saying, albeit in the passive voice, that “the spirit of what I’m preaching all the time was contradicted.” Indeed it was, governor.
But then we come to find out this week that the dinner wasn’t outdoors at all. Pictures obtained by the Fox News affiliate in Los Angeles show Newsom and a bunch of others dining at the French Laundry restaurant in Yountville, California. They are obviously not outside, not social distancing, and not wearing masks.
The woman who took the photos told the Fox affiliate that Newsom was with a “very large group of people shoulder to shoulder,” and that she was “surprised because it didn’t look like he was uncomfortable being there until the very end, until people were looking at him and staring at him as he was leaving the room.”
EXCLUSIVE: We've obtained photos of Governor Gavin Newsom at the Napa dinner party he's in hot water over. The photos call into question just how outdoors the dinner was. A witness who took photos tells us his group was so loud, the sliding doors had to be closed. 10pm on @FOXLApic.twitter.com/gtOVEwa864
But it doesn’t end there! On Wednesday, Politico reported that two top officials with the California Medical Association were among the guests at Newsom’s fancy birthday dinner.
You might think the state’s top medical lobbyists would think twice about flagrantly disregarding COVID guidelines, or even feign an apology like Newsom, but no. A spokesman for the CMA told Politico that “the dinner was held in accordance with state and county guidelines,” which prohibit more than three households from gathering privately—but do allow restaurants to seat people from more than three households together. See?
Apparently this is a pretty common attitude among California politicians and their lobbyist buddies. With much of their state locked down by government fiat, last week a bunch of state lawmakers and corporate lobbyists flew off to Hawaii for a five-day conference and schmooze-fest at an upscale Maui resort. Legislators and their families mingled with representatives of businesses and trade groups that paid thousands of dollars for access to the lawmakers in what has become an annual lobbying tradition—even during a global pandemic!
Dan Howle, chairman and executive director of the Independent Voter Project, which hosts the conference, didn’t apologize. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “Somebody has to be first to say, ‘OK, we’re going to do a group event safely.’” Yes, Dan, somebody does has to be the first, and why shouldn’t it be a handful of powerful politicians and corporate lobbyists instead of, you know, ordinary people trying to salvage their businesses and visit their loved ones?
Lockdowns For Thee, But Not For Me
On and on it goes. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who issued a citywide stay-at-home order last week, defended her recent appearance at a massive street rally celebrating Biden’s apparent victory, where a mask-less Lightfoot addressed the crowd through a bullhorn.
.@chicagosmayor Lightfoot defends celebrating Biden’s Election Day in the streets despite her own rules against mass gatherings: "That crowd was gathered whether I was there or not." pic.twitter.com/MR81LnHfa7
When asked about the obvious double standard on MCNBC last week, Lightfoot was defensive, insisting that, “There are times when we do need to have relief and come together, and I felt like that was one of those times.” She added, as if it excuses her hypocrisy, “That crowd was gathered whether I was there or not.”
Seemingly everywhere you look you find people in positions of power ignoring pandemic restrictions and doing as they please. Often these are the same people who are most outspoken about the need for lockdowns.
Back in September, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was defiant after being caught on camera (mask-less, of course) at a shuttered San Francisco salon in violation of a citywide lockdown order, calling it a “setup” and refusing to apologize.
Then last week, Pelosi was forced to cancel a dinner for incoming Democratic House members after a viral tweet showing tables being set up for the soiree understandably provoked outrage. “It’s very spaced,” she explained to an NBC News reporter.
The truth is, our elites have been doing this since the pandemic began. Who knows how many ordinary Americans were barred from attending the funerals and burials of their beloved dead these past months? Yet thousands were allowed to gather in July for memorials of Rep. John Lewis, in services that stretched from Alabama to Washington, D.C. Thousands were allowed to gather for George Floyd’s memorial service in June in Minneapolis.
We all saw the way the media treated Trump rallies like COVID super-spreader events yet condoned the hundreds of large-scale protests over the summer and fall in cities all across the country under the idiotic pretense that the protesters were “all wearing masks.” Same with the post-election celebrations that brought out thousands, dancing in the streets cheek-by-jowl and passing around champagne bottles.
Again, there is only one possible conclusion you can reach, based on months and months of appalling hypocrisy from the media and our ruling elite: they think lockdowns are for you, not them. They think pandemic rules are for you, not them. They think suffering hardships and doing as you’re told are for you, not them. Why? Because they hate you and think you’re stupid.
Children have suffered because many mayors and governors were too willing to close public schools.
By Nicholas Kristof
November 18, 2020
Some things are true even though President Trump says them.
Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right. Schools, especially elementary schools, do not appear to have been major sources of coronavirus transmission, and remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children.
Yet America is shutting schools — New York City announced Wednesday that it was closing schools in the nation’s largest school district — even as it allows businesses like restaurants and bars to operate. What are our priorities?
“I have taught at the same low-income school for the last 25 years, and, truly, I can attest that remote schooling is failing our children,” said LaShondra Taylor, an English teacher in Broward County, Fla.
Some students don’t have a computer or don’t have WiFi, Taylor said. Kids regularly miss classes because they have to babysit, or run errands, or earn money for their struggling families.
“The amount of absences is mind-blowing,” she said.
Adeola Whitney, chief executive of Reading Partners, an outstanding early literacy program, referred to the traditional “summer slide” in which low-income students lose ground during the summer months and told me: “The ‘summer slide’ is now being dwarfed by ‘Covid slide’ projections.”
Granted, the United States has done such a poor job of controlling the virus that as the pandemic rages across the country it may be necessary to shut some schools. But that should be the last resort.
I’ve been writing since May about the importance of keeping schools open, and initially the debate wasn’t so politicized. But after Trump, trying to project normalcy, blustered in July about schools needing to open, Republicans backed him and too many Democrats instinctively lined up on the other side. Joe Biden echoed their extreme caution, as did many Democratic mayors and governors.
So Democrats helped preside over school closures that have devastated millions of families and damaged children’s futures. Cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., have closed schools while allowing restaurants to operate.
It’s true that Trump was simply trying to downplay the virus. If he wanted schools open, he should have fought the pandemic more seriously and invested federal money to help make school buildings safer against the virus’s spread.
Yet today, while we all want in-classroom instruction, the practical question is whether to operate schools that don’t have optimal ventilation and other protections. The United States has answered by shuttering many schools and turning to remote learning even as many businesses have stayed open or reopened. Much of Europe pursued the opposite route, closing pubs and restaurants but doing everything possible to keep schools operating — and the evidence suggests that Europe has the smarter approach.
In both Europe and the United States, schools have not been linked to substantial transmission, and teachers and family members have not been shown to be at extra risk (this is more clear of elementary schools than of high schools). Meanwhile, the evidence has mounted of the human cost of school closures.
“Children learn best when physically present in the classroom,” notes the American Academy of Pediatrics. “But children get much more than academics at school. They also learn social and emotional skills at school, get healthy meals and exercise, mental health support and other services that cannot be easily replicated online.”
One child in eight in America lives with a parent with an addiction — a reflection of America’s other pandemic. I’ve seen kids living in chaotic homes, and for them the school building is a refuge and a lifeline.
America’s education system already transmits advantage and disadvantage from one generation to the next: Rich kids attend rich schools that propel them forward, and low-income children attend struggling schools that hold them back.
School closures magnify these inequities, as many private schools remain open and affluent parents are better able to help kids adjust to remote learning. At the same time, low-income children fall even further behind.
“Students are struggling,” Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, where more than four-fifths of students live below the poverty line, told me. “And if you’re not becoming proficient in reading in first, second, third grade, you may face a lifetime of consequences.”
Research from Argentina and Belgium on school strikes indicates that missing school inflicts long-term damage on students (boys seem particularly affected, with higher dropout rates and lower incomes as adults). McKinsey & Company has estimated that in this pandemic, school closures may lead to one million additional high school dropouts.
Dropouts live shorter lives, so while the virus kills, so do school closures. One study this month estimated that closures of primary schools in the United States will cause many more years of life lost, because of increasing numbers of dropouts, than could be saved even if schools did spread the virus freely.
Across the country from Taylor’s classroom in Florida, Lauren Berg is an elementary school principal in McMinnville, Ore. Berg said some students flourish with distance learning, but three or four students in each class struggle to attend regularly.
The school tries everything: It gives out Chromebooks, hot spots, headphones, even personal timers with meeting times pre-scheduled with alarms. Teachers drop off food and school supplies, or sit in driveways to try to get pupils to log in to the system. “Even with all of this,” Berg said, “we are still missing some students.”
Let’s follow Europe: Close bars, and try harder to keep schools open.
What a computer expert said about voting results in Michigan
By Mark Landsbaum
November 20, 2020
Donald Trump’s attorneys and investigators say he was winning Michigan by a landslide until ballot-counting computers were turned off in the middle of the night. When they were turned back on, Joe Biden suddenly not only closed the gap, but surged ahead.
“My colleagues and I … have studied … the November 3, 2020, election results,” said computer security expert Russ Ramsland of Allied Security Operations Group in a sworn affidavit Tuesday. “Based on the significant anomalies and red flags that we have observed, we believe there is a significant probability that election results have been manipulated[.]”
Until about 2 A.M. election night, Trump was running ahead in Michigan, “generally winning between 55% and 60% of every turnout vote,” said Ramsland. “Then after the counting was closed at 2 a.m., the situation dramatically reversed itself, starting with a series of impossible spikes shortly after counting was supposed to have stopped.”
Here’s Ramsland’s explanation: “The several spikes cast solely for Biden could easily be produced in the Dominion system by preloading batches of blank ballots in files such as Write-Ins, then casting them all for Biden using the Override Procedure … that is available to the operator of the system.”
“There were 289,866 more ballots processed in the time available for processing in four precincts/townships, than there was capacity,” said Ramsland.
In plain English, that means they counted almost 300,000 more ballots than physically possible.
“This is not surprising because the system is highly vulnerable to a manual change in the ballot totals as observed[,]” said Ramsland. “[W]e believe that these statistical anomalies and impossibilities together create a wholly unacceptable level of doubt as to the validity of the vote count in Michigan, and in Wayne County, in particular.”
The Dominion “systems contain a large number of vulnerabilities to hacking and tampering,” according to Ramsland. “These vulnerabilities are well known, and experts in the field have written extensively about them.”
The state of Texas rejected use of Dominion because of its vulnerabilities to hacking and cheating.
Ramsland’s affidavit was given under oath and penalty of perjury. He lays out in it what happened in Michigan, how Dominion voting machines were operated, and how a big Trump win suspiciously turned into a loss. The startling discoveries above are only a portion of the numerous alarming “red flags” Ramsland’s investigation found. And Michigan is only one of many U.S. states that used Dominion systems to count votes and determine winners on Nov. 3. Michigan’s response is that there were no improper irregularities and that unofficial vote totals show Biden winning the state by about 3%.
Here’s Ramsland’s affidavit.
See for yourself what Monica Palmer and William C. Hartmann, two courageous Wayne County election officials who refused to certify the highly questionable voting results this week, found beyond the pale that prevents them from certifying the election in good conscience. Their lists of irregularities are staggering.
The mainstream media will not publish these details precisely because they illuminate the corruption they want to keep under wraps. Read them and weep. Then share them.
Sidney Powell: "The entire election, frankly, in all the swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump" pic.twitter.com/gA6aFVhvdt
As Jonathan Turley writes, the team alleged a global, Communist-backed conspiracy to “inject” and “change” votes through the use of the Dominion computer system. It was exhausting and breathtaking. I was critical of the press conference as being long on heated rhetoric and short on hard evidence. Dominion issued a statement categorically denying the allegations.
The question is whether Dominion itself will now sue. The company denied the allegations but I often measure such denials by whether anyone actually sues. Dominion could do so and force the Trump team to reveal the evidence supporting their allegations or face potentially significant liability. I assume that counsel like Sidney Powell would not make such allegations without proof, but the press conference did not make such evidence public. But these are not just colorful but criminal allegations against named companies and by implication corporate officials and political allies.
Trump campaign counsel repeatedly accused Dominion and its officers of criminal conduct and business improprieties. Those are categories of “per se defamation” under the common law. No special damages must be shown in such per se cases. Individual officers could bring defamation claims and the company itself could bring a business disparagement action.
Businesses can be defamed like individuals if the false statement injures the business character of the corporation or its prestige and standing in the industry. In Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. v. Greenmoss Builders, Inc., 472 U.S. 749 (1985) the Supreme Court allowed a business to sue a credit reporting agency for defamation where the agency mistakenly reported that the business had filed for bankruptcy.
Restatement Second § 561 Defamation of Corporations states:
“One who publishes defamatory matter concerning a corporation is subject to liability to it
(a) if the corporation is one for profit, and the matter tends to prejudice it in the conduct of its business or to deter others from dealing with it, or
(b) if, although not for profit, it depends upon financial support from the public, and the matter tends to interfere with its activities by prejudicing it in public estimation.”
There could be lawsuits in Colorado or the place of the alleged defamation. The lawsuit would likely be filed under state law but moved to federal court under diversity jurisdiction arguments.
The press conference was an explosion of potentially defamatory claims by individuals or companies. The only clear defense is truth. The team insists that it can prove these allegations. It may have to do so. Not only can the individual lawyers face such lawsuits but the Trump campaign itself could be liable under the principle of respondeat superior, where an employer is liable for the conduct of his employees when they are acting within the scope of their employment. Ironically, the Latin term means “let the master speak.” The President or his campaign could be forced to speak in a defamation case if they have not spoken in the promised court filings.
There is a question of privilege for legal claims. There is an absolute privilege for lawyers in making statements in court. That is important because we often voice allegations that impute the veracity or character of parties, particularly in criminal cases. However, that privilege is more limited outside of court. It can still apply but some courts have refused to protect statements made to the press or the public. World Wresting Fed Entertainment, Inc v Bozell, 142 F Supp 2d 514, 534 (SDNY 2001); Kennedy v Cannon, 229 Md 92, 97, 182 A2d 54, 58 (1962).
In other words, if the Trump team does not put forward this evidence in its case challenging the election, it could now be forced to produce it in a case brought by Dominion or its officers.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 