New Yorkers: If You Re-elect These Idiots, It's On You

Today is Election Day. At the federal level, all seats in the House of Representatives and one third of the Senate are up for election. Also up for election here in New York, as in most of the states, are all state-wide elective offices, as well as all seats in both houses of the State Legislature. Currently the Democrats hold all of the state-wide elective offices (Governor/Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and Comptroller), as well as super-majorities in both houses of the Legislature (106 of 150 seats in the Assembly and 43 of 63 seats in the State Senate).

Of the New York races, the only one that has been subject to extensive public polling is the race for Governor. Republican Lee Zeldin has been running an energetic campaign against incumbent Governor-by-accident Kathy Hochul. (Hochul was Andrew Cuomo’s Lieutenant Governor, and took over for him when he resigned in August 2021.). Early polls back in the summer had Zeldin behind by as much as 24 points, but more recent polls have the gap in single digits, and one late-October poll (from Republican-leaning Trafalgar) had the race tied. Still, Zeldin’s odds are likely less than 50/50. In the other races, there have been a few polls in the AG contest, none very recent. A Siena College poll in August had incumbent Letitia James leading Republican challenger Michael Henry by 14 points. In the Legislature, the Republicans may pick up a number of seats, and may get rid of the veto-proof majorities in one or both houses, but an actual Republican majority in either house would require a miracle.

Zeldin has far and away made his big issue of crime. It’s an important issue, and I don’t mean to minimize it, but for me it is far from the most important issue. Crime has in fact surged in New York under Democratic leadership and policies. However, it is still relatively low. And relative to other comparable cities, it is very low. From the early 90s to mid-2010s, we had Republican mayors in New York City, and the Republicans held a blocking position, if not actual majorities at all times, in the State Senate. During that time, the murder rate in New York City fell from about 28 per 100,000 (2,245 murders in 1992) all the way to below 4/100K (289 murders in 2018). In 2014 we got a left-wing Democratic mayor. In 2019 the Democrats took full control of the State Legislature, and promptly passed criminal justice “reforms” that included making it almost impossible to hold arrested people for bail. In January 2021 we got one of those “progressive” prosecutors here in Manhattan. Put these factors together, and by the end of 2021 we were back to 485 murders for the full year in New York City, a big increase from just a few years ago. But still, at around 6/100K, we are a far, far safer city than essentially all of our big Democrat-run counterparts. Places like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington have murder rates in the range of 25-30/100K — four to five times our rate — and the really dangerous places like Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, New Orleans and St. Louis have rates ranging from 30 to 50 and even higher.

So crime is an important issue, and given the destructive policies that the Democrats have adopted, the recent surge in crime could be only the beginning of a negative trend that could go on for years or decades. But still, here are several issues that I consider even more important:

-Comparison with Florida. Of all the states, Florida is the one most comparable to New York in population and demographics. Florida has about 22 million people; New York has about 20 million. Florida’s population is about 17.0% black and 26.8% Latina; New York’s population is about 17.6% black and 19.5% Latino. Florida’s annual state budget is about $105 billion; New York’s annual state budget is about $220 billion, for 10% fewer people. What does New York get for all that extra spending? The Census reports Florida’s poverty rate as 13.1%, New York’s poverty rate as 13.9% (2021 figures). New York spends more than double per student what Florida spends on K-12 education, and its students get somewhat lower scores on the NAEP tests. Florida re-opened from Covid about a year earlier than New York, and had in-person instruction for millions of students for a year when New York did not, and still has about exactly the same death rate per million as New York.

-Energy policy. New York’s energy policy is completely insane. Perhaps Zeldin has not made much of this on the campaign trail because the negative effects of New York’s policies have not yet been harshly felt by the people. But these effects are about to hit us like a sledgehammer. In 2019, the newly Democrat-controlled State Legislature passed a law called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which I summarized in this post from December 2021 titled “Finally, New York Tells The World How To Achieve Net Zero Carbon Emissions.” The Climate Act sets highly ambitious and completely unachievable goals for reducing carbon emissions over the next three decades. Various commissions and panels have been designated to set forth the Scoping Plan for how to get there. These people have no idea what they are doing. The occasion of my December 2021 post was the issuance of the first version of this Scoping Plan. Excerpt from my post:

If you think that a document with this kind of build-up and heft would contain at least a little serious effort to grapple with the major engineering problems of decarbonizing everything from the electrical grid to home heating to private autos to aviation to ocean shipping, all at the same time, think again. The words “incompetent” and “amateurish” come to mind, but don’t really even begin to describe how bad this work product is. The 330 page length, filled with padding, fluff, and repetition, is mainly to assure that nobody whose time is valuable will ever be able to read it. The authors are like a parody version of King Canute, who actually believe that when they order the tide to stop rising, it will obey.

If Hochul and the State Legislature come back without much change, they will continue down this path until finally stopped by blackouts or some other comparable calamity.

-The public employee unions run the place. Put the teachers union in charge of education, and you get endless unnecessary school closures, mask mandates for 5 year olds, Critical Race Theory, accusations of systemic racism and white supremacy against elementary school kids, “gender affirming care” for early teenagers, and so forth.

New Yorkers, if you have voted for Hochul, this is what you have voted for. Nobody can say you weren’t warned.

Nypost.com
By Jon Levine
August 29, 2020

Confessions of a voter fraud: I was a master at fixing mail-in ballots

A top Democratic operative says voter fraud, especially with mail-in ballots, is no myth. And he knows this because he’s been doing it, on a grand scale, for decades.

Mail-in ballots have become the latest flashpoint in the 2020 elections. While President Trump and the GOP warn of widespread manipulation of the absentee vote that will swell with COVID polling restrictions, many Democrats and their media allies have dismissed such concerns as unfounded.

But the political insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears prosecution, said fraud is more the rule than the exception. His dirty work has taken him through the weeds of municipal and federal elections in Paterson, Atlantic City, Camden, Newark, Hoboken and Hudson County and his fingerprints can be found in local legislative, mayoral and congressional races across the Garden State. Some of the biggest names and highest office holders in New Jersey have benefited from his tricks, according to campaign records The Post reviewed.

“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes — it can make a difference,” the tipster said. “It could be enough to flip states.”

The whisteblower — whose identity, rap sheet and long history working as a consultant to various campaigns were confirmed by The Post — says he not only changed ballots himself over the years, but led teams of fraudsters and mentored at least 20 operatives in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania — a critical 2020 swing state.

“There is no race in New Jersey — from city council to United States Senate — that we haven’t worked on,” the tipster said. “I worked on a fire commissioner’s race in Burlington County. The smaller the race, the easier it is to do.”

A Bernie Sanders die-hard with no horse in the presidential race, he said he felt compelled to come forward in the hope that states would act now to fix the glaring security problems present in mail-in ballots.

“This is a real thing,” he said. “And there is going to be a f–king war coming November 3rd over this stuff … If they knew how the sausage was made, they could fix it.”

Mail-in voting can be complicated — tough enough that 84,000 New Yorkers had their mailed votes thrown out in the June 23 Democratic presidential primary for incorrectly filling them out.

But for political pros, they’re a piece of cake. In New Jersey, for example, it begins with a blank mail-in ballot delivered to a registered voter in a large envelope. Inside the packet is a return envelope, a “certificate of mail in voter” which the voter must sign, and the ballot itself.

That’s when the election-rigger springs into action.

The ballot has no specific security features — like a stamp or a watermark — so the insider said he would just make his own ballots.

“I just put [the ballot] through the copy machine and it comes out the same way,” the insider said.

But the return envelopes are “more secure than the ballot. You could never recreate the envelope,” he said. So they had to be collected from real voters.

He would have his operatives fan out, going house to house, convincing voters to let them mail completed ballots on their behalf as a public service. The fraudster and his minions would then take the sealed envelopes home and hold them over boiling water.

“You have to steam it to loosen the glue,” said the insider.

He then would remove the real ballot, place the counterfeit ballot inside the signed certificate, and reseal the envelope.

“Five minutes per ballot tops,” said the insider.

The insider said he took care not to stuff the fake ballots into just a few public mailboxes, but sprinkle them around town. That way he avoided the attention that foiled a sloppy voter-fraud operation in a Paterson, NJ, city council race this year, where 900 ballots were found in just three mailboxes.

“If they had spread them in all different mailboxes, nothing would have happened,” the insider said.

Inside jobs

The tipster said sometimes postal employees are in on the scam.

“You have a postman who is a rabid anti-Trump guy and he’s working in Bedminster or some Republican stronghold … He can take those [filled-out] ballots, and knowing 95% are going to a Republican, he can just throw those in the garbage.”

SEE ALSO
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New election ordered in NJ race marred by voter fraud charges
In some cases, mail carriers were members of his “work crew,” and would sift ballots from the mail and hand them over to the operative.

In 2017, more than 500 mail-in ballots in New York City never arrived to the Board of Elections for races that November — leaving hundreds disenfranchised. They eventually were discovered in April 2018. “For some undetermined reason, some baskets of mail that were bound to the New York City Board of Elections were put off to the side at the Brooklyn processing facility,” city elections boss Michael Ryan said at the time of discovery.

Nursing homes

Hitting up assisted-living facilities and “helping” the elderly fill out their absentee ballots was a gold mine of votes, the insider said.

“There are nursing homes where the nurse is actually a paid operative. And they go room by room by room to these old people who still want to feel like they’re relevant,” said the whistleblower. “[They] literally fill it out for them.”

The insider pointed to former Jersey City Mayor Gerald McCann, who was sued in 2007 after a razor-thin victory for a local school board seat for allegedly tricking “incompetent … and ill” residents of nursing homes into casting ballots for him. McCann denied it, though he did admit to assisting some nursing home residents with absentee ballot applications.

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