This is personal.
When tiny-minded stupidity gets me into unnecessary BS, I can go ballistic. It is how I am.
I was in Seattle last election voting absentee while providing comfort to a triple-negative breast cancer patient three years younger than me, going through the pain and depression of unsuccessful chemo, who has since died.
As readers can imagine, it was a stressful time. Emotionally hard. And that is understatement. At my age of 77, figure out how that kind of situation can weigh when I had to fill out a second ballot, because, when that second ballot was mailed to me there was an indication my first unwitnessed ballot was "rejected" by some clown show not identified, based on a "signature comparison." Of some kind? Huh and wtf?
That's crap, was my immediate reaction.
It was crap. Still is.
I did the second one, had the cancer suffering long time best friend witness it this time, mailed it in, and felt violated. Why this chicken shit? It made no sense.
My identification number consistency was not challenged. Signature! We all know that expert forensic signature analysts can disagree in court, and that my signature yesterday can look different in detail than today, where I might be in a hurry one time and not the other, but who-the-fuck was saying my ballot was unacceptable allegedly based on a guess the signatures were not from the same person. They were. From me. Each time. No question.
Then I read now that there is a new judicial opinion saying exactly what I feel. But in more gentle and legalistic dressing - That only some kind of ignorant and officious twit would get in the way of voters having a valid ballot counted without hassle of any reasonable kind.
Why-the-fuck allow inexpert but perhaps well intentioned (but posslbly not) election judge or ballot guru types or whoever, clearly wholly untrained and unskilled as signature "analyst" people, to add chicken-shit burden layers of any kind upon voting by anyone, where turnout is never as great as it should be and streamlined processes are always favorable over unduly burdensome impositions?
Yes. And Kim Crockett wants it the other way. She is critical of Simon being efficient. She favors burden and inefficiency. For reasons I am unable to divine.
She puts this kind of crap on her campaign website - quoted in full:
Steve Simon strips elections of signature comparison safeguards
(Minneapolis, MN) Secretary of State Steve Simon (D) has done it again. Known in the past for going around the legislature to get what he wants from Minnesota courts (packed with liberal judges), he’s openly waving another victory in the face of voters who were already concerned about his manipulation and corruption of the state’s elections. His administrative rule (8210.2450), under challenge by the Minnesota Voters Alliance (MVA), single handedly strips Minnesota election law of any signature comparison requirements on absentee ballots.
This is false. The Appellate Court opinion is clear, if the identification numbering required to early vote - application and returned ballot envelop - fail to match, then but only than can unskilled people guess at signature coherency. However, with matching numbers set the error-prone unneeded impediment aside, out of the way.
Exactly as the duly promulgated efficiency-promoting Secretary of State's administrative rule specifies.
Back to quoting from the Crockett campaign website:
The MN Court of Appeals, which released their opinion on the case this week, is letting him get away with it. MVA is filing a Petition For Review with the MN Supreme Court. The Upper Midwest Law Center argued the case on behalf of MVA and issued a press release quoted, in part, below:“First, the decision rewrote the law by brushing aside, in a footnote, that the law states that “the” voter must have signed the absentee ballot, not “a” voter. The Court’s decision allows the rule to alter that statutory requirement.Second, the decision failed to even acknowledge that, under the Secretary’s rule, two different people can sign an absentee application and ballot, as long as the name on both is the same. Under the Secretary’s rule, there is also no way to tell if the voter needed assistance from those two people at separate times or not. Instead of making the common-sense determination that the law requires that the same person sign both the application and the ballot and the signatures appear to be the same based on common sense and good judgment, the Court essentially held that any person can sign any ballot for anyone, without limitation.”
Well, the Court never said that, read the entire opinion and see, and it is wrongfully misleading to make that claim when knowing full well it is manufactured and untrue.
Back to quoting from the Crockett campaign website:
The majority of votes in 2020 were cast as absentee ballots. Does it give you confidence knowing that any person can sign any ballot for anyone, without limitation? What could possibly go wrong with that!? Remember that when Steve Simon repeats his “Minnesota elections are fair and secure” mantra over and over again to voters.
I am fighting for you, for the rule of law, and for safeguards like Photo Voter ID that will give us all confidence in our election outcomes.###
It gives me great confidence that I need not own and operate an automobile to drive to a precinct election day voting site beyond a reasonable walking distance, as I face in City of Ramsey, Ward 1, Precinct 1.
Hey - great improvement - it is streamlined. My vote matters enough that a process has been created making it easy instead of a burden, to cast my rightful ballot conveniently, as things in an ideal world should be. I rejoice, over eminent good sense:
Good for you Steve. Great move Steve to streamline things rather than being burdensome here-and-there for no good reason whatsoever. Burdensome is ways only Republicans wanting to quell the voting rights of some citizens would propose and try to snake people into unthinkingly accepting as if impediment and burden were a valid policy idea.
Note -- Giving the candidate Crockett credit for providing the link to the judicial opinion which she does not like. That's fair. So it is acknowledged.
But it governs. Whether she likes it or not it governs. And it is eminently sensible. Unlike Ms. Crockett, who seems a tight-assed by-the-book-as-I-want-it-read-no-matter-what idiot. A tiny-minded twit of first magnitude. An aberrant thinker.
If a thinker at all.
BOTTOM LINE: Anybody running for office on a policy of adding unneeded crap onto my life, in voting or otherwise, or onto the lives of other voters, is an ignoramus of first magnitude and should not even be thought fit to be elected dog catcher.
A like-minded feeling among the substantial majority of voters in a past election where picture ID as a Minnesota pre-balloting qualification was soundly rejected as an unnecessary bureaucratic imposition serves as evidence I am not a lone curmudgeon, but a curmudgeon with my finger locked onto the pulse of majority voter feeling and preference.
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| image from Crockett campaign website - Two ignoramuses of first magnitude neither of whom should ever be thought fit to be elected dog catcher. |
__________UPDATE_________
Start here; Minnesota Reformer,Crockett said Minnesota should “return to voting in person” and reject the “insecure, chaotic absentee balloting system and vulnerable wireless equipment connected to the internet.”
Yes she has voted by absentee ballot in every state general election since the introduction of no-excuse absentee voting.
Crockett is part of the Conservative Partnership Institute’s “election integrity network,” which is led by Cleta Mitchell, who played a key role in trying to help former President Donald Trump flip the Georgia election results. The incident is being investigated by a special grand jury in Fulton County.
Crockett said Mitchell isn’t new to her. “I’ve actually known her for quite some time,” she said of Mitchell in a YouTube interview with Max Rymer, president of Nativ3 Digital Marketing and a consultant to Crockett’s campaign. Crockett did not respond to a request for comment.
Crockett is part of the Election Integrity Network, or EIN, which is being run by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a think tank founded by former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint in 2017 to support conservatives on Capitol Hill. Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is a senior partner, and Mitchell is a senior legal fellow at CPI.
Crockett said EIN meets twice a week, with the Heritage Foundation leading one meeting, and Mitchell the other. She told Rymer the RNC knows it “missed the mark” in 2020, and she’s been “blown away” by the humility displayed by RNC leaders who “didn’t listen” in 2020.
Crockett and Mitchell think their group helped Republican Glenn Youngkin defeat former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race last year.
In the runup to the Virginia governor’s race, Mitchell said she helped organize “task forces” and trained more than 4,000 poll workers and observers.
“I know a lot about the task force that won that state,” Crockett told Rymer. “And I said OK if they can do this, we can do that in Minnesota.”
That is background, and presented as suitably sourced re Cleta Mitchell, but without second source checking found on absentee voting by Crockett since as long as it has been authorized.
The nub of this update
This updating is subject to substantial self second guessing. Ultimately, it touches on something Crockett can substantiate or refute, should she return media inquiry.
The assertion is damning, but second sourcing has not been found online, so take that as a caveat. First, from Crockett's campaign website, this image:
Straightforward stuff. No second sourcing needed.
This is the heart of the update, and a second source has not been found for that earlier quote:
Crockett said Minnesota should “return to voting in person” and reject the “insecure, chaotic absentee balloting system and vulnerable wireless equipment connected to the internet.”
Yes she has voted by absentee ballot in every state general election since the introduction of no-excuse absentee voting.
It is hard to think of anything more dishonest than holding up a photo "ID to vote" banner and mouthing that Minnesota should return to voting in person, than to do so while being a non-deviant, always absentee voter. There, no ID is required, but an identification data item is required, driver's license, or last four SocSec number digits. You are not required to show a license, but you have to give a number, meaning having a license. However, the last four digit data option, you give four digits, nobody in the elections office checks anything. When the ballot is returned, same four numbers on the envelope, you are kosher, nobody, presumably, cross checks those digits with Social Security officials.
That is what Crockett has done. Absentee, no ID needed. Consitently so.
Actions speak louder than words. Louder than held up banners. If she really believed in voting election day in person, you'd think she'd do it.
Readers are urged to weigh all this, and judge it by reader views of honest and dishonest.
Now if the report of always voting absentee is in error, it is another story. That is clear. Ask Crockett.
(Deena Winter, author of the factual assertions about Crockett's consistent absentee voting has not disclosed an email contact address.)
__________FURTHER UPDATE__________
Deena Winter did respond once I got an email to her attention:
The data is in the public information lists released by the Secretary of State's office.
She even held up a mail ballot packet while making a point to a Senate committee, to which her campaign manager responded by admitting it, but justifying it by saying she votes early, in person, at city hall.
What more is there to say? You publicly keen that voting in person is needed, while your history is - full recognition that early voting is profoundly easier than going to a polling place election day and standing in line. Yes, early voting is "in person" or by mail.
But then why the sign, "photo ID to vote," if she votes without any need to present a photo ID?
On that photo ID business, the train's already left the station. Voters rejected the idea of requiring it.
If all she is saying is she opposes voting by mail, why? I go to Ramsey City Hall to vote early, as Crockett does to her municipality. They don't card you for that.
Steve Simon has made it easier for people to vote. That's the bottom line. Nobody has proven any massive "fraud" problem with that in Minnesota, or any other State. It is all aimed at suppression of voting by people who can be intimidated.
Actual voting error, two ballots on election day, voting in two states, four people, WaPo link.
That is hardly any reason to say Simon's done the job admirably but should somehow be voted out anyway because Crockett wants the paycheck.
Basically, Crockett is running on the defeated idea of photo ID, and against absentee balloting, although she's voted on that early voting platform, but filled out the ballot at city hall instead of mailing it in. If she'd been in Bangladesh those election days, from the early voting start to election day, she'd have had to use the mail, just as those in the military services do. So? BFD. Photo ID got voted down, so good, we live without the inconvenience of it. Same day registration is another welcome reform. Why complain?