Maricopa County's failed 2020 election is back in the news.  First, an independent canvassing of Arizona's Maricopa County voters revealed a possible 173,000 "lost" ballots and 96,000 "ghost" votes.  Add this to the soon-to-be-released Maricopa audit, and — hopefully — the people responsible can be held accountable.    

Maricopa's guilty parties are not going down without a fight.  We need to be ready for what comes next.  Lucky for us, we already know what the adversary's next few moves will be; it's not the first time the Democrats have been caught rigging elections.  The Democrats' standard response is denial and misdirection.  Denial needs no explanation.  As for misdirection, here are an explanation, a demonstration, and a practical exercise in how the game is played.

The explanation: The Democrat party, like every leftist organization, is divided into two groups — a small inner cadre of senior party members called the Nomenklatura and all the others.  All others are apparatchiks.  Apparatchiks are expendable items.  When fraud and other crimes can no longer be denied, the Nomenklatura toss an apparatchik or two under the bus.  The public, seeing this, thinks things have changed.  The public is wrong.  The Nomenklatura remains in control, and the corruption continues. 

Broward County, Florida is the best demonstration of this misdirection.  Swapping out just two people enabled eighteen years of corruption.  After joining neighboring Palm Beach County's last-minute attempt to steal the 2000 presidential election, Broward County Democrats needed a scapegoat.  They settled on the Republican supervisor of elections, the 70-year-old Jane Carroll. 

Carroll promptly resigned, allowing the Nomenklatura to swap in Miriam Oliphant as supervisor of elections.  A career bureaucrat in the local school district, Miriam didn't know squat about elections and had never managed anything of comparable size and complexity.  But none of that mattered.  Miriam's real job wasn't running elections; it was assimilating the department into the Democrat party.  Miriam began replacing career civil servants with party hacks.  One hire didn't know the difference between a primary and a general election.  Another of Miriam's miracle workers was a homeless drunk hired to the mailroom. 

In 2002, despite repeated offers of assistance, Miriam ruined the 2002 primary elections.  Polling stations opened late, were shorthanded, suffered equipment failure, and closed early.  In the media firestorm that followed, Miriam attacked the press and her subordinates rather than accepting responsibility.  Then the news leaked that she gave her pet drunk a $5,000 raise after he "mislaid" hundreds of mail-in ballots.  Later, Miriam fired a subordinate for cooperating with state investigators when she thought it was safe to do so. 

Hanlon's Razor tells us to "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."  It may just be that the election had more moving parts than Miriam, never the sharpest tool in anyone's shed, could handle.  But consider this: if Miriam's mission was to bring the elections under Democrat party control, then why not create a public disaster that you then solve by bringing in your new people — people loyal to the party?

Consider also that at the time, many mail-in ballots were from military personnel based in Florida but deployed overseas.  The military leans conservative.  You could say Miriam Oliphant, Democrat apparatchik, rewarded a subordinate after he "mislaid" hundreds of presumably Republican votes, and you'd be right. 

On one level, whether malice or mediocrity caused the debacle is irrelevant.  Growing public outrage meant that Miriam's usefulness was at an end.  Under the bus she went.  First, the Nomenklatura cut a deal with the Republicans: no criminal investigations or charges if Miriam goes away.  Next, her supporters publicly turned on her.  Her mentor, Broward County public defender Alan Schreiber, went on record saying Miriam "had pre-existing psychiatric conditions." 

That's kind of harsh, but don't feel too sad.  Miriam was offered a golden parachute.  After a short time in real estate, her pre-existing conditions magically vanished, and she returned to public education as a $76,000-a-year high school guidance counselor.  (That's twice the average pay rate for that position.)  The left takes care of its own.

The Nomenklatura reached back into the same educational talent pool that produced Miriam and anointed Brenda Snipes as the new supervisor of elections.  Once again, the public just assumed that a fresh face solved the problem.  Once again, the public was wrong.  In 2004, 58,000 absentee ballots were "misplaced."  In 2008, 6,000 ballots were destroyed just before a mandatory recount.  In 2012, another thousand ballots were misplaced.  In 2016, during a hotly contested primary involving Debbie Wasserman Schultz, more ballots were illegally destroyed.

In 2018, when the Democrats needed to win back control of the House to impeach President Trump, Brenda Snipes was there.  Half of Broward County's election precincts produced more votes than registered voters.  So many Democrat ballots were popping up that Columnist Wesley Pruden quipped, "One box (of ballots) was ... at an elementary school, and it was not even show-and-tell day."  As jokes go, that was rather lame, but even less amusing were the 2,000 mislaid ballots and still more shady activities related to Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Thanks to some mean tweets by Donald Trump, Brenda's 2018 election performance became a national story.  The led to growing public outrage and a trip under the bus.  Brenda's golden parachute was being allowed to resign, which allowed her to keep her Broward County pension.  Add in the pension from the school district, and it's clear Brenda didn't suffer much at all. 

With its lost and ghosted ballots, Maricopa County was to the 2020 election what Broward was in 2018.  Our practical exercise begins when public outrage forces a few apparatchiks under the bus.  We need to back the bus up and spin the tires.  Decertify the elections if you can, but above all else, put an end to token resignations and golden parachutes.  Hold the guilty, all of them, accountable.  When illegal activities have consequences, when the apparatchiks are guaranteed three to five years upstate instead of doing nothing jobs and double-pensions, we will see a lot fewer rigged elections.

Image: cagdesign via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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