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August 20, 2021

Updated: In California, your recall vote is not secret

By Monica Showalter

As the California recall referendum approaches, we know that the leftist California gang determined to entrench Gov. Gavin Newsom in power, no matter how unpopular he is with voters and no matter how much they want him out, has been busy.

So here's the latest rig they've cooked up, exposed very well by a concerned voter named Jennifer Asper.

Seems the envelope to the state's mail-in ballots, which have already gone out except reportedly to people who signed the recall referendum petition, contains two holes.  Those two holes expose the contents of the one-vote ballot in exactly the right strategic place.  Asper's Instagram and Twitter video, done very well, demonstrate the problem.

Asper shows how it can expose an anti-Newsom voter to someone who might have access to the chain of custody — the mail carrier, the delivery staff, the guys in the back room hauling boxes of ballots, the person who sees that stack of exposed mail in an open white plastic Postal Service bin waiting to be taken to the truck, the person who can get into the unlocked postal yard near the trucks for late mail (I know a place in Los Angeles where this can be done), and toss the ballot out.  She calls it "sketchy," and "irresponsible," and "asking for fraud."

Given the left-wingery of the postal service staff in California, and the even more leftist orientation of the California ballot counters, her concern that an anti-Newsom vote might be tossed out is probably not far-fetched, although it's known that the postal service union is pretty disgusted with the COVID mandates that Newsom is so enthusiastic about.  The uglier reality is in tweets like this, which likely involves complicity from the postal service:

What's more disturbing from her video is that the flip side is true.  Someone looking at mail-in ballots (and your name and signature right next to the hole revealing whether or not you voted "yes") can also throw out a ballot with no colored-in hole.  They can keep all the ballots with the visible half-moon black mark which indicates a vote against Newsom and throw out any that don't have it. It's simply a gateway to fraud from any side

Asper points to the importance of voters turning around their ballot so no vote can be seen in the envelope window, but for many voters, it's too late — the mail-in ballots came, and they were mailed off already.

Coming as it is from a voter, you'd think California officials would be concerned, too, given that this naked exposure of non-secret votes with their signatures to any eyes that see it is at best an underminer of voter confidence in the voting at a time of mass mail-in ballots.  If they had any conscience at all, they'd at least admit the mistake and say "we can do better" or, better yet, pull the whole invitation-to-fraud mess and start over.

Instead, they're predictably arrogant about this legitimate concern from a voter.  They view themselves as incapable of doing wrong, or even making mistakes they should have caught, given their high salaries.

Here are a couple of responses, one from a county official and one from an obvious Newsom-supporter:

The question that comes up now is whether the whole thing was intentional — position the one-vote ballot with the checkmark strategically over the hole supposedly used for zip-tie bundling, and take a gander at who voted "yes" or "no" without even opening the envelope.  In the case of the pro-Newsom voters, there would be no need to — those voters supposedly don't tick their preference for the next governor in the second section of the ballot (although I am sure some do).  The "no" votes would need to be opened and tallied without the signed name of the voter next to it.

Who the heck is running this Hugo Chávez–like rigging operation?  None other than Newsom's handpicked secretary of state, Shirley Weber, who got the job based on the color of her skin, given the outcry from black activist groups about the vacation of Sen. Kamala Harris's seat with a Latino, not a black, California's dodgy secretary of state, Alex Padilla got the Senate seat.  Newsom picked Weber for the job Padilla vacated when the latter packed himself off to the Senate, and she's nobody's idea of an impartial non-partisan devoted to fairness for all.

Weber, who's pictured in a kente cloth stole in her official picture, has an official bio that goes like this:

Shirley Nash Weber, Ph.D. was nominated to serve as California Secretary of State by Governor Gavin Newsom on December 22, 2020 and sworn into office on January 29, 2021. She is California’s first Black Secretary of State and only the fifth African American to serve as a state constitutional officer in California’s 170-year history.

Weber was born to sharecroppers in Hope, Arkansas during the segregationist Jim Crow era. Her father, who left Arkansas after being threatened by a lynch mob, did not have the opportunity to vote until he was in his 30s. Her grandfather never voted as custom and law in the South, before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, systemically suppressed voting by Blacks. Although her family moved to California when Weber was three years old, it was her family’s experience in the Jim Crow South that has driven her activism and legislative work. She has fought to secure and expand civil rights for all Californians, including restoring voting rights for individuals who have completed their prison term. 

Weber attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she received her BA, MA and PhD by the age of 26. Prior to receiving her doctorate, she became a professor at San Diego State University (SDSU) at the age of 23. She also taught at California State University at Los Angeles (CSULA) and Los Angeles City College before coming to SDSU. She retired from the Department of Africana Studies after 40 years as a faculty member and serving several terms as department chair.

Her bio says she's from the Jim Crow South, which is very atypical for someone supposedly representing San Diego County, and her chief concerns remain defeating Jim Crow–ism, even though that never existed on a wholesale scale in California.  Not a problem for her, though — her previous legislative "contributions" have been mass reparations initiatives for black people and running the state's failing schools, which became some of the worst in the nation and the most tragic for black kids, on her watch.

Her education background is probably most telling — she spent all her time in the Afro-American studies departments of California's state system, probably the wokest part of the entire apparatus, and graduated from UCLA right around the same time as Angela Davis, who at the time was accused of aiding and abetting Black Panther terrorism, as well as serving in the top leadership of the Communist Party, USA.  Davis even ran for vice president on the CPUSA ticket, alongside now-exposed-as-a-Soviet-agent CPUSA chairman Gus Hall.  Davis tooled around places like Cuba and East Germany around that time, singing the praises of communist dictatorships.  Lately, she's been calling for the abolition of police and even prisons.  That was Weber's milieu.  Weber was four years younger than Davis, but her eight years at UCLA overlapped Davis's time there, and Weber prospered mightily in it, taking her show on the road to San Diego's state college system and then to the state Legislature.

Think a radical leftist like this is going to care much about whether elections are free and fair? 

Color me skeptical. 

If this garbage is not fixed in time for the recall, we will all know that the results were rigged.  Maybe federal action under a post-Biden GOP president is going to be what it takes to end this Venezuela-style rigging nightmare.

Image: Twitter screen shot.

Update: I transposed 'yes' and 'no' on the ballot. This post has been updated.

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