California GOP Voter Suppression and the Wildfire Connection
Written by Robert Patrick Lewis on 11/11/2018
Photo by Pawe? Czerwi?ski on Unsplash
California GOP Voter Suppression and the Wildfire Connection
Robert Patrick Lewis
There has been a lot of talk over the past several months regarding the possibility of voter suppression and voter fraud in the midterm elections that happened last Tuesday. But how many times have you heard about the California GOP voter suppression that actually occurred?
As we begin to dig deeper into what happened in the months leading up to and the day of the elections, however, it looks like the very people who made the loudest accusations were themselves responsible for voter suppression (see: projection & misdirection).
Democrats have long tried to argue that any voter ID law is racist and an attempt at voter suppression, although it’s somehow not racist to require an ID to:
- Buy alcohol
- Buy tobacco
- Open a bank account
- Get on a plane
- Apply for food stamps
- Apply for welfare
- Apply for Medicaid
- Apply for Social Security
- Apply for a job
- Apply for a mortgage
- Apply for unemployment
- Apply for a hunting license
- Apply for a fishing license
- Rent a house/apartment
- Buy a house/condo
- Drive a car
- Rent a car
- Buy a car
- Register a car
- Rent a hotel/motel room
- Get married
- Purchase a gun
- Purchase ammo for a gun
- Adopt a pet
- Fill a prescription
- Donate blood
- Pawn shop transactions
- Use a credit card
The GOP was actually caught targeting disenfranchised voters in 1982 which led to The Consent Decree, an arrangement between the GOP and Democrats that prevented the conservative party from investigating any voter fraud they suspected the Democrats were involved in.
If you’d like to know more about this deal that seems absolutely insane (but gives much better perspective of the past several decades of our political history), here’s an article that lays it out:
Long story short: The Consent Decree arrangement ended under President Trump, and an Executive Order he signed in 2017 created a task force exclusively to maintain the sanctity of our elections…I think they’re pretty busy right now.
But if we’re really going to talk about disenfranchised voters, there’s no group more disenfranchised than California conservatives. With the state’s “Jungle Primary” system set up to virtually guarantee the state remains a one-party state, you’ll not find a group in the US more likely to believe that their vote doesn’t matter.
Even with this radical primary system it seems the Democrats in California had to put another ace-in-the-hole to ensure they maintained a stranglehold on the state.
An important question to ask: have you heard about the voter suppression of GOP voters in the California election this midterm election?
Of course not, because immediately after the election, as GOP members began talking amongst themselves and discovering how wide-ranging the voter suppression tactics of the Democratic party in California had been, we had a mass shooting and multiple wildfires break out across the state (interestingly spanning the entirety of the state, with one of the fires starting in the same location as the mass shooting — how strange — we won’t even get into the 50-60 people who were present at both the Las Vegas Shooting and Thousand Oaks Shooting).
So while we’re hearing about the vote count shenanigans in AZ, FL, GA and others, all media in California and otherwise are focusing on these tragedies. If I were a conspiratorial kind of person I may think that the timing was too coincidental, given the significance of the voting/electoral power in California, the people & issues on the ticket and just how widespread this suppression was.
I’ve lived in California since leaving the Army in 2009 with multiple monthly trips back to Texas for the past 3 years (I still, however, refer to myself as a Texan). Like many living in California this election was very important because of what it represented.
I’ve been very excited for the past few weeks leading up to the election because, based on my conversations with Californians of all political walks, I felt Californians were finally fed up enough with the status quo to make a change.
There is a definite mood here amongst Californians of “we’ve had enough” and many of the items on the voting ticket Tuesday were not as much as vote for or against President Trump as they were on the state of disrepair in California.
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone in California, aside from politicians or their lobbyists, who would tell you that California is better off now than it was 10 years ago. As Texas swells from the large number of new inhabitants (many from CA), California is quickly losing the middle & upper class in droves as people leave to escape the heavy tax and regulatory burdens.
And if the amount of money spent on social services for illegal immigrants in this state is anywhere near accurate, it seems that for every taxpayer California loses, they are replaced by several illegal immigrants. Here’s an accounting from FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) on their website:
It does not take an MBA or economist to understand the terrible economic consequences of this continuing for any length of time.
The infrastructure is crumbling, schools are among the lowest scored in the nation, traffic is getting worse, regulations are added by the day and the only thing we can be sure about the tax environment here is that it will only get worse, for both citizens paying taxes and business owners.
Each of the reasons listed above as to why Californians are unhappy was represented directly on the ballot this Tuesday, and if the voting results were accurate it would mean that Californians were happy with all of the above and want to keep the status quo — including the taxes.
I have my own story that I will share below as to precisely how I discovered the California Democrats rigged the election, but without even knowing “how” the fact that the worst politicians for California were voted in and a ballot measure to keep high taxes was approved should have been enough to throw up red flags to everyone that something was not right.
The California Swamp Creatures
Take Gavin Newsom, for example. In terms of the California swamp, Newsom is a swamp creature that has inhabited the deepest, darkest parts of the swamp for quite some time.
While time in various political offices are normally used as “proof” that a certain political candidate knows what they are doing, the fact that Newsom has presided over the destruction of California’s once vibrant economy and state should make his time in office more of a detriment than anything.
His time in office shows that Newsom has had a hand in all of the terrible policies that are forcing the state to sink and everyone with the wherewithal to leave. He served as Mayor of San Francisco from 2004-2011 (how’s SanFran doing now, Gavin) and followed up as Lt. Governor of California from then until now.
While Newsom’s interview on the Adam Carolla Podcast (please click the link and have a listen) was kept far from his political campaign, it does a great job of breaking down what a true slimeball and swamp creature he really is.
And Californians know this. In the weeks leading up to the election his GOP competitor (John Cox) was “neck and neck” in the polls, yet somehow there was a blowout on the day of the election putting Newsom far ahead.
This is odd given that it’s usually the conservatives who don’t respond to polling (or are asked by pollsters in the first place), so past experience would indicate that if they were close in the polling, Cox should have won by a landslide.
But that’s not what we’re being told happened, and we’ll find out what led to this below.
Next we have Dianne “Chinese Spy” Feinstein who ran against Kevin “Ghost Gun” DeLeon. Because of the way elections work in California the only choices we had for senators were both Democrats, which is part of the problem that has led to the destruction of this state.
Another major red flag should have been raised by the fact that Feinstein came out with a win given all of her recent controversies (she employed a Chinese spy for 20 years, her husband not only won many contracts in China during the time she employed the spy but is also responsible for the “bullet train to nowhere” that CA voters did not want & is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, and of course there was her role in the Kavanaugh Hearings debacle).
And lastly, of course, we have the ballot approval of the infamous Gas Tax here in California with Proposition 6 (a voter initiative to repeal the gas tax). One of the reasons that California is among the highest taxed states in the nation is not only the state income tax, but also the various taxes the state imposes on your daily life.
So while well over 50% of the population in California pays no income tax, anyone who drives is still hit with the gas tax, which is called a “regressive tax” because it hits everyone regardless of income levels.
And since the public transportation system in California is terrible (watch “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” again as an adult — the entire plot of the movie was the destruction of public transportation in California), a very large part of the population must drive to get around.
The gas tax here in CA causes each gallon of gas be around $1 more expensive than other parts of the country, and the results from this election would make you believe that Californians are ok with that, as the measure to repeal the gas tax failed.
We won’t even go over the fact that the people of California recently voted for the gas tax amount to be listed on every gas station receipt, yet the politicians vetoed that decision by the people to keep the real tax total hidden — they don’t want us to know exactly how much of our hard-earned money they’re wasting.
Does it seem likely to you that people would vote to keep the extremely high gas tax, given that it’s a very significant complaint amongst Californians and they already won a vote to require the exact cost to be outlined on receipts?
Or is it more likely that once the politicians vetoed the voice of the people, all Californians meekly decided to capitulate and allow the politicians to do what they wanted with our pocketbooks?
So now that we know why it should be odd that known corrupt and incompetent politicians were kept in office, let’s get into exactly what voter suppression occurred in California to ensure these would be the results of the election.
The (Conservative) Californian Voting Experience
I found it odd that although I did not request a mail-in ballot for this election I was sent one anyway shortly before election day. I didn’t think anything of it as my plan had been to vote in-person, so when the day came I went directly to vote after picking my future step daughter up from school.
I felt something was off immediately, but wasn’t sure exactly what. Having expected long lines due to the large voter enthusiasm we had been told about, I was surprised to find the polling place near my house a ghost town. While there were at least a half-dozen poll workers, I only found 5 or 6 voters in the polling place between the time I arrived and the time I left.
After finding my name on the registration roll, the nice woman at the polling station asked if I had brought my mail-in ballot with me. When I told her no, she handed me a provisional ballot and directed me to the booth to cast my vote.
Not knowing much about what a provisional ballot was (bad on me) I took it, marked my votes and brought it directly back to her (she specifically instructed me that I had to bring it to her, not any of the other poll workers).
After I returned it to her, she ensured I had filled everything out correctly, put it in the envelope and directed me to hand it in to a woman in the middle standing next to a large grey container for the ballots.
But when I gave the woman taking the ballots my vote, I noticed she put it into a different pile than those going into the container. How strange, I thought, but since I had a child with me I didn’t dig too much deeper into the process due to the need to get her home.
The strangeness of the process continued to gnaw at me, so when I returned home I began to do a little research on what had been going on.
After doing a little digging online I found that I was not the only person in California this happened to. And (not surprisingly) many of the others I’ve been finding who had the same experience were either registered GOP voters or conservative voices.
First I found this video by Thomas Wictor explaining how and why the same thing had happened to him. If you don’t follow Wictor I highly suggest you do. He’s an extremely intelligent, funny and insightful pundit that discusses everything from politics to warfare and amasses a large following wherever he goes (after being kicked off Facebook & Twitter he moved to Gab, and after Gab was temporarily deplatformed he has focused on his YouTube channel and writing on Quodverum).
As it turns out this was not the first time Wictor had been removed and/or disenfranchised from the California voting process, so he was intelligent enough to expect and know how to react to it. Watch the video above to understand how.
Continuing my search, I found this tweet thread by Scott Laughlin discussing how this process had come to be and what it meant.
And as of Sunday we’ve been given a confession of a California poll worker who has come forward, reporting on the same instances happening in her Northern California precinct of Monterrey.
Recent California Changes to the Election Law Code
What Laughlin discovered was that in September 2018 the California Democrats wrote and passed a revision to the state’s election law code that allowed them to make an important change just in time for this midterm election.
The Election Code Division 3 Vote by Mail Voting Chapter 1:3019 was passed on September 17, 2018 (just in time for this midterm election) including a provision for not processing a returned ballot if the signatures don’t match the registration.
Let’s keep in mind that President Trump recently tweeted that this same exact tactic is being used in Arizona to reject cast ballots.
So let’s begin with the fact that a Provisional Ballot is not counted in the original vote numbers, and you cannot verify if it was even counted until 30 days after the election. Here are the reasons a provisional ballot may be voided from National Conference of State Legislatures:
But if you did happen to send your mail-in ballot (a method which skews highly to the Republican base) there is a new provision in the California election code stating that a ballot can be set aside completely until the signatures are confirmed.
Now we have to wonder…if you didn’t request the mail-in ballot in the first place (which happened frequently and, again, I’ve only heard of conservatives who had this happen), what signature are they comparing that on your mail-in ballot to?
As per the revision, if a voter’s signature doesn’t match what’s on the ballot they must be notified by mail at least 8 days prior to the election certification. But another rub to this is that if that notification is sent, the voter must have their verification received back at least 2 days prior to the certification. If the certification response is unanswered or uncounted in that 6 day margin it is voided.
I think we’ve all dealt with the USPS before, and believe me it’s no better in California than anywhere else in the nation — a 6 day margin relying on the logistics of the USPS is pretty shady in and of itself.
Most importantly we need to understand that this means any mail-in ballot in California, or someone who was sent but did not use a mail-in ballot (whether requested or not) was forced to use a provisional ballot — meaning many of these votes are not being counted at all in the election night numbers & “victories” that have been reported.
So we have to wonder how the Governor’s race was called for Newsom with only 9% of the total votes counted, and not even taking the provisional ballots into consideration.
The Interesting Timing and Location of the California Wildfires
The wildfires taking over the state hit very close to home to me, as one of them is raging so close to my house that we can see the fires from my street and our neighborhood has been filled with smoke for 2 days. As an avid outdoorsman I may love the smell of a campfire but find it unsettling to smell it when I step outside of my house for the past several days.
Not only is one of these fires extremely close to my house, but we had to evacuate my future step daughter from her father’s home late Friday night because the fires were less than ¼ mile from their house. So I am not writing this from a distant, unsympathetic and misunderstanding point-of-view; these fires are directly affecting my life right now.
As of today (Sunday) her neighborhood is on fire and we’ve taken in not only my future stepdaughter and her dog but also a friend of my future stepson’s who was trapped due to the highway closures from the fire. At least I enjoy cooking, helping others and having a full house!
But even from my close vantage point of the situation, I can’t help but wonder about the interesting timing and location of the fires, the Thousand Oaks shooting and the response to all of the above.
The very day after the elections, we began to hear reporting of a shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, a suburb just outside of Los Angeles. The media began to focus on that event and drowned out much of the discussion about politics, and the very next day 3 wildfires broke out around the state — with one happening to break out in the same town as the shootings.
So although there are some conservative voices expressing their concern about the potential California suppression of conservative voices, it is being completely drowned out online and in the media due to the shooting and fires.
California Politicians are Directly Responsible for the Massive Fires
(*note: much of the following research was compiled by DocRock1007, and can be found in his Twitter thread from this weekend here)
If you’ve spent your life primarily in the city, you don’t likely know about all of the year-round fire prevention measures that must be taken in order to prevent large fires like those burning California now.
I grew up in a heavily-forested suburb outside of Houston, and my time at Ft. Bragg during the Special Forces Qualification Course was spent almost entirely living in the woods of North Carolina. Our training exercises would routinely take us through active fire prevention areas, in which the state would either use controlled burns, dead tree removal or cutting fire lanes through the forests.
California used to spend quite a bit of time and money on these measures as well, but in April 2017 they decided to reduce their budget for Forestry & Fire Protection Response by $97.5 million.
They also cut the budget for dead tree removal and Emergency Water Tank Program from $52.7 million to only $8.5 million. Keep in mind that it costs around $1,000 to remove a single dead tree from certain areas of forest, so some simple math will show you just how much they destroyed that program.
Why in the world would they do that?
Because 3 months after taking office, President Trump signed Executive Order 13,768 stating that “sanctuary jurisdictions” would not be “eligible to receive Federal grants, except as deemed necessary for law enforcement.”
Yes, you’re reading that correctly. The Governor and politicians in California, a state notoriously known for its proclivity to catch on fire, cut their fire prevention measures in order to keep the “Sanctuary State” status.
If you have any trouble believing that was the cause, on October 5, 2017 Governor Brown signed Senate Bill 54, the California Sanctuary State Law.
What Was the (Easily Predicted) Outcome?
Since Governor Brown cut the fire prevention budget by about $100 million in 2017, the acreage burned in California so far (not counting the 3 fires currently burning) has almost tripled this year to date, going to 621,743 acres burned from a 5 year previous norm of an expected 231,453 acres per year.
There have been an additional 345 fires in California this year to date, above the same year-to-date interval average for the past 5 years.
To make it simple, let’s break down the chain of events into an elementary school-level explanation:
- President Trump signs an Executive Order keeping Federal funding from states that insist on maintaining sanctuary status for illegal immigrants
- California cuts its budget to account for a loss of federal funding, choosing to cut heavily from fire prevention measures
- Fires in California (expectedly) triple within a year
- California politicians call for aid from President Trump and the Federal government
- The same California politicians place nearly all blame on President Trump for doing exactly what he told them he was going to do, and their decisions to cut from fire prevention measures
How Does a State Which Has Lost Federal Funding Get Federal Bailouts?
So how does a state which has defied Federal legislation and lost part of their Federal budget get money from the Federal government despite their insistence on not following the law?
They declare a state of emergency and request Federal funding to help.
How is the amount of money to be given determined?
By the size of the State of Emergency.
Not only have the numbers of California wildfires significantly increased since these events took place, but so have the size of the fires themselves. Sure, maybe it’s just a coincidence.
But how many “coincidences” do we have to see before it becomes mathematically impossible to be called a coincidence?
Legitimate Event, Distraction, Money Grab or All of the Above?
I personally do not believe in coincidences, and this many stacked up against each other make my BS detector go on overload. To be perfectly clear, I’m not suggesting that either the shooting or the fires are fake. Again, I’ve had to evacuate family members as a direct result of one of the Los Angeles area fires and can see the smoke from my street — but the timing does seem to me that there is a high potential that these were caused and not accidental.
Since President Trump’s election we have been shown the levels of treachery that some nefarious traitors in our nation and government (and media) will go to in order to have things remain in the status quo and go their way.
The Kavanaugh hearings showed us that the Democrats are willing to do whatever it takes, suspend all reality and expect their followers to forgo any common sense in order to retain power and control of the narrative.
The debacles in Florida, Arizona and Georgia have shown us that they feel safe enough to blatantly disregard the sanctity of our election process and defy both procedures and court orders to continue their march toward stolen elections.
And the media, now nothing more than another voice for the Democrat party, have proven themselves happy to go along with whatever narrative they’re forced to convey along to their viewers & readers.
But again, we must ask ourselves: do any of their current narratives withstand scrutiny, make sense and/or really fit the statistical odds of being a coincidence?
I don’t believe so, but it’s up to you to make that decision for yourself.
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