2023 Elections: A Post-mortem

by CAPT. SETH KESHEL

The day after Election Day, which is hardly a day at all, but rather the culmination of many weeks of uncontrolled, unmanageable, and untraceable “voting,” by voters, proxies, and others, has become reminiscent of an abusive relationship.  Wounds are licked, blame is cast, and eventually, we vow to get it together and put the old smile on one more time and organize some primaries and polish up the “get out the vote” wagon.

Last night’s elections, the 2023 rendition of the ongoing national divorce, have brought more of the same.  Outside of a few outliers, like the Republicans flipping the Manchester, New Hampshire, mayoral seat, there’s not much to brag about.  Andy Beshear, a legacy Democrat from Kentucky, was re-elected over a dynamic, young Republican challenger, Daniel Cameron.  Abortion “rights” won out over pro-life efforts in Ohio, which has recently become so Trumpy we often forget that it was once the king of all bellwether states, wrong just twice in aligning with the presidential winner between 1896 and 2016.  In the Old Dominion, Virginia, Republicans got smoked in the battle for the state legislature.

So, what in the hell is going on out there?  Should you be upset?

There are many reasons to be upset, and most of them fall into the category of cause and effect.  First, it is critical for those seeking election reform (the so-called election deniers) to call balls and strikes consistently.  If we fail to do that, we will undermine the cause itself.  Some state Republican parties are circulating documents discrediting the work of election integrity groups because they are associating their good work with the dubious, conspiratorial, and sometimes utterly crazy claims of people who run in adjacent circles.  I’ve explained here in these pages before that I take very few logical leaps in my election forecasting and analysis because I need fence-sitters, not the choir, to see how clear the manipulation in Arizona, Pennsylvania, or Georgia is, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater because I’m obsessed with yard signs in California somehow making up a five million vote gap between Trump and Biden in a state that has hemorrhaged Republican voters for two decades.

Focus on that which we can impact.  Here are five key takeaways from Election Night (and Election Weeks) 2023:

I.               Legitimate Grievances

There is no greater outrage from this year’s election cycle than the glaring problems with voting machines, especially in Northampton County, Pennsylvania (a county that fraudulently flipped from Trump to Biden in 2020), which uses ES&S ExpressVoteXL machines.  The company bullshitted itself through an explanation that “human error” in programming was the culprit for their widespread system failures, which enraged county executive Lamont McClure, a Democrat.  Note: if you happen to be reading this and you work for or represent ES&S – you own this albatross, and thanks to your public pants-crapping, have absolutely zero grounds for calling for me to cease and desist.

This is low hanging fruit and has absolutely nothing to do with who won or lost an election.  It has everything to do with the voters’ right to transparency.  Voters were being told to ignore the screens, and that their ballots would be counted as they had marked on the voting machines.  Really? Just take their word for it?  Paper ballots do not require programming or extensive testing, if any.  The system itself is obviously designed to be so complicated that it requires confidence in government to adjudicate winners and losers.

II.             The Romney Effect

You may not like what I’m about to write, but I’m going to write it anyway.  We are long past the days of Republican voters showing up like robots to vote just to make sure Democrats don’t win.  There was a time for that, and the treachery and disloyalty of the Republican flagship, never more obvious than when they did all they could to ensure President Trump was ushered out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, has ensured the common man that Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson spoke of, doesn’t show up just so they can be betrayed by Democrats-lite.

People are bellyaching about the results in Kentucky, which feature a split-ticket decision in statewide races with the Democrat governor staying in the mansion, but do they realize that both Beshear and Cameron had fewer votes than Beshear 1.0 and former Governor Matt Bevin had in 2019?  In Ohio, “no” proponents (the pro-lifers) barely had half as many votes as Trump had in the Buckeye State in 2020?  The Romney effect is in play here.  Romney improved only in suburban counties in the working-class states, and in many rural or working-class counties, declined in votes from McCain’s 2008 totals.  It took Trump to get those voters to the polls, because they had been lulled to inaction by the inadequacy of the GOP machine.  One reason the 2020 election fraud was so obvious is because Trump had an extraordinary number of votes, which made it very easy to spot purely fictitious Biden vote totals across the country.

The GOP fails to engage the low propensity voter, and given that their modus operandi is to avoid the topics they care about most, like controlling immigration (legal and illegal), making trade favor Americans, and election reform, what exactly is the point of showing up?  There is also the case to be made for party engagement and the actual get out the vote (GOTV) operation, which is sorely lacking and misguided.

III.            Democrats Are Wicked – But Not Stupid

By now, you should have heard of smurfing.  While Republicans pinch pennies, Democrats enjoy trickle-down generosity from corporate America and the elite, while simultaneously laundering money from the same fictitious names they harvest votes from.  They are very organized – and they must be to get the worthless, America-hating communist sympathizers in their ranks elected (or selected) to office anywhere outside of Brooklyn or the San Francisco Bay Area.  Make no mistake, turnout was low for them, too, but just high enough to win every key race they targeted.  They have sophisticated data gathering means, and fully funded activists to spend the many weeks of early voting gathering enough ballots to get their people over the top, and by numbers that are largely believable, especially when the Republicans have piss-poor turnout numbers.

In Arizona, many of yesterday’s major elections were mail-in only, such as the Tucson elections.  Mayor Regina Romero (Democrat) won reelection easily over Janet Wittenbraker, an excellent Republican grassroots candidate, but had just 47,749 ballots (totals at time of publication).  For perspective, Joe Biden, he of the non-campaigning variety, had 304,981 ballots countywide, a total that is heavily bloated from reality.  The strength of the Pima County Democrat coalition comes from the City of Tucson, while Republicans are strong elsewhere in the county (Republicans hold all three state legislative seats assigned to LD-17).  Wittenbraker came in with 24,414 votes, not even one-eighth of Trump’s total vote in Pima County.  This makes it very easy for Democrats to come out on top and keep their outcomes believable.

While I do not doubt the mayoral outcome, or the city council races, I have my doubts about this one – which could be tilted by just 558 harvested phantom ballots in an all-mail race.

 
IV.           History Says…

History is heavily against Republicans winning the governorship in Kentucky.  This does not rule out in any way avenues for fraud, which are described in the final point below.  In 1851, Kentucky elected its first Democrat governor.  There have been 45 governors of the Bluegrass State in these past 172 years – and only nine were Republicans.  Kentucky became competitive in the mid-20^thcentury presidentially, but was won by Bill Clinton twice, and all throughout the early stages of his century, has featured Republican and Democrat split-ticket victories.

Cameron lagged Bevin’s vote totals substantially and underperformed him in key areas, such as the Cincinnati suburbs.  He was blown out in Fayette (Lexington/University of Kentucky) and Jefferson (Louisville) Counties and failed to put up Trumpian numbers in the rural counties that blot those two Democrat hubs out in presidential races.  Granted, he was thwarted by the worthless Republican apparatus, receiving no help from Ronna Romney or Kim Reynolds, head of the Republican Governors Association.

If there is any major thing to remember from this point – Donald J. Trump was not on the ballot in Kentucky, or anywhere else, like in Ohio, or in Mississippi, where Tate Reeves won his reelection by a nearly identical margin as his first win in 2019, with both Reeves and his Democrat opponent lagging 2019 vote totals.  Trump alone appears to be the only man capable of producing what Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse refers to as the monster vote.

V.             Avenues for Fraud

Has Captain Seth Keshel become an election affirmer?  Forbid it so.  I remain someone who keeps his powder dry and searches for convincing avenues with which to convince people that our sacred system of voting is becoming permanently corrupted with each passing quasi-election.  Even in Kentucky, vote counting in Fayette and Jefferson Counties crept to a standstill as the conservative areas of the state reported their votes.  This appears to be a wait-and-see approach to gage the outcomes in those counties and any potential need to activate readily available “absentee” ballots, or to lay low and keep totals within established norms.

One key tenet of election manipulation is that results must be believable.  To my eyes, yesterday’s numbers, including the historical aspects described above, reflect believable numbers.  This does not rule out the possibility that, thanks to software driven mail-in heavy elections, a low turnoutmodel for election fraud is not available to offset the ridiculous notion that candidates like Joe Biden (or Katie Hobbs) can stay in a basement and receive 81 million “votes” and simultaneously defy every known trend, indicator, bellwether, and predictor of presidential politics in play since 1888, before the formation of Major League Baseball and the onset of the Spanish-American War.

The truth of yesterday’s elections remains the truth of the past three years.  Our elections cannot be validated, one way or another, whether those results are something we would like or dislike.  The Ten Points to True Election Integrity would ensure they are verifiable, but that would hinge on government fat cats desiring such an outcome.  Do not get sidetracked chasing lasers on the wall – the goal was and remains transparency in our elections, and Northampton County, Pennsylvania, is a great place to start.

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