90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Voters Across Brooklyn Get Absentee Ballot Return Envelopes with Wrong Name and Address

The city Board of Elections sent absentee ballots to some Brooklyn voters with return envelopes bearing strangers’ names and addresses, THE CITY has learned.

In those cases, if a voter fills out their presidential election ballot and sends it in as instructed, their vote could be attributed to another person.

As of late Monday, THE CITY had received calls and emails from several voters affected by the apparent screwup in at least five neighborhoods: Sheepshead Bay, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, Park Slope and DUMBO.

Victoria Edel, of Sheepshead Bay, said she received a return envelope with the name and address of a woman who lives one street away and has a last name that begins with a D.

“This is not my ballot, we have this random lady’s ballot — it’s like they messed this up in a big way,” said Edel, 28.

Valerie Vasquez, a spokesperson for the city Board of Elections, blamed a vendor hired by the agency, Phoenix Graphics of Rochester, N.Y., hired to print and distribute absentee ballots in Brooklyn and Queens.

She said the board is trying to understand the scope of the problem and what to do about it.

“We are determining how many voters have been affected but we can assure that the vendor will address this problem in future mailings, and make sure people who received erroneous envelopes receive new ones,” she wrote in response to questions from THE CITY. “We will ensure on behalf of the voters in Brooklyn that the proper ballots and ballot envelopes are in the hands of the voters in advance of Election Day so they can vote.”

A message sent by THE CITY to Phoenix late Monday was not immediately returned. The Board of Elections in May awarded Phoenix a $4.6 million contract to handle absentee ballots.

The contract was a negotiated acquisition, which means that there was no competitive bidding. Phoenix was the only vendor contacted by BOE for the job, the city comptroller’s Checkbook NYC system shows.

Votes Would be Voided

The voters who contacted THE CITY reported receiving their absentee ballots in the mail Monday as requested. Each got a ballot along with an “official absentee ballot envelope” into which they were instructed to place their...

Three Things Ilhan Omar Loves....

Undercover video of alleged ballot harvesting scheme linked to Ilhan Omar is huge. Trump tells DoJ to launch probe.

Minnesota police investigating alleged ballot harvesting by Ilhan Omar supporters

Police in Minneapolis are investigating a report by a right-wing activist group of alleged illegal ballot harvesting by supporters of Rep. Ilhan Omar in Minnesota.

“We are in the process of looking into the validity of those statements,” the Minneapolis Police Department said in a Monday statement, according to Fox News. “No further information is available at this time on this.”

Project Veritas reported on Sunday that the Minnesota Democrat’s supporters were illegally collecting ballots and bragging about it on social media.

Although ballot harvesting, the act of a third-party collecting ballots from the residences of voters, is legal in many states, it is often limited to the number of ballots collected per individual. In the Project Veritas report , a man identified as Libon Mohamed was seen boasting about the large number of ballots he had collected.

related: Indiana woman charged for mail in voter fraud, delivered 400 ballots with Democrat box prechecked

Mohamed said he had collected “300 ballots for Jamal Osman,” who is a member of the Minneapolis City Council. The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that there is a three-person limit to the number of ballots that can legally be harvested.

“Numbers don't lie. You can see my car is full. All these here are absentee ballots. Look, all these are for Jamal Osman,” Mohamed said in the video.

President Trump called for an investigation into the report.

“This is totally illegal. Hope that the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota has this, and other of her many misdeeds, under serious review??? If not, why not??? We will win Minnesota because of her, and law enforcement. Saved Minneapolis & Iron O Range!” Trump said in an early Monday morning tweet.

Omar’s senior communications director Jeremy Slevin dismissed Project Veritas's reporting as a distraction.

“The amount of truth to this story is equal to the amount Donald Trump paid in taxes of ten out of the last fifteen years: zero. And amplifying a coordinated right-wing campaign to delegitimize a free and fair election this fall undermines our democracy,” he said according to Newsweek while referring to the...

Without common sense in government, civilization cannot continue.

After the summer protests and rioting in many large cities, activists demanded a defunding, or at least radical pullbacks, of the police. So-called crime experts often concurred.

So some city governments ignored public warnings and diminished their police presence despite a sharp rise in crime in many cities. Looting and arson were often ignored.

If you call 911 in a large American city, there is no guarantee that anyone will answer promptly and send out police to aid the endangered. So gun sales have soared. Some people who never before owned weapons, or even opposed the use of firearms, are now terrified to remain unarmed. Self-protection often outweighs abstract ideology.

According to a recent Gallup poll, most black Americans favor maintaining or increasing police presence. Often, city officials who support cutting back on law enforcement still expect their own homes and property to be constantly policed. The same is often true of activist elites who live far from the inner city.

Large swaths of the American West are now charred by out-of-control wildfires. Some governors and many federal bureaucrats blame the conflagrations on climate change.

But those who actually live within forests, or on mountains and foothills, that are historically vulnerable to wildfires know that the epic droughts of 2013-2015 killed or dried out millions of acres of trees and vegetation.

Yet most of these decaying trees were never removed by authorities. They now predictably provide the fuel for the current wildfire Armageddon.

A few veteran forest managers have been proverbial voices in the wilderness in recent years. They warned that ignoring dead trees, limiting the sort of domestic animal grazing that reduces dead brush and dry foliage, forbidding timber companies from harvesting decaying timber, and preventing periodic controlled burns were collectively a prescription for the very disasters that now cloud Western skies with fires, smoke, and air pollution.

In other words, pragmatic people once understood that tens of millions of dead trees were not to be left alone as mulch for pre-modern ecosystems. In the present, the dried-up vegetation has served as veritable napalm, causing traditional fall wildfires to blow up into biblical conflagrations that consume homes, property, and people.

The public trust in science depends on its consistency, its transparency, and its divorce from politics and ideology. There can be no left or right, liberal or conservative, blue-state or red-state slant if scientific expertise is to be taken seriously.

Unfortunately, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the very opposite has sometimes occurred: