Unassimilated Immigrants Fill Delco Apartment Buildings
By Sharon Devaney
Aston is green lighting the construction of apartments in a crowded section of the township, and apartment complexes, generally unattractive ones, are popping up at an accelerated rate throughout Delaware County, PA.
Whoever can be moving into this places?
Let me tell you hat happened to me at the Waterford Apartments in Havertown about nine years ago.
When I moved in, the apartment complex was well kept and clean. The grounds were beautiful and the staff was wonderful and friendly. If I needed something fixed the response was quick. It was a child and pet friendly enviroment. The neighbors were wonderful and friendly. When I renewed my lease within the year I started having some issues with other renters which I didnt experience before.
Then trash started appearing on the grounds. These included soiled diapers. The trash cans througout the grounds were ignored. Darby Creek in the back suddenly had trash floating in it.
The new residents could not speak English. Once upon coming home I saw a toddler’s head pushed outside a screen in a window on a second floor apartment. I had to run to the office to report it to the manager because there was no parent near the baby to help him.
Another very terrifying experience was with the new neighbors across the hall. They prayed in the hall outside my door and asked me in broken English why I wasnt wearing a hijab.
“Why would I?” I asked. “I’m Catholic.”
“You need to respect us,” they demanded.
I also had a small dog and they said they did not like animals. Herbie, my dog, was also apparently a sign of disrespect.
The men shouted constantly at their wives and disrespected them in front of others. On trips to the market, it was the wives who carried in the groceries despite the presence of empty-handed men.
I started making sure I left lights on at night and made sure my daughter was never alone.
These immigrants, I learned, received subsidized rent and health insurance, along with EBT cards.
I was a single mom with two kids. I worked full time. No subsidies for me.
The new immigrants did not assimilate and conditions worsened.
I chose not to renew my lease after an accident in 2017 left me permanently handicapped. The accident occurred a short distance from the apartments and the driver at fault was an illegal immigrant from Trinidad.
Still no subsidies, by they way, and I still work full time.
A society is required to have values and impose them. One of the values treasured in America is that one may not fight about theology. Another is that the rule of law applies equally to all. The illegal who crippled me was never prosecuted, I’ll note.
I used to wonder why our government subsidized illegals and gave them privileges unavailable to the native born.
Today’s news includes a report that an armed gang of illegals from Venezuela took over an apartment complex in Aurora, Col.
It appears that a group of sick but powerful people are importing their own army.
Harry Truman, former US President, had a sign on his desk saying “The Buck Stops Here”. Evidently, Kamala Harris never heard of that sign, or of that concept, involving her fellow democrat, as the following case will show.
Jamal Trulove, an emerging movie and tv entertainer, was convicted in October 2010, of a murder he did not commit. To be clear, Kamala, though the San Francisco District Attorney at the time, did not prosecute the case directly, but oversaw the case and was in the courtroom frequently.
Frequently enough to be aware that the conviction was based almost solely on the single testimony of one Priscilla Lualemaga.
Trulove appealed his 50-year to life sentence, and in 2014, his conviction was overturned by the California Court of Appeals, citing “highly prejudicial prosecutorial misconduct” by Harris’ office, including falsely and improperly inflating the personal danger Lualemaga had been in.”
Trulove was acquitted at his retrial in 2015. Linda Allen, a prosecuting attorney in the case, was later fired. Oh, and Trulove was awarded $13 million and change for his unlawful incarceration. Harris, btw, has never publicly commented on the case.
In 2020 he voted the Democratic ticket. He stated that “The people that I work with in Hollywood, they’re all on the left,” he added. “I really had no other choice.” .
He explained his switch to Trump thusly “When we look at what our life was like when Trump was in office we felt like life was good compared to right now,” “We wasn’t in no wars, right now we’re in wars. Illegals wasn’t coming in, but they’re coming in now.”
“Before he was acquitted, Trulove spent years in maximum security prisons, where he was stabbed “ Kamala Harris didn’t frame and prosecute a man for murder is technically a true statement, as it was done by her office, not her personally.
We do know three facts from this case;
The murderer of Seu Kuku has never been caught,
Jamal Trulove was falsely imprisoned.and may never have the career he should have had
In any political campaign, possibly starting at class president, it’s easier and more profitable to go negative on the other candidate than to tell the truth about yourself. Most of the TV/Radio ads on the airwaves are negative this year.
There’s a new Republicans for Harris ad which features such stalwarts as Former Rep. Denver Riggleman (formerly of the House Freedom Caucus) who calls Trump an “inveterate liar” and a “conspiracy theorist”.
Locally, Matthew McCaffrey, Upper Merion GOP leader, is now the ex- GOP leader, for his endorsement of Kamala Harris in a July op-ed. The Montco County GOP Chair Christian Nascimento said “Our bylaws are pretty clear that if you want to serve as a committee person in the party then you support the endorsed ticket”.
A number of Republicans including former Rep Adam Kinzinger who opined that “Donald Trump has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party.”
However current Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) criticized these speakers as suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” on NBC’s This Week. He continued “The Democratic Party under Kamala Harris has gone so far to the left that you actually had a Kennedy endorse a Republican.”
Of course, they’re reaching out to some of the former President’s critics though to no real effect as of yet. There are implications that they are planning events in Pennsylvania this September.
Lastly, where did this RFH campaign come from? “Speedily and bluntly put, Republicans for Harris is to 2024 what the Lincoln Project was to 2020:” This article goes on to mention that one Amy Cookson, a Harris staffer, is one of the main contacts for Republicans for Harris. One should read the whole article from westernjournal.com.
Wallingford Swarthmore Superintendent Is Gone, Gone, Gone
By Bob Small
One of the five demands at a contentious Wallingford Swarthmore School Board meeting was an independent review of Superintendent Wagner Marseille.
It was announced, Aug. 16, “the Board and Marseille . . . have mutually agreed to pursue an amicable conclusion to Dr. Marseille’s service as district superintendent”.
A special meeting was held Aug. 22 to vote on the terms of the separation agreement.
Jim Scanlon, a former West Chester superintendent, is expected to be voted in as the interim superintendent.
As noted in previous articles, parents accused Dr. Marseille of alienating staff members with his high- handed approach, and questionable spending decisions, such as hiring more administrators in lieu of staff, teachers, and repairs on the physical plant.
In the article in the Glenside local, we had some of Dr. Marseille’s backstory. He was a former track star who represented Haiti in the 1996 Olympics. He is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson where he was a Division 1 All-American.
He served at Cheltenham schools from 2015 to 2021. He received the annual President’s Award from the Cheltenham area NAACP Branch in 2012. He is enshrined in Princeton High School’s Athletic Hall of Fame.
Possibly a more diverse school board, including both academics and business people (with a history of hiring employees) could learn from each other and might provide a better model than the all-academic current board.
Just sayin.’
Today, the Swarthmorean newspaper returned from vacation (probably down the shore) and had an article which mentioned that, in his first seven months “he paid more than $70,000 for consultants and audits”. It also noted the recent resignations of Strath Haven Principal Greg Hilden; Wallingford Elementary School Principal Gabe Savage; and Assistant Superintendent James Conley.”
Nothing good would come from a Kamala Harris presidency, but endless bad things would come from one. It was reported the week before last that Harris’ campaign website had no economic plan on it. But everyone is supposed to cut Harris some slack, right? She was only just crowned after no real Democratic process.
Harris then said a plan was coming the next week, with a focus on the economy, as was a press conference at some point before the end of August — she needs the time to learn new words, as a talking head noted.
But as of August 18, still no plans — of any kind — on kamalaharris.com, but the requests for money were front and center on the website, along with the false claim that this is the team to “save democracy.” But why bother talking about pesky plans? As one Democrat operative said, “Why would we start talking about policy? We’re actually better off just running on this real wave of enthusiasm and energy.”
Harris did, however, start talking about old ideas that have failed on multiple occasions in her first policy-focused speech of her ever-so-brief campaign for the presidency last Friday. While most people would understand that socialist ideas which have been tried and failed are ideas never to be trotted out again, Kamala and today’s Democrats don’t. There is a School of non-Thought among the Democrat party today that socialist ideas will be different when they implement them.
A brief segue here … Every time I say or write “Democrat party,” I cringe. Today’s iteration of the Democrat party is so far removed from anything remotely connected to democracy. Thus, it’s truly Orwellian to refer to it as the Democrat party. So henceforth, I shall refer to it as the American Progressive Socialist Party (APSP), formerly known as the Democrat Party.
Le Economic Plan
On Friday in North Carolina, Harris’ “big economic idea” included a federal ban on “corporate price gouging” on groceries. “We will help the food industry become more competitive,” Harris said as she proposed price controls. Her research team should have told her that grocers operate on some of the thinnest margins of any industry. They should also have told her that most Americans today don’t believe the government can do anything efficiently. “Ms. Harris, we think you may lose credibility if you tell Americans that you will tell the food industry how to be more competitive. In fact, your proposal is likely to be compared to failed countries, such as Venezuela.”
The history of price controls is a history of failure, including Nixon’s. As revisited in a 2011 commentary in the Cato Institute, writer Gene Healy refers to the prediction of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, noting:
“Nixon’s gambit ended ‘in utter failure and the emergence into the open of the suppressed inflation.’ The people would pay the price — but not until after he’d coasted to a landslide re-election in 1972 over Democratic Sen. George McGovern.
“By the time Nixon reimposed a temporary freeze in June 1973, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw explain in The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, it was obvious that price controls didn’t work: ‘Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets.’”
When articulating her economic plan, such that it was, at least Harris did not resurrect her use of the term, “The Plan,” with a French accent, when she tried to explain it. See Harris’ brilliant elocution on a trip to France in 2021 here, where she said, “In government, we campaign with ‘The Plan.’ Uppercase T, uppercase P — The Plan!”
Not surprisingly, her economic plan involves spending a lot of money — $40 billion assisting local government in seeking solutions to housing scarcity and $25,000 per person to provide down-payment assistance for homebuyers. Not inexpensive programs. How will she pay for them?
Kamala’s answer was one of her usual word salads, a non-answer that ended with the statement that the programs would pay for themselves in some nebulous way. The best summary of how her spending would be paid for may have come from Insurrection Barbie in this short clip here, which involves leprechauns.
And the best summary of Kamala’s understanding of economics may be this reader comment in response to the RealClear Politics article, “Kamala Harris Outlines ‘Opportunity Economy’ Agenda: ‘More than 100 Million Americans will get a Tax Cut.” DNC Political Prisoner writes:
“… Harris is an economic illiterate that doesn’t even have a grasp of high school freshman economics. Like all Communists before her, she draws her economic policy from the emotions of the Communist manifesto instead of the laws of economics.”
Harris, part of the Biden-Harris crime syndicate, now in its fourth year of operations, has made the point publicly that she was the last person in the room with Biden when big decisions were being made. Together, they printed a lot of money, which is inflationary.
Some insight into inflation from X posts:
“With nearly four years under Biden-Harris ‘rule,’ inflation reached a peak of 9.6 percent in June 2022. Looking at specific categories after one year under Biden-Harris, there were shocking jumps. In December 2021, bacon was up 20 percent; beef, 24 percent; eggs, 12 percent; gasoline, 51 percent and natural gas, 28 percent.
****
“The rise in prices (inflation) is caused by government overspending, which increases the amount of money faster than the increase in goods & services output. That is the vast majority of the problem. Inflation was particularly bad during the Covid years, as there was massive government spending, despite productivity plunging, as people were forced to stay home. This is further exacerbated by excess regulation, which prevents the market from solving an unmet need (e.g., housing in high-demand areas). Occasionally, there is monopolistic behavior by companies, but this is relatively rare and usually only possible if those companies have gained control of their industry regulator. Again, a government, not private sector, problem.”
Then this, which is a tweet of Elon Musk from 16 Aug. 2024
“Inflation is caused by the federal government spending more than it earns, because they just print more money to make up the difference. To solve inflation, reduce wasteful government spending. Your tax dollars should be spent well, not poorly.”
Now we’re hearing “good news” on inflation supposedly dropping, but that doesn’t seem to be matching people’s realties.
Here’s one more on inflation and Kamala’s response:
An opinion piece by E.J. Antoni on FOX, “Kamala Harris’ economically illiterate agenda will just tank Americans’ finances even more,” opened with this zinger:
“If you’d been robbed by a person, you’d be insane to have that same individual investigate the crime. That’s essentially the situation with Vice President Kamala Harris’s plan to reduce the very inflation she helped cause. Like a burglar who won’t admit to the robbery, Harris is casting blame elsewhere and proposing an economically illiterate agenda that would only worsen Americans’ finances.”
Harris: The Thief
At a campaign rally in June in Las Vegas, President Donald Trump promised “no taxes on tips,” a bold idea. Reportedly this would impact 6 million workers.
Continuing the robbery theme of the Biden-Harris regime, Harris in early August announcedher no taxes on tips plan — a direct theft of Trump’s idea. Harris does not even have the political grace to give Trump credit. She could have said, “There is one thing I agree with Trump on.”
Harris is the mid-level manager who steals the fantastic idea from an “underling,” promotes it as her own to upper management, gets the promotion and has the lower-level employee fired.
There’s no way around the obvious reality of who Harris has shown herself to be through the years. She is a dolt. The three-month campaign is a con job — a faux campaign — with an anointed empty vessel, ready to be filled with whatever her puppet masters pour in to her to meet their agendas. Her flip-flopping on so many issues (fracking, policing, etc.) indicates she believes in nothing, but will say whatever seems the political flavor of the day. If there’s anything authentic about her, it doesn’t come across to the public.
Senator Harris
As a U.S. senator, Sen. Harris was a one-trick pony. Her “prosecutorial” background had given her one skill: grilling people to well-done. Often with bogus lines of inquiry. Often with a high level of disrespect. Often with her demanding, “Yes” or “No.” A few examples are here, here, here, here, here and here.
And we learned she can’t conjugate verbs properly. “The truth and the fact is …” And we got a taste of one of her favorite lines, “I’m speaking.” Here with Mike Pence.
AG Harris
As attorney general for the State of California, Harris’ bad policies and inability to think through implications have had real and painful implications for real people, a result she neither seems to care about nor own. A particularly horrifying law she advocated was penalizing parents for children’s school truancy. Newsweek detailed the horrors of Harris’ overreach of using the law enacted in 2011 to punish parents.
Harris also served as AG when Prop. 47 was introduced, which helped launch a crime wave in California by classifying theft of items priced below $950 as a misdemeanor, including for multiple offenses. As well, previous offenses categorized as felonies were reduced to misdemeanors. This included numerous drug possession offenses.
An informative piece on Substack by Sasha Stone, “Adopting Positions from Her Rivals is a Signature Move for Kamala Harris,” which provides tremendous insight into Harris’ career, also included a good discussion with Steve Cooley, the L.A. County DA from 2002 to 2012, who ran against Harris for the California AG position. Despite overwhelming endorsements from law enforcement and media, Cooley lost in a close race, 46.1 percent to 45.3 percent. We might have had an entirely different political landscape today if Cooley had won. That may have been Harris’ second big break, with the first one being her “special relationship” with one of the Democrat’s former powerhouses, Willie Brown, a relationship which resulted in several well-paying positions which launched her career.
*****
The list of Kamala’s failings is much longer (would easily be a 25,000-word article), but any one of the above failings should be enough to never put this person back into any elected office. But perhaps the most obvious disqualifier for sending Harris to the White House is four years of lies. There’s really only one role for the VP of the United States and that is to step in for the president if needed. While most of us saw that Joe Biden was mentally and physically incapacitated, Harris assured us for nearly four years that he was fit as a fiddle, rather than doing her duty to invoke the 25th amendment to remove Biden from office.
Had that been done in a timely manner — most certainly after the Afghanistan debacle — there would have been more than adequate time to conduct a legitimate Democrat primary versus the coup the country just experienced.
In a normal world, one where people weren’t suffering from full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome, a world where people voted in their best interests and used critical thinking, the Harris-Walz duo, along with other Democrats running for office, would be blown out of the water as criminal operatives of a criminal organization. Those with the ability to think and work through problems will not vote for the Harris-Walz pair. But there remain those who have financial interests in continuing to vote APSP — teachers’ unions, the APSP ruling elite, minions the APSP convinces and general hangers-on, toadies and sycophants — and will vote for Hollow Woman and Tampon Tim, no matter how poor their political career histories are.
Yes, in a functioning world, the 2024 election would be Mondale-Ferraro redux, the election where Reagan-Bush had 525 electoral votes to Mondale-Ferraro’s 13, with the popular vote, 54,455,472 to37,577,352, or 58.8 percent vs. 40.6 percent. (Interesting the year was 1984, but our 1984 closer to Orwell’s arrived in 2020.)
Americans hopefully will pull back their veils and see what lies have rolled out at this week’s Democrat National Convention. After a few weeks of Kamala 24/7 — the more you learn about her, the more you dislike her — I am more than done with her and have not watched this week’s farce & folly show. Hopefully the majority of voters will just say #NeverKamala, with the Harris-Walz pairing going the way of Clinton-Kaine — two politicos and two Timmys to be forgotten as soon as possible.
Maria Fotopoulos writes about the connection between overpopulation and biodiversity loss, and from time to time other topics that confound her. On FB @BetheChangeforAnimals and givesendgo.com/calliescathouse.
Walk Away Campaign Was Censored By Facebook, Never Forget
By Bob Small
On Jan. 8, 2021 Facebook closed the #WalkAway Campaign because founder, Brandon Straka, allegedly caused it to violate Facebook ” terms of use” because Straka had participated in the events of Jan. 6.
He was tried and received three years probation for his role. What he did could best be described as incitement but nothing beyond that.
So what is #WalkAway campaign? It was founded in 2018 by Brandon , a recovering liberal. He explains his reasons on one of the many videos on this website for walking away from the Democratic Left.
One reason “is the movement fighting back against Democratic exploitation of minority communities” through identity politics.
The website also lists the $10,000 Video Testimonial Challenge which should not be the reason for a person to join this movement.
There, however, is a Walkaway chapter in Pennsylvania which I just joined. How it remains on Facebook is beyond my understanding.
What happened after the initial Facebook ban is that Matt Taibbi , former contributing editor of Rolling Stone, who now publishes Racket News on Substack would not leave well enough alone.
Taibbi refers to what Michael Schellenberger calls the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” also inspired the infamous “Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798,” which outlawed “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against Congress or the president “
Legislatures have been passing laws prohibiting censorship by social media companies. George passed one in 2022, and Texas and Florida passed similar laws.
Federal judges have been putting them on hold on the grounds that social media companies have a First Amendment right to exercise discretion over the content on their platforms.
Similar laws from Texas and Florida were put on hold by federal judges last year on grounds that social media companies had First Amendment rights to exercise discretion over the content published on their platforms.”
On May 21, the Georgia legislature held hearings to investigate social media censorship and discrimination. It was sponsored by Georgia Representative Mesha Mainor who did her own walkaway from Democratic to Republican.
When can we expect these hearings in Pennsylvania?
The establishment media has mostly ignored one of the most devastating, avoidable developments in modern U.S. economic history. Since 2019, according to federal data, almost all job growth has gone to legal and illegal immigrants. The government’s Household Survey shows that there were only 971,000 more U.S.-born employees in May 2024 compared to pre-pandemic May 2019, while the number of employed immigrants during the same period increased by 3.2 million. Adding to working families’ pain, most of the jobs created in recent months are part-time, offer no health, no 401k, and no paid vacation benefits. Retail prices are at an all-time peak, and real wages are declining, a devastating one-two punch. Part-time workers are subject to immediate layoffs, their jobs offer few protections. For the marginally employed, marketplace conditions are tough. The news that Americans have been largely displaced by foreign nationals should be a clarion call for reforms to bring U.S. workers back to their proper place atop the employment queue. Instead, the major force that suppresses American workers—namely, the federal government —keeps piling on.
The obvious culprit that pushes American workers to the sidelines are the millions of illegal aliens that have surged the border and, in some cases, received parole from the Biden administration. Parole, as defined in immigration law, allows individuals to enter the U.S. temporarily to provide “significant public benefit,” requirements that the White House routinely ignores. Illegal immigrants who don’t receive work authorization often enter the underground economy, or the so called under-the-table or off-the-books economy. Estimates vary widely, but some put the underground economy between 6.4% and 12% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). In the second quarter of 2024, U.S. GDP was estimated at $28.06 trillion, which would put the underground economy somewhere between $1.8 trillion and $3.4 trillion.
Not only is the federal government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security, allowing millions of employment-aged males to enter the interior, but an agency with DHS, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, has moved aggressively to assure that illegal aliens can still get jobs. Last year, USCIS extended the valid period for some non-citizens from two years to five years. USCIS’ generosity extends even to illegal aliens in deportation proceedings. The complete list of five-year work authorized aliens: refugees, non-citizens paroled as refugees, asylees, asylee applicants, recipients of withholding of removal, applicants for adjustment of status, and applicants for suspension of deportation or cancellation of removal. Amazing but true; being in deportation proceedings is not a deterrent to qualifying for employment.
Beginning in October 2023 and continuing through July 2024, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas extended for 18-month periods Temporary Protected Status that includes work permission for the following nations, some hostile to the U.S.: Syria, Burma, Ethiopia, Haiti, Yemen and Somalia. Other countries whose TPS is still current but that will assuredly get renewals when their authorizations expire are Afghanistan, Nepal, Sudan, South Sudan, and Venezuela. Most of the work permits extend into 2025 so the percentage of foreign-born in the labor market will remain high for, at a minimum, more than a year. Another danger looms for prospective U.S. workers that could further depress their job prospects. Governors and mayors from the approximately 300 sanctuary states and cities are lobbying the federal government to issue work permits to the illegal aliens that have overwhelmed them. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has partnered with employers to find asylum seekers jobs, a generous gesture she never made to unemployed citizens.
These recently arrived illegal immigrants are shutting out of the job market a key sector; specifically, young men without a college degree. The decades-long decline in U.S.-born men’s labor force participation emphasizes the problem. Today, the labor force participation rate of U.S.-born men without a bachelor’s degree, ages 18 to 64, is 75.6%. — still below the fourth quarter of 2019’s 76.3% rate. And both those percentages are far below the 2006 and 2000 rates, 80.6% and 82.6%, respectively. Back in the 1960s, an era before unchecked immigration, 90% of prime employment aged men were in the labor force. Adopting policies like mass immigration that prevent young U.S. workers from employment is national suicide, a path that the Biden administration is determined to follow even in the waning days of his presidency.
Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org
Feds Piling On US WorkersFeds Piling On US Workers
To understand the various schisms within the Socialists is to understand that each Socialist Party believes they have the TRUE answer. See The Heritage We Defend mentioned in The Origins of Pabloite Revisionism, the Split Within … by Kishore which in 25 printed pages clarifies the different splits between Stalinism, Putinism, and Trotskyism.
The SEP has branches in the UK and other countries. The most votes they ever received in a Presidential election was the 18,693 by Edward Winn in 1988.
If only the various Socialist Parties could agree to work together…..
This is my last Socialist Party Profile, at least for this election.
Joseph Kishore Is The Socialist Equality Party PresidentialCandidate
Every election cycle in Pennsylvania, once the nomination papers are turned in — Aug. 1, this year — the objections begin to the aternative party and independent candidates. How dare they challenged the duopoly!!
This year, we note, the only challenges of this type have come from the Democratic Party.
Though the campaign of RFK, Jr filed some 23,000 signatures, most third-party candidates require far more names than the 5,000 needed by the Constitution, Green, and Libertarian parties. This ruling, as we understand it, only applies to those three political parties, not any other political parties nor any independent candidates.
The Clear Choice PAC is filing to block all the candidates for the Constitution Party. However, their Presidential Candidate, Randall Terry, goes around saying “The Democratic Party must be destroyed” so what do you expect.
The Libertarian Party also had their state-wide candidates challenged.
Neither of these parties had any reaction on their websites as of today.
Also being challenged are the American Solidarity Party, The Forward Party founded by Andrew Yang and the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Only Jill Stein and the other two Green Party candidates have escaped this year’s onslaught.
My friends in the Libertarian Party continue to try to improve the voting process.
Roy Minet seeks to replace plurality voting here. Around the time of our revolution “ French scholars, Jean-Charles de Borda and Nicolas de Condorcet, pointed out some of plurality’s serious problems. A 240-year-long debate ensued.
Roy feels plurality “is a cause of the increasing polarization that is rending the fabric of our society.” We end up electing presidents because they are better then.
“People are sick of having to vote for the “lesser evil,” he said.
He advocates Approve/Approve/Disapprove Voting. One of the main advantages of this is that you can express your disapproval.
He mentions that other forms of voting ; approval voting, condorcet, Instant runoff voting and STAR don’t allow voters to ever express dissatisfaction with a candidate. Would this prevent all the chowderheads and doofuses from running? Probably not, but it might make us voters feel better.
My friend Scott from Vermont sent me an article about hand counting votes in which we learn that over 24 countries use hand count elections.
Including Canada, France, Norway and the UK.
When the German Constitutional Court ruled against using voting machines, they went on to say that the “wide-reaching effect of possible errors of the voting machines or of deliberate electoral fraud make special precautions necessary in order to safeguard the principle of the public nature of elections.”
In Germany, the ballots are recounted “three times by different people and then once more in total.
This article goes on to say that if a country that is 14 times the size of Arizona, with 14 times the voter turnout, competently conducts hand count elections and reports preliminary results by the early morning hours, Arizona can achieve the same results “
This article also points out that “public scrutiny and reliable examination of voting machine records are PROHIBITED.”
Unlike in Germany, we are expected to trust the process and are not allowed to audit or question the outcomes. Reminds me of a recent election in Pennsylvania.
