An Unqualified Election Fraud Ideologue

Judging by his campaign website, Bob McCaslin, Jr’s most salient qualification for the job of Spokane County Auditor appears to be that he wasa “Principal Designee” in two different schools in the Central Valley School District more than a decade ago. Otherwise, judging by his recent activities, McCaslin is running on a platform of distrust, innuendo, ignorance, and misinformation about the office he seeks. 

As a representative to the Washington State legislature from legislative district 4 (Spokane valley north to Mt. Spokane) since 2015 he was reliable follower of the now disgraced Rep. Matt Shea (“The Biblical Basis for War”). With Rep. Rob Chase (LD-4) and Rep. Robert Sutherland, McCaslin is a consistent sponsor of Shea’s brainchild, the “State of Liberty” bills, a pie-in-the-sky proposal dangled at their supporters, a bill that would cleave Washington State in two at the Cascade crest—and produce two new U.S. Senators of a certain stripe. (The minority Republican takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court announced in the Dobbs decision should wake us up to the consequences of ignoring long term efforts like Shea’s Liberty State. Slowly, slowly, then suddenly.)

So what has McCaslin Jr. been doing in order to equip himself to serve as an election administrator (a primary function of County Auditors in Washington State)? Little noticed on this side of the Cascades, McCaslin, Chase, and Sutherland (the same bunch that are pushing the State of Liberty) held an unofficial public hearing questioning the integrity of Washington State election systems. The “hearing” was held last August in an Evangelical non-denominational church in Snohomish. The ad for the event is copied below from the “Americans United & Determined to Improve Transparency” (AUDIT) facebook page. (Be sure to note the cross with flag accents in the upper right.)

The origin of their Tucker Carlson-like questioning intimation of election fraud and their call for an audit of the 2020 election is summed up in the photograph of Mike Lindell and Rep. Sutherland to whom McCaslin’s plays the side-kick:

Rep. Sutherland (on the right) traveled to South Dakota for the three day “Cyber Symposium” put on by Mike Lindell (aka “The MyPillow Guy”, pictured on the left) in August 2021. There Rep. Sutherland received the Trump election fraud gospel directly from its biggest promoter. (Sutherland previously visited the showy Cyber Ninjas election “audit” of Maricopa Co., Arizona—which turned up precisely nothing of note.) 

McCaslin’s, Chase’s, and Sutherland’s antics in the Snohomish church were, as far as I am able to determine, completely unnoticed by eastern Washington media. However, the event was covered in the Seattle Times by Jim Brunner. (See below)

McCaslin’s (and the Spokane GOP’s) message has morphed. Apparently realizing that direct accusations of election fraud might not play well, local Republicans have resorted instead to sowing doubt by hinting that local elections lack transparency (they know better), that observers aren’t allowed (a lie), and that, somehow, current internal known checks, balances, and audits ought be subject to further audit. Since McCaslin prominently features his tax cutting credentials on his campaign website I wonder how he expects this uber-AUDIT would be funded? 

Send this man into retirement. He is an election fraud ideologue, not a knowledgeable man qualified to lead the office of Spokane County Auditor. To insure that every vote is carefully and transparently counted vote to retain Vicky Dalton. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Washington Republican legislators push election fraud narrative at hearing on Sunday

Aug. 13, 2021 at 6:00 am Updated Aug. 13, 2021 at 6:20 am

By Jim Brunner Seattle Times political reporter

More than nine months after the 2020 election, some Republicans continue to follow former President Donald Trump’s lead in waging a campaign to overturn or undermine confidence in the results.

That’s true even in Washington — no one’s idea of a swing state — where Trump lost to Joe Biden by nearly 785,000 votes.

On Sunday, five Republican state representatives are hosting an unofficial public hearing at a Snohomish church, encouraging the public to bring forward evidence of voting fraud or irregularities.

The goal is to lay groundwork for a review of Washington’s election results, similar to the controversial “forensic audit” being conducted in Maricopa County, Arizona, by a private company called Cyber Ninjas.

There has been no credible evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and courts have struck down dozens of lawsuits challenging the results. But that has not stopped Trump and his loyalists from continuing to claim the election was stolen from him.

The lead organizer of the Sunday hearing — which has not been backed by top Republican leaders — is state Rep. Robert Sutherland, R-Granite Falls, who visited the Arizona audit facility last month. In December, he told his Facebook followers to “prepare for war,” after declaring “Joe Biden is not my president.”

MyPillow conspiracy connection

This week, Sutherland was in South Dakota, attending a three-day
“cyber symposium” organized by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has emerged as a leading purveyor of outlandish, false assertions about the 2020 election.

Earlier this month, Lindell claimed without evidence that millions of votes were flipped by hackers or computer algorithms, not primarily in swing states, but in places like Washington, Oregon and California, “where they could take the most” in order to run up Biden’s popular vote margin.

Lindell faces a $1.3 billion libel lawsuit from voting-machine maker Dominion Voting Systems, which says his false claims have damaged the company’s reputation. On Wednesday a federal judge rejected Lindell’s efforts to have the case dismissed, writing that his claim of “a vast international conspiracy that is ignored by the government but proven by a spreadsheet on an internet blog is so inherently improbable that only a reckless man would believe it.”

Also attending the South Dakota event was state Rep. Brad Klippert, R-Kennewick, who joined other state lawmakers there in announcing creation of an “election integrity caucus” seeking audits in all 50 states.

Sutherland, who has held his legislative seat since 2019, did not respond to messages on Wednesday and Thursday seeking comment. He represents the 39th legislative district, covering most of Snohomish and Skagit counties.

Sutherland: People “must rise up”

In an interview with a conservative talk-show host at the cyber symposium, Sutherland said he’d heard from many voters concerned about ballot integrity. For example, he said, one woman reached out to tell him she is in the U.S. on a visa but was automatically registered after getting a driver’s license and received a ballot.

Sutherland said if compelling evidence is presented at the hearing, lawmakers will call for an audit, but acknowledged that with Republicans in the minority in the Legislature, they can’t force one. “The people themselves must rise up after hearing the evidence and the data,” he said.

In a podcast interview last month, Sutherland praised the Arizona audit, and said Washington’s election should be similarly scrutinized. He said he has been asked frequently whether he can vouch for the accuracy of Washington’s elections. He said he could not. “I don’t know how our system works when you get down into the weeds. It’s a black box,” he said, adding that “some of the results seem off.”

Other state representatives scheduled to participate in the Sunday hearing include: Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen; Rob Chase, R-Liberty Lake; Vicki Kraft, R-Vancouver; and Bob McCaslin, R-Spokane Valley. The group organizing the event has dubbed itself Americans United and Determined to Improve Transparency (A.U.D.I.T.)

While the hearing has been billed as a fact-finding mission, organizers have invited national speaker Seth Keshel, a retired Army captain from Texas who has promoted false claims of widespread voting fraud.

The event is being held at the House Ministry Center, a church that has previously hosted pro-Trump and anti-mask speakers and refused to comply with Gov. Jay Inslee’s orders limiting large gatherings amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some GOP leaders not on board

Unlike in Arizona, where the state Republican Party and legislative leaders backed the Cyber Ninjas audit, the Washington effort so far has not won support from top Republicans.

State House Republican Leader J.T. Wilcox said he only knew about the event from what he’d read on social media.

“It’s not a caucus thing. It’s something they’ve chosen to do. I don’t imagine that they could use public money on this. It’s not an official legislative thing,” said Wilcox, R-Yelm.

Wilcox added that in his long experience with elections in Washington he had not seen evidence of widespread irregularities. “There have been cases of people illegally voting, and when that happens, we should, you know, prosecute it. But again, I don’t think it’s systemic and I have never seen any evidence in Washington,” he said.

The claims being circulated by of organizers of Sunday’s event have drawn criticism from Secretary of State Kim Wyman, the state’s chief election administrator and sole statewide elected Republican.

Wyman previously has criticized the Arizona audit as sloppy and damaging, and pushed back on claims by 2020 Republican gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp, who lobbed fraud claims after refusing to concede his 545,000-vote loss to Gov. Jay Inslee.

Culp, who is now running for Congress against U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, filed a lawsuit over his election loss, but withdrew it after his attorney was threatened with legal sanctions for making frivolous legal claims.

Wyman: “You’re spreading misinformation”

In an interview, Wyman repeated what she has said to Culp and others making accusations of vote fraud without providing substantive evidence: Put up or shut up.

With talk of dead voters, or people voting twice, “these are felony-level crimes, please get that data to the FBI,” Wyman said. “And if you’re unwilling to do that, you need to stop saying it. Because now you’re spreading misinformation.”

In Washington, vote-counting machines are not connected to the internet, tabulations are observed by both political parties and a series of hand recounts last year in selected voting districts turned up no discrepancies, Wyman noted. There are a handful of fraud cases found during elections, which are referred to law enforcement.

Wyman, who has been speaking with GOP groups in an effort to explain the safeguards in the election system, said the years of Trump claiming he could only lose an election that was rigged have taken a toll.

“I’ve had too many people that I have known for years that are very rational, respected leaders in their community who believe this. And I can’t convince them otherwise,” Wyman said.

Trump’s “stop the steal” rhetoric stoked the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, in which a mob of Trump supporters violently attempted to halt the certification of Biden’s win. The Department of Homeland Security warned this week it was seeing an uptick in people calling for violence due to unsubstantiated claims of 2020 fraud, and seeking the reinstatement of Trump as president, NBC News reported.

Trump has continued to monetize his fraud claims, raising more than $100 million nationally, and pulling in nearly $700,000 from Washington donors this year so far.

“I think that there are many people that are making money and fundraising off of it, and having a lot of success,” Wyman said. “So they want to continue the narrative as long as possible.”

Jim Brunner: 206-515-5628 or jbrunner@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @Jim_Brunner. Seattle Times political reporter Jim Brunner covers state, local and regional politics. 

What We Were Not Taught

My public high school U.S. History course, as I remember it, pretty much trailed off in the late 1860s with some minimal coverage of the end of the end of the Civil War and the Lincoln assassination. Reconstruction was covered in a few sentences. Post-Reconstruction, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) and the Wilmington Massacre (1898)—not at all. The 1960’s Civil Rights era—which we were living at the time—was barely mentioned—certainly not related back to events of our sometimes appalling past that the history class avoided. 

I learned of Tulsa and Wilmington—blatant examples of that history—only in the last few years. If we are to judge by all the flap Republican operatives have stirred up around “CRT” and The 1619 Project, modern day Republican leadership wants to shield American children from understanding that we still live with the echoes of the slavery and racism over which the Civil War was fought. They would rather children were taught the sanitized Southern version that the war was a tragedy fought over the “right to secede” or that it might better be called “the war of northern aggression”. 

I hear—and I fervently hope—that today’s youth increasingly rejects the Republican historical fantasy narrative. 

Teen Vogue?? Isn’t that just about what the Kardashians are wearing lately? Well, no. In fact, Teen Vogue, according to Mark Joseph Stern, is a magazine that:

…also treats teenagers like rounded human beings with agency and intellects. The result is a teen glossy with seriously good political coverage and legal analysis, an outlet for teenagers who—shockingly!—are able to think about fashion and current events simultaneously.

I fail to remember how I came up the article, “The Wilmington Massacre Was A White Supremacist Insurrection in North Carolina,” that I have reproduced below but I was heartened to think that at least some of America’s youth are being reminded of historic events that inform our current times. It’s a good read (as are many in this online magazine)—and it fact checks well with everything else I’ve read of the Wilmington Massacre.

A couple of notes: 

1) The article points to “southern Democrats” instigating the Wilmington Massacre. Those southern Democrats were the racist holdover from the Confederate South and the Jim Crow era, people who fought tooth and nail against the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Nixon’s “southern strategy” to bring these people into the Republican Party for electoral advantage had the effect of changing the traditional Republican Party, the “Party of Lincoln”, into the Party of the Southern Democrats, a Party that would make Lincoln turn over in his grave.

2) Sometimes referred to as a “race riot”, Wilmington Massacre might better be taught as a “white supremacist insurrection”. Be sure to read about the evolution of meaning and political significance of the term “race riot” covered toward the end of the article. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

The Wilmington Massacre Was A White Supremacist Insurrection in North Carolina

BY CATHERINE CARUSO

JULY 4, 2022

Although the word “insurrection” has come to be associated with the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, America was no stranger to deadly insurrections and attempted coup d’états long before that day. In fact, the last successful insurrection to take place on U.S. soil occurred nearly 124 years ago, in Wilmington, North Carolina. In 1898, Wilmington’s duly elected, biracial government was violently overthrown by a mob of white supremacists who sought to regain power in the wake of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.

At the time, white southern Democrats deeply resented that Black Americans were now able to enjoy some of the same rights as they did, such as being able to hold public office. As the primary political party of the Confederacy, southern Democrats were threatened by the fusionist coalition that had formed in North Carolina between Republicans and Populists, a group comprised mostly of poor farmers and other working-class people. State party leaders wanted to squelch Black political power in Wilmington and throughout North Carolina.

Before the coup, Wilmington had been a prospering city, where Black residents thrived economically, especially compared with other places in the South. Not only was Wilmington the largest city in North Carolina, it was also considered a center of Black achievement. Black men owned the majority of barbershops and eateries in the city, and some were elected to public office. Despite their collective gains and successes, however, Black people faced widespread discrimination and harassment in Wilmington and were by no means considered equals by the white population.

The events that led to the Wilmington Massacre, which took place in a single day, didn’t happen overnight. The violent coup was the culmination of a monthslong white supremacy campaign. Vowing to rid the state of “Negro domination,” southern Democrats embraced racist propaganda to try to instill fear in the city’s white residents and create doubt about whether Black people should hold any political power at a time when Black voter registration and participation was particularly high.

In 1896, just two years before the massacre, North Carolina elected its first Republican governor since the end of Reconstruction: Daniel Lindsay Russell. That same year, George Henry White, a Black Republican, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in North Carolina, beating the Democratic incumbent and becoming the only Black member of Congress at the time. Then, in 1897, Wilmington elected a Republican mayor and a number of Black aldermen, expanding the amount of influence held by Black men and their white allies in the city.

With the 1898 election on the horizon, white Democrats, outraged by their loss of political power, launched a crusade to sway the outcomes. Politicians and businessmen such as Furnifold Simmons, Charles Brantley Aycock, Hugh MacRae, and Raleigh News & Observer editor Josephus Daniels spearheaded a multipronged plan to manipulate the results of the election through coercion, fearmongering, and disinformation. They promoted white supremacist propaganda in newspaper articles and political speeches, and terrorized Black residents and white fusionists through armed intimidation.

According to William Sturkey, an associate professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, the fusionist coalition was a direct threat to the interests of the white ruling class. As a result, they “concocted this white supremacist race scare in order to make sure that working-class white people understood that their differences lie not in economic differences between working-class whites and elite whites, but rather in racial differences between white and Black,” Sturkey tells Teen Vogue. “They certainly believed in white supremacy, but one of the more pressing things was how they were able to use it as a tactic here to mobilize violent resistance, but then also to mobilize voters.”

White-owned newspapers, such as the News & Observer, the Wilmington Messenger, and the Wilmington Star, were used to sow fear and division through the promulgation of disinformation and racist stereotypes. In the months leading up to the election, newspapers published cartoons and editorials decrying the threat of “Negro domination.” This was a powerful talking point for Democrats, who wanted to scare white men into believing that Black men would soon rule over them.

As the Zinn Education Project documented, the pages of white newspapers were also filled with an abundance of editorials that not-so-subtly implied that Black men, described as “brutes,” wanted to rape white women. This belief was echoed by Rebecca Latimer Felton, a white supremacist and former slave owner, who gave a speech at the Georgia Agricultural Society in which she advocated for vigilante justice and called for the lynching of Black men: “If it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts,” she said, “then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.” 

In response, Alexander Manly, the editor of Wilmington’s only Black newspaper, the Daily Record, wrote a scathing rebuttal asserting that not all rapists were Black and that many interracial relationships at the time were consensual. This editorial caused a stir when it was originally published, but it caused a cacophonous uproar when it was reprinted in the Wilmington Star just a month before the election. Shortly after it was published in August 1898, Manly received death threats and the Daily Record was evicted from its original building and had to find a new home, according to The New Yorker.

Months later, though, the article resurfaced when Democrats strategically republished it in other newspapers across the state, even sparking outrage from Republicans like Governor Russell, who called Manly his “enemy” and referred to the article as “villainous,” the publication notes. The widespread distribution of this editorial inflamed fears of miscegenation and interracial relationships among white residents and helped fuel outrage among Democrats in the lead-up to the election.

Incendiary stump speeches inflamed these divisions further. Aycock, a lawyer who was active in the state’s Democratic Party, gave no shortage of speeches in support of the white supremacy campaign, as did former Confederate colonel Alfred Waddell, one of the leaders of the white supremacist mob that later overthrew Wilmington’s government. 

Tim Tyson, a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, tells Teen Vogue that Waddell was a “demagogue” who was “available to speak at all occasions.” Just before the election, Waddell told a large crowd that he was willing to “choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses” to bring an end to “Negro domination.” He also instructed white residents to threaten and kill Black voters at polling stations to prevent them from voting. “If you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks,” he said. “We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns.”

Because of this violent voter suppression and intimidation, Democrats overwhelmingly won the state election in Wilmington on November 8, 1898. In fact, in some precincts in the city, due to rampant ballot stuffing, there were more votes for Democratic candidates than there were registered voters. 

But this victory only increased the Democrats’ thirst for revenge. White supremacists were still upset about the last municipal election in Wilmington, which gave them the majority fusionist government. Since many local seats weren’t on the ballot, and wouldn’t be until the following year, Democrats decided to take more immediate action.

The very next day, Waddell helped lead a mob of hundreds of white residents to the courthouse to sign a so-called White Declaration of Independence to prevent anyone of “African origin” from holding office again. Then, on November 10, 1898, a militia of 2,000 armed white men violently overthrew the government. The militia was comprised of civilians and a white supremacist terrorist group known as the Red Shirts, a group that was, as noted by the Zinn Education Project, equipped with military rifles, revolvers, and a hand-driven machine gun known as a Gatling gun.

During the course of that day, the armed mob burned down the building that housed the Daily Record, forcefully removed Black and white fusionist officials from office, and massacred anywhere between 60 and 300 Black residents — decimating Black economic success and Black political power in the city for the next century. 

This deadly backlash to racial progress helped white residents uphold white supremacy in the city for years to come, running Black citizens out of their businesses and implementing Jim Crow laws to prevent them from voting or running for office. No Black resident was elected to public office in Wilmington again until nearly 100 years later, in 1972, and no Black person in North Carolina would serve in Congress until 1992, as noted by journalist David Zucchino.

In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, thousands of Black people permanently fled Wilmington. White newspapers referred to the violent insurrection as a success, praising the triumphant seizure of the city. According to Tyson, the massacre was also commonly referred to as a “race riot” — a term that is now used to cast Black victims of racial violence as the sole aggressors in their own oppression. But, Tyson adds, the modern definition of the term doesn’t match the one used at the time of the massacre: “One hundred fifty years ago, ‘race riot’ meant when white people in mobs would storm the Black community and burn down buildings and shoot people in the street.” 

“People held on to the term a little bit because it sounded like something they preferred to think about,” he explains. “To be involved in the white supremacy campaign in 1898 was the most important political credential that you could have for a generation.” Those who played a role in the coup were proud of their involvement, Tyson says. No participants were ever punished for their crimes. It was only decades later that people in North Carolina made an effort to bury this history and erase it from public knowledge.

Many Americans may be unfamiliar with the history of the Wilmington Massacre, but it can provide some important insight into the ways in which white supremacy has influenced America’s system of government and electoral process. Although the 2021 attack on the Capitol was an unsuccessful coup attempt, there are some pertinent parallels between the two, according to Sturkey.

“From flying the Confederate flag to bringing guns and attacking the federal government to overthrowing an election, a lot of that stuff really is similar to what happened in Wilmington in 1898….,” he says. “The greatest ‘What if?’ in U.S. history, and especially in Southern history, is what if poor white and Black people ever started voting together. That would be an undefeatable political force. So to prevent that, people, like in the case of Wilmington, wanted to make sure that white working-class voters were worked up over this race scare. What’s remarkable is how well that tactic still works.”

Sturkey says that former president Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric, which included phrases like “take back our country” and an obsession with birtherism, exemplifies the effectiveness of this type of race-baiting. “There’s a deep, deep history of white voters thinking that somehow they’re losing power or that they’re somehow the forgotten people of this country, and that America belongs to them,” he continues. “Therefore, any action that they take to preserve their power in America is legitimate, just like the people in Wilmington thought in 1898.”

Underhanded Trump tactics in Eastern Washington

Last week a group (or one person?) called “Spokane Citizens For Election Integrity” spent quite a lot of time and money to promote Trump’s Big Lie of rampant election fraud. “Spokane Citizens For Election Integrity” sent pirated DVDs of Dinesh D’Souza’s (see P.S. below) 2000 Mules from Spokane to recipients at least as far away as Pend Oreille County (the NE corner of Washington State). The postage alone cost a dollar per DVD.

Like most, if not all, of Dinesh’s eight political “documentaries” and twenty books, the purpose of 2000 Mules is to push the Republican Party line among media-siloed gullible base voters. 2000 Mules claims that an analysis of anonymous cell phone data aggregated around ballot boxes in certain states proves there was widespread election fraud organized and funded by evil “Democrat” operatives. His intent is almost certainly cynical. As a man of notable education, that Dinesh actually believes the bogus election fraud evidence presented in 2000 Mules is almost (but perhaps not quite) beyond imagining. 

As Shawn Vestal points out, even the dyed-in-the-wool Republican commentator, Ann Coulter, who at one time dated Dinesh, characterizes 2000 mules as “Dinesh’s Stupid Movie”. Yet here we are in eastern Washington with “Spokane Citizens For Election Integrity” spreading Dinesh’s nonsense, stoking the idea that election fraud is rampant. Why? No doubt whoever is hiding behind the deceptive and benign sounding name “Spokane Citizens For Election Integrity” hopes to fuel suspicion of the conduct of local elections among those who know no better. What better way to motivate R-minded know-nothing voters to cast ballots to put an unqualified kindergarten teacher and Big Lie promoter into a position to oversee local elections? By their logic, our long-serving and immensely qualified County Auditor, Vicky Dalton, the supervisor of elections and the last remaining county-wide elected nominal Democrat in a Spokane County office, must be suspect based on party affiliation. (Of course, “Spokane Citizens For Election Integrity” dares not directly support or attack a candidate. To do so would raise a small risk of prosecution under Washington State election finance laws.)

Like developer Larry Stone’s inane youtube diatribe, “Curing Spokane”, the video that undoubtedly helped set the groundwork for Nadine Woodward’s election as City of Spokane Mayor, distribution of pirated copies of 2000 Mules requires no disclosure of financial backing to the Public Disclosure Commission. Who are these “Citizens” of “Spokane Citizens For Election Integrity”? Watchers of the DVD are, and are likely to remain anonymous—probably by design. 

Even the return address on the mailer, 7825 N Wall, Spokane, is fake. No such address exists. According to the Spokane County property records, there is no N Wall address between 7809 and 8211. Googlemaps points to 7809 when one enters 7825 N Wall. Evidently, whoever went to the trouble and expense to send these DVDs is being careful to remain unidentifiable, not exactly the picture of “Integrity”. 

Perhaps “Spokane Citizens for Election Integrity” is just one true believer with enough money and personal conviction to copy and send out ‘Dinesh’s Stupid Movie’ broadly across eastern Washington—but I wouldn’t bet on that. 

More likely this mass mailing of DeSouza’a 2000 Mules two weeks before the primary ballot comes out (July 13th) and concurrent with the much ballyhooed request of the Auditor’s Office by the local Republican Party for an extensive retrospective audit of the 2020 election in Spokane County is a local Republican effort to stoke doubt for political advantage. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. Dinesh D’Souza is a 61 year old right-wing political commentator, provocateur, author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist from the same mold as Steve Bannon and Alex Jones. Born to a Roman Catholic family in Bombay, educated (in part) at Dartmouth College, Dinesh became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1991, after serving as a policy advisor in the Reagan administration. His richly-referenced wikipedia bio cements him in the pantheon of Republican provocateurs and outrage-mongers. Dinesh thrives on media attention to public statements like a tweet mocking the survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. 

P.P.S. Evidently, local Republicans are listening to Steve Bannon’s “Flood the zone with s__t” directive, a call to publish such an overwhelming quantity of misinformation that the average citizen doesn’t have a prayer of discerning verifiable fact through the storm of excrement. National and local social media is rife with articles like PJMedia’s June 30th, 2022 feature, EXCLUSIVE: FOIAs Reveal Progressive Money Fueling FBI, DOJ, Leftist Activist and Election Official Coordination, and JustTheNews’ June 26th article, 2020 election investigations and lawsuits building momentum. Never heard of PJMedia or Just the News? No matter. The targets of this tripe, people of whom even Ann Coulter asks, “Is there anyone in Trump World who isn’t trying to fleece the Deplorables? Haven’t they suffered enough?” These are folks for whom the source of an article is unimportant. If it is in electrons on the internet and it agrees with their biases, then it must be true. These articles are just a sampling of those shared by “Citizens For Election Integrity”, a facebook group run by Slade Raine, a “Christian” conservative law student based in Cheyenne, WY. “Citizens For Election Integrity” was the only hit I got when I googled “Spokane Citizens For Election Integrity”. 

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Elections Observers needed. Will train.

Confidence in representative government of any kind requires that the voters have confidence in the integrity of election processes. As Trump, the leader of the Republican Party persists in making false claims of election fraud and particularly casts doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballot systems, more and more voters are inclined to respond with suspicion. Local Republican Party operatives, eager to capitalize on Trump’s baseless allegations, add fuel to his allegations by disingenuously claiming that more (and more expensive) audit processes are necessary to reassure the voters. Suspicion feeds on ignorance—in the pure sense of lack of knowledge—of the processes, checks, and balances of our election systems. Since each state is responsible for its own election administration—and processes differ—knowledge of the integrity of Washington State’s election processes is important. On account of great state based variety of election processes, national news coverage is, of necessity, nonspecific. An understanding of local electoral civics is vital to voter confidence in our elections. 

There is no better way to gain confidence in the conduct of our elections than to study and observe the processes yourself. Having done so, the observer is likely to become an ambassador for election integrity. In fact, Washington State Code (RCW 29A.40.100) requires County Auditors (Vicky Dalton in Spokane County) to “request that observers be appointed by the major political parties [click that for the definition] to be present during the processing of ballots at the counting center.” However, it is the responsibility of the major political party to provide observers. If no observers are put forward by a party, ballot counting proceeds anyway. 

In recent years the Spokane County Democratic Party has has not managed to provide a full complement of election observers to the Auditor’s Office. In part that was related to Covid. In part it was due to public lack of awareness of the opportunity. Under the new and able leadership of the Spokane County Democrats by Carmela Conroy that is about to change. 

In contrast to the Dems, the Spokane County Republicans have fielded nearly thirty observers in recent elections. Part of the concern this year is that some Republican observers might belong to the that-must-be-fraud crowd, considering that the Republican candidate to replace Vicky Dalton this election cycle, McCaslin Junior, is a follower of the My Pillow Guy (more on that later). The mere presence of a pair of Democratic Party sponsored observers as witnesses is likely to tone down any temptation some of these people might have to make a scene. 

Observers are not allowed to sport Party identifiers or carry guns into the observation area. 

Election observer is a volunteer position with only a modest time commitment. Contact Dave Michaud at davemeshow@msn.com or 509-263-0087 (leave a voice message) to volunteer. Provide your name, email address, and telephone contact. Dave will pass your information along to Carmela who will submit the list of observers to be trained to the Spokane County Elections Manager, Mike McLaughlin. I’m told the training is very informative. The training runs between one and two hours (depending on the number of questions) at the County Election Department at 1033 W Gardner St. The last training session for the Primary Election for Dems will be held there at 1PM on Tuesday, July 12. Please contact Dave before Sunday, July 10. If more people apply than can fit in the training session (we can hope!) they may hold an additional session. If not, there will be morning training sessions before the General Election in November. 

It is the Party’s responsibility to negotiate a schedule with the volunteer observers with the intention of each pair of Dem observers filling a few two hour shifts around both the Primary and General Election counts. “You just watch. It’s easy and interesting,” to quote a friend who has served as an observer.  

The more people who sign up, the fewer hours each would need to serve to cover the goal of fielding at least two Democratic Party sponsored observers at all available times. 

Training now is valid for two years, 2022 and 2023. Once you’ve taken the training and observed you can speak with some authority about the integrity of the electoral process. This is civics in action!

The next 2 hour training occurs on July 12th. Call or email Dave Michaud and sign up today. Get involved—your country, and our democracy, depends on the aggregate involvement of its citizens. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. Election administration is complicated. A total of five hundred and twenty-five candidates have filed for election just within Spokane County in the upcoming August 2nd Primary, 88 of them contending for positions that run from federal (U.S. Senators and Representatives) to statewide (e.g. Secretary of State—a unusual circumstance) to Spokane County Commissioners—along with another 433 Democratic and Republican Precinct Committee Officer (PCO) candidates. Fortunately, almost all of the PCO candidates are running unopposed. Happily, WAC 434-230-100 says (among other things) that unopposed PCO candidates should not be listed on ballots. Even so, with multiple State Legislative Districts (3, 4, 6, 7, and 9) overlapping 5 new County Commissioner Districts, the ballot mailed to voters in the precinct next to yours may need to list different candidates. (See and explore the list of candidates here. Find and check out your precinct on this map. Enter your address and look under the “Districts” tab.) Printing and mailing the ballots is a complex process that demands accuracy—and that’s just one step of many that the Washington State county auditors’ offices ably conduct to assure the integrity and accuracy of our elections.

I am taking the day off from writing. In the meantime, for those of you have not yet signed up to receive Letters From an American by Heather Cox Richardson, I offer you her historical perspective on the day.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

July 3, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson Jul 4

And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous slavery by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.

America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.

What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, and Irish were locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”

“Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually to include women.

But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle, as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Words to live by in 2022.

—

Note:

I have shared some version of this every year for the last few years. I wrote this quickly— actually running out the door— a few years ago, and no matter how long I sit at the laptop and fiddle, as I did this evening, I still think the original stands. It is a dark Independence Day in many ways this year, but I hope everyone is able to find at least a little respite, and to recall the whole point of what we’re up to in this country.

H.

Who oversees whom?

Last Wednesday’s post, “Spokane County Commissioners” discussed the major changes facing us this year as the Spokane County Board of Commissioners expands from three to five members and the manner of their election crucially changes. The top two district-based Commissioner candidates moving on to the November General Election will no longer be elected by a county-wide vote, but instead only by the voters in their district of residence. If the voters are paying attention, the result should be better accountability to the electorate.

County commissioners in Washington State wield a great deal of power. A three (or even a five) member county commission sits at a bottleneck in governance: county commissioners comprise both the executive and legislative branches of government. Thus, on a per person basis, county commissioners are in a position of leveraged power—power they often seem happy to wield mostly out of the awareness of the voters who elect them. 

The Spokane County Commissioners oversee a large bureaucracy illustrated in this “County Organizational Chart”: 

The “Board of County Commissioners” is in control of a County CEO, seven “Directors”, a County Engineer, and no fewer than 30 county departments. 

But, nestled in a postage stamp in the upper right corner of that chart is something well worth noting:

Why are these elected offices depicted off to the side of the Organizational Chart? After all, we learned in high school that in the federal government functions like those of the assessor, auditor, treasurer, prosecutor, and sheriff would fall under the executive branch. The individuals administering all these functions are be appointed by the executive (President) with the “advice and consent” of the Senate. Judges at the federal level are similarly appointed. (The functions analogous to those of the County Clerk—primarily record-keeping and interfacing with the public for the County’s Superior Court system—might also fall at the federal level more under the judicial than the executive branch.)

Here’s the key: All of the elected positions and functions contained in that postage stamp box in the Organizational Chart operate primarily under state law, not at the direction of County Commissioners. When, for example, our Spokane County Auditor, Vicky Dalton, manages elections, property record-keeping, and vehicle licensing and registration she is operating under the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) and the Washington Administrative Code (WAC) established at the State level. She performs detailed executive, managerial functions within checks and balances established by the state. Of course all these county elected officials interact with the County Commissioners in their work and to some degree around their budgets, but the rules under which they function are state rules, not the direct product of the executive/legislative function of the County Commissioners. 

We ought to think of all these non-commissioner, county-level elected officials listed on the postage stamp to be, in many ways, independent of the County Commissioners, while the Commissioners control the myriad of other important functions seen on the Chart. 

This year’s elections, an even-numbered, non-presidential year, have all these county level officials on the ballot.

The August 2 Primary Election for Spokane County features:

Spokane County prosecutor: Larry Haskell (R), Stephanie Olsen (R), Stefanie Collins (R), Deb Conklin (nonpartisan)

Spokane County sheriff: John Nowels (R), Michael Zollars (R), Wade Nelson (R)

Spokane County auditor: Vicky Dalton (D), Bob McCaslin (R)

Spokane County treasurer: Michael Baumgartner (R)

Spokane County assessor: Tom Konis (R)

Spokane County clerk: Tim Fitzgerald (R)

Eight Spokane County District Court Judgeships, only two of which are contested (two candidates for each of two positions), will appear on the November General Election ballot, but not on the August Primary ballot. (I understand that a District Court judge race would appear in the primary ballot if there were more than two candidates for one of the seats OR if these were partisan races.)

Each of contested positions for auditor, prosecutor, and sheriff deserve careful treatment in later posts, but for now…

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry