“How on earth are voters in America’s largest city choosing between a 33-year-old socialist and a sex pest for mayor?
But seriously, these are the choices Democrats here have before them when they go to the polls Tuesday in the most revealing primary election since the party’s debacle last year.
There’s Mamdani, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America by way of a noted workers’ paradise, Bowdoin, who’s calling for city-owned grocery stores and offending the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by trying to rationalize calls to “globalize the intifada.”
Then there’s former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was forced out of office less than four years ago after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment, now says he regrets resigning and has expressed little contrition about his personal conduct or his deadly mishandling of Covid-19.
Cuomo is despised by much of the city, including some of his biggest benefactors, and is the favorite to win.
Oh, and if either Mamdani or Cuomo falls short in New York’s ranked-choice Democratic primary, each already has secured a separate ballot line in the general election; if they win, they’ll get to use it in addition to the Democratic party line, and if they lose, they’ll still get the chance to run as independents. Neither ruled out remaining in the race when I asked them if they’d run on a third-party line this fall.”
The best place to find fraud in the U.S. government is to look at Medicare providers cheating Medicare and at the IRS where taxpayers rip off the rest of America by cheating on their taxes.
If Musk is right, and the House and presidency would have been held by the Democrats without him, then that means one man decided the election by spending millions of dollars, including buying a media company and using it to boost certain ideas.
“Incumbent Prime Minister Anthony Albanese secured a come-from-behind win for his center-left Labor Party in Australia’s election Saturday while his right-wing challenger lost his seat.
The Labor landslide came after Albanese’s government spent months trailing the opposition in polling, but gained support rapidly in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s clash with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his “Liberation Day” tariffs.”
“Underlying the 2024 election results was a subtle trend that could signal a dramatic reshaping of the electorate: a surge in ticket-splitting among Latino voters who shifted sharply toward Donald Trump but also supported Democratic House and Senate candidates.”
“”Well, they did sign up for it, actually. And this is what I campaigned on,” Trump said of the tariffs during an interview with ABC News that aired Tuesday.”
“North Carolina’s top court cleared the way for some voters’ ballots in a contested state Supreme Court race to be tossed months after the election, opening a path for Republican Jefferson Griffin to potentially overturn an apparent narrow loss.
However, the extraordinary decision from the Republican-controlled court — which drew angry rebukes from Democrats and a sitting GOP justice in the state — still may see more litigation in federal court.”
…
“Griffin argued three categories of votes should be tossed: Voters who were registered to vote with incomplete voter registration data; military and overseas voters who did not meet the state’s voter ID requirements; and overseas voters who have never lived in the state or expressed an intent to do so, a small category of voters who are generally family members of expats or service members.
Tossing out wide swaths of ballots after the election would be a near-unprecedented decision that voting rights groups, Democrats and even some Republicans condemned as violating voters’ due process rights and changing the rules of an election after it has already been run.”
…
“The state’s high court ruled Friday that most of those ballots — coming from roughly 60,000 voters with incomplete registration data, which could include missing driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers — should still be counted for this election, placing the blame on the state board of elections.
But the court’s order has the latter two categories of voters at risk. The court ruled that military and overseas voters who didn’t meet the identification requirement must prove their identity within 30 days — known as a “cure process” — or their votes could be invalidated, while affirming the lower court order that “never residents” ballots, which amount to a couple hundred votes, should be disqualified.
Friday’s majority decision elicited scathing dissents from two of the court’s justices — Anita Earls, the lone Democrat who participated in the case, and Republican Justice Richard Dietz.”
“The U.S. House has passed a bill that voting rights groups have repeatedly warned would make it harder for millions of Americans, including married women, to vote.
The Republican-controlled House on Thursday voted for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The legislation purportedly aims to block non-citizens from voting, which is already illegal and is very rare.
The bill would require an individual to present in person a passport, birth certificate or other citizenship document when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information.
Voting rights groups have said the bill will pose a barrier for millions of American women and others who have changed their legal name because of marriage, assimilation or to better align with their gender identity. An estimated 69 million American women and 4 million men do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name.
Republicans who support the bill claim that states will be able to create processes so people can prove their citizenship if their name doesn’t match their birth certificate.
Voting rights groups also worry the bill will disenfranchise others from marginalized communities who are less likely to have the necessary documentation on hand. More than 9 percent of citizens of voting age — or 21.3 million people — do not have documents that prove their citizenship readily available.
It was knowable in advance that Trump’s illegal immigrant crackdown was not going to involve just criminals. People have no excuse for not knowing this and are part of the reason this is happening.
“Trump doesn’t have to do something dramatic like cancel the election in order to erode democracy. The relationship between democracy and autocracy is a spectrum, not a binary; for example, countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Turkey and Hungary still hold elections, but their leaders aren’t held meaningfully accountable by them (or by other mechanisms like the courts). A more realistic concern is that the U.S. will slide into what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which democratic institutions still exist but they are regularly abused. Maybe the chief executive can’t just abolish the other branches of government, the free press and other tools of accountability for fear of being seen as illegitimate, but he can find ways to weaken or circumvent them. And while the incumbent party still must face elections — and can even lose them — it makes every effort to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor.”
…
“some of these things wouldn’t be new for Trump. During his first term, he fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. He purged the Republican Party of his critics by endorsing their opponents in primaries. And of course, he sowed distrust in the results of the 2020 election and attempted to overturn former President Joe Biden’s win. But that’s just the point: According to some political scientists, Trump’s actions during his first term already meet the definition of democratic erosion.”