Voter Fraud

The election process was changed this year. Many states mailed out ballots to everyone on their rolls. This did not take into account people who have moved or are dead. It also did not take into account that many people didn’t really want to spend the effort to vote, the election didn’t matter to them.

 Another thing not mentioned is that the state now has enough information on your ballot to know how you voted. In California there is a scan code on the envelope enclosed that id’s the voter. That is the important thing, they know how you voted. Scan the envelope and then scan the ballot. This circumvents the idea of anonymous voting. They know how you voted, they know who you are and where you live. 

 I can see where people may request a mail in ballot in order to participate in an election. But when the state issues every registered voter a ballot, it gives the owner of that ballot the right to sell it for profit. The right to vote is one to where you have to show up to vote. An absentee ballot is a certificate that you receive and can be sold to a third party. This new concept of absentee voting allows people to abuse the system. Your ballot can be turned into cash. $200 to $1,000 I have heard. 50 million raised in an election campaign can buy a hell of a lot of votes. 

 Notice that voting in person keeps dead people and people who have moved from voting. One person, one vote, limits voter fraud. Count the voters registered and then compare it to the votes cast, they should match. With everything done by mail, the party running the election process, has the power to determine the results. We depend on the people doing the counting being honest. And they may count the votes correctly, who is to say that the mail in voters were legit. Voting machines can be programed to count wrong, more ballots could be printed. With only 60 percent of the people voting in most elections, it wouldn’t take many invalid votes to turn an election. 

 The real problem not noticed, is if this happens enough times in one location, the losing voter after many elections gives up and stops voting. This could be what has happened in many cities in the country. Corruption is very profitable and the voter has no redress, all they get is a sticker that says “I voted.” You may have voted, but if the results can be changed by adding fictitious votes to the ballot box, have you really voted?

 I have a blank California ballot in my hands that was not submitted that was received at our house. How can we arrive at the conclusion that the election results are correct? I could have filled it out and mailed it in, and I am too honest to do it. It kind of sucks to be a nice guy. 

Postscript:

Usually a theft involves two people, the one who lost the item, and the one who stole the item. In voter fraud, the victim is the person running for office. And he is none the wiser that a crime has been committed. He can suspect that there was abuse, but it is very hard to prove.

The Pitfalls of Mail in Voting

In a democracy, the voter gets to elect his government officials, in secret, by voting, on election day.  Back in the 1800’s there were stories of the boss standing next to you when you filled out the ballot.  Not cool.  Think twice about voting by mail.  Your name and address are on the ballot being returned.  The government can cull out the opposition by recording how the vote was cast.  You can’t claim that you voted for someone else, it is right there in black and white.

In each election, millions of dollars are spent on advertising, to try and win your vote.  With mail-in ballots, going to every registered voter, voters who don’t even care to vote will get ballots.  Why spend on advertising in the media for your vote?  It could be a lot cheaper to buy each vote for $200 to $1,000. With a budget of 50 million, one could buy 50,000 to 250,000 unmarked but signed ballots.  This turns the mail-in ballot into a bonus check.  There is a claim that this already happened in Michigan during the previous election.  This should be illegal.  Many of our poor would rather have $1,000 in hard cash rather than voting in an election.  Notice that the time span from the delivery of the vote until the election, pretty much makes the blank ballots a fungible commodity that can be recovered and processed in a timely manner.

Another thing to look at is the voter rolls. 2.7 million people die each year in the US. That could be 2 million dead people on the rolls just for that year.  In some districts, they purge your name if you don’t vote in two general elections.  8 years of dead people amounts to 16 million dead people on the voter rolls. Mailing out a ballot to all of them might change the election results.  They have registered voters that would be 120 years old in some states. The neat thing here, you don’t have to pay dead voters for their vote.

Each year many families move for one reason or another, and re-register to vote.  This can create a duplicate second mail in ballot. A close friend of mine, moved to Pennsylvania three years ago and still received a mail in ballot for the California election. Nothing was done illegal, they moved and the election board had no idea. My next-door neighbor died last May, and I am sure he got a ballot in the mail.

 The voter election rolls determine how many voters are eligible to vote.  The mail in ballot was never meant to be for most voters.  Basically, the mail in votes were a very small number compared to the whole group of voters and the ballot had to be requested. It was different this year in California, everyone that was registered, got a mail-in ballot.  Many were ineligible to vote, dead or had moved from their registered address.  In-person voting eliminates many of the errors in polling records.  Some will not vote, because of the time and commitment involved.  Notice, if everyone listed on the voting roll can vote absentee, the ability to steal an election increases proportionally.  Your absentee ballot can be sold for cash.

If the people in charge of the voter registration are from one political party, elections can be massaged with mail-in voting.  It is not hard to compile a list of dead voters or of people who have moved out of state. This method of rigging an election is not perceivable if done surreptitiously. But in this age of computer technology, it is not hard to research and discover some of the voter fraud.  With the census that was recently taken, it might be a very easy thing to validate voter registrations by comparing it to the census data. 

Can we afford to have universal mail-in ballots?  It lends itself to internal corruption when one party runs the balloting process. The real question, is it fair that a ballot can be turned into cash?  Maybe the Supreme Court can settle the case.  If it can’t, elections will not be determined by the voters, rather the people running the election process will do it for you.  Its kind of like going into an “all you can eat restaurant.” You get up and go for seconds and are told “That’s all you can eat.”

Problems in Paradise

Right now, everyone is refinancing their homes at the new 2 ¼ loan rate for 30 years.  Everyone with a job that is.  A lot of people are behind in their mortgage payments 6 or more months.  No problem everything is okay.  The majority of workers have a 401K retirement fund that is probably heavily invested in the stock market.  As long as it goes up, no problem.  A lot of businesses are or will be closed forever due to the Corona virus.  When the government says it is okay to open, quite a few will not be able to.

 A majority of people envision a rich businessman, as a person with gobs of money.  However, in most cases, the person is highly leveraged and knows how to manage his finances.  So, if this average rich man had to liquidate his businesses to raise cash, he might find himself broke.    It can be very hard to sell a 500-million-dollar company with 400 million in debts in a bad economy let alone shut down for 8 months.

 During the Great Depression many cities increased tax rates to make up for the shortfall from taxes collected. Their tax base had shrunk considerably.  A lot of wage earners had no taxable income, they were unemployed. The net result of the tax increases, owners let their homes go into foreclosure.  The cities found themselves owning the real estate.  The logic to raise taxes to increase tax receipts, backfired.  Notice that politicians don’t go to jail for incompetence, they usually just fade away. Their decisions during that era ruined many a family.

 In the 1929 crash, the stock market was owned by individual investors who thought they knew what they were doing. In the present market, huge mutual funds manage the market.  They are too big to get out of the market. The stock market is very vulnerable to a drastic reset, there is no reason for some of the prices, they are absurd.  It won’t be quick; it will be slow probably over three months. Everyone in the market knows what they are doing, wink, wink; they will go broke buying the dips.  Actually, in a long bull market it is very hard to lose money even if you are incredibly stupid. In the 70’s and 80’s I can remember a market, where whatever you bought, it went down.  The present investment advisors have never experienced a bear market.  Imagine what the taxes on your 401 k would be, if you tried to withdraw the whole amount at once from the market.  The government and your investment advisor are banking you won’t even consider it.  Any losses are not tax deductible.

 As the government’s rate of borrowing increases, interest rates will have to rise.    With rates rising and delinquent real estate hitting the markets, look for dropping home prices.  The monthly payment will remain the same (the price drops 50% and the interest rate doubles).  A bank offering a higher interest rates will see funds transfer overnight to their bank, reminiscent of the Savings and Loan fiasco of the 1990’s. Banks deposits are short term and they lend that money long term. The low long-term loans bankrupted the Saving and Loans when interest rates rose and depositors fled in search of higher rates.

 With a 2 percent interest rate, it takes about 33 years for your money to double.  At 5 percent interest rate, it takes about 14.4 years to double.  A thing to be aware of is that historically, interest rates reflected the risk of the investment.  That appears to be overlooked in the market of today. With the government “insuring” mortgage loans, most investors falsely perceive that there is no risk in the market. Two percent interest does not even cover the current rate of inflation of 7 percent.  If interest rates were to rise higher than 5 percent, the government would be insolvent; unable to pay the interest on the national debt or for that fact be able to finance Social Security and Medicare. What that would do to the bond market, which is 10 times bigger than the stock market, is hard to imagine or describe.

 In the present market, the best investments may be your home or precious metals. The caveat here, is do you have a job? I you don’t, there is no reason to buy either. If the Corona virus lockdown lasts much longer, things could get very difficult.  Most parts of our economic structure are stressed to the limit.  The only real sources of taxation for the government is earnings and visible assets; real estate, vehicles and retirement savings. If you are not working, you’re not paying taxes or your mortgage.

 The saving grace for our market under President Trump was the cut in business tax rates, this brought jobs back to the US and gave the rest of the world higher unemployment. After WWII the US economy surged supplying goods to the rest of the world.  Since then, the rest of the world has been making goods for the US.  This turn around of the US producing goods for itself, is a stimulus that was beginning to show results.  I’m not sure if the next administration will continue this policy.

 It looks like Congress is going to try to print its way out of the current economic instability.  At some point it has to fail. The current consensus is that it should work, because it has always worked in the past.  It’s a little like a mouse going back to the trap one more time for that last morsel of cheese.