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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25941 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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Trump appears to be embracing his role as the late Republic's Gracchus.

I missed this announcement the first time around buried as it was under all the talk about Iran but it looks like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act may be moving to a vote and Trump has "tweeted" that he will refuse to sign other bills until it pases. The SAVE act is a measure that would require individuals to furnish proof of citizen when registering to vote, and significantly curtail the circumstances under which absentee and mail-in voting are allowed. Strictly speaking these rules would only be binding for federal elections but as the majority of precincts bundle their, federal, state, and municipal ballots together for cost reasons it's going to effect all elections except those in states that spend the extra time and resources to run federal and local in parallel rather than together. Naturally the GOP has framed this in terms of election integrity, while the Democrats frame it as an attempt to disenfranchise the under privileged, and (a bit ironically) usurp state authority.

This is happening in context of a recent FBI report suggesting that Fulton County Georgia had tabulated approximately 20,000 more absentee votes than they had recorded sending out. This is the same Fulton County that was the subject of a "conspiracy theory" alleging that after a broken water main had supposedly forced counting to be suspended for the night only for the poll workers to resume counting after the candidates' representatives had left. It's probably just a coincidence but it feels noteworthy that Biden won the State of Georgia by a little under 12k, IE just over half the number of allegedly dubious ballots.

For those who didn't recognize the historical allusion in the opening line, in latter part of the second century BCE the Roman republic was wracked with civil and economic unrest prompted in part by the importation of cheap foreign (slave) labor undercutting local wages and the ability of smaller family-owned farms to compete with large commercially owned estates. Tiberius Gracchus was a scion of wealth and privilege, the grandson of Scipio Africanus, he ran for the position of Tribune of the Plebes on a platform of Land Reform. The Senate used every procedural trick in the book the could to thwart him only for Gracchus to retaliate by famously(infamously?) using his veto powers to gridlock the senate until they acquiesced.

This is happening in context of a recent FBI report suggesting that Fulton County Georgia had tabulated approximately 20,000 more absentee votes than they had recorded sending out.

Ah... nothing like a good flashback to all the "no evidence of voter fraud" discussions we had here to start the day.

The piece of evidence already existed back in 2021, it was even worse in Maricopa County at 74k even! It just didn't go anywhere because the claim is intentionally misleading.

They have more early voting votes than were sent out precisely because they weren't sent out, they were the in person early voting ballots.

ABC15 and the Arizona Mirror examined the same records that Logan has, and found 74,241 people who are listed as voting by early ballot but aren’t on the EV32 reports. Of those voters, 74,238 appear in the master file of general election voters. More than 99.4% of those people — 73,819, to be exact — voted in-person at early voting centers.

Another 392 submitted their ballots by mail and requested them just before the deadline, but the county didn’t process those requests until the next business day, meaning they weren’t included on the EV32 report, election officials said . Another 57 people had recently registered to vote and had separate voter identification numbers — the records were merged after the election — while two other voters mailed ballots that weren’t counted because they didn’t have signatures affixed to them.

And we know the names of the people on the "phantom ballot", like this Republican elected official for example. So did she not vote and someone else used her name and she never spoke out? Or did she, a Republican state official, commit fraud? Or is it just a nothingburger?

The former president didn’t realize it, but Trump personally found a voter who had cast one of those ballots. Later in his speech, he asked each of the Republican gubernatorial candidates who had spoken earlier in the day to stand up and be recognized. Among those candidates was state Treasurer Kimberly Yee, who was one of the 74,000 voters.

She was, in fact, very real, and had cast a perfectly legal ballot. According to Maricopa County’s files, Yee cast her ballot in-person at an early voting center on Oct. 28.

Whoops turns out I've committed fraud every time I've gone to vote, I always vote before election day.

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