Hope for conservatism in Canada

Some readers might recall that three months ago Trudeau’s Liberal party in Canada suffered a terrible by-election blow when it lost an inner-city Toronto seat that had been held by the Liberals for aeons. To the shock of many, this past June Team Trudeau lost this blue-ribbon inner Toronto seat to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives by 633 votes. That was bad for Justin. It was also bad for Chrystia Freeland, the Liberal party Deputy Prime Minister, as this by-election loss was for a seat that was next door to her own in the inner-city heartlands of Toronto.

(Second note to readers: the opposition Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre did not throw together lefty policies to try to cater to this inner-city seat full of wokesters. He simply explained how real conservative policies would help them; he shunned all the focus group risk-averse crap; and he ran knowing he could easily win the next general election without such seats but that if the voters in this inner-city constituency wanted to jettison Trudeau they’d be most welcome to come aboard a party with actual conservative values and policies. This approach produced a stunning upset win.)

That was three months ago in June. Then just two weeks ago there were two more by-elections in Canada. One was in Manitoba in the west of Canada where the Liberals generally do badly (to the extent that in the 1980 general election the Liberals won a majority government while taking only two seats, all up, in the four western provinces). And in this just held Manitoba by-election the Liberal candidate won – wait for it – only 4.8 per cent of the vote. Ouch! That is strikingly bad even for the Liberal party in western Canada. The other by-election from two weeks ago took place in Montreal in one of the most historically famous Liberal party constituencies in the country. At the last general election the Liberals had won the seat by over 10,000 votes. Yet in this by-election they lost the seat by 248 votes to the separatist French-Canadian party the Bloc Quebecois that only runs candidates in Quebec. The Liberals gained only 27 per cent of the vote in the by-election. This, by the way, is a riding or constituency that has been held by a former Canadian Liberal prime minister. Hence this was a very, very bad result for Justin.

And what was the Canadian Prime Minister’s response to these two brutal by-election defeats? You can’t make this up. It was a combination of two things.There was the trite, vacuous, vapid, hackneyed, platitudinous slogans that up until recently had served Justin so well – ‘there is lots to reflect on’ and ‘we need to stay focused’ type verbiage. And then there was the blame-shifting founded on a core level sanctimony and smugness. After the two by-election losses Trudeau announced that, ‘Canadians need to be more engaged.’ Got that? He seems to think that he lost because the dumb plebs and Hillary Clinton-type deplorables weren’t paying attention to all the supposedly good things he and his government were doing. (Leave aside that on nearly every front the Canadian economy is bad, the government’s ‘accomplishments’ near-on non-existent and the Trudeau carbon tax is massively unpopular.

Pierre Poilievre promises to get rid of the Trudeau carbon tax; get rid of the federal EV mandate; and get rid of the Trudeau ban on crude oil tankers off British Columbia’s north coast. The lefties are saying Poilievre will ‘lay waste to Trudeau’s environmental legislative legacy’. Oh, and don’t forget that Mr Poilievre continues to pledge to halve the budget of the national broadcaster CBC TV and to turn the broadcaster’s posh head offices into social housing units. When a leader is chosen by the paid-up party members – as in Canada, where there are now over 750,000 Conservative party members who alone can vote for leader and only they can remove him – you can observe this thing known as ‘a backbone’ in right-of-centre party leaders because the views of the party room Black Hand types do not determine policy.)

As I said at the start, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is in deep, deep do-do. He is in his ninth year as PM. His first election win was a big majority government followed by two minority government wins. When Trudeau first won office back in 2015 he scored 63 per cent approval, a sky-high number. Today, after the left-wing economic policies, all the lockdown thuggery, the waning appeal of his vapid pretty boy routine, Trudeau’s approval rating sits at 28 per cent. A few Liberal party MPs are starting to say out loud that Justin should step down.

Polls have consistently shown Trudeau’s Liberals to be about 20 – yes, 20 – points behind Poilievre’s Conservatives. (And in my entire life I don’t recall a Tory party that far ahead in the polls. The Tories lead in every province save Quebec. A couple of recent polls have indicated the Liberals might come in fourth – yes, fourth – in the next election. There are now 343 MPs in Canada’s Lower House, the House of Commons, and some polls put in doubt whether the Liberals can win even 35 of those 343 – so just inner-city Montreal, the bureaucratic capital city of Ottawa (which is like Canberra in being allergic to conservative outlooks), and maybe a few inner-city Toronto ones.

All of this is why the further-left NDP party earlier this month tore up its minority government coalition agreement with Trudeau’s Liberal party. Canada has five-year terms and the next election could be dragged out till as late as next October. But the NDP is just watching to see when a general election might see it replace the Libs as the main party of the left. It’s balancing that against the clear likelihood of a big Tory win and postponing that for another while. But the odds of the NDP pulling the plug on Trudeau go up with every bad poll and every passing day.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/canadian-lessons-for-the-coalition/

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Get Ready for Another Mail-In Ballot Fiasco

Many states are sending out mail-in ballots now for the Nov. 5 presidential election.

Yet at the same time that so many more voters are depending on the mail to cast their ballots, the two leading national organizations of election officials wrote the U.S. Postal Service to demand immediate action to avoid confusion and chaos with mail-in ballots.

“We implore you to take immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail service,” wrote the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State. “Failure to do so will risk limiting voter participation and trust in the election process.”

According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, mail-in ballots accounted for 43% of the electorate in 2020, an increase of 20 percentage points from 2016.

The letter’s list of problems should alarm anyone thinking of voting through the mail instead of going to a polling place to vote in person. That includes U.S. Postal Service staff nationwide who “are uninformed about USPS policies around election mail,” resulting in “significantly delayed, or otherwise improperly processed” absentee ballots.

“Timely postmarked ballots” are being received “10 or more days after postmark,” the election officials wrote, demonstrating USPS’s “inability to meet their own service delivery deadlines.”

This letter follows a July report from the USPS Office of Inspector General, which warned that its audit of primaries in 13 states found that 2.99% of mail-in ballots reached voters too late and 1.83% were returned to election offices after their legal deadlines. Its list of horror stories included the discovery that “local management at one facility stated they were not aware primary Election Day was that week.”

That means that almost 5% of voters are being disenfranchised, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of votes across the country.

There are reports of other nightmares. Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab said he is “extremely concerned” that in the August primary, 2% of ballots sent by mail were not counted “due to USPS administrative failures.”

“The Pony Express is more efficient at this point,” said Schwab.

In July, Utah had a photo-finish Republican congressional primary where the victory margin was 176 votes. But nearly 1,200 mail-in ballots were not counted because they were first sent to a Las Vegas distribution center and not postmarked on time. Most of those ballots were in a county that was carried 2 to 1 by the candidate who ultimately lost.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation has sued Nevada officials for failure to fix obvious errors on the voter rolls. The organization has found hundreds of questionable voter addresses that include strip clubs, casinos, bars, vacant lots, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants.

“Nevada’s policy of automatically mailing a ballot to every active registered voter makes it essential that election officials have accurate voter rolls and are not mailing ballots to addresses where no one lives,” the legal foundation notes.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation also points out that in 2022, Nevada’s U.S. Senate race was decided by 7,928 votes, which determined party control of that body. Nevada’s secretary of state, PILF noted, “published figures showing that 95,556 ballots were sent to undeliverable or ‘bad’ addresses and another 8,036 were rejected upon receipt.” Also: “Another 1.2 million ballots never came back to officials for counting.”

This year, Nevada has another competitive Senate race that could determine the Senate majority.

Nationwide, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reports that of the almost 91 million mailed ballots sent to voters in all states in 2020, only 70 million were returned.

What happened to the others? Some weren’t filled out. But other completed ballots were probably lost by an increasingly inefficient Postal Service.

And election officials complained in their letter to the USPS that election mail being “sent to voters” is being returned as “undeliverable” at a “higher than usual rate.” Some voters registered more than once got more than one ballot.

At least 1.1 million ballots went to outdated addresses. Some may have gone to vacant lots and businesses. Some 500,000 were rejected by election officials when they were returned, often due to voter errors that could have been corrected by election officials if the voters had cast their ballots in person.

Registration lists are notoriously chock-full of ineligible, duplicate, fictional, and deceased voters, a fact easily exploited to commit fraud. Ballots cast by mail can become the object of intimidation and vote-buying schemes.

In 2005, a bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker pointed out that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

The New York Times admitted in 2012 that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth.”

Little has changed. In 2019, a congressional race in North Carolina was thrown out over mail-in ballots gathered through illegal vote trafficking. A judge ordered a new election in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, mayor’s race last year after a video appeared to show two women stuffing large numbers of suspect absentee ballots into drop boxes.

In New York, three Rensselaer County officials are on trial this month, accused of mail-in ballot fraud. A former GOP elections commissioner who has already pleaded guilty testified that looser post-COVID mail-in procedures make it much easier to commit voter fraud.

Before Election Day, Postal Service officials must address concerns about delays and mishandling of absentee ballots. Sloppy U.S. voting rules on everything from vote trafficking by third parties to lax or nonexistent ID laws in many states make it vital there be election observers watching every aspect of the voting and tabulation process.

And after the weeks of litigation and delays in counting that a tsunami of mail-in ballots will no doubt create, we should rethink the advice of those who disparage in-person voting and assure us “that the ballots are in the mail.”

After all, if you won the lottery, would you mail your ticket in or appear in person to claim your jackpot?

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/25/get-ready-another-mail-in-ballot-fiasco/

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