SARAH PALIN SPECIAL ELECTION RESULTS: And the Winner is . . . Dominion Voting Systems???

By Matt Johnson. Alaska’s Special Congressional Election has been called for Democrat Mary Peltola, who reportedly edged former Governor Sarah Palin by the slimmest of margins in Round 2 of the Ranked Choice vote (RCV) count.

RCV is working exactly as planned, as Alaska is now completely dependent on the “integrity” of the new Dominion Voting Machines purchased by the Dunleavy Administration in 2020.

Palin won the Special Election Primary with 27.01% and 43,601 votes. Democrat Mary Peltola, meanwhile, received just 10.08%, amounting to 16,265 votes, good for a 4th place finish.

This means that One-third of Establishment Republican Nick Begich’s supporters suicide voted by ranking Peltola ahead of Palin on their Special General Election ballot. A clear sign that they hate Palin more than they love their country.

Peltola was the first-choice vote of just 39.66% of voters in the Special General Election.

The makeup of the electorate, though, raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the outcome.

While it is only possible to gauge the Alaskan electorate with proximate accuracy, given the disproportionate number of undeclared and nonpartisan registrations, polling seems to suggest the turnout was disproportionately left-leaning relative to voter registrations and voter intensity.

While we can’t identify party allegiances, we can identify how most voters actually vote.

Registered Republicans in Alaska outnumber registered Democrats almost 2-1, and unaffiliated voters are roughly equal to Republican registrations.

While there are a few minor parties, mostly right-leaning, all things being equal a general election under RCV with two Republicans and one Democrat would be decided by an electorate that is in simplified short-hand 40% Republican, 40% Independent, and 20% Democrat.

This means for Peltola to receive nearly 40%, she had to win more than 50% of the Independent voters. This assumes equal turnout among Republicans and Democrats.

Why is this a heavy lift?

1. Peltola was a late entry to the Special Election, which was already on a truncated schedule.

2. Peltola is not a household name, and it is doubtful that half of the electorate knows who she is outside of the Alaska Native community.

3. Polling over the last several months has indicated a strong and decisive edge to Republicans in voter intensity that exceeds intensity during Republican wave cycles in 1994, 2010, and 2014, ranging anywhere from 10-22 points higher than Democrat intensity. This means turnout should’ve favored Republicans by a wide margin.

4. One poll taken back in March even showed Independents favoring Republicans in Alaska by 13 points.

5. Peltola is a sure vote for Nancy Pelosi in the midst of one of the most troubled economic environments in 40 years.

6. All things being equal, which they are not in the State of Alaska, midterm Congressional elections almost always advantage the party out of power.

Even if DOE numbers are taken at face value, Republican turnout exceeded Democrat turnout by more than 18 points, yet Alaska is faced with the prospect of being represented by a liberal Democrat in Congress.

How do we know this count is accurate? I guess we’ll just have to trust Dominion Voting Systems. But don’t ask any questions. It’s strictly verboten.

Welcome to the wonderful Brave New World of Woke! Fourth Place really is the new 1st Place.
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Alaska’s Ranked-Choice Voting Hands Democrat Victory Over Sarah Palin

By Townhall. For the first time since 1973, Alaska’s at-large U.S. House seat will be occupied by a Democrat after Mary Peltola prevailed in the second round vote tabulation of the special general election held to fill the vacancy created after GOP Rep. Don Young passed away earlier this year.

In the first round, Peltola held a lead after Republicans split their votes between former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (finishing second) and Nick Begich. Under Alaska’s new ranked-choice voting system narrowly approved by voters in 2020, the last place candidate (Begich) was eliminated and his votes reallocated to his supporters’ second-choice candidates.

Ultimately, according to data broadcast by the Alaska Division of Elections on Wednesday evening, round two saw 27,042 votes added to Palin’s total and 15,445 for Peltola while 11,222 Begich voters didn’t list secondary choices. In the end, Begich’s second-round votes gave Peltola a win with 51.47 percent of the votes over Palin’s 48.53 percent. (Read more from “Alaska’s Ranked-Choice Voting Hands Democrat Victory Over Sarah Palin” HERE)

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

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TRY TO MAKE SENSE OF THESE NUMBERS: More Evidence that Lisa Murkowski Cheated AGAIN

“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” So said George Santayana. Alaska’s been on replay for years. It’s time to learn a lesson. So, buckle up, and let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.

In December 2002, Governor-elect Frank Murkowski shocked and scandalized the world by appointing his daughter Lisa to serve the remainder of his term in the United States Senate.

The Alaska Legislature was so incensed by the move that they promptly passed legislation to block such a move from ever happening again.

What history has largely forgotten is that when then-Senator Lisa Murkowski stood for election in 2004, her electoral “victory” came under highly suspicious circumstances in both primary and general elections. Murkowski’s primary opponent that year was former State Senate President Mike Miller, who had been appointed to serve as her father’s Commissioner of Administration just months earlier.

According to those close to Mike Miller’s US Senate campaign, there was never a serious effort to compete with the Governor’s daughter, which prompted one staffer I’m acquainted with, when asked about Mike’s endorsement of Murkowski’s 2010 campaign, to quip: “I wish I could say that I’m surprised.” Other staffers and/or volunteers on Mike Miller’s US Senate campaign expressed the same sentiment. But it was the 2004 General Election that ushered in the larger controversy. At the time, though I was an Alaska resident, I missed the controversy. Only six years later when prominent Democrats reached out to support us in our challenge of Murkowski’s write-in did I become aware of the significance of that election. Ironically, the numbers are still on the Division of Elections website for the initial elections report. In that report, 51 precincts reported more than 100% turnout, and another 23 precincts reported more than 90% turnout, largely in heavily Republican Districts.

A group of Democrats came up with funds for a recount, saying they distrusted the machine count of the ballots. The recount supposedly confirmed the initial election results, and the recount report didn’t show any of the precinct irregularities the second time around. But six years later, Democrats were still smarting from what they deemed to be a rigged election.

After getting blindsided by a Joe Miller victory in the 2010 Republican primary, Lisa Murkowski launched her “historic” write-in campaign, with the help of State bureaucrats and judges, who cleared the way for unprecedented changes to State Administrative Code, without respect to The Administrative Procedures Act, which required a public process, and in violation of State Electioneering Statutes and the Federal Voter Rights Act.

The Obama Justice Department cooperated by rubberstamping the Division of Elections’ rogue maneuverings after the fact, and the Alaska Court System reversed a lower court ruling in Miller’s favor to tilt the scales decisively in Murkowski’s favor.

After the election, the Alaska State Legislature endorsed the Division of Elections’ actions by codifying the “voter intent” standard that allowed the DOE Director sole discretion in matters relating to voter intent. So, essentially, voter intent is whatever the Director says it is.

In 2016, on the eve of the filing deadline, Joe Miller received a call from former Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan asking for his support to run against Murkowski. Miller assured Sullivan that he would not enter the race, and that he would support Sullivan’s candidacy.

Only Sullivan promptly withdrew from the race shortly after the filing deadline, after a bizarre television interview where he insisted, he wasn’t actually running against Murkowski and gushed about his family’s historic relationship with the Murkowski family.

Conservatives had little recourse but to watch as Murkowski cruised to a 2016 Republican primary victory without a viable challenger. But even that wasn’t without controversy, as traditional Democrat voters in some areas of rural Alaska were allowed to vote two ballots in order to pad Murkowski’s totals. She still tallied less than 40K votes, even though she received more than 70% of the vote.

Joe Miller later accepted an invitation to join the race on the Libertarian Party ticket, finishing second to Murkowski with almost 30% of the vote in a four-way race. But it was too little too late, with Alaska Republican Party Chair Tuckerman Babcock assisting Murkowski by waging a scorched earth campaign of his own against Miller.

The Alaska Republican Party was subsequently fined thousands of dollars by the Federal Election Commission for failing to disclose Babcock’s dishonest “hit job” on Joe Miller was actually coordinated with Murkowski. It was completely ignored by the Alaska media.

Meanwhile, a frivolous complaint filed by the Alaska Republican Party on behalf of Murkowski against Miller that was eventually unanimously dismissed by the Federal Election Commission showed up as headline news.

As has now been established by Project Veritas, it turns out Murkowski was behind the 2020 Proposition 2 campaign that was thrust on Alaskan voters under false pretenses as a campaign against “Dark Money.” All the while it was always designed to deceive Alaskans and assist Murkowski in the 2022 election, as it was widely believed that Murkowski was nonviable without it.

The move to a jungle primary ensured that Murkowski could enjoy an open primary where she could access Democrat support, but more importantly for the Senator, the ranked choice voting system guaranteed that the general election vote count in 2022 would be completely machine-dependent.

Enter Dominion Voting Systems, newly purchased in 2020 by new (old Murkowski friend) Division of Elections Director, Gail Fenumiai. So much for Governor Mike Dunleavy’s promise to clean up elections in Alaska. As Joseph Stalin said, “It doesn’t matter how many people vote, only who [what] counts them.”

Now let’s look at some numbers for the 2022 Alaska jungle primary election.

Despite reports to the contrary, by total number of votes, the 2022 Alaska primary election enjoyed extremely high turnout by historic standards, eclipsing even the record primary turnout of 2014.

Some say this extraordinarily high turnout is due to the new jungle primary, and ranked choice voting system. But does this really make sense?

The jungle primary assuring the top four finishers automatically advance to the general election would suggest otherwise. It actually makes the primary less important, and leaves the general election as the all-important part of the equation.

According to the Alaska Division of Elections, with 5 precincts still not reported, two weeks after the election, Lisa Murkowski has now reportedly tallied 85,344 votes. Why is this number significant?

Dating back more than 30 years, this is the highest vote total an Alaskan politician has ever received in a primary election, including the beloved Senator “Uncle Ted” Stevens, for whom a State Holiday is named. How does this comport with Murkowski’s electoral history?

In three previous primary elections, Murkowski averaged just 46,376 votes, including her highwater mark of 53,872 in a 2010 loss to Joe Miller. In her 2016 Republican primary without a viable challenger, Murkowski garnered only 39,545 votes with more than 70% of the vote.

Now we’re supposed to believe she’s one of the most popular politicians in the history of Alaska primary elections: after breaking her promise to repeal Obamacare, casting the deciding vote to save President Obama’s ill-fated government-run healthcare plan; voting against confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh; supporting the impeachment of President Trump; and voting to confirm Joe Biden’s radical pick for Secretary of the Interior, a sworn enemy of resource development in Alaska?

Is it really plausible that Murkowski more than doubled her primary vote total over 2016 while running against President Donald Trump (who won Alaska less than 2 years ago by double digits), while being censured by the Alaska Republican Party, and running up against her most formidable opponent since 2010 in Harvard Law Graduate and former State Commissioner Kelly Tshibaka?

Is it actually plausible that Republicans are voting for Murkowski?

According to Breitbart News, a Cygnal poll conducted earlier this year found 87% of Alaska Republicans viewed Murkowski unfavorably. It further reported Republican voter intensity favored a generic Republican by 22 points on the ballot, and independent voters preferred a Republican over a Democrat by 13 points. A poll conducted by Gallup last month found voter intensity nationwide to favor Republicans by 10 points.

There is a truism in politics: “friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.”

Lisa Murkowski has made more enemies than any Republican office holder in the country, including the most powerful Republican enemy one can have at this point: President Donald Trump.

According to Breitbart News, Donald Trump’s 2022 endorsement record now stands at 209-17.

Yet, we’re supposed to believe Murkowski is running away with the 2022 Alaska primary election.

Are Democrats really voting for Murkowski? Really?

The same Democrats that voted Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Alaska Democratic primary 80-20?

Those Democrats suddenly decided to reward Lisa Murkowski for voting to confirm two out of three of Donald Trump’s picks for Supreme Court that resulted in the overturning of Roe v. Wade? Really?

Those Democrats decided to vote for Murkowski in a meaningless primary that benefits them in no discernable way? And they decided for Murkowski somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-20? How can that be? What is in it for Democrats to vote Murkowski in the primary when she was already assured a slot in the general election? For that matter, why would they vote Murkowski as their #1 choice even in the general election, given that their #2 choice vote would likely have an identical effect?

And how is it that Democrat turnout in this primary election is dwarfing Republican turnout relative to registration numbers, considering the overwhelming reported Republican advantage in voter intensity?

None of this adds up.

It doesn’t add up in the Murkowski race, but the anomalies keep coming even when one moves outside the Murkowski race.

Average Democrat primary turnout over the last 20 years has been 40,452; average non-Republican turnout (to include all other parties) for primary elections over the last 20 years is 50,814.

Murkowski’s vote totals are tracking almost the same as the Walker/Gara tickets when combined. Are we to believe that Bill Walker, who ran with Democrat Byron Mallott in 2014, totally sold out to the Democrat special interests, and stole the PFD for State spending is still pulling Republican votes? It’s difficult to believe it is happening in any significant numbers.

Mary Peltola alone garnered 70,048 in this primary, far outpacing other more well-known Democrats who have held statewide office in the past.

Is Mary Peltola, a late entry into the special election not widely known outside the Alaska Native community, really that much more popular than former US Senator Mark Begich? Or former Governor Tony Knowles?

One might argue that the Special General Election conducted at the same time as the primary could account for the historically high Democrat turnout for the primary, but this holds no explanatory power for why Democrat-leaning votes so far out-pace Republican-leaning votes relative to voter registrations and voter intensity polling.

What are we to conclude from all this? You decide.

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Ranked Voting Fiasco in Alaska: Unofficial Results Put Murkowski in First Place; Palin in Second Place to Dem

Here are the unofficial U.S. Senate results from Alaska’s Establishment-controlled Division of Elections for the “ranked voting” primary (the top four advance to the general):

Note, Lisa Murkowski, who committed extraordinary fraud in the 2010 U.S. Senate Race, and likely in 2016 as well, is leading her GOP opponent by several thousand votes. Many pundits assert that Murkowski has an even stronger advantage in the general election where she will pick up the second-position votes from the Democratic contender and left-leaning Republican in the top four.

Here are the unofficial U.S. House results from Alaska’s corrupt Division of Elections for the “ranked voting” primary (the top four advance to the general):

Note, Sarah Palin is in second place, assuring her that she will advance in the top four to the general. However, there is concern that many of the other candidates’ supporters will not rank her as a second-choice pick putting her candidacy at risk. Restoring Liberty believes she will pick up enough of Nick Begich’s second choice votes that she stands a good chance of winning the general election.

Here are the unofficial U.S. House results to fill Rep. Young’s seat until this January (“Special General Election”):

This election is decided by ranked voting. Note, the Democrat is beating Sarah Palin in first place votes, but the loser’s (Nick Begich’s) second place votes are then awarded to the top two vote-getters. So Palin has a solid chance of pulling this off.

HOWEVER, the winner of this election will not be declared for WEEKS! Our fraud-laced Division of Elections has posted the following:

If machine voting is so darn accurate, why not immediate results? The obvious answer: more time to manipulate the votes.

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Murkowski’s Fate in the Balance

By Breitbart. . .Also on Tuesday in Alaska voters will decide which candidates will advance to the general election in November in two important races, the U.S. Senate race for the seat currently occupied by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and for the open congressional seat vacated by the passing of the late Rep. Don Young (R-AK). What’s more, a special election for the remainder of Young’s term will take place as well. The state’s former Gov. Sarah Palin is running in both races–the special election and the 2022 election–and she has the endorsement of Trump. Trump has backed Kelly Tshibaka in the race against Murkowski, where the top-four vote-getters, Murkowski and Tshibaka, are expected to be among them, as well as a Democrat and another candidate, likely a libertarian, will advance to the general election for a ranked-choice vote in November.

Polls close in Wyoming at 9:00 p.m. ET, and in most of Alaska at midnight ET. Results are expected in Wyoming tonight, and in Alaska not until at least later this week and they might even take longer, given the complexities of the new ranked-choice voting system. Follow along here for live updates as the results pour in. . .

Per Trump’s team, these are the endorsements he has on the line … :

Wyoming-AL: Hageman, Harriet
Wyoming-SOS: Gray, Chuck
Wyoming-Treasurer: Meier, Curt
Wyoming-School Superintendent: Schroeder, Brian
Alaska-AL: Palin, Sarah
Alaska-Senate: Tshibaka, Kelly

(Read more from “Alaska Begins to Determine Murkowski’s Fate” HERE)

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Polls Close in Alaska Races Featuring Sarah Palin, Lisa Murkowski

By Daily Mail. Polls closed early Wednesday morning in Alaska, as voters decided on whether to give former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin another shot at elected office.

Palin has two chances – as she’s running in both the special election to fill the remainder of late Alaska Rep. Don Young’s seat – and in the primary to take the reins come January.

Alaska voters also made selections in a Senate race that pits incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who backed former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment, against his chosen candidate Kelly Tshibaka.

Both Murkowski and Tshibaka are expected to move on to the November general election, thanks to the state’s new ranked-choice voting system.

That system means Tuesday’s election results may not be finalized for several days. (Read more from “Polls Close in Alaska Races Featuring Sarah Palin, Lisa Murkowski” HERE)

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Mike Lindell’s Video “Absolute Proof” Released, Proves Biden Fraud, Shows How Murkowski has Stolen Alaskan Elections Repeatedly

For the past 10 years, Restoring Liberty has been relentlessly reminding readers of the dangers of electronic voting, something that Alaska uses statewide, like most other states. Although voters fill out a paper ballot in the voting booth, that ballot is then scanned and converted to an electronic vote. As Joe Miller discovered in 2010, if you request a recount, that recount is also conducted by scanning ballots and converting them again to electronic votes.

Mike Lindell has been hot on the issues of election fraud since the huge vote integrity issues that began to arise after polling places closed nationwide on November 3, 2020. He compiled this excellent, informational video explaining the manipulation of the presidential vote that resulted in Biden’s illegitimate presidency:

Starting at 48:50, Mike Lindell also interviews Dr. Shiva, a candidate for U.S. Senate himself in 2020, who explains how the vote was cheated in his state. Vote counts in manipulated precincts had very little variance in the percentage vote for him versus the percentage vote for his opponent (40/60) while hand count precincts had wildly different results (55/45). This is a mirror image of how the Establishment rigged the races for Alaska’s illegitimate Senator Lisa Murkowski, where both in 2010 and 2016, the vote remained constant, within 1 percentage point throughout the entire night of returns despite the very politically-disparate regions throughout Alaska (native regions vs. interior vs. Anchorage vs. Southeast).

Why is this important? Without vote integrity, we have tyranny and ultimately the dissolution of the Republic.

HBO Documentary: Strong Evidence Alaska Division of Elections was Hacked in 2016

Restoring Liberty has been reporting for years that the Alaska Division of Elections is incredibly unreliable. As numerous sworn statements showed in the aftermath of the headline-grabbing 2010 election, Alaska votes are routinely miscounted, election machines stuffed, and ballots not secured. Post-election surveys in 2016 suggest that Alaska’s U.S. Senator received only a fraction of the vote officially counted for her. Other indicators of fraud continue to plague Alaska elections, including evidence of repeat voting, illegal alien voting, and mishandled ballots.

Despite this, Alaska’s political leadership seems more interested with covering up election malfeasance than backing election reform that would restore vote integrity to the state. Some think that’s because they are beneficiaries themselves of a corrupted election process.

Now, a documentary just released by HBO reflects that many of these problems are not imagined. Not only does Alaska continue to use many Diebold AccuVote machines whose results can be changed in seconds, the Division of Elections itself was hacked in the middle of the 2016 election:

Although the HBO documentary focuses primarily on interference by foreign actors, it is important to remember that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has blocked election integrity reforms for years. That begs the question as to who is actually benefiting from hacked elections. Restoring Liberty maintains that, just as Mitch’s friend, Lisa Murkowski, appears to have stolen at least two Alaska elections, it is the Establishment that is the primary beneficiary of a corrupted election process. We must assume that any elected leader who does not back paper-ballot-only election reforms is benefiting from the same corrupted process, as well.

Vote integrity lies at the heart of self-governance. Can government have legitimacy without it?

The Courts Are out of Control: Stealing Elections

Those of you who are reeling from the election loss and the potential theft of more congressional seats in the election “postgame show” should take heart in the fact that elections evidently don’t matter. Nor do the branches of government that are determined by elections seem to matter; namely, the states, Congress, and the president do not matter. We have one branch of government controlled by the unaccountable legal profession, and it not only determines the outcome of every broad policy issue but the outcome of elections themselves.

Imagine if someone concocted a system whereby any one of the 535 senators or congressmen can unilaterally decide a broad public policy issue or direction of the country at any moment. Moreover, that the determination over which one of those members could unilaterally rule and the rules of construction governing the precedent and proceedings of such tribunals were set by an insular profession, say, Hollywood Thus, Hollywood can concoct a scheme to tee up tribunal outcomes of every policy issue before incoming Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar and have that deemed as “the law of the land.”

If this sounds like a despotic scheme more corrupt than North Korea, it’s actually more democratic than the corrupt system our political elites now use to subvert our constitutional republic. At least under this hypothetical scheme, voters could still remove the tribunal via the ballot box. Under the one-directional progressive scheme of court-shopping judicial supremacy controlled by the legal profession, there are no elections.

There is no low to which the lower courts won’t go

Let’s review some of the recent news from the courts.

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district judge’s opinion that not only can a president violate American sovereignty and immigration law by unilaterally making legal permanent residents out of those here illegally and offering them Social Security cards and refundable tax cuts, but a new president must follow that edict instead of our statutes. While the Supreme Court will likely take it up soon and overturn this decision, it has repeatedly rebuffed requests to do so in a timely fashion, even though this is sheer lunacy. If a lower court issued an insane opinion on the Right, such as mandating that a president pays for everyone to buy a gun, you better believe SCOTUS wouldn’t wait a full year to let this program continue. This is one of the many examples of why a conservative Supreme Court will not help us.

The rules of the judicial supremacy game set forth by the legal profession dictate that a lower court can always be more progressive than existing Supreme Court precedent, statute, and the Constitution, but can never test the limits of liberal Supreme Court precedent. This is why the lower courts keep coming back for more, even after the Supreme Court finally takes up the case and reverses the opinion. We saw this with Trump v. Hawaii and the president’s power to exclude aliens. Despite the categorical opinion of the court, several lower courts have ignored the decision in a number of immigration cases and are continuing to challenge our sovereignty, 130 years of the most settled plenary power doctrine in the court system, and the plain meaning of the statute. Heck, some of these judges are overturning immigration statute itself for the first time in American history. They have said laws against sanctuary cities are invalid. They have said you can’t deport an illegal alien who is an “immigration rights activist” or a “pizza delivery man.” And by the way, the pizza delivery man was arrested for beating his wife just weeks after ICE absurdly released him after listening to this illegal court order. He is still in the country because a district judge said he doesn’t believe in deportations, and the other branches are stupid enough to listen.

This won’t end. If you think the radical district judges in California, New York, and the Ninth Circuit won’t grant an order to allow the caravan to invade our border, you aren’t paying attention. The Supreme Court only hears a few of these cases, and even when it does, the lower courts turn around and continue to violate the principle of the decision and the rules of standing by finding one tiny difference in the facts of the case. We have seen this continuously with lower court injunctions against public prayer, even after the Supreme Court ruled properly. Yet only Thomas and Gorsuch agreed to take up the appeal.

Then there is the global warming lawsuit. In a decision that rivals only the DACA case in terms of sheer insanity, Oregon District Judge Ann Aiken gave standing to teenagers to sue the weather. The judge is putting the climate and the government on trial and demanding that DOJ present evidence debunking global warming, or she’ll side with the kids to order the government to turn down God’s thermostat, aka shut down capitalism. This lawsuit violates every legal norm and rule of standing for a court, but the Ninth Circuit, of course, has rebuffed any attempt to stop this lawsuit.

What about SCOTUS? Once again, it is continuing to allow this insanity to stand rather than rip it out at its roots. Only Justices Thomas and Gorsuch would have granted the emergency motion to the government. The rest absurdly contended that “adequate relief may be available in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.”

Then there is the Keystone Pipeline. Construction of the pipeline is one of the few good domestic policy victories we achieved out of this presidency, thanks to a comatose Republican Congress. Now, a district judge has unilaterally halted its construction. Judge Brian Morris of Montana said Trump didn’t offer sufficient justification for changing Obama’s decision to halt the pipeline!

In August, I compiled a list of 13 times courts said Trump must continue Obama’s discretionary or lawless executive actions. I could add at least another 13 to that list.

Judicial supremacism is ensuring that only Democrats win elections

Finally, there is election law itself. The Constitution gives states full authority to set the time, methods, and procedures of elections. Only Congress, not the federal courts, can get involved in extenuating circumstances. Yet, we have allowed federal judges to control every process of election law. There are dozens of very close races and we are now seeing that Democrats win all of them based on provisional and certain types of mail-in ballots that are problematic and often, pursuant to state law, are downright invalid. Yet the federal courts, from Georgia and North Carolina to Ohio, have forced election officials to violate state laws and count these ballots.

They are literally determining the outcome of elections. They are mandating all forms of early voting, registration and voting anomalies, voting without photo ID, and blocking all forms of regulations to clamp down on non-citizens voting, fraud, and incompetence in the electoral process. What you are seeing play out this week in all these states, with Democrats overturning election results, is due to courts having blocked states from fixing these problems for years. There’s no greater form of voter suppression than voter fraud, yet the federal courts have codified the Democrats’ insidious racial agenda into the Constitution and statutes and have ensured that any effort to conduct free and fair elections will be legally deemed racist.

What about the Supreme Court? Ironically, we haven’t lost an election law case in years. In fact, we’ve won every photo ID case and achieved a landmark victory just a few months ago in the case of Ohio’s secretary of state using the lawful procedures of the motor-voter law to clean the state’s rolls of dead voters. Yet just weeks before the election, the Sixth Circuit, which is not even one of the worst panels, came back for more and issued another injunction on Ohio’s law!

Conservatives who think that we can accede to this game of judicial supremacy but are putting faith into a “conservative” Supreme Court and Trump’s lower court picks are missing a number of points:

1) Before Trump, there was a supermajority of leftists on the lower courts thanks to Democrats batting .1000 and Republicans picking leftists half the time. Thus, even with Trump filling vacancies at a rapid pace, it’s not making a dent in most circuits, most of the vacancies are the best conservative judges retiring, and Democrats only need a few avenues to forum-shop and shut down our Constitution. Their biggest avenues, the Ninth, Fourth, and D.C. circuits, are gone for a lifetime.

2) The legal profession controls the “culture” of the court system and the arc of litigation. That will not change.

3) The Supreme Court is not categorically ripping out this judicial cancer, and even when it tries, the Left comes back for more. Death by one thousand lawsuits.

4) John Roberts and several of the other conservatives are being extra careful not to appear “political” and are doing everything they can to avoid overturning bad lower court cases.

If conservatives think they could walk blindly into the legal profession’s haunted house of judicial supremacy and win, they are seriously not paying attention. There is only one rule of engagement for progressives in the judicial casino they created: “We win, you lose.” For 60 years, the Supreme Court was the primary organ for their social transformation without representation. Now that they achieved all they needed to set the baseline precedents on the 14th Amendment and rules of standing (precedent that the conservative legal eagles have agreed to), they no longer need a Supreme Court. They can expand on the 60-year baseline with forum-shopped lower courts buttressed by the ACLU, NAACP, National Immigrant Law Center, and the law schools themselves.

The answer to this is to stop acceding to judicial supremacy. As I’ve explained ad nauseam, when courts grant standing to a straw-man plaintiff to decide a broadly consequential political question, the other branches of government have equal authority and greater power to push back. And in fact, when they know the courts are wrong, they have an obligation to interpret the Constitution properly. See my articles here, here, here, and here and listen to my podcasts here, here, here, and here.

Until or unless the issue of judicial supremacism is brought to a fight, no other issue, including elections, matters. (For more from the author of “The Courts Are out of Control: Stealing Elections” please click HERE)

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Stealing an Alaska Election, Part 4: Numerous Sworn Affidavits Regarding Fraud

Please find below dozens of affidavits from Alaskan voters regarding the unprecedented vote fraud committed in the 2010 Alaska election for U.S. Senate between Joe Miller and Lisa Murkowski. Also, you can find an excellent article summarizing the Deep State’s election fraud perpetrated against Joe Miller HERE.

1. Affidavit of Al R. Walton regarding Sandlake ballot stuffing

2. Affidavit of Elva Bettine regarding same handwriting on multiple ballots

3. Affidavit of William Peck regarding ballots in trunk

4. Affidavit of Brett Freyder regarding electronic vote screen anomalies, improper vote counting

5. Affidavit of Matthew Johnson regarding manipulated ballots, presorted

6. Affidavit of Cynthia Hite regarding ballots filled out before vote, ballots taken home

7. Affidavit of Dirk Moffat regarding manipulated vote in different color ink with image

8. Affidavit of Thom Buzard regarding a precinct that had no signatures on its envelopes, numerous improper votes counted by the Division of Elections for Murkowski, ballots cast for “Joe Miller” that were then changed to Murkowski and counted for her, “Murcowshit” and other misspellings counted for Murkowski

9. Affidavit of M.J. Monroe regarding blatant electioneering

10. Affidavit of William Peck regarding “Murcowhit,” other protest votes counted for Murkowski; Division of Elections fraud

11. Affidavit of Sharon Phillips regarding no chain of custody for seven Alaska precincts (page 2)

12. Affidavit of Steve Shell regarding regarding no chain of custody, numerous miscounted ballots, misspellings, Division of Elections fraud

13. Affidavit of Richard Stoffel regarding virtually all ballots in one precinct completed by same person, dozens in another precinct

14. Affidavit of Travis LaWayne Cox regarding Diebold machine programmed to favor Murkowski

15. Affidavit of Barbara Fiscus regarding Division of Elections fraud

16. Affidavit of Penny Mayo regarding Division of Elections bias against Joe Miller volunteers, Murkowski volunteer assaulting Joe Miller volunteer, intimidation, ballot manipulation after election, and Division of Elections counting “McCUNTski,” “MurSLUTky,” “Murcowsbutt,” etc.

17. Affidavit of Dorothy Beasley regarding Division of Elections placing ballots so they could not be read by observers, running off Joe Miller election observers

18. Affidavit of Gary Kreep regarding Division of Elections fraud

19. Affidavit of Harmony Shields regarding Division of Elections fraud including giving the campaign the wrong date for the beginning of the recount and giving the wrong number of observer slots

20. Affidavit of Ivy Frye regarding Division of Elections fraud including unlawfully counting ballots for Murkowski

21. Affidavit of Jessica Talbert regarding Division of Elections fraud including unlawfully counting ballots for Murkowski

22. Affidavit of Jodie Pessolano regarding Division of Elections fraud including striking volunteer with ballots, flipping through ballots too quickly for the observer to review, improper votes counted for Murkowski, ballots opened and not sealed and not signed

23. Affidavit of Mary Havens regarding Division of Elections fraud in moving dates of count, moving location of count, refusal to notify regarding procedure, “total chaos,” etc.

24. Affidavit of William Peck regarding Division of Elections fraud where overvotes counted for Murkowski; not following Division of Election regulations to favor Murkowski

25. Affidavit of Lt. Gov. Loren Leman stating that in past Alaska elections the Division of Election had never counted write-in ballots for a candidate if the name were misspelled

26. Affidavit of Sharon Benson regarding manipulated ballots such as a ballot for District 12 in the envelope for District 35, names erased and rewritten, “McCowshit,” no notice of review of absentee ballots

27. Affidavit of Dirk Moffat regarding Division of Elections not allowing Joe Miller volunteers to observer ballots properly, votes missing from precinct, Murkowski observers allowed to take pictures but not Joe Miller observers, “Mankowski” and other intentional misspellings counted for Murkowski

28. Affidavit of Rocky MacDonald regarding unsecured ballot boxes

29. Affidavit of Roderic Perry consisting of seven pages of misspelled votes for Murkowski including “Lasa” and “MurKaKitie” and numerous other variations, ovals filled in for Joe Miller but counted for Murkowski, etc.

30. Affidavit of Matthew Johnson regarding Alaska’s Department of Law working for Murkowski, ballot security issues, Division of Election’s bias against Joe Miller volunteers, etc.

31. Affidavit of William Peck regarding Division of Elections fraud via improper ballot counting

32. Affidavit of Brett Freyder regarding inflated votes through touchscreen

33. Affidavit of Penny Mayo regarding manipulated vote

34. Affidavit of Sharon Phillips regarding same handwriting, unlawful ballot access and manipulation

Click HERE for Part 1 of “Stealing an Alaska Election”

Click HERE for Part 2 of “Stealing an Alaskan Election”

Click HERE for Part 3 of “Stealing an Alaska Election”

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Stealing an Alaska Election, Part 3: Activist Judges and Hanging Chads

Early indications of what we were up against in November 2010 came when the Alaska Division of Elections decided to post lists of write-in candidates at the polling places in direct contravention of their own regulations. Upon learning of the lists, the Alaska Democratic Party demanded that the Division of Elections remove them. The Division refused. The Alaska Democratic Party immediately filed suit in State Court for a temporary restraining order to stop this reckless and unprecedented move. The Alaska Republican Party later joined, offering the weight of bipartisan opposition. Party Chairman Randy Ruedrich was quoted in a press release saying, “During this election every candidate and political party has been operating under one set of rules laid down by Alaska law. To now change those rules midstream is inherently unfair to all concerned. This hasty decision both threatens the integrity of the election process, and the legitimacy of every candidate elected.”

In a stunning rebuke to DOE’s bureaucratic overreach, Judge Frank Pfiffner offered the following decision:

For the first time in the election history of the State of Alaska, the Division of Elections has provided a list of the names, party affiliations, and the registration status of write-in candidates to each polling place in the state. The actions of the Division are in clear violation of an Alaska administrative regulation. Plaintiff Alaska Democratic Party and intervenor Alaska Republican Party have clearly shown that they will probably succeed on the merits of their claim. Pursuant to Alaska R. Civ. P. 65, the court hereby grants a temporary restraining order enjoining the Division from allowing election workers and polling place workers to post write-in candidate names, to provide a list of write-in candidate names to voters, or to provide verbally the names of write-in candidates to voters at any place within two hundred feet of a polling place for the November, 2010, general election.

Amazingly, the Division of Elections “illogically” argued at once that its own regulation should be supervened because it was both unconstitutional and a violation of The Voter Rights Act, and that it should be interpreted in such a way that the lists did not constitute “information” as referenced in Alaska Administrative Code, section 6.25.070(b). The regulation reads, “Information regarding a write-in candidate may not be discussed, exhibited, or provided at the polling place, or within 200 feet of any entrance to the polling place, on election day.”

Judge Pfiffner, confirming that there is still at least one honest judge in Alaska, opined that the Division’s “unreasonable and arbitrary interpretation” resulted in the violation of “the plain and clear meaning of the regulation.” He further wrote that the write-in list “clearly provides information,” and “smacks of electioneering,” violating Alaska Statute 15.15.160 which states that poll workers may not discuss any candidate while polls are open.

In an extraordinarily brazen move, the Alaska Supreme Court overturned Pfiffner’s decision, the clarity of the language notwithstanding, and in spite of the fact that the Division of Elections also violated the Voter Rights Act by posting the lists without receiving pre-approval from the US Justice Department. To make matters worse, DOE broke Alaska’a laws relating to the promulgation of new regulations. Alaska Statute requires either temporary emergency regulations to be filed and signed by the Lt. Governor, or an open process for the promulgation of new regulations that affords a public comment period. In a footnote to his decision, Judge Pfiffner explained his charge about the “surreptitious” nature of the Division’s actions:

If, with forethought, the Division decided to adopt a uniform standard of assistance to voters through use of a write-in candidate list, the Division should have followed the procedures of the Alaska Administrative Procedure Act, AS 44.62, proposing a new regulation, taking public comment, and only then changing the law.

Having worked in regulation review in the Lt. Governor’s Office, I knew the procedure. So I decided to look into what the DOE had done, myself. Upon placing a call to the Lt. Governor’s office, I was told that his office was unaware of any emergency regulations relating to write-in lists. And there was never a public comment period. Nevertheless, with respect to charges that were brought against State Senator Albert Kookesh on fishing violations, in a ruling just one month earlier, the state courts ruled Alaska Department of Fish & Game regulations to be null and void because they had not passed through a public comment period.

To my knowledge, the Division never changed its regulations. DOE simply changed the rules governing an election by fiat less than one month before the general election. Both the Lt. Governor and the Governor declined to intervene. In an official statement, Alaska Republican Party General Counsel Kenneth Kirk remarked charitably that “regardless of the actual motivation, making this kind of change for the first time ever, when there is a powerful candidate running a write-in campaign, will raise suspicions that political skullduggery is involved.” He added that in his view, several State laws had been broken.

What was just as extraordinary as the Supreme Court’s brazen disregard for the law was the US Department of Justice turning a blind eye to the whole debacle. The Alaska Division of Elections had undoubtedly violated federal law, and the Department of Justice never raised objection. In fact, DOJ’s response was quite the opposite. After a suit was filed over the violation of federal laws, DOJ expedited the approval process and rubber-stamped the changes after the fact, but a day before the election. Our lawyers commented that it was highly unusual to get DOJ to act so precipitously. It was evident that there was an intervention on DOE’s behalf by someone very high up in the Justice Department, or perhaps even the White House. Could it have been related to a rumored meeting that Murkowski had with the White House in September, or an explanation for why Murkowski was the only Republican member of the US Senate to vote for every major piece of legislation in President Obama’s lame duck agenda? We’ll likely never know.

Next on the docket was the Fairbanks North Star Borough personnel records case. After contents of Joe Miller’s confidential files were illegally leaked, the Alaska Dispatch filed suit to force them into public view. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and the Anchorage Daily News later joined the suit.

But even more astounding was the Court’s handling of the matter. In an act perhaps unprecedented in the history of the Alaska Court System, the Chief Justice of Alaska’s Supreme Court, Walter Carpeneti, personally intervened and appointed a retired judge to decide the case. In so doing, the Chief Justice apparently circumvented the random appointment process required under Alaska Court rules. Taking charge of the media’s late filed request, Judge Winston Burbank immediately fast-tracked the case, holding his first hearing on a Saturday. Our attorneys told us that they had never seen the Alaska Court System hold a Saturday hearing in a civil case, except for emergency child endangerment cases. Even the Anchorage Daily News, a party to the suit, acknowledged the fact, calling it “an unusual weekend hearing.” In short, the judge was essentially advocating on behalf of the plaintiffs. Incidentally, Burbank received his judicial appointment from Governor Frank Murkowski.

The facts of the case are just as disturbing. Burbank offered only a verbal decision, tailored specifically to Joe Miller, perhaps to avoid making precedent. In it he ruled “Mr. Miller’s right to privacy is outweighed by the public’s significant interest in the background of a public figure who is running for the U.S. Senate.” He gave no arguments, just a verdict. It was an extraordinary move, given the Alaska Constitution’s clear and unequivocal right to privacy that “shall not be infringed.” Joe Miller was not a public official, he was a part-time attorney, a position that is not elected or appointed. He was just a public employee like any other private citizen who works for state or local government. Our Attorney Tom Van Flein made an impassioned appeal stating, “It’s not correct to argue that merely by running for the U.S. Senate, that somehow everything in your past: your school transcripts, your medical records, your birth certificate, or your personnel file, suddenly magically convert to public records.” But it was all to no avail. Apparently, Joe Miller’s case deserved different treatment than President Obama’s.

Burbank’s decision was handed down despite the fact that the primary piece of information sought by the media, the disciplinary action, and one of the documents ordered released, did not even legally exist. The conditional disciplinary action, signed by both parties, explicitly stated, “This letter of Disciplinary action shall be removed for [sic] your personnel file no later than two years from the date of this letter, provided there are no further incidents.” There were no further incidents, but the adverse personnel action remained in the file.

Had the Borough kept faith with its contract, the disciplinary material would have been destroyed no later than March 28, 2010, weeks before Joe Miller ever declared his candidacy for the United States Senate. In essence, the Borough was holding illegal documents, and the judge ordered the Borough to disclose them, in spite of the fact that it had no legal right to possess them.

Later at a Christmas party, Judge Burbank asked someone connected with Joe Miller’s campaign why we had not appealed the decision. The clear implication being that even Burbank knew it was wrong. But it didn’t matter. The verdict was so late in the election that an appeal would have been just as politically damaging as the decision itself.

When the post-election legal festivities commenced, we were right back where we started with the write-in list case. We had an explicit state statute that was being ignored in favor of a bureaucratic order. Nowhere in Alaska Statute was there any reference to “voter intent.” The Division, with the help of miscreants at the Department of Law, trotted out some obscure judicial “precedent,” a ghost of elections past unrelated to the write-in statute in question, to justify their rogue behavior. And true to form, the Alaska Court System backed them up.

Knowing our chances of success would be more remote in State court, given previous decisions, we filed in Federal court first. Although some of our claims related to state law, there were critical federal issues at stake. But Federal District Court Judge Ralph Beistline ordered the case back into the State courts for adjudication, staying certification and preserving jurisdiction over the case until all State legal questions were resolved.

After two inexplicable judicial recusals, Judge William Carey, from the Murkowski’s hometown of Ketchikan, took the case. Upon graduation, Carey had interned at Cook Inlet Native Association and later clerked for Birch, Horton, and Bittner, a firm owned by fabled members of “the Alaska Mafia,” the very people who were invested in Joe Miller’s defeat. But apparently Judge Carey and Chief Justice Carpeneti thought there was no conflict of interest.

At issue in the saga of the write-in process was the clarity of existing law. The text reads as follows:
AS 15.15.360(a)(11) states: “A vote for a write-in candidate . . . shall be counted if the oval is filled in for that candidate and if the name, as it appears on the write-in declaration of candidacy, of the candidate or the last name of the candidate is written in the space provided.”

Judge Carey’s rendering of the above statute singled out the term “appears,” and proceeded to catalog the scope of dictionary definitions. “The use of ‘appears’ allows variations of the write-in candidate’s name to be accepted,” Carey said. “’Appears’ does not mean ‘exactly,’ ‘precisely,’ or ‘perfectly,’ but rather ‘close to,’ ‘like,’ or ‘resembles.’”

The more grammatically viable definition of the statutory usage of the term “appears,” was the definition offered by Miller: “To show itself or be plainly set forth in a document.” Clearly the text referred to a particular manifestation of the name, that written in the declaration document. While the judge acknowledged that the definition put forth by the Miller team was instructive, he held that it was not conclusive.

I might remind Judge Carey of one of the first canons of classical textual interpretation relating to the meaning of terms: “The meaning of a term is not determined by etymology or morphology; it is determined by context.” The immediate context of the write-in statute has three uses of the term at issue. In the same statute, there is an identical use in section (12), and an additional use in section (7) unequivocally supporting a constructive definition of the term as defined by the plaintiff, and lending unity to the text.

As the courts construed the term, it no longer had an internal statutory referent. Under the new definition of “appears,” the referent was something never mentioned in (or intended by) the text. It was the perception of the voter. By cherry picking a definition that did not comport with the immediate context of the statute, the judge had subtly shifted the referent of the term from the concrete document upon which the write-in candidacy was declared, to the perception of the voter. Moreover, it was completely contrary to DOE’s past application of the statute.

Imagine the legal ramifications of the absence of concrete referents in other contexts. Suppose I decided to purposefully disregard, or through an honest mistake violated, a (hypothetical) hunting regulation established by ADF&G banning moose harvests along a particular game management boundary. Do you suppose the alternate definition of “appears” deployed by the courts in both of the above mentioned cases would save my hide when I stood before the judge, given that I would be using it, contextually, in an almost identical manner as the courts? Of course not. After imposing a stiff penalty, Judge Carey would rightly laugh me out of court. It just doesn’t pass the red face test. Of course, neither did Carey’s decision in Miller v. Campbell. If similar legal definitions were allowed to proliferate, investing individual citizens with perceptual legal trump cards, societal chaos would ensue. It would essentially be the end of the law.

Other serious charges of fraud and irregularity were summarily dismissed for lack of evidence by the Alaska Supreme Court, despite sworn affidavits. We were not asking for summary judgment on the issues, only for discovery. In essence, we were asking the State to investigate the claims of fraud based upon the sworn testimony of eyewitnesses. If that is insufficient evidence for discovery, it is hard to imagine what the bar might be. Our attorneys were stunned that discovery was not granted. In most cases, with the evidence we presented, it would have been a foregone conclusion.

It is interesting to note that the law clerk who wrote Judge Carey’s decision bumped into Joe and Kathleen Miller in a coffee shop in Ketchikan during the summer of 2011. In a curious display of imprudent exuberance, he asked to have a picture taken with Joe, bragging that the decision “launched his career.” He claimed that he was being appointed to a position in the District Attorney’s office as a direct result of the work he did on the Miller case.

The Alaska Supreme Court’s ruling in Miller v. Treadwell was slightly more sophisticated, but transparently a conclusion in search of an argument, failing to overcome the internal contradictions outlined in Judge Carey’s decision. The members of the court unanimously opined: “The word ‘appears’ relates to a pseudonym’s possible presence on the ballot, not the particular form of the vote, and demonstrates that the statute is inclusive.”

As evidence for this interpretation, the Court pointed to the ‘nickname’ field on the declaration of candidacy form, suggesting that “appears” only applied to said anomaly, in spite of the fact that the declaration form had no inherent relationship to the text of the statute. There is no statutory reference to nicknames, making the argument primarily a dispute over regulatory discretion. Last I checked, Administrative law reposes on Statutory law, not the other way round. Further, the pattern of punctuation would lead one inexorably away from such an interpretation, not to mention the fact that by bringing up this point they had shifted the referent away from the voter’s perception back to the declaration document, thus mitigating the lower court’s decision and affirming Miller’s definition of the term “appears.” However, it illogically affirmed the lower court’s decision anyway.

The Supreme Court’s insistence that the pseudonym argument “demonstrates that the statute is inclusive – it is designed to include, rather than exclude, votes” also contradicts section (b) of the statute, which states explicitly: “The rules set out in this section are mandatory and there are no exceptions to them. A ballot may not be counted unless marked in compliance with these rules.”
A reasonable common sense standard would dictate that Miller’s interpretation was, in fact, the correct interpretation of the statute. Any other interpretation sets the statute at variance with itself, and renders it untenable under constructive cannons of interpretation.
The Alaska Supreme Court in Miller v. Treadwell affirmed the earlier ruling of Judge Carey in Miller v. Campbell that the write-in statute as it existed should be interpreted to be inclusive of disputed ballots. What is troubling about the court rulings is neither the fact of inclusion, nor the presence of a “voter intent” standard. Rather, it is the fact that the rulings clearly do not comport with the specific language of the statute established by the representatives of the people.

In an inherently undemocratic power play executed under the guise of democratic enfranchisement, the courts have swept the constitutional authority of the state legislature aside, and enshrined in its place their own “moral” imperative.

Further complicating the State’s position was the simple fact that there was precedent for Miller’s interpretation of the write-in statute. In past elections, the Division of Elections interpreted the statute the way Miller did. In 1998, gubernatorial candidate Robin Taylor had almost 8% of his ballots disqualified because they did not meet the statutory standard for write-in votes. There was no write-in precedent relating to “voter intent.”

Though the Alaska Supreme Court argued its decision was based upon such “bedrock principle” as one’s fundamental right to vote, and a prejudice against “wholesale disenfranchisement of qualified electors through no fault of their own,” the protest was specious on its face. The suit was never about one’s legal right to cast a ballot, or wholesale disenfranchisement of voters through no fault of their own. It was about the plain construction of the law which everybody involved knew and understood, and whether legal voters and legally cast votes would be disenfranchised by illegal voters and illegally cast votes. It was that simple, obscure case law notwithstanding.

The Supreme Court’s decision went on to say, “In light of our strong and consistently applied policy of construing statutes in order to effectuate voter intent, we hold that abbreviations, misspellings, or other minor variations in the form of the name of a candidate will be disregarded in determining the validity of the ballot, so long as the intention of the voter can be ascertained.” Here was the crux of the issue, both in terms of what the court was doing, and what the real issue was. First of all, the court openly admits to having a “policy of construing statutes in order to effectuate” their favored outcome, irrespective of what they believe the law to actually say, or mean. Even entertaining the question of “voter intent” reflects the court’s activist interference with a law that plainly means what it says, and says what it means. It was never questioned until a powerful sitting US Senator decided to run for office as a write-in candidate. It was a matter of constructive law, and equal justice under the law. There is no doubt in my mind that the statute would have been constructively interpreted and applied if Joe Miller had been the write-in candidate.

When the State Supreme Court inevitably ruled against us, we returned to the US District Court. Judge Beistline was clearly uncomfortable with trumping the state courts with the federal constitutional issues that had been raised, and opted to punt. In his dismissal, he merely stated that though the charges were not frivolous, and Miller’s statutory interpretation was “easy to understand,” the Federal Court declined “to second-guess the Highest court of the State.” He concluded that the “the Alaska Supreme Court is the final expositor of Alaska law.”

Beistline essentially opined that the DOE had formulated a methodology, that “some process was necessary” to count write-in ballots, and that the process was constitutional because the Alaska Supreme Court said so. The premises may have been true on some level, but the conclusion does not follow. In fact, it is no conclusion at all because it is not the resolution of an argument. It is simply an assertion. There would be no reason for a federal appeal if things were true merely by virtue of a fiat passed down from the State Supreme Court.

While I may grant judge’s the claim of the existence of a methodology to be meritorious on some level, I would also note, as I have in a previous chapter, there was not a uniform standard, despite the fact that there was a sole arbiter, as Judge Beistline noted. To argue that there was on that evidence alone is simply a non sequitur. Surely the fact that only one arbiter, rather than two or three or more, was making inconsistent and sometimes contradictory judgments, does nothing to change the fact that the decisions were arbitrary and capricious.

The equal protection case was modeled after Bush v. Gore, which found that there was unequal treatment of ballots from county to county, therefore constitutional guarantees of equal protection had been violated. In our view, the primary difference between Bush v. Gore and the present case was that by analogy, in the former case the hanging chads were not counted, and in this one they were. Bush sought to keep the chads from being counted. We were trying to get the chad count overturned. But Beistline didn’t buy it, opining that our case failed on its merits by the Bush v. Gore precedent because, unlike Florida, there was a single board regulating the Alaska’s state-wide election, and a single arbiter discerning intent. However, the ruling ignored sworn affidavits of multiple witnesses testifying that ballots with identical spellings or characteristics were indeed treated differently.

Judge Beistline also denied the unequal treatment of ballots relating to hand counts (Murkowski) vs. Diebold machine counts (Miller and McAdams), claiming that Judge Carey’s ruling in the State Superior Court had settled the question. In the earlier case, the State claimed that all the ballots were individually examined and hand-counted. Division of Elections Director Gail Fenumiai reportedly submitted an affidavit to the Superior Court claiming this to be true. If she in fact did, she perjured herself, because the intent could only have been to mislead the Court. While the statement may have been true with respect to the technical accuracy of the language employed, it was a false claim on its face relating to the merits of the case. The write-in ballots were hand-counted separately, while the rest of the ballots were hand-counted as one aggregate number. So Joe Miller’s ballots, in fact, did not receive equal treatment, and a segregated hand-count of his ballots was never conducted, nor tallied. Objectively, we proved that Murkowski’s hand-count exceeded the write-in Diebold machine count by thousands of ballots, but apparently none of the courts cared that votes cast for Joe Miller had less value than those cast for Murkowski. So much for equal protection and “one man (or woman), one vote.” As George Orwell so famously penned in his novel, Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Beistline also made a key error in analyzing the merits of the case with respect to equal protection by offering support for the State’s conclusion relating to the equal weighting of ballots by quoting a decision from the Eleventh Circuit which states, “manual recounts in some counties, while identical ballots in other counties are counted and recounted only by machine, and the inevitable variances that this will produce, do not in themselves severely burden the right to vote.” Beistline fails to distinguish between inter-jurisdictional and inner-jurisdictional weighting. Alaska is a single-jurisdiction. Therefore any inequity in ballot weighting is an inner-jurisdictional matter that constitutes a violation of the equal protection clause.

But in the end it didn’t matter who was right, any appeal was headed for the Ninth Circuit. We knew our fate. But it didn’t make the unwillingness of the courts to judge the case on its merits any easier to swallow.

Beistline also suggested that the Alaska Legislature clarify the write-in statute. While the Legislature did act on the recommendation, they merely added new “voter intent” language without defining it. It is clear that the nomenclature of intent by itself does nothing to preclude future legal issues similar to those the State of Alaska faced in the aftermath of the 2010 US Senate race. Without providing clear and objective standards by which intent may be discerned, the law fundamentally fails to provide a bulwark against such legal challenges, or to protect the integrity of the process from the whim and will of over-reaching bureaucrats and activist judges. But in the end, it was never about a flawed statute; it was about a series of willfully flawed decisions.

The Superior Court’s final ruling of the election came in on June 24, 2011. Joe Miller was required to pay the State of Alaska legal fees, despite of the fact that the Federal Court had ruled that Miller’s interpretation of the law was viable, his case was not frivolous, and it raised “serious issues” in State law. In essence, he was paying for the bad faith of the Alaska Judiciary. In one final display of arrogance and contempt, Judge Carey revealed his bias with a gratuitous insult of Joe Miller, stating, “The main thrust of this action was not, in this court’s view, to altruistically promote and preserve constitutional protections, but to win an election, with the political and pecuniary benefits that would accrue thereby.”

A black robe does nothing to make sense out of nonsense. The court rulings we witnessed in the 2010 Alaska Senate race are illustrative of what is eating away at the foundations of self-government. It is precisely the kind of sophistry that will lead to a crisis of confidence in our judicial system if it is not stopped. It is time for men and women of good faith to say enough is enough. And it is time for our legislative and executive branches to reassert their constitutional powers as equal branches of government.

Click HERE for Part 1 of “Stealing an Alaska Election”

Click HERE for Part 2 of “Stealing an Alaskan Election”

Click HERE to review the dozens of affidavits sworn by Alaskan voters who directly observed the unprecedented 2010 Alaska election fraud and corruption of Alaska’s Division of Elections.

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Stealing an Alaska Election, Part 2: Fraud and Irregularity

To be sure, it is not unusual to hear complaints raised by a losing candidate about foul play. The frequency of such claims tends to inoculate the populace against the requisite moral outrage that the gravity of the charges may demand. In 2010, we were not unaware of the risks involved in speaking out about the issues we were confronted with, but decided that if Joe was going to talk about reform, he needed to stand up and be counted when circumstance demanded it.

In the days following the election (click HERE for Part 1 of “Stealing an Alaska Election”), we received numerous reports of fraud, intimidation, and abuse of the electoral system. In many instances, the complaints came from folks who were not willing to come out of the shadows for fear of retaliation. There were those who believed their jobs or livelihood to be at risk, many feared social alienation, and some even feared violent retribution. The anonymous nature of some of these reports made them impossible to address, but the volume of complaints convinced us that there was likely fire behind the smoke.

In addition, there were other more public manifestations, some of which were documented. One such incident was taped by a federal contractor on Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks. The video was played on The Mike Huckabee Show on Fox News. In it the job supervisor essentially urged workers and contractors to vote for Lisa Murkowski. It was an illegal act.

Soon after the election, I received a similar complaint from multiple State of Alaska employees reporting that Alaska State Public Employee Unions were sending endorsement emails to State computers. In the emails forwarded to me, there wasn’t an explicit endorsement in the US Senate race, but there were veiled references to Joe Miller. For instance, they urged public employees not to vote for candidates who would cut federal spending. What made it so transparent was that Joe was the only candidate running on such a platform. They might as well have used his name.

A sworn affidavit from an Anchorage resident reported that he was one of the first voters at his precinct, Sand Lake Elementary School, at 6:45 a.m. When the polls opened around 7:00 a.m., he entered the voting area and filled out his ballot. When he returned to feed his ballot into the Diebold scanner, he witnessed DOE workers examining a jammed machine with the ballot box opened, revealing a sizable pile of ballots in the box which “number[ed] in the hundreds . . . 4 to 5 inches thick.” His conclusion was that the fix was in.

Another supporter from Western Alaska sent in a picture of his polling place with a Murkowski campaign sign propped up against the building beside the entrance, a clear violation of electioneering laws.

We also received reports of teenagers enrolled in the Job Corps program being bussed to the polls to cast questioned ballots for Murkowski. One poll worker overheard one of the kids say that they were headed to another location to do the same thing.

Another report coming out of a rural fishing community detailed how known foreign workers from the fish plant were being trucked to the polls to vote. We were never able to substantiate the claim, but it clearly heightened our concerns.

Not long after the election, we received a phone call from a police officer who suspected voter fraud in his locale. He suggested we check into the situation and offered a list of folks he knew to be ineligible to vote due to fact that they were either incompetents, or unqualified felons. We were told that if the people on his list had voted, we had a significant fraud problem. The names were forwarded to Randy DeSoto who happened to be in Juneau reviewing voter logs at the time. All of the names were on the voter rolls, and all supposedly signed the register indicating that they had indeed voted.

This prompted further investigation of the only list of convicted felons we could readily get our hands on, the State’s sex offender registry. A comparative analysis of the registry with DOE records affirmed more than 700 soft matches, and in excess of 500 moderate to strong matches out of 2800 sex offenders. Hence the much-publicized charge of a universe of illegal felon voters. The sex offender registry represents only 12% of the State’s felon population.

The Alaska Department of Law and DOE officials vociferously denied there was a problem with illegal felon voting in spite of the fact that it is a matter of public record. The sex offender registry and voter records reveal that categories of felons that cannot legally have their rights restored did indeed vote. The press has never reported the facts.

We have stepped up our efforts to uncover the extent of the problem, but the State of Alaska continues to dissemble and obstruct. Apparently, it would be insufferable to just admit that there are problems, and address them. With a compliant ally in the press that is deeply invested in the defeat of Joe Miller, and Lisa Murkowski’s personal friend over the Division of Elections, it is likely the State will never come clean.

In the spring of 2011 there was a story in the headlines of the Anchorage Daily News of an illegal alien, Rafael Mora-Lopez, who served on the Anchorage Police force for six years before he was discovered. He was subsequently charged with multiple federal crimes. The story hit the Drudge Report on the day it came out. It was never mentioned in the Alaska press that the illegal alien had voted three times in 2010, and numerous other times in the past, all felonies in Alaska. The Alaska Department of Law, presumably in an attempt to conceal their false claims relating to a universe of illegal voters, has declined to press charges. It is unclear what the extent of the illegal alien voting problem may be, but we are aware of others who are politically active.

After the completion of the vote count in Juneau, we decided to also examine the voter logs in select precincts where we suspected there might be fraud and irregularity. That was followed by further review of the remaining precincts when we found significant irregularities and anomalies. We uncovered many other problems relating to the 2010 elections.

For example, despite a statutory requirement, there were several thousand ballots cast by voters whose identities had apparently not been confirmed by DOE poll workers, covering at least 286 of 438 precincts statewide. At the very least, there was no record in the voter logs revealing confirmation of identity. Thousands more were ostensibly personally identified without showing proof of identification. Most were not required to vote by questioned ballot, as a plain reading of the statutory text would require.

I personally witnessed at least one precinct where the voter logs were tallied on every page, but after the final tally new signatures had been added, making voter totals at the bottom of numerous pages incorrect. It appeared the signatures were added after the election.

In an Anchorage precinct I reviewed, there was a discrepancy of 498 ballots between the number used and votes cast. In another, there were 49 ballots that DOE records couldn’t account for. It is unclear how many of the precincts had similar problems. We have no way of knowing whether those ballots found their way back into the system somewhere else.

In many precincts, the DOE failed to keep a record of how many ballots were actually used, a troubling situation that is further exacerbated by the fact that Alaska Statute allows for extra ballots to be destroyed on site at the precinct level. It is a practice that all but invites fraud. Unbelievably, all that is required of poll workers is that they sign the envelope the logs are sent back in, verifying that the extra ballots were destroyed. Such signatures were missing from several precinct records. Under such a regime, a reliable post-election audit is impossible.

There were also significant numbers of precincts with discrepancies between the number of signatures on the registry and that of votes cast. In some cases there were too many signatures, possibly indicative of missing ballots. In other cases there were not enough signatures, suggesting that more ballots were cast than the number of persons who voted.

A significant number of precincts were missing the original tapes with Election Day tallies of the vote count on them. When we requested to see them, the Director eventually brought in tapes for us to review. But they were not the originals, as they had the date from that day printed right on the tape. Without the originals, there was no way of knowing that the totals were the same as Election Day totals. A former legislator who lives in Anchorage approached me after the election to tell me her daughter was a poll worker at an Anchorage precinct where the original tapes were carried out the door on election night rather than sent in to DOE with the ballots.

There were precincts where the tapes from the touch screen voting machines were missing as well. Under such circumstances, there is no way to conduct an audit, or to confirm that the numbers comport with Election Day totals. Reviewers reported touch screen tapes with all the Murkowski votes spelled flawlessly. One would expect spelling accuracy on the touch screen tapes to reflect what we saw on the physical ballots.

In addition, there were instances of duplicate signature types in the review logs, but we never raised the issue because we only had evidence of a few dozen occurrences. The design of the voter logs complicated further analysis to see if there might have been a larger problem, making the scope of the task prohibitive.

Though the DOE insisted ballot security was not a problem, on numerous occasions during our review I noticed the door to the room where ballots were stored standing ajar. Sometimes DOE employees were visible, but on other occasions I didn’t see anybody around. I believe I could have carried a box of ballots out the door, or placed an extra box of ballots inside the room and DOE officials would have been none the wiser.

On another occasion during our review, I called a volunteer out of the room to speak with him privately. He proceeded to inadvertently carry a DOE precinct register out of the office suite without detection and I had to tell him to take it back in before we proceeded with our conversation. It’s a good thing we were trustworthy, because the DOE monitor never noticed it, coming or going.

Many precincts didn’t have the requisite number of poll workers, or at least they never signed the register.

The deficiencies in Alaska’s election system should raise grave concerns about the integrity of the vote. How are we supposed to have confidence in a system that allows for widespread irregularity and renders a reliable audit impossible? It is a travesty of justice to allow such a system to stand.

Every ballot printed for the Division of Elections should be returned after the election to a central location, and the chain of custody should be at least as sacrosanct as that of cash at a bank. Every ballot should be accounted for, and DOE workers should be held personally responsible for missing ballots. There is no good reason for the laxity I observed at the Division of Elections. It is an invitation to fraud.

Click HERE for Part 3 of “Stealing an Alaska Election”

Click HERE to review the dozens of affidavits sworn by Alaskan voters who directly observed the unprecedented 2010 Alaska election fraud and corruption of Alaska’s Division of Elections.

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Stealing an Alaska Election, Part 1: Counting Ballots

On November 10th, we gathered at a warehouse on the outskirts of Juneau to review more than one hundred thousand write-in ballots. The Division of Elections had initially set the count for November 18th, but the Lt. Governor suddenly moved the date up eight days, causing serious logistical challenges for the review team. We put more than a dozen volunteers on the ground, but when we arrived, found there were 15 review stations. Our organizers were still making contacts when the count began. We flew in more folks from Fairbanks that day.

There were other more technical challenges relating to our preparedness. We never had opportunity to meet with our lawyers until the evening of November 17, and many of the late comers were never trained at all before being thrown into the fray. We would try to give them a quick briefing as we were shuttling them into the counting area. It was by no means an optimal situation. There is no doubt that the Lt. Governor’s dubious decision to advance the vote count left us in the lurch.

In the beginning, some of the DOE employees seemed to have a chip on their shoulder. Evidently, the multi-million-dollar propaganda campaign waged by Murkowski and her minions had convinced some of the folks there that we were malevolent sociopaths. Some seemed surprised that we were actually human. But in time they warmed up when they realized that we had no evil designs. We were just concerned citizens who wanted to see an orderly and lawful outcome.

Among the attorneys assisting on the ground, there were five new faces, four of which the NRSC had apparently recruited and footed the bill for. The first couple days were somewhat erratic due to the fact that there really wasn’t time for any significant training, and the lawyers had some disagreements among themselves over what should and should not be challenged. Their standard for challenged ballots vacillated between challenging technical points to waiving ballots through that were challenged by volunteers and clearly misspelled. It didn’t help any that we had a revolving door at the top. Due to scheduling issues, there were three different lead attorneys designated within three days, thanks to the Lt. Governor’s rush to certification that was ultimately stayed by the Federal District Court.

As things went along, the first day was touch and go. We made some adjustments on the fly, altering an excessively strict decision that one of our lawyers decided to apply challenging name order. Our Alaskan attorney, John Tiemessen, took the lead for the first two days, but had to be back in Fairbanks for a court date on day three. Chip Gehrhardt, an attorney from Cincinatti, Ohio took over on day three and it seemed like we had reached equilibrium. However, when he left the following day to attend to family matters, we were left with yet another lead supervisor. This time things didn’t go so well. When I got back to the hotel, I got an ear full from several volunteers who believed the latest guy in charge was not acting in Joe’s best interest. I had seen some of the ballots he waived earlier and was mildly concerned, but after a volunteer revolt that night over his performance, I secured Joe’s authority to replace him. He had apparently waived numerous volunteer challenges throughout the day on ballots that multiple volunteers insisted were clearly misspelled.

In my view, the NRSC had screwed us once, and I stood idly by while they did it. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. Joe Miller would get the benefit of the doubt on our activities in Juneau. Our “friend” assigned from Washington would just have to sit on the sidelines. I asked him not to even show up at the vote count location because I didn’t want the media talking to him about why he was no longer in charge. Before the day was over, he would convince the rest of the NRSC team to pack it in and go home. He reportedly told them that they weren’t needed or wanted there, a sentiment we never even considered or expressed. In fact, the whole scenario was not a little bit unsettling. Nonetheless, the whole group walked off the floor in the middle of the count that afternoon, leaving us in a scramble to fill their posts.

When I took over as the vote count supervisor and named Bill Peck as my assistant, it had angered our attorneys. But Bill was a known quantity, and I knew I could trust him to act in our interests. At that point, I set clear standards that were executed consistently for the duration. They weren’t new; it was just a matter of uniform application. I instructed the volunteers that if there was doubt about whether a ballot should be challenged, they should err on the side of Joe Miller. The lawyers could sort out the rest later. There had been numerous ballots challenged over the previous days that should not have been challenged, but there had also been an equal or greater number that had not been challenged and should have been.

My standard was to challenge a ballot under the following conditions:

• if the name written on the ballot was misspelled

• if there were extraneous marks or words on the ballot

• if it was an over-vote or under-vote counted by the Director, even if she counted it for Joe Miller; or

• if the name was written somewhere on the ballot other than the line provided as prescribed by statute

We made it abundantly clear, even to our counterparts on the Murkowski team, that we had no desire to steal an election. We simply wanted the law to be followed. It wasn’t long until anybody in the room could have predicted what we would or would not challenge. In fact, many of the Division of Election workers began setting them aside before we even issued a challenge. There was no ambiguity over what we were doing. Toward the end of the count, a Murkowski observer was quoted in the Anchorage Daily News affirming that the Miller team was not making frivolous challenges, as the Department of Law and the Division of Elections would later argue in court. As the count wound down, we knew we did not have enough challenged ballots to change the outcome. We could have picked up the pace, but we opted against it, challenging only the ballots we would have challenged had circumstances been otherwise. It was just the right thing to do.

Incredibly, the Division of Elections provided no orientation for ballot observers. They simply stated a few ground rules at the beginning of the count, but by the time the count was underway it had become evident that the rules were ad hoc, and could be changed on the fly at the slightest provocation. Over the first couple days, there was a constantly changing environment. For instance, at the outset the press was barred from the floor and had to watch from a distance. But after the review began and we started challenging ballots, the Director politicized the process by allowing the press to have free range inside the review area, and to take pictures of the challenged ballots. We, on the other hand, were prohibited from taking pictures of the ballots being counted by the Director, or the Murkowski team. It took days before I saw any of those ballots make their way into the press. As a result, by design, only one side of the story was getting out. But by that time, the narrative had spread far and wide that Joe Miller’s team was making frivolous challenges.

Of course, the press was primarily taking pictures of ballots in the box challenged by Miller volunteers. Many of those ballots, however, were never ultimately challenged, because they were waived by floor supervisors. For reasons I cannot explain, the attorneys raised no objection to the rule until the end of the fourth day of the vote count. As I watched the Department of Law take pictures of votes we had challenged, it dawned on me that they were building a case against us. I called our Anchorage attorney Tom Van Flein, and asked him about the legal grounds for an appeal based upon equal access. He thought it was a good point and gave me the green light. I subsequently appealed to the Director. Upon consultation with the Department of Law, they relented, and allowed us to take pictures on day five. But it didn’t matter. We had already lost in the court in public opinion.

Other protocols were fluid as well. For instance, many of the volunteers had to stand opposite DOE employees while they sorted the ballots, placing them in boxes facing away from the volunteer observers. I was initially at one of those tables. When I protested and asked that the boxes be turned so I didn’t have to review ballots upside down, the Murkowski observer immediately intervened. The DOE employee ruled against me. It was as though they were trying to keep us from seeing the ballots clearly. The practice was later overturned.

The Division of Elections was never forthcoming on its standard for counting misspelled or otherwise questionable ballots. We heard various standards articulated. Some Division of Election floor workers suggested it was a two letter standard, three would disqualify a ballot. Attorney Gary Kreep, in a sworn affidavit, reported the following:

“Gail Fenumiai came over to view the challenged ballots at my table. She took three of the ballots away from the table so that she could discuss them with her staff. While simply sitting there, I could overhear what they were discussing. The male attorney, Mike, told her that there were three syllables in Murkowski, and as long as two of the syllables were ok, she should over-rule the challenge. The spelling of Murkowski, according to the context of the comment, is meaningless to the DOE, as long as the sounds are there.”

The Lt. Governor came out publicly and affirmed that it would be a phonetic standard. But from the Director’s actual decisions, one could not discern any concrete pattern being followed. We were not alone in our bewilderment. “Even [the Murkowski team] seemed unsure of the exact standard Ms. Fenumiai was applying,” said New York Times reporter Bill Yardley in a Nov. 10, 2010 article. He went on to quote Murkowski spokesman John Tracy saying, “it appears to me that there’s about a three letter standard.” At the end of the day there were ballots counted that didn’t meet any of the standards. Anyone now suggesting that there was a clear and uniform standard for determining which votes would count is involved in some very creative revisionist history.

We watched as the Director huddled over and over again with Department of Law attorneys trying to decide whether to count a ballot. In the early stages, their attorney’s kept a list of acceptable spellings. In time, the Director quit consulting the list. We all knew she was just winging it. It was no longer a matter of measuring against some intelligible standard; it was “discretion” without parameters. In fact, it was so arbitrary that we joked that she was “divining” intent. To my great amusement, Becky Boher of the Associated Press later used the term in reference to a new statute passed by the legislature granting statutory authority to the same “discernment” process exercised during the Senate vote count.

Whatever the “standard” actually was, it is difficult in the extreme to figure out by any definition of “phonetic,” or its cognates, how the Director arrived at the decision to count the following ballots for Lisa Murkowski: “Muskisk,” “Moukoky,” “Murcosaga,” “Mulkalkie,” “McKoskie,” “McKowkie,” “Mucoskie,” “Murski,” “Murkusk,” “Muskieawe,” “Murkousi,” “Matkoski,” “Marceuski,” “Murkoshi,” “Maruski,” etc. Apparently, if it started with an M and had two or three letters in common with Murkowski, it was good to go. I even saw one that didn’t start with an M that was ostensibly counted.

These and many more of the ballots we saw counted by the Division of Elections could hardly be described, even with considerable license for embellishment, as “minor misspellings” or “penmanship issues,” as the Department of Law stated in court. It was simply not true. According to Miller volunteers, there were also a number of rather vulgar mutations and permutations not fit for polite company that the Director mysteriously divined to be intended for Murkowski. Many of them were obviously intended as protest votes, but intent was a one-way street.

On many occasions, the Director also counted over-votes (votes with more than one oval filled in). There were votes counted where the whole ballot was filled out in pencil, except the US Senate portion which was written in ink. Others had been filled out in one color of ink with US Senate votes cast for Joe Miller or Scott McAdams, only to have the oval crossed out and Lisa Murkowski written in in another color of ink. There were all kinds of variations on the theme, but the point is, generally such ballots would be disqualified, especially when there is an appearance that the ballot may have been tampered with. But apparently the Director could divine the motives of these voters as well. To be sure, on a few occasions over-votes were counted for Joe Miller too, but it was a much less frequent occurrence, and we challenged those ballots along with the others. I even saw the Director count an under-vote (a vote with no ovals filled in) for Murkowski on one occasion. It was a faxed ballot with the oval circled rather than filled in. At the end of the day “intent” turned out to be whatever the Director said it was.

One of the issues that would later be raised in court was that the write-in ballots were treated differently than those that were cast for candidates actually on the ballot. All the ballots were counted, but only the Murkowski ballots were hand-counted separately. The other ballots were counted together, but their individual totals came directly from the Diebold machine count and became the official tally. It would have taken little effort for the Joe Miller ballots to be segregated and counted separate from Scott McAdams’, ensuring that there were no inequities in the process. It is truly mystifying that this wasn’t done, and it defies common sense when one considers the notorious issues raised about the reliability of the Diebold Voting machines.

A later internal audit of 5% of precincts revealed 160 extra ballots. If those numbers were extrapolated out across the state and held out, there would be 3,200 extra ballots. Presumably they would have all gone to someone who was on the ballot, which means that Joe Miller may have made serious gains. At least enough to destroy the mootness argument later raised in court.

In spite of the way we were pummeled in the press by Alaska State government officials, then-Lt. Governor Craig Campbell told me during a private conversation that he didn’t blame Joe Miller for what he was doing. “If I was him, I’d probably do the same thing,” he said. I knew that was his way of telling me that it wasn’t personal. He was just doing what he had to do. But I found it rather disturbing that he didn’t appear to have any convictions about the decisions he was making. It was reminiscent of Groucho Marx’ quip, “Those are my principles, if you don’t like them I have others.”

In numerous precincts there were ballots that appeared to be filled out in the same hand. In some precincts it was only dozens, in others, it was hundreds. The Division of Elections dismissed it out of hand, insisting it was nothing to be concerned about. They claimed the Voter Rights Act provides for voter assistance to be offered to the disabled, and to speakers of other languages. But legally, the weight of evidence is on the Division of Elections to account for such anomalies. They never did.

Several other precincts came in with ballots pre-sorted by US Senate candidate with all the write-in ballots segregated. Some of them also lacked the requisite signatures over the seal from supervising election officials, a standard operating procedure to ensure that the seals are not tampered with, and the integrity of the ballots not violated.

What made this especially disturbing was the fact that Division of Elections had entrusted ballot security to a private firm, Goldbelt Security, whose parent corporation, Goldbelt, Inc., had ostensibly received hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of federal no-bid contracts under the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program. Joe Miller had openly challenged the 8(a) no-bid contracts, and had pledged to reform the system. The parent corporation was disciplined in 2008 by the SBA after an Inspector General’s report revealed they had failed to fully disclose the financial interests of their non-native partners, in violation of their Participation Agreement, information that may have affected their eligibility status for the contracts in the first place.

Goldbelt also had multiple board members who were employed by Sealaska Corp., another sworn enemy of Joe Miller. Sealaska directly contributed one hundred thousand dollars to Alaskans Standing Together, a Super-PAC that spent a reported $1.7 million, and whose sole reason for existence was the election of Lisa Murkowski, or perhaps more accurately, the defeat of Joe Miller. Further, Sealaska board member Byron Mallott was Lisa Murkowski’s campaign co-chair. Other prominent Murkowski backers also had ties to Sealaska, including Sealaska board member and State Senator Albert Kookesh, who was also Co-Chairman of the Alaska Federation of Natives, an organization that donated more than three hundred thousand dollars to the efforts of Alaskans Standing Together. Representative Bill Thomas, Co-Chair of the powerful House Finance Committee in the Alaska Legislature was also a Sealaska board member and prominent Murkowski supporter. The campaign manager for Alaskans Standing Together, Jerry Mackie, was Sealaska’s lobbyist.

Sealaska’s support for Murkowski was driven, not only by Joe Miller’s promise to reevaluate the 8(a) no-bid contracting scheme, but by the sitting senator’s pet legislation designed to give large tracts of land in the Tongass National Forest to the Sealaska Corporation. The old growth timber alone was worth untold millions, but it also included future hydroelectric sites that raised the stakes even higher. Again, DOE insisted it was much ado about nothing.

I personally witnessed ballots come in pre-sorted without DOE signatures during the first day of the count, notifying our lawyers and DOE officials alike. Initially I wasn’t going to make a scene, but when I noticed it was a precinct from the Murkowski’s hometown of Ketchikan it raised suspicion. It only heightened my concern when I overheard Murkowski campaign manager Kevin Sweeney tell his observer, “This could be a problem.” Our lawyers later called on me to write an affidavit to be presented at a press conference on site, alleging potential fraud.

I was unprepared for what came next. Bill Yardley from the New York Times openly questioned the veracity of the affidavit on national television, implying that my word was inherently unreliable because I worked for Miller. I was taken aback by his cynicism. Everybody who worked in that room had a stake in somebody’s cause, including the Division of Elections.

Later, as I walked back to my work station, I was accosted by Dan Springer of Fox News. He asked me if we had any evidence of fraud. I told him he needed to talk to our press people. Then he held up the affidavit, almost shouting, “This is garbage! This is garbage!” I just walked away. My attitude was that he was supposed to be a professional. If he didn’t believe what I said, then he didn’t have to report it. But I found his apparent emotional investment in Murkowski’s cause inappropriate for someone passing himself off as a news reporter. I stand by my story. It should raise questions for any impartial observer.

There were also reports of Murkowski intimidation both toward our volunteers, and most importantly, toward some of the Washington DC lawyers who had come to work on our behalf. One lawyer claimed that the Murkowski observer at his table had a dossier on him, which she revealed. That lawyer was later overheard telling the Murkowski observer that he hadn’t challenged very many of the write-in ballots. What could go wrong there? A Washington DC attorney who depends on work in the Capitol for his livelihood being sent the message that a powerful member of the United States Senate knew who he was, and where he lived? They ostensibly had even shown him information relating to his property holdings in his home state, and who knows what else. Perhaps the more disturbing question is how they knew that particular lawyer would be there. The only plausible explanation was that the NRSC, whose executive director had described it as “an incumbent retention organization,” had shared the information.

One night during the count, some of our folks happened to stop into the bar at the infamous Baranof Hotel. They reported seeing the Lt. Governor, DOE staff, Murkowski staff, and members of the press drinking together. Such incidents didn’t tend to make our folks feel any better about the situation. It only fed an overwhelming impression that something was badly amiss.

Notwithstanding our issues with DOE decisions and process, most of the workers were professionals and treated us very well. Before the week was over, we had even forged positive relationships with many of the Murkowski folks. After a long and bitter campaign, there was a surprising level of civility among the observers. It was a grand example of the spirit in which disputes ought to be settled in a free society.

For us, the whole process was never about stealing elections, disenfranchising voters, or fighting over hanging chads. There were foundational principles at stake that also happen to be at the core of Western Civilization: the rule of law, equal justice under the law, elections integrity, etc. It was a fact the press never acknowledged. But after all the salacious nonsense coming from our own press corps, there was one very unlikely voice of reason cutting through the white noise in Juneau. I was transfixed as I stood and listened to a reporter from Al Jezeera TV (of all people) tape his evening report on site. The narration began, “This is more than just a dispute over ballots. It is a battle of ideas.” And so it was; realism versus nominalism. It was the most trenchant analysis I heard during the whole debacle.

It is a sad commentary on the state of American journalism when we have to look to Al Jazeera for a word of truth. It bespeaks the insipid nature of American education. In ages to come, I suspect the story of Western Civilization will be told along such lines. The only question that remains is, “Will it end on our watch?”

(Click HERE for Part 2 of “Stealing an Alaska Election”)

Click HERE to review the dozens of affidavits sworn by Alaskan voters who directly observed the unprecedented 2010 Alaska election fraud and corruption of Alaska’s Division of Elections.

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