By Monica Showalter
An upstate New York printing company on a no-bid contract mailed out voter registration cards to New York’s Nassau County voters ahead of the June 27 primary — and somehow, everyone who got one is now a registered Democrat.
That’s weird stuff given that 60% of the registered voters in that county are Republican. Well, now they are all Democrats, at least until “corrected” registration cards can be mailed out.
Hey, just a flub, they’re saying. Nothing to see here, move along.
According to the New York Post:
An upstate printer has once again screwed up downstate election materials, this time by mailing registration cards to Nassau County’s nearly 1 million voters — identifying them all as Democrats.
“It’s a terrible error. People are upset. People are angry. There is a lot of confusion,” GOP County Executive Bruce Blakeman seethed at a Tuesday press conference.
Democrats make up about 40 percent of the county’s 972,000 voters, according to state Board of Election records from February.
Blakeman, though, who runs the Republicans, is a piece of work.
He can be heard dismissing his own party voters’ concerns as emotionalism and assuring everyone else that there’s nothing to see here, just a little printer error that doesn’t involve elected officials (who gave that company its no-bid contract):
He sounds like a very naive man at best, an odd thing for a guy from street-and-corruption-savvy New York who has equally street-and-corruption-savvy voters to answer to.
“I don’t think the Democratic Party is engaged in a conspiracy to ummm create havoc in their own primaries.”
I’ve lived in New York and I know what those people, including the Long Islanders, are like. I can hear the catcalls on that one. Actually, there are plenty of things worth investigating here.
Perhaps the Dems don’t want to create havoc in their own primaries but we do know they might like to create havoc in Republican primaries, when no one can vote in them. Is that what’s going on, or is this an anti-Trump move from the GOPe? Is the fix in for some favorite in one of the races, to keep the Trumpsters at bay, Blakey? Or is this switch in voter registration a bid to shake out the GOP base and leave the lo-fo, half-commited voters that both parties have, into the Democrat column as new Democrats, the better to harvest their votes?
Blakeman is remarkably incurious, resembling the same sort of GOP election officials we’ve seen in Georgia and Arizona.
All kinds of stuff could be going on with this one and it’s striking that Blakeman wants to excuse everyone before the matter can even be investigated.
To start, funny how this printing company keeps making mistakes in its relatively simple task to program correctly and proofread what they’re printing. That right there is a red flag.
They’re two for two on the mistake front, having made a different “mistake” in the 2020 election in nearby Brooklyn, sending ballots with one name on them accompanied by mail-in envelopes with another name on them.
According to Gothamist, in a piece dated Sept. 29, 2020:
On Tuesday, the New York City Board of Elections announced a plan to print and mail new absentee ballots to nearly 100,000 voters who received erroneous envelopes in their absentee ballot packages. The decision comes after an unknown number of Brooklyn voters received absentee ballots with the wrong name and address printed on the return envelope.
“It is essential that confidence be established in this process and that we make certain that all of the voters who potentially have a problem have a full and fair opportunity to remedy that problem,” said Michael Ryan, the executive director of the New York City Board of Elections. “It is also essential to point out that this is a vendor error,” he added, noting that the Rochester-based company, Phoenix Graphics, has agreed to pay for the cost of the additional printing of the ballots, while the Board will ensure those new ballots are processed appropriately.
This sounds like the kind of trickery we’ve seen described by Jay Valentine in his accounts of all the rigging shenanigans voting officials pull to get loose ballots floating around out there for ballot harvesters to get their hands on.
Then-governor Andrew Cuomo actually spotted that that may have been what was going on, asking that Phoenix Graphics only mail out new envelopes, not new ballots. Otherwise, voters would have been left with two valid ballots and one envelope, something that could have enabled some to vote twice, perhaps by mail as well as in person, or else left a lot of unmarked valid ballots in trash cans for the harvesters to get hold of and fill out. The request was ignored either by the company’s decision or elected officials’ decision (I could not verify) and Phoenix mailed out new ballots along with new envelopes.
A second red flag is that all the foofaraw around the first mistake was supposed to be “fixed” by having county officials go to the printing plant to double-check and supervise the activity to make sure no mistakes happened again, as well as end no-bid contracts.
Ryan told the Kings County Democratic Committee the BOE plans a new approach going forward, with plans to bid out the absentee ballot work for the next election and possibly send staff to oversee the actual printing and distribution of ballots.
Somehow, that didn’t happen. Why?
A third red flag is the money factor, starting with the contract.
The company was awarded a very controversial no-bid contract that shut out other vendors, including minority and women-owned businesses, who could have done the same job at a cheaper cost, according to a local paper, Bklynr, and that didn’t have a benign history.
A 2015 audit by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli criticized the BOE’s prior no-bid contract with Phoenix, finding taxpayers would have saved $2.4 million had the board sought competitive proposals.
So they seem to be getting inflated contracts, which may have extended to 2023 even as they keep blithely making “mistakes.”
Another money factor is that these “mistakes” come at tremendous cost to the company — $300,000 for the latest mistake in Nassau, $10,000 for the earlier one in Brooklyn. What independent printing company can handle losses like that except if they are being handsomely overcompensated? Was that what was going on? They seem to have an abnormally large cushion for “mistakes.”
Yet another money factor from the local presses is that the company donates to Republicans in the main, but that looks incomplete as information and could be misleading.
Does it matter that Phoenix Graphics was a major recipient of printing projects from the now-late Rep. Louise Slaughter, a Rochester-area Democrat who was one of the most flamingly Bush-deranged leftwing pro-abortion congresswomen in memory, and very close to the Democrat establishment? Were the Phoenix donations ideological at all or was something else going on? Were they straw donors to weak Republicans in the primary to ensure that certain favored Democrats got elected in the general? These games have happened in San Diego — they may be happening elsewhere, too. And who did the top guys donate to? That I have not been able to find out, but it might be relevant as to why the “mistakes” keep happening.
The primary will be held on June 27, and the voting pattern in District 3 of Nassau County is interesting.
It was one of 18 districts that voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election while being won or held by a Republican in 2022.
There’s also District 4 in Nassau County, with the same pattern:
NY-04 is the second-wealthiest congressional district in New York, and among the wealthiest nationally.[4] It was one of 18 districts that voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election while being won or held by a Republican in 2022. It is also the most Democratic district in the country to be held by a Republican, with a partisan lean of D+5.
Really? The old coat with no coattails in that area? Seems like a prime area for paying very close attention to fraud given that voters motivated to vote don’t usually split their tickets, though it’s possible, what with the Long Island housewives said to be Trump-averse, yet somehow, no one knows why that happened.
Who’s on the ballot may have clues, too. Based on the official state list of certified candidates, it appears they are all just local judges. One name in Nassau County that sticks out, though, would be from the congressional race that will be decided in 2024: George Santos, who represents District 3. He’s a GOP rep under indictment for various frauds and says he won’t run again in 2024. His victory in the 2022 midterm was said to have come as a surprise. Obviously, Democrats want that seat back badly, so given the voter composition, any little rigging to give the Dems a voter registration boost could probably push them over the top. That couldn’t be operative here, could it?
It could be a state or local race a ‘mistake’ could boost, or it could even be a trial run for a national race. Anything could be behind this odd little mistake of casting every voter as a Democrat, but to insist that nothing untoward is going on — in Nassau’s volatile swing districts — is a bit strange for a Republican to be assuring about.
One final factor: “Mistakes” tend to occur in multiples, in clusters — as we have seen in Colorado, Riverside County, California, and Arizona. Why do those ‘mistakes’ always happen in the same places?
In this age of voter distrust of elections, every angle must be investigated in this Nassau County case. That may mean getting rid of these RINO Republicans who play Mr. Magoo any time something potentially corrupt happens that could undermine the GOP’s capacity to win. There’s no ratdog in them for spotting inevitably malign Democrat intentions or historic practices, they’ve always got the Spirit of George Bush in them, never suspecting that Democrats may want their won seats for themselves and seek to shrink the GOP’s already miserably low House majority, or other offices.
It’s wretched stuff to see the GOP trying to excuse these ‘mistakes’ which always go in one direction. They’ve got to start roaring like a lion or they’ll be field mice for the big cats among the Dems whose operating principle remains ‘by any means necessary.’