We Need You at the Montgomery County Fair!

"Pigs, Pies and Politics"

Sign up to volunteer HERE>.  Extra info on the sign-up site.

That's right - Party and Politics. AUGUST 12-20 -Montgomery County Ag Fair

We need folks to welcome visitors and sign up fair-goers for Republican activities. You can volunteer, students can volunteer, Candidates and their reps can volunteer.

At the MCGOP Big Top Booth (late morning thru evening). Candidates welcome. MCGOP Committeewomen Martha Schaerr and Laura Benson are coordinating our very popular political Big Top!

Sign up to volunteer HERE>.  Extra info on the sign-up site.

For info on the Ag Fair click the photo.

Election Season is Just Beginning!

By Ann Hingston

Our terrific Republican nominees must now go to work and engage, seek media attention and public opportunities to introduce themselves to voters of all parties. Let’s help them.

One predictable obstacle is overcoming the Democrat narrative that the 2022 election is over because Democrats outnumber Republicans in Montgomery County. It is a statement the media uses often to justify their lazy habit of ignoring Republican candidates and their shameful neglect of informing county residents that they do indeed have choices in the General Election.

It is time we call out the media and naysayers who say the election is over. Let’s provide them with some significant facts:

Why does it take Montgomery County longer to process mail and provisional ballots?

By Nahid Khozeimeh and David Naimon

A lot of Montgomery County and Maryland political eyes are on Montgomery County as we are now the only Maryland local jurisdiction continuing to process mail-in and provisional ballots, and the number one question we continue to receive is, “What’s taking you so long?”  This is not new — we’ve almost always been the last county to complete the canvass — but there understandably has been a lot more interest this year, with the large number of mail-in ballots and a few close races. Here are some of the reasons:

1. Greatest number of voters and mail-in ballots. Montgomery County, which has 670,000 eligible voters (more than 30% more than any other jurisdiction) received almost 75,000 mail-in ballots to process. That’s 50% more mail-in ballots than the next closest jurisdiction (Baltimore County, with almost 50,000 ballots), and more than we’ve ever had outside of 2020.
2. Greatest number of “web-delivered” mail-in ballots. “Web-delivered” ballots, which should be known as “Web-Delivered, Self-Printed and Mailed, Hand-Duplicated Ballots” slow down the canvassing process considerably. In addition to the extra work for voters to print the ballot, find and address the envelope to us, and provide postage, we need to duplicate the 8 1/2 x 11 paper ballots we receive onto ballot paper. Most of them are hand-duplicated by bipartisan teams, and some bipartisan teams have been using the ballot marking device. Either way, it takes more than twice as long for us to process these ballots. Montgomery County had a greater percentage of web-delivery ballot requests (16% of mail-in ballot requests) than any other jurisdiction in Maryland. We’ve canvassed about 7,000 web-delivered ballots so far.
3. Among greatest number of provisional ballots. Montgomery and Prince George’s counties have more than 8,000 provisional ballot applications each, many of which came from voters who requested mail-in ballots and either did not receive them or did not know if their voted mail-in ballot had been received before deciding to vote in person. Voters who lost, damaged, or made a mistake on their mail-in ballots also may vote a provisional ballot. We’re not sure why Montgomery and Prince George’s County have more provisional ballots applications than other jurisdictions, but we’ve heard about a lot of U.S. Postal Service issues, and plan to look into whether they affected Montgomery and Prince George’s counties differently than others. In any event, each provisional ballot requires staff research on the voter’s eligibility, and that takes time.
4. Available space and staff for the canvass during the summer months. Due to increased storage needs, our board office no longer has enough space to host a canvass or a recount (the 2018 canvass sessions and recounts were at our office). We originally planned to use a high school gymnasium, but because we knew we’d still be canvassing after August 1 (when high school fall sports practices begin), that option was unavailable and we were very fortunate that Montgomery College-Germantown allowed us to use a great space in its Bioscience Education Center. Of course, we always only have the room that the space provides, and this year (like most workplaces) summer vacation season and COVID affected staffing as well. We have had roughly 25 two-person bipartisan canvass teams working 8 hours a day, 5-6 days per week, but we might have been able to squeeze in some more in a larger space.
5. The process of preparing ballots for scanning (counting) and determining voter intent. We could speed up the process if we simply checked the ballot envelopes for timeliness and a signed oath and put them through the scanner. If we did so, the scanner would declare overvotes that really are votes where the voter crossed out one choice and picked another. (If the voter had voted in person, they could have requested another ballot. Mail-in voters can do that too, but many don’t bother to do so, since it’s much harder and takes more time.)  Our bipartisan canvass teams check each ballot for any ambiguities that require Board members to determine voter intent. For example, if a voter filled in the circle for candidate A, then crossed it out with an X and filled in the circle for a candidate B, the scanner would simply read two markings and count it as an overvote, which loses that voter’s vote. The Board can determine if it was a vote for candidate B and not candidate A, and the ballot can be hand-duplicated without the mistaken mark and counted to reflect the voter’s intent. 
6. Sorting ballots by precinct before counting them. This is time-consuming but also useful both to maintain accuracy and to be better prepared for possible recounts. If we didn’t do this sorting and had a recount that is less than county-wide, we might have to find particular ballots among all of our ballots before starting a recount — not quite finding a needle in the haystack, but pretty close.

All of the members of our Board understand the desire to get the results as soon as possible, and we’re doing what we can to keep things moving, and welcome suggestions for improvements. Our task in Montgomery County is larger than the tasks in other jurisdictions, and we also know that accuracy, not speed, comes first.

_____ 

The writers are president and secretary, respectively, of the Montgomery County Board of Elections. 

TO SEE THE COUNTY ELECTION SITE CLICK HERE>

The Reality of January 6^th Part 1

To understand January 6^th you have to understand the backdrop of January 6^th. 

It is crucial to the January 6^th narrative that there was no vote fraud.  The position is mandatory to paint January 6^th as an insurrection instead of an act of patriotism.  That is why many Democrats become rabid when you mention the vote fraud in the 2020 election.  If there was massive vote fraud – Trump was right (again) and his opponents were wrong (again).

There were enough “in kind” contributions from the mainstream media, social media, and various Internet companies to throw the election.  They hampered Trump's message and hindered his fundraising efforts (such Twitter/Facebook/Google cutting off some Trump fundraising in the days before the election).  But that is interference not fraud.

Let’s talk vote fraud.  It is odd when you look at vote fraud cases, the majority of vote fraud used to occur in the primaries.  Typical is the Compton Council race where Isaac Galvan conspired with Jace Dawson (another primary opponent) to defeat Andre Spicer in the Democrat primary runoff election by having people from outside the district vote for Galvan.  In fact most vote fraud that was prosecuted prior to 2016 appeared to occur in Democrat Primary Elections That's not good, it means Republicans were facing the best cheaters in the Democrat party as their general election opponent.  In the 2016 election there were about two dozen cases of non-citizen voting mostly from two counties that looked closely at the general election for some reason, and an uptick in mail-in fraud.

But the 2020 election introduced a new element, widespread mail-in ballot use, that was ripe for fraud.  This is demonstrated dozens of cases like Trenae Ryesha Rainey, a nursing home employee who ordered, filled out, and returned two dozen mail-in ballots for residents without their knowledge during the 2020 general election. Or Krista Michelle, Conner who sent in her deceased mother's mail-in ballot.  The 2020 election had few non-citizen voting convictions but about 30  mail-in ballot fraud and duplicate voting convictions primarily in the general election.

The claim there was 2020 vote fraud was denied by the media, the opposing political party and much of the “establishment” Republican Party.  Fraud investigations were not vigorously, thoroughly, or competently pursued anywhere.

Election Officials by and large resisted the investigations and were uncooperative.  What investigators were able to piece together were:

• Numerous problems with chain of custody and other election procedures
• Interference in the election by non-election officials (mostly Zuckerberg funded partisans)
• Various weaknesses in election machines
• Communication hardware (wireless cards and such) in actual voting machines.
• Problems with voter rolls,
• Some destruction of records and log files 
• Accusations of late or oddly sourced mail-in ballots.

But the lack of cooperation and failure of various secretaries of state to bring down the hammer and force a real investigation left us with an inconclusive picture.  Putting a number to how bad the election day machine fraud was, and whether it changed the election, is not possible with current information.

Trump's two legal teams assembled prior to the election were forced by the woke mob and some establishment Republicans to withdraw before the election.  He was unable to secure competent replacements, in my opinion, from reading some of their legal briefs. The evidence wasn't laid out in a clear way, and various unproven theories and back of the envelope calculations made their way into the filings. I did not find the filings persuasive and was not sure there was enough provable fraud until “True the Vote” laid out its case. 

What we do know is 2020 election in Fulton County Georgia and some of the surrounding counties was a complete mess on all levels with less than 5% of the chain of custody documentation filled out in Fulton County and excessive numbers of mail-in ballots (literally truck-loads) ordered too late to mail out.

We have known for a long time that elections in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major cities aren't clean.  The fraudulent vote in Chicago has been said to be about 10% since 1960.  Yet the Republican establishment apparently can't be bothered to take an interest and seems to treat it as a cost of doing business, in part because it is a fools errand to ask the winning Democrat cheaters to investigate their own cheating.

As bad as inner city elections are, mail-in balloting is worse.  The mail-in ballots were supposed to be returned by mail, or dropped in drop boxes, which in theory preserves chain of custody.  The only people touching ballots between the voter and the election officials were supposed to be USPS personnel acting as agents of the election officials.  But in some states (like Maryland) “ballot harvesting” is permitted.  “Ballot harvesting” is when an unlicensed unregulated agent picks up ballots from voters and delivers them to drop boxes.  While “Ballot Harvesting” may be legal in some states, it should be banned since it breaks chain of custody.  What happened far too often (7% of the time in swing states according to “True the Vote”) was that the ballots didn't come from voters but from partisan organizations.

Ballot trafficking is when ballots are delivered from partisan groups to drop boxes by people they hire, typically for $10 per ballot.  This is illegal and was done anyway in swing states.  There is no way to know how the partisan organizations got the ballots to begin with.

The REAL election fraud was by mail-in ballot trafficking.  “True the Vote” used GPS data and drop box video to match people to drop box locations. They identified cell phones that got within licking distance of multiple drop boxes and scrutinized what they were doing. There have been fact-checks of the evidence from True the Vote.  To summarize the position of the fact-checkers: “We don't like 'True the Vote', and it is completely normal for people to pick up hundreds of ballots from partisan organizations (like Stacey Abrams' Atlanta office and 2 Democrat Atlanta non-profits), deliver them to 28 or more drop boxes in 5 counties, fan the ballots to make the bar or QR codes visible and take a picture (to get their $10 per ballot), then drop them by the dozen into drop boxes.”

The amount of ballot trafficking exceeds the amount needed to overturn the election in swing states.   The level of ballot trafficking blows the “elections are fair” narrative out-of-the-water.  It also undermines the voting machines are safe narrative. If ballot trafficking can occur on this scale without leaks to news organizations, a large scale voting machine fraud program is also possible.

Yet there has been no serious investigation by the Georgia Secretary of State (a Republican).  Establishment Republicans used to care about elections.  The 12,000 vote cheating in the 1994 Sauerbrey vs Glendening election was challenged.  But as demonstrated by the Sauerbrey campaign’s lawsuit, having the Democrat winners who cheated investigate their own cheating is not a winning proposition.  However the 2020 election brought cheating to a wholesale level with 2000 ballot traffickers who drop boxed hundreds of thousands of ballots in the swing states to turn the election. Both “Never Trump” (establishment) Republicans and Democrats have ignored the evidence or taken a mulligan on investigating it.

The difference may be Trump.  Establishment Republicans and Democrats worked hand-in-glove to persecute an innocent Trump when he was in office. Perhaps Establishment Republicans and Democrats are still buddies.  Or it could simply be that establishment incumbents of all stripes routinely cheat against their primary opponents and don't want elections to be examined closely.

Since it is obvious from the “True the Vote” investigation that there was massive fraud, it is curious that establishment politicians, Democrats, and news media claim there was none.  Just to be clear – there is no benign explanation for the “True the Vote” data.  But then the anti-Trump narrative has to be maintained.

Ballot harvesting and ballot trafficking in federal elections must be made federal crimes. Further, there should be a right to force a 100% audit and 100% canvass of a limited number of problem precincts.  A 100% ballot audit/canvass won't stop fraud – but it will give us some solid data on how bad things are.  The 100% audits/canvasses must be done by an independent group with complete access to all records.

The Democrats have been fighting to stop fair elections for a while now by opposing Voter-ID, opposing the cleaning of voter rolls, making it easier for illegal aliens to vote, and expanding mail-in voting among other measures.  “Dirty” voter rolls are required for massive mail-in ballot fraud.  There has to be a pool of voters on the rolls that are guaranteed not to vote.   The position of the Democrats is unsupportable. Having insecure elections invites fraud by everybody.

 We need to elect Republicans who will fight back, Republicans who will take election integrity and election interference seriously. And we need to thank the patriots who showed up on January 6^th, not condemn them, because, after all, they were right.

God bless everyone and God bless America.

_________

Paul Agle is a Member of the Montgomery County Republican Central Committee.

MCGOP LEADERSHIP CHANGES

Del Lamiman received the gavel (sledgehammer) from Reardon Sullivan at the MCGOP meeting last week. Sullivan stepped down as Chair to continue his campaign for Montgomery County Executive. Mayor Lamiman as 1st Vice Chair moved into the position pending a full Committee vote.

Republican Delegates Rally in Clarksburg

Incumbent Republican Delegates Trent Kittleman and Reid Novotny are joined by candidates Lisa Kim and Jenny Zeng for a campaign rally at the Clarksburg Tavern last week. District 9 and 9A represent northern Montgomery from Clarksburg to Damascus. It's another opportunity for Republican leadership representing Montgomery County in Annapolis.

Coming Civil War Part I

Recently fellow conservative, Kurt Schlichter posted an article in Townhall asking the question, “Are we looking at another Civil War?”

Before laying out the myriad of reasons, he observes that, “while the chance of civil conflict is low, violence is not only possible but it has repeatedly been used by the left as a means of making political change in America”. He then spells out the long synopsis of the evidence that the left clearly remains open to using violence to achieve its goals. 

I have to agree that the “chance of civil conflict is low” but if one looks at the extended reactions of the Left to Donald Trump’s election, up to and including the left’s more recent hysteria concerning the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade, one has to ask “how can we not have a civil war”.

Let’s looks at the signs:

• The left is increasingly resorting to violence whenever they lose on the political battlefield; 
  • Burning, looting, tearing down statues after George Floyd incident)
  • Vandalizing and firebombing 23 Pro-life organizations after the Dobbs decision.
• The Left’s relentless demands to change the election system when they lose;
  • They immediately propose new and novel ways of electing public officials (jungle primaries, ranked choice voting, more allegedly “non-partisan” ballots;
  • Democrats’ abandonment of bipartisan election oversight 
• Constant push by Democrats to cancel, shutdown or even incarcerate their opponents
• The Democrats’ toleration and promotion of vilence against their opponents.

The only thing keeping American from devolving into civil war is the refusal of conservatives to emulate the violence of the ANTIFA cells and the BLM organizers across the county. 

We, then, have to ask what will it take to release the bottled-up rage of the Right? We have to assume tolerance of injustice and oppression is not infinite. The drafters of the Declaration of Independence were clear on that….”It is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new Guards for their future security….”

The question is, can we pull out of the long decline of America at the hands of corrupt, incompetent, and terminally foolish ruling elite that controls our major institutions without bloodshed?

______ 

William Richbourg is a Member of the Montgomery County Republican Central Committee

We're Looking for an Angel

After so many years and so much activity our Republican Headquarters entrance and lobby floor is all the worse for wear. We have a donor who will contribute the flooring but we need to pay their cost for the removal and installation - about $840. If you can help us out contact former Chairman Dennis Melby at [email protected].  If a Club, Organization, Business or super supporter could help out we'd appreciate it.

“One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”

There’s more on our minds this Fourth of July than fireworks and cookouts. While areas around our great County may light up the night skies in remembrance of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we must also acknowledge that we are living in complicated times that require deeply thought-out solutions. 

Whereas we may have come from diverse backgrounds, via different pathways, purporting different occupations, and speak different languages, we must be united by belief in a simple truth: that we are all created equal, that we are all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

It must be noted that our Government is unique in that it is a Government of the people. It MUST represent their will. Its officers may sometimes go astray, but that is not a reason for abandoning the principles of our Government. The heart of Government rests with the heart of the people. It is from that source that we must look for all genuine reform. We must work together to improve public safety in the County; to move our education system towards concentrating on science, technology engineering, arts and math, to prepare our student for the jobs of the future; and work diligently to bring jobs back to Montgomery County. 

As we are coming up on the primary elections, I am reminded of the historical lessons of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The pair became estranged after a bitterly fought presidential election, ultimately won by Jefferson, and the founding fathers ceased to talk. But after years, they set their differences aside, and began writing letters to each other about things other than politics. 

We must come together. 

I believe that together we can make the future of Montgomery County our best years, but we must rise above cynicism, doubt, and identity politics to perfect this County we love so much.

Since 1776, the Declaration of Independence has shaken the globe. We must acknowledge the work that started in the 1700’s continues to this day. We all know that Government cannot solve all of our problems and that all citizens are keenly responsible for the success of this County. Let us continue to move forward together to make positive change in the County.

Have a happy, safe and blessed Independence Day!!!