During a playoff game between the San Francisco Giants and the Chicago Cubs in 1989, Will Clark was up to bat with the bases loaded. The pitcher was Greg Maddux. The catcher went out to the mound to ask Maddux about how he wanted to pitch to Clark. Maddux said that he wanted to use fast balls away. Unfortunately for Maddux, Will Clark read his lips and he hit the next pitch for a homerun. Later Will Clark admitted that he knew what pitch was coming. This is why every pitcher today covers his mouth with his glove when talking on the mound. It probably would have been wiser for Clark to keep his mouth shut as well, because once pitchers learned about this they quickly fixed the problem.
In the recent Colorado recall election two state senators strongly in favor of gun control were recalled. This was a major victory for the NRA and for gun advocates across the country. It was also a major defeat for Mayor Bloomberg, who donated a ton of money to defeat the recall elections. But the real story here may be something else. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairman of the DNC and easily one of the dumbest people ever elected to congress, said “voter suppression” was the reason her candidates lost. The candidate, Angela Giron, repeated the charge on CNN:
Most people immediately dismissed this as traditional Democratic sour grapes. Liberal Democrats are always shocked to learn that a high percentage of people don’t buy the crap they are peddling. But the real problem for Democrats is that she just may have been telling the truth:
Giron: What this story really is about, it’s about voter suppression. When Colorado has voted by mail — 70 percent of Coloradans vote by mail — and we didn’t have access to that mail ballot, I mean, I —
This just may be an admission by Wassermanshultz and Giron that vote by mail is used by Democrats to gain additional votes through voter fraud. When Democrats were denied the vote by mail scam, they lost big time. The problem is more likely to be voter fraud when vote by mail is allowed rather than voter suppression when it isn’t.
Here is how that works and why it is so hard to control Imagine someone in a nursing home who is registered to vote, but not all that active. A nice smiling young man or woman shows up and offers to help them vote. They are very nice and even help them fill out the ballot and put it in the mail for them. Now imagine this happening over and over again including in some cases where the voter may not even speak English. Is it really a surpise that a high percentage of these vote by mail ballots miraculously turn out to vote for the Democratic candidate in far higher percentages than for those who show up at the polls?
It is bad enought that Democrats have no problem with people voting who are not required to identify themselves. At least somebody shows up. But with massive vote by mail, how on earth can anyone be sure who is doing the actual voting? How can they even be sure this is truly a secret ballot? Do 70% of hte people really need to vote by mail because it is too hard to vote in person? Republicans have only two choices here. They either change the laws, to remove this type of potential abuse, or they become better at playing the game than Democrats.
I think, possibly for the first time in her life, Debbie Wasserman-Shultz was right about something. I do think that the lack of the ability to vote by mail did impact this important election. Republicans should study the results in Colorado and learn from this experience. We may have a Will Clark moment here where a political opponent accidentally told the truth without realizing people can read lips.
TDM