Dear Mr. Bear;

Thank you for contacting me with your concerns regarding election integrity. Hearing your views helps me better represent Kentucky in the United States Senate.

Voting lies at the very bedrock of our society, and I believe the voting process should be as accurate, user-friendly, and fraud-proof as possible. Trust in democratic elections is crucial to the prosperity of our constitutional republic.

Throughout my career in the United States Senate, I have fought for fair and effective voting procedures, as well as the elimination of fraud. After the 2000 general election, Congress, the states, and various commissions examined our election procedures and voting technologies to determine whether national standards were necessary. As then-Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, I was a principal sponsor of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), designed to improve our election procedures to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. HAVA required states and localities to meet minimum technology and administration requirements, such as requiring a permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity for federal elections. The bipartisan legislation also established grant programs to provide assistance to states and localities to improve election technology. During HAVA debate, I staunchly defended the primacy of state and local control over election administration.

On December 19, 2019, the Senate passed, with my vote, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020 (H.R. 1158), which included a provision I cosponsored provide additional election administration grants to states. This legislation provided an additional $425 million for election security and voting system enhancement for the 2020 fiscal year. Kentucky received another $5 million in federal funding for election security under H.R. 1158. Our total allocation for election security for the country has increased to more than $800 million since fiscal year 2018. President Trump signed H.R. 1158 into law on December 20, 2019.

At my direction, the Senate passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act (P.L. 116-136), which I introduced in the Senate on March 19, 2020.

As part of the CARES Act, Congress appropriated $400 million in new HAVA emergency grants specifically to help states prepare for elections during COVID-19. This funding will allow these states to respond to the challenges presented by COVID-19 in the way they see fit, fulfilling their role as the facilitators of our elections. Kentucky received over $6 million from this CARES Act funding.

To ensure election integrity in the United States, all legal ballots must be counted and any illegal ballots must not be. The process should be transparent on all sides and the courts are here to work through concerns.

Because our Commonwealth has jurisdiction over administering elections, you may wish to contact your representatives in the Kentucky General Assembly by visiting: http://www.lrc.ky.gov and the Kentucky State Board of Election’s office by visiting: https://elect.ky.gov. Please rest assured that I will keep your thoughts in mind as the 117h Congress proceeds.

Sincerely,

MITCH McCONNELL
UNITED STATES SENATOR

I received this in response to my message from the other day.

Below is the text of the messages I have sent to my Senators and Congressman. If you have any opinion about the upcoming events in Congress and our country, please reach out to your own Senators and Representative and let them know.

Dear Congressman Massie / Senator Paul / Senator McConnell,

As a constituent and voter, I ask that you support those of your chamber who will be objecting to the Electoral College vote on January 6.

Over the past few months, I have watched with alarm the rising tide of venom and hatred directed at anyone who dares to question the legitimacy of this year’s election. The shenanigans we have heard about, read about, and seen with our own eyes are unprecedented.

From witnesses who, under oath, testify that ballots were either altered or counted more than once, to video proof that votes were either brought in under shady circumstances or that poll observers were obstructed or lied to, we have seen more than enough to throw a significant amount of suspicion onto the results.

The state legislatures have, for the most part, allowed this to occur and possibly-tainted electoral college slates to be certified. The courts have abdicated their role as an impartial and non-political arbiter of what is and what is not legal. The options available to us to have narrowed and the responsibility for discovering the truth has fallen to the Congress.

If there is no there, there, then the light of an open debate and vote will help to assuage those of us who have misgivings about the integrity of this election. If something untoward is indeed found, then bringing it to light is of the utmost importance.

Please, support those who want to use the powers of Congress to find the bottom of this mess, and either give us proof that the election is legitimate or correct the egregious wrong of a tainted election.

Respectfully,

Daddy J. Bear
Somewhere, Kentucky

Is this a ballot which I see before me,
The paper toward my hand? Come, let me change thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal ambition, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A ballot of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the Marxist-infiltrated braintrust?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I alter.
Thou marshall’st me the way that I was cheating;
And such an instrument I was to abuse.
Mine minions are made the fools o’ the other parties,
Or else worth votes a hundred thousand or more; I see thee still,
And on thy tally and summation gouts of votes,
Which were not so before. There’s no such thing:
It is the dirty business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one halfwit
Voters seem dead, and wicked media abuse
The curtain’d sleep; journalism celebrates
Pale Hecate’s offerings, and ignored mischief,
Alarum’d by his sentinel, the mob,
Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his blatant bias.
With Lenin’s ravishing strides, towards his design
Lies like a rug. Thou sure and firm-set cabal,
Hear not my ‘mistakes’, which side they favor, for sure
Thy very stones prate of my misdeeds,
And take the present election from the people,
Which now votes in it. Whiles I cheat, they win:
Votes to the knave of Obama too cold breath gives.

Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. – Wesley, The Princess Bride

Like a lot of folks, I had high hopes that this election would be done and gone by now.  Months, if not years, of constant bickering, complaining, and campaigning by unruly apes of all stripes have long since worn everyone’s patience paper thin.

The only way that could have happened was for one of the candidates to have walked away with a clear and decisive win last week.  As we all know, that didn’t happen.

So, in a replay of 2000, except this time it’s done four lines of uncut Columbian coke and four tabs of Berkeley-strength LSD, we are drawn into a quagmire of pronouncements, accusations, and shit-flinging.  One side wants us all to believe that the other side is a bunch of dirty, rotten scoundrels who can’t be trusted as far as we can throw them.  The other side wants to declare victory and go home to plot and have a nice nap, but please disregard the man behind the green curtain.

Problem is, they’re both right, or at least partly so.

Larry Correia has good write-ups of the ‘anomalies’ found in the way that votes are being counted in battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.  If you haven’t read them already, do yourself a favor and go on over there.  

I’m not much of an analyst anymore, but even without someone crunching the numbers, this all looks off to me, with off being the most polite way I can put it.  There’s a lot of smoke obscuring our view of what’s going on while the votes are counted.  I just wonder how much fire there is.

I’m not going to surprise anyone when I say that I didn’t support the Biden candidacy, and I have, to put it mildly, grave misgivings about a Biden presidency.  Leave out the possibility that he won’t make it through his term and is replaced by Kamala Harris and take him at his word that he’s fit for the office and will serve out at least one four-year term. 

Joe Biden has been a wart on the ass of American politics since I was in diapers.  My political coming of age happened while he was running for president the first time, all while openly attacking a black Supreme Court nominee and black young men in general.

So, now the country will have to withstand weeks, if not months, of political and judicial knife fights.   Fledgling peace deals in the Middle East will, at best, stay in an uncertain stasis, while China and Iran will exploit our inattention to our detriment.  That’s nothing to say about how the government will be basically paralyzed as we head into another economic downturn brought about by the latest reaction to Covid-19.

In short, we don’t need this right now, if ever.

That’s the short term.  The current crisis will end in January, when we will open up a whole new batch of post-Christmas crises.  The long term will make this look like a polite Victorian afternoon tea.

If Biden wins, there will be, at least, the perception that the election was gained through a grand exercise in ballot-box stuffing, undead hordes with voter registration cards, and the connivance of at least a few federal agencies.

If Trump threads the needle and ekes out a win, or at least a tie that throws the whole thing to the House of Representatives, then the last four years will have been nothing but the opening act for a three-ring circus of rioting, gridlock, and demagoguery that will last until at least 2024.

So, we are going to either see vote tallies that are soiled by opacity and a general feeling of sleaze on the part of a large number of Americans, or we are going to see an election decided in the most legalistic way imaginable.  

Either way, our faith in semi-clean elections and orderly transitions of power from one president to another are going to be shaken for a generation.  

No matter what, half of the American electorate is going to be mad as hell, and they aren’t going to take it anymore. They will believe that the election was stolen from them, and one side will be right. 

People don’t want to understand the nuances of voter registration and voting laws in Sheboygan or Punxsutawney.  They want a clear, unambiguous, up or down vote that they can point to and, even if they lost, say that the rules were fair and were applied fairly.  Shenanigans at the polls or arcane legal and political maneuvers don’t do that.

God forbid that something should happen, or almost happen, to either Biden or Trump.  That would be enough to get their most fervent supporters into the streets for a good old fashioned insurrection.

So, we’ll see.  The last time things were this muddled, President Hayes sold out to the southern states to gain the presidency.  I wonder what Biden or Trump are willing to bargain with to win this time.