Municipal elections next week
Can our government audit itself? So far, the answer is No.
My friend is going to be an election judge for the Minneapolis municipal election.
What’s at stake?
13 new city council members, all 4-year terms.
A (new) mayor.
Park board members… etc. etc. (Minneapolis has a $160-million per annum budget organization called the Minneapolis Parks Board that is partially tax-payer funded… similar in that way to the Minnesota Historical Society, also $100M+ per year, more than 60% tax-payer funded—it’s our local Ministry of Truth, founded 3 years after the Smithsonian Institution.)
At 8pm, on Nov 4, my friend will be asked to sign a summary slip, a receipt of sorts, that the tabulator prints out at poll closure, that says basically, ~I attest that the tabulator tallied the votes for all candidates accurately. This will later be used to certify the city-wide election. (There will not be a check that voters match ballots match reported results until weeks after the election.)
Of course, no one in her position, as an election judge off the street, could possibly know how the vendor programmed the tabulator, nor whether that programming would accurately create ballot images to then interpret all the voter’s oval selections.
In this conversation, I mention to her that there’s no need to fight too hard on this, but she may as well ask, How can I know?, to get a few others to think.
Minnesota government has shown to be incapable of auditing itself, in anything. Daycare fraud, Covid fraud, Medicaid fraud, election fraud. It is in full preservation mode as tax-payer resources continue to go into the pockets of the various branches and the bureaucracy.
Minnesotans are learning that cheating in various ways has become legal. It is perfectly simple for non-citizens to vote (the 2023 Drivers License for All Act), even though I doubt many non-citizens are physically going in-person to the polling precincts: I think their registrations are used by assigning ballots in the software databases, never to be audited, while political consultants moan about barely losing this or that election.
This is not a D or R question or even a Communist vs Moderate/Socialist D question (if you live in Minneapolis), but about whether Minnesotans want to continue tolerating cheating, especially if it is illegal, and even if it is legal—legal cheating should be revisited immediately.
Part of all this is why I continue to patiently wait for the Executive Order that will ban mail-in voting. And then some further action which catches the third-party software vendors, those that check-in voters, those that tally votes, and those that report the votes, in a net.
If we want to have a functioning government—which if we do, then I think should maybe be at most 10% of its current size—then we must, in my opinion, have many more free-thinking, non-politically affiliated, non-lobbyist dominated, type of people in the legislature to slash and amend laws. In four years few will attach a D or R to their name, or will do so more reluctantly.
This is not easy. But I think we are nearing the point where we are ready, collectively, for it. To clean up instead of doubling down in denial. Keep imagining positively as we clear the current toxicity. Even after that is done there will continue to be more to do, as the flow of our experience of life and as Life, continues.
