By Mary Anne Wentink
Opportunity is supposed to be a good thing, as per Merriam-Webster: “a favorable juncture of circumstances.”[1] In fact, as Americans we normally celebrate it. We boast of our country as being a “land of opportunity” and embrace the ideal of “equal opportunity for all.” Good things, right?
The real question should be: who is defining the “good,” and the “favorable” – especially in a toxic political environment where what could be favorable for one side could be devastating to the other?
Maybe all it takes is a little patience.
Dumbing Down our Kids:
The U.S. school system used to be one of the best in the world. Public schools were established and made mandatory to: 1) teach our kids the skills needed to turn them into productive citizens (reading, writing and arithmetic) and 2) teach them our history and promote general patriotism (civics). Sometime in the late 60’s and early 70’s that all began to change. Teachers became unionized. Largely unnoticed by the general population, school standards began to fall almost immediately thereafter as could soon be documented by a dumbing down of the SAT’s and other student achievement measurements. Kids just weren’t being taught what they’d been taught before. English grammar was one of the first casualties as math was sidelined then reinvented. The New Math they called it. Sort of a pseudo-algebra, it deemphasized arithmetic and concentrated on a cumbersome method totally foreign to the kid’s parents who could no longer help their kids with that part of their homework. The biggest changes were seen, however, in what was now called social studies but was actually a distorted version of history where the U.S. was somehow always portrayed as the villain. Little by little even that was stripped down to bare-bones anti-Americanism emphasizing increasingly racist tropes. Our founding documents were now the products of old white men most of whom were slave-holders. These curricula began being hidden from the parents, and teachers began teaching kids not to confide in their parents. When the decades flew by, the teachers teaching this crap had learned it when they attended school as maybe some of their teachers had learned it. The so-called basics have been swept away almost entirely in favor of Saul Alinsky activism, climate change alarmism, DEI and gender reassignment. Most teachers who have questioned any of this have been forced out of the classroom or thoroughly intimidated by their unions, but of course, by now, most of the teachers are true believers. In favor of equity, the dumbed down SAT’s are now being aside in favor of life experience while entire school districts now report there isn’t a single student within them that can pass a reading or math test at grade level. Many of our schools are now mini-battlegrounds and school shootings, once never contemplated, are now commonplace.
The Vote:
Take our vote, for instance. In all of the shouting back and forth as to whether or not the 2020 election was “stolen”, with the finger-pointing showing questionable activity at some registrar offices and the recorded promises of a voting-machine provider that he could assure the results of that election, no one could provide actual proof of election interference and/or achieve sufficient legal standing to present whatever “proof” they might have. Consequently, the Democrat Party and the mainstream media have dubbed anyone questioning the results of that election as an election “denier” or a Trump stooge, essentially shutting off debate.
That’s one of their favorite tactics, but let’s confront that taboo. Let us even admit up front that there is NO direct linkage between the Democratic Party and the widespread election fraud that would have been needed to steal that or any election.
Let us instead consider a different scenario where the Democratic Party in control of many state legislatures and frequently with the concurrence of a Democratic governor have enacted laws that have made it so easy to cheat that the local authorities are unable to prevent or even detect widescale cheating, i.e., opportunity. Let’s look at California’s voting rules in force today….
· For years, CA law stated that county registrars should remove any voter from their rolls who had not voted in the last Presidential election. That law was repealed. People now stay on the rolls until they inform the registrar that they’re no longer eligible to vote in that district or, and this is rare, the registrar compares their rolls to the county death rolls and removes all dead voters.
· Until recently all CA county registrars maintained their own rolls with no outside connection. Recently the CA Secretary of State initiated a statewide database to connect to all of the county rolls supposedly in support of DMV voter registration. It has since been reported that not only new voters but also voters who for any reason have been removed from a county roll are automatically downloaded to the county rolls, essentially negating any attempt by any county registrar to clean up the county rolls.
· CA used to require all would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship the first time they registered to vote and a photo ID for anyone voting. In a series of changes, the CA legislature:
o Removed the proof of citizenship requirement
o Removed the photo ID requirement
o Allowed more people to vote by mail
o Loosened the signature verification requirements for absentee voting
o Allowed same-day, provisional voting without any form of voter identification (supposedly only to be used by properly registered voters whose names have somehow fallen off the rolls and/or people who cannot find their mail-in ballots – verification procedures not identified and may vary from county to county).
o On all registrations, asked voters to check a box claiming citizenship without any proof thereof
o At every physical polling location, required poll workers to post a list of everyone who has voted during the day.
o And, in its most egregious action to date, made it illegal for any CA local community to set up its own voter identification measures.
In short, the CA state legislature with a super-Democratic Party majority has made it virtually impossible to verify any voter’s eligibility. Let us add to this the availability of local voter registration databases to any who are willing to pay a fee and promise certain safe-guards.
Talk about opening up an opportunity for wide-scale cheating. Let us look at how this works:
· In-Person Voting: A query of the voting rolls can easily identify individual registrants who seldom, if ever, vote. Another query matched against death rolls can also identify individual registrants who are dead. Finally, anyone can check the in-poll list of who’s voted already to find names of those who haven’t voted yet. Where armed with a list of those who’ve never voted or are dead or simply taking advantage of the no voter-id requirement, any individual can show up at the poll and claim to be someone on the poll’s voter list. This can be tricky (at least one fraudulent voter actually claimed to be one of the poll’s workers) but it’s virtually risk-free as few poll workers have the physical strength or inclination to confront such fraud.
· Absentee Voting: This has long been recognized as the most vulnerable to voter fraud, and back when Democrats cared about voter integrity, was a bipartisan concern for all of us which is why so many states restricted it for years. The 2020 election in the midst of a pandemic set all such laws aside and instituted universal vote-by-mail, a practice some states, like CA, have since attempted to maintain by discouraging in-person voting while essentially removing all integrity checks such as meaningful signature verification. There is now nothing to stop anyone from:
o Registering as different individuals from a single address and voting those ballots
o Registering although a noncitizen (and, as documented, sometimes encouraged to do so by Democratic Party candidates)
o Intercepting the ballots of voters who have moved but may not yet have changed their voting address (e.g., college students, active-duty military, a quick check of local moving van companies)
o Stealing legitimate voter ballots and voting them.
And then there is the practice of ballot-harvesting, another questionable practice recently legalized and a method the Democrats have embraced whole-heartedly. The practice itself seems harmless and a boon to those who, for whatever reason, are unable to vote at a poll or even get to a mailbox. There is, however, nothing to assure the integrity of those ballots. Some documented tricks:
· Canvassing old folks’ homes and sometimes filling out the ballots of individuals no longer capable of doing so
· Between harvesting and turning the votes into the local registrar, checking out each ballot and trashing those that don’t vote in the “right” way
· Encouraging folks just to turn over their empty ballots (i.e., no choices made as yet) and then filling those in
· Walking a neighborhood and offering the pickup of the ballot as a public service and again checking each ballot to check how the people voted
· Throwing ballot parties to gather folks together to discuss how they should vote and putting extreme pressure on any who might disagree on any issue or candidate.
Opportunities, all – easy to implement, easy to deny – opportunities to achieve a desired result without actually initiating a coordinated effort – in these cases full Democratic Party control of a district or a state or a nation.
Opportunities such as neglecting normal security procedures when preparing for a Presidential candidate’s speech.
– Mary Anne Wentink
[1] “Opportunity.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/opportunity. Accessed 16 Aug. 2024.
