BQof02

[BQof02 @RealAaron2002]

@mlh725 @FSociety_1942 @spencerpratt They codified it in Cali. It's legal cheating.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

@tedlieu @spencerpratt Ted,

Can you can point to any THIRD PLACE candidate who already conceded her race, who miraculously received MORE mail-in ballots than the FIRST PLACE candidate?

At any point in American history.

Literally any reference for this?

Go.

[Jason Bassler @JasonBassler1]

A couple of skate punks showing more spine than 96% of the chest thumping “MAGA patriots.”

When regular people start doing this, we don’t just reclaim our privacy... we reclaim the country.

[Jake Szetela @Jake_Szetela]

@QuietPart25 @m5reci @bennyjohnson Ok let’s say that’s true. Now explain why bass’ numbers have also sank. It just so happens the candidate that needed the bump leap frogs even the frontrunner incumbent?! lol

[BQof02 @RealAaron2002]

@GregoryRGreco @m5rec @bennyjohnson Also, they LOVE the 3rd place candidate. Not the one in 1st place, who is the incumbent and leading all the polls. They hate that person and have all, in unison, decided to vote for the 3rd place option. Duh. It's really simple.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🚨🇺🇸🇮🇱 Tulsi Gabbard allegedly received the Israel critical threat report 18 days ago, and resigned three days later.

Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar says the report was deliberately slow-rolled until Section 224 passed the House, giving Israel unprecedented access to U.S. intelligence and defense technology.

The U.S. just labeled Israel its most aggressive spy threat and handed them the keys to the vault the same week.

"You just robbed the bank. Want to be the bank manager?"

[DC_Draino @DC_Draino]

Mail in ballots received before election day:

20% Raman

Mail in ballots received after election day:

37% Raman

Does Raman even believe this fraud?

Oh wait she doesn’t b/c she already gave a concession speech.

[BQof02 @RealAaron2002]

@attncka @aaaaaaaa20030 @MAGAVoice Never fails.

[Robby Starbuck @robbystarbuck]

ChatGPT can’t find a single example of a 3rd place candidate surging, days AFTER Election Day, to overtake 2nd place.

It couldn’t find 1 example in all of American history.

That’s what’s happening with Nithya Raman & Spencer Pratt.

Los Angeles has 3rd world country elections.

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

Mail-ins arriving before Election Day:
🔵 Bass: 38.1%
🔴 Pratt: 27.9%
🔵 Raman: 20%

Mail-ins arriving after Election Day:
🔵 Raman: 37% (+17% surge)
🔵 Bass: 34.9% (-3% drop)
🔴 Pratt: 19% (-9% drop)

Who are we kidding here? This is fraud.

[Kostas Moros @MorosKostas]

Protip: if you don't want the integrity of your slowest-in-the-developed-world elections questioned, maybe don't have the Governor say there's a "contingency plan" if they think Dems woulda been locked out of the general election for the next Governor.

[Paul @LA_Multi_Fam]

Can someone explain to me how Raman is suddenly pulling in more dem votes then Bass?

Her polling pre election was weaker then Bass and on election day she was getting far less of the votes. She was crying the day after election day! I don't even think she believes this turnaround lol?

[Kelly @keleigh1959]

@Badgerboy71 @TheSCIF @SeanALarabee

[The Redheaded libertarian @TRHLofficial]

Yes, in fact, make owning a gun just as hard as it is to vote.

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921.

They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year.

Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move.

They lost them for two reasons.

The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack.

Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet.

That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois.

Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting.

So now it's all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything.

Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up.

But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works.

Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team.

And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team."

There it is. "Billionaire-owned."

That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line.

Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it.

Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return."

When you run things this badly, you sell what's left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect.

Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check.

But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires."

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster.

Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.

[Handre @Handre]

Milton Friedman's greatest regret.

The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.

Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.

Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.

This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.

Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.

[BQof02 @RealAaron2002]

@jteamjason @thevivafrei Ok sure. But why is everyone voting for the 3rd place candidate in droves? One would assume if the mail-in votes favored Blue candidates, the incumbent in 1st place would see the majority of the uptick.

[David Pollack @DavidPollackUSA]

You’re going to hear a lot of liberals in the media tell you that mail in ballots favor democrats so this is totally normal…but is it totally normal for mail in ballots that come in after Election Day to overwhelmingly favor the third place candidate that didn’t perform nearly this well until after the Republican beat her? You are witnessing a hoax in real time. Trust your gut. Ignore the left wing narrative.

[Chris @chriswithans]

In all seriousness, here's what's going on in California and Los Angeles and why Tom Steyer and Nithya Raman might incredibly surpass Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt even though they're both trailing them by 6-7 points a full three nights after Election Day.

Since September 2020, California's been mailing out full ballots to every single registered voter. Registering is trivially "easy" in California. Can do it with any DMV interaction. So 10s of millions of ballots are sent out each state election, primaries or general.

Ballot harvesting is completely legal in California. Any one can go around and collect ballots. Just need the voter to sign over the ballot to them, as well as sign their own name and address on the sealed envelope.

Ballots must be postmarked by 8 p.m. Election Day or returned in person by that same time. Must also be signed once; or, if harvested, it must be signed and also signed over to the harvester (as I said above). ALL ballots are supposed to be received by June 9th, one calendar week after election day.

Most voters just turn in their own ballots. But many have their ballots harvested, "legally," by harvesters. They target younger voters, lower-income voters, and minority voters. These are voters who tend to sit out during midterm elections. It's the case everywhere.

It's obviously easier to harvest ballots when it's very close to election day. It's easier because by then, the lower-propensity voters who haven't voted yet consider their ballots to be effectively meaningless. So who cares if they hand it over (completed and sealed, of course) to a ballot harvester. *This is big reason why so many ballots get returned on Election Day or just 1-2 days prior to E-day. They get mailed via USPS, or dropped off in person. This is why so few ballots are in the possession of election officials by Election day or even the day after.*

Again, the ballots must be signed; and, if harvested, signed over to the harvester; and postmarked by Election Day. Important caveat here is that if a ballot fails these tests, they're not simply discarded. Rather, they are "cured" and "rehabilitated." Seriously. So yes, a ballot must be postmarked by Election Day by law, but the law doesn't discard these ballots if they fail that test.

Harvested ballots often do not have a signature or the handover signature. Or they have signatures that do not match the name. To you, this means that they should be discarded, no? But to the State, it means they need to be cured and rehabilitated. They have 30 days to do this.

And yes, ballots are all supposed to be received a week after election day. But that's not "received by the counting machine." It's received by whatever local election office is supposed to receive the ballots. Again, how this is enforced, or if it even is, is a mystery.

Activist organizations know all of this so they harvest heavily in the final days before an election, including on election day. In some cases, they can look at polling and prior VBM/early voting trends and then invest more in their ballot harvesting efforts to push their candidate over the edge. The current 3rd place gubernatorial candidate has billions to spend, but he still has to allocate that money as well as save some of it for the general election. If he sees that he's trailing by 3-4 points in the polls and that Ds are underperforming turnout rates in VBM/Early voting, he would be wise to invest in ballot harvesting in the final week.

All of this is why (1) so very many ballots are not even received a full three days and three nights after Election day began, (2) why so many of them apparently lean for the Democrats, (3) why it takes literal weeks to count all the ballots, (4) why so few ballots are counted in the 2nd and 3rd day after E-day, and (5) why you are right to be suspicious.

[Nate Silver @NateSilver538]

It's hard to overstate how much of an outlier California is for its slow vote-counting relative to literally any other state or almost any other industrialized democracy.