[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
After a generation of clamoring that election monitoring was the only way to “protect democracy”, Democrats are turning on it now that they are the ones having their elections monitored.
“This is a preview of 2026. Wake up, everybody,” Gov. Gavin Newsom ranted, claiming that it was a “setup” and that Republicans were “screwing around with the election” and “rigging the election”.
“This is a bridge too far, and I hope people understand it’s a bridge that trying to build, a scaffolding for all across this country,” the prematurely election denying politician warned in an overextended metaphor. “You’re also going to see ICE deployed,” he baselessly claimed. “You’re going to see these masked men from Border Patrol also near voting booths and polling places.”
Newsom knows perfectly well that Justice Department election monitors don’t wear masks and don’t belong to ICE. The dubious institution of election monitors had long been a Democratic preserve for monitoring elections in conservative states and Newsom’s freakout is either bad theatrics by a hollow politician who wants to be president but has nothing to run on or a confession of guilt by a crooked pol.
The DOJ has far more reason to monitor elections in California, which suffers from unprecedented levels of corruption. Over the last decade, 576 California officials have been convicted on federal corruption charges and even the New York Times admitted that this is due to the state’s one-party status. Government corruption was the foundation of the Newsom family fortune courtesy of the equally crooked Brown family, and Willie Brown (no relation) who was accused of corruption served as the patron for the political careers of both Newsom and Kamala Harris: Gavin’s likely primary opponent.
Los Angeles, one of the places where the DOJ intends to dispatch election monitors, has notably suspicious elections, including its mayoral race where Mayor Karen Bass lost twice once the polls were closed, but then ‘won’ based on ballots that arrived later, only to then let part of L.A. burn down. The LA County Board of Supervisors has since seized control of homeless funds after they could not be accounted for. Her deputy mayor of public safety was arrested over a fake bomb threat.
None of this suggests a government that is run so well that it’s entirely above suspicion.
Democrats had insisted on the urgent need for monitoring elections in southern states with a fraction of the corruption and with more competitive elections, but now claim that California and, the mafia bedroom community of New Jersey, should be above reproach when it comes to election fraud.
The election monitors notification was met with threats of resistance from California and New Jersey Democrat officials that seemed more in line with a Southern governor during segregation.
Attorney General Rob Bonta, enmeshed in a scandal involving a local crime family who called him “uncle”, warned that California would monitor the monitors with unknown monitors “I can’t name them” and vaguely claimed that they “will not be allowed to interfere in ways that the law prohibits”.
Acting Attorney General Angela Cai of New Jersey warned local election officials that federal election monitors had no real right to enter polling places or observe elections without first getting authorization from the Democrat federal judges who depend on the same system for their patronage.
The head of the California Dems deemed it “election interference” which is another admission.
Election monitoring had been election interference all along. Once segregation ended, election monitoring became a means of rigging elections by falsely accusing states and jurisdictions of racial discrimination in order to gerrymander Dem districts, suppress any efforts against voter fraud and fund ‘community groups’ tasked with voter outreach to Dem voters all in the name of ‘civil rights’.
The freakout over DOJ election monitoring is projection. Dems are terrified that the Trump administration intends to abuse the machinery of civil rights to do to them what they had done for so long to Republicans. And they, like Gov. Newsom, clearly have a whole lot to hide from the DOJ.
The New York Times recently admitted that, “Democrats would be in danger of losing around a dozen majority-minority districts across the South if the court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.”
Were Dems really all that interested in civil rights or in abusing civil rights to create exclusive districts where only their candidates could win? If black people voted 51% Republican, would there be a single Dem on earth who would argue that civil rights, 60 years after segregation, required election monitoring? We already have part of the answer to that question in another New York Times admission.
“Democrats are divided and flummoxed over what to do. For years, the left has relied on a sprawling network of nonprofits — which solicit donations from people whose identities they need not disclose — to register black, Latino and younger voters. Though the groups are technically nonpartisan, the underlying assumption has been that most new voters registering would vote Democratic. Mr. Trump upended that calculation with the inroads he made with working-class nonwhite voters.”
And so Democrats are considering pulling back from registering non-black minority voters because they’re no longer the best investment for their ‘non-partisan’ funding for ‘voter registration.’
Dems like Gavin Newsom know better than anyone that civil rights election interference is a partisan scheme to rig elections. Every accusation that they hurl at Trump and the DOJ is really a confession. Democrats are denouncing the election monitoring they used to hail as the best way to defend civil rights and democracy as a scheme for rigging elections because it’s what they have been doing.
And they’re terrified that President Trump is about to give them a taste of their own medicine.
Democrats are finally admitting that the civil rights system they had depended on along to give them unearned advantages is a means of rigging elections. And if they really fear what Trump may do, it’s time for them to join conservatives in dismantling the Voting Rights Act and other pieces of outdated civil rights legislation to prevent them from being abused for partisan reasons.
Republicans let Democrats get away with election rigging for generations out of fear that they would be accused of racism even though they were the ones who had led desegregation in the South.
President Trump showed that doesn’t work anymore. Instead he’s turning the election rigging machinery against the riggers. Democrats can stop rigging elections under the false flag of civil rights or they, like Gov. Newsom, can go to war, threatening election monitors to protect their abuses.
And that isn’t likely to end well for them.
