QL President John Clifton’s quick observations about the election:
1- Note that (according to the NY Post tabulation) there were only 9600 write in votes for Governor in 2022. The strategy of writing in Larry Sharpe for Governor has apparently failed. Even a long-planned write-in campaign would probably not produce the over 130,000 votes needed to get the LP candidate over the hump to get regular ballot status. One silver lining is, at least we now have a real world number to reference from, to show why it is unlikely to accomplish something statewide via a write-in effort.
2- The gap between Hochul and Zeldin was about 300,000 votes. It is reasonable to suppose that a strong minor party showing, by the LP and/or Green candidate could have been in the hundreds of thousands of votes, and thus would have affected a tight Dem-GOP race. This may have been another reason why Gov. Cuomo changed the rules to effectively prevent true independent third parties from being able to achieve ballot status.
3- LPNY and the national LP will need to devise a better means of organizing and raising funds to run a successful independent petition drive for the Presidential candidate in the 2024 cycle, or else the party may have to forego having 50 state ballot status in that year. This does not count the organization also needed to enable the LP candidate, if put on the ballot in New York, to get the votes required in the election to secure permanent ballot status under the current rules.
4- Were there election integrity issues in New York, or the 2022 midterms in general? Well, there are signs somebody monkeyed with the voting transmission in Suffolk county, where Zeldin’s base is, to potentially suppress his vote from that region. The same “drop and roll,” indefinite stall and delay tactics in tabulating the votes seen practiced in 2020, were not only in evidence again in 2022, but were concentrated in the same states as last time (in NV, AZ, GA, MI, PA, WI), suggesting the same culprits are at work again. According to journalist Emerald Robinson:
“My rule of thumb is simple: if you’re a Trump-aligned Republican and your election results were not released within 24 hours of Election Day, then you’re toast.
The entire point of “slow-rolling” vote-counting is that it gives the cheaters the necessary time to count how many ballots they need to beat the Republican candidate and then to manufacture those ballots — or to disappear the necessary number of GOP ballots by “adjudication.”
Didn’t the GOP learn any of these lessons from the 2020 election? Of course not…
Why would anyone believe such things after living through the 2020 election? Why did the electronic voting machines stop in at least 5 states on Election Day this week? What do they think is really going on?
It’s almost like they don’t understand how cheating works.
Do they think the machines malfunctioned and the vote-counting stopped in Arizona, California, and Nevada by accident or something?”
5- Finally, MSNBC’s revised estimate of the House outcome now say it is 99.5% certain that Republicans will end up with 219+ seats, or a majority. The GOP unexpectedly won 5 Congressional seats in the Long Island area, perhaps as Zeldin’s coattails. The fact that most of the 2022 cheating happened in the same 5-6 states as in 2020, points to the steal being centered out of a handful of blue metro areas (Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Phoenix, Las Vegas). It’s NOT a nationwide phenomenon, and may not even be a majority of blue areas.
I will speculate that the Democrats were out to cheat their way into retaining a majority in the House, but did not count on losing 5 seats in NY, plus other upsets. Those flips ruined their math for ending up with about 221+ seats. They were too confident they had cheated enough, or else didn’t have their steal system set up in the upset races. They’re probably kicking themselves for letting their kept media call those races for the GOP too early.