It is shocking to see a well known journalist, for a major newspaper exposing himself as an election denier. Robert Price is a long time Progressive journalist, wears his hate Trump badge proudly and cares little about facts. So, when the people of Shasta County decided they want honest elections, Price goes into to full war mode—he tries to smear honest people and honest elections. Shasta County Supervisors, listening to the people, do not renew a contract with Dominion for elections ballot counting.
One of the provisions fo a Dominion contract is that only they are allowed to permit an audit of the system, Not the Supervisors, not the Registrar of Voters—only they, even if sued, can audit the accuracy of the system,
Price is also defending the practice of ROV;s adjudicating or curing ballots. Those are fancy terms for behind closed doors, without observers, ballots are torn up and remade—in the image of who? The voter? We do not know because Price and others do not want us to see it.
Glad to see that Price exposes himself as an election denier. Too bad for the people of Bakersfield and the reputation of the Bakersfield Californian.
ROBERT PRICE: Don’t let election-denier nonsense hamstring elections division
By ROBERT PRICE For The Californian, 2/11/23
The Big Lie lives on, and now it’s trying to take Kern County hostage.
More than two years after President Trump started pushing the myth that he had been cheated out of re-election, delusional, conspiracy-spouting sycophants, opportunists and cultists have fanned out across the country sowing outrage and doubt with nothing in their holsters but fantasy and hollow rhetoric.
One battleground in their baseless effort to foster distrust is the fable about electronic vote-tabulating machines and Dominion Voting Systems in particular. Claims about Dominion’s supposed unreliability include one scenario, manufactured by Trump allies Rudy Guliani and Sidney Powell, that identified malevolent “algorithms” — created at the behest of Venezuelan all-purpose bogeyman Hugo Chavez, who by that time had been dead for seven years — capable of seizing voting machines’ inner workings and falsifying the results.
Trump minions have taken this show on the road, appearing before county supervisorial boards to spew their nonsense. They’ve tried to convince county officials to reject new contracts with Dominion and return to the days of manual ballot counting and human error-riddled delays, perhaps looking ahead to the day when the wholesale rejection of ballot-counting technology can be exploited.
A prominent player in this circus, a paid actor familiar to Kern County officials, is one David Clements, a New Mexico lawyer who has turned election denialism into a nice little cottage industry. His conspiracy theories and false claims about the last presidential election prompted one rural, conservative New Mexico county to refuse to certify its 2020 election results. Otero County — whose three-person county commission included a convicted Jan. 6 Capitol trespasser — relented only on the orders of the New Mexico Supreme Court.
Clements has turned his attention to Kern County, where the Board of Supervisors must decide whether to fund Dominion voting machines through the 2023-24 fiscal year. Last month, after hearing from a succession of election-deniers — including Clements, who refused to leave the public-comment podium after exceeding his two-minute time allotment — Supervisors voted to postpone that decision, asking Aimee Espinoza, the new elections chief, to return to the board on Feb. 28 with a report on how the elections division can be improved and if Kern should continue using Dominion machines.
The county elections division can indeed be improved — lack of facilities, equipment, manpower and broad, overall staff experience are some of the shortcomings — but the contract with Dominion is not one of its problems. Newly retired Registrar of Voters Mary Bedard and Espinoza, her successor, have both endorsed Dominion, which Kern County has used since 2016. California allows counties to use one of only three authorized voting systems — Dominion, Hart or Elections Systems & Software.
But Clements, who last month convinced the Shasta County Board of Supervisors to reject a new contract with Dominion, is in the business of perpetuating distrust. He is part of a team of Trump allies that has been meeting with state and county officials across at least 22 states, seeking access to voting equipment and pushing to shake up county election organizations.
“You have seen a whole bunch of people — some sincere, some perhaps less sincere — who have rushed to fill the demand to provide evidence of the fraud that Trump created,” David Levine, a fellow with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, told the Associated Press last June.
Federal and state election and cybersecurity officials have called the 2020 vote the “most secure” in U.S. history, and a new report from the Washington Post, published Saturday, discloses that Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm to look into electoral fraud claims, including the possibility that Dominion machines were tampered with, but the findings were never released to the public because the firm found no evidence of significant fraud. Still, the false claims have proliferated.
Clements, a former assistant district attorney in southern New Mexico and former business professor at New Mexico State University, has traveled the U.S. speaking with local government boards, at conservative conventions and before church groups, according to the AP. He attended a 2021 “cybersymposium” hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a highly visible Trump ally who has been behind much of the blather about compromised voting machines manipulated to help Biden. Clements’ Telegram social media feed, the AP notes, often intersperses pontifications about democracy with scripture and prayer.
In a video posted on Telegram in March 2022, Clements chatted with Jim Marchant, a Trump ally from Nevada who claims election fraud has been rampant for years. Marchant, who last November ran unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate for Nevada secretary of state, has been a key organizer of an “America First” group of candidates who promote the idea that U.S. elections are corrupt, the AP reports.
In that video, the AP reports, Clements and Marchant talked about a “county commission strategy” to pressure local officials to ban “cheat” machines and adopt systems that rely on ballots cast and tabulated by hand. Such a system would, of course, make ballot-counting less accurate, more labor-intensive, dramatically slower, and potentially more vulnerable to cheating.
And, as Bedard and Esipinoza have said, machine tallies are routinely subjected to hand-count sampling, which would reveal errors and other miscounts.
For months, according to the AP, Clements pushed Republican-dominated counties to initiate partisan reviews of the 2020 election in much the same way Republican state legislators demanded that Arizona review its election results — an expensive undertaking that only confirmed what the machines had already concluded. In Otero County, N.M., according to the AP, Clements’ efforts resulted in a series of hours-long presentations to the county commission about unproven vulnerabilities in vote-tallying machines and patterns in voter registration activity — all for nothing.
The Kern County Board of Supervisors needs to make clear that any effort like that here will be greeted with all the sympathy and patience it deserves: none. Supervisors should vote without delay to reaffirm Kern County’s relationship with Dominion.
They may face some blowback. In Torrance County, another conservative stronghold in New Mexico targeted by Clements, the crowd hurled insults such as “traitors” and “cowards” at county commissioners who then proceeded to vote unanimously to certify the election results.
Here, Kern County Supervisor Jeff Flores has the right idea.
“I’m not getting into this election denialism,” he said last month. “I just want to improve our elections division and be the best we can.”
Operating the most efficient, scrupulous, professional elections division possible starts with the ability to parse the nonsense from the necessary. I believe the Kern County Board of Supervisors can tell the difference.
Robert Price is an Emmy award-winning reporter for KGET-TV. Reach him at [email protected] or via Twitter: @stubblebuzz. The opinions expressed are his own.
Any system that doesn’t allow proper independent scrutiny is one that should not be trusted. All dominion contract should unconditionally require independent investigators to monitor their systems. If they don’t like it kick them to the curb. Find out what Florida is doing and copy that.