I completely agree. I sure hope DHS and DNI are looking into this, along with every other state.
Two Orange County Republicans facing the prospect of defeat in the Nov. 6 congressional election as final ballots are counted have adopted President Trump’s tactic of making baseless allegations of vote fraud.
Neither GOP Rep. Mimi Walters nor Republican candidate Young Kim has produced evidence to back up their charges that Democrats are trying to steal the election. County registrars of voters supervising the ballot counts said they knew of no one doing anything that would compromise the election’s integrity.
Both Republicans leveled the accusations after they steadily lost ground in the continuing tabulation of tens of thousands of ballots. Walters finished ahead on election night, but has fallen 3,797 votes behind Democrat Katie Porter. Kim is clinging to a 122-vote lead over Democrat Gil Cisneros.
Walters and Kim have joined a growing number of Republicans in Florida and elsewhere who, like Trump, challenge the legitimacy of vote counts when Democrats gain in late tallies. Nonpartisan election watchdogs are appalled.
“The tone has been set at the top,” said Stephen Spaulding, chief of strategy at Common Cause. “I think it’s reckless. It is irresponsible.”
Scholars who track the rise and fall of democracies around the globe are also alarmed. Public trust in the validity of free elections is a pillar of democracy, they say, and a political party’s systematic attacks on that faith can be corrosive.
“People need to learn to lose and accept the results and move on to the next campaign,” said Daniel Ziblatt, coauthor of “How Democracies Die.” “If people don’t believe in the legitimacy of elections and start acting that way, then the whole thing can disintegrate very rapidly.”
The Walters and Kim campaigns both declined to comment or provide any evidence to support their allegations.
In California elections, it’s a firmly established pattern that the votes counted last almost always favor Democrats. The growing dominance of mail ballots has made it more pronounced. The most reliably Republican voters — a shrinking share of the state’s electorate — tend to be older white homeowners who send in their ballots before most other Californians do.
On Sunday, when she was still slightly ahead, Walters told supporters in an email that she needed donations to stop Democrats “from overturning the will of the voters.”
“I’m currently up by 1 point, but the Democrats are already preparing for a recount to try and steal this Republican seat after the fact,” Walters wrote.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-me-pol-walters-kim-fraud-claims-20181115-story.html