The Lone Raccoon

Sometimes you just have to sit back, watch what God is doing, and say "Wow". Wow.

As my friend @ZarkFiles wrote about recently, Boss Tweed held utter control of elections (and a whole lot more) in New York. Every manner of cheating... including physical threats and violence... were used. Read this. Really read this. And tell me how little has changed since then but the technology. Also remember that this was going on in a lot of places, Tweed just perfected it. Control of the Election Apparatus Tammany controlled key positions: election inspectors, returning boards (which certified results), police, courts, and often the mayor and other city offices. Officials were appointed through bribery, patronage, or political pressure. Tweed later testified that each ward had a designated operative who controlled how results were reported. Returning boards could “announce the result in bulk” without counting ballots at all. As Tweed put it: “The ballots made no result; the counters made the result.” In one documented case, a Republican board member was paid $2,500 to stay away so Tammany could install its own inspectors. This control extended to delaying New York City returns in 1868 until upstate results were known, then manufacturing enough Democratic votes in the city to overcome Republican majorities elsewhere in the state. Direct Vote Fraud Repeat voting (“repeaters”): Organized gangs voted multiple times under assumed, dead, or fictitious names. They received lists of names/addresses, were transported between polling places, and sometimes used disguises. Local sheriffs or temporary deputies often protected them. In the 1868 presidential election, analysts later identified roughly 25,000 fraudulent votes out of about 156,000 cast in the city. Ballot stuffing: Operatives physically inserted pre-marked Tammany ballots into boxes. Because parties printed their own tickets, control of the physical ballots was straightforward. Falsified counts and returns: When necessary, results were simply altered or invented to match the desired outcome. Tammany candidates sometimes received more votes than the number of eligible voters in a district. Expanding the Electorate through Naturalization Courts controlled by Tammany-aligned judges ran “naturalization mills,” especially in the weeks before major elections. Thousands of recent immigrants (heavily Irish) were rapidly naturalized—often with minimal scrutiny—and directed to vote Democratic. In the run-up to 1868, tens of thousands of new citizens were processed this way, significantly expanding the machine’s base. Intimidation, Coercion, and Street-Level Pressure Thugs (“shoulder strikers”) and crooked police intimidated opposition voters or disrupted polling places. Cooping: Men were sometimes kidnapped off the streets, held (often plyed with alcohol), and forced to vote repeatedly under different identities. Physical presence and violence at the polls discouraged opponents in an era when voting was public and ballots were not secret. Scale and Example The 1868 presidential election (Horatio Seymour vs. Ulysses S. Grant) is the clearest illustration. City Democratic totals were inflated far beyond prior years (by more than 25,000 votes in some accounts), enough to deliver New York’s electoral votes despite strong Republican strength upstate. Contemporary investigations and later testimony confirmed widespread repeating, stuffing, and manipulated counting. These methods were not subtle improvisations; they were organized, hierarchical, and directed from the top of the machine. Tweed’s own later testimony before the New York Board of Aldermen candidly described the system as absolute control of outcomes through the people who counted and reported the votes. The combination of institutional capture, direct fraud, immigrant mobilization, and intimidation made genuine competition extremely difficult until the machine’s exposure and partial dismantling in the early 1870s.

I love to make people laugh. Always have. I was the "class clown" in high school and college, and once almost accidentally caused Rockwell International to purchase Bolivia. Yes, the country. Humor is my defense mechanism, I am aware, it nicely papers over insecurity and depression. But if I leave a room with the people in a better mood than when I entered, it makes my soul glow. Some criticize me for not being serious enough. It is quite possible to be deadly serious with a smile on your face. In fact, I have found them to be the most dangerous people. Anyway, I had some doctor visits this week and for one of them they did an eye test. My glasses are "ranged in" at the distance they put me from the eye chart, and I quickly ran down each line. "Very good", the nurse said. I wanted more than that, so I noticed at the bottom left of the chart was a black smudge, obviously something was written there but it was tiny. I decided to go for it. "Made in China", I said, with a smile. The nurse didn't initially understand, then she walked up to the chart and sure enough, that was what it said. Complete guess on my part. I was instantly the belle of the ball, as everyone in the office was chattering over me having the best vision they had seen. When the doctor came in he laughed and said that everyone was talking about my eye test. I shrugged and said "some people got it, some people don't". Bottom line when I left the office everyone I passed by gave me a smile. And that made my day immeasurably better.

The book i am writing gets better and longer by the day.

I can't believe they stopped moving long enough for you to get this picture.

2 little girls are 2 today...

ELECTION NIGHT REPORTING Why do the numbers sometimes go down? For 5 years now I have rung the fire alarm about election night reporting, especially the strange phenomenon where an update takes votes away from candidates. There is a standard boilerplate answer to this from the counties and states, and that is "these are not official numbers, our official numbers are fine". I have a problem with that, and so should you. I will try to make this as simple as possible. On election day, when the polls close, counties will start registering vote either by scanning mail-ins or importing votes from drives brought in from precincts. These vote numbers are tabulated go into the election computers. Periodically, because the election computers are (theoretically) not connected to the internet, someone in the clerk's office will export current results to a flash drive, walk that drive to a computer which does have internet access, and sends them to their secretary of state (with sometimes a step in between). The Secretary of State sends them into the Associated Press who distributes them (through something called the National Election Pool) to all the media outlets and sites. Now, after the election, the final totals are retrieved from the SAME MACHINE and sent to the SoS as "official". Just the totals, from what I understand, not the updates that got them there. These official totals always match the final updates, they did that even in the horrific 2020 situation. The updates come from the same data source as the official totals. Unless they are running a second set of books, disassociating these anomalous updates from the official totals is intellectually dishonest. How can we know the interim updates are not catching "echoes" of an algorithm manipulating the totals? Answer: we cannot. This is why I consider the issue crucially important, and our election officials would agree if they took more than a second to consider it. And we are supposed to trust the count at the end but ignore problems in the middle. Preposterous

BIG primary day tomorrow. As always, my software will be recording and displaying minute by minute results at https://votedatabase.com/2026 plucked right from the NYT data site. Often faster than network updates. Alabama, Connecticut, Minnesota, South Carolina, Vermont, and Wisconsin - you're up. --- If you want to help support our efforts, we'd be so grateful and blessed. https://givesendgo.com/save-the-raccoons is the place to do it.

The reason they need the voting machines is because their fraudulent votes cost money. They need to know how the races are trending in real time. Polling data isn't reliable. They use the machines to show them how many ballots they must inject to beat the real support that is coming in from real voters. Extended and early voting simply provides them with more time to inject the fraudulent ballots. Mail in ballots are obviously the easiest to create and stuff. This is why every race now is so close. 51 to 49, just outside of the margins for recounts. Over and over. The ballots cost them actual money. And they want the ballots just incase they ever actually do have to survive an audit. The machines tell them how the votes are coming in, how they are trending, and how many they will need to get their desired result. Extended voting gives them the days or weeks they need to create the ballots. And the mail in system gives them the ability to simply create the votes. We need to vote on a single day, in person, id required, on hand marked and hand counted ballots. Anything else just creates opportunities for fraud. If you are against this... you must be in on it.

https://givesendgo.com/save-the-raccoons

New poster!

Our founding fathers had no interest in making voting "easy". In fact, originally only landowners were allowed to vote, and that didn't broadly change until the 1820s. I am not a time traveler, but I am pretty sure, based upon their writings, if you went back to Jefferson or Adams and suggested that obtaining a free identification card was a serious suffrage issue, they would laugh in your face until they passed out. Mail voting, early voting - they do nothing but allow people who care nothing for the privilege and honor of voting to still cast a vote, and the sacrifices made by others to give them that right. So those of you who are clutching your pearls that simple things like proper identification and verifiable voter rolls will "disenfranchise" people and make it harder for them to vote ... good. Wonderful. Voting is a privilege and if you aren't willing to walk out in a snowstorm to cast your vote, we don't want it. Stay home.

If anyone knows a realtor who can work in central Florida and might love certain raccoons can you dm me please? Thank you!

Https://givesendgo.com/save-the-raccoons