California Dreamin'

Long Odds

Mirrors on the ceiling / The pink champagne on ice / We are all just prisoners
here / Of our own device…

Relax, said the night man, We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like, But you can never leave!

-- Don Henley, 'Hotel California'

Unless you go to the eastward extension of California, where, as they say 'What
plays in Vegas, stays in Vegas'. There, odds-makers gave Trump an 8-to-1 shot
after the actual vote came in on election night. These are experienced
professional gamblers who bet large sums on election outcomes. Their forecasts, measured by dollars, not polls of the six percent who answer pollsters' calls, are the most accurate available. Yet even the pros were confounded by what happened next -- an avalanche of mailed-in sheets of paper delivered in the wee hours of the morning by the van-load, marked or destined to be marked for Biden.

Orchestrated in seven States like the fairies in Disney's 'Fantasia', the counting stopped after midnight as the size of the Trump landslide became apparent, systems were re-set, and by 6:00 am on Nov 4, a new day had dawned. Trump's odds suddenly dropped to 2-to-1, and deteriorated further as media called States for Biden early while staying mum on States where Trump was leading. Professional gamblers knew from that, that the fix was in, and switched their bets accordingly. A few in the know who had bet on Biden when the odds were 8-to-1 for Trump did very well for their evening's work. Wayne Root tells the story here.

California often prefigures what happens to the rest of the country. If its
devolution into one-party-statehood has similar predictive value, it might be
worthwhile to know how this stunning transformation occurred. As a one-time
Californian (though not a native), I asked whether they had been using Dominion voting machines, the kind that have become famous for producing miraculous electoral victories for the likes of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicholas Maduro. These systems were ingeniously engineered by Venezuelan geeks to specifications set by Chavez and his handlers the Castro brothers. They enabled real-time monitoring of actual vote totals, with granular estimates of how many additional (fabricated) votes would be required in each jurisdiction to produce a desired result nationally. Chavez took a 28 percent ownership stake in Dominion and sold vote-alteration systems to sympathetic regimes all around South America (Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua, etc.).

These same systems, with suitable localization, were sold to 30 U.S. States,
including California, Nevada, Arizona, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Virginia,
and Pennsylvania. This article by Katy Grimes lists the following California counties with Dominion systems installed:

Alameda, Butte, Contra Costa, Colusa, Del Norte, El Dorado, Fresno, Glenn,
Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Marin, Mono, Monterey, Napa,
Placer, Plumas, Riverside, Sacramento, San Benito, San Bernardino, San Diego,
San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa
Cruz, Shasta, Siskiyou, Sonoma, Sutter, Tehama, Tulare, Tuolumne, Ventura, and Yuba.

The genealogy of the voting-systems companies and their tortuous M&A, bankruptcy, and revival reveal that regardless of the name -- Dominion, Smartmatic, Sequoia -- they all feature the same larcenous software. This made me wonder whether the magical transformation of California into a one-party State was engineered by algorithm rather than deriving from unalloyed popular consent. Katy Grimes notes in her article that Rep Doris Matsui (D-CA) received 76 percent of the 6th District's vote (Sacramento) without even campaigning. Why bother pleading for votes when you can program them? In the 12th (SF), 13th, and 14th Districts, Democrats racked up 80 to 90 percent of the vote, proportions that Hugo Chavez himself might envy. Residents of drug-, needle-, and excrement-infested San Francisco might have stopped voting for officials responsible for such conditions. Why would they inflict such misery on themselves, repeatedly? Perhaps they didn't. As far back as 2006, Gavin Newsom as Mayor arranged to install Dominion voting machines there, before moving on to the California Governor's office. Katy Grimes asks 'Does California need an audit of these 40 counties which use Dominion Voting System?'

Traditional methods were also in play. One official would-be observer in San
Mateo County wrote: 'I was also unable to observe signature verifications at Tower Road [election center] under the pretext that it violated privacy laws. I will be checking with Election Integrity to clarify whether that is legitimate or not.'

For years, California has been written off by those opposed to the one party in
control of the State. But maybe the popular support for that one party isn't
really there, any more than it was for the Communist Party in the Soviet Union,
which collapsed without providing any clues to the ever-watchful CIA. We'll
never know until there are honest elections. The first step would be an
independent audit.

With such blatantly fraudulent vote-counting, incumbent officials might well wonder why they should even bother with an election in 2024.

In fact, there wasn't an election in 2020.