POLITIQUEROS?

Former Federal Election Commission member Hans von Spakovsky brought up the term in 2000 Mules, and politiqueros will doubtless draw a blank from many voters. Once upon a time National Public Radio actually directed a beam of light at this issue.

“In Rio Grande Valley, Some Campaign Workers Are Paid To Harvest Votes,” the July 7, 2015 Morning Edition explained. Politiquero or politiquera means “campaign worker,” and these workers are involved in “vote stealing.” Federal authorities were looking into it.

The politiqueros, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Sturgis explained, “are being paid to then go and essentially round up voters and have them vote a certain way.”  In one town, five politiqueras pleaded guilty to election fraud. Voters were bribed with “cigarettes, beer or dime bags of cocaine.”

In Cameron County, nine politiqueras were charged with manipulating mail-in ballots, and one campaign paid $3,000 a week for 15 politiqueras to work the mail-in ballots in a local race. In Brownsville, candidates hired politiqueras, and once in office gave jobs and contracts to friends and family members.”  According to NPR, this not a new activity.

Politiquera Herminia Becerra had been doing it for 60 years, and proudly holds up pictures of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and John Kennedy. That helps explain the “certain way” people were coerced to vote in most of the cases. Politiqueros were also active in Starr County, where dead people cast votes and non-citizens were illegally registered.

“Anytime you have a system where you have ballots floating around in mailboxes, you’re creating the circumstances for fraud,” noted County District Attorney Omar Escobar, in 2018. Illegal voting is difficult to measure, Escobar explained, and was a “nation-wide problem.”

One of the worst gangs in the Bronx, according to attorney Ramon Jimenez, is “Los Politiqueros,” which amassed an empire by controlling “a small group of elected officials.” Clearly, the threat of violence can get people to vote “a certain way.”

The politiqueros are strongest in California where the state’s “motor voter” program automatically registers illegals to vote when they get driver’s licenses. In 2015, Secretary of State Alex Padilla told the Los Angeles Times, “at the latest, for the 2018 election cycle, I expect millions of new voters on the rolls in the state of California.”

True to form, by March, 2018, the DMV had given licenses to more than one million illegals. Padilla wouldn’t say how many of the illegals actually voted in 2018, but his previous reference to “millions” provides a ballpark figure. The motor voter program has never been independently audited and after the 2016 election, Padilla refused to cooperate with a federal probe of voter fraud.

Padilla is now the U.S. Senator nobody voted for – except California Gov. Gavin Newsom. He named Padilla as the replacement for Kamala Harris, who got her start under Willie Brown and was Biden’s running mate in 2020. Ten years earlier, when Harris ran for California attorney general, Harris was so lightly regarded that the Sacramento Bee endorsed her Republican opponent Steve Cooley.

Roll Call ran a piece headlined, “When Kamala Harris lost on election night but won three weeks later.” The margin was less than one percent.

When he was vice president, Joe Biden said. “You know, 11 million people live in the shadows. I believe they’re already American citizens.” According to the Delaware Democrat, 11 million undocumented aliens “are already Americans, in my view.” As he had to know, they aren’t, and the number is also wrong.

More than 22 million people are illegally present in the United States, according to a 2021 study by scholars at MIT and Yale. Pew Research pegged the figure at 11 million, and for years it stood as the official count. Eleven million is more like the number illegally present in California alone. When he announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration in 2019, attorney general Xavier Becerra displayed a sign claiming “10 million “immigrants” in California.

Since early 2021, notes Victor Davis Hanson, “we have witnessed somewhere between 7 and 8 million illegal entries across the now nonexistent U.S. southern border.” For the most part, they came in “without background checks, vaccinations and health audits, legality, high-school diplomas, English-facility, skill sets, or capital.” They bring the count to some 30 million.

Joe Biden, who believes they are “already Americans,” wants to issue them ID cards. For all but the willfully blind, the “migrants” are an imported electorate, with politiqueros deployed to make them vote “a certain way.” If anybody thought that voter fraud is now inherent in the system it would be hard to blame them.

Don’t expect NPR, Roll Call, the LA Times, or any other media outlet to update their prior reporting on this issue. The edict to defeat Trump or any other GOP nominee now rules our newsrooms.