Tag Archive for: ElectionIntegrity

We Deserve A Better Voting System

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Elections aren’t being stolen. But they are carried out under rules devised by one side for their benefit.

The Left loves our election system and why wouldn’t they? It has been a boon for them. They can win elections even when all seems lost.  They have learned to exploit, through both legal and extra-legal means, the opportunities presented by bulk-mail voting, ballot harvesting, and lack of voter ID requirements. So they falsely insist our procedures are virtually fraud-proof, and that attempts to improve election security are racially motivated “voter suppression”.

In fact, voter fraud is not all that rare and is easy to commit. It is hard to detect because victims are unaware that their vote has been canceled and so are unlikely to complain.

In New York, 63 undercover agents went to the polls, giving the names of individuals who had died, moved, or were incarcerated. All but two were given ballots, including young people impersonating voters three times their age.

A television reporter in Florida, on his own, turned up 94 non-citizens who had voted. Elections have been overturned because of voter fraud in Miami, Florida, East Chicago, Indiana, in Essex County, New Jersey, and Greene County, Alabama among other locales.

And who can forget Al Franken’s 312 vote victory in Minnesota’s Senate race, when later over one thousand felons (most probably Democrat voters) were found to have voted.

In 2020, the Pacific Interest Legal Foundation published a meticulous analysis of voter databases in which 144,000 cases of potential voter fraud were documented. These included dead voters, voters who had moved, and voters who supposedly lived in vacant lots, restaurants, and gas stations.

The report was sent to the 42 states in which fraud was uncovered.  Not a single official or prosecutor asked for the relevant information for their state. Not one.  The stunning New York undercover operation also garnered little attention, either from the media or law enforcement agencies. Neither did the Florida reporter’s discoveries. You see the pattern.

Fraud must be looked for to be detected and most election officials aren’t that enthusiastic about investigating for fraud. Why give yourself a black eye?

Honest researchers admit no one knows how much fraud is out there. Defenders of the status quo like to point out the lack of proven fraud cases associated with mail-in voting, but unless someone confesses, the crime is essentially non-detectable.

Look at how bulk mail compares with in-person voting, long the gold standard of election security. At the voting site, voters are protected from undue influence. Only after the list of eligible voters is checked and their ID is presented are they given a ballot. They are monitored while they vote.  The secrecy of the ballot is maintained at all times. Finally, a formal chain of custody assures that ballots are handled securely until counted.

By contrast, bulk-mail voting, in Arizona and other states, begins with unrequested ballots being mailed to millions of names on poorly maintained voter lists, some of whom don’t give a hoot about voting. Most ballots are received by their intended recipients, voted, and returned.  But others get lost in the mail or are delivered to people who have moved or died.  Yet others go to voters, some mentally incapacitated, who are “helped”  by third parties to cast their vote. Some ballots are even sold.

Many of the votes are returned by “ballot harvesting”, where party activists collect the ballots and then return them or place them in a Dropbox. There is no chain of custody violations because there is no chain of custody.

Finally, signature matching is used as a substitute for actual ID verification.  But signature matching is an imprecise “art” with no objective standards which has been demonstrated many times to be unreliable.

Bulk-mail voting is popular and growing, both with those who innocently appreciate its convenience and with those who cherish the inexplicable election wins that can be achieved by it.

But the value of a vote in a democratic society depends on the integrity with which it is cast and counted.  A majority of Americans don’t believe their elections are secure, nor will they until we reject voting processes that are so porous to fraud and deceit.

 

 

House Considers Federal Ban on Private Money to Run Elections

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Eight House Republicans have introduced a bill to block the use of private money to operate elections and curb the controversial process called ballot harvesting.

If enacted, the Protect American Election Administration Act would block what the bill’s sponsors call a “private takeover of government election administration.”

The legislation, introduced Thursday, also would prevent private funding for ballot harvesting or ballot curing. (Ballot harvesting is when political operatives collect and gather large quantities of absentee ballots; ballot curing is the term used when election officials try to discern the intent of a voter’s defective ballot.)

And the bill would prevent use of local governments’ election infrastructure to conduct “ideologically motivated voter outreach campaigns.”

“It’s vital that Americans are confident that their vote is secure when they go to the ballot box,” Rep. Jake LaTurner, R-Kan., one of the bill’s eight co-sponsors, told The Daily Signal in a written statement.

“I’m proud to help introduce this commonsense legislation to ensure individuals with political agendas are not interfering with states’ voting processes and laws in an attempt to impact the outcome of American elections,” LaTurner said. “There is no place in our democratic process for the private takeover of our elections systems.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, after spending more than $400 million to provide grants for election administration in 2020, said they would not provide such “Zuckerbucks” again.

Conservatives contend that the Zuckerberg funds disproportionately were targeted in Democratic counties, to increase turnout in blue-leaning precincts.

Last year, the Center for Tech and Civic Life—which distributed the bulk of the Zuckerberg-funded grants—announced creation of the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence to train local election officials and dole out similar grants.

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., is the lead sponsor of the proposed legislation. Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., co-chair of the House Election Integrity Caucus, also is among the eight co-sponsors.

“When Americans go to the ballot box, they should have full confidence in the election systems that are the bedrock of our great republic,” Cole said in a written statement, adding:

After a tumultuous 2020 election cycle and as we enter the 2024 presidential election cycle, it is clear that this confidence has taken a hit. The Protect American Election Administration Act would prevent political agendas funded by private dollars from interfering with individual states’ nonpartisan voting processes and ensure Americans have the confidence that their vote truly counts.

Other House Republicans who are original co-sponsors of the legislation are Reps. Byron Donalds and John Rutherford of Florida, Tracey Mann of Kansas, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, and Pete Sessions of Texas.

The legislation would help protect free and fair elections, Rutherford said.

“Free and fair elections are fundamental to our democracy. I am proud to join Rep. Tom Cole in introducing legislation to block interference from private entities in federal election processes,” Rutherford told The Daily Signal in a written statement. “Americans should be able to rely on the checks and balances of our institutions and trust that they perform in line with how they have legally been designed.”

As noted in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” an investigation in Wisconsin determined that the Zuckerberg grants were used as an improper get-out-the-vote campaign. Other post-election reviews determined that the grants were targeted disparately to Democrat-leaning areas in states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.

The eight House Republicans introduced the election-related bill on the same day the House Administration Committee held a hearing on restoring voter confidence in elections.

House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., announced that separate legislation, called the American Confidence in Elections Act, or ACE Act, would provide more resources for states to operate elections.

The two bills from House Republicans are decidedly different than the so-called For the People Act proposed by the House’s previous Democratic majority, which would nullify state election laws and nationalize administration of elections. This year, Senate Democrats Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts introduced a bill that, among other things, would increase federal funding of elections and involve the federal government in recruiting election workers.

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This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

American Elections Shouldn’t Be Bankrolled By Billionaires

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State and local governments are sending the message they care enough about the credibility of elections to reject the taint of private money.

On March 29, the Georgia legislature gave final approval to a stricter ban on private money for running public elections. This came after the same left-leaning group that doled out the Mark Zuckerberg elections grants in 2020 attempted to skirt the existing ban with a $2 million grant to DeKalb County.

It’s been about a year since the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life — which doled out $350 million in Zuckerberg grants — launched the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. A five-year, $80 billion project, the CTCL is a partnership with other organizations — including one funded by the far-left political funder Arabella Advisors. But the alliance, which is primarily a CTCL operation, has faced plenty of skepticism.

The North Carolina counties of Brunswick and Forsyth opted against taking money from the alliance, as did Ottawa County, Michigan. Greenwich, Connecticut — among the wealthiest municipalities in the United States — nearly rejected a $500,000 grant for its elections department, but the cash proved too alluring. However, these are among the 15 jurisdictions that remain members of the alliance.

It should be encouraging that accepting money from the alliance has proved so contentious. It demonstrates that public opinion is solidly against allowing wealthy individuals or private organizations to finance the running of public elections. It’s why 24 states banned or restricted private funding of election administration.

Still, the alliance may have found a way around the funding bans without cash–by getting a foot in the door of election offices with training and promoting “best practices.”

Lawmakers at the federal, state and local levels are taking notice.

In the aforementioned case of Georgia, the 2021 state election reform prohibited funding specifically to election offices. So the alliance gave $2 million to the DeKalb County treasury — which then gave it to the elections department. In the wake of this clever move, the Georgia legislature plugged loopholes in the letter of the law.

Idaho, Montana and North Carolina have also advanced legislation to either enact or tighten existing bans.

Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., co-chairwoman of the House Election Integrity Caucus, introduced a reasonable bill to amend the tax code to prohibit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations from directly funding election administration through donations or donated services. The donated services would seemingly encompass what the alliance is doing.

This is one of the best reforms that could come out of Congress, since it should be up to states to run elections, not the federal government. But clearly Congress has a say over tax laws and tax-exempt status.

Zuckerberg swore off funding any more election administration. Perhaps that’s because it was such a public relations nightmare, or perhaps Joe Biden’s election meant the mission was accomplished. Either way, one billionaire — regardless of his political persuasion — pouring vast sums into the running of elections does not pass the smell test for most Americans.

Notably, the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence is chiefly financed by The Audacious Project. Inside Philanthropy describes its donors as “a tech-heavy group of funders that lean liberal in their grantmaking.” So in theory, a group of wealthy, left-leaning donors is preferable to one Big Tech oligarch. But the point is the taint of private money.

Zuckerberg said the grants were to help election offices deal with the pandemic, but almost none of the money was used for personal protective equipment. Further, he gave $350 million to an organization clearly identified as left-leaning. The Center for Tech and Civic Life is mostly funded by left-of-center donors such as the Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.

As noted in my book, “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” the CTCL was founded in 2012 by Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges, and Whitney May, all of whom previously worked together at the New Organizing Institute, which the Washington Post referred to as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts of digital wizardry.”

While the group notes it issued grants to 2,500 US election offices in 49 states, analysis of the grants from the Foundation on Government Accountability show the money went disproportionately to blue areas.

For Wisconsin, Zuckerberg grants were divided almost entirely among Democrat strongholds. The state House of Representatives appointed former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman as special counsel, and he determined the state’s grants were used as “impermissible and partisan get out the vote efforts.”

American elections shouldn’t be bankrolled by billionaires of either side. In 2020, this helped drive up the Democrat voter participation to the disdain of Republicans. But it’s quite likely Democrats would not be happy if Koch Industries, or any billionaire or entity on the right, used their fortune to push government operations to drive up the vote in Republican areas.

If bipartisanship comes on this matter, it will likely have to occur after both parties feel put upon.

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This article was published by The Daily Caller and is reproduced with permission.

Writing Code to Flip Votes ‘Very Easy to Do’ But ‘Hard to Stop,’ Programmer Warns Arizona Senate

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“Don’t use machines, because you can never, ever trust them to give you a fair election,” Clinton Eugene Curtis said.

 

A computer programmer testified this week to an Arizona Senate committee that voting machines are susceptible to manipulation as the panel seeks to require that voting machine components are made in the U.S. and that the source code for the machines used in the state is available to government officials.

Attorney and computer programmer Clinton Eugene Curtis told the Arizona Senate Election Committee Monday that there are multiple ways voting machines can be hacked to change election results.

Curtis, a Democrat, began his presentation with a video clip of him testifying before Congress following the 2004 presidential election about how he believed that the election in Ohio was hacked.

In the video, Curtis explained that in 2000, at the request of a Florida politician, he created a program that “would flip the votes 51-49 to whoever you wanted it to go to and whichever race you wanted to win.” He added that elections officials wouldn’t be able to detect such a program.

Testifying before the Arizona Senate, Curtis said that flipping votes is “very easy to do” but “hard to stop.” The only way to stop it is by not using machines, he explained.

“Don’t use machines, because you can never, ever trust them to give you a fair election,” Curtis warned. “There are too many ways to hack them. You can hack them at the level that I did when you first build them, you can hack them from the outside, you can hack them with programs that load themselves on the side. It’s impossible to secure them.

“You will never beat the programmer. The programmer always owns the universe. And as long as you have machines — I don’t care which company — as long as you have machines, they are vulnerable to this.”…..

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Continue reading this article at Just the Facts.

If Republicans Win On Tuesday, Thank The Election Integrity Movement

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If Republican candidates do as well as expected on Tuesday, they can credit the new, widespread, and coordinated effort to begin securing U.S. elections, helping give candidates the best opportunity possible to win a fair fight in the new voting environment of mail-in balloting.

The Republican National Committee, other party entities, and dozens of public interest election nonprofit groups built over the last two years a multimillion-dollar election integrity infrastructure that passed laws improving voter ID and other election security measures, defended those laws from legal attacks by Democrats, and sued states and localities that failed to follow the law. They also recruited, educated, trained, and placed tens of thousands of new election observers and other workers throughout the long midterm voting season.

And they did it all in one of the most hostile propaganda environments on record.

2020’s Wake-Up Call

The 2020 election was a massive wake-up call for many Americans on the right. In the months leading up to it, Democrats forced through changes to hundreds of laws and processes governing how elections are conducted.

The rule-change scheme was run by Marc Elias, a Democrat election attorney who also ran his party’s Russia collusion hoax, which falsely claimed Donald Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia. Sometimes Democrats’ 2020 changes were instituted legally. Frequently, though, they were effected by other means, such as getting a friendly state or local official to change the rules unilaterally.

The 2020 election plan, some of which was admitted to in a flattering Time magazine story, sought to flood the zone with tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots, historically understood to be riper for fraud and other election irregularities than supervised, in-person voting. The plan also involved the private takeover of government election offices to run Democrat-focused get-out-the-vote operations. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, financed the project, doling out $419 million to two left-wing groups that focused grants and assistance to government offices in the Democrat areas of swing states.

This radical change — “practically a revolution in how people vote,” as Time put it — included the widespread practice of placing ballot drop boxes predominantly in Democrat areas of the country, mailing out unsolicited mail-in ballots or applications for mail-in ballots, using well-funded teams of ballot harvesters both inside and outside of government, lowering and changing the standards for mail-in ballot acceptance, and fixing or “curing” ballots that were improperly filled out.

Corporate media and other Democrats claimed the election was the best-run in history. In reality, it was a mess. Big Tech and the media ran coordinated disinformation campaigns to benefit Democrats by suppressing news that hurt the party. Big Tech also deplatformed effective conservative voices and media outlets, suppressed fundraising emails from Republicans, and elevated certain information to help Democrats.

There were other problems. Candidate debates occurred long after mail-in and early balloting began. Poll observers were sidelined under the guise of a Covid “emergency.” The counting of ballots cast via unsupervised, mail-in voting resulted in curious and confusing results. It took days and sometimes weeks to find out how many ballots were cast, much less for whom. In the end, Americans learned that Joseph Biden, who had spent most of his campaign at home, had become the most popular American president in history, collecting an astounding 81 million votes.

Many Republican voters wondered how things were allowed to get so bad with elections.

Republicans Spent 40 Years on the Sidelines

Part of the reason Republicans hadn’t more effectively fought the election integrity battle before now is somewhat shocking. The 2020 contest was the first presidential election since Ronald Reagan’s first successful run in 1980 in which the Republican National Committee could play any role whatsoever in Election Day operations. For nearly 40 years, the Democratic National Committee had a massive systematic advantage over its Republican counterpart: The RNC had been prohibited by law from helping with poll watcher efforts or nearly any voting-related litigation.

Democrats had accused Republicans of voter intimidation in a 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race. The case was settled, and the two parties entered into a court-ordered consent decree limiting Republican involvement in any poll-watching operation. But Dickinson Debevoise, the Jimmy Carter-appointed judge who oversaw the agreement, never let them out of it, repeatedly modifying and strengthening it at Democrats’ request.

Debevoise was a judge for only 15 years, but he stayed 21 years in senior status, a form of semi-retirement that enables judges to keep serving in a limited capacity. It literally took Debevoise’s dying in 2015 for Republicans to get out of the consent decree. Upon his passing, a new judge, appointed by President Obama, was assigned the case and let the agreement expire at the end of 2018.

The effect of this four-decade hindrance on GOP poll-watching cannot be overstated. Poll watchers serve many functions. They deter voter fraud, but they also help with getting out the vote. Poll watchers can see who has voted, meaning campaigns and political parties can figure out which areas and voters to call and encourage to vote. They also can observe who was forced to vote provisionally or who was turned away at the polls.

“Without poll watchers, the RNC would have no good way to follow up with its voters to help ensure a provisional ballot is later counted, direct confused voters to their correct polling place and document irregularities, such as voting equipment malfunctions and other incidents that are important flash points in a close election or recount,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has explained.

For decades, Democrats built up expansive coordination efforts that the Republicans were prohibited from developing. Republican candidates and state parties could do things on their own, but not with help from the national party. In 2012, the Obama-Biden campaign bragged about recruiting 18,000 lawyers to be poll watchers, providing more than 300 trainings to ensure the observers understood election law. The volunteers would collect more than 19,000 problematic incidents at polling locations that were resolved with or without legal intervention.

The consent decree also meant the RNC was kept out of almost any litigation related to Election Day. In fact, one main part of the RNC’s legal efforts was training staff to stay away from Election Day operations, including recounts, and fending off litigation that arose from the consent decree.

It paralyzed the RNC’s political operations, as the slightest misstep would result in getting sued by Democrats. For example, when former Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer said in an interview with GQ magazine that he’d watched 2016 returns in an oversized utility room on the fifth floor of Trump Tower, Democrats deposed him to show he’d violated the order by being on the wrong floor, one tied to Election Day outreach.

The Democrats used that trivial fact to try, unsuccessfully, to get the new judge to extend the limitation on their political rivals for another decade. Even though the decree was finally lifted after nearly 40 years, it didn’t mean Republicans were on even footing with Democrats in 2020. Democrats had spent decades perfecting their Election Day operations and litigation strategy while everyone at the RNC walked on eggshells, knowing that if they so much as looked in the direction of a polling site, there could be another crackdown.

Thus there was no muscle memory about how to watch polls or communicate with a campaign. They had spent decades not being able to organize or talk to presidential campaigns, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or the National Republican Congressional Committee about any of these efforts.

What a change, then, when McDaniel announced in early 2020 her “intention to be the most litigious chair in history.”

But First, Election Reforms

Before mounting successful lawsuits, however, better laws had to be passed — a difficult task in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, when Democrats claimed any criticism of how that election had been run was unacceptable and possibly criminal. That campaign, designed to suppress efforts to bolster election security, continues to this day. Nevertheless, Republican lawmakers in dozens of states began pushing for election reforms.

For example, bans on so-called Zuckbucks, the private takeover of government election offices, were passed and signed into law in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Six Democrat governors vetoed attempted bans, understanding how key Zuckerberg’s funding was to Democrat success in 2020. The governors of Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all vetoed the bans. Wisconsin’s governor, currently in a tight election, vetoed twice. The Kansas legislature overrode the veto.

The resulting contrast between election integrity in some of these battleground states could not be clearer. Take Pennsylvania, for instance, a pivotal swing state where the Democrat governor vetoed the legislature’s attempted reforms. Its partisan Supreme Court meanwhile issues conflicting guidance, resulting in disparate treatment of ballots depending on the county they’re cast in. Elections here are high in irregularities and low in voter trust.

Not so in Georgia. Recall that despite tremendous pressure from Democrats who alleged massive GOP-led voter suppression, including Biden who smeared election integrity efforts as “Jim Crow 2.0,” Georgia passed much-needed reforms related to voter ID, mail-in voting, and drop boxes, in addition to the Zuckbucks ban. The result has been record-breaking early, in-person voter turnout, across demographics, surpassing 2 million voters this week.

Meanwhile, the Foundation for Government Accountability worked with states to make policy changes to clean voter rolls, ban ballot trafficking, secure ballot custody, roll back Covid waivers, enact penalties for election lawbreakers, require chains of custody, secure drop boxes, pre-process absentee ballots, improve absentee voter ID, and dozens of other types of reforms.

Florida has been working steadily to improve its election system since the disastrous 2000 election. Last year, that meant banning Zuckbucks. This year, those changes included “requiring voter rolls to be annually reviewed and updated, strengthening ID requirements, establishing the Office of Election Crimes and Security to investigate election law violations, and increasing penalties for violations of election laws.”

Incidentally, the Center for Renewing America filed a complaint with the IRS over the tax break that Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan received for their 2020 election meddling.

Litigate, Litigate, Litigate

While the RNC and the Trump campaign did achieve some legal successes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, it was nowhere near sufficient against the well-funded and coordinated Democrat effort. Republican donors and grassroots demanded more.

The RNC got involved in 73 election integrity cases in 20 states for the midterms, with plans to expand. They won a lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for restricting the rights of poll challengers; got Maricopa County, Arizona, to share key data about its partisan breakdown of poll workers; won an open records lawsuit against Mercer County, New Jersey, for refusing to share election administration data; won a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections for restricting the rights of poll watchers; and reached a favorable settlement against Clark County, Nevada, in which the county agreed to share information about its partisan breakdown of poll workers on a rolling basis.

“I’m so grateful the RNC is back in the system after 40 years. They’re so needed,” said Minnesota State Senator and former Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer.

Ken Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general and acting deputy DHS secretary who now runs the Election Transparency Initiative, agreed. “They’ve been a game changer in the litigation arena to keep elections clean.”

The RNC wasn’t the only big change in the litigation battle. Hotelier Steve Wynn, strategist Karl Rove, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and top Republican election lawyers launched an election litigation group, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), in July 2022, and within three months chalked up several major victories.

For instance, RITE sued over controversial Wisconsin Elections Commission guidance that conflicted with state law, telling election clerks to accept ballots that had been spoiled, and won the case. It was also part of the group that successfully sued Pennsylvania over whether ballots that failed to be dated, as required by state law, could be counted.

“It goes to show what responsible and tireless lawyering can do for election integrity,” said Derek Lyons, the president and CEO of RITE.

Groups with lengthier histories of battling for election integrity, such as the Public Interest Legal Foundation, also had successes. A Delaware court ruled that the state’s newly passed mail-in balloting scheme violated its constitution.

Monitoring Polls

U.S. elections used to occur on one day, requiring just one day of poll observations. Now that elections can spread out over days, weeks, or even months, many more workers are needed to monitor the casting of ballots.

The RNC hired 17 in-state election integrity directors and 37 state-based election integrity counsels in key states. They conducted more than 5,000 election integrity trainings, recruited more than 70,000 poll watchers and workers, and worked with more than 110,000 unique volunteers nationwide. They set up an issue reporting system and distributed copies of Poll Watcher Principles for states. If voters encounter election issues, they can file a report, and attorneys will be dispatched to resolve the issues. Sites were set up in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Congressional Republicans also got in on the action. Rep. Rodney Davis, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee, notified all 50 states that he would be deploying dozens of specially trained election observers to protect the integrity of the ballot box.

The move occurred after Democrats nearly seized a seat won by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa in 2020. She won her election by just six votes, leading Democrats to attempt to unseat her using parliamentary shenanigans. The Republicans of the House Administration Committee just released a mini-doc about Democrats’ attempt at literal election denialism.

With tens of millions of voters newly concerned about election integrity, other groups also took part in massive training operations. The Election Integrity Network, which started with a podcast on election integrity issues hosted by longtime election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, grew into state summits, which then built out into coalitions in states, attracting people to weekly meetings. The network has trained 76,000 poll workers.

The network’s North Carolina Election Integrity Team covers 95 percent of that state’s priority areas with poll observers. It has more than 30 local task forces, with representatives in 75 of 100 counties. More than 2,000 North Carolinians were individually trained. The group has established a strong working relationship with the state General Assembly to overhaul legislation and built relationships with local election officials. Similar groups are operating in Georgia, Virginia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and other states.

The Vulnerable Voters Working Group meets to develop and implement ideas to protect nursing homes from left-wing ballot harvesting. The American Constitutional Rights Union is one coalition partner working to protect seniors from illicit activities.

Part of the benefit of an aggressive legal strategy is that it incentivizes election bureaucrats and officials to follow the law, which helps restore trust in elections, Election Integrity Network Director Marshall Yates says. “What these people do is provide transparency and accountability to the system that was previously just run by unaccountable bureaucrats. They may or may not see something but just their presence is a check on making sure there is some accountability to the system, and it should restore confidence in seeing how elections were administered.”

What Remains

While reforms were passed in more than two dozen states, key lawsuits were filed and won, and poll workers are being deployed nationwide, many problems remain. Even with the recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court victory, that state remains essentially lawless when it comes to election integrity. North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, and other battleground states retain problematic election processes and guidance. And inflated voter rolls, combined with unsolicited mail-in ballots, are a recipe for disaster.

The new election integrity groups have much work to do in the years ahead. But many Americans, from establishment Republicans to grassroots conservatives, have poured themselves into restoring integrity to elections nationwide. They have begun to achieve major successes in lobbying for election security, litigating against a well-funded activist opposition, and training poll watchers. And they did it all in the face of a hostile propaganda press that maliciously disparaged them as election deniers.

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This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Voter Rolls Are Essential to Victory in the Election Integrity Fight. Here’s Why.

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Voter rolls are the most important election integrity documents. They tell election officials who is eligible to vote. The voter rolls also tell election officials where to send mail ballots, so it is even more important that they are accurate in states that automatically send registered voters mail ballots.

It is essential that states have accurate and up-to-date voter rolls. This includes removing individuals who moved, have died, and duplicate registrants. Many states across the country are failing to do this essential voter list maintenance that is required by federal law.

When people pass away and remain on the voter rolls, it is a problem. That means election officials believe these individuals are still eligible to vote. There are people who will take advantage of these vulnerabilities in the electoral process and cast ballots for these deceased individuals.

For example, in Pennsylvania, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, turned over information to Pennsylvania authorities about individuals who had passed away but had vote credits in the 2020 election. This led to the arrest of an individual who voted for his dead wife.

Pennsylvania entered into a settlement agreement with us to remove over 20,000 deceased registrants from its voter roll. It is now a lot harder to vote from beyond the grave in Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately, this problem is bigger than just Pennsylvania. We sued Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for failing to remove over 25,000 deceased registrants from the state’s voter roll. The court denied her motion to dismiss the case, and the litigation is still ongoing.

Just as many states are failing to remove deceased individuals, many are also failing to remove duplicate voter registrations. A duplicate registration happens when one person is registered to vote more than once. Often duplicate registrations are caused by a person being registered under variations of their name. Duplicate registrations matter because it provides the opportunity for individuals to vote more than once.

In Minnesota, we filed six Help America Vote Act complaints in six different counties for failing to remove a total of 515 duplicate registrations. And yes, government records do show that some of these individuals do have two vote credits in the 2020 election.

Unfortunately, the problem of duplicate registrations goes well beyond Minnesota. In a report released in 2020, the Public Interest Legal Foundation found nearly 38,000 duplicate registrants on America’s voter rolls. We even found a man in Pennsylvania who registered seven times. You read that right—seven.

Election officials in states across the country are not doing their jobs. Federal law requires deceased and duplicate voter registrations be removed from the voter roll.

Every inaccuracy on the voter roll presents an opportunity for fraud and abuse. This presents an even bigger problem in states that do automatic vote by mail. In these states, deceased and duplicate registrants will receive ballots. No one wants anyone voting from beyond the grave or more than once.

Accurate voter rolls are essential to election integrity. Election officials need to do the most basic aspect of their job, keeping voter rolls clean and accurate. We should not have to sue election officials to get them to do their jobs.

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This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

ZuckBucks Election Rigger Announces Plan To Take Over Government Election Communications

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A key operative in the Zuckerberg-funded scheme to take over government election offices during the 2020 election just announced his plan to provide public relations support for election workers facing increased scrutiny by voters.

Democrat elections activist David Becker’s Election Official Legal Defense Network (EOLDN) announced it will be providing communications for government election officials across the country.

This move is in response to a growing number of concerned citizens taking an active role in demanding greater transparency and oversight into the elections process, particularly after the chaos that marked the 2020 presidential election. Democrats and the media deride this activism as a dangerous “attack on elections” and claim that election workers’ safety is in danger (despite the fact that DOJ Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite admitted that out of 1,000 threats reported against election workers to the DOJ hotline last year, only 100 met the threshold for investigation, and out of that 100, five were prosecuted by the DOJ).

Becker claims his group will run communications efforts to help election offices combat “disinformation” and to create “an effective truthful narrative.” When asked about Becker’s new project, Cleta Mitchell, senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, quipped, “What disinformation are they countering and who is the truth czar?”

Through EOLDN’s website, election officials may request communications assistance and be matched with a professional free of charge. Such assistance will include “traditional media, social media, messaging, planning, rapid response, and anything else an election office needs to support their work and combat disinformation.”

Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, told The Federalist “it’s far from clear that administrators are being threatened by ‘disinformation’ – a loaded term used by activists – or that it’s appropriate for a tax-exempt nonprofit to provide pro bono services to government employees. That sounds like a left-wing workaround to escape the dozens of states that have forbidden Zuck Buck-style private funding of government election offices by instead giving government officials services and other in-kind support.”

But this kind of private takeover of government election offices is nothing new to Becker. During the 2020 election, Becker’s left-wing nonprofit group, the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), received roughly $70 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that it funneled to government election offices to drive Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts in blue areas of swing states.

Becker himself is a far-left activist with an extensive history of attacking conservatives. As an attorney for the Department of Justice, he was the subject of an ethics complaint which revealed disparaging comments he made about Republicans via email. After his stint at the DOJ, Becker worked for People For The American Way, a George Soros-funded leftist advocacy group best known for its website that attacks right-wing politicians. In 2012, Becker founded the Electronic Registration Information Center, a voter roll maintenance organization that inflates state’s voter rolls instead of cleaning them (and in doing so, drives Democratic voter turnout). In 2016, Becker started CEIR, of which EOLDN is a project. He currently sits on the board of advisers for Secure Elections for America Now, a center-left advocacy group that promotes same-day voter registration and voting rights for convicted felons.

Simply put, Becker and his operatives have taken over voter roll maintenance, voter registration and outreach, election administration (including the counting and curing of ballots), and now official elections communications — while being irreversibly compromised as Democrat activists.

Private citizens who notice irregularities at their local election offices will have no chance of remedying suspicious or illegal practices when officials can defer to Becker and his team to characterize their actions as legal and label complaints “disinformation.” Once EOLDN has control of state and local election offices’ communications, it’ll be that much easier to shut down citizen observers’ concerns and flood election offices with left-wing propaganda.

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This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Bombshell: DOJ Conceals Records About Biden’s Use Of Federal Agencies To Influence Elections

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Editors Note: The argument about election integrity seems to break into two separate, but related areas. Some are concerned about cheating, which is literally altering the outcome of elections by manipulating the vote. But more subtle, and more difficult to quantify, is the use of both private companies and Federal agencies, to use their influence to change the outcome of elections. One could in theory have a perfectly honest accounting of the vote, but have the outcome changed because private companies and Federal agencies use their money and power to change who shows up at the polls and what voters have as information to use in making decisions? Moreover, the government is doing a lot by itself, and using private corporations, to alter what you hear about issues, which also is a subtle, but powerful way, to alter the outcome of elections. Private companies and certainly Federal agencies should not become the vehicles for political parties and their partisan positions. Private companies of course are free to contribute to whomever they wish, but they should not be paying election officials. Government agencies use tax dollars, collected from citizens from different political perspectives. They should not be used as a tool of politics because taxes are taken by force from all of us and it is not the function of these agencies to engage in Democrat political efforts.

 

The DOJ is concealing documents related to Biden’s executive order that directed agencies to meddle in nationwide elections.

 

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is concealing key documents related to President Joe Biden’s March 2021 order that directed executive agencies to develop plans for federal interference in state election administration.

On Sept. 8, the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) was scheduled to receive a series of government records from the DOJ that detailed how the agency is complying with Executive Order 14019. That order mandated all federal departments to “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.” Among these included the DOJ’s 15-page “strategic plan” on how the agency intends to comply with Biden’s executive order.

Instead of releasing the documents, FGA requested pursuant to federal open records laws, however, the Biden DOJ released only a few records pertaining to the order, most of which were heavily redacted.

In one of the emails dated June 11, 2021, for example, Special Assistant to the Deputy White House Counsels Devontae Freeland writes to a redacted list of administration officials about the submission of June 15 interim reports regarding Biden’s executive order.

“Thank you for your work on the Promoting Access to Voting EO implementation plans,” Freeland wrote. “The interim reports, which are due this Tuesday 6/15, can be submitted by email [redacted] as a Word doc. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions or concerns.”

In a separate email chain dated June 21, 2021, Freeland discusses a proposed Zoom meeting between members of the administration and numerous “election officials” and “nonprofit organizations” engaged in “voting rights advocacy” and those with “expertise in reaching out to … particular populations of voters who may be more difficult to reach.”

According to Freeland, the goal of the meeting was to purportedly garner “recommendations” and “thoughts on best practices” on how to best fulfill the requests in Biden’s order.

“We believe that these sessions will provide some helpful feedback as you further refine the strategic plans due to the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy on September 23, 2021,” the email reads.

While the emails don’t specify which election officials or nonprofits took part in the meeting, Freeland does say that the administration reached out to “10 pragmatic state and local officials, from different parts of the country, serving very different constituencies,” with the group including “Democrats and Republicans and those with no partisan affiliation.”

“The American people deserve to know if the Biden Administration’s unprecedented action is fair and non-partisan, or if it is designed to help one political party over the other,” said FGA President and CEO Tarren Bragdon in a statement. “Why are they ignoring public record requests for strategic plans on federal voter registration efforts? Why are they treating these documents like they are classified information dealing with nuclear weapons? Midterms are approaching, and the DOJ’s failure to disclose information raises troubling issues. They need to reveal these public documents to keep our elections fair.”

FGA sued the DOJ in April 2022 after the agency failed to respond to the organization’s July 2021 open records requests related to Biden’s order. Nearly a year later, on July 12, 2022, a federal district court judge ordered the DOJ to turn over the documents before the midterm elections. The DOJ did so, but with heavy redactions that defy the intent of the order.

In addition to the Sept. 8 document dump, FGA is also scheduled to receive documents from the DOJ on Sept. 20 and Oct. 20, with the group set to publish such records on Sept. 27 and Oct. 25, respectively.

Additional organizations that have filed lawsuits against the Biden administration for refusing to comply with open records requests related to Biden’s directive include the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) and the Center for Renewing America (CRA). Filed against agencies including the Departments of Labor, Defense, and Education in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the litigation has yet to compel the administration to turn over federal records that would show how public employees are carrying out Biden’s order.

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This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Election Integrity Should be Bi-Partisan

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Election integrity is something everyone should be concerned about. Both parties have an interest in ensuring the public has confidence in the process. If not, it is destructive to the very core of the democratic process. The reason: if elections are not “honest”, what is the point of elections and without elections how can you have “democracy”, that is rule by the people? And, if not rule by the representatives of the people, elected by the consent of voters, by what standard can the “legitimacy” of governance be determined in a Constitutional Republic?

We know that Democrats too are concerned about election integrity because of their loud complaints in the first two decades of the 21st century. However, now they want to demonize anyone who questions the process.

Comparatively speaking, election integrity is even more important than the investigation of the unfortunate trespassing at the Capitol building, but it does not generate near the concern by the press, government officials, tech oligarchs, and Republicans like Liz Cheney. That event applied to just one Presidential election.  Election integrity applies to all elections, at all levels of government.

It is also somewhat disgusting that those that suggest that talking about election integrity is a “threat to democracy” try mightily to shut down the discussion. That is not going to work. We want to discuss it anyway.

What is an honest election? At one time, this seemed rather easy to answer. The results of the election should be determined by the votes cast. That seems simple, but the last election has shown how truly complicated it can be.

Let’s start with the voter. Can we all agree that voters should be citizens? No, some jurisdictions want non-citizens to vote and some resist the presentation of any kind of identification that proves both age and citizenship requirements, and additionally proof the voter is currently alive.

Can we agree that the voter casting the vote should be alive? No, the system often does not reliably verify signatures and ties those signatures to a physical address, which proves the person is who they say they are, and presumably alive and voting only once. A dead person apparently can vote by mail much easier than showing up to the polls and voting in person.  That much has been established. Why they always vote Democrat remains a mystery.

Can we agree that people should only vote once and that my vote should not count more than your vote? A recent study indicated that is difficult to determine that the number of votes cast equals the number of voters. The study found a 2.89% gap between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters. In a number of jurisdictions, the difference could determine the outcome of the election.

Can we agree on how the vote should be exercised? No, we can’t seem to agree on that.  It used to be you voted on one day, election day, and you did so at a polling place where at least there was some supervision and representatives of both parties present to see the supervision was fairly applied. This was standard procedure for a number of years, even when transportation was much more primitive. You voted at the polls on election day.

Today, a good deal of voting, sometimes the majority is done by mail-in and can be spaced over a number of days. And, the votes can be delivered into unsupervised drop boxes, where ballot stuffing can be done. Every voter should see the documentary film, 2000 Mules to get a sense of the extent of the problem.

Today, voting can even begin before campaigns are officially concluded, which allows voters to exercise their franchise often ignorant of late-breaking news, debate results, and opposition research, that might have influenced their thinking and choices. For example, polls indicate a substantial number of voters would have changed their vote, had they known about Hunter Biden and his criminal activities. But the news came after many had already voted.

A process that goes on over days with geographically spaced and unsupervised depositories is just an invitation to defraud the process.

Mail-in voting destroys the important “chain of custody”, which is a way of saying the voter casts a ballot, and that ballot gets to the counting center with no opportunity to change that vote, augment that vote with fake ballots, or remove that vote from the stream of ballots. The chain of custody is very important because it can stop a lot of voter fraud. Mail-in voting is thus rife with opportunities to manipulate, alter, or suppress the actual voting result.

Voting rolls should be regularly updated so people who have moved or died, cannot have their names entered into the process. This will reduce ballot stuffing by “mules.”

Once the votes get to a counting center, ideally, they should be counted by hand or by machines not connected to the internet. Machine counting can be quite accurate. For example, coins and bills are counted at great speed and with great accuracy by financial institutions, but there is no need to connect such analog machines to the internet where software can be hacked or manipulated. Representatives of both parties should be present when tabulations are collected from accurate high-speed analog counting devices.

Getting results to the press needs to take second place to accuracy in the vote count.

Can we all agree that the system should be one man, one vote and that all votes should be counted as accurately as possible? That would seem to be a no-brainer.

Here we will offer perhaps a controversial suggestion. The integrity of the system is a more important value to society than the convenience of the voter, but make voting as easy as possible. Therefore, make election day a holiday from work, so all can participate without great sacrifice to work or home responsibility. Require the voter to show up in person, with ID, and cast his/her vote on election day, not weeks before.

Convenience is a relative condition. For decades I voted at the polls on election day and got addicted to the convenience of mail-in voting. If people could walk, ride a horse or wagon, and get to a distant voting center in our frontier past, it is hardly inconvenient to give a person one task in a day they are getting off, to take a short drive in an air-conditioned bus or car, to vote in person at a polling station. With just one task to perform on a special day of civic responsibility, even those wheelchair-bound should find no difficulty getting to the polls. Usually, there are plenty of volunteers from political parties willing to help get out their mobility-challenged members to vote.

There is no need for independent parties to “harvest” or vote on behalf of another person.

We asked earlier, what is an honest election, and we have talked mostly about the process of voting itself, the security of those votes, and their accurate tabulation.

Beyond those mechanics, what is an honest election process?

In an ideal world, you should maximize freedom of assembly and the free press to see that the public is educated about the policy positions of the candidates and that they make informed decisions based on that information. That also presumes a fairly high degree of knowledge on the part of citizens so they understand their own political system (civics) and know a bit of history about their nation. But there is no realistic way to keep ignorant, bigoted, or uninformed people from voting. If government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, the quality of government will be roughly equivalent to the quality of the governed.

In this realm, there is huge room for improvement. Public-school teachers who teach civics and history often do a poor job. I can recall a few exceptional teachers, but many made these important subjects just about as boring as possible. School choice seems the only alternative to getting better-educated citizens in all subject matters.

However, one thing seems clear from the last election cycle. We now know that government agencies interfered with the flow of information to voters. A high-ranking FBI agent just was forced to resign by deliberately suppressing information about criminal activity in the family of a Presidential candidate. Also, several intelligence and law enforcement agencies conspired with one political party that paid for bogus intelligence, acquired from foreign intelligence operatives, to try to change the outcome of an election.

In a free society, we can’t stop politicians from lying. We can’t stop the press from lying, although competition can help in that regard. And likely, we will never be able to stop leaks from government agencies to their pet press outlets. But clearly, government agencies should not be allowed to put their thumbs, elbows, and feet directly on the electoral scales. Nor should government agencies recruit, intimidate, or otherwise manipulate social media platforms into suppressing some news and releasing others.

Our Constitution forbids the government from suppressing the freedom of speech. That should apply as well to media companies that act as agents of the government.

This last cycle also showed that private companies also were allowed to spend millions of dollars in payments to election officials and private organizations, supposedly to improve the election process.

Government officials should run our elections, not private companies such as FaceBook. To date, 24 states have passed legislation to ban “Zuckbucks”, but not all states have done so.

From what we have described, it should be clear we at present do not have an “honest” election process. The current system is full of deficiencies that can be exploited. Voting rolls are often shoddy, the chain of custody is questionable, and the identification of voters is sketchy.

Do we have an honest electoral process, including a free flow of information and an informed electorate? Probably not on both counts.

At the very least, government intelligence agencies should not be interfering in the process by either planting bogus stories or suppressing real stories. Certainly, to actively conspire with one political party is unethical and cause for dismissal.It likely should be illegal. Government is there for all of us, not just some of us.

A Congressional review of our intelligence agencies, somewhat like the Church committee of the Viet Nam War period seems justified. It appears they took an active role not in cheating on vote counting, but in altering the political outcome through information manipulation and an outright conspiracy with the Democrat party and foreign intelligence operatives.

If the voting process is not secure, and if the election process, specifically the free flow of information is not operative, then you can legitimately say our election process was compromised.

That is not a statement “inciting insurrection”, it is simply saying election integrity is in fact the most important factor supporting our democratic system. Integrity applies to all elections, not just those with electors needed to certify Presidential elections.

It is the enemies of democracy who want to shut the discussion down and block attempts to improve the integrity of our elections.

Our elections likely will never be perfect, but they could be a lot more secure and fair than they currently are.

By all means, let’s have an open discussion and let all views be considered and stop this nonsense that concerned voters are “semi-fascists” any more than concerned parents are “domestic terrorists.”

Our democratic institutions are too sacred to be soiled by this kind of demagoguery.

America’s Elections Are at Stake. Texas Shows They Can Be Fixed.

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As we approach the next election cycle, many Americans wonder whether or not their votes will count.

But given the incredibly high stakes in any election, how can Americans know that their votes actually matter and that their elections are free and fair?

Chad Ennis, director of the Forensic Audit Division with the Texas Secretary of State’s office and former senior fellow for the Election Protection Project at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, was instrumental in getting his state to take steps toward securing the election process.

“I really feel like Texas has been a leader in all kinds of voting,” he says. “We were one of the first states to have early voting, but we’ve always been very keen on keeping the security in place.”

Ennis joins the show to discuss the steps Texas took to secure its elections and offer some guidance on what other states should do to secure theirs.

Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript:

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This article and podcast were produced by Daily Signal and are reproduced with permission.