Election Integrity: The Thousand-Pound Gorilla is Still in the Room

In 2017, then President Donald Trump established a commission to study interference in the 2016 election. This action was based on reports that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats had engaged in serious nefarious actions, including the fake Russia collusion scandal, designed to affect the outcome of the presidential contest. Trump’s voter fraud concerns proved to be prescient as widespread reports of voter fraud served as an ominous warning of what was to come in 2020.

The Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, chaired by Vice-President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was convened on May 11, 2017 for the purpose of investigating claims of “voter fraud, improper voter registration and voter suppression.” A consensus emerged among investigators in different parts of the country that at least three million illegal aliens voted in the 2016 presidential election, costing Trump the popular vote.

Overwhelmingly dismissed by the left’s media propaganda arm as “a conspiracy myth,” Trump’s claims were later substantiated by a number of legitimate outlets, including “Investor’s Business Daily,” who cited a 2014 study in the Electoral Studies Journal that found illegal alien voting participation in both 2008 and 2010 was substantial.

“We find that some noncitizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and congressional elections,” wrote Gulshan A. Chattha and Jesse T. Richman, both of Old Dominion University, as well as David C. Earnest of George Mason University.

So, if illegal alien voters were a force significant enough to influence elections in 2008 and 2010, why would anyone doubt their participation would prove more substantial in 2016, when their numbers were much higher and woke leftist election rigging schemes had become more sophisticated?

Unfortunately, the election commission met the fate you would expect. Instead of cooperating in a good faith effort to ensure America’s elections would remain fair and accurate, many of the states in question refused to turn over essential data like voter names, addresses, party affiliation and voting history. Other states filed lawsuits, hiding behind fake privacy concerns. It became apparent those in charge of elections in states with probable voter fraud would never willingly turn over data that would incriminate them in rigging schemes Democrats routinely use to win elections.

Therefore, in January 2017, the White House released a statement that said, “Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry. Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and he has asked the Department of Homeland Security to review its initial findings and determine next courses of action.”

And that was that. As they have demonstrated consistently, woke leftists will vigorously fight against any measures that would ensure voter confidence in the results of our elections. They hide behind bogus and unsubstantiated claims of “voter suppression,” insulting their constituency by suggesting they are either too ignorant or too lazy to provide an ID when they are voting.

When the Left Thought Republicans Were Doing the Rigging

Despite their current stance on election integrity, after Hillary Clinton lost, many prominent Democrats claimed the 2016 presidential election was rigged. I mean, after all, how could the country actually elect a pro-America candidate like Donald Trump? In 2017, an in-depth study by the leftist publication, Truthout, found a variety of serious vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems, including:

* Machines are not safeguarded and sit vulnerable for weeks leading up to an election

* The shoddy locks and keys on the machines are easily opened and replaced

* Machines can be breached without breaking official security seals

* The secret software can be rigged with malicious, self-deleting code to steal elections

* The rigged code will not be detected by standard security tests

* Vote-rigging viruses can be spread from one computer through an entire network

* The administrative passwords are often easily hacked or missing entirely

* One person can access voting systems and others can enter behind them

* Last minute “patches” to (supposedly) update software can harbor malicious code

* Wireless connections are insecure and aren’t always evident

* Vulnerable hacking points include voter registration lists, any machines that are linked to the internet, any digital vote results that are transferred wirelessly to central tabulators, and all final vote tallies transferred to the websites of secretaries of states.

Further, the article discusses optical scanners:

The final, and possibly most dangerous myth to placate and mislead concerned voters, is that the optical scanners are safe. In fact, they are also computers that can miscount and can be secretly programmed or hacked to rig elections. The only difference in safety is that the paper ballots are available for hand-count audits. Some scanners also provide digital ballot images that can be used for a separate audit.

However, without actually auditing these records in public, with a secure ballot chain of custody, they offer nothing but a false sense of security.

Are you beginning to understand why Democrats are so terrified of investigative forensic audits (as opposed to recounts of fraudulent ballots that accomplish nothing)?

All seven of the battleground states, including Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, use optical scanners. It is interesting to note that since Democrats started to win elections where the very issues they raised about electronic voting came into play, publications like Truthout have remained strangely silent.

2024 Election Integrity Update

So, with the benefit of four years to enact legislation, what have states done to address election integrity and ensure the 2024 election is not a repeat of the 2020 debacle?

Arizona: In 2021-2022, Arizona Republicans controlled the legislature and the governor’s desk. However, 11 meaningful election integrity bills never made it out of Senate committee. Instead, Republicans in the legislature waited until a Democrat governor took office, and then they bombarded her with election integrity bills they knew she would veto.

Ultimately, Arizona passed two weak bills. One bill laughably requires proof of citizenship for state elections but effectively allows illegal aliens to vote in federal elections. The other bill lowered the recount threshold.

North Carolina: The legislature enacted some of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation, including ID requirements for both mail in ballots and in-person voting. Anyone want to bet who wins North Carolina in 2024?

Georgia: After passing a law requiring voter ID for absentee ballots, there is hope Georgia’s elections will be more transparent and honest.

Michigan: Woke leftist Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed voter initiative proposal 2, which codified a 9-day early voting period and required voters to sign an affidavit or show a drivers license when applying for an absentee ballot. Election administrators now have more time to “process” ballots. Many analysts believe Michigan actually made election rigging easier.

Nevada: Lawmakers expanded mail in voting access, ensuring every registered voter gets a mail in ballot, making election tampering much easier. The state also made it more convenient for convicted felons and indigenous people to vote.

Pennsylvania: Under Pennsylvania’s new election laws, people are automatically registered to vote when they obtain a drivers license. Currently, illegal aliens cannot obtain a license in the state, but there are several initiatives to change that.

Wisconsin: Absentee ballot drop box ballot harvesting was banned by the legislature, but the law is currently being challenged in the courts.

The Verdict

Unfortunately, America’s election system needed a complete overhaul, and instead we got patchwork reforms, and in some cases, regressive bills that will make it even easier to cheat. In Democrat controlled enclaves where leftist partisans run every aspect of the election and oversight is virtually nonexistent, the temptation to tamper with vulnerable electronic voting equipment may be too powerful for unscrupulous Democrats to resist, especially in tight races.

It’s fair to be optimistic for a different result in Georgia, but there is no reason to believe the outcome, or the nefarious methods used to achieve it, will be any different in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or Nevada.

Since the nuts and bolts of coding and computers remain a mystery for most people, too many avenues remain open for a partisan IT technician or a committed leftist zealot with an agenda to influence the election.

I continue to ask this question but still have not received a satisfactory answer:

What is to stop someone, or a group of people who share radical woke-leftist views, from printing out a bunch of ballots in the name of people on the active voter rolls who haven’t voted in several previous elections? After putting them in a drop box, they would subsequently be collected and counted. Drop boxes are the perfect leftist solution for that pesky postmark you used to need on the mail-in ballot envelope. After the ballots are processed, the signatures would be “verified” by the same people who created the fake ballots in the first place.

After the disastrous 2020 election, and the documentary “2000 Mules” by Dinesh D’Souza, which showed the same people repeatedly showing up at drop box locations with scores of ballots, you would think that at the very least, every state would have banned drop boxes, right?

Nope, out of all the swing states, only Wisconsin now prohibits their use.

I wish I was more optimistic about this, but I see a repeat of 2020 in November, only this time, woke leftists will be even more sophisticated in their cheating. I’ll bet money that as we speak they’re crafting a new technique we’ve never heard of before that they’ll unleash on election day to ensure the will of the people once again proves irrelevant.