Are Our Elections Rigged?
Here's what some people say:
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"OPERATION: Eyeball" is proud to be sponsored by The Virginia Project, a champion for Election Integrity since its founding in the wake of the 2019 Election. Copied here, is TVP's latest news release as of July 17, 2024:
Our report on the epidemic of missing children in Culpeper and the wider implications thereof has been delayed by events. It will be issued soon. Thank you for your patience.
We're all stunned and angered by the Left's attempt to assassinate our nominee for President, President Donald J. Trump. They have fomented it and enabled it for eight long years and they finally got what they have desired for so long. By the grace of God, Trump turned his head at just the right moment and his injuries were not fatal.
Everything about the situation looks bad. All the years of incitement, the refusal of repeated requests to DHS for augmented security, the diversion of resources, the usage of poorly-trained temp agents, tactical failures that rookies wouldn't make, the lack of response to people in the crowd who spotted the assassin, the refusal to take responsibility, the insulting excuses that are clearly deliberate lies, the expressions of confidence after a historic failure, refusal to cooperate with Congress, and so on.
It should go without saying that people who would do this, would cheer for this, and would let it happen, would also cheat that same candidate at the ballot box.
We are dealing with a very, very desperate Democratic Party. The bottom is falling out on their poll numbers, they have lost on all the issues, their candidate's rather extreme cognitive defects can no longer be hidden, and their coalition is disintegrating to the point that they did not even earn a majority of black voters' support in the latest Virginia polls. Silicon Valley has had enough and is bringing fresh, big money in on the Republican side.
Desperate people do desperate things. They are pulling out all the stops to cheat their way to an on-the-books victory even knowing that, should they pull it off, no one either domestically or abroad will consider it legitimate. These are the final, desperate flailings of a drowning party.
Republicans aren't going to get caught napping this time. We know what they are and what they are doing and we are crashing the boards to stop them. This race is already over on the merits. Everything is coming down to a contest of their ability to cheat versus our ability to stop them. The future of the nation, the world, and perhaps all of humanity are the stakes this game is being played for.
It was not difficult to read the tea leaves earlier this year and understand that a focus on election integrity was the most effective role the Virginia Project could play. And so we have. We have been relentless in passing on everything learned in Virginia to others around the country, to get Republicans focused on cleaning up the voter rolls in particular, and rallying up legal support for the necessary court cases.
We need your support to seal the deal and bring victory home, for President Trump, for candidates for Congress, and all Republicans on the ballot. Deadlines for action are rushing towards us and we have little time to make a difference. If you can consider a contribution to the essential work we do for the Republican Party, I would be grateful for your support.
Thank you,
David Gordon
Director, Virginia Project
History Shows that Our Elections Are Rigged...
​By Charles L. Zelden (click for more)
​The integrity of the American electoral system is under attack. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump charges that the (presidential) election is “rigged.” That the fix is in. That voter fraud is rampant and that the election will be stolen. Worse, 41 percent of all Americans polled agree with Trump that something is wrong with the election, even as the first votes are being cast, and that somehow the election will be stolen from “the people.” Among Republicans, these fears are prevalent. Recent polls show 73 percent of Republicans convinced that voter fraud is a real and present danger to the trustworthiness of the electoral process; 60 percent believe that immigrants vote unlawfully; 43 percent that people bussed in from out of state will vote illegally using dead people’s names.
In some ways, it’s not surprising that so many Americans, especially Republicans, question the integrity of our electoral system. For the last sixteen years, the United States has been at war with itself over how we organize elections and thus determine which Americans can and cannot vote. Dubbed “the voting wars” by law professor and political scientist Richard L. Hasen, this ongoing fight pits Republicans screaming about the dangers of voter fraud—“dogs are voting in Saint Louis” cried then-Senator Kit Bond as early as 2002—against Democrats more concerned with issues of voter suppression while insisting that the evidence of in-person voter fraud was so scarce as to be nonexistent.
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Though they have the facts on their side, Democrats have largely lost this battle. In state after state, Republican-dominated legislatures have passed laws instituting strict voter ID requirements; imposing narrow limits on early voting times, dates, and places; and implementing hyper-partisan voter registration rules – all in the name of combating voter fraud. Even the U. S. Supreme Court—in 2008’s Crawford v. Marion County Election Board—accepted such measures as necessary to preserving voter confidence in the electoral system’s integrity.
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This does not mean that it is impossible to fix an election’s outcome. Rather, the best way to fix an election is not via voter fraud but via electoral fraud. Electoral fraud occurs when the people organizing and running an election “game the system” to produce desired outcomes. Unlike voters, election insiders have access to the guts of our electoral system. They pick the voting machines, design the ballots, and decide where and when voting occurs; they determine the rules of voter eligibility, create voting districts, and set the requirements for registering to vote; and, of course, these are the people who count the votes. Electoral fraud has the added advantage that it can be carried out without lawmakers or election supervisors ever breaking the law. In fact, most techniques of election fraud have their effects through laws and regulations—a process I call administrative gerrymandering.
Whereas traditional gerrymandering is about the drawing of legislative-district boundaries to force partisan outcomes in elections, administrative gerrymandering manipulates the rules and procedures that organize, implement, and execute the electoral process to force partisan outcomes. Selective voter purges, unequal distribution of voting machines based on class or party criteria, and partisan administrative rulings from state election officials are but three of many perfectly legal actions available to those controlling a state’s electoral machinery and seeking to shape the outcome of voting. Other options include the continued decentralization of electoral processes and procedures which allow local officials a free hand in manipulating who could and could not vote; or the implementation of such partisan ”reforms” as Voter ID requirements, shortened early voting hours and locations, and felony disenfranchisement rules. The major impact of such “reforms” is to exclude unwanted voters from the polls. By selectively shaping the way that we organize and count votes, and primarily by limiting who can vote or how we vote in an election, government officials can effectively “control,” even arguably “fix” elections in which outcomes are largely predetermined based on who gets access to the polls.
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Rulings by the Supreme Court requiring decennial redistricting and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 largely put an end to many of these overt forms of voter denial. However the drive to adopt election rules to suppress voters and thus to shape electoral outcomes remained strong. Unable to blatantly exclude unwanted voters anymore, partisan politicians began to seek ways to dilute the impact of minority or partisan opponents’ votes. This pattern of vote dilution involved voting lists purges, at-large elections, and full-slate and majority-vote requirements. Mississippi, for instance, in direct contradiction of both the intent and objectives of the Voting Rights Act, amended its state constitution in 1966 to permit the consolidation of adjacent counties as a direct means of undermining black majorities. In Louisiana, white officials “actively solicited absentee ballots from whites and set up voting ‘substations’ to make it easier for whites to cast their ballots,” while refusing to do the same for black voters. In Texas, responding to the demise of the poll tax, the legislature quickly adopted an equally burdensome annual voter registration requirement, one that demanded that voters reregister every year between November 1 and February 1 for the next year’s election. As a district court judge noted in overturning this law in 1971, it was “beyond doubt that the . . . Texas voter registration procedures tend to disenfranchise multitudes of Texas citizens otherwise qualified to vote.” Even as late as 2008, secret recordings showed Alabama election officials plotting to undermine a ballot initiative that would have increased minority voting. Allow the initiative to pass, they were recorded saying, and “every black, every illiterate,” would be “bused [to the polls] on HUD financed buses.”
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Charles L. Zelden, Professor of History and Political Science at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, is the author of four books on the history of voting and elections in America. Among them are Voting Rights on Trial (2002), The Battle for the Black Ballot: Smith v. Alwright and the Defeat of the Texas All White Primary (2004) and Bush v. Gore: Exposing the Hidden Crisis in American Democracy (2008).
LIST OF ISSUES
EARLY VOTING by Hans A. von Spakovsky (click for more)
Early Voting Disadvantages Seem to Outweigh Benefits.
Early voting — opening a limited number of locations where people can cast their ballots prior to Election Day — is a “reform” that states should reconsider. Its disadvantages seem to outweigh its benefits.
Until the 1980s, states offered Americans only two ways to vote: in person on Election Day, or with absentee ballots intended for those unable to vote in person because of disability or illness. But proponents pushed early voting as a way of increasing turnout by making voting more convenient.
Texas became the first state — almost 30 years ago — to implement the policy, which has now spread to 37 states and the District of Columbia (including three states that mail ballots to all voters). A review by the National Conference of State Legislators shows that the early voting period ranges from as much as 45 days before an election to as little as four days. The average length is just shy of three weeks: 19 days.
The number of Americans casting their ballots early has risen steadily. In the early 1990s, only about 7 percent of voters did so. Last year, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, 17.2 percent of all ballots were cast through in-person early voting and 23.7 percent through mail-in absentee ballots.
While early voting may seem more convenient, it appears to have the opposite effect of what its proponents sought: It actually decreases turnout. A number of studies, including one by American University and another by professors from the University of Wisconsin, conclude that states that have adopted early voting have lower voter turnout than states without early voting.
The 2013 University of Wisconsin study found that “early voting lowers the likelihood of turnout by three to four percentage points.” In fact, the longer the window of early voting, the greater the effect on lowering turnout. This may seem counterintuitive, but that is what the studies show.
The reason why early voting decreases turnout has not been determined conclusively. One reasonable theory is that allowing voters to vote over an extended period before Election Day diffuses mobilization efforts. Candidates and political parties spend an enormous amount of time and resources on get-out-the-vote efforts just before Election Day. If those efforts have to be spread out over several weeks, then they will not have the same intensity and may not be as effective in reminding and persuading individuals to cast ballots.
There are other problems. Voters who cast their ballots early are doing so without knowledge of events that may occur later in a campaign or just before Election Day that could be important to their choice of candidates. Last year, the early voting period started in some states before Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had even completed their three debates.
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In the 2016 presidential primaries, Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, garnered more than 70,000 votes in Arizona, even though he had dropped out of the race a week before the election. Those who had already cast their votes for him wasted their ballots. John Kasich came in fourth behind Mr. Rubio, losing by only a little over 6,000 votes, leading one CNN analyst to say that Kasich was beaten by “Rubio’s ghost.”
Finally, it seems obvious that early voting increases the already skyrocketing cost of political campaigns. When so many citizens vote early, any candidate who limits spending on voter mobilization to the last few days before Election Day (instead of engaging in expensive turnout efforts during the entire early voting period) will be at a serious disadvantage.
Early voting seems to damage the civic cohesiveness inherent in having voters throughout the nation turn out on a single day to choose our president and our legislative representatives. Given the costs, particularly its tendency to lower turnout, early voting is a “reform” that states should consider undoing.
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Hans A. von Spakovsky @HvonSpakovsky, Election Law Reform Initiative Manager, Senior Legal Fellow
Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration. This piece originally appeared in The Washington Times.
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VOTER-ID by Fred Lucas (click for more)
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Voter ID Laws Are Popular for Good Reasons.
Hours after Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) signed a new voter ID law in Ohio, the firm of Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias announced plans to litigate against it. Abha Khanna, a partner with the Elias Law Group, echoed the Left’s evidence-free canard that "voter suppression is, unfortunately, alive and well" in Ohio.
The truth? Eighteen other states already require photo ID to vote, out of a total of 35 states that have some form of voter ID laws. In addition to requiring stricter photo ID for voting, Ohio's new law eliminates early voting on the Monday before Election Day to allow county election boards time to prepare for Tuesday elections. It also shortens the deadline to apply for absentee ballots from noon on the third day before Election Day to the close of business on the seventh day before Election Day to ensure adequate time for applications to be processed.
This change, according to the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office, was to ensure voters don’t "unintentionally disenfranchise themselves" by procrastinating too close to Election Day. The law makes Ohioans 17 or older eligible for a free state photo ID card. Previously, Ohio’s voter ID law didn’t require a photo.
>>> Election Integrity 2022 in Review: More Improvements Than Damage
Despite dire warnings from the voter suppression hysteria industrial complex, there was never evidence that voter ID laws prevented eligible voters from casting a ballot.
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That’s one reason why voters across all demographics support voter ID laws in virtually every poll by almost 80%. This typically includes more than 60% of Democrats. While the Left routinely claims that voter ID disproportionately harms minority and low-income voters, 64% of black voters, 77% of Hispanics, and 76% of low-income voters support voter ID laws, according to a poll conducted by the Honest Elections Project.
The Elias lawsuit in Ohio will likely fail, like most others against ID laws, because the evidence just isn’t there. After Republicans won control of state legislatures across the country in 2010, many passed ID laws, and the Left wailed. But nine of the 11 states that added voter ID laws in 2011 had an increase in turnout from the 2012 election to the 2016 election.
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Voter ID laws can stop multiple types of fraud, such as impersonating another registered voter, preventing noncitizens from voting, and stopping out-of-state residents or someone registered in multiple jurisdictions. It’s safe to say there is bipartisan consensus for voter ID but a clear partisan divide in the political class. That wasn’t always the case.
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>>> Best Practices and Standards for Election Audits
The 2005 Carter-Baker Commission report, named for former Democratic President Jimmy Carter and former Republican Secretary of State James Baker, called for voter ID. A National Bureau of Economic Research study from 2019 examined 10 years' worth of turnout data from across the country and concluded that voter ID laws have "no negative effect on registration or turnout overall or for any specific group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation." The same study also determined ID laws have "no significant effect" on preventing fraud, but prevention-based laws could be based on proving a negative.
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Moreover, 33 of the 37 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have voter ID laws. The exceptions are Britain, Japan (which instead has barcoded tickets), New Zealand, and Australia.
The public gets it, and so does most of the rest of the world. The question is whether the American Left takes its own arguments seriously.
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Fred Lucas is the Chief News Correspondent at The Daily Signal. This piece originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.
VULNERABLE MACHINES By Kevin Collier (click for more)
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Hackers find voting machines used throughout the US
are vulnerable to attack.
For the third straight year, elite hackers from around the world who spent a long weekend hacking into voting equipment have released a report detailing vulnerabilities in machines still in use across the country. Each of the more than 100 machines the researchers looked at were vulnerable to at least some kind of attack, said Georgetown professor Matt Blaze, one of the Def Con Voting Village’s organizers. The report will be of particular concern to lawmakers going into next year’s Presidential election.
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“I’m going to get this in the hands in every member of the US Senate,” said Oregon senator Ron Wyden, the most outspoken election security advocate in the Senate, as he introduced the Def Con Voting Village report.
As in previous years, the Voting Village collected versions of voting equipment used around the country, much of it ordered from eBay, and invited all of the more than 35,000 attendees of the Def Con hacker conference, which took place in Las Vegas in August, to see what kind of holes they could find.
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Some of machines were found to be vulnerable to remote attack and one electronic pollbook had a hidden ethernet cable to connect it to the internet.
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The issue is less that skilled hackers can break into election equipment, Blaze told CNN, and more that elections systems as a whole need to both minimize risk and double-check election results with paper ballots after every election.
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“We know these machines are vulnerable, and what’s important is we use machines like those that produce paper ballots that can tolerate the vulnerabilities rather than fail completely because of them. And that means paper ballots and risk-limiting audits,” he said.
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RELATED ARTICLE "First on CNN: Colorado becomes first state to ban barcodes for counting votes over security concerns"
The Voting Village has had a contentious, though improving, relationship with US election equipment vendors. Organizers were in talks with Dominion, the country’s second-largest provider of voting hardware and software, but those fell through in the days before the conference. In recent months the industry has pivoted away from providing machines that don’t produce a paper trail — except for certain circumstances with equipment made for people with disabilities — and agreed with security experts that states should be encouraged to upgrade to new machines that use paper ballots.
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But upgrades cost money, and even with federal funding, it’s impossible to make machines that can be expected to withstand a full-fledged nation-state attack, said Dominion spokesperson Kay Stimson. “There are no realistic cost or resource comparisons between securing election systems against nation-state threats, versus securing national defense systems against nation-state threats,” Stimson told CNN.
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Following accusations that he’d been blocking election security legislation, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last week backed an amendment to give states an additional $250 million to distribute for election security. But experts have questioned whether that’s enough money to get the US to an acceptable level of election security. “Yes, $250 million is a great step forward, but what’s next?” asked Chris Krebs, head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
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“News that the Senate is planning to support money for election security is an important step in the right direction after months of back-and-forth,” Larry Norden, director of Brennan Center’s election reform program, told CNN. “But the fight to secure the nation’s election infrastructure is far from over.”
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By Kevin Collier, CNN. Published 7:26 PM EDT, September 26, 2019
CHAIN OF CUSTODY By U.S. Election Assistance Commission (click for more)
Best Practices
Introduction: Chain of custody is essential to a transparent and trustworthy election. Every election office should have written chain of custody procedures available for public inspection prior to every election. Once a chain of custody process is initiated, it must be followed with every step documented.
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Upon completion, the process should be reviewed and updated based on any lessons learned. This report outlines items election officials should consider when developing or revising their chain of custody procedures for physical election materials, voting systems, and the use of third-party auditors for conducting audits and electronic discovery.
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Purpose: Chain of Custody refers to the processes, or paper trail, that documents the transfer of materials from one person (or place) to the next. Every state and local jurisdiction has its own controls for ensuring the chain of custody of election materials is properly maintained. These controls may include locks, seals, audit logs, witness signatures, or other security measures.
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This document is intended to provide best practices, checklists, and sample forms for maintaining a proper chain of custody related to the successful operation of an election but is not meant to be comprehensive of every election process. Jurisdictions are reminded to implement these voluntary best practices only after reviewing federal, state, and local laws and regulations. While the chain of custody process varies by jurisdiction, here are few key questions to keep in mind when developing your chain of custody materials:
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Where is the item that is going to be transferred?
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Are adequate safeguards in place?
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Who currently has access to this item?
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What makes this item unique (description, serial number, physical condition, etc.…)?
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When and where is this item being transferred (time, date, location)?
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Where is this item being transferred to?
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Who is transferring this item?
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What is the condition of the item to be delivered?
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Who witnessed this transfer?
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When and where did the item arrive?
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What is the condition of the item upon receipt?
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The chain of custody of ballots, voting equipment, and associated data is essential to ensure the election system remains trustworthy. Documentation of the chain of custody also provides evidence that all voting procedures were followed. It is a best practice for chain of custody procedures to be clearly defined in advance of every election, well documented and followed consistently throughout the entire election lifecycle or process.
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The key to an effective chain of custody is to have a set of procedures which are followed in practice. The procedures should be in writing with all steps documented. Chain of custody should be thought about as a wholistic process that takes all required pieces (e.g., data collection, transparency, processing, review, etc.) into account.
BALLOT HARVESTING By Center for Election Confidence​ (click for more)
How Ballot Harvesting Works
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When electors vote by mail, they typically have a few options for returning their completed ballots: by mail, by dropping them off at a polling location, or by delivering them to a designated drop box.
Ballot harvesting, also known as ballot trafficking or third-party ballot collection, occurs when individuals take advantage of these options to “harvest” or collect voters’ completed ballots and return them on behalf of the voter. While it may seem like a kind gesture to assist voters in submitting their mail ballots, ballot harvesting can severely undermine the fairness and honesty of elections.
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Ballot harvesting begins when a voter is given or requests to receive his or her ballot by mail. Once the voter’s ballot arrives, he or she has the opportunity to complete and return the ballot before the ballot return deadline.
While the voter still has possession of his or her ballot, a ballot harvester will approach the individual (often with the aid of a voter list to know which voters received their ballots by mail) to offer the voter assistance in completing and/or returning the ballot. If the voter consents, the ballot harvester will collect the completed ballot and return it for the voter. Ballot harvesters will repeat this process to deliver as many ballots as possible before the deadline, which is usually Election Day.
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Ballot harvesting currently presents one of the greatest threats to election integrity for multiple reasons. The first threat stems from the lack of oversight given to the handling of ballots in mail voting systems and the chain of custody that mail ballots pass through once they leave the supervision of election officials. During the election cycle, election administrators are tasked with maintaining and transporting thousands of ballots. But ballot harvesting puts this same power not in the hands of trained election officials but in the hands of private citizens with minimal accountability. Any number of issues can happen as a result, with little recourse for voters who are affected.
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Ballot harvesters often have ulterior motives and incentives for collecting and returning particular ballots. Due to the lack of administrative oversight, bad actors can determine the fate of the ballots they collect. Put simply, ballot harvesters have the ability to determine not only which ballots to collect, but also which ballots to return and which to discard. These harvesters can choose to return ballots belonging to registered voters of their preferred party and discard those that do not. Furthermore, ballot harvesters are often paid to collect ballots, adding an additional layer of concern for how it taints honest elections.
Another threat is the influence these ballot harvesters can have on how and if an elector votes. When a voter request to receive their ballot by mail, it does not necessarily mean that the voter will choose to complete and return their ballot. But when a ballot harvester approaches a voter who has yet to complete his or her ballot, the voter may feel pressured to vote a certain way or to vote in the first place when they otherwise would prefer not to participate.
Unlike when a voter casts his or her vote in person at a polling location in privacy, ballot harvesters are able to discuss with voters the candidates they should or should not vote for. Voters who have yet to make their decision may vote differently because of the ballot harvester’s influence. This infringes upon one of the most fundamental aspects of the American voting system – the secrecy of the ballot box.
Developments in California and North Carolina after the 2018 Midterm Elections brought ballot harvesting to the national spotlight.
In California, several Republican congressional candidates led their Democratic competitors on Election Night by thousands of votes. However, as election officials spent days and, in some cases weeks, after the election tabulating millions of ballots that were dropped off at polling locations on Election Day, these candidates ended up losing. Because California legalized ballot harvesting in 2016 with basically no restrictions,[i] a total of five million ballots – 40% of the total ballots cast – were dropped off at the polling locations on Election Day and were counted after election night. As several Republican candidates slowly saw their leads dwindle after the polls closed, it raised alarms concerning the fairness and honesty of the election due to ballot harvesting.
In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections refused to certify the 9th Congressional District race results after reporting substantial irregularities in the return of mail ballots. Eventually, news broke that McRae Dowless, a consultant to the Republican candidate whose victory was nullified, and his employees illegally harvested hundreds of ballots and discarded those that went against the Republican candidate. The State Board of Elections voided the election and ordered a new one on account of Dowless’ actions.
Additionally, the former Mayor of the City of San Luis, Arizona was sentenced in October 2022 for her role in an August 2020 Primary Election “ballot harvesting” scheme in Yuma County, Arizona where early ballots from other voters were collected and deposited into a ballot box on primary Election Day.
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These three examples are only the beginning. Ballot harvesting has the potential to affect the highest and lowest election contests in the country.
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According to an assessment by the National Conference of State Legislatures, 31 states and Washington, D.C. permit ballot harvesting so long as the voter designates the collector as his or her agent. These states include Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas.
Many of these states limit this to family members, household members, or caregivers, and nine of them limit how many ballots an authorized person can return. Four states further limit how long those ballots can remain in the authorized person’s possession.
Eighteen states do not specify who specifically is authorized to return a voter’s completed ballot. This includes Alaska, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
Beyond these, there are many nuances between the laws of the several states:
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Ballot harvesting is a felony in Arizona and Georgia.[ii]
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Alabama is the only state that expressly prohibits anyone other than the voter from returning the voter’s completed ballot.
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North Dakota outlaws a ballot harvester’s ability to be compensated for collecting ballots.
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Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, and South Carolina all prohibit a candidate or his or her employee from serving as a voter’s designated agent.
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North Carolina prohibits the public release of the names of voters who have requested to receive their ballot by mail until Election Day in efforts to prevent harvesters from targeting specific voters
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LDF is strongly opposed to ballot harvesting for how it jeopardizes free and fair elections, undermines ballot secrecy, and allows voters to be wrongly influenced by bad actors. In states that offer mail voting, voters already have several ways to return their completed mail ballots that do not undermine election integrity the way that ballot harvesting does. The lack of administrative oversight in mail voting affords too great an opportunity for ballot harvesters to undermine the fairness and honesty of elections by interfering with the free will and autonomy of voters who alone have the responsibility to determine who to vote for or whether to vote at all.
Last updated December 19, 2022. [i] See California Assembly Bill 1921 (2016). [ii] Arizona made ballot harvesting a class 6 felony in 2016 with the enactment of H.B. 2023. The law was immediately challenged. In June 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law and found that criminal penalties for unlawful ballot harvesting are a valid exercise of legislative power to prevent voter fraud and do not violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Georgia recently made ballot harvesting a felony with the enactment of S.B. 202. See Senate Bill 202 As Passed, Georgia General Assembly, 95 (Mar. 25, 2021), available at:
https://www.legis.ga.gov/legislation/59827.
© Copyright 2024, Center for Election Confidence (formerly Lawyers Democracy Fund)
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MAIL-IN BALLOTS/DROP BOXES By Shawn Fleetwood​ (click for more)
Media Tacitly Admit Mail-In Balloting Is
Not As Secure And Reliable As They Claim
Since the chaotic 2020 election and coincident expansion of mail-in balloting, America’s corrupt media have gone full throttle to convince the country that this unsupervised system is 1,000 percent safe and never produces fraud. The same consensus also accuses Americans concerned about the risks associated with mass mail-in voting of being conspiracy theorists and so-called “election deniers.”
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Within the past week, however, several legacy publications have released stories tacitly admitting that the process is not as secure or reliable as they regularly claim.
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On Saturday, NBC News — effectively a propaganda arm of the Democrat Party — published an article raising alarm bells about the effect postal delivery delays could have on mail-in voting during the 2024 election. The outlet cited recent remarks from Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, who expressed concern that the ongoing problem could have repercussions for the country’s fall elections.
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“We’re approaching a major November election,” Garcia reportedly said of the issue last month. “We need to make sure that we iron out any difficulties, any obstacles, any barriers, any issues now, so that we don’t end up in a situation much like we were in with the November ballots.”
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But mail delays are just one problem undermining the media’s “mail-in voting is totally secure and reliable” narrative. Last Tuesday, CBS News ran an investigative piece detailing the growing problem of mail theft, titled: “Amid surging mail theft, post offices failing to secure universal keys.” According to the outlet, mail theft has “skyrocketed” in recent years, “from fewer than 60,000 complaints in 2018 to more than 250,000 in 2023.”
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CBS further discovered that the U.S. Postal Service has failed to take necessary steps to “secure millions of universal ‘arrow keys’ that open bulk mailboxes in apartment buildings and neighborhoods coast to coast.” “A CBS News review of thousands of pages of audits, court records and agency documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show postal workers and supervisors not tracking the keys, not locking them up and not reporting them missing,” the report reads.
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Reported cases of assault and robbery against postal workers have also increased year-over-year since 2014, according to data from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.
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But how is this possible? Democrats have assured the public time and again that universal mail-in balloting is totally safe and secure. According to them and their media allies, there have never been elections contaminated by fraud stemming from mail-in voting problems.
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In actuality, the process is prone to errors and malfeasance, as the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency — the “nerve center” of the federal government’s censorship operations — secretly admitted ahead of the 2020 election. Instead of disclosing these issues to the American public, the federal subagency flagged online posts highlighting the problems of mail balloting to Big Tech companies for censorship.
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Widespread, unsupervised mail-in voting allows left-wing groups to harvest low-effort votes and accrue Democrat candidates an advantage over Republicans ahead of Election Day.
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Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood