No Election is Perfectly Safe and Secure
I recently read a thoroughly enjoyable piece by Mike Caulfield at Hapgood.US on the first use of “conspiracy theory” that he discovered in a letter from the English press, published in the New York Times on January 4, 1863. In a nutshell, the letter was a critical commentary on American intrigue relative to English aristocracy interests, and expressing disdain for America as a formidable foe, therefore anxious to see our ruin. This predates all other claims of the first use of “conspiracy theory,” and as Caulfield points out, “You’ll note too something that is almost too delicious: the first use of conspiracy theory is about a conspiracy said to involve the press.”
“Conspiracy theory” is a tired old meme still being used to discredit and demoralize the questioning of official narratives. Until recently, labeling alternative explanations as “conspiracy theories” created subliminal perceptions of unstable imaginations-gone-wild. By repetitively using single-phrase labeling, doubt could be instilled relative to the credibility of an explanation, and/or the reliability of its purveyor, marginalizing targets without the need for solid refutations or counterarguments. This strategy of labeling was effective over time, often chilling open debate. But like many things government inspired, its efficacy has waned with overuse, especially when monotonously applied in the face of obvious contradictions.
Because “conspiracy theory” isn't chilling like it used to be, new labels have been devised. “Climate Deniers” describe climate change skeptics who question official narratives relative to carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas essential for human, animal, and vegetation survival, as the primary culprit contributing to global warming and eventual planetary extinction. “Election Deniers” refers to Americans who believe that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 presidential election with 80 million votes, due to a preponderance of election irregularities reported nationwide. “Anti-vaxxers” are deficient people who decline to be vaccinated with experimental injections for a disease they have a 99.7 percent chance of surviving. “Anti-maskers” reject masking because this group is unpersuaded considering mask pores are one micron in size, while viruses are 1/1000th micron, akin to protecting against mosquitoes flying through a chain-link fence.
These labels are supposed to instantly discredit their targets when applied. And because transparent discussion, debates, and shared documentation greatly threaten official narratives, the preferred option for public consensus becomes public/private partnerships to discredit skeptics (regardless how credentialed) via censorship, deplatforming, peer pressure, financial hardship, and eventual ruination of reputations and livelihoods.
Such tyrannical tactics point to one thing only: the official narrative(s) are junk, and their creators cannot make their case(s) using traditional empirical methods or any other objective, conclusive, truthful means.
Specific “tells” that signal deep deception is afoot include departures from reasonable transparency, refusal to engage public discussion and debate, manipulation of results accompanied by denial of access to raw data, and campaigns of propaganda using coordinated repetitive media messaging – all represent traditional methods to deter the public from our role as stewards of government activities.
Newer progressive strategies include private (social media)/public (government agencies) unlawful contracts to censor/deplatform, and secret surveillance by these parties for potentially prosecuting administrative criminality that not only violate laws, regulations and rights, these behaviors emphatically signal cooperative corruption, potential criminal conduct, and crushing liability if exposed, all activities apparently worth risking for massive profits and power even if it means destroying lives.
The 2022 midterm elections are upon us, and lurking in the ethos is a deep bipartisan insecurity that elections are not fair and secure. For decades, it has been Democrats who have rightfully tried to alert the public to the vulnerabilities in state-election processes.
In 2003, house representatives filed up to the podium to report and opine on their concerns over George W Bush illegitimately wresting the presidency from Al Gore. Criticisms ranged from hackable voting machines to election office violations to electoral unfairness, and many things in between.
In 2016, Democrats rose again to voice opposition to certifying the 2016 election results. Hillary Clinton herself voiced this same objection in the following months and years. The House record and many subsequent interviews attest to this outcry.
On January 6, 2017, during the certification of Donald Trump as President, presided over by then-Vice President Joe Biden, Jim McGovern (D-AL) rose to object to uncertified electors, followed by: Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who objected to 10 or Florida's 29 electoral votes; Pramila Jayapal (D-GA) objected to Georgia's certificate; Barbara Lee (D-CA) objected twice to voting machines and Russian hacking; Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) objected three separate times to massive voter suppression; Rual Grijalva (D-AZ) objected to North Carolina's tally and violations against the Voting Rights Act; and finally Maxine Waters (D-CA) objected to the certification of George W Bush's 2000 Election. Then-VP Biden denied all their objections, mostly based on process (no signatures), after which the certification of Donald Trump was completed.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/politics/electoral-college-vote-count-objections/index.html
The truth is many elections have been contested through time, both state and federal, with many accusing rigged voting machines in the election malfeasance. Illegal voters and/or irregular ballots, harvesting and stuffing ballots, mail-in ballots without signature verification, and inaccurate/outdated bloated (dirty) voter-registration rolls have all been cited as contributing to election fraud during challenged elections. The list of election activities considered illegal and prohibited, potentially putting an election outcome at risk, is comprehensive, or would be if enforced. (CauseOfAmerica.org.)
No Election Is Perfectly Safe and Secure
With a long, well-documented history of decades of election irregularities and challenges, the bipartisan claims that the 2020 was the most secure election in history is flatly absurd. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was an unprecedented amount of evidence-based findings of election irregularities, incompetencies, illegalities, and fraud nationwide.
Most of it is appropriately described as “death by a thousand cuts.” Rarely did any individual county's reported irregularities rise to an election-changing outcome for any candidates down their respective ballots. Nor did the majority of states' aggregate number of verified irregularities, as reported by their individual counties.
But most is not all. There were some larger counties in the controversial swing states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Colorado to name a few), where huge volumes of Zuckerbucks were infused into Democratic election offices on behalf of Progressives, that reported significant ballot problems, including unreconciled ballot totals between precincts and county, and between counties and the state.
There were thousands of affidavits filed in states by poll workers, poll watchers, absentee-ballot adjudicators, and voters attesting to unethical, illegal conduct by election officials that, in a properly enforced world, would have impacted those districts until remedy ensued. Instead, such conduct was ignored, obfuscated, stonewalled and often denied. More perplexing is that almost all reform efforts, whether organized by voters or legislators, met with unprecedented and inexplicable resistance, contrary to the interests of those states' electorates.
In almost all cases, the attorneys general, secretaries of state, and state legislatures whose constitutional authority gives these specific bodies total purview over elections, vigorously resisted any reform. And many of these state offices were controlled by Republicans. It is a glaring indictment of these politicians and bureaucrats. Why? Because these politiopaths benefited from the vulnerabilities in their state's election processes.
The courts were also initially obtuse and refused to hear 60 of 61 preliminary lawsuits filed in the first months after the November 2020 election. Most of these lawsuits sought injunctions for more time before the electoral deadline, to acquire hard evidence of election irregularities and fraud that could trigger investigations within states, or be presented to Congress on January 6 during its joint-session certification. The media narrative that these 60 cases were tried and dismissed, or were ruled against and lost based on lack of merit, is flat hooey. Evidence was presented and heard in only one solitary case and dismissed, hardly the judicial rebuke as relentlessly and erroneously reported by media.
Since then, all manner of organized partisan, bipartisan, and nonpartisan efforts have emerged to better understand our states' election processes and the laws that govern them. Many citizens are far more savvy about elections as we approach the Midterm 2022 Election. This is, civically, a good thing.
All election shenanigans possible are inherently nonpartisan, meaning none are unique to one political party or the other. However, cheating in elections is a bipartisan supported opportunity for partisan manipulation of the process that deserves the unified efforts of all Americans to stop it in its tracks.
In Pennsylvania, 240,000 mail-in ballots were sent to addresses without voter-eligibility verification. This does not count the unsupervised number of ballots mailed by third parties in states that permit unsecured mail-in ballots. Unscrupulous county election clerks could receive completed ballots back and tally them without ever officially verifying them.
Military ballots are not registered, so counterfeit military ballots could also be illegally processed. In 2020, all 900 military ballots received in Fulton County, GA, went to Biden for president. This raised suspicions based on 2016 results, when Trump won with 60 percent to 34 percent of the military votes.
Additionally, the majority of overseas ballots are no longer from military, but from U.S. citizens who are living abroad.
Recently, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobs, who is running for governor, “mistakenly” sent out 6,000 ballots without the governor's race included. This is indicative of more systemic rot in politics that has spilled out into society, of a collective cheating heart that permits bad behavior by public servants knowing they will not be held accountable – because they aren't.
There are countless examples of this kind of administrative and constitutional flouting of the law by those in positions of authority. Their superiors rarely call them to account, or exact consequences. Why? Because we the people don't, either. We ignore this increasing lawlessness to our own end.
Serious Documented Evidence-based Election Irregularities
Wisconsin hired former Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Michael J. Gableman, who did a deep dive into election issues in the state, only to find a host of problems, such as election officials arbitrarily changing laws in the middle of the election without legislative action, and misuse of Zuckerbucks. Gableman has since been vilified for his findings, but he stands by them. His report is illuminating in terms of the things that could occur to derail elections.
https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/22/brandtjen/media/1552/osc-second-interim-report.pdf
And there has been solid legislative reform in various states to better secure elections and protect our votes. The electronic voting machines are problematic, and have been from the jump. Princeton University handily demonstrated the vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines back before Diebold sold to Dominion and ES&S. For over a decade Blackboxvoting.org collected data and videos attesting to such vulnerabilities, including fractional voting.
Electronic voting-machine vulnerabilities have only gotten more sophisticated, capable of interfacing with county-registration poll books in real time via WiFi and Bluetooth, regardless of disclaimers that the machines are secure. They have the capacity, and that is concerning. (For example, ES&S admitted to releasing equipment installed with Internet connectivity capability between 2000 and 2006.)
Internet access to poll books (electronic voter registration books) can show hackers everyone who has voted in real time, allowing bad actors to potentially add votes during centralized-counting, fraudulently using ballots from inactive registered voters languishing on voter rolls because the rolls are not properly maintained over time as required by law.
Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is Operational in Iowa with Limited Public Access to Its Products and Services
Companies such as the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a service Iowa and 30 other States, including DC, subscribe to for managing voter rolls, updating, registering, and purging voters who have moved or passed away. ERIC located 17 million new voters for the 2020 election compared to only 5.7 million in 2012 for Obama's election, according to the Gateway Pundit, which published a series on ERIC in early 2022.
Curiously, according to county and state officials, ERIC stipulates in its contracts with states that the public is not allowed access to its terms of service. The various services ERIC provides include demands by ERIC on member States, such as States providing Motor Vehicle databases, and a registration campaign to solicit a minimum of 95 percent potential new registrants within 90 days from a list of unregistered but eligible voters that ERIC supplies. Perhaps more curiously, under no circumstances are States permitted to transmit records to ERIC indicating US citizenship status.
Dr. Douglas Frank, a professional election modeler and educator, has compelling evidence demonstrating States that utilize central-counting can manipulate election totals using voter rolls. Counties send their voting machine tallies to a central location where the Secretary of State combines all the counties' tallies and performs the final counting.
What Dr Frank has discovered is that registrations just prior to elections rise predictably in every Iowa county by the same number, then after the election, decrease by the same number in every Iowa county, and have done so since 1990. Using the 1990 Census, he is able to predict the percentage increase of eligible Iowa voters, registered Iowa voters, and actual Iowa votes cast for every Iowa county in every election using a range of 83 ages. Remarkably, the graphs depicting eligible, registered, and actual voters of each Iowa county bears this statistical impossibility out because the county graphs are nearly identical across the entire state. There is no possibility of this outcome occurring randomly across counties, let alone repeatedly over time. And to shock the senses, the exact same statistical anomalies occur for every county of every state for all 50 states. (Youtube.com/watch?v=IoXaUQUmsmM; Vimeo.com/738796146.)
Most election-integrity efforts have no allegiances to political parties, nor is there an underlying agenda to decertify or legitimatize Joe Biden as President, especially on behalf of former president Donald Trump. Instead, common sense election integrity reforms are almost exclusively aimed at securing elections for the American people, regardless of political affiliation or ideologies.
The mantra “Make it easier to vote, harder to cheat” is a great lens with which to examine reforms to verify their purposes. For example, requiring an ID with my signature protects my vote as my own, makes it easier to cast my vote, and more efficient to count it. It is, however, a pesky rule if my intention is to cheat, using someone else's identity to cast an illegal vote.
Never forget one of our three super powers as American citizens is the power of our vote. If we don't protect it, no one else will.
