Our elections must be made more secure ahead of the mid-terms

An Associated Press review of potential cases of voter fraud in the six battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — found fewer than 475 cases. That number would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election, according to an article on apnews.com.

The review was directed toward the six states that were disputed by former President Donald Trump.

Most Americans will likely be pleased with this determination. And while this review found a tiny fraction of the vote fraud needed to prove a stolen election, it also reminds us that the election systems in the 50 states are not fraud-proof, and with the mid-term election coming up in less than a year, we would be smart to examine our election procedures and methods and make them more secure.

By contrast, The Lincoln Institute published a report saying, “the fact of the matter is that the 2020 election had hundreds of thousands of votes counted that should not have been, and the distribution of those votes could have affected the outcome in several closely-decided states.

Many will choose to believe one; many will choose to believe the other. Which one is more accurate?

With tens of millions of people voting in thousands of polling places, and with tens of thousands of election workers in those polling places, it would be a miracle of epic proportions if there weren’t any problems or crimes. Therefore, we can acknowledge, without calling an election stolen, that there is fraud, abuse and carelessness in every election. The only question is, how much?

The AP review focused on only six states and found an average of 79 issues in each state. How many other examples of fraud existed, but were not discovered?

Here are some methods of cheating in elections, according to The Heritage Foundation:

• Forging voter signatures on candidate ballot qualification petitions.

• Voting in someone else’s name in person or through absentee ballots.

• Registering and voting under a false identity or in a district where the individual does not actually reside.

• Submitting fraudulent, altered, or forged absentee ballots.

• Registering in multiple locations within a state or in different states to vote multiple times in the same election.

• People voting even though they’re not eligible because they’re felons or noncitizens.

• Paying, coercing, or intimidating people to vote for certain candidates.

In addition, the U.S. Constitution mandates that election procedures are to be controlled by state legislatures. Officials in four of the battleground states mentioned previously — Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — changed election procedures in the 2020 election by circumventing legislative action. Assuming the best of intentions on the part of the wrongdoers, these changes were nonetheless illegal/unconstitutional. Were any election results — local, state or national — affected by these actions?

In a case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 where the Court upheld Indiana’s voter-ID law by a 6-3 margin, Justice John Paul Stevens, who is not a conservative justice, said in the majority opinion that “flagrant examples of such fraud … have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists … that demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real, but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.”

“Absentee ballots are the tools of choice of vote thieves,” Heritage noted, “because they are the only ballots cast outside the supervision of election officials and outside the observation of poll watchers, destroying the transparency of the election process that is a fundamental hallmark of a healthy democracy.”

Heritage produced the “Election Integrity Scorecard — Assessing the Status of State Election Fairness and Security.” Here are some of the results. Finishing in first place, with a score of 83, is Georgia. Coming in last, with a score of 26, is Hawaii. Virginia scored 67, and placed 15th, while West Virginia placed 30th, with a score of 54.

In its discussion of the condition of our elections, Heritage reported, “In 2012, the Pew Foundation released a report on the voter registration systems maintained by the states. The report found that:

• Approximately 24 million — one in every eight — voter registrations were either no longer valid or significantly inaccurate.

• More than 1.8 million deceased individuals were listed as voters.

• Approximately 2.75 million individuals were registered in more than one state.”

These weaknesses invite fraud, and must be corrected. 

The list of things one cannot do in America without a valid photo-ID is long, and includes: buying alcohol or cigarettes; opening a bank account; applying for food stamps, social security, and many jobs; and get on an airliner. Photo IDs are generally pretty easy to acquire, and every voter should be required to have one.

Elections are too important to have security methods weakened, for example, just to make voting easy. The easier it is to vote, the easier it is to cheat. If Americans have to sacrifice a little convenience in the name of election security, so be it.

Our elections must be made more secure. That is fundamental in a democratic republic like the United States, where the people select those who serve them in all levels of government. We cannot depend upon an honor system to guarantee free and fair elections.

Abolishing honest elections and re-imagining legislative procedures

Deceptively called the “For the People Act of 2021,” H.R. 1 and S. 1 should more accurately be named the “Act to Encourage Cheating and Vote Fraud.”

Critics of this legislative boondoggle charge that it federalizes and micromanages the election process now administered by the states. It also imposes unnecessary, foolish, and even unconstitutional mandates on the states, and puts the federal government in charge of elections, which is a reversal of the decentralization of the American election process as created by the Founders to protect our liberty and freedom. 

The Founders established a federalist system that deliberately did not cede all power to the federal government. 

Furthermore, it interferes with states and their citizens in determining qualifications for voters, ensuring the accuracy of voter registration rolls, securing the integrity of elections, participating in the political process, and determining district boundaries for electing their representatives.

States will be forced to implement perilous methods such as early voting, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, and no-fault absentee balloting. The latter is the tool of choice of vote thieves.

Early voting is convenient, but voting early can put those voters at risk of casting their ballot before late-breaking developments occur that might affect their decision.

Same-day registration prevents election officials from verifying the eligibility of registrants, and allows ineligible voters to register and vote. It also makes it difficult to predict how many voters will appear at polling places, and thus more difficult to adequately staff the polling places.

The bill would also force precincts to allow voting by persons registered to vote in other precincts, preventing adequate steps to prevent ineligible voters from casting ballots, or to prevent people from voting more than once.

The accuracy of registration lists will be degraded by automatically registering individuals from state databases, such as DMV and welfare offices. These registrants likely will include large numbers of ineligible voters, including aliens, and multiple or duplicate registrations of the same individuals.

Online voter registration allows for massive fraudulent registrants through actions of cyber criminals if registrations are not tied to existing state records, such as a driver’s license.

These election revisions are a strategy for increasing fraud and abuse and are plain stupid. We must have an honest election system that will reflect the actual choices of eligible voters. The election system already needs to be strengthened; this bill will essentially destroy its security.

Elections are too important to allow foolish mechanisms in the system for no better reason than for a bit of convenience, which is a prominent reason cited for making these changes. Voting is too important to be made too easy.

Those behind these absurd changes also cry out against “voter suppression,” which they term any sensible idea that helps to protect the integrity of the election system, such as photo IDs and signature verification for mail-in ballots. We need photo IDs for lots of normal things we do, but somehow requiring an ID to vote is suppressing voters.

In addition to a clean and honest election system, we need a sensible system for creating legislation. Every piece of legislation offered should focus on making things in America better for the American people. Not some of the people; not a political party, but things benefitting the nation at large.

Bills should be limited to one topic and be only long enough to describe that topic. Having more bills of such a limited nature is far simpler, therefore better, than having a few gargantuan bills of hundreds or thousands of pages with multiple issues addressed.

Legislative language should be as brief as possible to get the concept of the legislation across, not written so as to make the intent difficult to understand. Most bills should be no longer than about 50 pages, which still is a significant read for legislators, particularly if there are more shorter bills to study.

Passage of legislation that affects the nation should be passed by a 60 percent or 67 percent majority. A truly beneficial bill will be able to gain that level of support. If it doesn’t gain enough support, it wasn’t a good enough bill.

No cheating! A good piece of legislation that benefits the entire country, and has broad bipartisan support, should not be a mechanism that members can load with pork-barrel items or items to benefit partisan goals. 

Trying to get a pork feature passed by tagging it onto a very good piece of legislation, hoping it will slide through if people are afraid to vote the good legislation down to prevent the bad feature from getting through, is blackmail.

No riders or amendments should be allowed that are not directly related to the topic of the legislation.

And while we are improving things, we need to remember that whatever the job is, the best qualified people are who deserve that job. If they are all men or all women, or all black, or all Asian, or all Latina, or all white or any combination of those groups, those who have displayed the highest level of competence and actual ability for the job in question are who should get the job.

Is Election 2020 the most unusual presidential election in history?

If nothing else, the election saga is certainly interesting. It has created great misery and hand-wringing across the political spectrum. 

Based on the projections of news outlets relying on state voting totals, former Vice President Joe Biden, D-Pa., and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Cal., were declared the winners. That, however, does not make them the President-Elect and Vice President-Elect.

The process has not yet reached the stage where any candidates are officially declared to have won.

Every election has problems, like human error and fraud. The question always is, how much of an effect do the errors and fraud really have?

This election was doomed to be controversial from the beginning, with the potential for more problems than usual due to the fear of the coronavirus pandemic and the restrictions it created. More people wanted to vote early or by absentee or mail-in ballot than usual to avoid the crowds at polling places. 

And then there were potential problems from the tens of millions of universal mail-in ballots sent out, many/most from states that were ill-prepared to handle that situation.

The dangers of mail-in voting are well known. We were warned about problems by such important voices as former President Jimmy Carter and The Carter Center, Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter, and The New York Times.

And now that the voting is done, there are claims that confirm those warnings: Lost ballots, ballots found in trash cans, more votes in some precincts than registered voters, vote count observers prevented from observing the process, among them.

The Constitution gives the sole power to establish election procedures to the state legislatures. Yet in several states these procedures were recently changed by judges, secretaries of state and others who do not have that authority. 

Since changes were made by unauthorized persons, how many ballots were counted that were received after the previous -- legal -- deadline, or under previous requirements for signatures and such? Those ballots are not valid!

There are many charges of mistakes and fraud being looked into. President Donald Trump’s lawyers have filed multiple lawsuits challenging various aspects of the election process in several states. 

This has greatly angered Trump’s enemies; lots of people are urging Trump to concede, severely chastising him for not having already done so. This, despite that what he is doing is both legal and not uncommon. In the 2000 race, for example, Democrat candidate Al Gore challenged things for more than a month; Trump has done so for only three weeks, as of today.

And, given the array of false charges and hoaxes Trump was tortured with for the last four years, starting when he first declared himself a candidate, perhaps he has good reason to hold off conceding until challenges are resolved. Note: his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, still has not acknowledged Trump won, and she advised candidate Biden not to concede “under any circumstances.”

Democrats felt confident that a blue wave was coming, expecting that they would win the presidency, expand their House majority and perhaps win control of the Senate.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, Republicans increased their numbers in the House, flipping possibly a dozen seats from blue to red, and leaving the Democrats with a very slim majority. 

While the Democrats gained a seat in the Senate, Republicans may possibly retain their majority, depending upon the run-off elections for two Georgia seats.

Despite the losses in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Cal., claimed victory, touting the popular vote tally showing House Democrats collected more votes than Republicans. Apparently, the number of votes for Democrats is more important than the number of Democrats that will be in the House.

Perhaps the most interesting, or the strangest, issue is the alleged massive fraud by voting machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems based in Canada. The Dominion machines are alleged to have actually thrown the election to Biden/Harris through manipulative software.

It is a complicated scenario that many people have discounted because of a lack of evidence having been revealed to support it. However, supporters say there is plenty of evidence, adding that evidence is critical and necessary for legal proceedings, but is not needed merely to assuage doubting reporters and Trump opponents. The Trump legal team cites dozens of sworn affidavits, filed under the threat of perjury, alleging vote fraud in some states.

Dominion has denied all charges, and its officials had agreed to testify before a Pennsylvania legislative committee. Then, Dominion strangely cancelled out the night before the hearing. 

These days computers are capable of doing fantastic things. But can they control the votes of tens of millions of voters in hundreds of different voting locations?

Georgia’s experience with Dominion computers used in the state’s primary raised questions and concerns over the company’s voting system. But Georgia stuck with them.

And the head of another computer voting system, Smartmatic, admitted in 2017 that his company’s computers and software created at least one million additional votes in the Venezuelan election.

Most view Trump’s efforts to prove he won as improbable. But with the vast array of problems and potential fraud, taking a few weeks to investigate them is not asking too much.

Secure elections are imperative for a free and honest society

The stay-at-home orders, the business and school closures, certainly have introduced a lot of changes to our daily lives. These changes have interfered with some of the spring elections across the land, and created questions about what to do on Election Day in November. That has spawned a movement to use voting by mail as the way to resolve fears and possible problems that voters may encounter by going to their local polling places.

Voter convenience and safety from the COVID-19 virus are cited as reasons for mail-in voting. And we are told that voter fraud does not make a difference in any given election.

But voters in parts of Florida, Missouri, New York, and North Carolina have reasons to disagree, based on what has occurred in recent years.

Voter fraud in these states resulted in overturning elections. The Daily Caller listed 15 state and local election results over the last few years that were overturned due to mail-in voter fraud. Guilty parties were removed from office, fined, or sentenced to community service, probation, or jail time.

The ballot crimes involved bribery, vote buying, ballots stolen from mail boxes, absentee ballots asked for or purchased from valid recipients, voter assistance involving filling out an absentee ballot in a way other than how the voter directed or without direction from the voter, the casting of absentee ballots by persons who did not receive absentee ballots, ballots with forged or not properly witnessed signatures on them, illegally applying for absentee ballots and voting them, racially motivated manipulation of ballots, and obtained and improperly counted defective absentee ballots.

Things were bad enough in Florida that the state Department of Law Enforcement concluded: “The absentee ballot is the ‘tool of choice’ for those who are engaging in election fraud.” 

Things in Texas were no better. An assistant attorney general with the Criminal Prosecutions division in the Attorney General’s Office, Jonathan White, testified that mail ballot fraud “is by far the biggest problem that we see across the state ... It’s the wild West of voter fraud.”

And, highlighting the larger scale problem mail-in voting could cause is this: "A significant increase in mail-in voting this fall could greatly incentivize 'ballot harvesting,' where third parties collect mail-in ballots on behalf of voters and deliver them to election officials," Real Clear Politics reported. "There’s long been a consensus that such a practice incentivizes fraud ..."

To illustrate the risk, Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), notes that in 2016 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by garnering over 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump. But nearly 6 million unaccounted for mail-in ballots were never counted in 2016, more than twice her margin in the popular vote. Based upon this, Clinton may have won the popular vote by a wider margin, or maybe have lost.

Concerns about fraud in mail-in ballots were serious enough that a 2008 report produced by the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project recommended that states “restrict or abolish on-demand absentee voting in favor of in-person early voting.”

The convenience that on-demand absentees produce “is bought at a significant cost to the real and perceived integrity of the voting process,” the report added.

But the PILF obtained voter data from Oregon, the first state to adopt voting by mail exclusively, for the 2012 and 2018 elections and checked it against census data. Of the 7,000,000 ballots the state sent out in those two elections, some 871,000 ballots were totally unaccounted for.

The U.S. Census Bureau data show that 11 percent of Americans move every year. And it further shows that lower income voters are much more likely to move around. This makes it difficult or impossible to reliably get ballots to the mobile population without lots and lots of ballots going to the wrong address, where they may be illegally marked and submitted.

And the federal Election Assistance Commission reports that between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots remain unaccounted for. The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail.

From 2004 to 2016 the number of mail-in ballots more than doubled, from 24.9 million to 57.2 million, and roughly 40 percent of U.S. voting is done by mail.

Yet this huge increase in mail-in ballot use has been accompanied by little if any additional research on the risks of voting by mail, or improved methods to secure the process. And the methods of fraud mentioned could dramatically increase if more than 200 million ballots are mailed out for the November general election.

Every American voter should be concerned about the security of the election process. No election, at any level, can be decided by cheaters who want to overrule the decision of the citizenry for cheap political purposes. State and local governments must insure an honest and fair election process.

If we can go to big box stores, grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations and other such places safely by employing safe distancing and other sensible measures, we can safely go to polling places and vote in a more secure process.

How to hold elections during the age of the coronavirus pandemic?

Every true American understands the importance of her/his right to vote and the importance of secure national, state and local election systems that allow us to express our preferences for elected officials.

Elections must be conducted in a secure, fair and sensible manner. Only eligible voters — which, in most every case, involves only citizens — must cast ballots in our elections. And measures are required to assure, to the greatest possible extent, that only eligible voters vote.

Conveniences have been made a part of the election system to make voting easier. But elections are far too important to allow measures to weaken the systems for no better reason than for a little voter convenience. Having to endure a little inconvenience in order to secure this vital process is a small price to pay.

In certain circumstances, absentee ballots may be allowed. Military personnel and others who must be away from their voting district on Election Day, as well as seniors and others who are unable to get to the polls, are legitimate candidates for mail-in ballots. But we must recognize that voting by mail is an insecure process — one with great opportunity for fraud.

And can you guess which voting convenience has the most support among those who wish to transform the country?

Absentee voter fraud — voting by mail — was so great a problem in Florida, Missouri, New York and North Carolina that some elections in those states were overturned.

The case in North Carolina involved the 9^th Congressional District race, which the state election board overturned due to illegal vote harvesting, including forging and altering absentee ballots.

Under present circumstances, tens of millions of eligible American voters are under restrictions, including no gatherings of more than 10 at a time, social distancing, masks, gloves, stay-at-home orders or recommendations, etc. The primary elections are upon us and Election Day, 2020 is a bit more than six months away.

Some opportunists want existing election system weaknesses to remain in place into the future, and for the upcoming elections to be carried out by mail. All in the name of safety, they say. As genuine as these concerns may be for some of them, this suggestion is a prescription for voter fraud at a previously unimagined level.

And with the help of absentee voting the evil orange man, if he has his way, will easily win reelection.

Or, perhaps the other side will do the better job of “getting out the vote,” particularly since it is the liberals/Democrats that are campaigning for voting by mail.

Currently, millions of those whose names are on voter rolls are deceased, have moved, or are ineligible for various reasons. Automatically mailing ballots to these people does not merely allow for the ballots to be stolen, marked, and returned, it invites that result.

If you are still not convinced that voting by mail is fertile ground for fraud, consider this: a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the city of Los Angeles and the state of California alleging failure to maintain accurate voter registration rolls has been settled.

California and Los Angeles agreed to remove 1.5 million individuals who were not removed when they became ineligible to vote. It is fair to wonder what might happen to 1.5 million ballots mailed to people who are ineligible to vote, many of whom no longer reside at the address on their registration.

Naysayers contend that there is no real voter fraud threat. And those in the “nothing to see here; just move along” faction prefer a system that can be manipulated for political gain.

But even if the contention is true that no real threat exists, what harm is there in continually examining election systems, and strengthening them to prevent fraud?

However, voter fraud is a true threat. More than 1,200 instances of proven fraud can be found in The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database. These cases include absentee ballot fraud.

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, saying, “flagrant examples of such fraud … have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists [including] Indiana’s own experience with fraudulent voting in the 2003 Democratic primary for East Chicago Mayor … [and] demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real, but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.”

The most secure voting procedure is when poll workers are presented required evidence by potential voters proving they are who they say they are, and that the person is properly documented as being an eligible voter. That evidence is a valid photo ID.

Accurate voter rolls, and eligible voters with a photo ID appearing at the appropriate polling place, staffed by people dedicated to allowing only eligible voters to vote are essential elements in a secure system.

Even if the COVID-19 virus has not completely run its course before Election Day, or if it reappears during flu season, as has been suggested, polling places can be operated safely. Voters and poll workers must conduct themselves appropriately.

Under such circumstances voting in person at polling places is safe, and is also the most secure method of holding elections.