There was voter fraud—enough to overturn the 2020 election, and maybe the Georgia runoff, and maybe a few since then. But mainly we’re concerned about that 2020 presidential election—and consequently also the upcoming midterm election.
Mail-in
Ballot Problem
Dinesh D-Souza’s movie 2000 Mules lays out one
particular type of voter fraud—related to mail-in ballots. The numbers are
pretty staggering. True the Vote, the organization that did the investigations,
set very high criteria: a “mule” had to visit at least five nonprofits related
to getting out the vote in addition to at least ten mail-in ballot drop boxes.
They were trying to eliminate anyone who coincidentally went by such locations.
And with that criteria, five of the six states they looked at had more such
illegal mail-in ballots that the vote margin, so they would be flipped. That finding alone is enough to overturn the 2020 election outcome.
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| illustration of someone mailing multiple ballots, found in this August 29, 2020, New York Post article |
But, seriously, who goes multiple times to that type of
nonprofit and also happens to go to multiple mail-in ballot drop boxes—when it’s
illegal to handle anyone’s ballot but your own? You could set the bar much
lower, say maybe only five drop boxes. So they looked at that level of data
too. And of course the numbers are staggering.
They looked at only 3% of the country—not to mention other
types of voter fraud. What about the rest of the country where this could have
been going on but was not looked at?
There’s a story from the New York Post, from August 29, 2020—before that election. This was brought back up via Mike Huckabee, in light of the 2000 Mules information coming out. The story is about a Democrat operative, who confesses (anonymously to reporter Jon Levine) that he has performed voter fraud for years, and describes the methods. He says it’s more the rule than the exception.
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| illustration of the parts included in a mail-in ballot, image found in New York Post article from August 29, 2020 |
The article is full of details and verifications, as well as
quite a few photos. Worth the read. But, anyway, here’s the
summary of the article from the Huckabee post:
“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes—it can
make a difference,” this tipster said. “It could be enough to flip states.”
It’s a big operation. He said he had not only altered ballots
himself but had led teams, mentoring at least 20 operatives who were active in
New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, which, of course, would turn out to be
one of the battleground states at issue on Election Day 2020.
This operative, who said he'd been a Bernie Sanders supporter
and no longer had a stake, said he’d come forward in the hope that states would
fix their glaring security problems with mail-in ballots, because November 3
was going to be “a (bleeping) war.” I wonder if he had any idea then how bad it
was going to get.
The Post includes his descriptions of how
election-riggers do their stuff. For example, they can just make copies of the
ballot itself, but they have to collect actual envelopes, because it's not
possible to recreate those. That’s where vote harvesters come in, going from
house to house, “helping” people by mailing their ballots for them, but
steaming them open and using the real envelopes to mail the phony ballots.
These they would “sprinkle” around numerous mailboxes in town.
He said sometimes postal employees are in on it. If they
don’t like Trump, for example, and they work in an area that’s predominantly
GOP, they can just “lose” those ballots. They can either dump all the mail in
the trash or, if they have time, sift through their mail for ballots, and throw
the ballots in the trash. (Or I would think they could take them to be steamed
open if more envelopes are needed.)
Then, of course, there are the nursing homes. We’ve discussed
how that works, but the Post article provides details.
Sometimes, if they’re in a state that doesn’t require ID,
operatives will even go to polling places and vote in person. They go through
publicly available information to find the names of registered voters who
routinely skip elections, and vote using those names.
They also buy the votes of homeless people. This tipster went
on to say that Michael Bloomberg's campaign spent roughly $174 per vote to win
his third term as New York mayor. He likened this effort to a mafia
organization, with the candidate himself typically kept in the dark about the
details, to maintain “plausible deniability.”
This particular political insider even took credit for a
helpful little idea that he says was put into practice: bending one corner of
the ballot, where the signature appeared, to signal to Democrat Board of
Election counters that this was one of “their” ballots and to let it go
through.
Huckabee also passed along an additional story from just a couple of days ago, reported by Newsmax. A woman, Christina Repaci, was walking her dog and came upon an entire box of ballots, sitting on the sidewalk, apparently abandoned by the US Postal Service, since it was in one of their boxes.
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| Box of ballots found by woman in East Hollywood screenshot from here |
These 104 unopened mail-in ballots were in a U.S. Postal
Service box, just abandoned there on the sidewalk. Sacredness of the vote,
indeed.
Ms. Repaci didn’t know what to do about this; it was only
thanks to her persistence that an official picked up these ballots from her. Of
course, the chain of custody had long since been shot. The registrar’s office
said not to worry, they’ve reissued ballots to all the people affected. But
what if someone not quite as conscientious as Ms. Repaci had found the ballots
and used them for, I don’t know, bird cage liners?
“Early signs indicate that this was an incident of mail theft and not a directed attempt at disrupting the election,” the registrar’s office said in a statement. To that I say, “How do you know?” I also say, “So what?” because either way, a box of votes that doesn't get counted can affect the outcome of a close election. Doesn't say much for mail-in voting.
Whether intentional or accidental, if a ballot loses chain
of custody, it is an illegal ballot; it cannot be legally counted. Mail-in
ballots lose chain of custody between the time they leave the voter’s hands
until they are received by an election official. Ostensibly the US Postal
Service qualifies as handling that. But I don’t think they’re that reliable. We
had other stories around the 2020 election of dumped ballots, and ballots
transported across state lines. A truck driver for a contractor of the US
Postal Service reported a trailer filled with 288,000 ballots disappeared.[i]
But, as with so much election-related material, it wasn’t reported, and it
didn’t get heard by a judge.
Our Own
Chain-of-Custody Issues
In Texas, mail-in ballots are intended only for those who
physically can’t make it to a polling place—at all, during early voting or on
election day. This is likely to be someone out of town for an extended period
of time or an invalid. It isn’t someone who is “scared of COVID” or too
inconvenienced to vote somewhere in person. But in 2020 the replacement Harris
County Clerk (after the elected one stepped down because of legal issues
against her, and before we had an Election Administrator imposed on us by the
County Judge and Commissioners Court) tried to send mail-in ballot applications
to every voter on the non-cleaned-up voter rolls. He was stopped, but not
before spending big bucks on printing, nor before he actually mailed quite a
few.
So his next move was to make more drop-off locations. In
theory, the mailbox is sufficient. But voters are also allowed to turn them in
at the County Clerk’s office. He tried expanding it to dozens of locations, but
I think he was limited to 12 or so. There should be a person from each party
wherever and whenever votes are received, so his attempts to open them up, at
short notice, to prevent Republican workers from being there was an obvious
ploy. But, why would a person be fully capable of driving downtown to one of
these various locations—during early voting—but not be able to go to one of the
dozens of voting places? There shouldn’t have been such drop-off locations.
Anyway, back to chain-of-custody issues. We had a special election last Saturday, May 7, statewide for ballot propositions, plus in some places also for local jurisdictions, like school boards or water districts. (We also had one for our Emergency Services District, but they handled their own election in separate locations, which was inconvenient for voters, but was run smoothly and provided a vote count promptly.) The Harris County Election Administrator had to turn in her resignation after the March 1 Primary Election failure—so many things wrong that were simply incompetence. However, she promised to stay on through June, which means she’s there to fail for both this special election last Saturday and the Primary Runoff Election on May 24.
Chain-of-custody was the failure of choice last Saturday.
Dropping off ballots has been a problem every election since
she got appointed. In November, which was a pretty limited election, mostly
school boards and a few local races, they had everyone turn in their materials
at one location, outdoors. This was at Reliant Stadium parking lot. They
thought they had a neat system. You hand off your stuff from your car to the
workers who receive it. But they set up lines such that, if someone ahead of
you had an issue, no one could move until it was handled. We arrived fairly
early, waited 45 minutes in line, and that was uncomfortable but not
intolerable. People who got there later waited up to three hours. There were no
restrooms; you’re stuck in your car. Some people got fed up and abandoned their
election materials (including ballot boxes) on the sidewalk outside the
building; those lost chain of custody.
In March, they thought, “Well, that didn’t work. Let’s go
back to having multiple drop-off locations.” But they didn’t go back to
multiple lines inside the various buildings; they did the outdoor thing again.
With similar problems. We waited 45 minutes in line. Then we were told we were
missing equipment; we were not. They were wrong. Months later they admitted
that. But it was, again, not a smooth handoff.
Remember that election workers get to the polling place at
5:30 AM to prepare the polling place to open at 7:00 AM, as required by law.
Polls close at 7:00 PM—plus processing any voters in line by 7:00 PM. Then
there is shutdown. The new equipment is slower and more complicated to shut
down. We’ve done it with the new machines three times now, and we’re pretty
quick. But it’s taking us about 30-45 minutes longer than the old system.
Election workers haven’t been able to get dinner yet. So then you add on these
extra hours and/or long drives, and you discourage a lot of workers, especially
the older ones who think, “I’ve put in my time, and I just don’t want to go
through this anymore.”
This past week the County wanted to try yet another new
idea. “Hey, how about if we have someone pick up the materials from every
polling place?” They decided to use the Constables for that, the local law
enforcement. But, again, there were failures. In our case, the Constables
assigned to pick ours up were stuck at another polling location where the
workers had trouble figuring out how to print out their tally and shut
everything down; and the Constables, instead of taking care of the other
locations on their route and then going back, stayed and waited. So our polling
place Presiding Judge and Alternate Judge had to wait the extra two hours until
the Constables came. I heard that others waited even a couple of hours longer
than we did.
The real problem came when the Election Administrator (the
one who resigned but hasn’t gotten out of the way) decided that, since there
weren’t enough Constables, they’d just hire other people. Some of these other
people were County Sheriff Deputies, which seem as reliable as the Constables.
But others were simply County employees, from whatever department. Law
enforcement officers ought to be trusted not to break the law. But I have no
such reason to trust some random Democrat-hired county employee.
Harris County Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel has called
them out for breaking the law. The law requires the Election Judge to hand off
custody of the ballots and equipment only to another Election Official—somebody
from the Ballot Board hired to do receiving and counting. There should be
signatures to verify this handoff; there were not.
That means the Election Administrator actually eliminated
chain of custody on all Election Day ballots. Oops.
So who knows what the drop-off procedure will be for the May
24 Primary Runoff Election. But it won’t be one of the past failures. They’ll
want to fail in a whole new way. If it’s enough of a spectacular failure, maybe
they’ll use it for the November Midterm Election.
As my friend, ballot security expert Alan Vera says, “Incompetence
is the perfect camouflage for malfeasance.”
They are trying to get us to quit, so they can hire their
cronies, who will “count” the ballots the way they want—keeping them in power
perpetually. We must not quit.
In November, Harris County Republicans are planning to put a poll watcher at every polling location. In the past we’ve concentrated mainly on troubled areas. But now, with county-wide voting, every place might be a troubled area. We might get a poll watcher at our location for the first time. This is not to show that we are distrusted; it is to show that we all care that the law is followed.
Alan Vera told us precinct chairs on Monday night that it is all hands on deck this November. No one should be sitting home on election day. Most precinct chairs will be running their elections. So they'll need to recruit other poll workers and an army of poll watchers.
Free and fair elections—what a concept!
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