Deterrence, Prevention, and Real-Time Intervention

This past Saturday, at our local Tea Party meeting, we had the privilege of hearing from Alan Vera on election integrity—including a heavy dose of what we need to do. Alan is an expert on the subject and trains people nationwide in fighting various kinds of election fraud. As one of the originators of True the Vote, he was mytrainer for poll watching back in 2011.

Unfortunately, I missed the first 20 minutes or so of his talk; I was stuck in traffic, spending 40 minutes to travel the last 2 miles. Of course there was no warning of the slowdown until after the only previous exit. I recorded it (here), but I’m missing that first part. Still, there was enough in the hour, including Q&A, that I heard to share a few gems here.

He reiterated the refrain that we need “Deterrence, Prevention, and Real-Time Intervention.” I’ll mostly be looking at his stories of real-time intervention—the stories of what regular citizens have done and need to do, because, as he puts it, “Law enforcement ain’t comin’ over the hill to save us.”

Alan Vera, former Army Ranger, election integrity expert,
speaks at the Cypress Texas Tea Party, July 23, 2022
screenshot from here

This first story is from way too close to home—about three miles down the street:

The day before Early Voting in 2020, I got a call from a lady here in West Houston. She had been to the Food Town Grocery at the corner of Highway 6 and FM [farm-to-market road] 529. She came out of the Food Town and was stopped by a young man and young lady, each of whom was pulling a big wagon full of canvas bags. And they said to her, “Would you like to earn a $100 gift card?” And she said, “Well, yeah. What do I have to do?” “Well, just take a handful of these home, sign them, put a stamp on them, and send them in.” And she said, “What are they?”

So they pulled out a stack. It was all mail ballots. Already filled out. Every Democrat candidate was checked. And they showed her, “Just check the name of the voter here. Fold it up, and before you seal it sign your name across that seal. And here is the roll stamps to send it in with.”

And she said, “I don't feel comfortable with that.” She went home and called the Harris County Sheriff's Office, but they said, “We don't do election fraud.”

We don’t do election fraud! Law enforcement ain’t comin’ over the hill to save us.

Sure, we need laws on the books, and we’ve done well at upping some the crimes to felonies. But once the crime is committed, it’s often too late. We need to deter, prevent, and step up—in real time—to stop the steal from happening in the first place.

Another of Alan’s stories is from 2020, when the interim county clerk, replacing the elected county clerk who stepped down amid ethical violations “for health reasons because of COVID,”—that interim clerk did all he could to use the COVID crisis, proving that mail ballots are their chosen election fraud tool:

Back in 2020, you know, County Clerk Chris Hollis held a press conference. He announced that there was going to be a record number of mail ballots in Harris County for that election: 285,000 mail ballots was his confident prediction. We knew the Democrats were going to use try to use mail ballots as their key fraud that election.

So in March of 2020, my wife, Colleen, published the first of two articles exposing the mail ballot fraud ring in Harris County, to get started on it. And we published that, and we said, “What do we do now?” And we said, “Let's pray.” So we prayed.

some of the evidence found by Colleen Vera,
in her 2020 post here

Two days later, I got phone calls from four private investigative agencies. They'd seen the article. They said, “What can we do to help?” We said, “What do you know? How can you help me again?” They said, “We know where the two buildings are which are the mail ballot factories in Harris County. One’s owned by a guy named Womack [?—couldn’t tell what he said]. The other owned by a guy named Dallas Jones. We know where those are.”

So I said, “Tell about that.”

“Well, there's buildings, two-story buildings. People come in, and they go to the top floor, and they work there all day, signing mail ballots—fraudulently signing mail ballots. We know where they are.”

I said, “Well, can you surveille them?” They laughed, and said, “We'll do better than that.”

So they surveilled these two buildings. But they didn't do it clandestinely from two blocks away with binoculars. They were on the sidewalk outside the front door of each building, with video cameras. They were recording the face of everyone going in their door. They were taking photos of their driver's licenses. [I think he means license plates, visible on every car.] They were making it very uncomfortable to go in and out of those buildings.

Two weeks before early voting began, they shut down both facilities, thanks to four private eyes who said, “We’re going to do something.”

That’s only the first part of the story. Here are some more details of a win for the freedom fighters:

And you all have seen the movie 2000 Mules. We didn't have unmanned drop boxes in Texas. But we had worse. Governor Abbott, in his COVID wisdom, extended early voting by a week in 2020. Then he did something much worse. He changed the rules for dropping off your mail ballot in person.

The Texas Election Code says you can drop off your mail ballot in person on only one day: Election Day between 7 AM and 7 PM, and only at the main office of the Early Voting clerk, which is the EA [election administrator]. One day, 12 hours. Governor Abbott extended it to 62 days. 62 days, you could drop off your mail ballot.

Well, I wrote and sent off a letter of protest. Got [Senator] Bettencourt involved, Senator Hughes involved. Said, “You guys got to do something about this.” And then I just prayed. Prayed and prayed and prayed.

Two days later, I got a call from a church leader I'd never met before. She said, “I hear you need some help with mail ballots.” I said, “Yeah, I need 35 poll watchers who will be around 24/7 at NRG Arena and stop the mail ballot fraud to that venue.” She said, “Give me two days.”

Two days later, she had me 35 poll watchers willing to go round the clock at NRG. And I trained them by Zoom call Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. And they did it. They did it. They stood at NRG through rain, and through heat, through wind, thunderstorms. They were there 62 days at NRG Arena.

mail ballots being turned in at NRG Arena in Houston in 2020,
Getty image by Go Nakamura, found here

Did they stop stuff? You betcha.

Car after car would pull up with banker's boxes full of mail ballots filled with mail ballots. And these church poll watchers said, “No, the law says you can only drop off your own mail ballot. That's it. And you must show ID to do so. And the name and signature on your driver's license has to match the name and signature on the carrier envelope. And then you have to sign this form here,” it’s a sign-in form with the time you dropped off your mail ballot.

They upheld that. And they turned away car after car after car, full of mail ballots to be dropped off. They stopped it.

Now, there were a couple of nights that got kind of harry. And, believe it or not, the private detective guys were across the street from NRG Arena with binoculars, making sure our polls were okay. They were watching over them.

Chris Hollins said 285,000 mail ballots. We got 163,000, just average for Harris County in a presidential election. We beat him. We beat him without a single act by law enforcement or any elected official. Real time intervention.

This is not to say you don’t also work with the legislature and law enforcement. This next story is a good look behind the scenes of the legislative fight. To remind you, in the 2021 legislative session, we had a bill, SB1, that would strengthen voter laws in a number of ways. The legislators cut work short by a day, preventing some final bills from passing, which included this one. So the Governor called a special session. The Democrats fled the state so no business could be done. So the Governor called a second special session, by the end of which some Dems were trickling back in. There were three sessions in all, but the “time bomb” was planted in the second:

From August 2020 to October 2020, there were four of us working clandestinely to write the bill that eventually became Senate Bill 1. It was myself representing Harris County Republican Party. It was the Texas Public Policy Foundation. It was Texans for Lawsuit Reform. And it was the Opiela Law Firm up in Austin. We worked for three months drafting Senate Bill 1, and the bill was finally filed that January. 80% of the language was ours.

So we got it done. We hand it off. And now it belongs to Senator Bryan Hughes. And we got to watch the Democrats go apoplectic over Senate Bill 1. They broke quorum. They fled to Washington. They held press conferences. They yelled voter suppression. And we're all sitting back here laughing. The four of us again going, “Gee, no one knows we did that.” But it’s fun to watch them melt down.

So then Senate Bill 1 didn't pass in the regular session, because they broke quorum.  It didn't pass in the first special session. And Democrats are starting to trickle back. Between the first and second special session, we were doing a project for Mike Schofield, and I suddenly remembered, because I’m old, that—Holy Cow! We've got another problem. In Harris County, since the Democrats took over in 2019, in every election we have had more ballots and voters. Another miracle of the loaves and fishes. Every election there were more ballots cast than voters who signed in.

So I approached Senator Bettencourt and Senator Hughes, and said, “Guys, I need to add two sentences to Senate Bill 1.” Just two simple sentences. Just requiring that, every election there be a reconciliation of the number of voters and the number of ballots. They snuck it in there between the sessions.

Now, because the special session starts all over again, Senate Bill 1 was refiled. It wasn’t like an amendment from the floor of the Senate. It was refiled. So these two sentences are at the bottom of page 38 and an 80 page bill. Nobody noticed them. They fought over the poll watchers. They fought over the civil penalties. They fought over everything, but not over that reconciliation issue. It sailed through and was finally passed in the second special session.

So, like a good Army Ranger booby trap, the tripwires were set. The detonators were all primed. and the ammo was all live; the explosives were all live. And it just sat there sat there. It sat there until the March 1^st Primary. Isabel Longoria [the appointed Elections Administrator, after the County Commission removed oversight of elections from the County Clerk] had pretty much screwed up everything about the elections. She had screwed everything up. And it was getting harder and harder for [Harris County] Judge Hidalgo to continue to support her—especially when the Communist Chronicle [the Houston Chronicle] even said, “Sorry, Dems, this mess is not the Republicans’ fault.”

Then, on election night, of course we had to sue, because she was not going to finish counting the ballots in the 24-hour period required by law. We had to go to court to sue to give her more time to count the ballots. It took her 41 hours instead of 24 hours.

And then came the moment of truth: the reconciliation form. They signed it at 3:00 in the morning, on March 3^rd. They're all sleepy, they're all groggy. And they signed it and sent to Secretary of State. The next day, he called and said, “Harris County, you seem to have forgotten to count 10,000 ballots. Boom! Trip wires went off. Detonators went off. It was great. Lina Hidalgo then asked for Isabel's resignation.

No one knows who did that. Bettencourt knows was, because he helped me get it in there. But it's fun. There's real satisfaction in doing things quietly behind the scenes that nobody will ever know about. It’s important. It's important.

So real time intervention, it's up to us.

There were more stories, and there was more advice. But this is enough for now. Again, he makes sure we understand—this November 8^th, no one gets to sit home on election day. We’ve all got to volunteer. Work the polls, or be a poll watcher. Or volunteer at central count. Between now and then, we can help check the voter rolls and clean them up; we can get our neighbors to understand how important it is to vote in this election.

I asked Alan afterward if what I’m seeing is true: if we don’t stop the voter fraud this election, and we lose to Democrat cheating, is that the end of our freedom? Are things that dire?” He said yes, things are that dire.

Don’t be caught sleeping through the demise of our great country, when you could be taking a day off to deploy to somewhere in your county to guarantee free and fair elections. Join in our fight to recover our constitutional republic. Be there for the real-time interventions.