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Americans Deserve a More Secure Voting System
Elections aren’t being stolen. But they are carried out under rules devised by one side for their benefit.
The Left loves our election system and why wouldn’t they? It has been a boon for them. They can win elections even when all seems lost. They have learned to exploit, through both legal and extra-legal means, the opportunities presented by bulk-mail voting, ballot harvesting, and lack of voter ID requirements. So they falsely insist our procedures are virtually fraud-proof, and that attempts to improve election security are racially motivated “voter suppression.”
In fact, voter fraud is not all that rare and is easy to commit. It is hard to detect because victims are unaware that their vote has been canceled, and so are unlikely to complain.
In New York, 63 undercover agents went to the polls, giving the names of individuals who had died, moved, or were incarcerated. All but two were given ballots, including young people impersonating voters three times their age.
A television reporter in Florida, on his own, turned up 94 non-citizens who had voted. Elections have been overturned because of voter fraud in Miami, FL, East Chicago, IN, in Essex County, NJ, and Greene County, AL, among other locales.
And who can forget Al Franken’s 312 vote victory in Minnesota’s Senate race, when later over one thousand felons (most probably Democrat voters) were found to have voted.
In 2020, the Pacific Interest Legal Foundation, published a meticulous analysis of voter databases in which 144,000 cases of potential voter fraud were documented. These included dead voters, voters who had moved, and voters who supposedly lived in vacant lots, restaurants, and gas stations.
The report was sent to the 42 states in which fraud was uncovered. Not a single official or prosecutor asked for the relevant information for their state. Not one. The stunning New York undercover operation also garnered little attention, either from the media or law-enforcement agencies. Neither did the Florida reporter’s discoveries. You see the pattern.
Fraud must be looked for to be detected and most election officials aren’t that enthusiastic about investigating for fraud. Why give yourself a black eye?
Honest researchers admit no one knows how much fraud is out there. Defenders of the status quo like to point out the lack of proven fraud cases associated with mail-in voting, but unless someone confesses, the crime is essentially non-detectable.
Look at how bulk-mail compares with in-person voting, long the gold standard of election security. At the voting site, voters are protected from undue influence. Only after the list of eligible voters is checked, and their ID is presented are they given a ballot. They are monitored while they vote. The secrecy of the ballot is maintained at all times. Finally, a formal chain of custody assures that ballots are handled securely until counted.
By contrast, bulk-mail voting, in my state of Arizona and other states, begins with unrequested ballots being mailed to millions of names on poorly maintained voter lists, some of whom don’t give a hoot about voting. Most ballots are received by their intended recipients, voted and returned. But others get lost in the mail, or are delivered to people who have moved or died. Yet others go to voters, some mentally incapacitated, who are “helped” by third parties to cast their vote. Some ballots are even sold.
Many of the votes are returned by “ballot harvesting,” where party activists collect the ballots and then return them or place them in a dropbox. There are no chain of custody violations, because there is no chain of custody.
Finally, signature matching is used as a substitute for actual ID verification. But signature matching is an imprecise “art” with no objective standards, which has been demonstrated many times to be unreliable.
Bulk-mail voting is popular and growing, both with those who innocently appreciate its convenience and with those who cherish the inexplicable election wins that can be achieved by it.
But the value of a vote in a democratic society depends on the integrity with which it is cast and counted. A majority of Americans don’t believe their elections are secure, nor will they until we reject voting processes that are so porous to fraud and deceit.
Published in General
Ricochet’s own intrepid reporter has been categorizing, investigating, and following up on the 2020 Election since…about 2020. You might even find some more evidence to support your views that the elections are somewhat fallible.
https://ricochet.com/1270895/the-quest-and-questions-continue-some-election-2020-updates-2/
Shh! You’re not supposed to talk about this lest the National Review “Republicans” label you a kook! Don’t you know 2020 was the most securest, bestest, most fraud-free election ever!? Even “Republicans” said so.
The Republicans will have only two chances to right this very terrible wrong. The vote on the Debt Ceiling and the Vote on the 2024 Budget. I fear that the Republicans will not seize the day and use the leverage they have in those votes to force change back to an honest election system. If they do not, America as a Constitutional Republic is finished and welcome to be enslaved in a high tech gulag.
Better late than never but honestly where have you been?
I guess I tend to disagree with the title of your piece. American do not deserve a more secure voting system. They need to demand one. You get what you deserve in most cases. If the majority of American’s don’t demand an honest system, they will continue to get what they have been getting. Indifference is its own reward.
Some people keep insisting the Dems would have to manufacture millions of votes to cheat. Not true! They only need to manufacture just enough votes in a small number of precincts in certain states to tip the balance and change their electoral college votes. After every Presidential election, someone (usually on the losing side) calculates the smallest number of votes needed to make the election go the other way. IIRC, the margin in 2000 was frighteningly small . . .
The media and the French-Republicans always use the phrase “no evidence of widespread voter fraud.” There are two key qualifiers in that phrase.
“No evidence” – A lack of evidence merely indicates the lack of an investigation. Where audits were done … Michigan in 2016, Arizona and Georgia in 2020 … there was evidence a-plenty.
“Widespread” – The fraud does not have to be widespread to flip a state’s electoral votes. It only takes a concentrated effort in Democrat-controlled cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, and Phoenix to flip a national election or a senate or governor’s race.
[The author then provides 20-something counterexamples. Weird writing style.]
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We need to back off to the first principles. I’ll put it this way:
A government system without transparency and checks and balances will fall into corruption. And note that there’s an enormous incentive for the corruption part.
This should be blazingly obvious, but it gets lost in the sauce. The Founding Fathers knew it. If there’s a single theme for the Constitution, that’s it.
The current election system hides a lot and has no real mechanism of checks and balances.
See my post A Better Approach to Elections for a potential solution.
I actually got a tour of Utah’s mail-in ballot counting and honestly after seeing the process they go through to verify and count the votes, I was actually more confident mailing in my ballot in Utah than I would by traditional in-person voting. I should, in fact, write on that process. Utah has built in multiple levels of verification, from cleaning up voter rolls, to counting submitted ballots, to giving signatures multiple levels of verification, to protecting counts, and finally to preserving counted ballots for later contest if any.
That said, do note that I’m Oregonian born and bred and what I know of the process in the state of Oregon, it’s so corrupt and fraudulent that I’m certain no one that wins the vote in Oregon really deserves to gain office.
The conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s not the particular system that is or is not fraudulent, but rather the will of the various states to make certain the process is as secure and verifiable as possible. Those in Oregon that benefit from their entirely fraudulent vote-by-mail system have no impetus whatsoever — they’ve all to gain and everything to lose if they tighten things down.
When it comes to electoral integrity and every other government activity, I accept Scott Adams formulation: Citizens are entitled to presumption of innocence, government is not. The burden should be on government to prove its innocence by transparency and ethical conduct. Government misdemeanors left unchecked lead to felonies.
So … riddle me this, why are democrats so opposed to a more secure and fair process?
It is obvious. They have now figured out how to cheat in the urban strongholds of the ‘battleground’ states to guarantee that they can submit enough fraudulent ballots to ensure their ‘victory’. Now that they have succeeded in this without gOp pushback (because Trump), they will never give this away.
That’s my conclusion.
The biggest problem with mail-in voting is that you cannot certify who actually voted the ballot, nor that they were not persuaded to vote a certain way. In-person voting builds that security into the system. It is allowable to have an interpreter or assistant, but prior to them assisting the person, they are administered an oath in which they promise not to sway the voter. We usually watch and listen to those rare occasions and if there is an issue, we step in and stop them from guiding the person’s vote. There is no way for anyone to certify who actually filled out a mail-in ballot.
That can be something of a problem, but again there are ways to minimize this to a degree. Here, Utah doesn’t allow for ballot harvesting for example.
Thing is, despite its weaknesses, mail-in ballots remain popular across the aisles. Last year, a Republican challenged the incumbent Democrat for the office of County Clerk which happens to be where voter registration and ballot counting is handled. He ran against Utah’s vote-by-mail system and, if he couldn’t get rid of that he was promising to make sure it was secure. He lost fairly handily. Salt Lake County can run red to blue depending on how close you are to the city, but plenty of Republicans won in the county so it wasn’t like he faced an impossible task.
Afterwards I received the tour of Salt Lake County’s system and well … his plans to make it more secure had already been implemented. And overall, people in general like the mail-in system. Basically, we can rant against it, but if the people like it we’re just yelling at clouds at this point. People won’t get rid of a system they perceive as working. You might as well be running to eliminate root beer floats. So at this point, we need to identify the weaknesses, press to mitigate those weaknesses if not outright eliminate them, and rigidly enforce the law when irregularities arise.
Exactly! They first cite a lack of evidence, then turn around and say, “Therefore, we aren’t going to conduct an investigation.”
Sounds good to me.
Ha! Elections are NEVER stolen?
You could have said almost never stolen, but you said that they aren’t stolen.
Why do we deserve a more secure voting system, if elections aren’t stolen?