I have a number of friends who are excited about the impending results of the Arizona election audit. I also have a little knowledge of what’s going on there, though perhaps not much beyond what is available to the average American. What I tell my friends is: Don’t get your hopes up.
My home state of Connecticut had a Republican governor in recent memory and, not long before that, no state income tax. In the 2010 gubernatorial election, Democrat Dan Malloy was trailing Republican Tom Foley statewide, even as the counting seemed to be wrapping up. But then—shazam!—a bag of uncounted ballots was “found” in McLevy Hall. As the Connecticut Post reported at the time, “Even as Foley’s campaign demanded the ballots be taken by State Police to Hartford for counting by a neutral authority, city officials insisted the existence of the ballots previously had been disclosed and that Bridgeport election workers would count them Thursday night.”
They were still counting in Bridgeport three days after the election. They eventually came up with enough votes in that single city to erase Foley’s statewide lead. Malloy was declared the winner, and Connecticut has been an uncontestable blue state ever since.
Any of this sound familiar?
The problem with a careful audit of the ballots is that most vote fraud has been sanctioned by state law. In Georgia, for example, a consent decree signed by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger changed the process of signature verification so that when an official notices a mismatch he now has to consult with two other officials and they have to agree by a two-out-of-three vote that the signature doesn’t match. Then they have to put their names in writing to record their appraisal of the matter and they mail the voter in question a provisional ballot, giving him an opportunity to “cure” the mismatch. In practice, therefore, signature verification never happens.
And of course, once a ballot has been separated from its envelope—as they all have been by now—there is no way to reconnect the two, even if auditors find a suspicious signature. Which means there is no way to cure the fraudulent vote itself. That is why mail-in voting is such a bonanza for fraud, and why the Democrats have worked so hard to make it the norm. The toxic Voting Rights Lab was proud to note in a recent report that only two-thirds of voters cast their ballots on Election Day in 2016, and in 2020, only one third voted on election day. So we’re told.
The Art of Voter Fraud Made Simple
Here’s a quick synopsis of how vote fraud actually works: A nonprofit organization gets hired by a state to clean its voter rolls. To assist in its mission, the nonprofit gets access not only to the voter rolls, but to the DMV records, which are not publicly available. The nonprofit seems to do its work, and even submits a list of voters who should be removed from the rolls. But then another nonprofit, working in tandem, sues the state to prevent the removal of those voters from the rolls. So what has been accomplished by nonprofit A?
First, they send out voter registration cards to everyone in the state DMV database who isn’t registered to vote—and this is paid for by the state.
Second, they now have a list of all the people who are registered to vote but shouldn’t be on the rolls. These are people who wouldn’t notice if you requested a mail-in ballot on their behalf and voted it for them—people who might be dead or might have moved, but most often simply don’t vote, and therefore don’t notice when a ballot they never requested is sent to an address that isn’t theirs.
A huge number of safe-to-cast ballots are mailed to designated addresses or are scooped out of non-voters’ mailboxes. Another nonprofit collects these ballots en masse and marks them. Then mules are paid to deliver them to dropboxes (as in Georgia) or to bulk-vote them in-person (as in Arizona).
An audit won’t find anything wrong because the ballots and the envelopes are both genuine. The entire system is a scam, but as long as you’re willing to operate within that system, there is nothing to find.
We may be awake to the threat of fraud now, but if we stake too much on these audits, we’re playing into the Left’s hands. If the audits fizzle, which I believe they must be given their inherent limitations, we will have put another arrow into the quiver of the official “there was no fraud” line.
The Trojan Horse for a Permanent Majority
Joe Manchin laid out the entire Democratic strategy on election fraud in a recent op-ed, a strategy in which he is slated to play a major role. You just have to know how to read what he wrote.
Examine the problem from the Democrats’ point of view: The barrier in between them and a permanent majority is that states currently determine their own election laws. So if a state wants to have a voter ID requirement, signature matching, or if they want to insist that poll watchers be able to see and hear what is going on, that is entirely up to them. Red states generally want anti-fraud measures, and blue states don’t. As long as those measures are in place, there is no convenient way to turn a red state blue.
The solution is to have the federal government nullify states’ election laws. The legal principle is called “pre-clearance.” It was a feature of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and it required any states that had been accused of systematic racism in their voter laws to submit all laws to the Department of Justice for approval. So the federal bureaucracy, not the citizens or their elected representatives, got to decide what became an election law and what didn’t.
And while this feature of the Voting Rights Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, the court uselessly invalidated only the formula by which states could be subjected to Justice Department scrutiny, not the principle of pre-clearance itself. And today, pre-clearance is back at the heart of proposed legislation called the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. It would invalidate state-level anti-fraud measures, including those recently passed in Georgia, and would require any new laws to be approved by the Department of Justice.
Now take another look at Manchin’s op-ed: He writes that the bill known as S.1, the “For the People Act,” is too partisan. He could never support such a measure. What this country really needs is genuine but moderate voting reform that brings us together as a nation. Voting reform like the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. He actually names the legislation in his piece.
S.1 was never meant to be passed. It was not even meant to be taken seriously. It was meant to make the John Lewis Voting Rights Act look moderate by comparison, so that when Manchin throws his weight behind it (and behind whatever procedural, filibuster-destroying move is necessary to get it passed) Manchin can use his phony “moderate” credentials to present it to America as a compromise.
A necessary part of this strategy is that Manchin must allow himself to be pilloried by the Left for failing to support S.1. This has already happened, and is ongoing. The outrage is real because many of the writers are unaware of the grand strategy, but the motive and forces behind the outrage are entirely cynical. It is all intended to shore up Manchin’s claim to being a bipartisan representative of middle America.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Act is the real threat to our elections, and Joe Manchin is the Trojan horse by which it sneaks into law and destroys the nation. Manchin is a very savvy politician. But he doesn’t represent Americans or the people of West Virginia or the spirit of compromise. He’s a fake.