Happy New Year to all! Also, for the tl:dr crowd, a much shorter, more concise post. When you read about election fraud in third world countries, the most common way that elections are rigged is through ballot stuffing. One of the most important ways to prevent ballot stuffing is to have strict chains of custody of ballot boxes. New Zealand is a paragon of clean and efficient election administration with voter fraud relegated to a tiny few fringe operators who may vote twice or pay for food for Polynesian voters in South Auckland to get to the polls. The numbers of court cases in NZ alleging improper vote counts can be counted on one hand and, from memory, a court ordered recount has reversed an election night (plus special votes) count only once (in 1978 Winston Peters sought a High Court electoral petition that successfully overturned his election night loss in the electorate of Hunua when he was in the National Party). Having been a polling booth party scrutineer and an election night count party scrutineer in NZ, I can attest to the simple, uncomplicated bipartisan approach taken with voting and ballot counting in NZ. Aside from overseas votes, there are no absentee ballots allowed and every vote is cast in polling locations monitored by paid election officials employed by Elections NZ. Advance voting occurs only at selected polling locations designated to receive ballots and the ballot boxes are locked and supervised by people like Council or Library staff to ensure there is no tampering.
On election night in NZ, votes are counted only at each polling booth with the polling supervisor at each location being the only person with the keys to the ballot boxes. The paper ballots are tipped out onto tables and are sorted into party vote and electorate vote piles with party observers watching all the time, no machines are ever used to count or tabulate ballots. When NZ moved from a ballot that required voters to strike out the names of candidates they didn’t want to a straight X in a box next to the preferred candidate or party in 1996, there were far fewer disputed ballots. Any party observer can dispute a ballot and it is put into a disputed pile and the election workers and party scrutineers go over each disputed ballot to come to an agreement on voter intent. The polling booth supervisor then locks the ballots back in the boxes and communicates the polling booth tally to Elections NZ central processing centre where the vote tallies for each electorate are tallied and the party votes for the whole country are aggregated.
One of the most insidious trends in the 2020 US Presidential election was the widespread use of unsupervised ballot drop boxes exclusively for voters to drop off absentee ballots. Under the cover of the Covid 19 pandemic, a few obscure charities, the most notable of which was the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), began to offer funding to cities and counties to fund the cost of community sited ballot boxes, election equipment, poll worker training and so-called election supervisors. These proposals, couched in terms of making it easier for voters to return absentee ballots rather than voting in person, selectively funded a whole new private election infrastructure under the nominal purview of local government election officials. What emerged was a pattern of selective funding of Democrat heavy cities and counties and as 2020 rolled out, massive donations from the likes of the Mark Zuckerberg Foundation (the Facebook founder and owner) totaling more than $350 million were made. The CTCL expended an average of $47 per voter in Democrat controlled cities and counties and only $7 per voter in Republican counties. The actions of the CTCL have been the subject of extensive research done by the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society spearheaded by former Kansas State Attorney General Phill Kline. It makes for grim reading.
Elections in the US are governed by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which requires each county and state to submit and have approved a Safe Election Plan. Such innovations as a large private charity funding big boosts in spending on election infrastructure must all be approved in advance. The CTCL submitted a Wisconsin Safe Elections plan and an equivalent in Michigan that specifically required municipalities and counties receiving the assistance to circumvent Wisconsin and Michigan election law in 5 key ways:
- In Wisconsin, they heavily promoted people circumventing the strict absentee ballot signature requirements by enrolling as Indefinitely Confined as detailed in Part 1 yesterday.
- The plan called for hundreds of unstaffed and unsupervised absentee ballot boxes to be placed in Democrat heavy communities thus breaking chain of custody requirements as there was no way to monitor if someone was using the unstaffed ballot boxes as a no-questions-asked place to launder fraudulent ballots as the legitimately placed ballots would be commingled with the illegal ballots at the time the ballots were counted.
- Consolidation of counting centres. This made it easier for Democrat election officials to exclude Republican observers or to force them to sit so far away as to render the close up scrutiny we take for granted in NZ impossible to achieve. The most notable example was the TCF Center in Detroit that aggregated all the ballots from metro Detroit and Wayne County in a single location where GOP observers were shooed away and then the windows were boarded up. Can you imagine such a thing happening in NZ?
- The plan called for paid ‘Vote Navigators’ whose job it was oversee the CTCL procedures. No such position exists in the legal election infrastructure as proscribed by state law.
- A crucial part of any HAVA compliant state election plan was for provision to be made for updating and cleaning electoral rolls. The Amistad Project examined hundreds of CTCL employment contracts and not one made any mention of cleaning voter rolls because dirty rolls are a feature not a bug in Democrat controlled jurisdictions.
The unstaffed drop boxes were placed in extraordinary concentrations in Democrat strongholds with for example, one every 4 square miles and 4,000 voters in Philadelphia and one every 1,100 square miles and 77,000 voters in rural Pennsylvania AND none of these boxes had auditable logbooks of what was picked up, when and by who as ballots were collected often by people on the payroll not of the city or county but of the CTCL (and related entities such as Rock the Vote) ‘Vote Navigators’. The scope for rampant fraud was wide open.
The subterfuge engineered by the CTCL went further. One of the requirements of the funding was for the municipalities receiving the funds was that [EDIT] CTLC could directly register voters via direct access to the country registration database rather than just submit registration forms to county clerks’ offices like other parties do to enable the CTCL (and subsidiary groups) to engage in voter registration more easily and rapidly and also to register ineligible people to vote to circumvent the clerk pre registration checks. Cities and Counties receiving funding were required to allow the CTCL access to these computer systems. They went a step further – to oversee this expansion of the voting infrastructure, whilst the overall control was still in the hands of County election officials, jurisdictions were cash strapped after Covid and so paying for extra election supervisors was not in their budgets. Instead, the CTCL grants paid for the salaries of additional election officials including election ‘judges’ whose job it was to adjudicate disputed ballots. Never in US history has some of the vital machinery of running and supervising elections and even the adjudicating of ballots been effectively privatised to an outside charity with a massive bias in its funding in favour of one candidate against another with no ability to audit and none of the usual checks and balances, transparency and being able to examine records as is the case with a taxpayer funded city or county elections department.
The Amistad Project used considerable legal resources to litigate disclosures of information about the CTCL as, being a private entity, they refused to abide by FOIA requests that are routine for any governmental agency. This was a massive private funded election infrastructure effort almost entirely hidden from private scrutiny. Their report details the many lawsuits and other ways that they were able to penetrate the veil of secrecy that surrounded this unprecedented effort. They were able to get detailed breakdowns of how much money was donated to what cities and counties across the battleground states.
Those trying to defend the actions of the CTCL have said that the pandemic left municipalities uniquely vulnerable to funding constraints and yet the Federal Government allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for voting infrastructure and training of poll workers etc. and in many states, millions of these funds (that would be accountable as taxpayer funds) were unallocated with jurisdictions (almost all Democrat) choosing to take the CTCL money instead because it enabled them to circumvent state election laws by establishing the huge number of remote unsupervised absentee ballot drop boxes. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the activities of the CTCL was that Democrat Governors, Secretaries of State, Attorneys General, and County Election Supervisors were entirely comfortable with what they were doing and how they were doing it, blindly ignoring state election laws to ensure secure chains of ballot custody.
What was the electoral impact of this type of fraud? As stated, it is hard to separate legitimately cast ballots from those received via ballot stuffing – that is the reason why remote ballot boxes are illegal. We do know that this was the preferred method used by illegal ballot harvesters to ‘launder’ their harvested ballots. In almost all states (and in all the key battleground states), ballot harvesting is illegal. Ballot harvesting is when third parties go around and collect absentee ballots for other people. Ballot harvesters target large apartment complexes in states that authorized the mass mail out of absentee ballots as that is where multiple ballots sent to apartments get thrown in rubbish skips so they dumpster dive, they look at apartment complexes and housing subdivisions with a large communal mailbox blocks for discarded mail in ballots and they target low income housing, retirement homes and council housing with elderly residents to offer to ‘help’ them vote. Some ballot harvesters will simply assure the elderly person that they will cast their ballot for them as they wish and not waste their time and then complete the ballot for Biden in their own time. Other ballot harvesters target specific ethnic communities and speak the same language so as to engender trust. Obviously a ballot harvester cannot bring a big haul of absentee ballots into a normal authorised county or city ballot box as the official ones normally are in a lobby of a government building that is monitored by either reception staff or has a camera on the box to detect any tampering. A ballot harvester was caught on film in Minneapolis with over 300 absentee ballots in his car, many for which he had paid cash, all for Biden and for his boss (controversial Somalian Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar) from only a few days work. Imagine hundreds of illegal ballot harvesters fanning out across the various key Democrat strongholds in the key states doing the harvesting like the type seen on film for weeks. The numbers of illegally obtained and cast ballots soon adds up to the tens of thousands. The placement of thousands of illegal remote ballot drop boxes by the CTCL and others was the perfect way to facilitate this fraud.
Can this activity be actually proven on a scale sufficient to overturn a current state result? As stated in Part 1, it would appear that the Trump lawyers in Wisconsin during their recount (which, like Wisconsin electoral law, has one of the most stringent and thorough recounts in the country) unearthed over 20,000 illegally cast absentee ballots that were put into illegally placed community ballot boxes in just the city of Madison alone. If a judge had the courage to rule on this illegality, that alone would reverse the Biden margin in Wisconsin. The city of Milwaukee is five times larger than Madison and even if you were to assume that illegal community ballot boxes were put in only a third of Milwaukee, that’s still almost double the likely number of illegally cast absentee ballots that were dropped in community boxes in Milwaukee. The use of unsupervised community ballot boxes was widespread in Atlanta, GA, in Pittsburg and Philadelphia, PA, In Phoenix, AZ, in Las Vegas, NV and in Detroit, MI – all are cities that strongly vote Democrat. Proving this specific fraud in those cities will be next to impossible.
In conclusion, imagine if Graham Tindall’s Foundation had a $5 million fund that it made available to community Get Out the Vote organisations in NZ and that they paid for remote unsupervised ballot boxes to receive advanced votes in shopping malls, train/bus stations and sports stadiums in key Labour strongholds in the major cities. There would be an uproar about private interference in our elections and one that was purely partisan in nature. An idea like that would be rightly shouted down in the NZ media and public opprobrium would mean the scheme would ever see the light of day and yet here in the world’s richest democracy, elected officials for one party allowed billionaires to fund an infrastructure that broke the fundamental rule of free and fair elections, that of a traceable chain of custody of thousands of ballot boxes all conveniently in locations that went heavily for Biden. The practice of elections in Democrat controlled jurisdictions bears no resemblance to the election procedures used in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK and has more in common with that which is done in Zimbabwe, Bolivia and Venezuela. Media incuriosity at this outrage here in the US is staggering until one realizes that they are so heavily invested in a Biden win that any evidence of election fraud is to be ignored, poo pooed and dismissed as inconsequential.
