Q&A – Election Integrity Fact vs. Fiction
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Today’s entry: I deeply appreciate your using your platform to expose the elections theft in California today.
It is a well-known axiom among elections experts (and I am one), that you never receive and count votes after election day totals have been announced because it gives the disappointed candidate time to steal enough votes to change the results.
California’s mass mailing, late receiving, late counting scheme throws this basic rule out the window, replacing electoral security with their purported “higher virtue” of counting every vote. We partner with the UN helping establish elections in emerging democracies around the world, an industry that peaked with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We would never set up such a shady system anywhere else.
That is why I was stunned, angered, but not especially surprised when hearing talk show host Erick Erickson defend California for being “incompetent” rather than crooked, as he dismissed the reality of vote theft.
Worse, he cynically describes people who lie to people to make money and that the most money is in lying to people who want to be lied to, essentially calling you an opportunist for calling it fraud.
He then gives the ultimate virtue signal, teeing up his next comment as one that will lose him money as HE tells the “truth” that what is happening in California is incompetence not fraud.
I thought you should know. I would love your take.
Bottom Line: Today’s note comes from a rock-solid person who is an election expert, and it comes on the heels of my analysis of California’s election process, and most recently, what I presented in my Top 3 Takeaways on Tuesday which illustrated that California’s election integrity measures are the second worst in the country and score a 37 out of 100 based on data from the Heritage Foundation, and place California’s election integrity score via, Harvard’s worldwide Electoral Integrity Project, below Haiti’s score – and only three only three points ahead of Venezuala’s score under Maduro!
This is to say that California runs its elections with integrity measures that are lower than standards used in any developed countries, and that are most closely associated with countries where notoriously corrupt elections have been conducted. Importantly, the increased opportunity for fraud to take place via weak integrity measures – doesn't inherently mean fraud has taken place. Also, I need to amend an inference from the note. While I’ve illustrated the numerous flaws in California's election system, what I’ve not stated is that there has been fraud within the recent primary elections (where votes are still being tabulated a week and a half after the fact). What I specifically said was this:
Do I know if there have in fact been shenanigans playing into California’s elections that continue to show the candidates who had been in distant third place positions in the LA mayoral race and California governor’s race with about half of the votes having been in just after Election Day? No, not at all. I have no evidence of this. Now, do you inherently trust Haiti’s election results – especially if there are voting pattern anomalies? Context is key, as is the company that California keeps with Election Integrity. Specifically, the anomalous patterns we’ve seen in both the LA mayoral race and in the governor's, race is that the vote share for the leading Democrats – Xavier Beccera and Karen Bass, have been static – but the third – candidates – also Democrats have been surging with the vote-by-mail ballots that were post marked by Election Day but that had an additional seven days to arrive at election supervisor’s offices. We’ve seen Democrats fair best with vote by mail ballots across the country since 2020 – so it’s no surprise to see Democrats benefiting most from those votes. However, what we’ve never seen are the leading Democrats not benefitting by significantly increasingly their leading margin – but rather to have the second-tier Democrats, who’d been in a distant third place – suddenly receive a majority of the vote-by-mail votes.
Time may tell if election fraud took place in California. From my perspective, partisans on both sides tend to misrepresent the issue of voter fraud. Commonly those on the right have been inclined towards overstating alleged election fraud, while often those on the left have dismissed the prospect as a rare non-issue. As always there are two sides to stories and one side to facts, and the facts are these. There has never been an election cycle in American history without documented voter fraud that’s led to criminal convictions. At the same time, it’s rare that the level of fraud arises to the level that overturns election results (though that does occasionally happen).
By the numbers... Since 1982, or over the prior 43 years, there have been 1,620 criminal convictions for voter fraud within the United States. That’s an average of 38 criminal convictions for voter fraud per year – not just per election cycle. Since 1993, 71 of those criminal convictions have occurred in California – or in other words there are an average of over two criminal convictions for voter fraud in California per year. And it’s important to be mindful that these are only the instances that are identified, prosecuted, and that lead to convictions. It’s safe to suggest that if there are multiple criminal convictions for voter fraud per year, there are also many other instances that slide under the radar.
Conversely, Republicans have at times eroded their credibility on the matter of voter fraud. The most pervasive example are allegations against Smartmatic voting systems stemming from the 2020 election cycle. Following the 2020 election I went to great investigative lengths to illustrate that voter fraud allegations against Smartmatic’s voting systems weren’t true. Nevertheless, the false narratives were relentlessly reported by many conservatives and ultimately led to massive settlements by networks like Fox News and Newsmax that repeatedly reported the false claims.
If you’re a longtime listener you probably know I’ve had an extensive background in covering election integrity issues, including playing an active role in specifically documenting, reporting and sharing the election fraud and related violations of law which occurred in Broward and Palm Beach Counties in the 2018 midterms – which aided in the ouster of both elections' supervisors. More recently I highlighted the 156 officially referred but unpursued cases of potential voter fraud – in conjunction with the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Findings that led to Florida’s establishment of an Election Crimes division.
The bottom line is that voter fraud exists, it should be taken seriously, and I most certainly do. At the same time, it's critical that the voter fraud bell is only rung when there’s clear evidence of misfeasance. When allegations of voter fraud are advanced, and they aren’t appropriately evidenced, it not only erodes the credibility of those associated with the accusations, it undermines the attention, coverage and reality of voter fraud cases.
More than ever, we need minimum federal standards like the SAVE Act passed. California’s current elections might be free and fair, but without transparency in the process, and with third world ranking integrity measures in place – there's statistically a greater possibility that Haiti’s next elections will be more trustworthy. Florida is the third largest state in the country. Approximately an hour from the polls being closed, we know the results of every race save the curing of provisional ballots, and a smattering of signature reconciliation on vote by mail ballots. We also have paper ballot backups for every ballot cast for recounts as well. California and every state could do this too.