Moving Toward The Goal Of Honest Elections

On Sunday, PJ Media posted an article about a recent judicial ruling in Wisconsin.

The article reports:

A judge in the state of Wisconsin ruled on Thursday that the use of ballot boxes in the 2020 election was, in fact, illegal. Joe Biden was declared the winner over Donald Trump in the state by 20,682 votes.

Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Bohren issued the decision in a lawsuit that had been filed on behalf of two voters by the Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty (WILL). WILL argued that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) had unilaterally issued guidance to election clerks, authorizing the use of ballot collection boxes, in contradiction of state law.

“The guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission on absentee ballot drop boxes was unlawful. There are just two legal methods to cast an absentee ballot in Wisconsin: through the mail or in-person at a clerk’s office. And voters must return their own ballots,” commented WILL Deputy Counsel Luke Berg. “We are pleased the court made this clear, providing Wisconsin voters with certainty for forthcoming elections.”

In a memo issued to state election officials months before the 2020 general election, the WEC gave its blessing to install an unlimited number of drop boxes of numerous descriptions: indoors or outdoors, staffed or unstaffed, in a box or with a fox. Officials could even use COVID-19 as an excuse to repurpose existing local “infrastructure” for ballot collection, such as mail slots set up for taxes, mail and public utilities, book and media drop slots at the local library, even “businesses or locations that have already implemented social distancing practices, such as grocery stores and banks.”

During arguments, Berg noted that, because these recommendations were made outside the rule making process they should have gone through, there were no real legal standards regulating what could qualify as a drop box. “A shoebox on a bench in a park would be legal for collecting ballots,” argued Berg. “Now, that’s absurd, of course. But that’s the logical consequence of the position that the commission is taking.”

Please follow the link to read the entire article. Chain-of-custody rules were ignored, and only one municipality recorded the number of ballots in the drop boxes.

The article concludes:

By an odd coincidence, Wisconsin is one of a handful of swing states where “midnight magic” occurred on election night. These were the states where, at some point in the wee hours, massive vote dumps produced huge jumps in Biden’s, and only Biden’s, vote tallies.

The Healthy Elections Project reports that, during the 2020 election, “only eight states explicitly permit[ed] or require[d] ballot drop boxes by statute or regulatory guidance,” but that drop boxes were nonetheless available to voters in at least 19 states. In other words, under the umbrella excuse of COVID!, at least 11 states used drop boxes without legislative authorization to do so. As the WILL report shows, there is seldom a clean chain of custody and even more seldom an accurate count of the number of ballots collected from these ad hoc receptacles. The opportunity to dump thousands of ballots into the boxes in each state cannot be discounted.

Election integrity is important. I suspect that it was severely lacking in the 2020 election. That lack needs to be fixed.

This Is A Problem

Just the News is reporting today that there were major chain of custody violations in the handling of mail-in ballots in DeKalb County, Georgia, in the 2020 election.

The article reports:

More than 70% of the 61,731 absentee ballots put in drop boxes in the November 2020 presidential election in DeKalb County, Georgia, were counted and certified by officials, despite violating chain of custody requirements.

The exact number of ballots was 43,907, according to the Georgia State News. The ballots were counted and certified by county and state officials, the news outlet says.

The chain of custody requirements are set forth in Georgia Emergency Rule 183-1-14-1.8-.14, put into effect by the Georgia State Election Board in July 2020.

The rule states absentee ballots placed in drop boxes “shall be immediately transported to the county registrar” by the two-person collection team. The team is required to sign a ballot-transfer form indicating the number of ballots picked up, the time the ballots were picked up and the location of the drop box.

The rule also states the county registrar or a designee “thereof shall sign the ballot transfer form upon receipt of the ballots from the collection team.”

It is interesting that the greatest concerns about election fraud in the 2020 election are centered in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These states represent 73 electoral college votes. There are also a number of anomalies in the election–bellwether counties that voted 18 to 1 for President Trump, states that have voted for the same candidate for eighty years suddenly voting differently, and other usually bellwether counties that supported President Trump.

Some states are already adding laws that will help protect election integrity. That’s a good thing. The place fraud is easiest is mail-in ballots. However, the electronic age also opens the door for electronic tampering of election results. Even though the machines that scan the votes are generally not hooked up to the internet, as soon as the election head puts the election results on a thumb drive to report them, those results have entered the cloud. We need to find a way to secure the electronic reporting of our elections. We also need to keep all electronic tallying in the United States. Having overseas servers tabulating American voting is not a good idea.