Article by Shipwreckedcrew in RedState
Election Integrity is Not Possible Under the Election Processes As They Exist Given Modern Technical Capabilities
When you have an election system involving a few million hand-marked ballots, reviewed and tabulated by hand, a 75-day window to validate the accuracy of the reported vote totals is easily manageable.
We no longer have that in the United States.
On November 3 we had 150+ million votes cast and counted in 50 different states, each with its own unique set of electoral processes and procedures. The voting and vote counting processes were all then followed by a hodge-podge of laws and rules for contesting or certifying the outcome of the voting and vote counting. The same “election contest” procedures for the race for County Health Sanitation Chief apply to the race for President.
But the one big difference in the two categories of election contests — the one for President, and the one for every other office — is that the election for President allows only 75 days to validate or contest the lawfulness and accuracy of the voting and vote-counting process.
Yet, in every circumstance I have reviewed, the ability to contest the outcome of other election contests is not constricted by time. The judge or other authorized tribunal presiding over the election contest takes whatever time is necessary to sort through the allegations and evidence to arrive at a factually supported conclusion.
It is only with regard to the Office of the President of the United States that such a deliberative procedure is simply not possible, so it is not allowed.
Georgia law provides that when a losing candidate prevails in an “election contest” lawsuit, establishing through evidence presented at trial before a judge, that a sufficiently large number of invalid votes were cast and counted so as to make the actual outcome of the election unknown, the remedy afforded to that losing candidate is a new election in order to obtain a valid outcome.
Such a lawsuit cannot be filed until the election being contested has been “certified” as “official” by the Georgia Secretary of State.
With regard to the Nov. 3 election, the Secretary of State certified the outcome on December 3, 2020. The Trump Campaign filed a Complaint contesting the election outcome in Fulton County Superior Court on December 4, 2020.
That case remains pending, with no judge yet having been assigned, and the Trump Campaign being denied the due process right to present its evidence of invalid votes having been cast and counted as is its right under Georgia law.
WHAT IF — and I know the media, the Democrats, and some in the Georgia GOP dismiss this possibility — the claims of the Trump Campaign turn out to be true?
The remedy provided for by Georgia statute is a new election — for the Georgia Electoral College voters.
But those Electors have already been named for the benefit of Joe Biden, and now their votes have now been cast.
In New York, a race for a Congressional seat is STILL be litigated, with a judge going through ballots one by one during a trial procedure in order to arrive at an accurate outcome That outcome will determine which individual and party represents that district in Congress. Resolution of that dispute is going to take however long the judge deems necessary for him to come to a decision. The office remains empty until that happens.
But a contested election for President? Can’t tolerate such an exercise.
Does our electoral process allow this? Well, given the realities of the 75-day calendar, there seems to be no functional alternative.
The Democrat party has internalized this functional reality. As a tactical weapon, they seek to impose through legislation or litigation subversive election procedures that tolerate and/or make it difficult to detect likely invalid votes. They do so knowing the limited time available to a Presidential campaign in the aftermath of an election and before January 20 of the following year almost guarantees that their efforts will be rewarded with higher vote totals impervious to serious investigation.
We saw it first with legalized “ballot harvesting” in California in 2018, resulting in several Congressional seats being flipped from Red to Blue by razor-close margins.
And now we have seen it again in 2020 with the massive wave of “mail-in” ballots where it is practically impossible to know or verify for each such ballot that the name is on the outside of the envelope is the person actually responsible for the votes cast on the ballot inside.
Consider just briefly what the Democrats did by way of litigation to the “Signature matching” requirement under Georgia’s expanded mail-in voting law.
Under the statute as written, the “Clerk” of the County had the obligation to “match” the signature of the voter on the outside of the ballot to the signature of that same person in an electronic file of the voter registration paperwork.
If the signatures did not match, the ballot was rejected.
The Democrats sued, charging that “handwriting experts” were the only individuals qualified to form an opinion as to whether two signatures “matched” or did not “match.” The Democrats wanted the “signature matching” provision to be tossed out altogether on “equal protection” grounds, claiming that because minority voters would be using mail-in voting in greater numbers in 2020, the “signature matching” requirement would disproportionately disenfranchise such voters.
The Georgia Secretary of State agreed to a settlement in the case weeks ahead of the election. In that settlement, he agreed that he would issue regulations to the County Clerks on how the “signature matching” procedure in the statute should be carried out. He agreed that rather than having just one person be responsible, a clerk who found mismatched signatures would need to consult with two other elections officials, and the ballot would be disallowed only if all 3 officials agreed that the signatures did not match. The three officials would then be required to write their names on the envelope, and the voter would be contacted and advised that the ballot was being disallowed.
Shockingly, this process resulted in a dramatically reduced number of mismatched signatures being identified. I’m shocked that otherwise anonymous election workers didn’t want to have their names written on envelopes as having been responsible for rejecting voters’ ballots. Much easier to simply say “close enough for government work” and move on to the next ballot.
Now play out similar efforts in dozens of lawsuits brought nationwide by the Democrat Party and Democrat Party interest groups — combined with the “panic” by elected officials and judges over the risk created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Democrats made a concerted and sustained effort to create a “Wild West” version of election processes and compliance monitoring in what they identified as the key battleground states.
It was a happy confluence of circumstances for the Democrats that this environment coincided with the re-election efforts of an incumbent Republican President reviled on the left more than anyone since Ronald Reagan — and probably more so than even him.
It was hardly necessary to encouragement voter or activist conduct that was outright fraud or bordering on outright fraud, in the name of beating Donald Trump.
To the degree that such activity took place, uncovering it in the time available and with the limited type of evidence that a court might recognize, was simply impossible.
The Democrats knew that, they exploited it, and they will continue to exploit it until changes are made.
Rules for elections that states have clung to for over 250 years have trapped us in a situation where election integrity can no longer be assured. Democrats are determined to undermine any rules that limit their ability to shove through illegitimate votes for their candidates — “disenfranchisement.” At the same time they know there exists no functional means of conducting a legitimate dispute of the outcome of Presidential elections under the rules for election contests in the states that exist for every type of race for elective office other than the Presidency.
The GOP must bring about change in this regard, or the Electoral “Wild West” will persist.
