Republicans Risk New Wave of Apathy in Future Races If Election Integrity Is Ignored

Count me among the millions of people that are highly skeptical of this miraculous shift for Biden on election night. But, I’m not alone. Of the 73 million that voted for Trump, over 70 percent do not believe Biden won a “free and fair” election. President Trump and his legal team have vowed to pursue any and all leads for potential election fraud in every swing state he lost, despite the mainstream media’s coronation (including some establishment Republicans) of a presumed President-elect Biden.

The Democrats seized upon the famous quote, “never let a crisis go to waste” with state election officials and even district judges unconstitutionally overturning state laws enacted by state legislatures allowing ballots to be mailed to residents without requesting them and creating a huge burden on election officials to manage huge quantities of mail-in ballots. All of this was done in the wake of Covid-19. Further, the president’s legal team claim several states violated equal protection laws by lessening voter requirements for mail-in ballots as opposed to those who showed up to vote in person. President Trump had been mostly a singular Republican voice in the months prior to the election sounding the alarm that these mail-in ballots were susceptible to fraud.

But the GOP cannot feign ignorance or surprise, as study after study has proven the vulnerabilities in the integrity of our elections. The federal government passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act to address election discrimination and integrity issues, especially in the South. That legislation still affects most Southern states even today, as states are required to get “pre-clearance” before implementing election law changes even now, 55 years later yet it is common knowledge that election integrity issues have plagued Democratic-controlled cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Las Vegas for generations without significant resolution for generations.

Just last year, a comprehensive report co-authored by Georgetown University, the University of Chicago and others at the annual Defcon 27 Voting Machine Hacking Village conference attended by leading cybersecurity experts, hackers, election officials, academics, lawyers and elected officials from both parties jointly concluded the scale and the shocking breadth of vulnerability in voting systems used across the country.

Their conclusions included:

Commercially available voting system hardware remains vulnerable to attack.
There is an urgent need for paper ballots and risk-limiting audits.
Voting systems that don’t use paper ballots cannot be audited.
New ballot marking devices (BMD) products are vulnerable.
Optical character recognition of ballots in high-speed scanners are not infallible.
Significant security issues remain in infrastructure and the supply-chain for hardware and software developed in foreign countries that are used in our election systems.
Direct recording electronic voting machines (touch screen) have no process in which an audit can be produced nor can they duplicate a record of the voter’s choices.
Voters rarely get a printed document that proves who they actually voted for.

These vulnerabilities are well-documented, yet neither Congress nor many of the states have adequately addressed the security, hacking and tampering risks. If this report wasn’t enough, the National Academy of Sciences produced another comprehensive report in 2018 titled Securing the Vote – Protecting American Democracy. Many of the recommendations made in that report were mirrored later in the Defcon 27 report, however the Academy went somewhat further to make additional recommendations that included:

Standardizing election technology standards for the states.
Indexing and cross-matching voter registrations across state lines to avoid citizens voting in multiple states.
Cross-match voter registration rolls with Census data and perform a regular purge of rolls for voters who have not cast ballots in years and compare to death records.
Provide paper audit trails in every election no matter the primary source of voting technology.
Require a post-election audit (at least of sample data) before certifying any election results.
Perform pilot election tests before any live implementation of new balloting systems.
Create federal subsidy incentives for states that adopt Best Practices in balloting systems.

The sordid truth is that despite the claimed technological advances in balloting systems, the most secure voting system in the world is the one used by third-world countries, where a voter shows up to vote in-person and dips their thumb in permanent purple ink after their paper ballot has been cast, which completely prevents voter fraud.

Every single GOP officeholder and candidate should dig in and demand that every legal vote be counted – and every illegal vote should be tossed. Demand a rigorous audit – or challenge via the courts if necessary, otherwise we are no better than a banana republic.

If the GOP ignores this mandate or is perceived to have wilted under the glare of the complicit mainstream media complex and the Democrats without due process, the massive Trump turnout that turned back the “predicted” Blue Wave will stay home in apathy in 2022 and beyond because they will rightly believe the system is rigged and their vote really doesn’t matter – because it doesn’t.