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Palm Beach, Florida - Last weekend the Republican National Lawyers Association conducted a continuing legal education program on election integrity in Palm Beach County, Florida. This event drew a record number of 300 lawyers from across the country, with the largest contingent from the District of Columbia and Northern Virginia.
Election integrity is not only about: (1) poll-watching; and (2) poll-working; but also about: (3) voter rolls, and their maintenance and registration requirements; (4) voting machines and the counting of votes; (5) signature verification of Vote-By-Mail ballots; (6) lobbying to limit VBM back to the requirements for absentee ballots; (7) lobbying to defeat legislation that would criminalize poll-watching; and so on.
Vote-By-Mail
The Jimmy Carter-James Baker commission convened to review election procedures, after the debacle of hanging chads in 2000, reported in 2005 that VBM is the most likely method for electoral irregularities. It is rife with fraud.
The United States is the only democratic republic that allows large-scale Vote-By-Mail. France abolished it in 1975 after a large scandal in Corsica. Great Britain has never permitted it on a large scale, especially after some postal trade unions were found to be tampering with the ballots. India has the world’s largest voting population, and they do not allow it. Even Venezuela requires voting in person. Nevertheless, some states use only VBM, and the Harris-Walz campaign has called for national VBM.
Vote-By-Mail does not allow for the requirement of voter ID or for tracking the chain-of-custody of a ballot. It creates opportunities for intimidation and bribery of voters, and no objective observer ever sees the actual citizen voting. Political operators can collect VBM ballots from the mail, and vote them on behalf of registered voters who may have died, moved away, never existed or are otherwise indisposed.
Florida
Speakers at the program included the Florida Secretary of State and other representatives of its state government. They rightly pointed out that one of the state’s greatest achievements for election integrity is to require that all votes be counted on election day.
Florida has a new Office of Election Crimes to conduct investigations of electoral irregularities. They also work with state-wide prosecutors in the office of the Attorney General in order to pursue cases where the local State’s Attorneys do not pursue such cases with alacrity. They suggested that improvements can be made by recruiting more poll-watchers, including to watch not only polling places, but also canvassing boards and signature-verification sessions. They also encouraged more Republicans to run for Supervisors of Elections in Florida’s 67 counties.
The Florida Secretary of State said that his office is focused on preventing non-United States citizens from registering to vote, and removing them from the voter rolls. They are obtaining citizenship information from the United States Department of Homeland Security, and passing it on to the Supervisors of Elections, who are the officials authorized to remove voters from the rolls.
Nevertheless, some non-United States citizens are filing voter registration forms. Some of these forms are delivered to them by state administrative agencies, like the Florida Department of Children and Families when they provide public assistance to newly-arrived aliens. At the polling places, voters are required to sign a certification of their identity. This certification does not expressly require confirmation of United States citizenship in order to cast a ballot. The Secretaries of State of Arizona, Michigan, Ohio and Florida are scheduled to testify on this issue before Congress next month.
Despite the assurances from the Florida Secretary of State and his team, however, election integrity issues continue in the state:
1. In Collier County, as part of the Republican primary elections on Tuesday, August 20 for Supervisor of Elections, reasonable allegations have been made that non-United States citizens continue registered to vote.
2. In Pinellas County, also as part of the Republican primary contest, reasonable allegations have been made not only about non-citizens voting, but also about the mis-counting of so-called blank ballots, where the voter does not make a choice in every race.
3. In Palm Beach County, another Republican candidate for Supervisor of Elections has filed a federal lawsuit against Florida’s Secretary of State and Attorney General, as well as other state and federal officials, alleging that they had not done enough to prevent non-citizens from voting. This case is being heard by United States District Judge Aileen Cannon, who also heard the Trump documents case.
4. Finally, fake voter guides have been distributed in more than half a dozen counties. The most extreme example has occurred in St. John’s County, around St. Augustine, during this early voting season. The county Republican Executive Committee has endorsed Gerry James, a private citizen and investment advisor, for State Senate District 7. However, an unknown group, falsely calling itself the county REC, has distributed a fake voter guide endorsing Representative Tom Leak, another candidate for that office and the beneficiary of an endorsement from Governor DeSantis. At least one voter realized the deception too late and tried to go back to her polling place in order to change her vote. Of course, it was too late and her vote could not be changed. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating.
As Ronald Reagan advised: “Trust but verify.”
Nationwide
Republican poll-watchers and poll-workers should be on the lookout for such nefarious practices as: (1) when they are sent home on election day before all the counting is completed, especially after a fake emergency, like a water leak, is announced; (2) when carboard is put over the windows of rooms where votes are being counted; (3) when trucks deliver overnight boxes of unfolded, neatly-stacked mail-in ballots, all marked for only one candidate; (4) when counting is stopped at the same time in several swing states, so that the counters can see how many votes they need to make up; (5) when more votes are counted than the number of voters registered on the rolls; and (6) when private operators funded by tech moguls take over the administration of elections during early voting and on election day; and so on.
Also, many conservatives would like to see the voting period brought back to only one election day, with no early voting. However, that may be impractical in the United States, where elections are typically held in the middle of the week, not on a weekend or holiday as in many other countries. Accordingly, it may make sense to have a short period of early voting, like a week. This has been done in Texas since the 1980’s, but early voting for periods of up to 45 days is clearly excessive.
In sum, you should vote in person during early voting. Don’t wait until election day, because something may happen to prevent you from voting, and don’t trust the United States Postal Service. They are even less trustworthy than the United States Secret Service. It is foolish to trust your ballot to the post office, which is operated by government labor unions hostile to the conservative cause, and they are often incompetent to boot.
Convenience is an on-ramp for the road to serfdom. Preserving liberty sometimes requires that we be inconvenienced.
Fight, Fight, Fight!
At the end of the program, President Trump called in to express his gratitude for all the lawyers who are committed to election integrity. He talked about the importance of showing up at election operations and dealing with local election officials, in order to “work the ref.” This was the tactic used successfully by basketball coach Bobby Knight at Indiana University to win three national championships.
