Q: How could there be fraud when all the lawsuits were dismissed?
A: No election fraud lawsuits have been heard. Many cases were filed to challenge un-Constitutional procedure changes which would enable or facilitate fraud, or to preserve or gain access to evidence that would show fraud, and many of those were filed before the 2020 election. Most (less than 30 of > 90) of those cases were not heard or decided on merits, but were dismissed on administrative grounds, e.g., because of “lack of standing,” or because the complaint was “moot,” (the injury had not yet occurred) or on the doctrine of laches (the complainant waited too long). If the candidates don’t have standing, and the American voters don’t have standing, who has standing in a court of law with regards to our elections?
Q: I think there was probably some fraud, but was it really enough to have made a difference?
A: We don’t know; that’s why it’s so significant that most law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, have refused to investigate, and so significant that election records have been systematically destroyed (like voting system log files) and despoiled (like ballots on the wrong paper, in boxes with no seals). Specifically, what amount of fraud would be acceptable to you? This isn’t about “getting Trump back in office,” it’s about restoring free and fair elections. If there’s fraud, then our elections are neither free nor fair. Transparency throughout the process (including audits) is the only way we’ll know the extent of the damage.
Q: We don’t have Dominion Voting Systems in our county/state, so why should I worry about election integrity?
A: The vulnerabilities and problems in our election systems aren’t limited to one voting system vendor. In fact, they aren’t limited to our voting equipment. We have centralized voter registration systems that must be secure and accurate, but they’re neither. And nobody enforces that statutory Federal requirement. We have ballots cast through USPS and drop-boxes with no real chain-of- custody, including (sometimes) video that nobody reviews. We have signature verification performed by amateurs with no tools, or by machines with no standards, certification, or oversight. We have “voter ID” that wouldn’t allow you to buy beer. Then we have the voting machines, all made either overseas or from overseas-made components, with no supply-chain security, with sham testing to weak, obsolete standards developed by the very industry they’re supposed to regulate, from companies which have shared engineering and technical personnel and architectures, and have been caught lying to customers.
Need more info? Check out a few of the vulnerability reports by renowned cybersecurity experts: J. Halderman (GA); Maricopa (AZ); Mesa (CO); Antrim (MI); and the Texas Auditor Reports.
Q: Doesn’t the “human error” in hand counting have a higher error rate than machine counting?
A: No. Machine error rates range from 0 (unverifiable) to 100%; election officials simply are not in control of the machines, and they are corruptible. When anyone wants to know whether a machine count was accurate, they check it by hand-counting the paper. If you have to hand-count to know what’s true, you might as well just hand-count. Furthermore, hand counting error rates range from 0.48 to 0.96% for the “read-and-mark” method, and from 1.47 to 2.13% for the “sort-and-stack” method, under less-than-ideal conditions. We think those low error rates can be zeroed out by using two or three independent counters, with batch-level reconciliation, under video.
Q: My clerk/Secretary of State/party leader said our machines aren’t connected to the internet.
A: Not one of those individuals has the slightest idea what is or is not inside a voting machine, nor what any component or software in a voting machine is doing, any more than they know what’s happening on their own smartphone. Furthermore, the fact that they say “to the internet,” rather than “to any external network or device” tells you right away that they’re technologically illiterate, with respect to the threats to computer-based voting systems. Even if the Election Assistance Commission’s accredited Voting System Testing Labs had modern, comprehensive, effective standards (which they do not) and competent, experienced cyber professionals (which they do not), and were testing the way they should be (to the threat posed by our most capable foreign adversaries, which they are not), they still only test a small fraction of a percent of voting systems. NOBODY tests the overwhelming majority of voting systems in use in the U.S.
Q: Would a “dumb” tabulator be safer?
A: Not unless it’s an abacus. Need more info? Find out what hardware and software are being used in your county’s elections and check the online CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exploits) and then search up your county’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities at https://cve.mitre.org. At last count, there were 170,389 known vulnerabilities published since 2005 (2005 is the current standard of US voting systems). Imagine how many are still unknown? Our current election systems take only a few minutes to hack into, according to the gentlemen who performed security testing for the Voting System Testing Labs for 9 years.
Q: Won’t it cost a lot more to hand count ballots than to use tabulator machines?
A: No. Essentially, you’re asking, “will it cost more to count an election in a manner that people can trust?” If it did cost more, it would be worth it. But it won’t. Paper ballots counted by hand under video by a precinct’s citizens don’t need expensive tech support. Or logic and accuracy testing. Or costly ongoing maintenance agreements.
Q: Don’t we need to know the outcomes on election night? I heard hand counting will take weeks to complete, plus a lot of manpower.
A: If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer accurate election results to “fast” election results? Imagine rushing to the hospital with chest pain, having the doctor tell you within 30 seconds “you’re going to die,” then telling you 6 hours later that you probably won’t die for decades. Regardless, there’s no precinct in the U.S. larger than 4,000 voters, and most of them would be counting simultaneously, just like most U.S. elementary school classrooms are in session simultaneously. Nobody says, “how are we going to teach 49 million students all at once in the same place?” because teaching them all at once in the same place would be absurd. Reversing the centralization and reverting to precinct-counting will allow same-night election results, in most cases. The fact is: it is the job of local election officials to report the outcomes to the citizens of their jurisdictions, not to the media, and the media’s demands for updates and reports hasn’t served anyone particularly well.
Q: If everything about our election systems is as bad as you say, why should I bother voting at all?
A: Because fraud becomes more difficult when we vote in person, on election day, on a paper ballot, with ID. Besides, you’re American and we don’t give up that easily.
Q: If we fix it all, won’t it just get fouled up again?
A: It might. History and human nature seem cyclical, and we let this happen even though the Founders warned us about factions, the dangers of party, the risks that partisans would corrupt elections, the excesses of government, and the tendency of government agencies to accrue and abuse tyrannical power. But it’s a lot less likely if we stay involved in our government.
Thank you to our good friends at CauseOfAmerica.org for leading the fight in restoring integrity to our elections!