TRUST BUT DON'T VERIFY
How California's Online Voter Registration System Invites Mail-In Ballot Fraud
Progressive critics often cite the Brennan Center to contend that there is an insubstantial amount of fraud in US Elections, and that Mail-In Ballots have adequate fraud protections. Based upon these assurances, they contend that Republicans have no basis for demanding that States implement “anti-fraud” measures: requiring Birth Certificates, Social Security, Passport, Driver’s License, or other State-Issued Photo ID to authenticate US Citizenship, address, age, and identity.
Despite the rich history of election fraud in the United States, and the steps that nations like Mexico take to deter election fraud (similar to Republican proposals), the Brennan Center and other Progressives assure us that we have nothing to worry about because “election fraud is exceedingly rare.”
The best refutation of the Brennan Center’s assurances is to describe an electoral fraud scheme for the State of California that the Brennan Center ignored in its analysis. States like South Dakota adopt strong anti-fraud measures for their Mail-In Ballots, but California has adopted the “Trust But Don’t Verify” approach to voter fraud.
In California, you can register to vote without facing a live government official, and you don’t have to provide a number from, or photograph of, a government-issued identification card or other documents that authenticate your age, Citizenship, or residency.
If you visit this website to register online to vote in California, then you can confirm how easy it would be to engage in Voter Fraud. The first thing you’ll notice is that there are no anti-robot protections. No Captcha safeguards exist to stop an automated registration scheme being executed on the website.
When you proceed through the several steps to register as a new voter, the last step is this:
Affirmation
I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of California that:
· I am a U.S. citizen and a resident of California and at least 18 years old.
· I am not currently serving a state or federal prison term for the conviction of a felony.
· I am not currently found mentally incompetent to vote by a court.
· I understand that it is a crime to intentionally provide incorrect information on this form.
· The information on this form is true and correct.
The threat of a criminal conviction for mis-representing this affirmation represents the extent of California’s vigilance to deter identity fraud throughout the entire process.
Prior to that final step, the website solicits the applicant to provide their California Driver’s License or Identification card number, and the last four digits of their Social Security Number. Despite this apparent anti-fraud barrier, the applicant has the option to check boxes that read:
“I do not have a Social Security number”
“I do not have a California Driver License or California Identification card”
The State of California invites an applicant to register to vote, and it doesn’t require the applicant to provide any information that allows the authorities to independently authenticate the voter’s affirmation of US Citizenship or even whether they are eighteen years of age.
To accommodate homeless persons or others who have not settled on a home address, the applicant doesn’t even have to provide a current home address. All they have to do is provide an address to where their ballot could be mailed (Church, homeless center, friend’s home, etc.) and be picked up. They could even claim their last permanent address as the location for purposes of voter registration to qualify in elections different than the district of their mailing address.
About ten days after completing the online registration, the County Voter Registrar sends a letter to the mailing address entitled CALIFORNIA VOTER REGISTRATION RECEIPT. At the top there is a unique 10-character alpha-numeric “Affidavit Number” and a bar code. Attached is the CALIFORNIA VOTER REGISTRATION APPLICATION that has pre-printed the information the applicant previously entered online.
The only thing missing is the signature for the County Registrar to have on file. Because no Social Security or California ID numbers were provided for this voter, this signature will serve as their sole method for authentication of this voter’s identity. For the final step, the voter folds up the form and mails it back to the County Registrar. Prior to the election, the County Registrar will deliver the Mail-In Ballot to the Voter.
The Brennan Center doesn’t see a problem. They argue that “anyone fraudulently casting a ballot is risking prison and fines.” However, that assertion would not be true if the applicant is a phantom using a fake name.
How easily could a scheme to register fake voters occur in California?
A Cabal for Voter Registration Fraud could operate abroad or on US soil using a virtual private network (VPN) so that authorities cannot even track their IP Address with clues to their physical location. From this perch, the Cabal could use software to automatically register thousands of fake identities because California does not employ anti-robot measures on its website. Even if California erected an anti-robot barrier, a Cabal could hire low-cost, overseas, entry-operators to handle this step.
Anticipating this tactic, the Brennan Center asserts that the perpetrators “would need to redirect the mail ballots, requesting that they be sent to locations other than the voters’ homes. These alternate addresses would all have to be unique to avoid raising red flags about thousands of mail ballots going to the same address.”
Is this the fail-safe wall of protection saving California from the Cabal? Not quite.
This Cabal could set up a website that solicits like-minded political activists to volunteer their home addresses as locations to which the ballots for “homeless people” in their neighborhood could use. The Cabal could direct the Voter Registrars to send no more than two ballots to these Activists’ Addresses to avoid arousing suspicions of “California’s menacing, anti-voter-fraud patrols” {irony quotes inserted}.
The Cabal’s website assures the Activist Address Volunteers that the “Homeless Person” will come by to pick up the ballots at the Activists’ Addresses, or that a volunteer will pick up the ballot for later delivery to that homeless person.
There are no statutes preventing someone from offering their home as a mailing address for a homeless person’s ballot. And if election officials cannot ask for proof of identification when people show up to vote, then you could not hold these Address Activists accountable for handing over a ballot to a stranger without asking for his photo ID. The Cabal could even deploy juveniles to visit these Activists’ addresses to pick up the ballots to avoid any possibility of serious jail time done in the unlikely event that someone had the evidence to prove that the juvenile was engaged in election fraud. The juveniles could even exchange gift cards for the ballots as a “thank you” to the Address Activists to encourage greater participation in this wonderful voter outreach program!
Even if California law enforcement personnel posed as Address Activists to receive fake ballots, they could not prove that a ballot mailed to their address is not earmarked for an Eligible Voter.
There is no reason that this kind of scheme would have to be centrally managed on the industrial scale described above. Any activist voter who is willing to participate in riots, smash store windows, steal merchandise, and burn police cars should have no qualms about registering one or two additional fake voters at his home address and completing the online forms himself and finding a friend not living at the address to write signatures of fake names once someone else explains how easy it is to do.
Another scheme could obtain addresses in zip codes with a high percentage of voters registered to a specific political party. The Cabal could register fake names and spread out the fake names across these addresses in targeted zip codes. Rumors can be spread that these ballots should be saved so that they can be turned over to juvenile ballot harvesters, not subject to adult sentencing. The residents handing over these Mail-In Ballots would be “rewarded.” These juveniles would hand over a unique code to the residents at their address. The residents could visit another location and present their code numbers to another juvenile who confirms the codes and hands out a “reward” for each ballot they turned over.
Even if only ten or twenty percent of these ballots were handed over, this could still net thousands of votes. Like practices employed by drug dealers, setting a buffer between the person picking up the ballots and the person handing out the rewards makes it nearly impossible to prove fraud, unless the head conspirators are identified by someone within the Cabal.
Once the ballots are handed over to the Cabal, they could hire juveniles or unemployed adults to sign the outer envelopes for the Mail-In Ballots and scan that signature, the printed name and address of the fake voter into a database. Then the Cabal could store this information to re-use these fake voters and their signatures for future elections. Then juveniles would mark the appropriate candidates on the ballot, and seal them inside the envelopes to be mailed or dropped off in a Ballot Drop Off Box.
The signature check is the final defense against acceptance of fake Mail-In Ballots, but it only works when someone tries to impersonate a real voter already in the registrar’s database. It fails when the original signature comes from a fake voter. Even when signature verification is utilized by the Registrars, it is fraught with so many errors that many States don’t bother rejecting ballots with signatures that fail to match.
Today we observe gangs running drug production and distribution operations using juveniles as work horses for surveillance and street sales. Is it so hard to imagine a criminal Get Out the Vote (GOTV) operation using the same tactics and labor force that works so well in the drug trade?
Who would have the motivation to finance these Cabals? Chinese Government agents targeting pro-Taiwanese legislators; Russian agents targeting anti-Putin, pro-Ukrainian legislators; Cannabis and gambling business interests targeting supporters and opponents of legalization; dark money, independent expenditure committees that act as a buffer between innocent political donors with no idea that their moneys are being directed toward nefarious GOTV operations.
The voter fraud schemes outlined above could only be uncovered if the perpetrators of the schemes confessed their guilt. Anyone auditing the voter registration system or voted ballots could not prove any fraud occurred with the evidence provided by the voters when they register or cast a ballot. Remember that the next time the Progressives solemnly state that there have been hardly any cases of proven voter fraud.
The abysmal security protocols of California’s Voter Registration system should be Exhibit A supporting the arguments to eviscerate the misleading propaganda issued by the Brennan Center and other Progressive Activists promoting HR 1 and other flawed Election Reform measures. Anti-fraud measures protecting the integrity of our elections should be a non-partisan foundation for our democracy. Unfortunately, the intensely partisan and misleading attack campaign launched by President Biden and supporters of HR 1 have obscured the threats posed by states like California.