By David Robb ——Bio and Archives--February 18, 2024
American Politics, News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
How many ghosts live with you? Are you sure? I'm not talking about escapees from the local cemetery. I'm talking about all the people who are registered to vote from your address that you've never met.
Election Series
I wrote in my previous article how easy it is to create new voter registrations, even for fictional voters. One thing that can make false registrations difficult to detect is the use of an existing address for a legitimate voter. Giving that false registration a different mailing address means that the legitimate resident might never know that a ghost is using their address because all ballots and election materials will be sent to the mailing address. Use of a legitimate address helps hide the ghost from ghost hunters that look for improper addresses.
All that is interesting, but why do ghosts matter? Can they affect the outcome of an election? Actually, someone who knows which registrations are for ghosts can use them to determine the outcome of most elections that have large numbers of vote by mail ballots.
As of now, there are eight states that have all vote by mail elections, including California, Colorado, Nevada, and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia. Those eight plus one state can determine the outcome of most national elections, and also happen to be highly vulnerable to election manipulation. The vulnerability arises from the interactions between dirty voter rolls and how ballots are processed in vote by mail systems.
Imagine for a moment that you are a nefarious person who wants to control the outcome of an election. You know the thousands of ghosts that are present in a particular state or county's voter rolls, either because you put them there, or you were provided with a list of them. You might have an idea of how many ghosts must vote in order to ensure the results you want, just in case you don't want to use all your ghosts at once—after all, you don't want to raise unwanted attention by being greedy.
Since you know the mailing addresses—you provided them, after all—you can pick up lots of ballots at your leisure, or have your agents collect them. You can even have lots of mail go to one address to make things simpler.
With ballots in hand, you then proceed to mark them according to your wishes. If there a lot of them, you could even have a ballot marking party. Put the marked ballots back in their return envelopes, scribble something in the signature area, and send your mule off to drop batches of them in convenient drop boxes. With all the drop box security provisions, your fraudulent ballots will be safe and sound until they can be collected and counted.
You will want to use drop boxes instead of return mail. In most places, putting a fraudulent ballot in a drop box is a misdemeanor at worst, while putting one in the US mail is a Federal crime. Drop box violations are consequently unlikely to be prosecuted, while the Feds are likely to be quite annoyed.
I mentioned a signature. Signature validation is represented to the public as a reliable way to detect fraudulent ballots. Not to worry. Signature checking by humans is highly subjective and expensive. Most places that require signatures discourage close checking because of the time it takes. Mostly inspectors just look to see that there is something present, and if they can read it, that it resembles the voter's name on the envelope.
Many states have dropped signature checking entirely, Rhode Island being one of the latest. California regulations state that any mark that is not obviously false —no, Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny can't vote— must be considered valid. As a result, almost any scrawl will be accepted. There are a surprising number of ballots that are returned without a signature or with an obviously bad signature. In the 2022 election, nearly 5% of mail in ballots were challenged for lack of signature in one mid-size county.
Close ballot envelope inspection is not generally encouraged. First, inspection takes time, and with the number of ballots that must be processed, there is strong incentive to move things along quickly. If human inspectors are used, such inspection is costly, again encouraging only a cursory glance. California requires agreement between three inspectors to challenge a ballot —a process both slow and expensive. Finally, officials don't want to admit that there is significant fraud in our elections, and also don't want to question too many ballots to avoid charges of voter suppression. The result is that only 1-2% of ballots end up being challenged on inspection. With that low number, officials can claim that the elections are safe and secure, even though the actual amount of fraud might be much greater.
If just 10% of ballots are fraudulent, but only 1% get challenged, that means that at least 90% of fraudulent ballots are counted! The actual amount of fraud in recent elections is not known exactly, and attempts to measure it are often actively discouraged by election officials. Understandable from their perspective, but a gross betrayal of public trust.
Because of a recent conviction for election fraud in California, we were able to make an informed estimate that a minimum of 15% of the ballots counted were fraudulent, even though only about 1% of the ballots were rejected. Interestingly, 100% of the ballot envelopes recovered in that case had passed signature inspection.
Support Canada Free Press
The perpetrator in that case used several methods to introduce fraudulent ballots into the system, including the one described above. He also used a variation known as ballot redirection. In this method he used the online voter registration system to change the mailing addresses of numerous voters in his area. Their ballots were sent to his address instead of their own, and he was able then to mark and return them as he pleased. The information needed to impersonate a voter in the online system is minimal, and there are multiple sources, many of them legal, for such information. The honor system only works with honorable people.
I have written of fictional registrations, but there are many other species of ghosts present in the rolls. Deceased voters who have not been removed are obvious, but there are large numbers of people who have moved away but their registrations have not been removed. Name changes are often not recorded properly, leaving a ghost registration in the rolls. There are also many registrations for people who have never voted since they registered, often for years. In a county of fewer than a half million registered voters, inspection of voter rolls showed over 16% of the registrations were for voters that hadn't voted for over five years. These are called low propensity voters and are prime candidates for exploitation.
Ghost wranglers know where those ballots will be sent, and know that such voters are unlikely to complain if someone votes in their name because they aren't likely to find out. In a recent election in California, about 10% of these low propensity voters were reported to have voted after years of not voting. Were they the real voters, or were they ghosted?
The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) mentioned before only allows a very limited number of ways that a registration can be removed from the rolls. Unlike real people, ghosts don't die, they don't move, they don't request to be removed, and as model citizens they don't commit crimes. Unlike certain of our political leaders, they don't even become senile. All this means that once a ghost is introduced in the rolls, there is less than a ghost of a chance they will be removed. If they vote early and often, they will live in the rolls forever.
The NVRA was enacted in 1993. Ghosts have been accumulating in the voter rolls ever since. We now have over 25 years of accumulated ghosts in the voter rolls in every state. Like civil service employees who can't be fired, ghosts can't be removed. Current estimates are that at least 30% of our voter rolls in every state are ghosts, and likely even more.
With the interplay between vote by mail and dirty voter rolls, there is no way to ensure that an election is fair and honest under such conditions. Many of our elections are decided by a few percentage point differences. A recent study by the Heartland Institute shows how even a small percentage of fraudulent votes can make a deciding difference in an election, with the will of the fraudsters thwarting the will of the people.
While it might sound like the situation is hopeless, there are many things that can be done. Sure, many involve some work, but even individuals and small groups can make a huge difference. Bill Murray doesn't have a monopoly on ghost busting.
An important first step is to obtain a copy of the voter rolls, including voting history for at least the last five general elections, especially for your county. The voter rolls are generally considered public records, and as such, are available to the public. There will often be a charge for them, as well as some restrictions on their use, such as no commercial use. Some jurisdictions try to discourage people from getting copies of the rolls and will charge large fees, or will only provide them to political candidates or to "authorized" parties such as various NGOs.
Generally such restrictions can be challenged through county officials or even at a state level. California will provide an electronic copy of the rolls for the entire state for about $100 to political candidates, academic researchers, and election fraud investigators. Many other states have similar provisions and costs. Others don't want their rolls examined too closely. Wonder why?
With rolls in hand, the ghost hunt begins. Most of the work can be done on a home computer with a spreadsheet program. Things to look for include:
There is much more that can be done, but you get the general idea.
Develop a good relationship with your local sheriff. They can put the information you find to good use, and many will appreciate citizen assistance that produces hard evidence they can use and that doesn't cost them scarce resources. The recent California case I mentioned used information of the sort I described provided by a couple of ordinary citizens. The information they provided was critical to the case and was instrumental in obtaining a conviction.
Canvassing is an important and powerful activity that can be used in conjunction with information from the voter rolls to provide hard evidence of fraud. We will get more into canvassing in the future, along with describing how ballot drop boxes promote fraud, and other fun topics.
Time to shine some light into dark places.
View Comments
David Robb is a practicing scientist and CTO of a small firm developing new security technologies for detection of drugs and other contraband. Dave has published extensively in TheBlueStateConservative, and occasionally in American Thinker.