By John F. Di Leo -
Despite having stuck themselves with a presidential nominee with boatloads of ethical, policy, and likely mental health problems, Democrats don’t seem scared of this November. Some believe that’s because the Democrats will just “steal it”… as if the Democrat party can suddenly just decide to turn on the vote fraud machine, and steal the five million they’ll need to win the presidency.
It doesn’t actually work that way.
Those who follow the business pages might have a better analogy: it takes time, but if you build a funnel, a system, a regular flow of steady clients, then that flow can keep producing revenue for your restaurant chain, your consulting business, or your retail business, without added management. Such a clockwork "revenue generator" is the goal of every business.
That’s how vote fraud is today, in America. There's a ballot generator that operates under the surface, not in one city or state, but to varying extents and by various methods, all across the country.
Voting Rules
The press usually presents vote fraud by leading us to envision an old fashioned “stuffed ballot box,” with the idea that, somehow, election workers (called pollworkers, election judges, or similar terms depending on the region) can take advantage of the lulls to fill in ballots and cast tons of additional votes when nobody’s watching. While this does still exist, it’s not as simple as that, nor is it the only way that vote fraud occurs.
There are in fact dozens of specific different routes through which votes can be stolen. Some have nicknames based on where they are most popular, but all are so long established, they have become an automated flow of illegal votes, even without active management by the Democratic Party.
Let’s begin by remembering the traditional rules of voting: Every citizen, 18 and over, gets to cast one ballot in an election cycle, with the traditional exceptions of felons and people who haven’t registered yet at their current address. In recent years, many states have relaxed or eliminated both of these limits, allowing felons and unregistered citizens to show up at the polls and cast a vote.
Obviously, non-citizens are not allowed to vote; the vote is something for green card holders to look forward to, but it’s a perk they don’t yet have. Voting is an immense responsibility; it can only be for citizens.
People with two residences – like students away at school, or people with second homes – can pose a complication; in many cases, they can choose which of the two to vote from. The government doesn’t usually worry a great deal enforcing which one is most appropriate for you; as long as you pick one or the other, you can cast that one vote.
So there you have it. You must be over 18; you must be a citizen, you must be alive; you must exist… and you get one vote. Not terribly complicated, is it?
A Plethora of Systems
There are more ways to commit vote fraud than we can list in one article, but let’s begin with the best known:
Buying votes: A vote must be uncoerced – the free choice of a free citizen – but there are reports every election of politicians passing out box lunches, or bottles of alcohol, or packs of cigarettes, or even cash, for casting their votes for the local machine’s candidate. Blatantly illegal, but the practice dates back at least a century, and many one-party cities with political machines have reports of such practices every election cycle.
Ballot Harvesting: This is as blatant a crime as any imaginable: a party hack goes door to door, collecting the absentee ballots of residents to turn in himself, so that he has the opportunity to see how they voted (or even to fill them out himself), and to spike the ones that involve votes for the opposition. Always illegal until very recently, some states (including California, our most populous state!) have had the audacity to legalize the practice, essentially institutionalizing vote fraud.
The New Orleans Method: You can only legally vote once, from your house, apartment or dorm… but imagine a political party that fills buses with patronage workers and their families, and has the buses drive around all day, from polling place to polling place, passing out names and addresses as they file off the bus at each stop: “Here, you’re John Smith of 101 Oak Street.” “Here, you’re Bob Jones of 501 Elm.” “Here, you’re Jane Doe of 2000 Center Street.” Each bus holds 40-plus people; one bus can hit at least 20 polling places a day; that’s 800 votes per bus. And cities like New Orleans and Chicago have a lot of buses… and a lot of patronage workers.
The Chicago Method: Every city has cemeteries; Chicago is famous for allegedly having party hacks copy down names from tombstones. This is likely apocryphal, but it is true that “the dead do vote” in Chicago and other cities all over the country. The reason is simple; once someone is on the voter rolls, it’s very difficult to get him removed. Once people die, those lines on the voter rolls are available for vote fraud; depending on the area, the name can be used for absentee ballots, early voting, or election day lulls, without fear of the real owner of the registration showing up and raising a fuss for having shown up on the list as having already voted that day. It’s not unusual for a precinct to have dozens and dozens of names who have died or moved away in recent years; these names are there fore the taking when election day rolls around.
The St. Louis Method: Every city has a lot of federal judges. There will always be a few polling places that don’t open on time, as machinery gets more complicated and pollworkers get harder and harder to recruit. Prompt a few people to call in complaints about being unable to vote when the polls opened, and an amenable judge will order that all the polling places in that area must stay open a few more hours that evening. This enables the city to find out how the count is going so they know how many to steal, and they can ramp up the other methods.
The College Town: If you live 8 or 9 months of the year at college, you feel you have a moral right to vote from there; you can also choose to vote from home, where your roots are, and where you still have your permanent residence, for now at least. But who’s going to catch you if you vote from both? Especially if they’re in different states? There is no way to know how many students vote twice per cycle, but we know it occurs in epidemic proportions, more so than ever, now that students can add a month of early voting to the traditional options of absentee and election day in-person voting. There are approximately twenty million college students in the United States today. If even just five percent cheat this way, that’s a million additional votes in the system, diluting the effect of honest votes.
The Nursing Home: This is a particularly painful one to recount. Everyone knows that many of the occupants of nursing homes, hospices, and other longterm care facilities tend to be elderly, often mentally handicapped by senility or medication… but they usually have a remarkably high turnout on election day, explained away by the fact that their homes often serve as polling places. But if you’ve ever personally witnessed the parade of near comatose patients, pushed through the voting stations in assembly line fashion, their hands held in “assisted voting” style by the pollworkers, then you’d know how ripe this situation is for vote fraud. Ask yourself what percentage of these poor patients are really in control of their faculties on election day, and you can figure out for yourself how many votes the party in power is harvesting from such places.
Military and Expats Abroad: This is another painful one, since it’s our servicemen stationed abroad –and their families – who sacrifice so much for our American system. If anyone deserves to see their votes counted, it’s them. But we have 170,000 servicemen stationed abroad at any one time, and even those stationed in America are often far from the home where they’re registered to vote. Add their spouses and sometimes 18-plus children living with them, and you have half a million citizens dependent on the absentee ballot to participate in elections. Add non-military expats, people stationed abroad for work, and that more than doubles the number. This should be safe, shouldn’t it? Unfortunately, No. Many states schedule their primaries too late, or finalize their November ballots too late, to enable the necessary back-and-forth of absentee ballot request, ballot sending, arrival through the military post. Actual voting, and return through the military post, to work out in time. It’s estimated that over a quarter of these votes have no chance of arriving in time to be counted… not just that they don’t, but that they can’t. And since the MOVE Act was passed specifically to force states to allow the necessary time, the fact that the problem remains is inexcusable.
The Foreign Vote: Citizens can vote; non-citizens cannot. But most states don’t track citizenship on the driver’s license, and many states now offer non-driving state IDs too, which are allowed for use in voter registration. Many states even allow onsite registration with no chance to check citizenship. As a result, millions of non-citizens – both legal visa holders (such as green card holders) and others (such as illegal aliens) – are able to vote every year, and some don’t even know they’re breaking the law. Radical state governments like California’s have intentionally blurred the rules by allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections. Once you have voted for mayor and alderman, as a foreigner who likely doesn’t even speak English, how can you be expected to know which elections you’re allowed to vote in and from which you’re forbidden? This method alone is estimated to create well over two million, and more likely over five million, illegal votes nationwide each election.
The Pollworker’s Lull: Much as we hate to mention the obvious, it can’t be left out. There are crooked pollworkers, particularly in the big cities but likely elsewhere as well, who take advantage of the down time to cast ballots on behalf of names on the list who haven’t shown up yet, and most likely won’t. If the pollworker has done his homework, he looks at the list, and sees “the Joneses’ daughter moved away, she won’t be voting today… the Smiths’ parents both died, they won’t be showing up… the Whites’ house was knocked down to build a gas station, that’s two more votes available for the taking…” the more names that should have been purged but haven’t been, the more opportunities the list creates for the corrupt party hack.
The ACORN Method: For awhile, it was popular for political parties to send paid workers around neighborhoods with registration forms, talking people into registering to vote, whether they really intended to or not. These paid workers, if paid by the registration, might get creative. ACORN was one of many such groups made famous in the 21st century for being a hotbed of corruption in this regard, with many members turning in list after list of fictional names, fictional addresses, or both. Once the fake name is on the roster, it’s hard to remove; the vote is there to be cast, whether in advance by a corrupt party absentee ballot filing, or on election day by a crooked pollworker. Once the name is on that roster, plenty of options arise.
The Touchscreen Method: Another 21st century innovation is the election touchscreen, the ability to vote by touching a picture of a candidate or his name on a screen. It sounds foolproof… until you remember that computer hacking is one of the most popular crimes on earth at the moment. There have been reports all over the country of people seeing their selections jump to their choice’s opponent before their very eyes, or of the screen displaying their proper selection, but registering the opponent on the printout. This one famously happened to an actual candidate in Illinois in 2014: a Republican who voted for himself for the state legislature, and watched aghast as the system recorded the vote for his opponent. They told him it was just a problem with that particular machine, and took it out of service for the day. Sure it was.
Fraud Like Clockwork
We don’t know how much vote fraud there is in American elections. All we know for certain is that all of the above methods – and many more – are used all the time. There are prosecutions every cycle, just nowhere near enough. And the mainstream media, which does report the occasional prosecution that makes it to trial, happily cites such reports as evidence for how rare they claim it to be. “There was only one such case last year,” they’ll report, because only one made it to the courts.
The challenge is, while most forms of vote fraud and election tampering are very easy to proactively prevent, they are very difficult to catch after the fact. The secret ballot is – rightly – a foundational element of our system. But it comes at a cost: it means that we must take preventative measures, not rely on reports after the fact. We cannot look through a stack of secret ballots and cull the illegal ones from the pool; we must keep them from ever polluting the ballot box in the first place.
- We can demand a Real ID to vote – mandating proof of citizenship and residence before the ballot is provided.
- We can demand the enforcement of the MOVE Act, and force the late primary states to move up their primaries so that servicemen and other expats aren’t denied their ability to vote.
- We can demand secure ballot methods – such as an optical scan paper ballot, the hardest to fake, the easiest for the voter to check – to reduce the odds of counting machine error or corrupted programming.
- We can mandate that everyone vote on election day unless they have good reason for using an absentee ballot, and eliminate or curtail these month-long early voting periods that make it easier for people to vote from multiple residences.
- And we can crack down on the crooked party hacks, by federal stings that can cut through the local patronage structure.
But none of this is easily done, though still necessary. The Democratic party shuts down any attempt to prevent vote fraud; there can be only one reason why.
Most of this fraud has become clockwork – once set it motion, it takes care of itself.
The corrupt Democrat precinct captain doesn’t have to ask the college student to vote from both home and dorm; he does it on his own, because he always has. The corrupt party leaders don’t need to remind their wealthier businessmen and retirees to vote from both their winter homes and their summer homes, or from both their main houses and their weekend cabins; they do it anyway, because they always have. In many cases, they’ve even justified it to themselves, thinking “I pay property taxes at both places, I have a right to vote from each!” They just don’t carry the thought forward to the necessary conclusion that even so, they could never logically create a right to vote twice for the same office.
Once the names are on the voting rolls, many of them will get voted, without any need for a machine to tell their hordes to “ramp it up.” The nursing home patients will be walked through their assembly lines; the non-citizens and felons will show up to vote. The party will encourage them, to maximize the numbers, but even if they don’t, many will do it anyway.
We know there is fraud, but we don’t know how much. Five percent? Probably, at least. Ten percent? More likely, but currently unprovable. In some areas, like Cleveland, where whole wards were impossibly recorded as voting 100% for Obama in 2012 (a statistical impossibility), the fraud hast to be closer to twenty percent… but we don’t have the evidence to prove it.
We know it’s overwhelmingly Democrat (once in a blue moon, some Republican precinct captain is found with a ballot box in his trunk, but they’re the exception that proves the rule). This it has been for generations, certainly since 1948, when Lyndon Johnson launched his Senate career with the Box 13 Scandal.
America simply cannot trust its elections to be honest. Democrats have been allowed to steal votes for so long, it’s just factored into the polling.
The usual approach the Republicans have taken is the one enshrined in literature with Hugh Hewitt’s famous book, “If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat.” While it’s good advice to push for ever greater numbers on election day, this is hardly an acceptable approach. The fact is, they do cheat; just because one election isn’t close doesn’t mean that the stolen votes haven’t had an impact downballot.
The map of these United States is covered with districts where Republicans don’t even run because the districts look – on paper – like 65-35 Democrat, making them unwinnable. What if such districts, absent fraud, are really only 55-45 Democrat? Or even 53-47 Democrat? Far more districts would be recognized as competitive, if we could purge the Democrat vote fraud that has been allowed to infect the nation for so long.
Some writers do write about it, and some activists do fight hard for ballot integrity. John Fund and Hans Von Spakovsky, for example, have authored books on the matter, activists like Alan D Vera of Texas and national groups like True the Vote have been fighting in the trenches for years. But it’s not enough.
America needs a groundswell - a public outcry – to put an end to this horrible blot on our record.
Election fraud is a crime against every American. It’s the reason why Democrats are always confident, no matter how abominable their candidates, and it’s the reason why supporters of the Founding principles of this nation begin every campaign with a deficit.
It’s not enough to win a majority of the votes; a Republican must win enough to overcome the margin of fraud. And it’s time this outrage was put to an end.
Copyright 2020 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based transportation and trade compliance trainer, writer and actor. His columns have been found in Illinois Review since 2009.
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