By John F. Di Leo -
Depending on who you ask, vote fraud is dismissed as something that never happened, or used to happen but doesn’t happen anymore, or happens, but not in numbers significant enough to change an election, so who cares?
I’ve always been particularly irritated by that last one, having had two good friends – members of a state legislature and a county board – win or lose elections by a single vote over the years (Penny Pullen was the Illinois State Rep, and the late Donald Conn was the Ogle County Board Member).
Personally, I’ve always known that vote fraud is real. One day, about 35 years ago now, a friend and I helped out in the city of Chicago, serving as Republican election judges in one of two polling places located in a north side nursing home. Our precinct was relatively clean, consisting of the professionals who lived in the neighboring apartment buildings. The precinct voting across the hall, however, constituted the almost uniformly incapacitated residents of the nursing home. Over the course of the day, seeing their election judges holding their hands for them and casting their votes without instruction or even awareness, it became evident that these poor residents had no idea where they were or for whom they were voting.
We learned on that day without a doubt what cynics have always suspected of the big city Democrat party machines: that the Party views interest groups as votes to be harvested twice a year, nothing more, nothing less. From welfare to business licenses, from garbage collection to snow removal, the singular focus of these local bureaucracies is on the election day that enables their corrupt world.
But even those who believe it of Chicago, doubt it elsewhere. People all over the country chuckle and say “Well, that’s not a problem here; we’re not in Chicago.”
That assumption is rapidly becoming downright laughable.
Take two recent examples that have received minimal attention outside of conservative media:
John Lott’s Research:
John R. Lott is a highly respected scholar and author. His 1998 bestseller, “More Guns, Less Crime,” settled the question of whether gun control or gun ownership contribute to safer streets. He has recently turned his scientific mind toward the issue of vote fraud, studying it from a different point of view than most.
Mr. Lott’s peer-reviewed research, to be published in Public Choice, studies the 2020 General Election by statistically comparing neighboring precincts in neighboring counties, predominantly looking at the critical swing states of Pennsylvania and Georgia.
One might assume, with Republicans motivated and confident with President Trump’s successful presidency, and Democrats demoralized and uninspired with an elderly and likely senile sacrificial lamb at the top of their ticket, that Republican turnout would be strong and Democrat turnout would be sluggish.
Mr. Lott’s research of Republican-majority and Democrat-majority counties largely showed that very difference in voter enthusiasm and turnout, with an interesting exception: the vote totals indicate that Democrat turnout increased to match Republican enthusiasm only in the Democrat-majority counties where vote fraud has been reasonably alleged.
Mr. Lott points out that the precincts he studied – in six key swing states – are neighboring precincts along county lines, generally identical demographically except for that invisible county border down the middle of the street. The only significant difference between them is whether normal Republican city and county officials run their election apparatus, or if that apparatus is controlled by a suspect Democrat machine.
His research indicates some 255,000 extra votes in just the areas he studied.
And when you expand that to the entire country? This is a pattern of fraud worthy of all the attention that Republicans have always said it merits.
Nursing Home Fraud
As I learned some 35 years ago in Chicago, there is something irresistible to the machine politician about the very singular situation of nursing homes.
Such residents are usually dependent on a distant family or even more distant government for their bills, and are therefore vulnerable to the administration and staff for everything from getting fed and bathed to getting medical care. Worse yet, a high percentage (in some homes, approaching 100%) suffer greatly diminished mental acuity, and can easily be taken advantage of, financially or otherwise.
Worse yet, these homes are so highly regulated, a corrupt regulator has immense power over them. Readers of a certain age will remember the backstory around Juanita Broaddrick’s horrifying encounter with a certain Arkansas attorney general who went all the way to the White House. Mrs. Broaddrick was a nursing home administrator in 1978, and the state attorney general controlled licensing for such businesses, so he knew she wouldn’t dare to prosecute.
Local city and county governments often have even more power over nursing homes; they can not only deny or yank licenses, shutting them down, they could also deny garbage and snow removal services, cut a deal with the unions to stage a strike, even turn off water or power… just to make their point.
Nursing homes are not inclined to refuse a request by the powers that be, knowing how much could be jeopardized by saying No.
A bigger problem, painful though it is for those not yet jaded enough by a lifetime of watching the news, is the fact that many who work for these nursing homes may not need to be coerced to participate in vote fraud. For generations, children have been told by their politicians, their schoolteachers, their pastors, and their pop culture heroes, that Republicans are mean, or racist, or anti-woman, the party of the rich. Raised to believe such lies, it should be no surprise that some of them will grow up to believe they are doing the ethical thing by helping to steal votes in the noble effort of defeating such villains.
The one bright side in all this is that it has become so widespread and so blatant that it can no longer be hidden.
Wisconsin: Beginning last fall with Racine County Sheriff’s detailed allegations in his own southeast Wisconsin county, the state’s special counsel on vote fraud, former state supreme court justice Michael Gableman, investigated ninety nursing homes across the state, and reported a shocking pattern of vote fraud by administrators ordering mail-in ballots on behalf of often-incompetent residents and completing them “on their behalf,” in complete violation of state law, and with the full complicity of the state’s corrupt Democrat-majority Wisconsin Election Commission.
Texas: Almost immediately after the election, in November of 2020, a Texas social worker named Kelly Reagan Brunner was charged with 134 felony counts of taking advantage of elderly and developmentally disabled people, ordering ballots on their behalf and allegedly forging signatures and casting their votes, despite many of them having been formally determined by courts as mentally incapacitated.
Michigan: Just last month, Trenae Myesha Rainey and Nancy Williams, nursing home workers in suburban Detroit, were convicted for forging dozens of absentee voter applications for the unaware and mentally-incapacitated patients in their care.
Similar stories are surfacing in state after state, as people gradually awaken to this long-hidden crime.
Cognizant of this growing problem, the American Constitutional Rights Union (ACRU) has been pushing a Senior Citizens Voting Bill of Rights, in an information packet warning nursing home administrators not to enable or commit such crimes against the people in their care, and their hotlines have turned up countless tips all across the country, which are finally in the process of being investigated.
There are dozens of distinct types of vote fraud. Could any one of them be sufficient to change an election? Sure, but it’s doubtful. Taken together, however… counting the use of old registrations of real voters who have moved away or died, and counting the many corrupt political operatives who round-table mailed-in ballots in the basement, and counting the millions of non-citizens who vote, and counting this explosion of nursing home corruption… not to mention the dozens of other methods of fraud practiced all over the country… it is undeniable that even the highest vote fraud estimates, often dismissed by the press, must be considered possible after all.
It's extremely difficult to find all the vote fraud, and harder still to prosecute and convict for it all.
But it’s easy to prevent it. Just a few simple measures would stop the vast majority of vote fraud across the country.
It is telling, then, isn’t it, that the Democratic Party is so obstinate, insisting that vote fraud is minimal, but fighting tooth and nail against any of the simple measures that might prevent it.
This alone should tell us all we need to know, not only about how real it is, but also about how dependent the Democratic Party really is on these illegal votes to push them over the top and keep up the pretense of being a nationally popular party.
Copyright 2022 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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