Could the following process have been successfully stopped by GOP challenges prior to the 2020 election? I don’t see how that could have been done in states in which the office of Secretary of State was held by a Democrat.
Years ago I was unaware of the important of that SOS role in elections. I believe it was during the lengthy drawn-out legal wrangling in Florida following the 2000 election that it came to my attention. I think it’s still an underappreciated fact. But you will see from the following excerpt from a Powerline post by attorney John Hinderaker how important the Secretary of State post was in the lawfare by which the Democrats accomplished the voting rule switcheroo in Minnesota and several other states in time for the 2020 election [I have bolded some passages and added some of my observations in brackets]:
In a number of states, including my home state of Minnesota, the Democrats pursued a coordinated strategy of collusive litigation to eliminate electoral safeguards. In Minnesota – and the same thing occurred in a number of other states–the Democratic Party recruited plaintiffs to sue the Democratic Secretary of State, asking that the statutory requirement of witness signatures on mail-in ballots be eliminated. The requirement of a witness signature is, as a practical matter, the only speed bump on the way to fraud in mail-in voting [I don’t think it’s the only speed bump, but it’s certainly a major one]…
Of course Secretaries of State have no power to change election laws, hence the need for collusive litigation, which is one of the most sinister forms of corruption in today’s world. In Minnesota and other states, the Democratic Secretaries of State immediately “settled” the lawsuits brought “against” them by their fellow Democrats. The “settlements” simply agreed to what the Democrats wanted – no safeguards to prevent fraud in mail-in voting.
The Democrats knew how corrupt, and therefore likely to fail, this tactic was, so in my state they made sure they had two bites at the apple. They recruited two sets of plaintiffs, one in federal court and another in state court, thereby dodging res judicata if they lost the first case. The key to collusive litigation is that the “settlement” conspired at by the supposedly adverse parties is ratified by a court. In Minnesota, the federal court refused to approve the Democrats’ fraudulent “settlement,” finding no showing to justify it. But a loyal state court judge went along with the Democrats’ charade. As a result, mail-in ballots in Minnesota, as in a number of other states following similarly corrupt litigation, bore no witness signatures, in plain violation of state law. The door to fraud was wide open, as the Democrats intended. One of the problems in assessing the 2020 election is that the same lax procedures that enable fraud in the first place also make it more or less impossible to prove after the fact. Sixty-nine million mail-in votes were cast; how many were fakes, and which ones? There is really no way to tell. Once those votes have been counted (sometimes in the absence of Republican poll-watchers, illegally excluded by Democrats from the rooms where counting was going on), there is no way to identify which ones were illegal and pull them out of the vote totals.
So at this point, neither I nor anyone else knows whether the Democrats stole the 2020 election, and we may never know…
That wasn’t the only method by which various rule changes occurred, but it was a major one. In addition, settlements such as this were not solely limited to Democratic Secretaries of State. For example, there’s been a lot of discussion of whether the legal settlement entered into by Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, which has been the center of so much argument, featured similar relaxations of the mail-in signature rules. The legal document for Georgia is at that link, and signature matching remains, but to discover what the agreement really signified in terms of rule changes, one must be aware of what the rules were before the agreement.
Here’s an analysis of those changes, and you can see how cleverly it was done:
The settlement introduced “ballot curing” to Georgia law. Ballot curing, as Davidson describes it [in this Federalist article], is when voters whose mail-in ballots are rejected for some reason— the signature on the ballot doesn’t match the one on file, the ballot is missing certain voter information, etc.— are notified and given a chance to correct or “cure” their absentee ballot. “Under the settlement, state election officials agreed to contact voters whose ballots were rejected within three business days. If an absentee ballot is rejected in the 11 days before Election Day, officials agreed to contact the voter in the next business day,” Davidson writes.
But here’s where it gets worse. Because more than 8,000 absentee ballots were rejected in Georgia’s 2018 general election, this provision in the settlement got the most media play. Yet the most important one is a crucial change to the rules for accepting absentee ballots in the first place. Consider Davidson’s findings:
“Previously, the signature on the absentee ballot had to match the signature on eNet, a computer database that maintains Georgia’s voter registration and absentee ballot information. If the signature on the ballot didn’t match, it was thrown out.
“In a cleverly worded section of the settlement, Georgia election officials agreed to a subtle but profound change. Instead of having to match the signature on file with eNet, the absentee ballot signature only had to match the signature on the absentee ballot application. The key word in the settlement was ‘“any.’ That is, an absentee ballot can only be rejected if it doesn’t match “any” of the signatures on file— either in eNet or the signature on the absentee ballot application.”
Incredibly, Davidson concludes, an absentee ballot can only be rejected if, A) it doesn’t match any other signature, and B) “a majority of the registrars, deputy registrars, or absentee ballot clerks reviewing the signature agree that the signature does not match any of the voter’s signatures on file in eNet or on the absentee ballot application.”
Think about what that change means. If someone fraudulently filed an absentee ballot application, for example, that same person could then sign the absentee ballot itself. And since the two signatures would match, the ballot would be accepted. This is obviously a huge flaw – and one that Raffensperger okayed. And the Georgia Republican Party was kept in the dark about it until much later.
So yes, claims by Raffensperger that Georgia still checked signatures are absolutely true. But whether they are checked effectively is a completely different question, and I think on the face of it they are not. Raffensperger’s agreement to this is at least part of the reason so many Republicans are so very angry at Raffensperger, who is considered a turncoat. And in the post-election brouhaha in Georgia, Raffensperger was – among other things – in CYA mode, because if the Georgia election results were fraudulent his settlement role could easily be blamed. So he had a very personal interest in protecting the validity of the results and rejecting any Republican challenge.
At one point in all of this I had the idea of checking how it worked in every single state that featured any changes of the rules prior to the 2020 election, and seeing how it was accomplished. But I quickly became overwhelmed by the task. I assume someone will write a book about it, but that book will of course be much too late to change anything for 2020-2021. That’s the beauty of election fraud – those asserting it run up against the enormity of the difficulty of proving it in the requisite time required, or of proving it at all in cases in which we simply lack the evidence because the ballots have been separated from the envelopes that contained them.
There is an extra problem, as well, which is that these issues and this history is nitpicky and boring to most people. Nor is it properly covered by the MSM, of course. And so it is inclined to go under the radar, although it is vitally important to understand exactly what is happening and to prevent it from happening again and/or to correct the problem. It is also necessary to understand when members of the GOP acquiesced and why – for example, the details of what made Raffensperger enter into that settlement in the first place – and when they tried to stop it but were essentially powerless because of processes like those described by Hinderaker in Minnesota.
It could be argued that in Minnesota it really didn’t matter. After all, isn’t Minnesota a blue state? Recall, though, that Hillary Clinton only won Minnesota by 1.5% in 2016, and there was talk prior to the 2020 vote that Minnesota just might flip into the Trump column this time. In actuality it wasn’t even close; Biden beat Trump by over 7%. But most of that win centered on Minneapolis and its suburbs, a Democratic stronghold that would have been the place most of the fraud occurred if in fact fraud did occur. And because of the signature rule changes outlined by Hinderaker, it is likely that such fraud would not have been discoverable.
I don’t think we’ll ever know what happened regarding election fraud in 2020. We will probably be arguing about it for decades, though. Unless this situation is corrected – and I don’t see how that can happen, except in red states – it will continue and allegations of fraud will continue. And if the Democrats pass a federal law mandating these rules relaxations in national elections (for president, House, Senate), increased possibilities for voting fraud and/or the perception of voting fraud will be institutionalized in all states.
