Election Fraud Is Easy

In 2016, California decided to join some other foolish states by opening our elections to fraud.

How?

By blithely scattering ballots around the landscape every election. Our brain-dead legislators passed the “Voters Choice Act”, and once the enabling legislation was enacted, in every election since then they’ve sent a mail-in ballot to every registered voter. Millions of them. To live voters. Dead voters. Voters that have moved. Everyone.

Now, I’d read that sending mail-in ballots to everyone makes election fraud easy. But I’m a scientist, and I do my best to disbelieve rumors. So I decided to put it to the test.

Here’s a copy of the most recent blurb that I get each election from the California Secretary of State:

As you can see, they said I can vote in person. And they said that I can vote by mail.

So starting three elections ago, I did exactly that. I voted in person, and I voted by mail.

I made no attempt to disguise that fact. I signed my actual name to the mail-in ballot and everything. Then I waited for the axe to fall …

… nothing. Not a hint. Not a whisper.

I thought maybe this was just a fluke. So two elections ago, I did exactly the same thing … with exactly the same result. Nothing happened at all.

Finally, in the most recent 2022 election, I did the same again. As I’d done in each previous election, I showed my photo ID and voted in person at my polling place, and I deposited my filled-out mail-in ballot in the nearest ballot drop box.

For the first time, the day after this latest election I got an early morning text from the California Secretary of State. I thought, “Thank goodness, they’ve finally gotten it together to detect fraudulent votes! Bad news is, I’m busted!” and my heart started beating faster … but no. The text said:

This is a message from the California Secretary of State on behalf of Sonoma County Registrar of Voters. Our records indicate you voted in person at a voting location. Your vote for the November 8, 2022, General Election will be included in the election results. Thank you for voting!

So nope. They haven’t noticed the voter fraud.

Now, I could have collected a bunch of ballots and sent them all in. It would be easy to do. I live in a rural low-crime area. All I’d have to do is wander around after dark on the day my mail-in ballot arrived and collect ballots from rural mailboxes. Then fill them out, put on any kind of illegible signature, and send them in.

Would that have made a difference? As I write this, the difference in the Lauren Boebert race is about 50 votes out of 150,000 … and local city and county races often are decided by a handful of votes.

But my intent was not to actually affect the election, quite the opposite. My intent was simply to prove, not just assert but demonstrate, just how easy voter fraud is when mail-in ballots are sent to every registered voter.

The solution, of course, is simple. Fair, honest, fraud-free elections are conducted all around the globe. The keys are:

• Voter Photo ID must be required, as is the case in Mexico, India, and almost every country. ID is to be provided by the state free of charge.

• Paper ballots only. As someone who has programmed computers for over half a century, I can assure you that any voting machine can be hacked. It’s far and away the easiest and most secure way to cheat. Paper ballots cannot be hacked.
• Voting in person, with absentee ballots only for the military, people living overseas, and invalids unable to travel to the polling place.
• No mail-in ballots. As I’ve proven in three successive elections, they make voter fraud far too simple to accomplish.
• No ballot harvesting. Combined with mail-in ballots, harvesting makes mass fraud quite simple.
• Secure handling of all ballots, with an audit trail to allow any batch to be checked and recounted.
• Hand counting of ballots, with observers from both parties watching the count. Vote tally machines are as easy to hack as voting machines.
• Make election day a public holiday, with voting only on that day, no early voting.

If we take those simple, easy-to-implement steps, our elections will be secure, transparent, and fair. There’s only one reason that a person or a political party would oppose this plan—because they want it to be easy to cheat.

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And now, my experiment is over, “les jeux sont faits”. In closing, yes, I know that I’ve committed three separate crimes. And I know that the fact that I’ve committed them as a part of a scientific experiment does not make them legal.

CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS CODE – ELEC

  DIVISION 18. PENAL PROVISIONS [18000 – 18700]

    CHAPTER 6. Corruption of the Voting Process [18500 – 18578]

      ARTICLE 4. Corruption of Voting [18560 – 18578]

18560.

Every person is guilty of a crime punishable by imprisonment pursuant to subdivision (h) of Section 1170 of the Penal Code for 16 months or two or three years, or in a county jail not exceeding one year, who:

…

(b) Being entitled to vote at an election, votes more than once, attempts to vote more than once, or knowingly hands in two or more ballots folded together at that election.

“Votes more than once”. That would be me. Three separate offenses, per the law that’s up to four to nine years of jail time.

And if the State of California wants to come after me and charge me, well, so be it. I’ve been in jail before. If I have to go on trial to improve our voting system, I can live with that. My trial would bring national attention to the fact that people in countries all around the world are laughing their asterisks off at the US because we don’t require Voter ID, it takes us weeks to count the ballots, there’s no audit trail, and we’ve opened our elections to crooks and invited the fraudsters in.

And they assuredly are coming in, because as I’ve demonstrated by example … election fraud is easy.

Look, this shouldn’t be a partisan issue. We should all work to support the implementation of the simple reforms outlined above. Transparent honest elections are in everyone’s interest, and the lack of them has spread immense discontent and problems in every election since 2016. I don’t want to see this madness in every election from now on.

My best regards to all,

w.

PS—I tried submitting this as an Op-Ed piece to the NY Times and some other newspapers. “Sorry”, they said, “not interested.” Hmmm … when I was a kid, I worked in the newsroom of our local paper. The saying at that time was “Bad news sells papers”. Seems like it’s still true, which may be why they weren’t interested in my Op-Ed about fixing the system.

Or perhaps they didn’t want to print it because they’re mostly Democrats with bylines, and far too many Democrats for unknown reasons are opposed to things like Voter ID.

Or maybe they weren’t interested because they just didn’t like my writing style. Fair enough, I’m sure I’m not everyone’s cup of meat.

But every citizen should be interested in making sure every vote is counted, and that every vote counts. The changes required are small. We can get this done, and we must. This embarrassing charade simply cannot continue.

PPS—Someone gets caught forging a signature on one single fraudulent ballot … and gets 15 years in prison.