(Chuck Muth) – When it comes to the 2020 general election in Nevada, I’m neither an “election denier” nor an “election defender.”
Those who claim massive voting fraud, without providing actual proof, are just as bad as those who claim there was absolutely no voting fraud at all. Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
Remember, they didn’t *prove* that OJ killed his ex-wife. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.
But there IS proof that election fraud DOES occur. The latest example…
In Flint Township, Michigan, Democrat clerk Kathy Funk was recently found guilty of election fraud after admitting “she broke a seal of a ballot box to ensure that votes could not be recounted in her 2020 race.”
Funk pled “no contest” in a deal with prosecutors and will serve no time in jail. In other words, even when caught red-handed rigging an election, there’s no real penalty. What message do you think that sends to others attempting the same thing?
Back to the 2020 election…
Nevada GOP Chairman Michael McDonald and former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt immediately leveled allegations of widespread voting fraud and claimed the election was “stolen” from Donald Trump.
In a big dog-and-pony show/press conference a couple months after the election, McDonald dropped off four big boxes of supposed “evidence” of 120,000+ cases of voting fraud to the Secretary of State’s office.
But the truth is, his “evidence” was nothing more than unsubstantiated suspicions based on rudimentary database searches.
In fact, the Secretary of State’s office, after examining the supposed 120,000+ pieces of “evidence” of election fraud, discovered the allegations were “based largely upon an incomplete assessment of voter registration records and lack of information concerning the processes by which these records are compiled and maintained.”
In other words, McDonald and Laxalt did, at best, a half-assed job of submitting admissible proof, as was further explained by the Attorney General’s office in response to their complaints…
“This morning, we received a redacted affidavit that does not contain the individual’s name, signature or contact information. As it stands, our office has not yet received a formal complaint and cannot conduct an investigation without such critical details.”
Indeed, if McDonald had done the hard work of actually getting real evidence, he would have released all 120,000+ examples to the public so they could be independently investigated and verified.
He didn’t. And he hasn’t.
Why not? Because he doesn’t have bupkis…and he knows it.
Instead, in an interview with conservative talk-show host Alan Stock a few weeks ago, McDonald claimed he was barred from releasing his “evidence” by a court order. In response, Stock asked McDonald to show him the court order.
He didn’t. And he hasn’t.
Now, of all the unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud in 2020, the one that got the most attention was, as one Trump surrogate put it, that “hundreds of dead people” voted in Clark County. Indeed, the party would later claim “that 1,506 votes were cast in the names of persons who are deceased.”
But when the names were bounced up against the data provided by the Office of Vital Statistics, “only 10 of the 1,506 records were identified as being deceased.” The ten were referred to the Attorney General’s office for investigation.
To date, I’m only aware of two of that have been resolved.
In one case, a man who died in 2017 had a ballot cast in his name. However, the investigation revealed that the ballot was cast by a family member who did not cast a ballot herself.
So this was just a case of someone simply mailing in the wrong ballot – a mistake more easily made thanks to automatically (and stupidly) mailing a ballot to everyone rather than only mailing ballots to voters who request one.
And this is why it’s totally irresponsible to make wild “voting fraud” allegations based on a simple database search without deploying “boots on the ground” to confirm the facts. While this example is technically a case of a person voting the ballot of another, there was no intent to actually commit voting fraud.
The other is the only proven case, thus far, of actual election fraud from 2020.
A man, Kirk Hartle, claimed his deceased wife, Rosemarie, had voted. “I was surprised because she passed away three years ago,” Hartle told KLAS-TV a week after the election. “That is pretty sickening to me, to be honest with you.”
Indeed, Rosemarie passed away in 2017 but was still listed on the “Active” voter file for the 2020 election – which again demonstrates the level of potential election fraud thanks to the voter files being littered with inaccurate or outdated voter registrations.
Yes, a ballot was mailed to her and cast in her name. And yes, it was counted by the Clark County Election Department – which said the signature on the ballot envelope was “a match to what’s on their records.”
That, of course, is an admission by the election department itself that signature verification in Clark County is anything but foolproof. But that’s another issue for another day.
Embarrassingly, the subsequent investigation by the Secretary of State’s office and the office of the Attorney General revealed that Hartle himself had voted his dead wife’s ballot. From what I understand, Hartle went to his previous home where Rosemarie’s ballot had been mailed, retrieved it from the current resident, and cast it on her behalf.
Of course, this never could have happened if a ballot hadn’t been automatically mailed to someone who not only no longer lived at the address where she was registered, but no longer was alive at all.
Hartle was subsequently prosecuted, took a plea deal, and was sentenced to probation.
The fact is, catching voting fraud is next to impossible after the fact, especially the way Nevada’s laws are currently written. And it’s not gonna get any better any time soon.
While Gov. Joe Lombardo has proposed a number of common-sense reforms to limit the potential for voting fraud, Democrats who control the Nevada Legislature have already labeled them a “non-starter.”
That means, barring some political miracle on par with raising the dead or changing water into wine, automatic universal mail-in balloting and ballot harvesting will be among the rules of the game again in 2024.
So what can be done about it?
Stay tuned. That’s what Citizen Outreach’s new “Pigpen Project” is all about. Details coming soon…