August 2, 2023

In a letter unanimously signed by the delegates to the First Continental Congress on October 26, 1774, our founders stated, “The first grand right, is that of the people having a share in their own government by their representatives chosen by themselves, and, in consequence, of being ruled by laws, which they themselves approve, not by edicts of men over whom they have no control.”

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It is for this reason that our Constitution defines a zero-trust system.  In America, transparency and direct accountability are central to securing our inalienable right — to live as a sovereign being, possessed of our own thoughts, experiences, and creativity to guide us.  Self-governance in our country is restricted by a moral duty to respect the free will of others and a civil duty to share in the responsibility and benefits of a limited government.  Otherwise, we answer to our maker, whether we admit it or not.

When our laws no longer honor individual sovereignty, and are turned on the people who have ostensibly consented to their passing, elections are logically suspect.  When officials arrogantly turn away from the cries of the people, it falls upon us to probe our zero-trust toolkit for a peaceful remedy.  How fortunate we are to have that opportunity!

There are two ways to approach the problem of corrupt elections.  First, the election challenge.  This is historically very difficult to win.  In order to ensure continuity of governance, our elections are designed to be self-adjudicating.  Outcomes are required to be stringently accurate, tightly controlled, and auditable.  These qualities make it hard to convince a judge to overturn an election, but relatively easier to use the second approach: prosecution of election fraud.

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What is election fraud?  The DOJ’s 2017 guide, “Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses,” includes many powerful statements like these:

Election fraud usually involves corruption of one of three processes:  the obtaining and marking of ballots, the counting and certification of election results, or the registration of voters.

The federal government asserts jurisdiction over an election offense to ensure that basic rights of United States citizenship, and a fundamental process of representative democracy, remain uncorrupted.

Examples in the DOJ document abound regarding conduct that constitutes federal election fraud.  A pivotal “Achilles heel” moment occurs at the moment of certification, when the election official attests to the accuracy and legal compliance of the election.  If results are later proven to be inaccurate, the following claim is valid, regardless of “intent”:

Malfeasance by election officials acting “under color of law” by performing such acts as diluting valid ballots with invalid ones (ballot-box stuffing), rendering false tabulations of votes, or preventing valid voter registrations or votes from being given effect in any election, federal or non-federal (18 U.S.C.  §§ 241, 242), as well as in elections in which federal candidates are on the ballot (52 U.S.C.  §§ 10307(c), 10307(e), 20511(2)).

The appalling inaccuracy of the nation’s voter rolls is not a clerical error, as election officials would have us believe.  It is an offense.  First, accuracy is identified as critical in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA):