Questions about the newly rebalancing weight of bureaucratic privilege loom large. The overturning of mandatory judicial deference to experts, with the SCOTUS Loper Bright decision, regarding the interpretation and application of congressional legislative intent, opens a wide realm of possibilities for reasserting the primacy of civil liberties over what amounts to unaccountable opinions by support staff — and political ones at that. Nowhere is this change as instantly significant as inside our election bureaus preparing for the 2024 general election.
Election officials have a challenging task. They have an equal responsibility to make sure every eligible citizen has the opportunity to vote, while simultaneously preventing any ineligible or fictitious voters from diluting those precious rightful ballots. There’s not some magic equation that resolves this conundrum perfectly. Therefore, election administrators have long held authority to excuse or justify questionable registration practices on the basis of weighting denial of the vote as the more important harm to prevent, despite SCOTUS having ruled in Reynolds v Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964) that denial and dilution of the vote are equal harms.
As an example of administrative deference in voter list management, observe the humble “default” date. In a time before time, when there was no such thing as an anonymous voter because people lived together in towns and congregated in schoolhouses, churches, Conestoga wagons, and publick houses, and were therefore known to one another, birthdates and registration dates may not have been required by the local clerk. Therefore, we can reasonably expect that some registration records will lack accurate date information. Although it is a requirement to be 18 years of age, and a requirement to be registered to vote before voting, and voter rolls are required by Congress to be accurate in order that elections be reliable, it is generally considered understandable that these dates are missing from some voter records. When this completely normal, everyday circumstance arises, experts at the election bureaus assign a default date in the absence of a factual date. According to them, every time this occurs, it made and continues to unquestionably make perfect sense.
A wandering mind, however, might deign to ask, “Exactly how many times has this happened?” (If you are in possession of such a mind, you are surely an election denier.) In a report recently released by nonpartisan election validity watchdog United Sovereign Americans (USA),* professional auditors volunteering with the organization provided an answer. Looking at the official voter roll records for the 2022 general election, in 20 states responsible for 338 Electoral College votes, USA found 10,921,180 registered voters with invalid registration dates. Reasonable “defaults” every last one.
Curiosity will surely draw you to the inevitable next question: “Does it matter?” One hundred forty years of U.S. Supreme Court decisions originating with In re Coy, 127 U.S. 731 (1888) show again and again that accuracy in the conduct of our elections matters a lot. Returning to our example, dates in your voter registration determine your eligibility; they provide the anchors against which to weigh the law. The mere presence of so many uncertain registrations demands comprehensive and immediate investigation.
And default dates are only one of the areas of potential fraud identified in the report, which breathtakingly measured 29 million facially invalid registrants responsible for 10 million apparently illegal votes in the 2022 midterm. At a minimum, the report proves there are no data validation controls applied to our voter rolls, mystifyingly rendering our voting systems a sitting duck.
Now that a new judicial era has dawned, prioritizing philosophical consistency with the U.S. Constitution above obeisance to the countless ministers of policy set down by Congress in law, United Sovereign Americans has begun challenging election administrators in federal court regarding these findings. Referencing the pathways of enforcement described in the U.S. DOJ’s Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses, USA asserts that these facially invalid registrations may be nothing more than “deadwood,” false or corrupted registrations that exist purely for injecting felony false votes.
Mandamus actions ordering the State to properly perform ministerial duties are filed in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, with more states in the hopper. USA makes no direct accusations and does not suggest altering previous election results. Represented by Bruce L. Castor, Jr. of van der Veen, Hartshort, Levin & Lindheim, they assert that error in the 2022 midterms created by this mountain of uncertainty has so corrupted the very meaning of the right to vote that the courts must order recalcitrant officials to bring their systems immediately into compliance for the 2024 presidential election. Granting a right to vote to registrants who are not proven to meet state and federal requirements for eligibility and citizenship equally to those who are is a crime against all Americans and against our system of legitimate representative government.
Elections contain an intractable trap regarding expertise, and there couldn’t be more at stake in this regard in the 2024 election. When we confer absolute authority upon election administrators to make blanket decisions about poorly construed efforts (possibly in ignorance of serious security breaches), we effectively entrust decision-making power over election outcomes affecting the nation to a tiny group of umpires. This renders the third sentence of the U.S. Constitution, that the people of the several states shall choose their representatives, meaningless.
Our founders deliberated at every turn to construct a system of government that protected against such vulnerability. Rule by experts must be replaced with government by consent, starting immediately at the key that turns every lock: the process of electing representatives.
*Marly Hornik is the volunteer CEO of United Sovereign Americans.
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