Five Ways You Can Help Restore Honest Elections
These online tools make it easy.
In 2014, Catherine Engelbrecht testified before Congress. I remember her particularly because she looked to me like a real-life Dagny Taggart, an impression only enhanced when I learned that she also owned a small industrial manufacturing facility.
As Engelbrecht explained back then in her testimony, she had recently witnessed voting irregularities while volunteering to work in a polling station and decided those needed to be addressed. To that end, she started True the Vote, an organization intended to promote election integrity. However, after filing for non-profit tax-exempt status for True the Vote, a routine bit of paperwork for any such group, she was subjected to no less than fifteen audits and inquiries by federal agencies including the IRS, OSHA, BATF, and FBI. It seemed someone in the then Obama administration didn’t like what she was doing. The rot was much deeper than she had realized.
Ten years later she’s still at it and True the Vote is bigger and better organized than ever. Authorities have tried to shut down Engelbrecht through continued harassment, even imprisonment, but she has, as they say, persisted. That said, Engelbrecht and her heroic staff are just a few good souls and they can’t win the nationwide battle for election integrity alone. Happily, their website offers several ways you can help, and these are listed below along with additional options:
Remove Your Expired Registrations
This is the easiest way you can help. Election audits routinely show that many, many people are still registered and still “voting” in their old districts, even ones they moved from years ago (that is, someone is fraudulently voting in their name from their old address). You can help fix this by using this tool to see if you are still registered somewhere other than your current location and by removing that registration. This only takes a few minutes.
Report Voting Irregularities
See something fishy in your local elections? Local officials may or may not care about such voting irregularities, but True the Vote does and may be able to help. Keep your eyes open, and if you see something, say something. Report irregularities here.
Become a Poll Watcher
True the Vote offers informational toolkits, including details on local election processes, that will prepare you for being an effective poll watcher and even help you organize teams of poll watchers should you choose to. There’s a right way to do all this and you need the plan.
Help Clean Up Your Local Voter Rolls
At least 3.5 million more people are on U.S. election rolls than are legally eligible to vote, according to Judicial Watch. There are 462 counties where the registration rate exceeds 100% of the eligible voter population. States and counties are supposed to stay on top of keeping voter rolls current — in fact, they are required to do so by federal law, but as a practical matter they often don’t. The good news is that a little prompting by local citizens can help push the ball across the line, and an online system has been created to make it easy. IV3, as it’s called, is a web-based app that “empowers voters with an automated way to confirm accuracy, identify ineligible records, report findings to local authorities, and stay up to date on the recent changes to your local voter rolls.” It’s remarkably simple. You identify your county, the app suggests registrations that are suspicious (e.g., 35 people registered to vote at a Seven-Eleven — not kidding, it’s often like this), you confirm the address is correct, and IV3 files a correction on your behalf according to the state’s process. Check it out.
Become a Poll Worker or Manager — And Get Paid for It!
These jobs are routinely posted online and requirements are minimal, usually just proof of local residence, a driver’s license, and lack of felony convictions. Why not be one of the people in charge, help to save our elections, and get paid for it in the bargain?
Why All This Is Urgent: Is Time Running Out for Our Elections?
You might think cheating in elections is nothing new, so what’s the urgency? And indeed, there has always been some cheating. For instance, during the US Civil War, mail-in ballots were introduced for soldiers, as most could not return home to vote. Almost immediately there was an attempt at voter fraud that was detected and made the news: it was an attempt by Democrats to fraudulently use fake mail-in ballots to deny Republican Abraham Lincoln reelection in 1864.
But in recent years, there is a widespread sense that our elections have gone well beyond the normal level of cheating, and not by chance. The process has been deliberately compromised in a variety of ways, including: widespread use of mail-in ballots, harvesting of these ballots, the use of machines of questionable integrity, etc.
What is worse, the political left in the US has made the federalization of these changes their Holy Grail, and they nearly got away with it in 2019 and again in 2021. The House under Nancy Pelosi introduced the For the People Act, which was intended to federalize US elections and enshrine into law legalized ballot harvesting and other dubious changes that would make fraud easier. In both the 2019 and 2021 attempts, the bill passed the House and nearly passed the Senate but was blocked by heroics from a handful of Senators. It was a very, very close shave both times. These will not be their last attempts.
I have listed above five ways to fight election fraud, but really all of these come down to just one thing: ordinary decent people must return to participation in the process, and in large numbers. Most of us, including myself, have taken honest elections for granted. We abandoned the field of civic duty thinking the battle for decent government was won. That was a mistake. It is our absense that has allowed things to reach this perilous stage. It is time for our return.
