Tabulations & Transparency • Ensuring Election Fairness in the Electronic Age

by Brian T. Kennedy

Additional reporting by Robert E. Martin

Editor’s Note:

Without doubt the 2024 Presidential election will mark the most important turning point in our nation’s history.  It is not the purpose of this essay to discourage anyone from participating in the 2024 election. Quite the opposite. Its purpose is to encourage unprecedented numbers of citizens and their elected representatives to work together to ensure that this upcoming 2024 Presidential  election will be fair and free from interference and manipulation.

This public service message video published by Elon Musk on 'X' concisely explains the ongoing dangers of absentee ballot voting in this upcoming Preidential election.

Background • Vulnerability of the U.S. Election System

At no time during the Cold War with the Soviet Union was it imagined that the Russians could manipulate a United States presidential election in favor of their preferred candidate. Hollywood’s portrayal of a “Manchurian Candidate” aside, American elections were held in person, using paper ballots, counted by human beings, and with other human beings watching them. However vicious and corrupt the normal partisan interplay of American politics may have been, this practice insured that a fair enough election could be held. 

Today that is no longer the case. Regardless of who the nominees are in 2024, just as in 2020 much of America will hold their elections in the least transparent, most vulnerable method possible: by relying upon and promoting absentee ballots.  Because of this it matters not whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris are tied, ahead of one another, or when factoring in the 30% of undecided and independent voters, locked in a veritable three-way horse race with  Robert Kennedy, Jr. 

The United States is made vulnerable by being the only developed country in the world to allow for the wide-spread use of absentee ballots. Every other advanced democracy conducts their elections in person, with identification shown, on paper ballots counted by large groups of people transparently tallying vote totals with the results available the same day of the election.

Moreover, in states around America, Secretaries of State have allowed or been part of the development of elections systems that would appear to be flawed and susceptible to fraud because they lack transparency, whether it is the absentee ballot process or the electronic voting system itself, so that it can be exploited should seem obvious.

One thing widely underreported is that Communist China declared a People’s War against the United States back in May of 2019 after the Trump Administration’s efforts to curb their theft of American intellectual property. This so-called People’s War was declared in the pages of the People’s Daily when Communist Party apparatchiks told the Chinese people they would have to make sacrifices to stop the “greed and arrogance” of the Trump Administration.

This conflict between the U.S. and China involves political warfare, information warfare, and psychological warfare. It is war, so there are few rules. Any reasonable assessment of the state of U.S. defenses should include whether such political warfare could include the CCP intervening in the 2024 election; however, this assessment appears not to have been done. 

Consequently, it is highly probable that November’s election could be the target of a massive intelligence operation to decide the next president. It should also be noted that America’s election system was not built to stop the Communist Chinese or any nation state, or for that matter any dark money group, with the capacity and the interest in deciding an American presidential election.

This is critical since this is not merely about the manipulation of search engines or social media platforms. This is about a comprehensive strategy to manipulate the 2024 election using whatever means necessary.

China’s Strategic Design

Communist China is a great nation with great ambition. They spend roughly $16 billion on intelligence and influence operations annually in the United States, so It would not be unreasonable to believe that they wish to interfere in November’s election. They also have important allies at their disposal. Indeed, the political and information war currently being waged against the American people is by a condominium of the Chinese Communist Party and  the collection of transnational corporations and globalist elites that run them. This latter group assumes they will have a preferred position financially and economically in a new world order.

For their part, China and their allies seek to perpetuate our ongoing military, strategic, and economic submission. In the past three and a half years China has taken unprecedented steps toward an invasion of Taiwan, prepared for an attack on the United States through the use of surveillance balloons across the United States, operated bio-weapons laboratories (at least one of which was found in Reedley, California replete with Ebola, anthrax, and the like), formed a “no limits” strategic alliance with Russia in their war with Ukraine, signed an “all-weather” strategic partnership with Hungary on the threshold of Europe, and supplied both funding and intelligence resources to the Iranians, Hezbollah, and Hamas in their war with Israel.

Likewise, the Biden Administration, with Congress, has engaged in levels of spending that have ballooned the American national debt to nearly $35 trillion. This reckless spending has led not merely to inflation but has undermined the world’s faith in the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency.  Witness Saudi Arabia’s failure to renew the use of the U.S. dollar as the primary means for the clearance of oil contracts.

That this is not clear to anyone with eyes to see might seem a great mystery, until one considers the active measures of the Chinese to buy up the most influential law, public relations, and political lobbying firms in Washington and New York. Money—the aforementioned $16 billion—is spread through political and philanthropic donations, investments, advertising in new and legacy media, support for journalists and scholars, and contributions to major academic institutions and think tanks throughout the country..

These billions of dollars ensure not merely that journalists and scholars think twice before publicly acknowledging Communist China’s ongoing malfeasance, but also that counter arguments regarding the origins of COVID-19, China’s military buildup in the South China Sea, or the ongoing harmful effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative throughout the world, are formulated and propagated proactively by a domestic Fifth Column within our opinion-making institutions.

Globalists, especially America’s business elites, will point out that Communist China is highly dependent on America for trade, and that hundreds of thousands of its young people go to college in the United States each year, so why would they wish to destroy the United States? But China may have determined they have served as the manufacturing base of the United States for long enough. It may be they wish to develop China along different economic lines and expand their reach throughout the globe through the many client-states they have developed. Trade with the United States along the lines of the three decades since China was awarded Most Favored Nation status may not align with their strategic plans. It may also be that the Chinese have extracted from the West all the knowledge that is necessary for them to become the most powerful nation the world has ever known.

Regardless, within six months of the declaration of the People’s War, COVID-19 was spreading throughout China and the world. The spread of COVID came just before an American presidential election and Americans were locked down and fed a steady diet of narratives that COVID-19 was a death sentence.

Based on this, elections were changed nationwide—mostly without the legislative participation at the state level required by the U.S. Constitution—to require the use of absentee ballots. Prior to 2020 it was widely accepted by both Republicans and Democrats that absentee balloting could lead to widespread voter fraud. The blue-ribbon commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker in 2005 explained this clearly.

But COVID-19 created the perfect circumstance to look the other way. Who, after all, would want to die going to a polling place?

Was the 2020 Election Stolen?

The most important question still hanging over us is whether the 2020 election was fair. The signature anomaly, the middle of the night pause in counting in the six swing states where Trump was in the lead at the start of the pause, only to have the count resume with Joe Biden ahead, were both red flags.

The election of 2020 was decided - most likely - by the illegal collection and production of absentee ballots by a variety of front groups whose purpose was to steal the election. Because there was no real investigation of the election and its many anomalies, while it is not possible to demonstrate with absolute certitude this assertion, we do know that historic numbers of absentee ballots were returned, with many of these ballots the chain of custody of was either missing or defective, and signature verification was in many states nearly non-existent.

Consequently, under the letter of the law, many key states were unable to certify their elections legitimately.  Citizen groups that did investigate were treated not only with contempt, but as if their civic actions were criminal in nature. Charges of Trump supporters being election-deniers became the dominant narrative throughout the left-wing media, which ironically  only four years prior had supported similar claims from Hillary Clinton and her supporters - claims that remain to this day.

Rather than demonstrating to the world the legitimacy of America’s political system by thoroughly investigating these discrepancies, this was not the case in the 2020 election. Instead, raising the question of election irregularities was met with lawfare and intimidation. For many Americans this merely reinforced the illegitimacy of the election and therefore the Biden presidency itself.  Because we are citizens of a free country we naturally tend to think in terms of fairness between one citizen and another. We don’t like the idea that one citizen might steal another citizen’s vote or that another group would engage in voter fraud, whether through the electronic manipulation of ballots or the stuffing of the ballot box with fake or fraudulent ballots.  This is especially true of a presidential election.

While many assert the election of 2020 could not have been stolen since it was litigated all over the country and no court saw fit to overturn the election, including the Supreme Court - what is true is that no court was going to insert itself into the presidential process either before or after the election.

The 80-some cases brought before state courts were all summarily dismissed on procedural grounds having primarily to do with issues of legal ‘standing’, either before or after the election. Consequently, the actual merits and physical evidence substantiating each of these claims was never actually examined nor addressed.

Unlike the case with the 2000 Bush vs. Gore election, the Judiciary in the 2020 election summoned neither the force nor will to enforce its decisions. The letter of the law be damned, it mattered not whether the elections were not held in accordance with state election law. The courts were not going to put themselves in the middle of political controversy.

The elections were over and that was that. And, in any case, is it not the job of the Secretaries of State around the country and the Trump Administration’s own Department of Homeland Security and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to make sure an election is fair? Certainly, the nonpartisan government oversight function could not have gotten this so wrong, could it?

Secretaries of State are partisan offices and especially in the blue states, they were overwhelmed by the political pressure of the COVID-19 lockdowns to permit absentee ballots. They were also being given access to funds and programs such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life, which were designed to promote the use of absentee ballots to get as many people voting as possible. 

These efforts, presumably to promote voting in this non-traditional method because of COVID-19, opened the door for unknown, and uninvestigated, amounts of fraud and may well have been cover for other dark money spending and their much less transparent efforts.  The billions of dollars funneled into the system by Arabella Advisors, The Tides Foundation, The Sixteen Thirty Fund and other anodyne sounding organizations themselves mask the sources of funding including from foreign individuals and corporations seeking to influence American politics to promote globalist and communist priorities.

The Department of Homeland Security, it would appear, is clueless to all this. It is as if they did not think it was their job to take seriously a radical change in how Americans vote during the middle of a historic national health crisis and civic unrest and violence the likes of which the nation had not seen for decades.  

Yet to be investigated is the statement made on November 12, 2020 by CISA Director Christopher Krebs and his superiors that the election “was the most secure in American history.”  How could he know that and how could he know it so soon?  There was no way of knowing so shortly after the election what had transpired in the submission of millions of ballots never before cast in a presidential election in this manner.  

Moreover, never did a presidential election have such a wide use of electronic voting systems under these circumstances, which is no insignificant matter. Let us be clear on this: there is no freedom of speech in America to discuss electronic voting systems. It is stipulated that electronic voting systems are perfect. But it should only be noted that they operate with electronic components made in China and that many if not most of the machines that will be used by voters were not made in the United States.

The software in use in the machines comes from a variety of proprietary developers located in America, Canada, Serbia, Venezuela and elsewhere. Anyone interested in learning more about this should consult the excellent HBO documentary from 2020 titled: Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections.  In the film, our current voting systems were attacked first by Democrat Senators Amy Klobucher and Elizabeth Warren, who spoke out against using them when this issue was brought up in Congressional hearings.

Their essential argument is that they can be manipulated by foreign bad actors.

How Would Communist China Steal the Election?

It is the view of Communist China and their Central Party Secretary Xi Jinping that they are in a People’s War with the United States, and we should expect that the Chinese will use their intelligence services to play a role in the 2024 election. Although their role in the 2020 election was never investigated, given the change in administrations, there is their funding of communist front groups in the United States during the George Floyd and Antifa riots and the logistical support that the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas appears to have been providing such groups.

It is likely no coincidence that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ordered that the Chinese Houston consulate cease all operations on July 21, 2020 for, among other things, their on-going and aggressive espionage activities in the United States. In the days after this investigation plumes of smoke could be seen from the consulate as CCP staff burned the embassy’s documents.

In 2024 we should expect them to be even more aggressive. Consider the fact that Communist China can counterfeit U.S. $100 bills, as can North Korea. If we apply this to absentee balloting in American elections, we simply have to ask whether Communist China would, with their vast intelligence and influence operations budget, use a small fraction of their resources to counterfeit hundreds of thousands or more ballots in each of the seven swing states that decide a U.S. presidential election.

Counterfeiting American election ballots is radically easier than reproducing U.S. currency, which has many sophisticated security features, and is printed on special paper with special ink.

Election ballots  have no security features. As a practical matter the Chinese will have access to the same paper stocks being used, easy access to the actual PDFs of the ballot, and ready access to U.S. voter rolls (themselves highly unreliable in many circumstances). Using artificial intelligence, they can collect the signatures of every voter through databases used in the signing of checks, credit cards, and other methods that require a signature, even if some of this required the surreptitious acquisition of signatures,

Communist China’s People’s Liberation Army has a cyber unit of some 600,000 men and women who engage in hundreds of thousands of cyber-attacks on U.S. banking, financial, and industrial systems daily. And, they have thousands of warehouses around the United States from which such ballot counterfeiting could operate.

Given that the Chinese have the capacity financially, the interest strategically, and the desire politically to see a “soft on China” president elected, whether it is this election or any future election, it would be a small investment on their part to engage in such measures.   And to frame it differently, what would we do as a country if we knew with absolute certainty that Communist China was going to print up one million ballots of low-propensity voters for each of the seven swing states for the Democrat nominee for president and have them inserted into the system somehow?  The low-propensity voters are not going to complain since they don’t vote in any case. Would anyone dare to insist on in-person balloting, or would that be called an effort to disenfranchise minority voters? Or would we simply watch as a national election was stolen?

It should be of great concern that nowhere in the calculations of how to secure a U.S. national election has the subject of China and their ability to interfere in the election in this way been raised. China has every interest in deciding the election in their favor. If we had an adequate counter-intelligence capability in this country, or if we eliminated absentee balloting, it would not be an issue. Unfortunately, it is.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned in May that Russia remains the greatest threat when it comes to influencing a U.S. election, harking back to 2016 and the idea that the Russians wanted President Trump elected. She even noted that China and Iran could also play a role when it came to social media and artificial intelligence.

But If Director Haines genuinely believed in the Russian threat there would be an immediate call to ban on absentee ballots and their usage in the 2024 election, lest Russian President Vladimir Putin install his supposed puppet Donald Trump into the White House. U.S. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies know full well of the potential of an industrial level production of absentee ballots by foreign intelligence services that could decisively alter an American presidential election and therefore American history and are by all accounts doing nothing.  

Why is this not being debated as if the future of the American Republic actually mattered?

Are There No Safeguards Against This?

Though the actual running of elections falls to state officials, the federal agency tasked with securing the integrity of the election, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

This is the very part of the U.S. government tasked with securing our border and therefore the country itself, which has allowed in over 10 million illegal aliens—some of them criminals, terrorists, and foreign combatants.  If this department cannot keep our borders secure, how will they be able to guarantee that our next presidential election is secure?

Equally important and not insignificant is the fact that back in June Michigan Democrats passed Bill #603, which now strips away the authority of local Boards of Canvassers to investigate allegations of suspected election fraud in the event of a recount and subpoena individuals involved with their investigation.

This overturns an authority that has existed for 70 years in our statewide elections, but now this investigative power of the local Board of Canvassers will be turned over to the state level and investigative and subpoena power will be given to the Secretary of State and Attorney General offices. 

This is not insignificant.  In the 2020 election irregularities were reported in 79% of the precincts in Wayne County and when their Board of Canvassers attempted an investigation they were met with death threats. Additionally, as an important swing-state in this year’s election, Michigan is sending over 1 million absentee ballots for the 2024 August primary, including 26,000 dead citizens that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson refuses to purge from the absentee voter list. 

A federal court has turned down Benson’s motion to throw out a lawsuit filed against her for refusing to remove these 26,000 dead voters from Michigan voters rolls. Instead of simply settling the lawsuit and agreeing to finally remove the dead voters, Benson filed a motion to dismiss the case. The good news is that because of this recent federal court ruling, Michigan might be one step closer to fixing this problem, whether Benson wants to or not.

On the national front, this looming threat is not lost upon the Republican Party, as evidenced by the push to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility ("SAVE") Act. While non-citizen voting in federal elections is prohibited under federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 prevents states from confirming citizenship status at the ballot box. Only New Mexico, Tennessee, and Virginia even require applicants to provide a full social security number to register to vote.

In the interest of mitigating that threat, the House Of Representatives passed the SAVE Act, which would have required voters to present proof of citizenship to cast their votes. However, that effort seems futile given the opposition the legislation faces in the Senate. Furthermore, it would inevitably be vetoed by President Biden even if it was able to be passed by both bodies on Congress with any feasible voting margins to get it on his desk to begin with too slim to overturn the veto.

Like Georgia's Election Integrity Act of 2021, Democratic opposition to the SAVE Act has been framed as if its measures are intended to violate voting rights instead of protecting them. In response to the threat the massive influx of illegal immigrants presents to the result of the 2024 Presidential Election, Democrats have repeatedly pointed out how proof of citizenship is required to be able to register to vote and as such the necessity of presenting proof of citizenship at the polls is a redundant complication that poses the potential to inhibit citizens from exercising their right to vote.

Although non-citizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections, the framework created by Democrats to address the ramifications of the influx of illegal immigrants into the country shows that those measures also facilitate bypassing federal law to get them registered as voters.

By expanding the pool of resources available to illegal immigrants coming to the country such as making them eligible for things like welfare benefits and driver's licenses, those undocumented migrants have been able to receive voter registration forms without needing to present any proof of citizenship.

The magnitude of this threat is exemplified by the fact that 46 states have provided voter registration forms to illegal immigrants applying for welfare, driver's licenses, and the like. Only North Dakota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming have implemented more stringent measures to prevent potential voter fraud.

There are several problems, of course, in stealing an election. We have seen them over these past four years. However, if an election is so obviously stolen that everyone in the country believes it to be the case, you will have set the stage for an ungovernable country for four years and there will be a constitutional crisis even greater than the one we have today.

What Is to Be Done?

The only real remedy for all of this is to conduct the election only on November 5^th - not through  some multiweek voting scheme - by human beings in person, who show their identification and cast ballots that are counted by other human beings in the most transparent way possible.   

Absentee ballots could be used for the military overseas or the indefinitely confined. Every other voter should have to show up in person. In a world of cyber warfare and artificial intelligence, only a system that relies upon the actions of a human being verified by other human beings present in the room will do.

Many believe  that this November election will be “Too Big to Rig.” That may well be the case, but this  election in 2024 in the key swing states will now be conducted by some of Trump and Kennedy’s  most vicious political enemies. That does not mean the election cannot be won by Trump or Kennedy. What it means is that they have to win by such an overwhelming margin that even the concerted efforts of foreign actors  and the billions spent by dark money groups, cannot overcome it.

In the war we find ourselves in -  a war for the future of the American Republic - it is critical that Congress, the President, and the political class of the United States do everything in their power to ensure a free and fair election this fall.   This may be the only thing separating this country from a genuine civil war, where citizens no longer believe that they live in a republic, and that their vote no longer matters.

This is the logical result of the political war being waged against the United States by enemies foreign and domestic and the rise of technologies that could easily undermine America’s voting system.

If it truly is the strategy of China and Russia that America be divided, there is no better way to achieve this than to corrupt our electoral process in this manner.   Americans will find out whether they are still one people or whether they will allow our enemies to divide us.

Let us pray that the better angels of our nature prevail. Let us also recognize that if ever there was a time for the American people to humble themselves before God, to ask his forgiveness and to pray for justice this fall, now is the time.

Brian T. Kennedy is President of the American Strategy Group and is Chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China. He is a Senior Fellow, board member, and former president of the Claremont Institute. Follow him at @BrianTKennedy on GETTR and Truth Social.