It’s election season in America, and that means early voting, absentee ballots, and making sure your voter registration is current.
It’s also a test of how well each state maintains its voter rolls, its election systems, and the ways each state assures its elections are conducted and counted fairly.
A new report from the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) counts at least fifty threats to election integrity. The report, just out this week, categorizes fifty different threats to election integrity according to whether they concern the influence of “dark money,” lawfare operations, voter fraud, or election fraud. The report documents examples of each and offers potential solutions.
On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, Peter Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers tackle the many ways elections can be rigged and, more importantly, how to make sure that it doesn’t happen.
Many states have been conscientious about cleaning their voter rolls — removing deceased voters, voters who have left the state, voters who are not U.S. citizens but who were registered through their driver’s license applications, and so forth.
States such as Michigan, however, have not been so fastidious, as the GAI report and the Drill Down hosts explain. “We always talk about this because this continues to be a problem in [battleground] states that are poised to matter,” says co-host Eric Eggers. “In Michigan, we’re seeing the number of counties with voter registration rates over 100 percent.”
Eggers wrote a book in 2018 called FRAUD that detailed many of the different types of election rigging and fixing that have taken place in U.S. history. That book, however, was published two years before the 2020 COVID pandemic, and rule changes made by some states that were ostensibly to make voting safer during the pandemic had the effect of making election security much harder to ensure.
GAI’s report covers how those rule changes, which many states have since been repealed or replaced, may have affected the 2020 outcome and threaten the integrity of the 2024 presidential election.
“We’re now seeing 53 counties in Michigan with more than 100% registration, which obviously means there are some names on there that don’t belong there,” Eggers says. He notes this isn’t always the fault of local or state election officials. Technically, it is the voter’s responsibility to call up their previous state’s registrar and ask to be removed from their voter rolls. “The book I wrote in 2018 came about because of a report [GAI] did that focused on duplication in voter rolls. We found more than two thousand instances of double voting in 2016 in Florida alone.” That report from 2017 is available on GAI’s website here.
GAI’s new report explains how those rule changes, which in many states have since been repealed or replaced, may have affected the 2020 outcome and threaten the integrity of the 2024 presidential election. The report divides the risks to our elections into five categories:
- “Dark money” such as “Zuckerbucks” that is used for public election administration.
- Lawfare operations that use taxpayer resources to “weaponize the justice system against challengers to incumbents.
- “Get Out the Vote” operations that use nonprofit status to target voters from a preferred political party.
- Vote Fraud by people who double-vote, fraudulently vote someone else’s ballot, or vote without being eligible to vote.
- Election Fraud that seeks to fix elections by illegal activities that take place during the counting or collection of ballots.
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