Posted on 11/04/2020 8:05:12 PM PST by TigerClaws
President Donald Trump has ramped up his rhetoric about voting fraud to include foreign interference — specifically making the unfounded claim that “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES,” resulting in a “RIGGED” election.
Voting experts say there are numerous logistical hurdles, such as reproducing ballots in multiple jurisdictions, and security safeguards, such as bar codes and signature checks, that would prevent a foreign government from slipping large numbers of fraudulent ballots past election officials. Those safeguards make such a plan highly unlikely to result in fraudulent votes being cast, experts say, and certainly not enough to sway a presidential election.
Numerous voting experts told us they were not aware of any cases of counterfeit ballots being used in past elections. But if foreign actors were to attempt something like that this year, some experts believe the goal might not be to fool election officials, but rather to create chaos and confusion among American voters, many of whom might be voting by mail for the first time and might be tricked into voting with a counterfeit ballot that is never counted.
In his ongoing and often misleading campaign against the expansion of mail-in voting in the upcoming presidential election, Trump has repeatedly warned about fraudulent ballots. More recently, Trump has warned of foreign interference.
In a speech in Arizona on June 23, Trump posed these questions about mail-in ballots: “Will they be counterfeited by groups inside our nation? Will they be counterfeited maybe by the millions by foreign powers who don’t want to see Trump win because nobody has been tougher on trade or making our country great again?”
Speaking about the “tremendous potential for fraud and abuse” with expanded mail-in voting, Trump warned in remarks on May 28, “They can even print ballots. They get the same paper, the same machine — nothing special — they get the same paper, the same machine. They print ballots. And Bill [Attorney General William Barr] would have to do a great job to catch them doing it, or your state authorities would have to.”
In remarks on May 26, Trump said, “They’ll even be printing them. They’ll use the same paper, the same machines, and they’ll be printing ballots illegally. And they’ll be sending them in by the hundreds of thousands, and nobody’s going to know the difference.”
Trump’s concerns have been echoed by Barr.
Barr told The New York Times Magazine for an article published on June 1, “We’ve been talking about how, in terms of foreign influence, there are a number of foreign countries that could easily make counterfeit ballots, put names on them, send them in. And it’d be very hard to sort out what’s happening.”
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Barr warned that an expansion of mail-in voting “opens the floodgates to fraud,” and he specifically expressed concern about foreign countries creating counterfeit ballots. (Starting at the 15:00 mark.)
Barr, June 21: Right now, a foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots, and be very hard for us to detect which was the right and which was the wrong ballot. So, I think it can — it can upset and undercut the confidence in the integrity of our elections.
We reached out to the Trump campaign for clarification of the president’s statements. Did he mean that millions of fraudulent votes would be cast due to counterfeit ballots created by foreign governments? Or did he mean that counterfeit ballots might be distributed to confuse voters, either by tricking them into sending a fake ballot to a fake address or frustrating them to the point that they don’t vote at all?
We did not get a response. Counterfeit Ballots to Cast Fraudulent Votes?
If the president meant the former — that foreign governments would create millions of counterfeit ballots, and that enough of them might slip by election officials to swing the election — many voting experts say that would be impossible.
“The kind of fraud the President and Attorney General described is farcical. It cannot happen,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and author of “The Voting Wars,” told us via email. “Foreign entities would have to figure out how to make the exact ballot of voters on a large scale—with each ballot differing in terms of the races covered, duplicate the same paper stock, replicate bar codes on many state ballot envelopes, forge signatures (and potentially witness signatures) and have detailed voter information, such as last few digits of a drivers’ license. It is beyond ludicrous, and seems intended to do no more than undermine voter confidence in the integrity of the 2020 election.”
Wendy R. Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law, said there are ample verification processes in place, so she has little concern that foreign nations could interfere in U.S. elections in that way.
For example, she told us, most states that use mail-in ballots also use bar codes matched to a specific person in the voter files. In addition, ballot envelopes are keyed to particular individuals on the voter files and usually include personal information, such as date of birth or driver’s license numbers. And signatures are required and matched against ones on file. If foreign governments wanted to record fraudulent votes, they’d not only have to create an exact replica of a local ballot but also include that voter information, she said.
“There’s really a dozen different ways” that election officials would know if ballots were counterfeit, Weiser said. “It would be noticed and their ballots would not even be counted in the first place. There are multiple layers of protection.”
That is why, she said, she’s “not aware of any cases of counterfeit ballots. It’s just not something we’ve ever seen happen before.”
It is true that foreign actors are trying to interfere with U.S. elections, she said, and local governments need to be better prepared for that. However, she said she’s not worried about this counterfeit ballot scenario the president and attorney general describe.
Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School and voter fraud expert, agreed the logistical hurdles make the prospects of a foreign government successfully fooling election officials with counterfeit ballots a fanciful idea.
“Mail-in ballots are printed on special paper, with specific barcoding unique to each election office and special US Mail election insignia,” Levitt told us via email. “If a foreign country or a private entity went to the trouble to manufacture ballots, they wouldn’t be delivered by the USPS, and they wouldn’t be read or accepted by American election officials. Plus, even if they did somehow manage to discover all of the relevant non-public details for all of the different election jurisdictions, and get ballots through to individual voters with the races they expect to be voting on, elections offices match the signatures on the outside of absentee ballot envelopes to the signatures on voter registration forms.”
Explaining how and why the U.S. Postal Service would likely flag fake ballots, Levitt noted that “the USPS knows that election mail is high priority, specialized, and delivered only at certain times – and has certain procedures for it, so it doesn’t get lost.” Ballots that are “off in minor ways … would trigger pretty substantial alarms pretty quickly,” he said.
“Also, election ballots come from election offices,” Levitt said. “USPS knows when they’re coming and where they’re coming from. So in order not to trigger alarms, the fictitious foreign entity would have to not only deliver the ballots in a way that’s substantively undetectable for each individual ballot, but they’d have to have operatives physically in the same locations as all of the election offices whose ballots they wanted to replicate, delivering ballots for bulk mailing that carefully get intermingled (without anyone noticing) with the bulk ballots dropped off by elections officials. USPS isn’t going to deliver 100,000 ballots to Los Angeles voters if those ballots are dropped off in bulk in a Philly post office, much less if there are a truckload of ballots coming in from overseas. And even one slipup locally would be enough to alert postal inspectors, who are in contact with each other nationally.”
Considering all of those hurdles, Levitt said, “To believe that this could or would happen millions of times over is the plotline to a poorly researched middle school creative writing assignment.”
“The closest analog to what the President seems to be talking about – one of the vanishingly few absentee ballot modes that doesn’t have to be printed on special paper – is the Federal Write-in Absentee Ballot used so that servicemembers (and citizens overseas) can still cast a valid ballot even if they’re in combat conditions. It’s been used since 1986 to help servicemembers vote securely and reliably, as a failsafe for regular mail-in ballots,” Levitt said. “There’s absolutely no evidence that the program has been abused at all, much less with ‘millions of mail-in ballots printed by foreign countries,’ in the 34 years of its existence. And I find it surprising (and distressing) that the President would be calling to clamp down on the sorts of ballots regularly used by members of the military.” Sowing Chaos and Confusion
Logan Churchwell, the communications director for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group that opposes the expansion of mail-in voting, acknowledges that “there’s a lot to” the arguments made by those voting experts and that counterfeit ballots are “probably not going to trick election officials.” But focusing on whether counterfeit ballots might result in fraudulent votes being accepted and counted may be missing the point, he said.
“You’re not going to confuse election officials,” Churchwell said, “but you can cause confusion with the end users, the voters themselves.”
In other words, Churchwell said, counterfeit ballots don’t need to be good enough to fool elections officials, they only need to be good enough to trick some voters, or at least to cause confusion among voters and sow chaos and general distrust among the public in the elections process.
Although Churchwell said he’s never before seen anyone try to create counterfeit ballots, it would not be hard to get enough voter information and ballot details through publicly available data to create a convincing fake ballot, he said.
“Every tool you need to do it is a public record,” Churchwell said.
Churchwell said he assumes Barr is “getting some kind of information that this is some kind of concern.”
We reached out to the Justice Department to see if it has intelligence that foreign governments may be planning such an operation, but DOJ declined to comment. Barr told the New York Times for the June 1 article, “I haven’t looked into” foreign governments conspiring to produce fraudulent ballots. The Times said Barr offered “no evidence to substantiate that this was a real possibility.”
Five states now conduct elections primarily by mail-in vote: Utah, Colorado, Hawaii, Washington and Oregon. Numerous other states are attempting to expand mail-in voting in response to the coronavirus pandemic. States including Michigan, Iowa, Georgia, Nebraska and West Virginia have mailed absentee or mail-in ballot applications to registered voters. Other states, such as California and Nevada, have sent or will send actual mail-in ballots to all registered voters in their states.
Churchwell said bad actors would likely target states where mail-in balloting is being significantly expanded for the first time, and where most voters would not have a frame of reference to spot a counterfeit ballot.
“If the goal is to confuse people, you want to go to states where mail-in balloting was not that common and where people have not voted by mail before,” Churchwell said.
In such states, voters new to mail-in voting might be convinced to send a counterfeit ballot to a bogus address, where their ballots would simply be thrown away, he said. Or, Churchwell said, voters might get two ballots — a real one and a fake one — and not know what to think.
“That would only increase distrust of the system,” he said.
In a statement provided to FactCheck.org, Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the conservative Heritage Foundation, laid out a step-by-step plan for how a foreign government could create counterfeit ballots to confuse voters.
“If a foreign spy operation wanted to create mass chaos, confusion, and long delays in our election process, mounting such an operation that took advantage of states that are going to all-mail elections or are vastly increasing the use of absentee ballots would not be that difficult,” von Spakovsky said.
A spy agency could, he said, send counterfeit ballots to voters, or forge voter signatures on counterfeit ballots and send them to election officials. Unlike Churchwell, von Spakovksy is convinced a sophisticated foreign spy operation could slip some fake mail-in ballots past elections officials.
“Depending on how good the counterfeiting/forging operation is, the spy agency might be able to get a certain percentage of its fraudulent ballots accepted as real votes,” he said.
Again, that point is contested by the voting experts we spoke to and who, for the reasons outlined above, said it would be extremely unlikely to fool elections officials with counterfeit ballots. Von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, was a controversial addition to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity — which was formed by Trump, in part, to examine “fraudulent voting.” The commission was dissolved just months after it was created without reporting any proof of widespread fraud.
Regardless of whether counterfeit ballots actually result in fraudulent votes, von Spakovsky said, “even just causing chaos and confusion, damaging the confidence of the public in the integrity of the outcome, would probably be a worthwhile objective for foreign adversaries.”
We’ll let readers decide whether Trump is warning that foreign countries might produce millions of counterfeit ballots in hopes of registering enough fraudulent votes to tip the election against him.
But many voting experts say Trump’s warnings that hundreds of thousands or millions of ballots will be sent in and that “nobody’s going to know the difference” isn’t possible. There are enough logistical hurdles and security safeguards to prevent that from being successful, they say.
In some cases, Trump’s words are vague enough, however, that it’s possible he means that an expansion of mail-in ballots might entice a foreign government to produce millions of counterfeit ballots in an attempt to confuse voters, or to foment mistrust in the election system, not necessarily to record fraudulent votes. Although, at this point, there is no evidence that a foreign government is hatching such a plan.
"FOUR JACKS"?
PING!
Factcheck.org ??????
That’s on a par with SanFranciscoSnopes.
Just California, leftist, Know-it-all nerds.
not only this but the democrats could order massive amounts of absentee ballots , the democrat chant of “count every ballot” appears to admit cheating. Every Ballot should be VERIFIED as legitimate , not just counted
As everyone knows, other countries are unable to duplicate our bar-code technology.
“...prevent a foreign government from slipping large numbers of fraudulent ballots past election officials...”
Not true. Do 100,000 ballots and process them thru a single facility in Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, etc. and lock out poll watchers and cover the windows. If you own the vote counting mechanism it is no problem. NOBODY, I REPEAT is going to do a detailed audit of the ballots, match numbers against number of registered voters, precincts, etc.
Factcheck.org .... really....who owns them?
Machine Identification Code (MIC), also known as printer steganography, yellow dots, tracking dots or secret dots.
Okay.
Follow this for 4D chess playing Don...
1. Dems can’t resist cheating.
2. To do so they’ll have to either print up fake absentee ballots or get them from certain friendlies.
3. All that can be tracked.
4. The frauds can be PROVEN in court to be frauds and tossed out.
5. Federal election = federal crime and federal jurisdiction and mandatory sentences.
Maybe this is a giant STING?
Let them cheat.
Arrest the low level criminals and work your way up. RICO
the entire operation and take them all out.
Trump KNEW in July foreign actors or Dems could use mail ins to cheat.
Did he really do nothing to stop this?
Then his ‘What happeend? I dunno but I’m mad and...’ press conference was all part of the act.
Dems are making votes up RIGHT NOW and falling further into the trap.
None of this matters to demoncraps
They would be happy just to go “ ding ding ding “ on the counter ; Print “ joe “ on toilet paper.
You get the drift
The best solution is a REVOTE when fraud has been endemic
After Trump banned H1Bs and other assorted garbage from the USA, foreign Indian garbage claimed on many forums and social media that they will do everything legal and illegal to get Biden/Harris elected.
Their jobs and livelihoods depended on that.
PING
And how many counties are told NOT to match signatures? NOT to check for witness signatures?
Remembering the fires in the courtyard of the Chinese embassy (Houston, Texas) when our government officials were instructed to remove the foreigners from the location. (July, 2020)
At the time, all we could do was wonder just what in the world these devious men (and women) might be burning. Certainly, it was something they wished to completely destroy; shredders were not enough.
Fact check didn’t consider the possibility of insider collusion with the foreign entity.
No chain-of-custody being followed here.
Where did all these bags of ballots come from?
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1044919355933231/permalink/1045125159245984/
I posted this to show what Trump has done.
He knew this would happen.
The real ballots are encoded and Dems are falling into a trap.
They did this in CA to steal two Congressional seats. So we knew this was coming. The fake ballots will be tossed. We will win.
Freepmail incoming.
Darn near every book sold in the USA in recent years has been printed in China, doubtless that goes for many other kinds of printing as well. Just open the cover of any new book and look- China.
The firm that is behind weakening the very balloting safeguards this article above cites as protection against fraud :
Spygate Law Firm That Attempted To Overturn 2016 Election Behind 2020 Voting Lawsuits
The Federalist ^ | May 26, 2020 | Willis L. Krumholz
Posted on 5/26/2020, 9:57:06 AM by Kaslin
A Democratic effort is underway in at least 16 states to overturn restrictions on mail-in balloting and third-party ballot harvesting.
A nationwide effort by Democrats is underway in at least 16 states to overturn restrictions on mail-in voting and third-party ballot harvesting. States where suits have been filed include the swing states of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
The effort is being backed by the National Redistricting Foundation, a Democratic group headed by the Obama administration’s Attorney General Eric Holder. The suits appear to be funded by Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC. A Wall Street Journal headline from April read, “Biden Campaign Indicates Priorities USA Is Preferred Super PAC — Nod from the presumptive Democratic nominee sends a message to top donors on where to focus contributions.”
For example, the Pennsylvania lawsuit, funded by Priorities USA, seeks to mandate mail-in ballots, require the counting of votes received by mail after election day, and strike down Pennsylvania prohibitions on ballot harvesting, meaning the third-party mass collection of absentee and mail-in ballots.
The efforts in other states are similar. Democrat lawsuits in Minnesota take a similar, if less direct, path. A suit filed in Minnesota earlier this year by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee seeks to strike down a law prohibiting ballot harvesting.
Last week, conveniently just after Minnesota Democrats failed to get mail-in voting through the state legislature, another suit was filed by the Minnesota Alliance for Retired Americans Educational Fund, the local chapter of D.C.-based political action group Alliance for Retired Americans, a prominent left-wing and union-linked group that supports Democratic causes across the United States. The plaintiffs claim that requiring voters to have a notary public or registered voter witness and sign their absentee ballot is a threat to safety.
Another plaintiff in the same suit is a 24-year-old Yale Law School student, who complains that he cast his Minnesota absentee ballot too late in 2018, which disallowed it from being counted.
Getting rid of Minnesota’s rule requiring a witness when casting an absentee ballot and requiring that ballots be received by election day would turn Minnesota’s absentee voting system into a de facto mail-in balloting system. Critics allege Minnesota’s absentee voting system is already subject to abuse. For example, more than 25,000 Minnesota voters in 2018 had a challenged voter-registration status, meaning something in the state’s systems flagged them as ineligible to vote. Nevertheless, these voters are allowed to vote absentee and “self-certify” that they are eligible.
In the 2008 election between former Sens. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and Al Franken, D-Minn., election judges controversially rejected about 12,000 absentee ballots, and more than 1,000 ineligible felons were still allowed to cast votes in that election. After Coleman initially won by about 700 votes, a recount declared Franken the winner by a mere 312 votes.
Unfortunately, the corporate media has grossly mischaracterized these lawsuits, couching their aims in humanitarian terms. Minnesota’s Star Tribune ran a headline titled “Older Minnesota voters file suit to change absentee voting rules.” The corporate media has conveniently ignored that Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic to accomplish their longtime goal of overturning much of American election law.
Even more stunning, all 16 lawsuits are being run by Perkins Coie attorney Marc Elias. Elias was chief counsel to both the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee in the 2016 presidential election, and was one of the key figures in the Russiagate conspiracy to remove President Donald Trump from office.
Elias and another Perkins Coie partner, Michael Sussmann, hired the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS to try to create ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. This led to Fusion GPS paying money to former British spy Christopher Steele, who paid money to anonymous Russian sources via a British national named Edward Baumgartner, who had ties to Russia.
These Russian sources, working with Steele and Fusion GPS, came up with the allegations in the so-called Steele dossier, which circulated throughout the highest levels of the Obama administration during the 2016 election. This occurred despite no part of the dossier being anything close to verified. The intelligence agencies had good reason to doubt the dossier’s author, and knew it was politically motivated.
Nevertheless, the Obama administration’s intelligence agencies used them to spy on the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team. In one specific instance, Democratic lawyers Elias and Sussmann directly worked to plant now-debunked stories in the media about a server in Trump tower communicating with Russia’s Alfa Bank. Elias has faced no repercussions to date for his role in the Russiagate matter.
In total, Democrats plan to spend tens of millions of dollars on the lawsuits run by Perkins Coie and Elias. The Trump campaign and Republican groups are planning to spend at least $10-$20 million to counter the Democrats’ efforts.
*****
Problem is, no judge is going to allow testing of individual ballots without evidence of a crime being presented FIRST. The evidence is thus protected from discovery and exposure.
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