Fan the Flame to Ignite the Inferno
It was the will of people with an unquenchable thirst for freedom that gave birth to the United States of America. In the extreme, the people went to war to assert their will. Independence was won; slavery ended. The will of the people is peacefully expressed today when citizens cast their votes. Wars of ideas are fought at the ballot box and winners and losers emerge. Losses are hard to take. The unwavering confidence of the voters that election results accurately reflect the will of the people is essential to accepting them and moving on.
The will of the people is being undermined by the unverifiability of Wisconsin’s elections and the refusal of those who are accountable to address the system flaws. In an age where cybercrime is the fastest growing crime in the world (Criminals do not rob banks with masks and guns anymore, they hack their data systems), and the FBI logs 3,000 complaints of cybercrime every day, the Wisconsin Legislators and Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) are knowingly violating all of the best practices for secure databases by maintaining the names of more than four million ineligible voters on Wisconsin’s Registered Voter List.
An Advanced, Persistent Threat (APT) is a prolonged and targeted cyber attack where hackers gain unauthorized access to a network and remain undetected for an extended period, sometimes years. APTs focus on stealth and persistence, often targeting sensitive data or critical systems. Many ATP’s are conducted by state-sponsored actors or well-funded organizations, enhancing their sophistication and resources. They are patient and methodical making them especially dangerous and hard to eliminate.
New Horizons, a leading provider of information technology skills, warns that maintaining outdated data is risky and can lead to breaches. They stress the importance of “removing what no longer serves a purpose” because “the more data you store, the more there is to protect”. The four million ineligible voter names on the Wisconsin Registered Voter List include one time Wisconsin voters who have died, moved away, been convicted of a felony, declared incompetent, or had any other change in status that rendered them ineligible. The ineligible voters will have to re-register if they want to vote in the future. They no longer serve a useful purpose and must be purged.
Advanced, Persistent Threats are the methods by which Wisconsin’s Registered Voter List can be hacked, fraudulent ballots created from ineligible voter names, and elections stolen. They will not be detected after the fact; recounts, audits, and court challenges cannot expose these sophisticated crimes. It is critical that the election system design implements the rigorous controls that will prevent the crimes from occurring in the first place.
Ignore, Deflect, and Deceive
Verifiable elections will only come to Wisconsin as a result of an informed electorate demanding change. Every state Legislator and member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission is fully aware of all of the significant flaws that make our system vulnerable to cheating. They have chosen to ignore them. It is our job to confront them at every opportunity with “Why?” until the pressure becomes so intense that they respond, or we are able to replace them with people who will. There is no dispute about the contamination of the voter rolls with millions of ineligible voters, driver’s licenses that have been issued to non-citizens that can easily be used to vote, or the process of issuing student voting ID’s that does not require proof of citizenship, leaving only two plausible explanations for their refusal to act – corruption or cowardice.
Those who have the power and the responsibility to ensure that the election system is as impenetrable to cheating as humanly possible are only able to ignore the will of the people because of the utter failure of the media to do their jobs. Our Founders anticipated money and power would be corrupting influences and made a free press an integral part of the new Constitution to keep government officials honest. The blatant political bias and dishonesty of the media today make a mockery of the Founders’ charge to them that they follow the truth wherever it leads.
There has been no serious investigative reporting on the vulnerabilities within Wisconsin’s election system. Each week the public, which for the most part has turned away from the mainstream media due to its untrustworthiness, is fed deflections and deceptions intended to reassure them that “there is nothing to see here.”
Last week, in a typical example of the shoddy and deliberately deceptive “reporting” Molly Beck of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MJS) is known for, she provided a forum for the Executive Director of the Milwaukee Election Commission to, not only gloss over the “mistake” that was made during the primary election on August 11, but also to take a jab at the concerned voters who recognize cheating is possible in our flawed election system and are watching closely while they fight for verifiability.
The “mistake” made on election night was caught on the strategically positioned camera of CBS 58, leaving every thinking person who witnessed it to conclude the downloading mishap could not have happened five times in error. Nevertheless, Milwaukee’s top election official announced that election workers will now have to verbally state the steps they are taking when downloading results. This ridiculously meaningless added step went uncontested by Beck.
Beck, serving as a propaganda vessel for the Milwaukee Election Commission, was more than willing to feed the narrative that those who are concerned are the problem by including the statement that the Commission “recognizes the broader environment in which election officials and election workers now perform their work” and “Mistakes can quickly become the basis for misinformation or unfounded allegations about election integrity” and “It also reinforces the need to protect dedicated election workers from abuse by bad actors focused on continuing to sow distrust regardless of the facts.”
In the front-page headline article in MJS last Wednesday, Beck did all she could to delegitimize the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launch of a voter fraud initiative that will include Wisconsin and eight other states. In a statement to MJS, DHS identified the focus as illegal aliens voting stating, “Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences - including criminal charges and deportation.” Beck reported that “Governor Tony Evers blasted the Trump Administration for focusing on voter fraud”, (which he claimed is rare with no pushback from Beck about the lack of evidence to support that assertion) and “We’ll fight whatever they are doing” because “…it’s more of an issue of the DHS…” wanting people to “feel uncertain about a system that actually works.” In his most outrageous statement Evers went on to say, “There isn’t a state in the nation that doesn’t do it well and we’re one of them.” “…the idea that Trump is essentially trying to put a cloud over our work is just absolutely ridiculous…frankly, we have a good system.”
Fan the Flame
It is encouraging that the rhetoric opposing the essential reforms to the election system is escalating from those who know if cheating is no longer possible, the Democrats will not win. Opportunities for cheating extend far beyond non-citizen voting, and to hear Governor Evers assert that every state in the nation does elections well in light of what we know about our system here at home and have learned about other states in recent months simply reinforces that he and others invested in maintaining a flawed system feel the walls closing in. Rest assured that the Trump Administration is not limiting the review of election practices to non-citizen voting. Every Wisconsin voter invested in the integrity of our elections will welcome the involvement of the Department of Justice in Wisconsin’s Federal elections, consistent with their responsibility as defined in the National Voter Registration Act.
I have inserted a link to a 17-minute segment of a presentation I recently gave on restoring verifiable elections in this Blast. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FZ0Na728kMaxDEiu-MJy91nsykq1_k3P/view?ts=6a9359af&pli=1
I hope it will be useful to you as you continue to educate yourself and others about this critical issue of verifiability. Keep fanning the flame to ignite the inferno that will make the will of the people impossible to ignore. Verifiable elections will only come to Wisconsin as a result of an informed electorate demanding change.