The U.S. for years has been witnessing countless displays of people deliberately committing criminal acts, including felonies, that prosecutors refuse to charge. These include mass violence in cities, widespread gun violence (for instance here and here), and rampant vandalism and theft.
This anarchy is not helped by "revolving door" laws that put perpetrators back out in the street, movements to defund the police, and decriminalizing theft under $950. Target blames a loss of $400 million on retail theft by organized crime, and does not even touch on an industry-wide loss of $800 million just from theft of shopping carts.
If a populace is threatened, it is easier to control – as during COVID-19 restrictions, when most people agreed to be locked up. The people will look to the government for help. Poverty must be among the easiest ways to suppress people, as Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro produced in Venezuela. "The worse, the better," Vladimir Lenin is alleged to have said.
Meanwhile, massive criminality in the form of China poisoning American children wholesale with fentanyl and the world in general with COVID-19. China lied about its transmissibility and insisted on sending its people abroad well after its leaders knew how infectious the virus was; yet, to this day these mass murders go unaddressed and unpunished.
When 10 million ballots go missing and 226,000 are rejected in just one state, California, you know you have a problem. "After accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding, meaning election officials do not know what happened to them," according to a report by J. Christian Adams, President and General Counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. "It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients. But, under mass mail elections, we can only assume what happened."
"Mail ballots disenfranchise," Adams noted. "California's vote-by-mail demonstration should serve as a warning to state legislators elsewhere." That is, of course, unless a state wants to cheat. The Carter Commission, headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III -- hardly Conservatives -- warned against mail-in ballots as early as 2005; France has rejected them altogether.
"The nonpartisan 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform... noted among its many findings... [that] voting by mail creates increased logistical challenges and the potential for vote fraud, especially if safeguards are lacking or when candidates or political party activists are allowed to handle mail-in or absentee ballots," the Carter Commission concluded. It also mentioned as a serious problem, "ballot-harvesting": "eliminate the practice of allowing candidates or party workers to pick up and deliver absentee ballots."
Two threats to election integrity seem extremely pernicious,. The first is the possibility of unlimited amounts of money poured into not-for-profit non-governmental organizations (NGOs), especially if the donors are able to get a tax-deduction for tacking the word "educational" onto their donation. The educational NGO already has a list of likely voters – for instance for environmental preservation, climate change, whatever. The NGOs are presumably free to further "educate" potential voters in the election districts that will deliver the political result the donor wants.
Facebook has even set up a page for you to funnel your not-for-profit donation through its organization – what happens to the funds after that? What is the oversight? It was $400 million from Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook (Meta), that "saved" the 2020 election, as NPR put it. Is it possible that "click to donate" is something similar on a larger scale? What about unlimited donations from "dark money," where one is not able to know who gave it? How would one monitor that?
The second massive threat to election integrity is the surreptitious voter manipulation conducted by Google, Facebook and other social media – able to shift voters' preferences by tens of millions of votes without voters even being aware of it. "Google and Big Tech can shift millions of votes in any direction," notes Dr. Robert Epstein, who has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Both sides of the aisle are presumably being amply rewarded by lobbyists to do nothing, and even if Big Tech companies were to be broken up, they would just sell off a few acquisitions, and the result would be no different.
All this time, threats to our Constitution have been coming in hot and hard – such as suggestions to expand the Supreme Court until the number comes out "right" for whichever party is demanding it. As illegal migration, runaway inflation and the national debt all soar to unimaginable heights, no one seems to know who is actually running the country. The Biden administration has been trying to hire 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service agents to break the bones of small businesses who would rather pay up than try to find the money for legal or tax advice. With Executive Order 14067, the Biden administration has also been trying to launch a national digital currency -- already called a "massive threat to freedom" -- to replace the paper one, perhaps the better to monitor everyone's financial transactions down to the dime. Could a national digital currency be the government's newest Big Brother surveillance program? If ever a republic needed rescuing, it would seem this is it.
Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.
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