I am going to tell you how massive numbers of mail-in votes in elections can easily be falsified. I have revealed this before–including to Congresspeople and no one seemed to care. I am hoping that this time someone will because it’s on the top of everyone’s mind atm.
Let me be clear that this isn’t in support of Trump or opposition to Biden/Harris. I disapprove of the BOTH. But I’m hoping that people are paying more attention to something I’ve been aware of for more than a decade because of current events.
Mark my words: While everyone was arguing about the presidential candidates (who I continue to assert were cooperating behind the scenes), judicial seats, local official seats and local ballot initiatives were stolen. I’ve never believed there was a choice between presidential candidates who are always, and probably always will be, two sides of the same Federalist coin; but our local elections used to count, and they don’t anymore.
Last year, I found this article about a voter registration scam in LA where the petitioners were paying homeless people $1 and a cigarette to sign fake voter registration cards for them. (link #1 in footer)
The Times said that the fake wouldn’t be a problem for elections because the Registrar checks the signatures to make sure the ballot signature matches the signature they have on file in the voter registration card. So no one would be able to use these fake voter registration cards to vote because no one would know what the fake card’s signature looked like and so the signature on the ballot wouldn’t match the signature they have on file. They would just throw out a fake vote like that.
I’m going to explain to you why this measure is NOT sufficient to prevent fraud, and just how this can be manipulated by resourceful scammers.
A few (very few) fraudulent petitioners are running massive fake voter cards scams because they are paid to do so by sometimes complicit and sometimes unwitting political actors.
Scammers do this for two reasons:
1) they often get paid to register people to vote in voter registration drives
2) they sometimes can’t get people to sign unpopular petitions, and since they get paid per signature, they make people up if they can’t find real people willing to sign.
This happens every day on political campaigns and petition companies are tasked with the difficulty of weeding out these scams. It’s hard because they are often sophisticated. You see, the scammer spends all night on the internet in a hotel room doxxing names, addresses and birth dates of random people so they can “register them to vote” and then sign the petition with the fake registration.
In order to keep the signatures from looking the same, they often did what was called a round table, meaning that they would have different people randomly forging the signatures in a circle, passing it around so the handwriting would change.
But petition companies got wise to this because they started to see a pattern emerging in the handwriting. So, scammers solved this problem by increasing the pool of random people forging names. They would go out on the street and pay people to sign the fake voter cards and petitions.
Now, keep in mind that when they do this, they are sometimes registering fake people to vote, and sometimes registering real people that they doxxed but with new political parties and new signatures. The article said this wouldn’t be a problem for the elections because the Registrar of Voters checks signatures when people turn in ballots for the election, and if the signatures don’t match, they throw them out.
But the signatures will match for the fake ballots just like they do with the fake petition signatures IF they have copies of the voter registration cards and are good forgers (and the scammers are).
Making copies of voter registrations is standard practice in the petition industry. All major petition companies require it now. It’s a common point of contention between petitioners and petition companies that the petitioners have to pay 10 cents to 25 cents per signature to copy voter registration cards when they only get paid per signature and the registration companies don’t finance the copies.
Its a dodgy practice, but the petition companies think it is necessary for petitioners to make copies of their voter registrations and turn them in with petition signatures because petition companies need to verify the petition signatures before they pay the petitioners.
Here’s how that works: They use voter registration rolls, purchased from the registrar of voter’s office, to verify the signatures. Basically, they just enter the name of the person that signed the petition into a search engine and verify that the person is actually registered to vote at the address they provided on the petition.
These voter registration rolls do NOT have copies of signatures, last four of social or any other forge-able information. They actually are fairly safe. Plus people with stalkers can have their addresses withheld, and the registrar only gives this information to people who apply and accept responsibility for any misuse. Advertisers, campaigners and political parties use these rolls as well for mailers and door to door campaigns and even pre-election phone calls.
Petitioners often accuse signature gathering companies of using outdated voter rolls to verify signatures so they can underpay the petitioners. These petitioners say that petition companies re-verify the petitions with updated voter rolls and find out how many good signatures they really have, and how many valid signatures they just got for free because they ripped off the petitioners.
Whether this actually happens or not is irrelevant. The point is to explain that the petitioners see this as a problem, so in response they will often register a person to vote for the election while they sign the petition. They way, they can guarantee that it is a valid signature, and no petition company will try to say that it’s not valid.
They then turn in the voter registration card with the petition and viola! they have a signature that is guaranteed to pay out.
But if a petitioner is working several petitions at once for different petition companies and they only have the original voter card to prove that the registered the person to vote, then how do they prove to the other petition companies that they registered the person to vote?
The petition companies solved this problem by saying “provide a copy of the voter registration card with the booklet of signatures so we can verify that they actually registered to vote, the card was filled out properly and their signatures match.
So they do, and that’s why you’ll often see huge teams of petitioners clogging up the copy machines at Kinko’s in big cities at the height of petition season.
Now, the scammers make copies of their fake voter cards too (and the real ones if they get any), and I’ve long suspected that they will make extra copies of the voter registration cards for themselves so they can keep using that fake signature or real one on future petitions. This is conjecture only, but it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t.
After all, if they have a copy of their fake signature on the paper cards, and if they copy that signature with a good forgery on the next petition in that city or state, and the signature on the new petition matches the fake signature on file. They think they’ll never get caught–so why not save them and use them again?
This, this, THIS is why LA has 117% of their population registered to vote.
Now, you might be thinking, “wait, that would never work because you need a social security card or something to verify the person is real, and the fake person wouldn’t have a social so the fake voter would be thrown out, right?
wrong
“The voter registration application asks for your driver license or California identification card number, or you can use the last four numbers on your Social Security card. If you do not have a driver license, California identification card or Social Security card, you may leave that space blank. Your county elections official will assign a number to you that will be used to identify you as a voter. “
So, I ask you, what is to stop unscrupulous parties from using these fake voters they created with fake signatures in ballot harvesting schemes as well ? What’s to stop unscrupulous fraudsters from copying real signatures from disaffected voters? The chain of custody for this personal voter information has become very unstable and very insecure in the petition industry.
Besides, they’ve been caught doing similar before. That’s what the Acorn scandal was all about. The point here is that the LA Times article linked above said the forged voter cards wouldn’t be a problem for the election, and I just explained that they most likely will be.
This is NOT an Attack on the Initiative Process
Don’t get me wrong here. Direct democracy is VITAL to the health, safety and welfare of the American people. It is our last check and balance against an out of control legislature, enforcement branch and judicial branch. We can recall bad judges, change laws, introduce new ones to eliminate bad enforcement practices and recall elected officials who abuse their station.
WE NEED direct democracy, but our methods of preventing abuse have become sorely outdated and left gaping holes open for fraud.
If you were to look at this process from the perspective of a penetration tester, this is how I figure a group might try to steal the election in a vote-by-mail scheme:
1) Using copies of the real cards of real people they registered to vote, fraudsters could look for people in their stacks that haven’t voted in the past election or two, re-register them to vote in a high-density apartment building that has a lot of people at the same address (using the copy they have of the voter registration card to match the signature), then harvest the mail in ballots before the election, vote as they choose and sign with the forged matching signature.
The LA Times stated that the fake voter registration cards wouldn’t be a problem because the Registrar of Voters has the original signatures on file and if the signatures don’t match, then they throw it out. But I just explained exactly how the signatures WOULD match, AND how fake voters can make it completely past the registrar’s validity checks by people who are willing to break the law and forge names with templates they keep on file. They are ONLY subjectively validated by signature, and then, I’m betting not very well on the first count of the mail in ballots.
2) Fraudsters can use copies of the FAKE people that were registered to vote (with homeless signatures scams as mentioned in the articles above or other scams) with impunity. They don’t even have to wait a couple of elections to make sure they aren’t active voters like they would have to do with real voters. They can have them registered at any addresses they want and harvest the ballots with impunity, passing them off as real votes because they can forge the signatures that the Registrar has on file using their own copies of the same cards.
How do these fake voters get under the radar? Don’t they need to prove they’re real people with ID? NO! No DL# or SSN to verify you’re a real person? No problem! They’ll GIVE you their own four digit number and you don’t even have to know that number to re-register at a new address or vote in an election. There isn’t any purpose for the number. What they are saying is, there’s no need to prove you’re real.
My friend got 5 mailers from the election office mailed to her house this election for five people that no longer live at her address. The voter rolls haven’t been cleaned up in years.
We have more people registered to vote than actually LIVE in the city, and their only defense against fake votes is to check and make sure the signatures match.
This won’t work, and I have just explained why in detail.
I’m not going to get whacked for revealing this. It’s not a secret. It’s common knowledge and it’s why there are entities that are suspicious of mail-in voting. I’ve been complaining about it very loudly every years since I discovered this scam years ago. All I did here was explain it succinctly so those who are wondering what all the fuss is about can understand the background problem.
I explained it to a DA when I first discovered it, and he was just mystified and shocked that this scam was happening. It took two hours to explain the scam in detail. I have told politicians, lawyers, sent out mass letters to Congress about it, posted it on Facebook to 5,000 some-odd friends and followers, put it on discussion boards, told reporters, and on and on.
It’s really not a secret and perhaps my efforts, and the efforts of others like me, have had some small effect in the issue since there seems to be mounting resistance against the scam.
1) I don’t agree that forcing people to show up to vote is the only solution, but we HAVE to LET people show up to vote if they want to. We can’t have an all mail-in election. But we need some way to allow safe mail in votes too because some people just can’t go to the polls. Mail-in voting is necessary too.
2) We can’t have registrars replacing missing IDs or SSNs anymore. Last I checked, you don’t need an SSN to get a California ID, so there’s no reason not to require voters to use their ID to register anymore. Actually, I’m open to suggestion on that one because there could be other contingencies I haven’t considered and perhaps some constitutional implications–especially with the implementation of Real ID.
3) An alternative could be a more secure voter ID with a specific voter ID number assigned to the person that they need to know just like their SSN or ID. This number could even be anonymously registered in a national database to verify the voter hasn’t voted in multiple elections at the same time too. The difficulty with this would be that it would have to be completely anonymous, so the only thing you could do if you found duplicate votes is throw out both votes. That’s rough. Open to suggestions.
4) We need to clean up the voter rolls. There’s no reason to have so many inaccurate, outdated and fake registrations. It doesn’t just effect ballot initiatives and elections. It also affects redistricting plans, and in combination with gerrymandering, changes the course of entire elections.
5) We need to update the petition process to be more secure, and this includes letting petitioners do the work they do because they often inform the public of petitions that they didn’t even know were circulating. The vast majority of petitioners, I’d say 99% of them, are honest. The misconception that they are all fraudsters is perpetuated by a press that only highlights the bad actors involved. The massive, rampant fraud is being caused by a small cohort of bad actors who are taking advantage of security flaws–actually, gaping holes–in the system. Like having a backdoor in an operating system.
Please help us return security to our voting process so our vote finally matters again. Please share this information with every one you know, including representatives…again. The information bears repeating for as many times as it takes.