Show Notes
Special guests were Major Dave (Dave Goetze) and Meloni Wray, Director of Elections for Craven County.
Rick started things off by asking Meloni about changes since the last election, and she gave a smooth and even handed description of all that has happened. She also talked about how voters can help things go well by educating themselves, and pointed out that the Board of Elections has a new website, cravenvote.com, which is designed to be a tool to help voters learn what they need to know.
Next Rick opened the issue of voter fraud by observing, “Some folks claim there is none,” and he threw the question of voter fraud to Major Dave.
Major Dave’s background: he’s retired Army, and he handled and designed huge data bases for the Army and used them to do investigative work, and also taught related classes at the Army’s Professional Education Center.
Major Dave began by saying we do have voter fraud, and that most people look at what he calls the “front end” of it – voters who use someone else’s name, fake addresses, and the like – much of it things that people mentally associate with same day registration and voting during early voting. And there are people working on documenting that.
However, Dave believes there are thousands more fraudulent votes cast through the “back end” of the system, and that possibility is what he has been examining for months.
Dave quoted “chapter and verse” of several situations and gave exact numbers (he brought a cart on wheels with a gazillion print-outs so he could show us hard evidence to back up his remarks), but my simplified version of an “inconsistency” he saw that grabbed me is this…
After the polls closed, the vote totals continued to change for awhile. This is legitimately caused by two things. One of them is ballots that are postmarked by the right date, but arrive after Election Day. (For example, this is often the case with the ballots of members of the military.) The other thing is provisional ballots because some of them end up being counted and some of them are excluded for various proper reasons. In total, 36,000+ of these two types of ballots counted in the last election.
However, during the period these ballots were being counted, the governor’s race received an additional 50,000+ votes! WHERE did they come from??? That means 13,000+ more votes were added to the tally than were available to anyone from the 36,000+ pool.
Now, consider this; prior to counting those additional votes, Governor Cooper was leading by less than 10,000 votes which was within the margin for a recount. After these votes were added, Governor Cooper was leading by more that 10,000 votes which meant if former Governor McCrory called for a recount, he would have to have paid for the recount himself!
What happened then? Governor McCrory acknowledged defeat, and that set up a chain reaction. The Republican candidates for Attorney General, State Auditor, and Secretary of State also threw in the towel.
What do those 4 offices have in common? Those are the 4 state offices that have a statutory duty for elections. So, with the help of 13,000+ votes-from-nowhere, the 4 offices responsible for running fair, fraud free elections was flipped to Democrats.
How could that have happened? Those two classes of votes that can legitimately be changed after Election Day are normally handled within each county, and the changes are noted in a machine that is a stand alone machine and is not hooked to any system, and then the new totals are sent in.
That was done in the most recent election, but with a twist. When each report went in, a report of all the accompanying key strokes were required to be sent with it. That would make it possible for someone at the state level (or for someone associated with the vendor who supplied the machines) to pick it up from there and run with it and create, oh, I don’t know, say 13,000+ votes-from-nowhere.
Now it really gets interesting. In future elections, Directors of Elections in the various counties are not to use their stand alone machines to reconcile changes after Election Day, they must in-put their information into a connected system. This gives them less autonomy, less control, and less ability to keep up with all the data they might like to keep up with, AND it gives people at the state and vendor levels an easier way to create votes-from-nowhere!
Now, for one final link in this chain of information and logic, there is only one vendor in the state of North Carolina (they do have subcontractors), and they achieved their status in an interesting way. When bids were put out, the specs included that not only the company that won the contract, but the CEO of that company would be personally liable if anything should go wrong. At first there were a number of applicants, but the personal liability requirement caused all companies except one to withdraw, an outfit called ES&S. ES&S was awarded the contract, but guess what? The personal liability requirement was removed from the contract before it was executed!
Could the four seats (Governor, Attorney General, State Auditor, and Secretary of State) have been fraudulently stolen in our last election?