Killer Election Reform On the Prairie?

The Wisdom of Crowds Works For a Lot of Things, Why Not Voting Records?

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My former home state of Illinois is a wasteland in most ways these days. It’s run by the corrupt Democratic Machine and has been for decades. Corrupt Republicans in the state turn the entire political process into an Illinois Combine and it’s powerful. People are fleeing the state. The only thing that can save it is election reform.  Kennedy might not have won the Presidency without Illinois and Texas being stolen. Elections are stolen all over Illinois all the time. But, it’s hard to prove and hard to beat the Machine. They own the judges too.

My new state of Nevada conducted a shady election in 2020. Then, the Democrats gerrymandered the state. Other states have their own political machines that direct money and practice crony capitalism and patronage which is a drag on our economy and hurts citizens.

If you know one thing about Illinois, you know it’s very crooked.  From the Governor’s office right down to a city councilman. They have their hands in the till. At Senator Robert Dole’s funeral service, his daughter read a letter to the people that had congregated.  It said, “I also confess that I’m a bit curious to learn if I’m correct in thinking that heaven will look a lot like Kansas and to see like others who have gone before me if I still be able to vote in Chicago.”

However, if you are a Democrat in a heavily populated Republican state, you have the same interest I do in seeing that elections are fair and square.

If you know me, you know I have been investing in startups for a while now. I am keen on seeing startups solve problems. Some problems, like global warming, cannot be solved with a startup. But, voter fraud is a problem that might be able to be solved.

There is a way to hold unresponsive legislators’ feet to the fire.

I ran across this startup, VoteRef.com. They are methodically putting our nation's voter rolls online for the first time in U.S. history.  You can find out who's registered to vote in 10 states: Connecticut, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Jersey, and North Carolina. Not only who's registered, but you can also peruse a person's voting history, and, depending on the state, their party affiliation.  Remember when your neighbor told you they were Democrat or Republican?  In 26% of the states, you can find out for sure.

As we know, people that are intent on committing and fostering fraud in elections are against election reforms like voter ID, cleaning up old voter rolls, and transparency.  Fraudulent elections undermine our Democratic Republic that at least all politicians from both parties pay lip service to.

Personally, I don’t want another 2000 or 2020.  Democratic and socialist Georgia governor candidate Stacy Abrams still hasn’t conceded her loss. Virtually every close election these days has some aspect of it that is viewed suspiciously by the other side. There is way too much distrust between the people of the two dominant political parties for anything like that to happen again. By the way, can someone make sure the drains are working in Fulton County Georgia in September of 2022

Another allegation from 2020 is that too many people voted in certain counties. States like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania at least had the appearance of impropriety and that things weren’t on the level. OJ murdered his wife, but they couldn’t prove it in court. I have heard that about 2020 too.

Does VoteRef.com have a path to the killer election reform we've been waiting for?  They might.  You should sign up and check it out yourself.  Their killer feature is crowdsourcing. 

It’s not a joke that the dead vote in places like Chicago.  I was an election judge. You saw how they rigged the system in some ways prior to the vote even being cast and counted. Great breezes emerge from Chicago cemeteries on election day. With VoteRef.com you can find out who voted and who didn’t.  Did your aunt who died 10 years ago "vote" after she died? Did your "neighbor" who moved to another state vote? Did 55 votes emerge from a five-unit apartment complex?

This information has always been public, but never easy for the average person to access. You can download an entire state's voting list but good luck trying to wrestle a spreadsheet with thousands of pages.

Many vote fraud claims are swirling around the internet but election insiders know the two most vulnerable elements of the system: Sloppy voter rolls, and free-for-all absentee ballots.  That’s where the true business of elections gets done.  

A Pew study in 2012 found that 24 million voter registrations "are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate." Mark Hemingway of Real Clear Investigations said in 2019, "In sum, America's voter rolls are a mess and everyone knows it." For perspective, in 2020 there were 168 million registered voters in the US. Using the Pew data, 14% or more of registrations are inaccurate. That’s more than enough to swing an election.

All this sloppiness and lack of attention to detail provide golden opportunities for determined fraudsters to cast fake votes in those names that are nearly impossible to track down afterward.  The undemocratic process of ballot harvesting is also enabled.

That saps the confidence of voters and diminishes turnout.

Doug Truax,  the Founder and President of Restoration PAC/Action, has stepped in. He spent several million dollars in 2021 setting up the Voter Reference Foundation (VRF) and VoteRef.com. The model is the Baseball-Reference website, a wellspring of statistical information about baseball. Just the facts.

It is an enormously Herculian lift which is probably why it hasn't been done before. VRF is run by former election officials, with the help of data experts. State-by-state, county-by-county, they obtain massive voter lists and convert them to a user-friendly format. Soon, the public will be able to download data off VoteRef and analyze the data in any way they'd like. All 50 states will be posted online by the end of 2022 and updated permanently.

Truax is a conservative Republican who ran for U.S. Senate from Illinois in 2014 and almost pulled off a huge upset in the primary. MSNBC called him one of the most promising new political figures in the country. A West Point grad, he's also a successful health care entrepreneur with a proven touch on starting and growing companies. He's running the VRF more like a start-up than a political organization, thank goodness.

After the 2020 election, Truax wrote an op-ed in American Greatness outlining 10 steps to clean up America's elections. One was making election information available online "in as close to real-time as possible."

As distinguished Supreme Court judge Louis Brandeis said, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” We know that political powerhouses want to do things underground and behind closed doors. VoteRef.com gets the public a seat in the room where it happens.

There's no reason why voter lists should be shrouded in secrecy. The public pays for them and has an enormous vested interest in the accuracy and fairness of elections.  The decisions elected officials make can radically change our lives.

Unsurprisingly, VoteRef has already discovered discrepancies in every state they've downloaded. The votes cast and the votes certified differ by between 42 and 74,136 in the 10 states. Even in the state with only a 42-vote net discrepancy, North Carolina, the actual number of records that don't match is close to 25,000.

Why are we putting up with this unacceptable imprecision in our voting system, or worse?   It is time for citizens to hold election officials’ feet to the fire.

We cannot wait for legislatures and courts to clean up this mess. Many legislators don’t have an incentive to clean up voter rolls.  It’s time that "we the people," with the help of VoteRef.com, do the job. Sign up and check it out today.