Audit Every State, Audit Every Election
"We need an army of patriots swarming this state, swarming this country."
Two and a half weeks before the midterm election, The Heritage Foundation held a seminar titled “It’s Time to Audit: Every State, Every Election.” Since Heritage is a far-right, Koch-funded think tank, the call to audit every state might seem surprising — but it has become the standard rightwing demand.
In Texas, a state Donald Trump won, Republican leadership is full of people who refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election. In November 2021, Governor Greg Abbott and the GOP gave the Texas Secretary of State’s office a $4 million budget to form a Forensic Audit Division. FAD is tasked with performing county-level audits throughout the entire state, under the leadership of an attorney named Chad Ennis.
Ennis was one of the speakers at Heritage’s seminar, along with Texas state senator Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) and Hans von Spakovsky (the manager of Heritage’s Election Law Reform Initiative). They discussed minimum standards that should be met for audits and the new robust industry that could grow out of the demand for professional vote auditors, emphasized that auditing should be done at the country level and not federal, and reminded everyone that the first step of an audit is auditing the voter rolls before the election.
Despite delivering this message from the hyper-partisan Heritage Foundation, they promised they were nonpartisan. Ennis even explained how to get Democrats on board. “I think what's going to happen is that the pendulum needs to swing and both sides need to go through a round of losses. And then I think everyone will come around to it, because it's something that needs to be done.”
If the Republicans win, it’s on the Dems to want an audit from FAD. If the Republicans lose, the Dems will be angry about the audits because they just don’t get it yet.
Of course, Heritage and the state of Texas aren’t the only ones calling for audits. It’s common within the right to find various groups working toward the same ultimate goal, but with very different motivations — oftentimes, leaders spearheading a cause are motivated by personal reasons.
Last year, QAnon influencer and disgraced attorney Lin Wood ran for South Carolina GOP Chair against incumbent Drew McKissick. Since McKissick conceded that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Wood considered him a traitor and made it a central part of his campaign.
A month before the election, Wood started messaged his 800,000 followers on Telegram that McKissick had a history of cheating. By May, Wood had honed in on the ES&S machines used to tabulate votes in South Carolina, telling his followers “South Carolina must get rid of the ES&S computer voting machines…We must return to voter ID, paper ballots, and fingerprint verification and confirmation.”
When Lindsey Graham endorsed McKissick, Wood turned his ire to him.
I talk the talk and I walk the walk.
Drew McKissick and Lindsey Graham, i.e, The McKissick/Graham SC Cabal, cannot claim to do so. Check their records. They are all hat, no cattle.
Their 2020 SC success was the result of the popularity of President Trump. In Lindsey’s case, he likely got quite a bit of help from the ES&S computer voting-fraud machines.
There is no way Graham received almost as many votes in November 2020 as President Trump.
Do an audit of the SC November 2020 election.
I bet McKissick and Graham would fight tooth and nail against an audit.
And now the McKissick/Graham SC Cabal is planning to cheat again in the election of the next Chair of the SCGOP.
We The People cannot allow our votes to be stolen again.
The ES&S machines used in South Carolina are ballot marking machines; voters select their choices on a touchscreen, and the machine prints out a paper ballot. This is by far the most common way to vote in person in the US. 70% of US voters will hand mark their ballots this year, 23% will use a machine that marks a paper ballot, and 7% will vote on a machine that does not mark a paper ballot (Reuters has a very useful page explaining ballot styles). Despite Wood’s wishes, these votes are almost never counted by hand; local races and initiatives would make the process incredibly arduous.
Wood was a carpetbagger, becoming a South Carolina resident in February 2021, and recruited to run by a man named Pressley Stutts. Stutts, a local Tea Party leader turned MAGA patriot, was extremely far right (The Daily Beast did a great job covering Stutts if you want to read up on him). At the same time Wood was up for state GOP chair, Stutts was vying for a spot on the Greenville County GOP executive committee, and two more Tea Partiers turned MAGAs were running for Greenville chair and vice chair.
All five of them lost their elections. For Wood, the election was a blowout. He received 28% of the vote to McKissick’s 68%.
Of course, things didn’t end there.
Stutts and the other Greenville candidates contested their results. For two months, they harassed the “RINO” Republicans that had won the positions they wanted. On July 8, the fairly elected Republican officials resigned, citing the ongoing “intimidation, threats, bullying, disenfranchisement and character assassination” they faced. On July 10, I attended the Liberty for All festival in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where both Stutts and Wood were speakers.
High off his recent victory, Stutts implored us all to participate in similar ways for the good of the country.
But what I want to encourage each and every one of you to do, you're sitting there today and you say, "well I'm just me, you know, I've got an eighth grade education. You know, I just make only $10 an hour, what can I do?" There's a lot to do. Because we want you to get educated, hopefully today you're going to get educated, then hopefully you're going to get motivated. And then we're going to get you activated, because we need an army of patriots swarming this state, swarming this country.
Stutts didn’t invent the idea of recruiting an “army of patriots.” It’s straight out of the standard Tea Party playbook. While Lin Wood’s participation makes the South Carolina GOP’s story more well known, there are countless Pressley Stutts across the country, riling up and encouraging participation from countless Republican voters — including the bullying, harassment, and intimidation tactics that helped bring Stutts his own success.
Since losing his own election 2 months prior, Wood had doubled down on his “audit everything” stance, and was working hard to spread the message. On June 2, 2021, Flynn messaged his Telegram followers that “every State should demand forensic audits,” and Wood promptly cosigned it. This idea was highlighted in his speech to us in Spartanburg.
What happens in Georgia has an impact on South Carolina. And what happens in South Carolina has an impact on what happens in Georgia. So when I tell people you need to have a full forensic audit of your vote in November 2020, in South Carolina, they go, “Oh, no, well, Trump won. So we don't need to do anything.”
Wait a minute. If you do a forensic audit of South Carolina, who uses the ES&S voting machines, the computer machines, and you discover, as I am confident that you will, that on the down ballot and including on some of the votes for Trump, they cheated. So you need to find out about the cheat in South Carolina, because that will help us people that used to live and do live in Georgia…
Call your legislators. You call your local people and you demand a forensic audit of the South Carolina vote. And you will learn that you were cheated. And you will then get rid of the computer voting systems, which were designed and introduced to cheat.
Get back and have a paper ballot. If you don't have integrity in your vote, you have no integrity in your leadership. And if you don't have integrity in your leadership, you will run down the rapid course downhill to living in tyranny where the leaders tell you what will be done, and the voice of we the people will be lost. That's where we're heading and we're heading there quickly.
Because if you have illegal elections and illegal leadership, you lose the rule of law. And if you lose the rule of law, you have lost control of your ability to protect your freedoms that were granted to you, not by government, but by Almighty God.
After Wood spoke, audience members mingled with each other. At my table, one woman was confused, and asked if we could explain to her why Wood wanted us to audit states Trump had won. After a man explained the idea of knocking out down ballot races, she smiled. She told us now that she understood, she would start making calls on Monday.
The Heritage Foundation hosts seminars in Washington, DC, the very swamp Trump promised to drain. Speakers wear suits, and attendees are lobbyists, consultants, and political operatives, all looking to network. Heritage does not go to southern towns with 40,000 residents, telling people who make $10 an hour that they are valuable, and that their participation is necessary for the movement.
They don’t need to; everyone has their own role.
While Lin Wood is still worried about 2020 and taking out his down ballot enemies, Chad Ennis has made Harris County (Houston) his focus. Days before he spoke at Heritage in October, right before early voting started, Ennis sent a 15 page letter to the Harris County Elections Inspector, notifying them that election monitors and attorneys would be overseeing their election. But given the leadership in Texas, there is a legitimate concern that this is more intimidation than monitoring. Houston’s mayor requested federal monitors from the DOJ, saying “these actions appear designed to chill voters' trust in the election process in Harris County, and to disrupt and intimidate local election workers as they execute their duties.” (The DOJ is sending election monitors to Harris, Dallas, and Waller counties.)
The problems in Texas extend beyond Harris County. Outside of Dallas, a ticketed event featuring prominent election deniers walked citizens through filing their own election lawsuits, and encouraged them to “get involved as poll watchers, election judges, or amateur election-fraud investigators ahead of the November 8 general election.”
In Arizona, Maricopa County election workers have already received over 100 violent threats, including “you will all be executed.” Rightwing figures across the state have encouraged their supporters to intimidate voters dropping off ballots at ballot boxes.
In New Mexico, the Otero County commission voted to get rid of voting machines and to hand count ballots. The county clerk, backed by the current Secretary of State, has refused to comply for 2022. But that could change next election; a member of the QAnon Secretary of State coalition is running for office in New Mexico.
Twitter and Facebook have allowed misinformation and lies to spread, not even bothering with the half-hearted notices they threw on some posts in the lead up to the 2020 election.
Threats have spread to election workers across the country, with the FBI receiving thousands of tips about violence.
Even if the democrats sweep the election, the right will not be giving up peacefully. Every time the right is allowed to intimidate and harass vote counters, file frivolous lawsuits or bully voters, or have leadership spreading lies, we move one more step away from democracy.
Do not be lulled back into the complacency many seemed to feel after Biden won in 2020.
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Tf?!? I can’t even post a meme here.. what will I do with my life 😢