By Steve Levy
Of all the election integrity blockbuster stories that hit the airwaves over the last several years, this one might be the most significant. It’s the disclosure by the new FBI administration that FBI agents in 2020 had intercepted 20,000 fake driver’s licenses that were manufactured by the Chinese Communist Party for the purpose of distributing them in our inner cities to help facilitate their Chinese nationals living in the US to vote illegally through the mail-in the voting process.
Whoa!
This is exactly the type of scheme that many of us have been warning about for years. In fact, it underscores why former Democratic President Jimmy Carter said in his report issued in 2005 that mail-in voting represented the single greatest threat to election security in our nation.
But then came Covid, which was used as an excuse to dramatically dilute the safeguarding of the electoral process. At the same time that mail-in ballots were being sent out indiscriminately throughout the electorate whether requested or not, many of our governors and secretaries of state were unilaterally changing the rules to further weaken signature verification. Adding to the chaos was that many states were issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. Some like New York and California automatically gave people the opportunity to register when they went to state agencies, especially when applying for a license.
They further diluted the chain of custody by allowing for dropboxes to be placed in the middle of sidewalks so that political operatives could dump dozens of ballots that no one knows from whence they came.
Still other states were expanding the concept of ballot harvesting, where political operatives would knock on the doors in senior citizen complexes or densely populated apartment buildings to collect ballots for unrelated people. Another loosening of the chain of custody.
Many states that used to require both the Democrat and Republican election inspectors to sign off on a signature now only required one, and some states had their secretaries of state issue a unilateral decree declaring that signatures would be presumed valid.
If you don’t think that can lead to fraud, look at the experiment that was conducted by Nevada reporter Victor Joecks, who sent in absentee ballots for nine individuals. Affixed to their ballots were signatures in his penmanship. You would think that all nine would be rejected. Alarmingly, eight of the nine were accepted. The answer as to how many others throughout the nation followed this path, can only be answered with the following: We just don’t know.
We said that this dilution of election integrity would open the door to bad actors to try to influence our elections.
And now we see that the Chinese Communists were indeed trying to take advantage of the weakened laws. At this point, the FBI is not saying that the communist plot was successful. The shocking part is that they had the goal to try and we may never know what other attempts were made that got past us.
Why tempt fate? The ultimate irony is that a three-year investigation, millions of dollars, and dozens of hearings were invested to find out if the Russians had affected the 2016 election for Donald Trump.
It looks like there should also be investigations as to whether the Chinese were able to influence the election on behalf of Joe Biden in 2020. It was noted by the FBI that this was their intent.
Equally appalling is the then-FBI Director Christopher Wray quashed the investigation regarding the Chinese plot and buried the data so it wouldn’t help Trump or counter his narrative that the 2020 election went smooth as silk.
No one is saying to invalidate any past elections. But we are saying that we should learn our lesson from having diluted election safeguards to the point where our sworn enemies are now feeling emboldened to try to put their thumbs on the scale in our democracy, and that puts both parties and our entire system at risk. This is a wake up call. We better start paying attention.