SAN JOSE, Calif.—A Southern California company was created to watch over California‘s current voting system. The co-founder is here to share what she found after eight years of research.
On April 24, the Silicon Valley Association of Republican Women invited Linda Paine, president and co-founder of Election Integrity Project California to talk about the corruption in the California elections.
The Los Angeles-based company sent out a 26-page comprehensive report on April 23 about what happened in the 2018 elections. It was documented the exact way they have been documenting California elections for the past eight years.
“It’s a formal complaint with the attached report asking homeland security and the department of justice to look into it,” said Paine. “If they will take the report and look at it, I think it will alarm them and then we hope that it will open up a conversation to give citizens of California reprieve and help restore fair and honest elections in time for the 2020 election.”
The group retained Judicial Watch in 2017 and was able to file a lawsuit against the secretary of state and the Los Angeles County registrar of voters. It required them to follow federal law to update their voting rolls.
“Our documentation was so compelling and strong that our attorneys told us it was the strongest NVRA case in the country,” said Paine. “For us, that was a huge win.”
The nonprofit has been researching this since 2011. It consists of a group of retired professionals who volunteered to document all the problems. They were constantly told that there wasn’t any voter fraud, and had no lawsuits to prove it. They couldn’t get an attorney to file the lawsuit until Judicial Watch stepped in.
“The result of our strength of documentation and of a Supreme Court ruling, making sure that the NRVA law uses the word ‘must’ instead of ‘may,’ force California to now start the process of first alerting and then removing 3 million to 4 million people who are on the inactive voter rolls list,” said Paine.
In January, Judicial Watch announced that California and Los Angeles County will be removing 1.5 million inactive voters from their voter registration rolls. Inactive voters are defined as those who have moved away or died.
However, they found that there were more registrations than those who are old enough to register to vote.
“According to data provided to and published by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Los Angeles County has a registration rate of 112 percent of its adult citizen population,” Judicial Watch alleged.
Paine said they found as many as seven copies a ballot. In November last year, nine people were charged with a voter fraud scheme in that county for forging signatures from homeless for petitions and registration forms.
“Both legal and illegal are being taken advantage of,” said Paine.”They’re registered to vote and they don’t even know it.”
That’s Not All They Found
In addition to addressing voter fraud, Election Integrity Project California also found that voting by mail is not secure.
“The problem with vote by mail voting is that ballot goes into an envelope and it must be processed before it can be counted,” said Paine. “It’s processed by many hands. And in that processing, if there are people doing that work of processing the ballot, that ballot can be changed or just simply tossed out. If that’s possible to change a ballot through the remaking process, then the real question is, are the people voting at all?”
The current voting procedure in California is forcing people to vote by mail. Paine and her volunteer group have been working hard to ensure that every vote counts and there’s voting integrity, as their mission states.
“We’re pressing into Congress to make changes in the federal law because now we’re proven that the federal law, NVR Section 7, has opened up the possibility of manipulating voter registration and we’re calling on the federal government to investigate the state of California.”
Why We Should Care
Peter Kuo, vice chair of the California Republican Party, was surprised about the level of corruption in the elections.
“We fled our home country to come here to a Republic,” he said. “And that is the value we are pursuing. Why are we voting again for a socialist country?”
“Article 4 Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution clearly states that the federal government must ensure that every state has a constitutional form of government,” said Paine. “And we believed that we proved in California that we are functioning more like an oligarchy.”
In her opinion, the elected feel they are elites and that they know more. And they are not worried about passing laws that people may not like because they cannot be removed from office unless there wasn’t an honest election.
When people lose their right to self-govern, then the elected leaders would not care what the people want and the people would lose their voice.
“If one state goes so rouge that the citizens have lost their right to choose, do they then slowly infect the rest of the other states? And we believe they do. Because other states are now using California’s procedures of using legislation to weaken integrity. We’re seeing that in other states and other states are asking us for help,” said Paine.
She mentioned that the Arizona Law Review wrote a 49-page document addressing the same concerns and referred back to Article 4 Section 4 of the Constitution.
According to Paine, Election Integrity Project Arizona was launched last week.
Most agreed that people need to be educated and motivated to advocate for honest voting.
“Be informed on the issues, learn about what the issues are, get your friends informed on the issues,” said Peter Soule, a former member of the Santa Clara County Central Committee.
“As citizens, we have to be involved in what’s happening around us and especially in our government, or we won’t have the liberty or the right to be free citizens,” Valerie Hill, CEO of Real Options.
“The bottom line is, this country was founded to be a constitutional republic, not a democracy,” said Paine. “The cornerstone of our constitutional republic is that citizens self-govern, beginning with having the right to choose those who will govern and remove those who are corrupt.”
