An Agenda Moving Forward

A Georgia Republican Party poll watcher looks over voting machine transporters being stored at the Fulton County Election Preparation Center in Atlanta, Ga., on Nov. 4, 2020. (Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

Commentary

We lost. And more importantly, America lost.

And no, it wasn’t a fair fight—and nothing the media and Nancy Pelosi’s Ministry of Truth say will convince us otherwise.

We watched the theft of this election take place right before our eyes.

So now, what are we going to do about it?

First, we the MAGA movement are not going away. We're not just the Republican Party but the Great America Party. And, as we learned during the railroaded second impeachment on Wednesday, there are many Republicans who hate our movement and want to destroy it just as much as the Democrats do.

The single most important task facing us in the coming months is to ensure that the Republicans who control the state legislatures in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin move immediately to re-install fail-safes into their election laws. Existing fail-safes broke down this year in a well-organized national campaign by the Democratic Party to destroy them.

Critical reforms include:

• End no-fault absentee ballots. We will never win another election if Democrats are allowed to stuff the ballot boxes with dubious mail-in ballots. We need to return to the system that worked for generations, requiring a voter to sign a sworn statement in front of a witness that he or she is physically absent from the state during the election period because of business, illness, overseas deployment or residency, or family emergency.
• End early voting, or at the very least, limit it to three days during the week before election day. Our constitution spells out the date for the national election for a reason, because elections are a rite of passage we undertake as a nation. It’s time for a binary decision, not a waffle.
• Specifically outlaw universal mail-in ballots and make sure the language of the ban is airtight enough to withstand the legal onslaught that will surely ensue.
• Mandate the cleaning of voter rolls with specific procedures requiring state secretaries of state to conduct weekly checks of the National Change of Address database to eliminate voters who have moved out of state, and of the Social Security death registry to eliminate the dead. Let them rest in peace!
• Require photo ID for in-person voting, and for absentee ballots require the inclusion of the number of the voter’s state driver’s license or other form of state ID on an inner sleeve created for this purpose. Passports should not be accepted since they do not establish state residency.
• Require that all electronic voting equipment be made in America by companies controlled by Americans.

State legislatures also need to strengthen the certification requirement for electronic voting systems to include automatic triggers for recertification if manufacturers or their proxies attempt to upload software “patches” after the ballots and the machines have been certified for a specific election.

As I revealed in my book, “The Election Heist,” electronic tabulating machines don’t actually count the paper ballots; instead, they count codes embedded in scanned images of the ballots. Because of this, state legislatures must mandate risk-limiting audits as Florida did in 2018. These audits, of roughly 2 percent of the vote total, test individual machines and entire precincts chosen at random by matching the machine count to an actual hand-tally of the paper ballots.

State election officials in Georgia swear up and down that they conducted a hand-recount of the paper ballots in November 2020, but they forgot to report the actual results. In Coffee County, for example, election officials could never get the hand-recount to match the tabulated result from election night. And in overwhelmingly Democrat areas in Atlanta, Republican poll-watchers were never allowed to actually examine the ballots or get closer than 20 feet away from the counting tables, which were run and staffed by Democratic Party operatives.

I’m sure readers can come up with other measures that would help to restore election integrity, but these would be a good start.

Next, the Republican Party needs to take election integrity seriously. And that means more than just fundraising to hire lawyers to litigate allegations of fraud after they have occurred.

County central committees and local Republican clubs must launch a massive effort to recruit and train volunteer poll-watchers and empower them to intervene during the ballot count, not afterwards. Guaranteeing meaningful access to poll-watchers from both parties and the procedures for challenging the count must be spelled out and written into state law, including real enforcement mechanisms when election officials flout them.

And these are just the mechanical reforms that must occur if we are ever to believe in the integrity of an election again.

Without them, we will continue to be the Banana Republic the Democrats established on Nov. 3, 2020.

Kenneth R. Timmerman is the best-selling author of “Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary and Obama blamed for Benghazi” and 10 other works of non-fiction, including “Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.” Ken’s fictional account of the 2020 election, “The Election Heist,” was released by Post Hill Press in August. He was a member of the national security and foreign policy advisory board of Trump for President and was co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 with Ambassador John Bolton for his work on Iran.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.