North Dakota Shows the Way Ahead for Election Reform, and the Governor Doesn't Know It

Topic: Elections

With the work week coming to a rapid close, today is a good day to put a bow on the topic of voter registration, especially the automatic kind.  I’ve covered it extensively, with a full writeup on Pennsylvania’s frantic efforts to prevent a Trump victory, a quick reference guide, a Rumble talk, and finally, last night’s X Space.

Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) is bad news.  It would take belief that Governor Josh Shapiro is an altruist who would oppose his own party by allowing hordes of Trumpers to become registered to vote and disadvantage his own fragile coalition to think that he did us any favor whatsoever in commissioning the state’s DMV to enhance the pool of available voter registrations.

Here are the stats on AVR, once more:

Trump lost 18 out of 20 states and Washington, D.C., running AVR in the 2020 election, 243 electoral votes to 9.

Trump won 23 of 30 states not running AVR in the 2020 election, 223 electoral votes to 63, and these numbers only increase when undoing the cheating in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.

One of my favorite literary qualities is irony.  Indeed, it is quite ironic that two of the governors challenging President Trump for the GOP presidential nomination have made election reforms that are worthy of mentioning, if even as feathers in the cap, given that 80 percent of GOP primary voters believe President Trump was robbed of reelection thanks to widespread cheating.  One of them is Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who created an Office of Election Crimes and Security, and signed a bill making ballot harvesting a felony.  While some colleagues in Florida have given me their opinion that both actions were for show and largely ineffective, it at least suggests there was reason to doubt election security at the time they were signed off on.  DeSantis, of course, can’t discuss election security because it would lead to a conversation that confirms there is no market for another candidate, because the one we had in 2020 was not actually vulnerable to lose reelection and should therefore still sit behind the Resolute Desk.

The other gentleman in mind probably doesn’t even know that his state, not Florida, sets the standard for what American elections ought to be.  That man is North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

Burgum governs a state that has the cleanest 2020 election result, evident through analysis of North Dakota’s 53 counties and their implied trends from 2012 to 2016 to 2020.  Who knew that a blowout state in the Great Plains would provide such great insight for fixing a national crisis?  This state is the gold standard for voter registration, and subsequently, election management.  Why?

North Dakota is the only state that does not have voter registration.

That means there exists no pool of fraudulent or otherwise ineligible registrations from which to draw mail ballot requests or assign fraudulent software-assigned ballots to.

If machines, software, and mail ballots are the guns used to blast elections to pieces, then voter registrations are the bullets.  Ban machines all you want; a corrupt voter roll will still yield filthy mail elections.  Ban mail ballots all you want; a supply of fraudulent registrations will leave electronic elections open to manipulation.  The voter roll, depending on its accuracy, is either the foundation of a clean election or, conversely, of a corrupt one.

How does one exercise the right to vote in North Dakota?  From the above state link:

A large percentage of precincts in North Dakota maintain a list of voters who have voted in previous elections. When a voter approaches a polling location they are asked to provide an acceptable form of identification. Then the election board will attempt to locate the voter’s name on the voting list. If the voter’s name is on the list, the voter’s name and address are verified and the voter is then allowed to vote. In precincts that do not maintain a list of voters the election board begins each Election Day with a blank poll book. As each voter’s name and address are verified, a member of the election board enters the information into the poll book.

If the voter is not on the list, either because the voter is new to the precinct or for some other reason, or if the voter is suspected of not being a qualified elector of the precinct, the voter may be challenged. As part of the challenge, the voter is asked to sign an affidavit swearing to the fact that he or she is a qualified elector of the precinct and therefore qualified to vote in the precinct. If the voter agrees to sign the affidavit, the voter must be allowed to vote. If the voter refuses to sign the affidavit, the voter may be denied the right to vote.

So What?

My baseline hypothesis since the 2020 quasi-election is that the election was clearly a farce because one candidate, Joe Biden, if we take President Trump’s vote totals at face value, has far too many votes nationally that defy voter registration trends, and all valid electoral trends, indicators, bellwethers, and predictors available, some of which have been present for as many as 132 years leading up to the 2020 race.

What is interesting about North Dakota’s 2020 numbers that lead me to believe voter registration is the true catalyst for massive election manipulation? Consider the following:

While America experienced an unexpected dual-candidate turnout explosion (only Trump’s turnout boom could have been predicted based on available open-source information), North Dakota somehow did not:

North Dakota

Total Votes, 2012, President: 322,932

Total Votes, 2016, President: 344,360 (+21,428, +6.6%)

Total Votes, 2020, President: 361,919 (+17,559, +5.1%)

North Dakota had more net new votes cast for the 2016 race between Trump and Clinton than it did for Trump’s race against Biden.  How did adjacent states, all operating voter registration, shake out?