What's Old is New in Election Integrity

Topic: History

The American media, in their insistence that our country’s elections have never been cleaner, leave themselves vulnerable to easy and accurate criticism by ignoring our history.  One need not travel far back in time, given America’s relative youth in a world of past and present national powers, to find stories like those pertaining to the Tweed ring of 19th century New York City.

In those days, William “Boss” Tweed was the head honcho of the Democrat party, which operated under the watchful eye of the organization known as Tammany Hall. With Tweed at the helm, Democrats deprived citizens of their rights to free and fair elections, and unjustly used these fraudulent representatives to advance a political agenda lawful voters did not want.  The Bill of Rights Institute wrote this about Tweed’s involvement in manipulating elections:

The Tweed Ring…manipulated elections in a variety of ways.  It hired people to vote multiple times and had sheriffs and temporary deputies protect them while doing so.  It stuffed ballot boxes with fake votes and bribed or arrested election inspects who questioned its methods.  As Tweed later said, The ballots made no result; the counters made the result.  Sometimes the ring simply ignored the ballots and falsified election results.  Tammany candidates often received more votes than there were eligible voters in a district.

Does any of that sound familiar?  Aren’t modern governors and federal representatives intimidating citizens for sounding the alarm about election manipulation?  Just as in those days, citizens today aren’t allowed to see the receipts of election materials and supporting documentation that would easily put claims of malfeasance to rest.  Quite simply, We the People are fighting a battle for transparency.

Notably, controllable law enforcement is mentioned in the Tweed article linked above. Sheriffs are essential for upholding the rule of law in our counties, and many have turned a blind eye to the things they know are going on in their counties.  I had one notable interaction with a California sheriff last year who nodded along in agreement at my data, and even insinuated his willingness to ensure no election manipulation took part in hiscounty.  The iron grip of tyrants is tightened by gutless courts and lawmen who go against their oaths to defend the Constitution by taking bribes or allowing politics to blind them to their duties.

A lack of transparency allows questions, especially those that naturally arise when more than one hundred million ballots are cast in federal elections, to go unanswered, sewing doubt in the minds of the electorate in a period of heightened media-induced political polarization.  Despite what one may discern from tuning into certain social media channels, nearly every American from a losing political faction would tolerate defeat if it could be verified that your candidates lost fair and square.

“You’re just a member of the Trump cult,” your enemies say.  Wrong.  I am a citizen of a Constitutional Republic in which we elect our representatives, not our rulers.  The repeated fraud in 2022, with no Donald J. Trump atop any ticket, has negated the argument that Trump’s base can’t “deal with defeat.”  72% of American’s sided with Kari Lake’s legal filing stating Maricopa County botched its own election and purposely disenfranchised voters.  This battle for clean and transparent elections is bigger than any one man, including Donald Trump, and it transcends party lines.

In that sense, you do not fight this fight to defend the honor of any politician or political party.  Your fight is for transparency – the ability to walk into any establishment and verify which individuals in there voted, and who they voted for.  Until we have that, we trust the government to produce election results and depose its chosen incumbents from power, when the very foundation of American self-government is the belief that government is not to be trusted, especially when it comes to protecting the rights of the people.

Boss Tweed’s legacy is his own replication in an increasingly technological world in thousands of counties across the United States.  No longer can the people predictably pin down widespread cheating to a few big urban counties and rely on small town USA to carry the day, anyway.  Boss Tweed eventually went down, and so will the bureaucratic mob bosses who are destroying America, and by extension, the Western World.  Like the downfall of Boss Tweed, victory in the modern sense will require resilience, persistence, and courage to get the job done.  I will discuss the downfall of Boss Tweed in a future article.