These smurfs are not cute; they may be funneling illegal campaign contributions
Over the past 8 months data analysts have been investigating a money laundering operation nationwide that funnels small donations in large numbers through “smurfs.” Smurfs are unsuspecting individuals generally over 65, retired, white and liberal. But their names are allegedly being used for these “under the radar” donations.
How is it done? Amounts are donated in very small amounts sometimes less than a dollar but there are several hundred to several thousand per smurf. For example, the top smurf in Florida contributed 10,445 times in 2022 for a total of $554,279.34 in federal donations. In addition, she had 452 state level donations totaling $10,844.27. By the way, she was 90 in assisted living and hadn’t voted recently. Based on a review of the database in our state, the top smurf in South Carolina is from Greenville and had 8,779 federal contributions in 2021-2022 totaling $375,066.70.
In addition to money laundering, this potentially amounts to ID theft and elder abuse. Note that many of these donations are going to liberal PACs such as ACT Blue, but other conservative PACs like Winred are also involved. It is suspected that there is cartel involvement as well as foreign involvement. There is a high correlation between the worst smurf states and those states with high fentanyl deaths/issues.
Analysis is underway by a data team who is working through this and has been for 8 months. This is still being investigated by multiple sources so stay tuned. Is this a database repording issue or something more?
In order to further investigate to see how legitimate this issue is you may want to check this to see if you or your loved ones are on the list. Do the campaign contributions make sense? Go to fec.gov; click on search campaign finance data and input your name or a family members name to see if you were affected under the “individual contributor name.”
Note: Campaign laws dictate that if any campaign donations were not acquired legally, they must be returned.
If you have been working on election integrity for the past 2 years plus you likely suffer from what I like to call ETB (Election Trauma Bond) an annoying, painful disorder that goes along with being in a toxic relationship with people who display signs of narcissism or other cluster B personalities. Anyone who has experienced a toxic relationship will readily recognize these signs. If you have experienced even a few of these phases you likely have ETB:
Fast courtship: In this stage, the agency officials act as though they are interested in your concerns. They attempt to address your issues while assuring you that they have everything under control. They provide a great “dog and pony” show that illustrates that the elections are “secure,” “done mostly right,” and that, “you have no reason to worry. They have it covered.”
But of course, in your gut you don’t trust them. Something seems off. There are red flags. The facts seem to suggest otherwise which brings you to the next phase.
Gaslighting and control: During this stage, you are consistently told things that are contrary to what your own eyes are telling you—the voter rolls are clean. ERIC (the Electronic Registration and information Center) does a fine job of helping the state clean the rolls. Trump won so all is fine in South Carolina. The machines aren’t connected to the internet. That is all a conspiracy theory.
However, your team has personally gathered the evidence that proves otherwise. You knocked on doors where people hadn’t lived in years but somehow managed to vote from that address. You researched the obituaries of people who were able to magically vote post mortem. You drove past registered addresses that were not legal domiciles—graveyards, shops, vacant lots, post offices. You have seen machines without security seals, sloppy election day processes, inconsistent adherence to election laws.
The county and state election officials and law enforcement reply that there may be fraud or irregularities; but it is not easy to prove and not enough to change any results. Hmmm. You start thinking you are the one who is delusional, but you know better. They try to judge your every move and control what you can see and how and when you can see it. You want to view the polls on election day? Sorry, you need to sit in this chair on the far side of the room where you can’t even view the process or machines. You want to observe the audits post-election? Wait in this room until we tell you what the results are. Or maybe they tell you it starts at noon but you show up then and they have already finished their audit.
Abuse and Discard: Just when you think you may have enough evidence to really convince your legislators or your state agency in charge of elections, they discard you. Suddenly, your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are ignored, delayed indefinitely, or they claim they don’t exist. You apply to be a poll worker and are denied even though they are still looking for help. But wait, I am the one you want, you think. I have in depth knowledge of the processes and systems. I am most qualified. Nope. They are on to their next supply—the person who is naïve to their ways and knows as little as possible about their system. Or perhaps they recruit nonprofits to “adopt a polling place” and put them in charge. Yes, that is a thing.
The Silent treatment: At this point you are pretty frustrated but still want to engage with your election agency. After all what are your other options? You need them. They are in charge. They are in control. You are powerless. They are now ghosting you and perhaps they respond to you occasionally just to keep you thinking they actually care or are adequately doing their job. They don’t.
This is when you think you need to quit but you don’t. Why? Because the best revenge against the toxic partner or partnership is to win. To succeed. You are not weak. You are not stupid. You know their game. So, you fight harder, stronger, and become the inner warrior you were always meant to be. The truth is worth fighting for and it always has a way of coming to light.
I applaud all the election integrity grassroots volunteers out there. I feel your pain. We have traveled this road for a long time and we fight for every vote—- for democrats and republicans, independents and libertarians, for young and old, voters of all races, religions. You are the light; you are the answer, you are appreciated and you will prevail.
Elections are the foundation of our republic. There is no option to quit. You are worth it and so is your state and your country. You too can survive ETB. You deserve a better system, better legislators who listen and act, a better election agency who cares about the sanctity of your vote rather than preserving a flawed system, and an executive branch that truly cares about clean elections.
Let’s hope we can find new non-toxic partners in the future so we can finally have trust and confidence in our elections.
ERIC, for those who aren’t aware, is the Electronic Registration Information Center, that many states use to help “clean” their rolls. Unfortunately, many states never remove names despite deaths, moves out of state (10% of people move annually) and other disqualifying reasons. Most states due to federal laws in the National Voter Registration Act don’t remove someone from their rolls until 2 election cycles transpire or the person specifically notifies them in writing to remove them from the state voter rolls.
Most troubling is that ERIC shares sensitive personal information with various non-profit groups who then target potential voters for “get out the vote” campaigns or to thump certain candidates. Over the past year, several states (Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia) have decided to say “adios!” to ERIC and perform their voter registration administration in house or utilize other options. South Carolina should consider following suit.
A history of ERIC
Eric was founded in 2012 as a membership organization across states to help clean the voter rolls. Original funding came from George Soros Open Society. John Lindback, Jeff Jones, and David Becker were involved and each one of these men has connections to Democratic elected officials and to Pew Charitable Trusts. These are partisan democrats who are involved in collecting voter info all over the United States. In fact, Becker ultimately founded the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) in 2016 and was responsible for distributing the “zuck buck” grants for the 2020 election. CEIR received roughly $70M from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2020.
According to Verity Vote: “The member agreement does not prevent ERIC from sharing the data with “agents, contractors or subcontractors.” There is no requirement for ERIC to disclose the names of the entities with whom they share this private information. The agreement prohibits member states from
disclosing any information yet places no limits on when and where ERIC can share it.
Source: Verity Vote
From the Verity Vote report: According to IRS records, ERIC is an organization with just three employees. Shane Hamlin, the executive director lives in Oregon, Ericka Haas, who lives in Oregon, and Sarah Whitt lives in Wisconsin. ERIC has no physical office. ERIC’s mailing address is just a virtual office at 1201 Connecticut Ave, Washington DC (which recently was found to be vacant). ERIC is not a government organization—it is a private corporation registered in Delaware. ERIC should be required to publicly disclose records regarding the transmission and storage of Personally Identifiable Information for citizens in all member states.
How ERIC works
Member States pay an initial fee of $25,000 as well as annual dues based on the state’s population. The state must not only submit all details on inactive and active voters to ERIC every 60 days, but they must also provide every individual in their state’s Motor Vehicle Department database including names, addresses, DOB, License #, last 4 of social #, voter activity, phone, email, title and documentation of citizenship. The first priority ERIC has prior to reviewing the rolls for clean up is to mail a huge swath of EBUs (Eligible but Unregistered) citizens to encourage them to register to vote. As the Gateway Pundit notes:
“The Membership Bylaws require the State to contact at least 95% of these people within 90 days, soliciting them to register. ERIC also wants specific registration profiles updated and requires the State to contact these voters within 90 days too. It is essentially a left-wing voter registration drive.”
Furthermore, ERIC doesn’t enforce the states cleaning their rolls but merely encourages them to make updates at least once a year. If the whole purpose of this organization is to ensure voter rolls are accurate, why are they adding names right away as opposed to focusing on eliminating outdated registrants? This calls into question the true motives of ERIC.
For context see this memo from ERIC’s Shane Hamlin to Marci Andino (the then Executive director of the SC Election Commission dated Mary 31, 2018 which was obtained via a FOIA request:
letter from Shane Hamlin to Marci Andino regarding priorities for ERIC prior to the election
SC -member since 2018
Our state became a member of ERIC in 2018 and took grant money in the amount of $177,000 from the Pew Charitable Trust to send postcards to the unregistered voters to increase our rolls. Despite the recommendations from ERIC regarding cleaning our rolls, an analysis by our own team and Jeff O’ Donnell aka (Lone Raccoon) in early 2022 showed the following:
There were 2,035 addresses that weren’t complete and contained a street number of NA. Many of these registrants voted.
South Carolina voter rolls include over 1300 registrations where either the Date of Birth (DOB) is wrong, the Date of Registration (DOR) is wrong, or both such that the registrant would have been between 15 years old and negative 82 years old at the time of registration. About 780 simply have identical DOBs and DORs. There are also a few registrants between 114 and 2060 years old at the time they registered.
1353 people on our voter roll that have a date of registration that is well before the person’s date of birth.
11 people have registration dates that are over 100 years after their DOB 12.
1,284 are registered within 15 days of their DOB!
There also appear to be large swaths of registrations on certain dates and counties with hundreds moving on the rolls in a certain day. Additionally, there are excess registrations based on last name typos, identical names and appended names.
2,478,217 voted in either the 2020 General Election. (The official South Carolina results state the ballots received as 2,533,010. This is a difference of over 50,000 ballots and must be explained. If these have been purged from the voter rolls so soon after having voted, there should be a “purge list” which matches this number. If it does not, then this is a serious Red Flag.
In September 2020 alone, more than 90,000 voters were registered. This was about twice the previous month high of 48,000 in November 2018.
8,471 people were registered on September 22nd alone. 225,912 voters were registered between June 1 and election day 2020. This represents more than 6% of the total South Carolina registration. 179,502 of these new registrants subsequently voted (79%), accounting for over 7% of all voters.
A large number of 18-year-old citizens were registered in the 6 months before the election and they voted at a higher rate than any other age. In fact, the “direction” of the curve of the recently registered runs counter to the overall trend. This is a definite red flag.
Registration Number Sequence Issues The 9-digit voter registration numbers appear to be in logical sequence over time and are largely consecutive. The 8-digit numbers, however, have no logical sequence based upon the registration dates and have large gaps between the numbers. This is a red flag because new registrations can be “hidden” in the middle of old ones with no way of detecting it. The differences between the 9-digit and 8-digit voters should be investigated and demystified in order to gain confidence in the registration system.
Of course, our own canvassing efforts revealed ERIC wasn’t working as intended as dead people remained on the rolls many years after their death, people voted from properties they moved from years prior to the 2020 election, and citizens were registered as well as voting from commercial or otherwise ineligible addresses.
Recently, our analysis team reviewed the voter rolls from the 2022 primary and 43% of the people who voted in the primary were missing party affiliation. How can data at the county level be rolled up to aggregate at the state level and be missing such crucial information? This doesn’t inspire confidence and suggests that good data management practices are not being adhered to.
The efficacy of ERIC
Source: Verity Vote; Note that the additions to the rolls far outweigh reductions.
Wisconsin is an ERIC state and they have over seven million registered voters however the state has less than 4 million eligible voters. In 2020, Judicial Watch found 8 states where the average registration for the entire State exceeded 100%. How does that happen? Inquiring minds want to know. In fact, multiple analyses show that despite using and paying for ERIC many ERIC member states have counties that have removed zero voters from their rolls. In fact, list maintenance studies show that non-ERIC states outperform 2.3% to 1.9% in list removals as fraction of the voting age population. Source: (US Election Assistance Commission published data from the 2020 Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS).)
Although the NVRA National voters registration act requires states to make a reasonable effort to remove eligible votes it allows states to wait up to 2 general election cycles to remove that name. Note that most often these names and records are not removed from the rolls but instead are put in an “inactive” file. This makes it easy for these names to be injected into the voter rolls, poll books, or voting machines to pump up phantom votes when needed. Many states are finding voters on the rolls up to 10 years or more.
From NVRA
REMOVAL OF NAMES FROM VOTING ROLLS.—(1)
shall not remove the name of a registrant from the official list
of eligible voters in elections for Federal office on the ground that
the registrant has changed residence unless the registrant—
(A) confirms in writing that the registrant has changed
residence to a place outside the registrar’s jurisdiction in which
the registrant is registered; or
(BXi) has failed to respond to a notice described in paragraph(2); and
(ii) has not voted or appeared to vote (and, if necessary,
correct the registrar’s record of the registrant’s address) in
an election during the period beginning on the date of the
notice and ending on the day after the date of the second
general election for Federal office that occurs after the date
of the notice.
Verity Vote has uncovered some alarming additional information from their Freedom of information requests. See below. Download their report here:
States are sharing information about individuals, whether they registered or declined to register, when they were offered the opportunity to do so in “other agencies” such as the Department of Aging and the Department of Human Services
ERIC is required to protect the sensitive PII of millions of people from 31 states, but records reveal that ERIC is sharing data with CEIR, the Zuckerberg funded organization.
CEIR is creating the lists of voters who should be targeted for voter registration efforts and laundering the lists back through ERIC for distribution to the states.
CEIR is promoting and launching a new, free service for election officials called REVERE, which is aimed at combating “disinformation” in real time; a task that no one could succeed at but is poised to distribute partisan propaganda. This tool will use cell phone and email information obtained from states to send targeted messages to voters. (Anyone been the recipient of one of these lately? )
Note: CEIR grant amounts to SC to date exceed $1M.
Questions to ponder:
Do you feel comfortable with these partisan groups having access to our data?
Why do ERIC participating states fare worse in voter roll management than the non-participating partners?
Why can’t our state do this in house with qualified IT professionals? ERIC only employees 3 to 4 employees for the whole nation. Our state could employ a few database experts to do the same.
Our team has been getting numerous emails weekly from concerned citizens asking how we can remove ERIC from our state. We need more transparency and accountability for our election systems and voter rolls.
CALL TO ACTION: Call you legislators today and ask them to defund ERIC in the budget or draft a law to dump ERIC and ensure that our personal data is not given out to any outside organizations other than perhaps states who want to share their data of cross state voters and people who have moved and registered in their state who used to be registered in our state.
We have filed a motion for reconsideration so that the election commission can stay in our suit. Our lawyers are in the process of scheduling depositions so that they can get more info from some of the counties and we continue to find more evidence that substantiates our position that there is no personally identifiable information on the ballots and that it is near impossible if not impossible to tie a ballot to a specific voter.
In short, there is not a compelling reason that we can identify for not receiving a report that 27 other states receive other than to reduce transparency of the counting of our vote. Note that South Carolina is one of a few states that specifically state in our constitution that our vote shall be cast in secret but NOT COUNTED IN SECRET.
Here is a sample of a CVR report just to show you that there is no PII (personally identifiable information).
The black box nature of our system currently does just that–counts our vote in secret. The cast vote record report is essential to enabling more accountability and transparency of the vote. Analysis of these records points to the presence of potential algorithms per Jeff O’Donnell and other analysts.
Please support this fight today by contributing to our give send go for our legal costs. If everyone just contributes a little bit we can win this battle.
Jeff O’Donnell has compiled and evaluated upwards of 1,000 CVRs across the nation. Thus far, he has found signs of manipulation in all CVRs he has reviewed which has convinced him more than ever that there is an algorithm at play in these machines. According to this most recent interview with Brannon Howse he shows that 43 out of 64 counties in Colorado have the same pattern of the trajectory of the vote count. In fact, based on this pattern he can predict what the final vote count will be if given the halfway-mark count. This should not occur in a random vote done by humans.
This pattern was observed in other counties with literally the same formula able to predict the final outcome of a race knowing just the midway result.
In addition, rather than showing a progression of votes that tapers off over time to a stable end point which you would expect to see as the number of cumulative votes come in, there is a large change in votes that occurs over time. This is not statistically possible.
Jeff considers this a huge breakthrough.
Why won’t law enforcement officials look into this? Well, they haven’t been willing to investigate this election malfeasance during the past 2+ years so why now?
Jeff opines that we are observing statistically impossible results and the presence of an algorithm that indicates that our elections are being manipulated and our republic is threatened. This should concern everyone. By the way, this same pattern was seen in 2022 as well. How can we trust these machines? Why aren’t these machine companies such as ES&S, Dominion, and Hart Intercivic under more scrutiny? This appears to be a RICO (racketeering) issue that should be investigated to the fullest extent.
Is this why SC Safe Elections is being stonewalled (and countersued) by the South Carolina Election Commission regarding our fight to gain access to the cast vote records? These records might show irregularities. We need more transparency not less in our elections for the people to trust our system again. If there is nothing to hide then why can’t we have access to records that 27 other states have access to?
Please support our battle to gain access to the cast vote records. We humbly ask for your financial support so that we can pay legal fees and experts to travel to Columbia to testify. If all the SC citizens and people across the nation can give a little to this battle we can and will win! Below is our give send go link.
This letter was sent to one of our team members/followers. She lays it out well to Governor McMaster. In every one of my presentations I ask people if they trust our system is counting their votes accurately. Only 1 or 2 hands normally are raised. Let’s go back to paper ballots and give power back to the people at the local precincts and counties!
Let’s bring confidence back to our elections in SC!
In this amazing and must see video one of our expert witnesses in our CVR lawsuit, Dr. Daugherity, describes what a CVR is and how it is a great tool to provide transparency to our elections.
Here is volunteer Tara P’s account of her Second Berkeley BOE hearing re: challenging voters on voter rolls
At the hearing on October 13, 2022 I turned in a new list of 200 voters based on a canvass of 2021. I received a letter on December 2, 2022 notifying me that the hearing was scheduled for January 11, 2023.
To prepare for January 10, I did a deep dive on each of the 200 names. I found eight names that were ok to vote in the 2020 GE due to early voting, but still needed to be removed from the voter roll as they had moved. There were seven names that should never have made the list. I even recanvassed them to be sure. Three had been 20 y/o’s on the walk book sheets (children of mothers who remarried and home ownership changed to new surname.) The other four were reasons we wouldn’t have known/realized/recognized at the time. I verified all the names on a newer version of the voter roll from after June 2022 and found only six had been removed and only four had been updated to new address…of these all four had also voted 6/14/22. Two that should be removed voted 11/3/2020 and 6/14/2022. In the end there were still 185 still on the 2022 voter roll that had also voted in the 2020 GE. That is +/- 92% of a small sample.
The procedure of the hearing on January 10 was the same as October 13. I asked a few questions to start…When a voter goes in to vote and they do not live at the address they are registered…what happens? If the change of address happened greater that 30 days before start of voting, were they allowed to vote? If in any of these cases they were given a provisional ballot would that be updated on the voter roll?
I was informed by the lawyer that I am not allowed to ask questions of the board.
I explained to the lawyer and the board that I was only bring up these questions to ensure we are aligned regarding who can and cannot vote. I also explained that these names had been submitted to the SEC in February 2021 and yet they still remain on the June 2022 roll. I tried to focus on how it should be important for our county BOE to have clean voter rolls especially if the SEC is not going to act. I explained I want to work with them to raise awareness and clean things up and hoping they can be the voice of the concerned citizens of Berkeley County before the SEC.
There were four people that showed up to challenge. The roll had been updated since our June 2022 version because letters were sent to their new residence, so that caused confusion and irritation by voters. Updates in latter 2022 of address changes that should have happened in 2019. Another woman stated she had been back and forth between her home and her elderly parents, but was not residing at her registered address during 2020 GE.
After all is presented the Board, BOE Director and BOE Lawyer retire to a closed room to deliberate. When they returned they advised me that these hearings are not productive and that they believe I should just sit down and share with them my findings/evidence for them to compare with the infromation they have. They also asked to sit down to discuss, so I did with a friend that was sitting in the audience. He turned on his phone to record, the lawyer asked him if he was recording? My friend responded that he was. I asked the lawyer why it would matter beacuse he wasnt going to be saying anything incriminating, was he?
During that conversation it dawned on me why they considered these hearings non productive…because there were six people in the audience (there to support me) but that was not known by the BOE and each of them was recording the hearing. Not a good look for them.
Meeting with BOE Director
On January 24th I (with a person from our Berkeley team who sound recorded the entire meeting) went to meet with the BOE Director regarding the evidence(signed affidavits) I had that supported my challenge of the ineligible voters for the 2020 general election. I was sent three date/time options for this meeting. The director invited me.
We were shown to the conference room, a small room with a large table and eight chairs. A worker started bringing in more chairs because “the board was going to attend”. Wait!-What? Well that turned out to be misinformation. It was only the two of us, the director and two election office clerks. The director walked in with a pad of paper and pen and sat down. I was a bit confused because how was she going to verify my evidence with a pad of paper? I asked the director what was going on and she answered, “I dont know you are the one who wanted this meeting.” Wait!-What? I reminded her that the lawyer suggested that we sit down for me to share my evidence and that she sent me the invite. After a bit of back and forth I realized that we were not going to go through my evidence, they did not have laptops and she couldn’t look people up with me present because I was not allowed to see private data.
I quickly changed my strategy to try and still gain something out of the meeting, so I started telling them about ERIC…which they knew nothing about. From there we moved on to voter roll sort by age and showed them screenshot printouts of the oldest people on the roll. 118/117 year olds registering to vote in 2020.
Deceased voters
A 113 year old that died in 1999 that voted 11/3/2020. I showed them a comparison of the August 2021 copy I had with the June 2022 copy. Some of the numerous deceased that I had found had been removed but the three noted above were still on the roll. I showed them two women that had the same voter registration number. I showed them one woman having two different voter registration numbers. Each time one of the clerks would run back to her desk and look up the situation. Some had valid clerical error explanations and she submitted requests to the SEC to have them marked inactive. Note: all three used the term “inactive” and not “removed”. Even being valid clerical errors, I pointed out that the process for cleaning things up, if there is one, was not working. I asked them if they were familiar with the term ballot stuffing and explained voter roll stuffing is similar and how it is done and how all this opens the door for those “ineligible registered voters” to be used fraudulently.
We learned how the numbering process works for voter registration numbers, which we did not know before. Up until 2012, a person’s voter registration number started with a number which identified the county they first registered to vote in. 1 for Abbyville and 46 for York. That number stays with the person no matter where they move within the state. After 2012 it was centralized and all new registrants received 47 as the first digits of their number.
We listened to their testimonies and frustration with the SEC in trying to do their job. Both clerks had worked there for many years and took their job very seriously. We also learned about their heavy workload and how they are understaffed and not paid overtime for any work outside of regular hours.
They are currently working on updating all the returned new voter registration cards(thousands) that were sent out before November 2022 elections due to restructuring. Each case has to be investigated and a process followed. They are not just able to send a request to the SEC to have them marked “inactive”.
Up until 2020 a person’s ssn was used to verify a registered voter. During 2020 it was changed to only the last four digits of the ssn, all in the name of private information. But that caused a lot of confusion and errors as many people may have the same last four digits. This was either done intentionally or someone didn’t think it through very well.
In the end I believe we were able to build a relationship with them and we gained information we did not have before.
At the end of our meeting I handed them another list of 80 names of ineligible voters from the 2020 general election telling them I don’t agree with what the lawyer said about these hearings not being productive. I feel they have been very productive.
Here is a great interview by Palmetto State Watch’s VP Alaina Moore who talks to Laura Scharr from SC Safe Elections about the Cast Vote Record lawsuit and why it is important for transparency of elections in our state.
