Is it really reducing the impact of absentee voting?
Bill 4919 has been lauded by the establishment as being a bill that puts more restrictions on absentee voting in SC, but my question is compared to what?
Prior to COVID, we didn’t have any in-person “absentee voting.” Due to COVID, the state allowed people to vote in person 40 days prior to the election as well as to mail in their ballots. Bill 4919 is now reducing the time period of in-person absentee balloting to 2 weeks which is 12 times the time period of in-person voting prior to COVID.
Further restrictions were put on who could request an absentee ballot to be mailed in.
Here are the people allowed to vote absentee by mail:
Students and their spouses and dependents
Anyone serving in the Armed Forces and their spouses and dependents
Government employees and their spouses and dependents
Anyone 65 and older
Does this seem restrictive to you?
The only people I see eliminated are people who need to be at work when the polls are open.
They even allow people to vote absentee mail-in if they will be out of the county during the 2-week period and election day but who will be checking that? I could just say I was going to be out of town and request an absentee ballot. I assume that the same people who are keeping our voter rolls clean will not do the best job of verifying the absentee status of the mail-in voters.
My personal view is that these bills are trojan horses for expanded absentee voting which promulgates FRAUD. This is where the majority of the issues occur and it is something even President Jimmy Carter warned about.
Furthermore, Bill 3444 gives more power to the SEC in a centralized fashion when they are the ones who have been negligent in cleaning the rolls. That is not a good thing. Some of the other provisions in the bill are ok but that is how trojan horses work. They seem great on the outside but beware of the details. Look forward to our blog on that.
These bills are going to require many amendments if we the people are able to take back our vote.
The following blog is by Laurie Zapp, a constituent and registered voter in Bluffton, South Carolina. She has spent significant time researching the active registered deceased list in our state.
I have read some of the filed election bills that are currently up for consideration in the State House and Senate and would like to offer some concerns and recommendations based on my experience with leading canvass efforts in the state.
I was very excited to see a bill that was addressing an elector’s domicile. I feel that the bill is very clear in how it defines domicile as a person’s residence. It defines domicile as follows (from the text of the bill):
“A person’s residence is his domicile. ‘Domicile’ means a person’s fixed home where he has an intention of returning when he is absent. A person has only one domicile.”
What we discovered during our time canvassing is how the law is being interpreted not only by electors, but also by employees at various county boards of elections. For example, in Beaufort County, we discovered electors registered at rented spaces: such as a chiropractic office, mattress store, furniture store, and the Hilton Head Library. In Horry County, we found electors registered at Hungry Howies, a tailoring shop, a pub, Dominos Pizza, and Dunkin Donuts, to name a few. One man in Beaufort stated that the County Board of Elections gave him permission to use a rented space for his business as his registered voting address.
In section (D) 1-11 of the current law, and in S 898 of the proposed bill, I feel that loopholes remain. Unfortunately, we do not have county board of election employees or state employees who are diligently checking new voter registrations to confirm a new elector is providing an address that is consistent with a domicile. Amending the law to not fully address the bigger problem at hand will allow electors to continue to use commercial addresses as their domicile. It is recommended that we put in place procedures to ensure that a domicile is in fact a legitimate primary residence.
The first feature that I noticed about this bill is the responsibilities given to the South Carolina Election Commission. There is language in this bill giving roles and responsibilities to the SEC and using words such as “must do” or “shall.” What is missing is any accountability if the SEC Director fails to perform the duties of his job. Many voters are frustrated that the responsibility of our election system is under the authority of the South Carolina Election Commission, which is appointed by the Governor. We know that under their leadership, our voter logs are full of errors with electors who are deceased, electors who no longer live at the address they are registered at, and electors who are registered at addresses that are not a domicile. There needs to be new accountability measures to ensure compliance with the laws and regulations.
The second concern I have about this bill is part (C) under Section 3. This part of the bill gives the power of the South Carolina Election Commission (SEC) the authority to enter into agreements with organizations in an effort to maintain an accurate database of our registered voters. One such organization that gives the SEC permission to use is an organization called Election Registration Information Center ( ERIC).
I conducted extensive research into ERIC including their history, an examination of financial documents, and correspondence between employees of the SEC and ERIC, which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. My findings reveal serious concerns. There have also been recent articles in TheGateway Pundit that raised alarms – even resulting in Louisiana canceling their membership with ERIC.
Below I have provided you with a summary of the information, which led me and my group to realize that South Carolina needs to end its membership with ERIC.
History of ERIC
In 2012, ERIC was founded by three men; John Lindback, Jeff Jones, and David Becker. One must research each of these men to establish if ERIC is truly a nonpartisan organization. Each one of these men has connections to Democratic elected officials and to the Pew Charitable Funds. I will not go into depth on each of these men, but I will give a brief overview of some of the most partisan aspects I have found.
John Lindback– He was the senior officer for Elections Initiatives at the Pew Charitable Trusts, and chief of staff for former Alaska Lieutenant Governor Fran Ulmer (D). He is also listed as a leader of an organization called Center For Secure and Modern Elections (CSME). Listed as one of the roles of CSME which is funded by left of center donors is to “engage in advocacy and lobbying for “automatic voter registration” (AVR) laws that would automatically register eligible individuals to vote when they acquire or renew a driver’s license, apply for social services, or otherwise interact with a state government agency.” Also important to note, CSME lobbied against legislation in Texas that was to reduce the occurrences of voter fraud.
Jeff Jones– Like John above, Jeff also has an interest in supporting Democrat candidates. According to the Federal Election Commission website, Jeff has donated to Democrat candidates like Harry Reid, Bernie Sanders, and Obama for America, to name a few. Jeff also worked with the Pew Charitable Trusts to modernize voter registration in the county. Today he is the CEO of a company called Senzing.
David Becker– Today David is the Executive Director and Founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR). Coincidentally, CEIR gave over a million dollars in grant money to South Carolina in 2020 to be used for election purposes. This is in addition to the over 5 million dollars that rolled into South Carolina via the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL).
David worked at one time for the Department of Justice as a trial attorney and later in his career at the Pew Charitable Trusts as director of the elections program. Of the three men listed above, I am personally troubled by Mr. Becker’s ability to be nonpartisan the most due to the following article. https://legalnewsline.com/stories/555822683-mark-zuckerberg
The article above not only discusses how Becker talks about Republicans and the fact that there was a complaint filed against him but as the article goes on, the following quote is shared. “To be honest, I don’t use LinkedIn very much and haven’t updated my profile in years, and there’s probably a lot missing from it,” Becker told Legal Newline. “For instance, I also didn’t list the fact that since February my organization and I have a contract and work closely with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger,….”
Personally, if I lived in Georgia I would be interested in using the Freedom of Information Act to uncover the “contract and close work he and the Secretary of State” were conducting.
The three men mentioned above all had a part in developing the organization ERIC. Today, Lindberg and Becker are considered non-voting board members, and Jones is listed as being on the privacy and technology advisory board.
What is ERIC?
Eric’s mission per their website is “assisting states to improve the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increase access to voter registration for all eligible citizens.” On the surface when one sees that an organization has the mission to improve the accuracy of the voter rolls, it sounds like a win! One must dig and look further to assess if what is stated in their mission is really being followed through with, and are their other agendas at play?
ERIC Requirements of Members
Once a member state signs on and agrees to be a member of ERIC, the first thing the state must do is register new voters. The state is sent a list that is referred to as EBU voters. EBU refers to eligible but unregistered voters. ERIC provides the member state with a list of the EBU voters. The state can then apply for a grant from Pew Charitable Trusts to help with the cost of mailing each EBU a postcard that is intended to encourage the EBU to register to vote. Part of the agreement with ERIC also states that the member state must continue to send postcards to EBU voters every two years and coincidentally it is in even number of years that they must do this.
In 2018, South Carolina became a member of ERIC. South Carolina took the grant money offered from the Pew in order to send out postcards to register new voters. South Carolina received $177,000.
As far as “improving the accuracy of America’s voter rolls”, the states that join and are members of ERIC also share their state’s data. The states are to share information such as the death of a voter or a voter that moves from one state to another. We also have concerns about our voter’s personal data being shared with an outside organization. (Most likely voters have no idea, and have not been informed, that South Carolina is sharing their personal data with a third-party organization.)
Partisanship with ERIC?
A few things to know about the Pew Charitable trusts; in 2020 Pew gave 99.5% of their money to Democrat candidates and not even 1% to Republican candidates, Pew gives funding to organizations like Planned Parenthood, and most recently in 2021 the Pew was instrumental in supporting police reform in the state of Washington.
Is ERIC Cleaning Voter Rolls or Strengthening the Democrat Vote?
On June 30, 2021, I testified at the House Legislative Oversight Committee on the number of active registered voters I and volunteers had discovered that remained on our active voter logs. At this point, South Carolina had been a member of ERIC for 3 years. One statistic that was given in testimony by the SEC was that the SEC had received 54,455 names of individuals that were deceased. 45,000 of those 54,455 deceased were provided to the SEC from DHEC, 6,600 of those names came from other sources, and only 2,600 names were from ERIC. We also discovered that there are modules set up that ERIC has to offer, and the SEC has yet to implement them. One of the fundamental requirements to vote is to be a citizen of the United States. Unfortunately, ERIC states that if a state knows that someone is not a citizen, the state is not allowed to document this or share this information electronically. Are they encouraging non citizens to vote?
Recent Reporting By The Gateway Pundit
Last month,The Gateway Pundit published a 3 part series on ERIC. Please see the links below for shocking information about ERIC. If you feel as strongly as I do that we must end our agreement with ERIC and follow in the footsteps of Louisiana (who terminated their agreement with ERIC), I hope you will amend this bill and also request our Governor to terminate our membership with ERIC.
In response to our canvassing efforts Seth Keshel, former military intelligence officer, describes how the data correlates with his analysis. Here is a link to his video.
Results of South Carolina Citizen-Led Canvass of 2020 November General Election Reveal Election Irregularities and Thousands of Errors In Voter Rolls
Columbia, S.C. – February 5, 2022 – SC Safe Elections Group, a non-partisan volunteer group comprised of approximately 75 citizens from across eight South Carolina counties presented findings of its canvass of South Carolina voter rolls and the 2020 General Election today. Presenters shared results that revealed widespread inaccuracies with voter rolls and potential ineligible votes.
“Our canvassing efforts have shown that much work needs to be done by our local and state election officials to clean up our voter rolls and to enforce existing laws, said Laura Scharr, leader of the South Carolina voter integrity effort. “Our state lawmakers also need to enact new legislation now that ensures greater accuracy and confidence in our elections. Every illegitimate vote cancels out one of our voices. It is essential that we not have any errors in our voter rolls and that only legal votes are counted.”
Highlights of the audit included the following:
• Approximately 21% of voters on the voter rolls appear to be ineligible or to have voted outside of the regulated guidelines.
• Over 4,300 registered voters on the rolls across eight counties were either deceased or had moved prior to the 2020 November election.
• We found 1,369 citizens were registered to vote (and many of which voted) at commercial addresses such as grocery stores, USPS locations, non-residential university addresses where the voters were not students, and vacation RV parks.
“For citizens to trust our elections, it’s imperative that state and local officials and representatives work together to clean up the voter rolls, fix broken systems, and ensure that our election laws are followed,” said S.C. State Representative Vic Dabney, District 52. “I applaud the efforts of all these citizens involved with the canvass who took months of their time to research our voter rolls. Clearly, we have election integrity issues that must be addressed.”
“If our elections are not trustworthy, we lose any confidence in our system, said Josiah Magnuson, S.C. State Representative for District 38. “This is not a partisan issue but one that is foundational to our Republic as a whole. I am so thankful for those who through dogged persistence are bringing to light possible attacks on our state’s election process and showing us what must be done to ensure those candidates the people legally vote for are those who get elected. I look forward to pushing for immediate legislation that will renew the security and accuracy of our elections.”
S.C. State Representative Robert J. “RJ” May, III of District 88 added, “Free and fair elections are the bedrock of our Republic. We must have confidence that our votes count and that only qualified citizens are casting ballots. As your state representative, my stance on election integrity is simple: No cheating! I’m attending this conference to learn, but more importantly, to stand with the people I represent who demand action from the General Assembly.”
Other issues addressed at the presentation included: 1) concerns with the voter machines, 2) the state’s use of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), and 3) voter roll and statistical election race anomalies. Canvass volunteer leaders from each county presented their findings; in addition, Jeff O’Donnell, a software and database expert, spoke about voter roll anomalies, and Phil Evans, a data analyst and engineer, spoke about election race anomalies. A summary report of the findings of the audit can be found at: https://scsafeelections.org. A video recording of the presentation can also be found at this website.
Laura and Representative Vic Dabney from Kershaw County were interviewed by Citizen Journalist Richard Potcner about why reform of the election process is so important. And we talk about the reveal of our statewide canvassing efforts.
We were honored to be mentioned in this week’s Gateway Pundit article about our BIG REVEAL of the canvassing and data analysis results of our grassroots efforts over the last few months.
The SC Safe Elections team will be presenting their findings on voter roll analysis and canvassing efforts for the state of South Carolina on February 5th, 2022 from 1 PM to 5 PM. All the SC legislators are invited to The BIG REVEAL as well as Governor McMaster, the SC Election Commission, the Republican and Democratic chairman, and Attorney General Alan Wilson. The event is not open to the public. Only invitees, press, volunteers, and their family and friends are attending. Please call your legislator today to encourage him or her to attend. This is MUST SEE TV!
Details are below. We will post a link to the live feed on February 4th and an executive summary will be posted after the event. Be sure to tune in.
Results of South Carolina Citizen-Led Canvass of 2020 November General Election To Be Presented on February 5, 2022, in Columbia, S.C.
Who: SC Safe Elections Group – A non-partisan citizen volunteer group focused on election integrity.
What: Media and Elected Officials are invited to attend a presentation by group members and election experts on the findings of the canvass of S.C. voter rolls and the 2020 November general election. The public will be able to view a live feed online at https://scsafeelections.org.
When: 1:00-5:00 p.m. EST, February 5, 2022
Where: Segra Park, Club Lounge, 1640 Freed Street, Columbia, S.C.
Columbia, S.C. – January 25, 2022 – SC Safe Elections Group, a non-partisan volunteer group comprised of approximately 75 citizens from across eight South Carolina counties will present findings of its canvass of South Carolina voter rolls and the 2020 General Election on February 5, 2022, from 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. EST in the Club Lounge at Segra Park in Columbia, S.C. Presenters will share results that revealed widespread inaccuracies with voter rolls and potentially ineligible votes.
“Even though South Carolina is a red state and went for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, our canvassing efforts found bombshell evidence of phantom voters, deceased voters, ineligible voters, lost votes, cross-state votes and many other anomalies with the 2020 election,” said Laura Scharr, leader of the South Carolina voter integrity effort. “Our goal with this event is to inform the public and our lawmakers of the issues we uncovered and to request specific steps that will improve the accuracy of our elections.”
The public will be able to view the presentation through a live feed at: https://scsafeelections.org. A summary report of the findings of the audit will also be found at this website.
This post was submitted by member Barbara Williams.
SC GOP: Nothing to see here.
Why am I still focused on events of the ‘voting’ conducted (perpetrated?) on or about 3 November 2020? Why do I refuse to give up the fight for election integrity and just move along to 2022?
It’s because I am fully convinced that We The People were played for fools at best, and at worst the victims of the crime of the century. We must find out exactly how it was done and take direct action to bring to justice those responsible. Failing that, we must get rid of the current methods of candidate ‘election’ and go primitive.
In November 2021, a year after the 2020 election, we had a school board ‘election’ here in Spartanburg County. Not only were voting machines used again, but the poll books appeared as electronic terminals. No more of those antiquated printed lists of registered voters, no sirree! Let’s speed things up and look up the names on the internet!
What? But haven’t we been told that there is no way the voting machines are connected to the internet?
What really happens at a polling place in SC.
On your phone, you can check for available internet connections wherever you are. Right? Most of the time in a school or a fire department polling place, the choices are innocuous. But those brand-new, oh so convenient little poll books are connected via hotspot to the net. Yes, they are. The way you can tell is that there is a network listed for SEC-SITES.
That network sets up a Local Area Network (LAN). Ostensibly the LAN is used only to transfer data, from voting machines set up at a precinct, to the router used to store that information. That would only hold true if everything were hard wired, with no wireless functionality.
If data is whizzing through the air, it can be intercepted by any 10 year old with a cell phone. Fact. All you’d have to do would be to access the SEC-SITES network. It can be done from the privacy of your car in the parking lot. Want to make sure a candidate wins? This is virtually undetectable.
What are election officials hiding?
When informed of this security breach, public and election officials bluster that it can’t happen here. None of our election machines are connected to the internet (wink, wink), Trump won in 2020, so we’re good. Right? Nothing to see here, move along, peasants.
Much is made of the Board of Elections claim that the voter rolls in SC are publicly available for inspection, even online. It’s also in our South Carolina Constitution. See Article 5, Registration Books and Lists of Electors, Section 7-5-410, Maintenance and inspection of official registration records. Of course. If all you want to do is to verify one registration, you simply need to provide the name, address, date of birth, and SSN. One at a time. And you can’t see anything except those fields before you fill them in. But you are free to investigate, peons. Knock yourselves out. Furthermore, if you want to analyze the entire voter roll database you must fork out $2500. Some states have no fee to acquire the voter roll database.
I submit to you that we haven’t had a fair election in over a generation, maybe further. The installation of these voting machines from hell simply made the steal easier. Why do you suppose the new motto of SCVotes is, ‘Every vote matters. Every vote counts.’? Presumably, they mean every Legal vote. But why not say that? And why would our GOP leaders insist that we should make it easier to vote, but harder to cheat? How soon are they going to implement the ‘harder to cheat’ part?
The unvarnished truth about voting in SC
All of these attitudes and actions, taken together, make it obvious that those currently in power (elected or not) have no intention of jeopardizing their power base. If you get a positive response from an official, promising to look into this serious problem, you won’t get any further action. That invisible stone wall is virtually impenetrable. The SC GOP party line is, we need to “move forward.” They don’t want to acknowledge the 600 lb gorilla in the room. We need to review and analyze what happened in 2020 to diagnose any potential issues and determine what we need to fix to ensure that no invalid votes are recorded.
There are few politicians in the entire state of South Carolina, who will commit to action on honest voting. It seems as if they are in their own little world and they see things completely different than the rest of us. For the most part, we the people are on our own. Again.
What’s to be done to ensure voting integrity?
Perhaps a better question would be, what Can be done? The public is denied free access to the entire election database. Why is that? Are they concerned that the dead people voting, multiple votes, the illegals, the phantom voters, and the vote switching would be found and corrected? Can’t have that, now.
The simplest, least expensive, most reliable thing to do is to shove those machines to the side and vote Amish. Paper ballots, marked by each eligible voter, with a copy for the said voter to prove his action. One day to vote. Minimize mail-in ballots. No electronics whatsoever. Count the ballots with any registered voters who care to observe. There should be an equal number of counters – Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Christian, MAGA, whatever. No exclusions. And total access.
Once the votes are counted, that’s it. No more of this ballot discovery in the closet, or someone’s van, to be added to the certified total until a Democrat or equivalent ‘wins.’
We The People have had enough of this nonsense. We deserve a full forensic audit to examine the paper ballots, machines, routers, tabulators, voter rolls, servers, etc. Given the egregious errors and fraud that have been found in other states, we want to ensure that SC doesn’t just do elections “mostly right” but that it does them professionally and legally.
“If the Vice President of sales for a voting machine company admitted on camera a fatal flaw in the machines that makes them susceptible to fraud before the county voted to spend millions of dollars to spend on new machines, don’t you think the public should be aware of that video of him admitting the flaw in the machines, don’t you think the news should cover that?”
