It is hard for most people to accept there is large fraud in the U.S. elections, and even harder in the state of Iowa. In general, Iowa has followed a centrist policy that seems to satisfy both major parties over time. We have large rural areas and a few big liberal cities that seem to coexist at the moment, and have for some time. Gov. Reynold’s has been one of the top Governors through the pandemic, in terms of least covid restrictions, and maintained a budget surplus that has created favorable tax laws. Iowa also has much better election laws like voter id, no mass mailed out ballots, and absentee voting limited to 20 days before election.
The Secretary of State Paul Pate likes to also reassure people that Iowa has the 3rd most secure election of the 50 States. And so, with this favorable situation, and the perception of election integrity why wouldn’t the average Iowan go along with the status quo?
Well anyone with a notion that we have secure elections may change one’s mind, when they realize the same MIT list that ranks us third in election security, ranks Wisconsin fourth, and ranks Arizona sixteenth, despite their blatant problems in the 2020 and 2022 elections.
The truth is that any voting process that is executed through a machine instead of hand counted paper ballots counted in a single night, is susceptible to fraud, and in fact is already subject to said fraud we believe. The process of elections is complicated, which is telling in itself, why would simply adding choices into a cumulative total be so complicated? It shouldn’t be. We have had no issues in the past hand counting ballots, and any fraud in that process can be more easily tied to an individual counting in a precinct, it is also much easier to recount and audit for because the mechanism of counting isn’t some code hidden from all of us. We are expected to trust companies with dubious ties, that we know nothing about, to have exclusive access to the counting of our votes.
The tangled process of elections started with the HAVA Act passed in 2002, which aimed to modernize elections. It created federal standards for voting machines through a new commission at that time, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), and so while elections are technically in the jurisdiction of the States, the new law over time brought machines which brought “critical infrastructure”, networks, big data, several companies offering digital services to all aspects of the election process, and ultimately, oversight from the Cybersecurity an Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is an agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In essence it has been quasi federalized with forced use of voting machines. It should be clear to everyone. The Federal Government has no business in our local elections, nor would we need them with hand counted paper ballots.
Each state has codified the HAVA Act into their state law to some varying degrees which attempts to close the state to federal loophole. This creates some differences State by State, but two things I can tell you for sure: 1. Per the affidavit of Tore Maras there is most likely a trapdoor mechanism that can alter our votes. 2. There is questionable oversight of the voting machines via EAC policies. We sued the Secretary of State for both these topics. We have sourced every machine in use in the state of Iowa to lack of proper EAC certification which we simplified into the following table. You can read more about it and download a copy of what we filed on our lawsuit page.
Elections in the state of Iowa are ultimately under the administration of the Secretary of State (SoS). County precincts flow through the administration of the County Auditor up to the Secretary of State. In Iowa we use hand marked ballots that are counted by a machine tabulator. The machines are approved by the State Board of Examiners, which is made up three members assigned by the SoS, with at least one trained in cybersecurity, and no more than one in the same political party. Precinct election workers verify voter registration and ID and direct voters to feed the tabulators with their ballots when they are finished voting. They count the total ballots for any anomaly but not the votes on the ballots themselves. This is fed into a black box, meaning what goes in and out of it is a mystery. See Iowa Code §52 and the Iowa Admin Code 721 §22 for the precise legal details of the election process.
There are many mechanisms for fraud, some of which Iowa has safeguarded against, some which major figures have influenced us to singularly focus on like ballot harvesting.
However, A vote is not a ballot, and how the votes are counted is the fundamental mechanism for fraud. A fraud that could not take place if we counted the votes ourselves, and whose results we could more easily audit to people in our community entrusted to count it accurately.
The fraud is in the machines. The truth is that at the moment the people that win our elections are either allowed to win, or selected to win, at the will of those who have access to the trapdoor mechanism.
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