Let’s Rock—and Lock—the Vote

There’s a great deal of work to do for those who want Donald Trump to be President again. I’m among those who think there aren’t nearly enough Trump ads appearing on the various social media networks. Every time I open up YouTube to play some music while I’m doing chores—no matter what kind of music I choose—I’m invariably besieged by ads with Kamala Harris telling me to donate to her campaign and support her. I hope and pray that I’m just unlucky, but others have told me they have the same experience. 

So, too, with the Republican ground game. The irrepressible Scott Presler has been updating his followers on X concerning his continuing bid to get hunters, the Amish community, veterans and many other groups who have an interest in a GOP victory to get registered in the important swing state of Pennsylvania. He’s focusing on Pennsylvania right now, but his organization, Early Vote Action, is working in most of the other key swing states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. But Republicans could be doing a lot more. Just because your state is red doesn’t mean it’s time to relax. We need to be getting out as many votes as possible. To borrow the name of the 1990 group started by MTV, we need to “Rock the Vote” this year.

But we also need to lock the vote—by which I mean, make it a secure and fair election. Democrats are famously opposed to making sure people who vote are actually eligible to do so. These days, they have been busy trying to make sure that it is very easy for the ineligible to join voter rolls. In Tim Walz’s Minnesota, according to a report from Center for the American Experiment’s Bill Glahn, not only are “all foreign-born residents, including illegal aliens,. . .eligible to receive state driver’s licenses and identity cards,” but “everyone who applies for a driver’s license or identity card is automatically registered to vote” and is automatically sent an absentee ballot by state election officials along with “all registered voters.” Those trying to sort out this mess in a state that now has half a million foreign-born residents are going to have a task on their hands.

What is true of blue states such as Minnesota is true of the nation. An academic article in 2014 provided evidence that non-citizen voting could swing elections. That likelihood has only gotten worse with Joe Biden’s open border and his 2021 Executive Order 14019, which was used to make sure that all federal agencies become essentially voter registration and collection agencies. In addition, as Danielle Wallace reported, “Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, a Republican, has been sounding the alarm about how state agencies receiving federal funding are required under Biden’s executive order to send out voter registration information to anyone who comes into contact with those agencies without any verification of citizenship.” 

There was an attempt earlier this summer to force states to legally prove their voters were citizens. The SAVE Act passed narrowly in the House earlier this summer with all Republicans and five Democrats voting for it, but there is little chance the Democratic-held Senate will vote on the bill despite Republican attempts to pressure Chuck Schumer. Thankfully, some states are independently taking action on this.

Georgia has now been awakened to the revelation of 1600 documented cases of non-citizens on their voting rolls and has turned over names to federal law enforcement agencies. Ohio removed almost 500 non-citizens from their rolls last month after removing 136 in May. That’s along with removing 155,000 inactive or dead from their voter rolls. And America First Legal is suing Maricopa County, Arizona, to remove non-citizens from voting rolls, after a Rasmussen poll in the state revealed about one percent of voters admitted to being non-citizens. Presler has been pushing the Pennsylvania Department of State to say whether they have non-citizens on their rolls. Since they refuse to answer, he has been writing to individual counties.

In addition to keeping non-citizens from voting, there are the many problems with mail-in ballots and computerized voting machines. Glenn Youngkin in Virginia has boasted that the Commonwealth has removed over 80,000 deceased voters from the rolls as well as 6,303 non-citizens. He introduced his new Executive Order 35 this week with a summary that should be imitated by every red state governor: 

“We use 100% paper ballots with a strict chain of custody. We use counting machines, not voting machines, that are tested prior to every election and never connected to the internet. We do not mass mail ballots. We monitor our drop boxes 24/7. We verify the legal presence and identity of voters using DMV data and other trusted data sources to update our voter rolls daily, not only adding new voters, but scrubbing the lists to remove those that should not be on it, like the deceased, individuals that have moved, and noncitizens that have accidentally or maliciously attempted to register.”

In addition to Virginia, Georgia has taken action. Their state election board issued a new rule allowing county supervisors to demand information and make inquiries before certifying elections. While Democrats and even some Republicans have objected to the new rule, it’s a good sign since objections to election oddities after certification are hard to act on. Tarrant County, Texas, has now become the second jurisdiction in America to use a new platform created by Civera, a technology company focusing on making available more information to citizens, that “will allow people to search online for images of ballots, and compare them to the voter record tabulated by the county.” The platform will also double check the counting of the votes.

Some politicians are realizing that voter security is a potent platform to run on. Denny Hoskins, Missouri GOP nominee for Secretary of State, has proposed changes similar to Youngkin’s for the Show Me State’s rules.

The RNC itself has been active, though not entirely successful in attempting to force states not to accept mail-in ballots that arrive after election day. They have made challenges in Nevada, North Dakota, Illinois, and Mississippi.

In short, there is a lot of work to make sure the fiasco of uncertainty that was the 2020 election does not happen again. Unfortunately, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s now liberal majority reversed a 2022 decision that unmanned ballot boxes were against the state’s constitution, a problem considering that there has been no uniform approach to how these boxes were treated (e.g., collection of ballots or chain of custody).

So, what happens if we do have another election like that of 2020? Thankfully, earlier this summer, the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) released a report on some political scenario exercises they conducted with over fifty participants from June 17 to June 21. Unlike the 2020 Transition Integrity Project, which was run by former lawyers in Barack Obama’s White House Counsel office, TIP 2024 was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and organized by Heritage’s Mike Howell, University of Houston-Downtown Professor Adam Ellwanger, and Chuck DeVore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Though conducted when the Democratic nominee was still presumed to be Joe Biden, the report, written by Ellwanger and reviewed and edited by Heritage and TPPF scholars, still has relevance without Biden on the ballot. Those interested in the different scenarios gamed out and analyzed can read TIP 2024’s full report. But its three primary conclusions are important.

First, the idea of an “election month” is dangerous because it “facilitates voter fraud and procedural manipulations.” Second, in the event of another Democratic popular vote victory and electoral college loss, there is a strong possibility that President Biden and other Democrats would encourage states to reject the electoral college results. That the Biden Administration might well do such a thing with Harris on the ballot seems possible as well. Third, “unelected administrators in the executive branch will resist the transition process should the outcome of the election be at odds with their political preferences.” That we have seen such a scenario in 2016 makes this almost a certainty in 2024 if Donald Trump wins again.

TIP 2024 recommendations are to prepare for a close election, to be ready to document election anomalies, and to make sure that state and local law enforcement are ready to enforce laws in the event of voter fraud and other violations of election laws. Additionally, they should be ready for violence, especially if the Democrats lose. For individual voters, they recommend the following:

• Vote.
• Volunteer as a poll worker.
• Contact election officials and elected representatives to express the importance of adhering to the laws and traditions of our democracy by completing the tallying of ballots on election night.
• Call prominent members of government and leaders in law enforcement to demand commitment to enforcing the law should there be violent unrest in the aftermath of a contested election.
• Document any irregularities or potential or attempted violations of election law that you observe on Election Day and be certain to report them to the relevant authorities and share them on social media.

One way of getting involved is through AMAC Action, the advocacy affiliate of AMAC – Association of Mature American Citizens. They have been getting deeply involved in state-level advocacy on critical election integrity issues by helping to either stop bad ranked-choice voting bills (another very destructive practice) or support efforts to ban this voting scheme in Ohio, Wisconsin, Kansas, Georgia, and Rhode Island. AMAC has had notable success in Oklahoma, Missouri and Virginia in stopping many bad ballot measures. AMAC members are also signing up to serve as poll observers and election workers and engaging in a concerted GOTV effort to encourage low-frequency voters to get to the polls this November.

We absolutely need to be doing and supporting the work that AMAC Action and Scott Presler’s Early Vote Action have spearheaded in getting people registered and ready to vote. There are a lot of people who just aren’t in the habit of voting or have fallen into a kind of despair or apathy about the country they love. They need to know their votes count. But we also need to support officials trying to make sure the 2024 election is completely aboveboard.

And, as TIP’s recommendations indicate, we need to be doing what we can in our own places (through AMAC Action or other conservative organizations) to see to it that our votes and the legal votes of those around us really do count—and that there is no cause for doubt that we have had a free, fair, and secure election. I believe that if this happens, we’ll see a very needed Republican victory and a change in the political temperature.     

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.