What have, what are Republicans doing to ensure free and fair elections in Washington State?
Editors’ Note It is not the purpose of this essay to discourage anyone from participating in the 2024 election. Quite the opposite. Its purpose is to encourage unprecedented numbers of citizens and their elected representatives to work together to ensure that the election will be fair and free from, among other things, interference by foreign governments and their intelligence agencies.
At no time during the Cold War with the Soviet Union was it imagined that the Russians could manipulate a United States presidential election in favor of their preferred candidate. Hollywood’s portrayal of a “Manchurian Candidate” aside, American elections were held in person, using paper ballots, counted by human beings, with other human beings watching them. And, however vicious and corrupt the normal partisan interplay of American politics may have been, this practice insured that a fair enough election could be held. Today that is no longer the case.
Regardless of who the nominees are in 2024, just as in 2020, much of America will hold their elections in the least transparent, most vulnerable method possible: absentee ballots. Because of this, a free and fair election cannot be assured. It matters not that President Trump is ahead in all the polls and in ways that some pollsters believe cannot be overcome. Citizens should expect that, since America is in a war with Communist China, November’s election will be the target of a massive intelligence operation to decide the next president.
It should be noted that America’s election system was not built to stop the Communist Chinese or any nation state, or for that matter any dark money group, with the capacity and the interest in deciding an American presidential election.
The United States is made vulnerable by being the only developed country in the world to allow for this wide-spread use of absentee ballots. Every other advanced democracy conducts their elections in person, with identification shown, on paper ballots counted by large groups of people transparently tallying vote totals with the results available the same day of the election. In states around America, Secretaries of State have allowed or been part of the development of elections systems that would appear to be designed to allow for fraud. So whether not an election is stolen, a free and fair election system has been stolen from the American people. Today we have systems that lacks transparency whether it is the absentee ballot process or the electronic voting systems. That it can be exploited by the Chinese Communist Party should seem obvious.
It was widely underreported that Communist China declared a People’s War against the United States in May of 2019 after the Trump Administration’s efforts to curb their theft of American intellectual property. This so-called People’s War was declared in the pages of the People’s Daily when Communist Party apparatchiks told the Chinese people they would have to make sacrifices to stop the “greed and arrogance” of the Trump Administration. This war between the U.S. and the CCP involves political warfare, information warfare, and psychological warfare. It is war, after all, and as such, there are few rules. Any reasonable assessment of the state of U.S. defenses should include whether such political warfare could include the CCP intervening in the 2024 election. This assessment appears not to have been done. This is critical since this is not merely about the manipulation of search engines or social media platforms. This is about a comprehensive strategy to steal the 2024 election using whatever means necessary.
And, though the level of hostilities between the U.S. and the CCP has not risen to traditional military conflict, we should be clear that the Chinese Communist Party is deadly serious in their intent to destroy the United States. The death of over 70,000 Americans last year because of Chinese-manufactured fentanyl—imported via Biden’s open border with Mexico—means that China’s unrestricted warfare is in full operation and that nothing is beyond the pale of the CCP.
It is delusional to believe, therefore, that the U.S. government under President Biden has taken the necessary steps to defend America from Communist China. We let our children die at the hands of the Chinese Communists. Is permitting them to steal an election so far-fetched?
China’s Strategic Design
Communist China is a great nation with great ambition. They spend roughly $16 billion on intelligence and influence operations annually in the United States. They do so because they have not yet subjected us to their rule. It would not be unreasonable to believe that they wish to change this in November’s election.
The Chinese Communist Party has at their disposal important allies. Indeed, the political and information war being waged against the American people is by a condominium of the Chinese Communist Party and American leftists—from Progressives to Communists—and the collection of transnational corporations and globalist elites that run them. This latter group assumes they will have a preferred position financially and economically in a new world order.
For their part, the CCP and their communist allies here within the United States seek to perpetuate the Biden regime and its ongoing military and strategic submission to the Chinese Communist Party, and to dismantle the political and economic system of the United States. In the past three and a half years, China has taken unprecedented steps toward an invasion of Taiwan, prepared for an attack on the United States through the use of surveillance balloons across the United States, operated bio-weapons laboratories (at least one of which was found in Reedley, California replete with Ebola, anthrax, and the like), formed a “no limits” strategic alliance with Russia in their war with Ukraine, signed an “all-weather” strategic partnership with Hungary on the threshold of Europe, and supplied both funding and intelligence resources to the Iranians, Hezbollah, and Hamas in their war with Israel. No one believes any of this would have happened under President Trump.
Likewise, the Biden Administration, with Congress, has engaged in levels of spending that have ballooned the American national debt to nearly $35 trillion. This reckless spending has led not merely to inflation but has undermined the world’s faith in the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency. Witness Saudi Arabia’s failure to renew the use of the U.S. dollar as the primary means for the clearance of oil contracts. If it is in Communist China’s interest to have the Renminbi be the world’s primary reserve currency, the fiscal policies of President Biden could not be any more conducive to that goal.
That this is not clear to anyone with eyes to see might seem a great mystery, until one considers the active measures of the Chinese Communist Party to buy up the most influential law, public relations, and political lobbying firms in Washington and New York. Money—the aforementioned $16 billion—is spread through political and philanthropic donations, investments, advertising in new and legacy media, support for journalists and scholars, and contributions to major academic institutions and think tanks throughout the country. Quite literally the most powerful forces in American politics and communications have been coopted—whether they know it or not—by the Chinese Communist Party to promote or sympathize with Beijing’s perspective.
These billions of dollars ensure not merely that journalists and scholars think twice before publicly acknowledging Communist China’s ongoing malfeasance, but also that counter arguments—regarding the origins of COVID-19, China’s military buildup in the South China Sea, or the ongoing harmful effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative throughout the world—are formulated and propagated proactively by a domestic Fifth Column within our opinion-making institutions. This should come as no surprise, of course, since active measures are to be expected by a nation at war.
For the Communist Chinese only the United States stands between them and global domination. From China’s purely strategic point of view, the American people and their republican form of government must be destroyed. This may not be something that can happen overnight, but China is patient.
Globalists, especially America’s business elites, will point out that Communist China is highly dependent on America for trade, and that hundreds of thousands of its young people go to college in the United States each year. Why would they wish to destroy the United States? But China may have determined that they have served as the manufacturing base of the United States for long enough. It may be that they wish to develop China along different economic lines and expand their reach throughout the globe through the many client-states they have developed. Trade with the United States along the lines of the three decades since China was awarded Most Favored Nation status may not align with their strategic plans.
It may also be that the Chinese have extracted from the West all the knowledge that is necessary for them to become the most powerful nation the world has ever known, in the fields of engineering, physics, science, philosophy—including political philosophy—and literature. Here again, they may no longer need the United States. Indeed, they have probably noticed that the teaching of even the hard sciences in American universities has not withstood the effects of so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” and that our once-superb research institutions no longer produce the kind of excellence that built the modern world. From the CCP’s point of view, having extracted the wealth and knowledge of the United States, they are now better off managing America’s exit from the world stage.
Within six months of the declaration of the People’s War, COVID-19 was spreading throughout China and the world. Within another six months America was in lockdown. Would Communist China’s strategic planners be capable of seeing that a kind of global reset caused by a global pandemic would create the conditions to remove an American president whose policies were explicitly designed to put America first and to put Communist China in its place?
The spread of COVID came just before an American presidential election was held under circumstances that disadvantaged the populist incumbent Donald Trump, whose political energy was built on his signature rallies. Americans were locked down and fed a steady diet of narratives that COVID-19 was a death sentence.
Based on this, elections were changed nationwide—mostly without the legislative participation at the state level required by the U.S. Constitution—to require the use of absentee ballots. Prior to 2020 it was widely accepted by both Republicans and Democrats that absentee balloting could lead to widespread voter fraud. The blue-ribbon commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker in 2005 explained this clearly. COVID-19 created the perfect circumstance to look the other way. Who, after all, would want to die going to a polling place?
At one level it matters not that the American Left was radicalized to exploit the death of George Floyd and the ubiquitous and false narrative that Donald Trump was a racist and open Nazi sympathizer. The Black Lives Matter and Antifa operations were part of an effort to intimidate the American people into compliance. Americans were to stay indoors and accept that their political interaction was to be limited to television and social media, the latter of which would turn on President Trump in the final weeks of the election. At a more basic level it created the necessary political narrative that would allow otherwise sensible observers to believe that President Trump lost the election legitimately. The middle-class aversion to violence and disorder was exploited to suggest that the removal of Trump would lead to a restoration of calm.
Was the 2020 Election Stolen?
No serious person believes the 2020 election was fair. The signature anomaly, the middle of the night pause in counting in the six swing states—where President Trump was in the lead at the start of the pause, only to have the count resume with Joe Biden ahead—is all one needs to know.
The election of 2020 was decided—most likely—by the illegal collection and production of absentee ballots by a variety of front groups whose purpose was to steal the election. It is not possible to demonstrate with absolute certitude this assertion because there was no real investigation of the election and its many anomalies. Historic numbers of absentee ballots were returned, the chain of custody of ballots was either missing or defective, and signature verification was in many states nearly non-existent. Under the letter of the law, many key states were unable to certify their elections legitimately.
Citizen groups that did investigate were treated not only with contempt, but as if their civic actions were criminal in nature. Charges of Trump supporters being election-deniers became the dominant narrative throughout the left-wing media that only four years prior had supported similar claims from Hillary Clinton and her supporters, claims that remain to this day.
One would think that a legitimately elected president would have been eager to demonstrate to the world the legitimacy of America’s political system. This was not the case. Indeed, raising the question of election irregularities was met with lawfare and intimidation. For many Americans this merely reinforced the illegitimacy of the election and therefore the Biden presidency itself.
For all their sophistication, Americans are amazingly naïve about the mechanics of their electoral process. They are somehow of the belief that there are real authorities from both parties scrutinizing the electoral process and, by so doing, bringing order and fairness to the system. Were that it were so.
Because we are citizens of a free country, though getting less free by the day, we naturally tend to think in terms of fairness between one citizen and another. We don’t like the idea that one citizen might steal another citizen’s vote or that another group would engage in voter fraud, whether through the electronic manipulation of ballots or the stuffing of the ballot box with fake or fraudulent ballots. This is especially true of a presidential election.
It was clear that once President Trump had been adequately vilified for the specious idea he was a racist—George Floyd died while he was president after all—the political conditions were created so that not only could an election be stolen, but should be stolen by any means possible. For the American Left, Trump was Hitler and better to stop Hitler by stealing an election than to watch him win another term.
But hasn’t it been said by some that the election of 2020 could not have been stolen since it was litigated all over the country and that no court saw fit to overturn the election, including the Supreme Court? What is true is that no court was going to insert itself into the presidential process either before or after the election. The 80-some cases brought before state courts were dismissed on procedural grounds having primarily to do with standing either before or after the election; the merits of the argument were not addressed. The Judiciary, in our system of government, is the weakest branch, having neither force nor will to enforce its decisions. This was evident after November of 2020. The letter of the law be damned and it mattered not whether the elections were not held in accordance with state election law. The courts were not going to put themselves in the middle of political controversy. The elections were over and that was that.
And, in any case, is it not the job of the Secretaries of State around the country and the Trump Administration’s own Department of Homeland Security and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to make sure an election is fair? Certainly, the nonpartisan government oversight function could not have gotten this so wrong, could it?
Secretaries of State are partisan offices and, especially in the blue states, were overwhelmed by the political pressure of the COVID-19 lockdowns to permit absentee ballots. They knew that the Democrats and Biden would not be disadvantaged by this. They were also being given access to funds and programs such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life which were designed to promote the use of absentee ballots to get as many people voting as possible. These efforts, presumedly to promote voting in this non-traditional method because of COVID-19, opened the door for unknown, and uninvestigated, amounts of fraud and may well have been cover for other dark money spending and their much less transparent efforts. The billions of dollars funneled into the system by Arabella Advisors, The Tides Foundation, The Sixteen Thirty Fund and other anodyne sounding organizations themselves mask the sources of funding including from foreign individuals and corporations seeking to influence American politics to promote globalist and communist priorities.
The Department of Homeland Security, it would appear, is clueless to all this. It is as if they did not think it was their job to take seriously a radical change in how Americans vote during the middle of a historic national health crisis and civic unrest and violence the likes of which the nation had not seen for decades. Yet to be investigated is the statement on November 12, 2020 by CISA Director Christopher Krebs and his superiors that the election “was the most secure in American history.” But how could he know that, and how could he know it so soon? The idea that it was the most secure election was completely ridiculous on its face, but a very useful media narrative emerged that even the Trump Administration believed the election was secure.
There was no way of knowing so shortly after the election what had transpired in the submission of millions and millions of ballots never before cast in a presidential election this way. And never had a presidential election had such a wide use of electronic voting systems under these circumstances.
If there is an obvious lesson to be drawn from this, it is that whereas President Trump is the leader of an enormous national political movement, he does not control, even very likely today, the Republican Party and its many establishment members. What became clear in 2017 was that the Republican Establishment was not on the side of President Trump. They were not for closing the border, standing up to Communist China, or reining in the administrative state. They were as desirous as any Democrat of seeing President Trump out of the White House. President Trump is a man with a movement but not a party. And Presidential elections are run, alas, by political parties.
There is also the not insignificant matter of the electronic voting systems. Let us be clear that there is no freedom of speech in America to discuss electronic voting systems. It is stipulated that electronic voting systems are perfect. But it should only be noted that they operate with electronic components made in Communist China and that many if not most of the machines that will be used by voters were not made in the United States. The software in use in the machines comes from a variety of proprietary developers located in America, Canada, Serbia, Venezuela and elsewhere. Anyone interested in learning more about this should consult the excellent HBO documentary from 2020 titled: Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections. In the film, these systems were attacked first by Democrat Senators Amy Klobucher and Elizabeth Warren, who spoke out against using them. The essential argument is that they can be manipulated by foreign bad actors.
How Would Communist China Steal the Election?
It is the view of Communist China and their Central Party Secretary Xi Jinping that they are in a People’s War with the United States. We should expect with absolute certainty that the Chinese Communist Party will use their intelligence services to play a role—decisive if possible—in the 2024 election. Although their role in the 2020 election was never investigated, given the change in administrations, there is their funding of communist front groups in the United States during the George Floyd and Antifa riots and the logistical support that the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas appears to have been providing such groups. It is likely no coincidence that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ordered that the Houston consulate cease all operations on July 21, 2020 for, among other things, their on-going and aggressive espionage activities in the United States. In the days after plumes of smoke could be seen from the consulate as CCP staff burned the embassy’s documents.
In 2024 we should expect the CCP to be even more aggressive.
Consider the fact that Communist China can counterfeit U.S. $100 bills, as can North Korea. If we apply this to absentee balloting in American elections, we simply have to ask whether Communist China would, with their vast intelligence and influence operations budget, use a small fraction of their resources to counterfeit hundreds of thousands or more ballots in each of the seven swing states that decide a U.S. presidential election?
Counterfeiting American election ballots is radically easier than reproducing U.S. currency, which has many sophisticated security features, and is printed on special paper with special ink. Election ballots have no security features. As a practical matter the Communist Chinese will have access to the same paper stocks being used, easy access to the actual PDFs of the ballot, and ready access to U.S. voter rolls (themselves highly unreliable in many circumstances). And, using artificial intelligence, they can collect the signatures of every voter through databases used in the signing of checks, credit cards, and other methods that require a signature. Even if some of this required the surreptitious acquisition of signatures, Communist China’s People’s Liberation Army has a cyber unit of some 600,000 men and women who engage in hundreds of thousands of cyber-attacks on U.S. banking, financial, and industrial systems daily. And, they have thousands of warehouses around the United States from which such ballot counterfeiting could operate.
Given that the Communist Chinese have the capacity financially, the interest strategically, and the desire politically to see a “soft on China” president elected, whether it is this election or any future election, it would be a small investment on their part to engage in such measures. At a minimum they do not want to see an America First president like Donald Trump returned to office.
And to frame it differently, what would we do as a country if we knew with absolute certainty that Communist China was going to print up one million ballots of low-propensity voters for each of the seven swing states for the Democrat nominee for president and have them inserted into the system somehow? The low-propensity voters are not going to complain since they don’t vote in any case. Would anyone dare to insist on in-person balloting, or would that be called an effort to disenfranchise minority voters? Or would we simply watch as a national election was stolen?
It should be of great concern that nowhere in the calculations of how to secure a U.S. national election has the subject of Communist China and their ability to interfere in the election in this way been raised. China has every interest in deciding the election in their favor. If we had an adequate counter-intelligence capability in this country, or if we eliminated absentee balloting, it would not be an issue. Unfortunately, it is.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned in May that Russia remains the greatest threat when it comes to influencing a U.S. election, harking back to 2016 and the idea that the Russians wanted President Trump elected. She even noted that China and Iran could also play a role when it came to social media and artificial intelligence. If Director Haines genuinely believed in the Russian threat there would be an immediate call for ban on absentee ballots and their usage in the 2024 election, lest Russian President Vladimir Putin install his supposed puppet Donald Trump into the White House. U.S. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies know full well of the potential of an industrial level production of absentee ballots by foreign intelligence services that could decisively alter an American presidential election and therefore American history and are by all accounts doing nothing. Why is this not being debated as if the future of the American Republic actually mattered?
Are There No Safeguards Against This?
Nearly every part of the US government appears committed to denying President Trump a fair shot in this November’s election. From the courts’ prosecution of transparently bogus lawsuits to the harassment and intimidation by the FBI and Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, the Biden Regime has decidedly put their finger on the scales against him.
The very officials within the Biden Justice Department who approved the use of lethal force in the raid on Mar-a-Lago, in effect putting President Trump in the crosshairs, will be, at one level, the people overseeing the 2024 election. And though the actual running of elections falls to state officials, the federal agency tasked with securing the integrity of the election, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Why would anyone believe that the very part of the U.S. government tasked with securing our border and therefore the country itself, which has allowed in over 10 million illegal aliens—some of them criminals, terrorists, and foreign combatants—would be capable of or interested in ensuring that such an election was secure? This is made even more remarkable since the open border policy of Mayorkas was carried out at the behest of an Administration that would also like these same illegal aliens to be able to vote in our elections including this November.
The American Left has assembled a cohort of lawyers nationwide who will work with friendly judges and election officials to ensure that the election will be run much like 2020 and that there will be little transparency to see what is going on both before and after the election. Lawyers on behalf of the Trump Campaign and the Republican Party will wage a valiant effort against this but it is a decidedly uphill battle given that courts may not consider relevant cases, may ignore relevant facts, and even if successful, may be ignored by state and local election officials.
There is right now a widespread campaign in the media suggesting President Trump would engage in “retribution” for what has happened to him and his allies over the past four years. Given that President Trump’s political enemies already think he is Hitler, when you combine this with the idea that there will be justice for their actual crimes over the past four years, who in the Biden Administration will raise a finger to make sure there is a fair election?
And, under these circumstances, why would anyone believe that the House of Representatives and the Senate will not be stolen as well? If Communist China’s goal is the destruction of the American Republic why not give the new Democrat president, whoever that may be, all the power they need?
There are several problems, of course, in stealing an election. We have seen them over these past four years. If an election is so obviously stolen that everyone in the country believes it to be the case, you will have an ungovernable country for four years. There will be a constitutional crisis even greater than the one we have today. If you are Communist China, what better way to control the United States then to put us into a state of confusion, chaos, and possible civil war? And however much Democrats may desire political power, and desire it they do, they will have a country in ruins and the Communist Chinese know this.
What Is to Be Done?
The only real remedy for all of this is to conduct the election only on November 5—rather than some multiweek voting scheme—by human beings in person, who show their identification and cast ballots that are counted by other human beings in the most transparent way possible. Absentee ballots could be used for the military overseas or the indefinitely confined. Every other voter should have to show up in person. In a world of cyber warfare and artificial intelligence, only a system that relies on the actions of a human being verified by other human beings present in the room will do.
Many of President Trump’s supporters believe that they are going to ‘outvote the steal’ and that this November election will be “Too Big to Rig.” That may well be the case. But that wasn’t the case in 2022 where around the country in the key battleground states—where one would have thought that President Trump’s advisors would have gone all-in to ensure that Republican governors and secretaries of state were elected—nearly every MAGA candidate who could have ensured a fair election in 2024 lost. This was a strategic error of immense proportions. The election in 2024 in the key swing states will now be conducted by some of President Trump’s most vicious political enemies. That does not mean the election cannot be won by President Trump. What it means is that he will have to win by such an overwhelming margin that even the concerted efforts of Communist China, and the billions spent by dark money groups, cannot overcome it.
In the war we find ourselves in, a war for the future of the American Republic, it is critical that Congress, the President, and the political class of the United States do everything in their power to ensure a free and fair election this fall. This may be the only thing separating this country from a genuine civil war, where citizens no longer believe that they live in a republic, and that their vote no longer matters. This is the logical result of the political war being waged against the United States by enemies foreign and domestic and the rise of technologies that could easily undermine America’s voting system.
It is entirely the strategy of China and Russia that America be divided. There is no better way to achieve this than to corrupt our electoral process in this manner.
Americans will find out whether they are still one people or whether they will allow our enemies to divide us. Let us pray that the better angels of our nature prevail. Let us also recognize that if ever there was a time for the American people to humble themselves before God, to ask his forgiveness and to pray for justice this fall, now is the time.
Brian T. Kennedy is President of the American Strategy Group and is Chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China. He is a Senior Fellow, board member, and former president of the Claremont Institute. Follow him at @BrianTKennedy on GETTR and Truth Social.
