Op-Ed: Election Integrity Is Our Most Critical Battlefield - We Need a Plan for 2024
We realized during the Trump administration that we were already at war with China. It wasn’t a shooting war, but it was a real war nonetheless, with real war consequences.
It was being fought against us by the Chinese Communist Party in the economic and information spaces, both at home and through proxies abroad. The oddest thing was that most Americans didn’t even know we were in a war.
Now, with the publication of “The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare,” it is becoming increasingly clear that this war is just a piece of a much broader and deeper conflict with Marxism and globalism that spans the world and has ignited a civil war at home.
Just like the conflict with China, the civil war has two defining characteristics: One side has a long-term strategy and uses unconventional and unrestricted tactics to achieve its goals, and the other side doesn’t even know it’s in a war.
But thanks to Michael Flynn and Boone Cutler’s little book, people are waking up, recognizing where we are, and looking for ways to fight back.
Flynn and Cutler list six critical battlefields in the civil war: election integrity, border security, parental rights, medical freedom, the Bill of Rights, and identifying and removing fifth-column members of the uni-party; but there is a reason election integrity is listed first.
Free and fair elections are the only legitimate means for the nonviolent resolution of political conflict, so none of the other objectives can be achieved, none of our democratic rights and freedoms protected, without free and fair elections.
As our forefathers learned, and oppressed peoples across the globe have demonstrated time after time, the only alternative to free and fair elections for establishing or restoring liberty and democracy is violent and bloody conventional war.
What is a free and fair election?
In the democracy field, we have technical definitions of what makes an election free and fair, but these can be boiled down to an environment where candidates can campaign free of government or other interference, voters have adequate and uncensored access to information on candidates and issues, and the election process results in an outcome that accurately reflects the will of the people.
By these metrics, we now know that U.S. elections were not free and fair in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022.
The majority of voters in the U.S. now doubt the integrity of our election processes, yet a democracy cannot function without public confidence in the legitimacy of its elected representatives.
Reversing this trend, and holding transparent and verifiable elections in 2024, is likely our last chance to avoid bloody civil war or life as slaves or serfs in a one-party tyranny.
What can we do to restore confidence in elections?
Had reforms been made earlier, before the erosion of confidence had progressed too far, small adjustments might have sufficed to restore confidence, but we have now gone way past that stage.
No one who currently doubts the process will be reassured by statements from politicians. The only way now to restore the confidence of the American electorate in the fairness of the election process and legitimacy of elected representatives is to conduct elections that are completely transparent and verifiable by ordinary voters.
While the answer may sound simple, it’s not.
There is an entire infrastructure that has been hard at work for most of a decade to decrease the transparency and security of our elections. This includes many politicians, many secretaries of state (some elected with funding from George Soros), and many government officials at the federal, state and local levels. They are assisted by allies, acolytes, and accomplices in academia, NGOs, the media, Big Tech and global corporations.
Although the program to inflate voter rolls with ineligible voters, eliminate voter ID and decrease transparency through the use of voting machines has been ongoing for some time, the anti-integrity brigade was handed a golden ticket with the arrival of COVID-19, which was used to introduce and normalize incredibly insecure mail-in ballots and extended voting periods. COVID was also used to ramp up censorship and political repression by government agencies and compliant corporations and to politicize and weaponize the institutions of state security.
With all these institutions working against free and fair elections, only the people themselves, working together, have the power to turn the tide.
But the people are not together. There is tremendous concern for election integrity among the voters, and enthusiasm to do something about it, but (unlike the anti-democracy Democrats) we have nothing like a coordinated strategy to improve the quality of our election process. Instead, we have a disorganized band of election integrity “experts” who travel the country raising money off their particular magic bullet.
Elections in this country are decentralized, so rather than one reform program, we need 50 reform programs, each tailored to the idiosyncrasies and dysfunctionalities of their particular state.
In each state, we need to identify and address the technical deficiencies of the laws and regulations that prevent the process from being transparent and verifiable, then mount an effective political pressure campaign to ensure reforms are enacted by the state legislature.
The final complicating factor is time. We ain’t got much of it.
While the Democrats have been building their Marxist insurgency since the ’60s, and the Chinese have been focused on undermining our country since the ’90s, the pro-democracy and pro-election integrity movement in America is a relative newborn. Somehow, we need to come together, organize, identify the needed reforms, then mount a campaign to have those reforms enacted before the 2024 elections.
It’s a tall order, but not impossible. Marxism, both at home and abroad, is ancient, cynical and morally bankrupt. Although we are young and inexperienced as a movement, we have the power of youth thrusting toward our manifest destiny. And we have truth on our side, while they have only lies.
With our backs to the wall, our liberty, lives and sacred honor on the line, we can only fight or surrender, and it seems to me we are up for a fight.
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