Commentary By Stephen Macaulay
Odds are you have received multiple pieces of mail from individuals running for office or from organizations backing those candidates or ballot initiatives. You may wonder how your name and address got into play. Simple: That information (and more) is collected by states.
According to ballotpedia.org: “After the 2000 presidential election and the resulting Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. HAVA legislation created the US Election Assistance Commission. The legislation also directed every state to create “a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained, and administered at the State level that contains the name and registration information of every legally registered voter in the State …”
States make that information available either for a fee or for free.
During his July 16 speech one of Donald Trump’s bombshells was that China had acquired “220 million US voter files,” starting their collection in the 2020 election cycle.
Which is likely the case.
According to the Independent Voter Project, which has as a mission getting more people to sign up to vote so it is probably erring on the positive side, there are 217.8 million registered voters in the US, so quite possibly the Chinese got some duped names.
But the point is, you could get for $0 the “DOB, SSN, DL number, gender, phone number, email address, voting history, voter registration ID number, date of registration” for voters in Indiana, again according to Ballotpedia. (The state that really makes you pay some serious money is Alabama, which charges $37,000. But presumably the Chinese can manage.)
The point is, voter information is out there and only someone incredibly naïve would image that state actors from countries like China and Russia wouldn’t send out requests for these lists.
It is the “gambling in Casablanca” scenario, yet somehow Trump and his minions made this seem almost inconceivable if not incomprehensible.
(Speaking of Russia: on March 10, 2021 “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections,” drafted by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)— State Department, and the National Security Agency (NSA), wrote this: Key Judgment 2: We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US.
How many times did Trump reference Russia in his speech? Once. Putin? Zero.)
Funny thing about Trump’s concern regarding the 2020 election — and it is not that he keeps trying to relitigate something that happened six years ago and which he has been unable to provide bona-fide evidence for any game-changing fraud in this period of time, a period that includes time that he was the President of the United States and can see whatever files he wants. That’s just sad.
No, the funny thing is that the 2020 election was held when he was the President of the United States and as such, were he as concerned about election integrity as he now proclaims to be, there would have been no monkey-business in that election.
There wasn’t. Yet for some reason he keeps thumping the podium claiming there was.
In other words, if the 2020 election was “rigged,” wouldn’t it have been his responsibility to untie the knots before the election occurred?
Back in 2020, perhaps to gin up new viewers and to satisfy existing ones, Fox News and its commentators made claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines had been rigged during the election, switching votes for Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
In March 2021 Dominion filed a $1.6-billion lawsuit against Fox for fraud.
In April 2023, just before the trial was to begin — and the jury was seated, so this is really at the final moment — it was announced that Fox would pay Dominion $787.5 million.
Does anyone think for a minute (outside of Trump and his acolytes) that Fox would pay that kind of money if it thought it would be able to show there was anything wrong with the Dominion equipment?
You’d think that case would have been enough to put the whole thing to rest.
Trump spent about five years (2011 to 2016) claiming that Barrack Obama wasn’t born in the US until he acknowledged that Obama was.
Six years after his defeat by Obama’s vice president, he’s still on the election lie.
Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings, where he writes primarily for the right (conservative) column.