The were three areas the GOP needed to do to beat the Democrat cheating in 2024

  1. Building a legal machine to challenge that of the Democrats everywhere all the time. (see Part 2)
  2. Ensuring voter integrity
  3. Building a Get-Out-The-Vote machine.

Guarding Voter ID, Mail-in Ballots and Ballot Harvesting

The legal machine built by the GOP in 2024 would play an important role here also, but more in support of GOP teams that were fighting to clean up voter rolls and pass laws that would protect voter integrity, laws that would hopefully then be used by the legal teams when voting started.

The focus of course would have to be on the seven battleground states and by early 2024 only two, Georgia and North Carolina, had enacted meaningful election integrity legislation. The other five had Democrat Governors utterly uninterested in such legislation, arguing that they were all good. By utter chance they included states that Biden won in 2020 by tiny margins after protracted post-election vote counting.

In the post Your Cheatin’ Ballot IV: Democrat Party History, I listed the 2020 election issues with each of the following states and it’s an exercise in black comedy to match that up with the following post-2020 actions of those state’s Democrat governors.

  1. In Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro didn’t have to do anything after 2022 because the GOP lost the state House (while holding the Senate), but before he was term-limited out, Shaprio’s Democrat predecessor, Tom Wolf, vetoed legislation that would have:
    • Strengthened voter ID requirements.
    • Decreased the abuse of mail-in ballots
    • Tightened the rules governing ballot drop boxes.
  2. Arizona’s Katie Hobbs had vetoed 21 election integrity bills passed by the Republican legislature, despite election chaos in the state in 2020 where Biden won by just 0.4%.
  3. Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer:
  4.  Wisconsin’s Tony Evers vetoed every election reform bill passed by the state’s Republican legislature, including:
    •  Nine bills in 2022, including legislation that would ban election officials from accepting grants from private entities (e.g. Zuckbucks).
    • A measure that would have banned automatic mailing of absentee ballot applications to all registered voters.
    • Legislation in 2023 that would have required the state Elections Commission to verify voter citizenship.
  5. Nevada was one state I ignored because I saw no chance of the election rules being changed. It now conducts elections entirely by mail and ballot harvesting is legal, so although Trump was ahead in the polls that meant nothing; in 2022 former Senate candidate Adam Laxalt was ahead and lost. In this case the only way for the GOP to win was by building a GOTV machine that was better than the Democrats.

BTW, every state that allow their elections to be conducted entirely by mail (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington) have become single-party Democrat fiefdoms. Hardly a surprise when in some states, signature verification on mail-in ballots has been reduced to a bored election worker clicking a mouse in one or two seconds, when a proper review takes up to thirty seconds.

Despite these setbacks the GOP did score some big wins.

  • In Pennsylvania the state Supreme Court overthrew the rules they had allowed in 2020, the GOP getting what had been vetoed by the Governor.
  • In Wisconsin the GOP engineered a constitutional amendment that banned “Zuckerbucks” and it was approved by voters in April 2024. This had immediate legal spillover effects in other swing states where Zuckerbucks had made an impact.

In some states the GOP had not learned the lesson (Feb 2024), possibly because they were Deep Red states, like South Dakota, where the GOP would win anyway:

Senate Bill 17 [] modifies the state’s recently-enacted law requiring new South Dakota voters to have resided in the state for at least 30 days. …Now the bill, in its current form as amended by the Republican-controlled Senate, would abandon the 30-day residency protections entirely and do away with current residency law that defines a residence as “an actual fixed permanent dwelling.” Such a change would allow practically anyone to buy a South Dakota mailing address and use it to vote.
…
Citizen-led canvassing groups, of which I am a part, identified thousands upon thousands of voters registered to commercial addresses, vacant lots, hotels, motels, campgrounds, Walmart parking lots and more. A closer look revealed a booming business called mail forwarding. 

Cleaning Up Voter Rolls

With or without such laws it was also essential to also clean up the rolls in these states, because without flawed rolls the whole system of cheating via ballot harvesting and mail-in ballots, doesn’t work – or at least doesn’t work as well. Naturally these efforts were also fought against tooth and nail by the Democrat Party in these states.

Even so, in Michigan the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) had great success in removing ineligible voters from the rolls – including dead people:

One of these former residents is a woman named Mamie Jones, whose voter file listed a birth year of 1823 — 14 years before Michigan became a state. According to the records reviewed by PILF, Jones was registered to vote as recently as 2008. Another former resident highlighted in the video is Pauline Schmainda, who died in 1990 and is still listed on Michigan’s voter rolls. Over 17,000 of the registrants on the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s list passed away over a decade ago.

PILF extended its efforts from Michigan to other states and was joined by outfits like Omega4America, which got very sophisticated, applying Fractal Programming technology at scale to find and challenge phantoms on the rolls:

For the ballot-gathering strategy to work, Democrats need tens of thousands of phantom addresses and voters.  A few is not enough.  Without thousands of loose ballots tied to phantoms, the edifice comes crashing down. They also need Republicans to do nothing. The Wisconsin team proved, in this election, that adding even a small amount of friction – removing thousands of phantom names and identifying several hundred thousand incorrect addresses — has a massive impact on the ballot-gathering system.

The cleanup did not have to be perfect, just good enough to stuff the Democrat strategy of mail-out ballots and ballot harvesting, which would negate the slack rules around signature and address verification and ballot harvesting.

They went to scores of county registrars and challenged thousands of phantoms — proof in hand.  Quietly, below the radar, they showed registrars, whose job it is to deal with this sort of thing, that Bill Jones was not a real person.  They helped clean up addresses that were wrong — either typos or fake. Any one of those addresses was a landing pad for a loose ballot.

On Election Day [2022], the Wisconsin Democrats did not have enough phantoms or mail-in ballots to go around.  A Republican senator might have been saved by these actions.

The same thing happened in 2024, following another two years of Omega4, PILF and other groups grinding away, but this time funded by Lara Trump’s GOP National Committee, who had ignored them earlier.

Although it wouldn’t matter, other groups like United Sovereign Americans and Election Integrity Project California were working on the same things even in Deep Blue states where it wouldn’t matter, but where hundreds of thousands of ineligible voters were found on the rolls.

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How The GOP Beat The Cheat in 2024, Part 1
How The GOP Beat The Cheat in 2024, Part 2: Lawfare

Your Cheatin’ Ballot I: Illegal Aliens
Your Cheatin’ Ballot II: Pennsylvania
Your Cheatin’ Ballot III: Pennsylvania Right Now
Your Cheatin’ Ballot IV: Democrat Party History