A Guest Post co-authored by:
Becky Behrends, M.D. VP of Research for Michigan Citizens for Election Integrity
Phil O’Halloran, VP of Michigan Citizens for Election Integrity

FILE – In this Sept. 24, 2020, file photo, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson wears a mask before talking about voting and the upcoming elections in Detroit. Benson said Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2020, that the 1.5 million people with absentee ballots still in hand should put them in a drop box or take them to their local clerk’s office rather than use the mail with two weeks to go until the presidential election. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)

Here we go again!  Another attempt to undermine election security and integrity.

Promote the Vote is a coalition of organizations which led the successful effort to pass Proposal 3 in Michigan in 2018.  This proposal added new voting policies to the state constitution, namely straight-ticket voting, automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration and no-excuse absentee voting.  All in time for the 2020 election.

Thus, in 2020, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson flooded the state with unsolicited absentee ballot applications. This coupled with a bloated voter registration roll with no clean-up of dead voters or those people who had moved, same day registration with no verification of eligibility to vote and the infusion of third party money in the form of the infamous ZuckBucks among many other items led to Biden’s “victory” in Michigan.

The deceptively positive-sounding “Promote the Vote 2022” is now back with a petition.  It is a dark money funded attempt to write into the Michigan Constitution many of the worst things that occurred in the 2020 election debacle.

That means it is going to be PERMANENT!  Here are just a few of the awful things about this dangerous initiative.  It would …..

  • Make the now infamous “drop boxes” PERMANENT and distributed everywhere, courtesy of the taxpayer. This will make illegal ballot harvesting and ballot trafficking even easier than when billionaire Mark Zuckerberg financed drop boxes in Michigan in 2020.
  • Restrict election audits to government entities only. Sorry, no independent audits by concerned citizens will be allowed.  If that isn’t letting the fox into the hen house, we don’t know what is!
  • Let people vote without photo ID. The public is being deceived by the notion that “voters will have the right to verify their identity with a photo ID or signed statement.” The signed statement is an affidavit which allows a person to say they are who they say they are with NO VERIFICATION.  They can be charged with perjury if they falsely sign the affidavit but who is going to pursue this?  No one!!!  It is a ruse.
  • Allow funding of (and thus control of) elections by outside organizations directed by billionaires. What amounts to bribery of clerk’s offices will now become legal.
  • Promote and facilitate unsolicited absentee voting. This was, perhaps, the single biggest problem in 2020.  When a state is awash in mail-in ballots, the job of the fraudster is much easier.
  • Require canvassing boards to certify election results based only on the official records of votes cast. No opportunity for the canvassing board to determine if the ballots were legal, or eligible.  Just accept the count.  And yet it is the canvassing board that is supposed to certify an election.  Now, with their hands tied behind their back, according to this petition.  Don’t ask questions, don’t investigate.  Why?  So, the fiasco that occurred at the TCF Center in Detroit in 2020, where 70% precincts were out of balance, and it was still certified, will become the norm.
  • Require military or overseas ballots be counted if postmarked by Election Day. MC4EI feels that there should be a firm deadline for all ballots at the close of election day.  Under UOCAVA (Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act) and amended by MOVE (Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act), military and overseas citizens receive their ballots 45 days prior to federal elections.

The public has been propagandized with the notion that republicans who insist on measures to make our elections more secure are engaging in suppression of the vote.  That is simply false.  Conservative, constitutionally based republicans want to make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat.  The two are not mutually exclusive.

Democrats say that election fraud is rare to nonexistent so why put into place measures that make it inconvenient for the voter?  The 2020 election was an unparalleled demonstration of how illogical this argument is.  If fraud is non-existent, then why was there such a barrier to evaluating the 2020 election in detail?  Why did they….

  • Block forensic audits
  • Deny evidentiary hearings in election fraud cases
  • Refuse to respond to subpoenas and FOIA’s (Freedom of Information Act requests) and/or to make the results transparent to the public
  • Accept a 70% “out of balance” in Detroit precinct absentee ballot election results so that by Michigan law, an audit could not be conducted? Why hasn’t the Republican dominated Michigan legislature, in all these years, addressed this egregious law?

So, in essence, what the Democrats did was say “We won’t let you investigate or prove fraud, so therefore, we can conclude there was none.”  But at the same time, any lawyer or citizen who pursues an investigation of it is threatened with the loss of his license or job for “eroding American democracy”.  The liberal Democrat engagement in censorship and denial of “redress of grievances” as allowed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution is what erodes democracy.  Make no mistake about it!

Abundant affidavits and sworn testimony to all the illegal and fraudulent behavior that occurred in the 2020 election are deemed as just one type of evidence whose credibility was determined by the judge.  Since the judiciary is dominated by liberal/leftist judges it is no wonder that all they had to do was lower the gavel and say- “no credibility to your claims” in the preliminary hearings and pronounce it as “case closed”.

Citizens need to STOP and think about what unintended consequences will occur from signing a petition that reads like sugar and spice but IS NOT VERY NICE when it comes to preserving election integrity which should be a bipartisan concern.  This petition will constitutionalize the loss of election integrity and open the doors to abuse and fraud.  Don’t be fooled by “Promote the Vote”.   Your vote does not count if it is diluted out by ineligible and fraudulent votes.  Security in elections is paramount!  Safeguards need to be in place before elections and not minimized as unnecessary or irrelevant.

Say NO to Promote the Vote!!!

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