Marly Hornik and Harry HauryComplex and critically important systems, ranging from the financial sector to elections, need to be able to have outcomes validated through audits. Holding accurate elections is a core principle under our Constitution and the law, as is auditability, though you might not have thought about it.
The unique right of all Americans is to collectively exercise sovereignty over our government. The founders believed this was a divine right granted by our Creator. Since 1803, after the peculiar case of political skullduggery in Marbury v. Madison, it has been established law that a right without a remedy is not a right. Thus, the auditability of our elections is not mere detail, it is the “check and balance” ensuring that accuracy and compliance prevented any corrupted intent from affecting our elections.
The computing systems managing our elections should offer a great advantage in this area. Computers can help administrators track the myriad data sources in a federal election, along with any and all inputs or changes made along the way. An instant record can be generated of who made the edits, and why. This allows control over the entire voting system; we can monitor and identify the source of any breach or misdeed, in theory.
But facts often deviate from theory. Effective monitoring and administration require great systems, many experts, and significant effort. Did we have these in 2020 or 2022? How can we tell, without transparency?
The requirement of auditability is written into the Help America Vote Act, HAVA. We should have the most provable elections in our history. Instead, we are allowing people to make changes that have no corresponding entry as to why the record changed. Managing our elections is the most important function of our democracy, yet we just accept that any edit is legitimate and correct.
A fine example of how foolish this blind trust is was found in the North Carolina statewide voter roll database. At the time the 2022 midterm was certified, a copy of this official voter list obtained via public records request contained 13,371 unique, specific registrants whose birthdates had been altered, as compared with a previously audited version. Birthdates are immutable. Can this be explained? Is there a record of registrants requesting this correction? Who made each of the changes?
If there is no auditable record, Congress has told us there is no reason to presume good intentions. Under the power of the Necessary and Proper Clause, our representatives have time and again passed laws to protect the integrity of federal elections. Because elections fundamentally contain only three elements — voters, votes, and counts — untracked edits to any of these elements immediately raise the risk of fraud.
The 13,371 changed birthdates bring into direct question the possibility someone is tampering with the voter rolls, in the absence of proof to the contrary. The fact that 12,610 of them voted in the 2022 midterm in North Carolina, a 94% turnout rate according to the official records, suggests that the person doing the tampering is not innocent. That is more than enough votes to sway most elections.
Volunteer researchers with United Sovereign Americans have found altered birthdates, backdated registrations, vanishing voter history, blank ballots, and much more in every state voter roll database they have meticulously inspected. No official has attempted to thoroughly answer the simple questions of who and why, when asked. They have also refused to provide the audit logs for public review. When an edit was made to the middle initial of a voter, or their apartment number, who did it, and under what authority? Congress granted citizens a civil right to an accurate voter list in 1993, making unexplained edits an abridgment of suffrage.
In October 2021, the official New York State voter list showed 109 particular voters who apparently voted twice in the 2020 general election, through two different ballot entry points. In July 2023, the same document showed 226,000 particular voters who voted twice in the 2020 general election, through two different ballot entry points. Can there be an explanation for edits to an election certified as accurate three years prior? By raising such questions, volunteers in New York have drawn the ire of Attorney General Letitia James, who is now investigating New York Citizens Audit for alleged voter intimidation, under the Ku Klux Klan Act.
Another trespass against transparency is the inability to reconcile votes and voters. United Sovereign Americans analysts consistently find that more votes were counted than voters who voted in the 2022 midterms. The discrepancy in Ohio the day after certification, calculated by attempting to reconcile official counts with official voter history records, was over 1 million more votes counted than voters who voted. That may be because the Ohio Legislature has inexplicably allowed counties to reconcile for 20 days after certification. Ohio law says that is it acceptable to edit a federal election post-certification, a million times. How can that be?
How can there be ballots with no voter, that get counted? The anonymity of a ballot makes it impossible to audit, once it has (theoretically) been accepted from a qualified voter. Chain of custody documents for these records would prove there was a valid voter associated with each ballot cast. The intent of the law is to track the ballot from the voter’s hand to the final reconciliation, verifying its authenticity. When a ballot is missing a connection to a voter, counting it is an illegal act. What statute authorizes officials to override this basic control? How come the votes and participating voters don’t reconcile? In the Illinois 2022 midterm there appear to have been 291,234 more votes counted than voters who voted, a number obtained by comparing certified results with the statewide official list of voter registration and participation.
On March 6, Maryland Election Integrity, joined by United Sovereign Americans, filed a federal lawsuit against the Maryland State Board of Elections. Plaintiffs allege that the Board has denied access to records regarding 180,000 blank ballots from the 2020 and 2022 elections, in addition to not sufficiently answering for 79,000 registration violations, from which over 27,000 apparently invalid votes were cast by ineligible or invalid voters in the 2022 midterm. Defendants are alleged to have lost control of the voting system, as evidenced by gross inaccuracy and lack of compliance with certification and transparency requirements. A right without a remedy, it would seem, in a high-stakes environment. Plaintiffs assert that the board-certified federal races in the midterm without being able, or willing, to prove outcomes to qualified citizen voters.
Tragically, the obligation to grant public access to information used in verifying election outcomes is often dismissed. This results in denial of rights under color of law, suspicion and unnecessary conflict. The only requisites in an election are voters, votes, and counts. If the tools we currently use to manage this system are neither transparent nor accurate, they must be replaced immediately.
We are a people governed by laws to which we ourselves have consented. Insisting upon provably accurate election results does not constitute harassment or intimidation of election administrators. Auditing elections is responsible stewardship of our most basic duty, choosing representatives carefully. If we fail to verify, we could lose our enlightened system of liberty and equality under the law, forever!
Marly Hornik is CEO of United Sovereign Americans, Unite4freedom.com, and executive director of New York Citizens Audit.
Harry Haury is the chair of United Sovereign Americans, and an information assurance and cyber systems architect. His expert testimony on election validity, in the disbarment trial of Jeffrey Clark, is here.
I think an element of election certification that many won’t acknowledge is the unfortunate way the press has horned its way into being the “certifier of record” for our elections. The public has consented to this, by not telling them to only report and not act like they are the ones to call elections.
Then the worst affront to this was allowing the “social media” companies to only allow discussions among their members if they did not say that there was anything wrong with the election results.
In effect, we have gotten the presentation of election results away from the actual vote counting, and to the reporting of the “results”.
All good points.
Marly Hornik. Thank you. You guys, both, deserve our admiration and respect. Please keep going for US.
Four points.
1. You mention auditability at the top (Thank you!) and I want to stress that almost everything is audit-able. That does not mean every transaction, every measurement, every statement is audited, but that even in a high trust society (or especially?) we reserve the right to verify. Buy a donut and you get a receipt. That transaction leaves a paper trail, and can be audited by the shop owner, the IRS when they file taxes, you as a credit card customer when you get the bill, the company you submit your expense report to, etc. All require an auditable trail — That is why there is trust.
2. One reason (IMHO) that things got so far out of hand is because for years we have allowed many inner city precincts to submit un-auditable returns. They submit counts on election night and the voter count does not match the vote count does not match the tallies. Box is sealed, tally accepted. “What can you do.” That box can *never* be audited since we know from the start that the numbers don’t match. Think about that a bit to understand.
We (as a society) allowed this because it was only in the inner cities and things were outside the control of outside oversight. If those pols don’t care about accuracy, who are we to complain. We allowed mice into the pantry thinking they would only eat the crumbs on the floor.
Steps have been attempted in various jurisdictions to “correct” this, but always with the dysfunctional starting point that some precincts can not get an accurate count on election night. That is unacceptable.
3. Your starting framework seems to be toward a software controlled system. I have a lot of thoughts here but I think you will only get a truly auditable result built around a paper system. I have too much for this comment so I’ll leave it there.
4. My main point is that the solution is local. local. local. Each precinct should be small enough that ballots can be counted locally and tallied, and the tally sent downstream. Local voting, local oversight, and local tallies keeps it manageable, scaleable, and honest. The biggest assault on the system in 2020 was centralized counting.
For what it’s worth.
Thanks for all your work.
Sarbanes-Oxley forces public companies have to have that controls to ensure reasonable accuracy in their financial statements. COBIT covers the software world. If public company officers can do prison time for inadequate controls and fallacious results, so too should government officials be held accountable. Auditable controls are not rocket science. And, our election system is not really that complex. When I worked in Switzerland I observed how their national identity card was used in elections. The US should follow the best practices of successful nations. Until then the election system will continue to be gamed.