Counting

Lynn Taylor, president of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, describes in this episode of “Who’s Counting?” how thousands of Virginians, who saw disturbing irregularities in Virginia’s 2020 presidential election, decided to take firm action to restore the public trust in the state’s elections. Numerous grassroots organizations came together to form the Virginia Fair Elections Coalition, a statewide election integrity network that helped create local election integrity task forces in Virginia’s largest counties, who became citizen watchdogs over the election offices, the General Registrars and the local electoral boards, and which also trained and equipped enough election officials and poll watchers to fill 85 percent of the 14,000 available citizen oversight slots in Virginia’s 2021 statewide and state House elections. The Virginia Institute's election integrity infrastructure program — now known as “The Virginia Model” — is a successful plan that can be implemented in any state with an adaptation of that state’s specific election laws and protocols. Lynn walks through the formation of the task forces with Cleta, from poll watcher training, protecting low-income and senior voters, understanding voting machines, and verifying absentee ballots. She relates important coalition experiences, one of which led to the Virginia Institute’s filing suit against the Fairfax County election officer who refused to follow state statutes for verifying the identity of individuals requesting absentee ballots. Calling for organizations to “check their logos and egos at the door” to protect election integrity, and training volunteers to be “right and polite” in all circumstances, Lynn’s spearheading of this effort proved it is possible to return trust in the system to voters when engaging the citizen observers in roles that are not just allowed by law, but demanded by it. Click here to download a PDF copy of the Virginia Fair Elections Model Guide, or email the Virginia Institute at info@virginiainstitute.org to request a hard copy of this important pamphlet. And don’t forget to download the Citizens Guide to Election Integrity Infrastructure Citizens-Guide.pdf (whoscounting.us) so you can start a local task force in your county or community.

In 2021, a group of citizens activists created a network to promote election integrity in Virginia that was highly effective in the bid to reclaim election integrity from the ground up and the beginning of a critical election integrity infrastructure. In this Podcast, Cleta refers to the election integrity activists in her series touting Virginia as a model for election integrity as “smart, dedicated, engaged patriots.” Find out why — and how we all can be engaged in protecting the ballots of all Americans. A “don’t miss” mini-series from Who’s Counting with Cleta Mitchell.

Your local election integrity task force can monitor the activity of the USPS in our elections. Understanding and monitoring your local post office's handling of political mail is vitally important. Meet with your local post office master. Know the relevant statutes and bring questions with you. This must become a priority to your post office master. Learn the difference between political mail and election mail. Become an expert on mail ballots so you aren't fooled by left wing political mail.

Get as much training for becoming a Poll Watcher as possible. Poll Watcher rules vary from state to state so its important you contact your local election office for state specific details.

Election Integrity Network’s Citizen's Research Project is a nationwide collaborative effort engaging volunteers who are researching the left’s billionaire-funded efforts to manipulate election results by taking over local election offices. The Citizen Research Project is directed by Ned Jones, Deputy Director of the Election Integrity Network, who is Cleta’s guest on this week’s episode of Who’s Counting? After years of public service in New Jersey, Ned moved to Virginia and served as a poll watcher in 2020. He was alarmed by what he saw. Seeking answers to election issues and problems he had witnessed, Ned began researching the outside influences in elections. He identified myriad left-wing non-profits mobilized to influence and manipulate every aspect of the election system. Ned researched the granddaddy of all left-wing billionaire influence over elections: the Mark Zuckerberg hundreds of millions of dollars used to turn election offices into Democrat turnout machines in key Democratic counties and cities in 2020. It was enough to elect Joe Biden. Now, we see Zuckerbuxx 2.0 arriving on the scene, except now it is billionaire Bill Gates leading the charge to manipulate the 2024 elections. Ned talks about how citizen researchers are unearthing more information every week about this massive effort to undermine the independence of America’s elections. Ned directs the Citizen's Research weekly National Working Group (join at www.Whoscounting.US). In this episode of Who’s Counting? Ned describes the National Working Group and the information identified by the citizen researchers. Join us for a discussion with Ned Jones and learn how you can be part of stopping the invasion of election offices by left-wing advocacy groups. Join Ned and hundreds of other patriots across the nation who are fighting the Leftwing billionaire takeover of the election systems. Listen / watch this episode of Who’s Counting? Share the podcast. Subscribe.

Step 3, 5, 6 & 7 of the Citizen Guide to Building Election Integrity Infrastructure covers the importance of working groups to addressing local election integrity issues. Becoming part of a Working Group in your state can stop fraud, restore integrity in our election systems, and increase confidence in the outcome of the results.

Listen to exclusive content from the Virginia Institute's Lynn Taylor at the Arizona's Election Integrity Summit, with a sneak peak at some of our exclusive content. Learn how Virginia put itself on the path toward restoring confidence in their elections with lessons learned from 2021! The Virginia Model is something that any other state across the nation can emulate and use as a blueprint when building their election integrity infrastructure. Learn more about the Virginia Model at vafairelections.org

Fighting State-Sponsored Anti-Election Integrity Propaganda Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer at the conservative news outlet, The Federalist, which covers issues and angles ignored or lied about in the leftwing media – it counteracts false narratives and presents important information to concerned Americans. Shawn covers a number of topics with a key focus on election integrity. Not only does he research and write about the left’s goal of disrupting free and fair elections, but he understands their strategy. He has keen insights into the interaction between leftwing billionaire dark money and the one-sided political collusion between government security agencies and the media – including the interference orchestrated in the 2020 presidential campaign by now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken. And then, of course, there’s Hunter Biden and why his laptop is an affront to honest elections. Did his laptop and the deliberate evasion collusion between government and media keep any conversation about the Biden family’s foreign business dealings out of the reach of the American public? Yes, it did. Could one laptop potentially change the outcome of a U.S. election? Watch/listen as Cleta and Shawn connect the dots, provide the answers, give specific examples, and name names in the pursuit of identifying and fighting against one-sided, leftwing ideological corruption and collusion disrupting our nation’s election systems. We hope you listen/watch and share this episode of Who’s Counting? With Cleta Mitchell and subscribe to receive Cleta’s latest podcast interview each week.

Ron Armstrong, President of Stand Up Michigan, is a man who refuses to sit down. He is a passionate advocate for election integrity in a state with a tyrannical liberal governor and a secretary of state who blatantly manipulates state election statutes to provide a partisan advantage. So what’s a freedom-loving Michigander to do? When you are Ron Armstrong, a former Mayor and a businessman with more than 35 years as an exhibit and display executive, you turn your expertise in creating consistent messages and providing measurable results into a statewide grassroots powerhouse. Stand Up Michigan was created out of frustration at totalitarian, arbitrary and economically devastating lockdowns by Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Growing to over 350,000 activists nearly overnight in 2020, it achieved success in fighting for economic and individual liberty in the first months of Covid through Michigan’s unique petition initiative process that shifts unilateral gubernatorial powers back to the hands of the people. In his conversation with Cleta, Ron explains how Stand Up Michigan’s partnership with the statewide election integrity coalition, Michigan Election Protection Team, is changing the narrative and election integrity landscape in Michigan by utilizing the initiative process, engaging in social media messaging, and successfully in recruiting over 5,500 poll workers statewide.

Your local task force can ensure that this equipment is kept up to date and working properly before the election. Every voting machines must be tested prior to every election. Be able to identify what technology is used in your local elections. Are your local election offices using electronic/automated systems to verify signatures? Are you allowed to observe the use of those processes? Is the equipment working properly? Are the E-Poll books working properly before the election?

Please join Cleta as she interviews Verity Vote founder and Pennsylvania Fair Elections Coalition Chair Heather Honey, recently called as an expert witness in the post-2022 Arizona election integrity court case. With her election integrity experience, expertise as an open source investigator and ability to review and interpret the accuracy of ballot reporting systems and procedures, Heather traveled to Maricopa County, Arizona to investigate and report on allegations of mishandled ballots, chain of custody failures, lack of compliance with state law and reporting requirements, and the post-election appearance of ~25,000 mystery ballots. Heather reveals facts about the mishandling of ballots from ballot printers to their transportation on a truck with none of the required documentation completed to the co-mingling of counted ballots with uncounted ballots. And undelivered ballots? Between the Post Office and the County election office, they are …. somewhere? In addition to her key work and analysis in Arizona, Heather also won a recent public access request court case in her native Pennsylvania after first being denied by her local election office and the Secretary of State who blocked the public release of the state’s very public voting records.

How badly out of date are your voter rolls? That's the question that needs to be asked in every jurisdiction. The concern for your local task force is how you can maintain the integrity of your local voter roles. Follow allow to this lesson by turning to Section 2 Step 5 in the Citizens Guide to Building an Election Integrity Infrastructure. (whoscounting.us)

Cleta interviews Jason Frazier, a citizen volunteer, and self-described ‘data geek’ who has taken it upon himself to examine the voter rolls in his home county of Fulton County, GA. Jason, as a nonpartisan citizen just interested in clean data, has identified many issues, problems, and anomalies in the Fulton County voter rolls. In this podcast, Jason shares his expertise as a data analyst with an MBA, who ‘for fun’ looks at the lists, finds issues, and beats his head against the bureaucratic wall to clean voter rolls in his home county.

Fred Lucas is the Chief News Correspondent for The Daily Signal The Daily Signal: Policy News, Conservative Analysis and Opinion, a project of The Heritage Foundation. Starting with his high school newspaper, Fred was covering politics at any early age and went on to legislative coverage in Kentucky and Connecticut before joining the Daily Signal. He is also the author of The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections, where he likens today’s efforts by the left to subvert elections and manipulate voters to the “old days” of New York’s Tammany Hall corruption and the cruelty of Jim Crow. What has changed in current elections? Not the goal, not the cynicism; just the methods progressives use to destroy election integrity. Now they have technology and a compliant leftwing media to assist them to head back to the future to disrupt elections to favor their Democrat fellow travelers. Fred discusses his research and hard-hitting coverage of election integrity with Cleta, including the voter suppression lie, the left’s attempt at true disenfranchisement of voters, the citizen intimidation inherent in the Biden Administration’s order for federal agencies to register voters, and the left’s continued attempts to buy election offices like they were a loaf of bread. We hope you listen/watch and share this episode of Who’s Counting? With Cleta Mitchell and subscribe to receive Cleta’s latest podcast interview each week.

After the November 2020 election, Ned Jones began asking questions about how elections really work. He wondered who influences the election officials, who does business with the election offices, who are the vendors and contractors and are any of those influences and entities political in nature. What he discovered is a web of entities, both nonprofit and for profit, that have been created over the course of the past decade, funding by leftwing billionaires, engaged in election structures and systems across the country. Primarily engaged in building an infrastructure to support voting by mail, the tentacles of these entities reach far and wide into our entire election system. Ned’s work shows what one determined, patriotic American can learn and share with others about the changes that have occurred in our elections without our realizing it. And it underscores why every local and state election office needs the eyes, ears, and presence of conservatives as part of their operations.

Cleta’s guest this week is Kathleen (“Kathy”) Harms, whose official title is co-director of the Tennessee Free and Fair Elections coalition, which is part of the Election Integrity Network. The organization is dedicated to ensuring that Tennessee’s elections are being administered lawfully and accurately. Kathy is one of the Volunteer State’s most important volunteer leaders. She and her network are wisely focused on the basics: authenticating voters, authenticating ballots and authenticating vote counts. Simple, right? But not easy and often not done. Leading the EIN’s National Election Integrity Working Group on State Legislation, Kathy understands the critical importance of educating state legislatures to the problems in the election systems. The Tennessee coalition is researching, investigating and challenging election procedures in their state that discourage or even suppress voters. These include the danger of voting centers instead of precinct voting. And Kathy has been consistently educating election integrity volunteers to work with their local election offices, and to help ensure that election administrators perform their only job (administering elections,) creating positive relationships with election officials despite differences, and protecting the rights of poll observers. This latest episode of Who’s Counting? With Cleta Mitchell is crammed with important information about how national, local and state coalitions are working together to restore election confidence. It creates a great opportunity for us to thank and congratulate all our partners who work with us on EIN’s state coalitions and through our National Working Groups. Subscribe to the podcast, share with your friends, and become part of the Election Integrity Network.

Your task force should be worried about military voters that aren't counted. How does your local office handle overseas military ballots? What is the calendar they use to send these votes off? All people should have a full and equal right to vote. What are your local offices preparation to assist with disabled voters? Know your rights so we can protect vulnerable voters.

West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner is a West Point graduate and attorney who served in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps. As such, he knows the law and understands the value of rules and procedures. Leaning on expertise acquired through those experiences, Mac is a leading advocate for election integrity both in his state and nationwide by his interaction with other Secretaries of State through personal relationships and participation in the National Association of Secretaries of States. A key responsibility of any Secretary of State is ensuring proper and lawful adherence to that state’s voting laws. This sacred duty also includes protecting voters of that state from unlawful, unconstitutional intrusion or manipulation from the federal government and any of its alphabet soup of agencies to disrupt or destabilize free and fair elections. On March 6, 2023, just a few days after this episode was recorded, Secretary Warner took a big step in protecting his state's voters when he announced that West Virginia would join Alabama, Louisiana, Florida and Missouri in revoking its participation in ERIC (Electronic Records Information Center) a non-government organization that poses as a “voter roll clean up” entity that cleaned up nothing, but is a conduit to state sharing of private data about unregistered citizens to third party leftwing voter activist organizations. Maintaining voter rolls is also one of the Secretary’s key duties, and after entering office he and his staff worked with county clerks to remove over 365,000 names from the state’s voter rolls by researching death and address change records. Cleta and Mac discuss a wide range of topics from the incursion and blatant bias of federal agencies such as the FBI, DHS and DOJ into state and local election procedures, true disinformation about election security spread by these agencies in cooperation with leftwing organizations, proven interference in our elections by non-state actors, the role of technology and cyber security, and utilizing strict guidelines in protecting American voters’ ballots. Secretary Warner notes that real voter suppression comes from the erosion of voter confidence caused by false talking points and unlawful voting procedure changes – all from the left and the federal government – that lead to confusion and disillusionment of the voting public. The West Virginia Secretary of State proves that good governance is possible, but only when elected officials put rule of law ahead of self-serving and manipulative partisan politics. That describes Secretary Mac Warner in a nutshell.

When public policy expert Trent England saw election integrity undermined by progressive policies in his home state of Washington, he took action that has an impact at the national level. That action came in the form of an organization called Save Our States, and its newest project STOPRCV (Ranked Choice Voting.) Save Our States was created to protect the Electoral College and prevent this beacon of American freedom and states’ rights from being hijacked by leftwing interests using the National Popular Vote as a tool to consolidate their own power at the federal level while leaving local voters with little or no political voice and eschewing minority rights. (See the trailer for the SOS movie about the EC “Safeguard” here.) As Trent discusses with Cleta, his working in protecting the Electoral College led him to uncover other “alternative voting methods” leftwing billionaires are pushing in our country that flaunts their disregard for the Constitutional and Rule of Law, tacitly destroys both political parties’ ability to choose their own candidates, and makes voting so cumbersome and complicated that voters become discouraged and alienated from the process. These methods include Ranked Choice Voting (also known as Instant Runoff and Final Five,) Approval Voting and STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff.) Cleta and Trent unpack each one of these dangerous methodologies that range from suppressive and unconstitutional to patently absurd. And guess what? Any one of them may be coming to your state SOON. Trent and his team are dedicated to educating the public about how each one of these schemes – and the abolition of the brilliant Electoral College – rip at the very fabric of our country, our voting rights, and our ability to choose our elected officials and form of governance. Visit Save Our States and Stop RCV for more information, and visit EIN here to sign for Stop Ranked Choice Voting and any of our other topical National Working Groups. We hope you listen/watch and share this episode of Who’s Counting? With Cleta Mitchell and subscribe to receive Cleta’s latest podcast interview each week.

Did you know the post office handles more ballots than any prescient? Based on the number of ballots handled by the USPS, it has become the biggest prescient in your state. This means your mailman has become a poll worker based on the number of ballots handled. Learn how you can conduct oversight over the USPS and mailed ballots. Learn more by downloading the Citizens Guide at Whoscounting.us

Officials in Tarrant County, Texas (Fort Worth) have taken a bold approach to keeping their elections safe and secure, and hope their model will be a blueprint for localities across the country. In this episode of Who’s Counting? Cleta interviews Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare about his county’s program to ensure local elections are conducted according to law. As a county judge, Judge O’Hare has governmental responsibility for the state’s 3th largest county. An attorney and property investor, O’Hare was elected County Judge in November of 2022. Campaigning on a platform of securing Tarrant County elections, Judge O’Hare worked in partnership with his County Sheriff and County District Attorney to create a formal, governmental Election Integrity Task Force. The task force has a hotline and those calls trigger a series of official responses and investigation by a Sheriff’s deputy specially assigned to the task force, and if merited, a designated Assistant District Attorney to pursue prosecution. In the few months this task force has been active, and against a backdrop of a Tarrant County ballot harvesting scheme that made national headlines, there are already four substantial cases working their way through that system. Cleta and Judge O’Hare discuss specific threats to elections in Tarrant County, Texas and nationwide - and the merits of this critical program – both as a prosecutorial responsibility and a deterrent to any bad actors looking to game or corrupt the system. As Cleta notes, elections are all conducted locally, and there must be a local focus on ensuring their integrity. Citizen task forces are making an enormous difference in protecting elections – and the effort of a local government task force focused on election integrity is a model for every county and city across the country. We hope you listen/watch and share this episode of Who’s Counting and subscribe to receive Cleta’s latest podcast interview each week.

Living up to its nickname of the “Equality State,” Wyoming is putting election integrity first to protect its freedom and its voters. Currently leading this charge is its newly elected Secretary of State, Chuck Gray. The Secretary discusses with Cleta how, as a former Wyoming legislator, he developed a keen sense of the relationship between the ballot box and public policy -- from protecting the pre-born, defending Wyoming’s natural resource economy, or keeping destructive leftwing ESG (Environmental, social and corporate governance) policies from wreaking havoc on Wyoming businesses. Secretary Gray is working through a “to do” list of election integrity protections with his former colleagues in the state legislature. They successfully ended “crossover” voting where members of one party can register on primary day to vote for a candidate in the opposite party, thus muddling results and stealing the ability of Republicans to choose a Republican candidate, for example. He has worked to harden and clarify voter ID laws for in person and absentee voting, increase accuracy in the state’s voter rolls, and defeat Ranked Choice Voting before it even emerged from committee. His underlying election integrity principles are to increase transparency and protect his state from machinations from leftwing organizations from outside Wyoming from compromising election security and destabilizing elections. In this interview with Cleta, Secretary Gray makes two other critical points. One, that federal election laws have undermined states’ rights to determine their own election procedures in a way that harms voters. He and Cleta also agree that all citizens must act as “sentinels” to ensure proper election administration and trustworthy results that increase voter confidence. We hope you listen/watch and share this episode of Who’s Counting? With Cleta Mitchell and subscribe to receive Cleta’s latest podcast interview each week.

Kim Strassel, prize-winning Wall Street Journal columnist and editorial board member, discusses the runup to the 2020 election and how the left manipulated election laws and offices to impact the outcome. She urges citizens to “get engaged in their electoral systems” in order to fight the left’s infiltration of election offices nationwide. Kim is the author of Potomac Watch, a WSJ weekly column that appears on Fridays.

Know the difference between a poll worker and a poll watcher, learn how to get certified, and how concerned citizens can serve as a check on their local election systems.

Georgia’s Marci McCarthy is Chairman of the DeKalb County GOP and a fierce warrior for election integrity. Her commitment is to never see a repeat of what she witnessed in the general election in 2020. During the 2020 election, Marci was an election worker in Georgia’s second-most blue county as a member of a bipartisan team adjudicating absentee ballots rejected by tabulating machines. Everything worked according to state law and established procedures during the 2020 primary…but the 2020 general election was a different story. In this episode of Who’s Counting?, Marci describes a lawless general election, where election officials in DeKalb County violated standards, procedures, and statutes by taking ballots away from the required locations, adjudicating ballots in secret, in a manner not in keeping with the laws, and where there was no accountability for their disregard of the Georgia election code. Marci’s eyewitness experience of the issues in DeKalb County in 2020 propelled her into her mission now of doing whatever she can do to restore FITness in the election process in Georgia. Marci has become one of Georgia’s most active leaders in the effort to ensure election integrity, even when it involves Democratic candidates harmed by faulty voting machines and lax election procedures, as was the case in a 2022 Democratic primary for county commissioner in DeKalb County. In late January 2023, Marci and the rest of the public were stunned to learn that DeKalb County’s election office was receiving $2 million in private funding from the same forces that mobilized Mark Zuckerberg’s $400 million in 2020, and who funneled his money into targeted election offices in key states to manipulate and change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Despite the law passed by the Georgia legislature in 2021 prohibiting local election offices from accepting private funds, DeKalb county officials are now attempting an end-run around the law. Marci describes in this episode her determination to stop the buying of the DeKalb county election system and to force compliance with the Georgia law prohibiting private funding of local election offices. What is Marci doing about it? She discusses her campaign to stop a repeat of the 2020 lawlessness. Marci McCarthy is a great American patriot. Others across the nation can learn from her example described in this episode of Who’s Counting? with Cleta Mitchell.